My son, who lives deep in the wilderness of three years old, checks my heartbeat with a plastic stethoscope. He says, Almost done, Mama, one more. I breathe for him. He says, You’re here, which is what he says when I come home from work. When he talks on the telephone, he says That’s me when he’s done, like whatever he’s said sums him up, though usually what he’s said is what he’s been watching on TV. You’re here, he says, pulling at my shoulder. I lean down. He brushes my hair back, gentle and awkward with his fingers, and suddenly, I see all the times he will be gentle and awkward with the hair of women to come, or maybe I remember all the gentle, awkward boys I once knew. Regardless, time stumbles, then rights itself. He places his plastic drill into the cup of my ear and turns it on.
My brother-in-law, a horror writer, comes to the school where I teach and reads a story about a woman who grinds her fingers in a disposal to get her husband’s attention. This woman is not like my sister, but maybe she is like the woman who came before my sister, my brother-in-law’s ex-wife. In the story he reads to my students, the woman wanders out into the snow, slits her wrists, and drinks a glass of Drano. Before this, we were reading Southern classics, the kind where a mother and son get on a bus and something happens.
My students laugh when they are uncomfortable. My brother-in-law is an attractive man, affable, friendly, teaches high school himself. I liked him instantly. When one of my students, dressed in a tissuey T-shirt that cuts away from her shoulders, her shiny turquoise bra, and a pair of men’s underwear rolled down at the waist, stretches out her bare legs and props her ankles on the desk in front of her, my brother-in-law doesn’t notice, or does, but doesn’t seem to notice, how all of it is for him.
My brother-in-law is not my brother-in-law, not actually. It is often just easier to talk about him that way.
When my son sees himself as a baby on video, he tells the baby himself to wake up. I watch him watching himself, and I think how strange that must be, to grow up alongside another version of you, to speak to another version of you, to order yourself around. I think my son’s memory will work differently when he is my age, that he will remember what it was like to be a baby, that what you wanted was to be awake.
When I was my son’s age, I remember standing in my baby brother’s room and watching the poodle have a seizure. I did not know then that my mother was having seizures too, a condition that stemmed from an accident where she hit a horse head-on with her Chevy station wagon. The horse came through the windshield. Its hoof knocked out my mother’s teeth. For several years afterward, she had seizures, like the dog. The dog had been a present from my father, on the occasion of their engagement. The dog died when my brother was three or four, and he shot it with a cap gun. The dog was old then, in kidney failure and ready to die, but my brother was the last to see it, and shoot it, and for years he believed he’d caused its death.
A woman I knew from college introduced me to her boyfriend. He had been a baby in the town where I lived then, before my own children were born, and the two of them were back to visit his parents. His parents were not his actual parents, a fact he should have realized early on, as he was tall and brilliant in a family of shorter, dimmer people. But he hadn’t realized on his own, and when his parents determined it was time to tell him, they knew enough to know they didn’t know what they were doing. They consulted a psychologist. The psychologist said to take the boy to the pound and let him pick out a dog, to take the dog home and to tell the boy even though the dog was not born into their family, they would still love it and feed it and take care of it until it died. Then they could tell the boy he was adopted, like the dog. His father took him to the pound, let him pick out a dog, and then chickened out.
They got home, his mother asked his father how it went, and his father said, fine, fine, and that was it, for years. Then one Thanksgiving dinner, his aunt is teasing him about how dumb his father is, and she says, Well, thank God boy-o here’s adopted. And he says, What adopted? His aunt looks at his mother, and then his mother looks at his father, and then everybody looks at the dog. When I remember this story years later, I steal it, whole cloth, for the novel I am working on.
My brother-in-law tells me his story about the woman with her fingers in the disposal is a complete allegory, that his ex-wife lives in Virginia, that he hasn’t talked to her in years. I am hoping soon he asks my sister to marry him and they move to the town where I live, that they have children of their own. Right now, all they have is dogs.
I have called my parents. No one knows why the poodle had seizures. One day he started having them, and then he stopped. The dog I own now has seizures, and she started having them when I first got pregnant. I used to give her Phenobarbital, but the prescription ran out one summer and she never had another seizure after that. I wonder what a seizure does inside a dog’s brain, if it’s like a stutter, a stumble, a drill you can almost hear at work. My mother says you don’t remember anything about it.
