Animal Appetite

she removed the paw the second I awoke.
    Today, she gave me a few moments to learn to tolerate its presence. Before my religious conversion, I’d have grabbed Kimi’s paw, removed it, and told her to forget the doomed crusade, thus unintentionally reinforcing the behavior by paying attention to it. Now, I emerged from sleep trying to plan a positive behavior-shaping strategy to achieve my goal.
    To say that I woke up thinking about dog training is to say that I woke up happy. My dogs and I were alive and healthy. I was blessed with the incomparable friendship of dog people and the love of an excellent vet. Compared with Gareth Andrews, my father was barely eccentric, even if Steve thought otherwise. Once I got really clever at applying positive reinforcement to dog behavior, I could switch species and shape his mother right up, preferably by conditioning her to move to Fiji. Kevin Dennehy was due back from his ashram today. I’d leave the murders in his beefy, competent hands. The construction in my neighborhood was almost finished: The vile rats would retreat. And for all the complications I’d encountered in accepting Rita’s bet, I actually had learned a lot about Hannah Duston and would certainly be able to write something that had nothing whatsoever to do with dogs.
    The optimism stayed with me throughout the morning. In response to a tactful complaint from my third-floor tenants, I cleaned the accumulated bits of freeze-dried liver, solidified cheese, and miscellaneous other transmogrified dog treats out of the coin-operated washer and dryer in the basement. Although the sky remained clear and the air dry, I surveyed my snow shovels and went out to stock up on sand and ice-melting crystals. When I returned, the machine had a message from my cousin Leah, who announced that she had a ton of stuff for me about Hannah Duston. Confident that the world would shape itself around her plans, she said she’d arrive for lunch at twelve-fifteen.
    The intellectual nourishment Harvard provides for its freshmen is undoubtedly rich and varied. According to Leah, however, Harvard has worked out a deal to buy up the beef, poultry, meat by-products, animal liver, and fish meal that fail to meet the standards of Bil Jac for inclusion in its fresh-frozen dog chow. No other theory, she maintains, can fully account for the hamburger patties served to undergraduates. Until I’d tasted Harvard’s food myself, I dismissed my cousin’s complaints as the usual college-kid gripes about mystery meat. I’m still not convinced that she’s absolutely correct. The appearance of the brownish-colored layer in the middle of my lasagna, for example, strongly suggested Pro Plan Turkey and Barley Formula, and the lamb and rice in my Greek casserole could have been lams or Pedigree.
    Since the contents of my cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer consisted mainly of what would have been more of the same, I ran to the row of gourmet shops on Huron and arrived home with an assortment of salads and cheeses just as Leah’s bicycle rounded the corner from Concord. A few years earlier, when she’d habitually been costumed in cycling shorts, leotards, rugby shirts, running shoes, and other such athletic gear, her idea of strenuous exercise had been to train for marathon longdistance phone conversations by working up a sweat placing a series of short local calls. Now that she’d cast aside the bright aerobic colors of the body, she pedaled around Cambridge dressed exclusively in the hue of the mind: existential black. Her only concession to the spurned style of her youth was a shiny ebony helmet. Her red-gold hair streamed out beneath it, and her face was flushed from the cold and the exercise. Imagine a medieval damsel as painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti on Prozac. Perch her on a bike, replace her tubercular pallor with the glow of health, and there you have Leah, who greeted me by scanning the bags in my arms and caroling, “Free food!”
    But Leah is graced with infinite forgivableness. From the saddlebags on her bike, she produced numerous volumes, photocopies, and lists of references about Hannah Duston.
    Five minutes later, when she’d hugged the dogs and I’d set the kitchen table and spread out our little feast, we sat down to lunch, and I said, “Leah, you’ve really brought me a ton of stuff. Thank you.”
    “When my parents called, it gave me something to talk about. Some of it’s just background. Colonial New England. Indians.