Read Online Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner - Free Book Online Page A

want a dog. What she wanted more than anything was an invisible-dog leash. The leash looked like a regular leash but extended magically out into the air by itself and hung there as though an invisible dog were on it, the dog’s neck filling out the open “O” of the collar. The leash was red, or at least all the ones the child had seen were red. The child asked for one for Christmas every year but she never got one. Itwas just plain stupid, her parents said, not even funny. It was not even clever.
    She thought she could make one herself, maybe. She had a choice: Either find a way to make rope stiff or make something already stiff, such as a stick or pole, look like rope. Of course she had no rope, but her mother kept in the linen closet a skein of thick red yarn from which she cut lengths to tie off the child’s pigtails. The child unwound the yarn and glued it to a yardstick, but the yardstick was too stiff and did not by any stretch of the imagination appear to hang, so she removed the yarn and coated it with Elmer’s glue and lay it on the lawn to dry. But she hadn’t bargained on the yarn just soaking up the glue the way it did. It just drank it up, like it was doing it on purpose. The child began to get irritated. The yarn was not getting stiff at all. It got soggy, then rubbery, then gray from her touching it, with grass blades stuck along its underside.
    The big dog had watched her in its usual way when she first came outside, but after a while it went to sleep, lying flat with its big head resting on its front paws, still pointed right at her. She noticed this about the same time she gave up and sat back on her heels, surrounded by the horrid, ruined yarn. The dog went on sleeping, oblivious. Seeing this, she was angry, and then, a moment later, a little panicky.
    â€¢ • •
    The passionate grandmother had a secret. Obviously, she wasn’t very good at keeping her feelings to herself, but there was one thing she had not revealed to anybody, had not allowed even herself to acknowledge. Well, she had acknowledged it, but she would not turn and greet it, for that would imply recognition. She knew once she recognized it she was done for. That was the kind of secret it was. It concerned her own demise, lying in wait for her, hidden somewhere in her future. It concerned the cause of her demise, harbored invisibly within her even now, somewheredeep within her body’s connective tissue. She kept this secret not for her own sake but for the sake of the child.
    â€œHow old are you?” the child often asked her. The passionate grandmother was a little vain. Not a lot, but somewhat vain.
Oh, I was never what you would call beautiful
, she sometimes said,
but I knew how to walk into a room
.
    â€œI’m as old as my tongue, and a little older than my teeth,” she told the child.
    The child loved this. “How old?” she would demand, leaping excitedly around in her grandmother’s face.
    But the passionate grandmother always said the same thing. The child usually kept on for a while and then eventually gave up. Then the two of them would sit smiling at each other in silence, each worried in her own way but still smiling at the other, at all that could not be understood about the other.
    â€¢ • •
    Christmas is coming and there is much discussion over what to get for the child. The child’s parents discuss the issue in their bedroom with their door shut; the grandmothers discuss it in the Chevy Nova on their way to and from the child’s house. The parents discuss it with the grandmothers on the telephone, abruptly falling silent when the child skips or sidles by. A puppy is not yet warranted, it is decided, so the child’s father begins construction on a dollhouse in his utility room, trying to hammer softly after the child has gone to bed. He has everything he needs: clean blond sheets of pine, glass cut to fit the windows, carpet samples to lay