Bloodlines

even have done it. But since no harm came to him, thank God, I am taking a constructive, civilized approach to the situation.”
    “Stop this car!”
    “No,” I said, peering out to check a sign that pointed the way to Arlington. “Of course not. You haven’t even met Kimi yet. Do you have any other questions?”
    She said nothing.
    “Well, I do,” I said. “First of all, are you from A.L.F.?”
    A.L.F.? Animal Liberation Front. The militant wing of animal rights extremism, the Irish Republican Army of animal liberation, but, oddly enough, British. Really, that’s true. Her accent was what made me ask, of course.
    “No,” she said. “It was my own symbolic act.”
    “Rowdy is not a symbol. He’s my dog. And if you think it was okay to let him loose indoors,” I went on, “you’re wrong. A dog fight would have been almost as bad. And he could have wandered out. It wasn’t likely, okay, but it could have happened. What you did was not just symbolic, you know. It was directed against my dog.”
    “Ownership is not something I choose to recognize,” she said smugly.
    “Well, you may not, but Rowdy and Kimi do,” I said.
    “Ownership is exploitation,” she mouthed. It’s a stupid cliché, I know, but she was very young.
    “Fine,” I agreed. “But it goes both ways. What you probably don’t know is that dog people joke about it all the time. ‘Congratulations! You are now owned by an Alaskan malamute.’ But it’s no joke! We honestly are owned. I am. And, believe me, the interspecies relationship is voluntary. It has been from the beginning. People didn’t force wolves to come into the cave, you know.”
    “Is that dog part wolf?” she demanded.
    Well, asking that question seemed to me to be the only intelligent thing Gloria had done so far, and I gave her a thoughtful answer. Gloria. Yeah, before long, she told me her name. Gloria Loss. We talked about her even more than we talked about dogs. She was eighteen years old, and she lived in Cambridge. Until a year ago, she’d been a day student at a private prep school just outside Boston, a place that specializes in troubled kids without embarrassing their parents by advertising itself that way. The British accent came from four years in England. Her father was a professor of linguistics, and Gloria and her mother had gone to England with him when Gloria was eight. When they’d returned to America, the father had immediately turned around, gone back, and moved in with one of his students, and Gloria had seen him only twice since then.
    “What does your mother do?” I asked.
    “Personal growth,” Gloria answered, as if it were a form of full-time employment. “Energy healing,” she added. “Healing modalities. Right now, she’s trying to clarify her desires. She used to do Feldenkrais. You wouldn’t know what that is. Awareness through movement, they call it.”
    I didn’t have the heart to explain why I knew exactly what the Feldenkrais Method is, even though I knew it mostly by another name, TTouch. What is it? New Age massage and movement, a healing touch for dogs. Dog owners use Feldenkrais to heal those they love. Gloria’s mother evidently did, too. Gloria herself had never owned a dog or cat. She’d once had gerbils that had reproduced and promptly eaten their newborn offspring.
    At a stoplight, I glanced over at Gloria, who’d removed the ugly Peruvian cap and sat hunched in the seat, her knees drawn up in a fetal curl. Even in the dim light from the dashboard and a nearby streetlight, her face was painful to look at. She had the kind of acne you practically never see anymore, certainly never on children of privilege, children whose fathers are professors, who’ve traveled abroad, whose mothers can afford to pursue personal growth instead of working for a living. I felt furious at the parents who’d neglected this poor kid, who’d turned her loose to develop into a mangy stray. By the time we reached the intersection of Alewife Brook Parkway and Mass. Ave., which is to say, Cambridge, I was feeling disappointed and chagrined. I’d thought I was capturing Satan himself. What I’d caught was, at worst, a minor imp.
    I didn’t even bother to press her about why she’d released Rowdy. She’d already told me herself. “It was my own symbolic act,” she’d said. The sight, sound, and scent of two thousand show dogs, each one groomed, pampered, and adored? Two thousand beautiful dogs, each one loved and cared for?