morning of the day Daddy died, I never saw Chipper again.”
Eight
Returning from my visit to Brat Andrews, I took advantage of a second burst of Indian summer—am I allowed?—to tidy my yard, rake leaves, and work on my woodpile. If the stripped, skeletal branches of the trees and the blackened mounds of frost-killed impatiens hadn’t given away the late-November date, the day could have passed for a warm October 1. If you know Cambridge, you’ve probably noticed my house, which is the barn-red one at 256 Concord Avenue, almost on the corner of Appleton.
What draws attention to my house is the little “spite building,” as it’s known, that occupies the actual corner °f Concord and Appleton, and fences in one side of my yard. Although the spite building apparently memorializes the bitterness of some long-ago property dispute, the improbability of the long, narrow one-story structure adds charm and whimsy suitable to its recent reincarnation as a tiny toy shop. Vines grow thickly up the brick wall on my side of the spite building, and I keep my house and my wooden fences freshly painted. I clean up after the dogs every day, regularly fill in the holes left by Kimi’s bouts of excavation, routinely prune the lilacs and roses, and apply gypsum in a doomed effort to undo the damage caused by dog urine.
This year, I added a park bench. It’s been a big hit with the dogs. Consequently, I have to hose it down all the time, and it’s already showing rust spots. The bird feeder was a disaster, at least from my point of view. Rowdy and Kimi saw it as a device to lure prey. Mala-mutes, I hereby testify, can catch songbirds on the wing. On the last day of the bird feeder’s residence in my yard, Kimi turned out to have caught what I think had once been a house sparrow. She’d swallowed it whole. Enough said. I gave the feeder to Mrs. Dennehy. Even without it, however, the yard is on its way to becoming a little urban Eden.
A New Yorker by birth, Rita was seated on the perfectly clean park bench leafing through the Times and listening to me describe Brat Andrews. Rita wore a wool skirt, a good sweater, and leather pumps. I was on my hands and knees uprooting dead annuals. I had on torn jeans, a dirt-smeared sweatshirt, and a pair of the heavy leather boots with reinforced toes that I wear when I split wood.
“In most cases,” Rita pronounced, “that particular defense against loss doesn’t take quite such an extreme form. It does happen, though. Now and then, you hear of a man whose wife dies, and all of a sudden, he appears in public wearing a piece of her clothing, with no apparent awareness of the incongruity. It’s a testimony to love, really. It’s the best way he can find to keep her alive.”
“Well, besides trying to turn herself into a man,” I said, shaking the dirt off nasturtium roots, “what Brat’s doing is keeping herself Daddy’s little girl. When she refers to Jack, that’s what she calls him: Daddy. And she’s really got it in for her mother. She never calls her anything but Claudia, and she spits the name out, too. Daddy was perfect. Everything bad was Claudia’s fault.”
“Polarized,” Rita commented. “Really, it all sounds like an effort to preserve the moment just before this traumatic loss. What a shame that she never had a chance to work herself free of this extreme idealization of the father! Every child deserves the opportunity for disenchantment. Speaking of idealized figures, how is Hannah coming along?”
“Hannah! Well, damn, it’s—”
“No, don’t tell me! She owned a darling little lapdog, and—”
“No, she did not. That’s why I picked her to begin with. The New England colonists had dogs—some of them did—but not as real pets. They were superstitious about dogs. They thought they were creatures of Satan. God spelled backward.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. I mean, I should’ve known there’d turn out to be something radically wrong with
Eight
Returning from my visit to Brat Andrews, I took advantage of a second burst of Indian summer—am I allowed?—to tidy my yard, rake leaves, and work on my woodpile. If the stripped, skeletal branches of the trees and the blackened mounds of frost-killed impatiens hadn’t given away the late-November date, the day could have passed for a warm October 1. If you know Cambridge, you’ve probably noticed my house, which is the barn-red one at 256 Concord Avenue, almost on the corner of Appleton.
What draws attention to my house is the little “spite building,” as it’s known, that occupies the actual corner °f Concord and Appleton, and fences in one side of my yard. Although the spite building apparently memorializes the bitterness of some long-ago property dispute, the improbability of the long, narrow one-story structure adds charm and whimsy suitable to its recent reincarnation as a tiny toy shop. Vines grow thickly up the brick wall on my side of the spite building, and I keep my house and my wooden fences freshly painted. I clean up after the dogs every day, regularly fill in the holes left by Kimi’s bouts of excavation, routinely prune the lilacs and roses, and apply gypsum in a doomed effort to undo the damage caused by dog urine.
This year, I added a park bench. It’s been a big hit with the dogs. Consequently, I have to hose it down all the time, and it’s already showing rust spots. The bird feeder was a disaster, at least from my point of view. Rowdy and Kimi saw it as a device to lure prey. Mala-mutes, I hereby testify, can catch songbirds on the wing. On the last day of the bird feeder’s residence in my yard, Kimi turned out to have caught what I think had once been a house sparrow. She’d swallowed it whole. Enough said. I gave the feeder to Mrs. Dennehy. Even without it, however, the yard is on its way to becoming a little urban Eden.
A New Yorker by birth, Rita was seated on the perfectly clean park bench leafing through the Times and listening to me describe Brat Andrews. Rita wore a wool skirt, a good sweater, and leather pumps. I was on my hands and knees uprooting dead annuals. I had on torn jeans, a dirt-smeared sweatshirt, and a pair of the heavy leather boots with reinforced toes that I wear when I split wood.
“In most cases,” Rita pronounced, “that particular defense against loss doesn’t take quite such an extreme form. It does happen, though. Now and then, you hear of a man whose wife dies, and all of a sudden, he appears in public wearing a piece of her clothing, with no apparent awareness of the incongruity. It’s a testimony to love, really. It’s the best way he can find to keep her alive.”
“Well, besides trying to turn herself into a man,” I said, shaking the dirt off nasturtium roots, “what Brat’s doing is keeping herself Daddy’s little girl. When she refers to Jack, that’s what she calls him: Daddy. And she’s really got it in for her mother. She never calls her anything but Claudia, and she spits the name out, too. Daddy was perfect. Everything bad was Claudia’s fault.”
“Polarized,” Rita commented. “Really, it all sounds like an effort to preserve the moment just before this traumatic loss. What a shame that she never had a chance to work herself free of this extreme idealization of the father! Every child deserves the opportunity for disenchantment. Speaking of idealized figures, how is Hannah coming along?”
“Hannah! Well, damn, it’s—”
“No, don’t tell me! She owned a darling little lapdog, and—”
“No, she did not. That’s why I picked her to begin with. The New England colonists had dogs—some of them did—but not as real pets. They were superstitious about dogs. They thought they were creatures of Satan. God spelled backward.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. I mean, I should’ve known there’d turn out to be something radically wrong with
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