Never Coming Back(52)

“What are you thinking about?” Tamar said at one point. We were halfway to campus, halfway to the place where I would spend the next four years.

“Dog. What if we get rear-ended by a semi and he goes flying through the windshield?”

She shook her head. Her strange daughter. We stopped for gas, we stopped to let Dog pee, and then we were there, at a gray stone building, with all the other freshmen and parents and crammed cars.

Tamar hauled bags up to the third floor alongside me. She first cranked the truck windows down a few inches so Dog wouldn’t overheat—no animals allowed in the dorms—and I glanced through the first-floor- and second-floor-landing windows each time I labored up and then ran down the stairs, to make sure that he was okay in there while we moved me in.

Then I was moved in. Then Tamar and Dog were in the truck, backing up, doing a slow five-point turn, inching their way back out the road we’d come in on, past all the other parents and their sons and daughters. She turned once and waved, a tiny wave. Dog’s eyes were on me the whole way until the truck turned around a curve and disappeared.

And that was it.

I didn’t remember much else of freshman orientation. I remembered meeting my roommate, Sunshine, and how she crossed out “Samantha” on her ID card and wrote in “Sunshine” in permanent marker, and I remembered meeting Brown, who lived in the room directly below ours. I remembered getting my own ID card, figuring out class times and buildings and how to fall asleep surrounded by hundreds of breathing and talking and laughing and drinking and vomiting and smoking and dancing and crying and singing people instead of by two: my mother and Dog.

Did I think about my mother and Dog much?

If I said no, that once I got there it was a blur, making my way through those first few weeks, meeting people and professors and figuring everything out, that would be true. But it would also be a lie.

I pictured them, Tamar chopping wood and taking Dog on his walk, the two of them sleeping in the silent house under the silent stars in silent Sterns. But I couldn’t think about that for more than the second it took the scene to flash itself up into my head before I had to shut it down. Calm down, Clara. Breathe.

It was just the two of them, was why. The two of them in the one house and each of their days was exactly like the one that came before and the one that would come after. Unlike the way it was for me. Me and a thousand others my age around me and my life, my life that was blowing open, the ceilings and doors and windows of that life I had known in Sterns, the life my mother was so insistent I leave, now disappearing.





* * *





The next time I saw Dog in real life, after I left for my first year of college, was on Parents’ Weekend. It had been only two months. Two months since I watched them disappear around the bend, Tamar driving and Dog with his head hanging out the half-open window, staring at me, unblinking.

Everything was different by then. I talked different I ate different I dressed different I studied different, focused and deep-down scared because everyone around me was smart. They all raised their hands right away during class discussions while I was still trying to understand the question being asked. They were all uppercase Confident College Students to my lowercase clara winter. It was a different world I lived in now, and I was a different girl in it.

That Friday I waited outside Mulberry Hall with everyone else who was waiting for their parents. There would be a Parents’ Tea and a President’s Dinner and a football game and a Campus Walkabout and a Sunday Brunch and I had the schedule in my hand as I waited. I was wearing the new boots I had bought at the boot store downtown, the real leather boots that took every penny of the money I had made over the last two months serving up breakfast in the cafeteria, my work-study job. Scrambled fried hardboiled poached. I had never heard of poached eggs before and if I had landed on Eggs for $400 and it turned out to be the Daily Double, I would’ve bet it all that Tamar had never heard of them either.

Then she and Dog were there and I forgot everything.

“Ma!”

She had parked somewhere—where, I didn’t know; I hadn’t seen the truck pull up even though I was outside watching for it—and Dog was on his rarely used leash. They were making their halting way through the crowds of parents and children.

“Ma!”

Sunshine was next to me, waiting for her family, and she looked at me with curiosity, but I didn’t look back. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted again: “Ma! Ma!” but it was Dog who heard me first, or smelled me, because suddenly there he was. A bounding blur of fur leaping into the air and shoving himself against the unfamiliar leash, trying to get to me. Then he was on me and we were both on the ground, me with my arms around him, both of us pushing our noses into each other’s necks because there he was. There he was, and there I was, and a lump rose up in my throat. Dog.

Tamar was there too, then, her hand white-knuckled around his leash. Jeans and white Keds that she had re-whitened for the occasion with roll-on polish. The roll-on marks were evident. She was wearing her lumber jacket. It was a cold day but I wore only a sweater because that was what we did back then in college: we pretended we weren’t cold, we pretended that a crewneck sweater was all we needed even on a day of bitter wind. Her hand touched my shoulder.

“You’re cold.”

That was the first thing she said. I looked up from the ground at her Tamar face looking down at me. This was the longest I had ever been away from my mother. Her hair looked shorter. Dog had climbed up onto my lap with his paws on my shoulders. He was still pushing his nose into my neck, my hair, my collarbones.