Black Ribbon

Ranch. Dessert was bread pudding. A white meal.
    After I’d eaten, I got a cup of coffee, and instead of downing it and excusing myself, I sat there as the passive observer of a ritual at which I’d often officiated. The liturgical phrases and sentences were ones I’d recited myself. Whole paragraphs had passed my own lips. Don’s advice to Craig was my own, as were Eric’s injunctions, and, most of all, Phyllis’s enthusiasm. Time and again, in welcoming newcomers to the fancy, I’d offered the same grand incentives: the promise that shows were such fun and that dog people were so wonderful.
    Our table dispersed when Don Abbott asked whether he could interest anyone in a cognac and no one but Eric accepted the suggestion. Craig, I felt sure, wanted to join the other men, but succumbed to the batting of Joy’s tired, imploring eyes. He escorted her away with the genuinely reluctant but duty-first, no-choice, you-understand air of a parent forsaking a good party to get the baby-sitter home. As Ginny rose from her seat, the thought crossed my mind that for once, she looked her age. Then I realized that I had no idea what it actually was. Her skin was suddenly more wrinkled than weathered, and loose hairs were making their escape from what had always been the tight-security lockup of that narrow plait. Although Phyllis pleaded fatigue, her wide, glossy eyes and the tension in her jaw and hands predicted a choice between pills and insomnia. Maxine looked damp and overheated: Artificial-looking pink blotches burned on her cheeks, and the veins around her nose blazed red. In contrast to the rest of us, Cam looked neat, tidy, and precisely as sleepy as a healthy person should be at bedtime. In the lakeside humidity and the lingering warmth of the unseasonably hot day, everyone else’s hair had broken out in everything from unexpected little crimps and waves to Orphan Annie mops to what looked like the kinds of bizarrely dual-purpose items advertised on late-night TV—voluminously pilose wigs that had only to be whisked off the head and lightly damped to serve as restaurant-size scouring pads guaranteed to remove even baked-on grease from commercial cookware. And I’m not just the president of the Hair Club for Pots! I’m also...
    But Cam didn’t believe in gimmicks. What she believed in was obedience. I imagined her standing in front of the bathroom mirror, where she’d command the full attention of her short, dark hair (“Ready! Watch me!”) and go on to issue the same commands she gave to her dogs, and in some of the exact same words, too: Down! Stay! And stay down it did, in neat rows of controlled waves, until Cam released it. Or possibly she never did. For some people, no exercise is ever really finished.
    So when I left the main lodge, Eric Grimaldi and Don Abbott were heading across the lobby to the little bar known as The Pub for what Eric had insisted was going to be one quick nightcap; and Joy and Craig were presumably in their cabin, where, I imagined, he was zipping her into or possibly out of a fuzzy pink bunny-sleeper. Since Cam, Ginny, Phyllis, and I were going in the same direction, we walked together. Phyllis, as I recall, did all the talking: Wasn’t it exciting to encourage newcomers to get involved! Joy and Craig were people with a lot to contribute. Didn’t we agree? Instead of waiting to hear whether we did, Phyllis switched to exclamations about the brightness of the stars and the beauty of the moon on the lake. I slapped at a mosquito and said nothing. When we reached Cam and Ginny’s cabin, Phyllis said her good nights in exactly the same gracious tone she used in the ring, as if she were ordering them to prepare not their dogs, but themselves, for the long down. I’d always found Phyllis very pleasant in the ring—friendly, considerate, and fair. Judicial, too, of course. After all, she was a judge.
    As Phyllis and I covered the short distance to our cabin, she remarked on what a trooper Ginny was. “You know, it’s not every breeder who’d take full responsibility for that dog,”
    Phyllis said. “Some people out there would decide they didn’t like the impression people were getting of their lines, and they’d put him down. But not Ginny. I admire her spirit. I hope she’s not setting herself up for disappointment.”
    I said I hoped so, too. Starting up my own stairs, I wished Phyllis good night. She told me to sleep well.
    But every diligent dog owner is a sort of