Black Ribbon

probably sue her for slander,” I said. “This morning, after agility? I could not get away from Eva, and she went on and on about Bingo and Ginny. What she says—and I had the feeling that she tells this to everyone—is all about how Ginny has too many dogs, and how no one sees her kennels, she doesn’t socialize her puppies, that kind of thing.”
    “Ginny does have too many dogs,” Cam said.
    “She does?”
    “I think so, but then probably she thinks so, too. She keeps her old dogs, and she takes her dogs back, and she ends up keeping an awful lot of them. What is true is that—Look, her third husband was a vet, okay? George. Everyone says he was a lovely man, a prince.”
    “What did he die of?” I asked.
    “Heart attack, I think. Anyway, I guess Ginny got used to not paying vet bills.”
    “A lot of breeders do their own shots,” I said.
    “Ginny does a little more than that. And she waits a little longer than I’d wait to have a vet take a look at things. She has, uh, a tendency to cut corners. But Ginny believes in OFA. She OFA’s all her dogs. I know she does.”
    OFA: (noun) Orthopedic Foundation for Animals; (verb) to screen breeding stock for hip dysplasia. Buying a puppy? Oh, no you’re not! Not until you’ve seen the original certificates attesting that both parents have cleared either OFA or the University of Pennsylvania’s PennHIP. Approximate cost of full hip-replacement surgery: two thousand dollars. Enough said?
    “How many litters does Ginny breed a year?”
    “One or two.Two maximum. Really, she’s a very responsible breeder. For all I know, she’s as good as most vets. And there’s nothing wrong with her dogs.”
    “Except maybe Bingo,” I couldn’t help saying.
    Cam eyed me. “Holly,” she said, “imagine yourself if you’d been raised by Eva Spitteler.”
     

 
    AT TWO O’CLOCK that afternoon, I was sitting alone at a table in the front window of Doc Grant’s restaurant (“Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole”) looking across Route 4 at the State Liquor Store and the Pine Tree Frosty, and eating two deep-fried fish fillets, a plateful of fries, and a platter of potato skins topped with melted cheese. The fish had come with tartar sauce, the potato skins with sour cream. To make sure I wasn’t left starved for carbohydrates or vulnerable to collapse from a deficiency of dietary fat, the waiter brought a little plate on which sat a roll and two pats of butter. I felt happy. The State of Maine abounds in tourist bistros with names evidently inspired by the quasi-artistic productions of children who’ve learned their colors and their vegetables, but haven’t integrated the two spheres of knowledge: The Purple Carrot, The Red Zucchini. Worse, the portions at those places are tiny, and all the food’s steamed over no-salt water by anorectic dieticians from out of state. But Doc Grant’s? Maine, the way life should be.
    At a table not far from mine sat Everett Dow, the camp
    handyman, and a blue-uniformed guy with a silver badge pinned to his left breast. On the chair next to him rested a Stetson hat. A patch on his shoulder read: Police, Rangeley. Everett was halfway through an order of fried clams with french fries accompanied by a roll and butter, a bag of chips, and a side of mashed. The cop wasn’t eating anything; he was just drinking coffee. In rural Maine, two o’clock in the afternoon is way too late for lunch, practically suppertime. I wondered whether Everett Dow hated olive loaf as much as I did.
    Dissatisfaction with the stewards’ lunch was not, however, my excuse for driving into Rangeley; and as for my presence at Doc Grant’s, if I’d been forced to justify it, I’d have given the George Leigh Mallory explanation except that mine wouldn’t have sounded quite so silly as his, Mount Everest having been far away and extremely inconvenient to reach, whereas Doc Grant’s was a fifteen-minute drive from camp—and on street level, too. In fact, I’d always suspected that when Mallory said, “Because it’s there” what he really meant was, “Because it isn’t here.” What impelled him to flee his here I don’t know. Social entropy, perhaps, order turning to chaos. Maybe he couldn’t face learning yet one more thing he preferred not to know. Maybe he was starting to hate his own ugly perceptions of people he wanted to like.
    Take Max McGuire, to whom I’d been favorably predisposed for a variety of disparate and perhaps