Dear Life

Let’s just think a bit. Guns are a terrible thing. If I went and got a gun, then what would I be saying? That Vietnam was okay? That I might as well have gone to Vietnam?”
    “You’re not an American.”
    “You’re not going to rile me.”
    This is more or less what they said, and it ended up with Neal not having to get a gun. We never saw the wolf again, if it was a wolf. I think my mother stopped going to get the mail, but she may have become too big to be comfortable doing that anyway.
    The snow dwindled magically. The trees were still bare of leaves and my mother made Caro wear her coat in the mornings, but she came home after school dragging it behind her.
    My mother said that the baby had got to be twins, but the doctor said it wasn’t.
    “Great. Great,” Neal said, all in favor of the twins idea. “What do doctors know.”
    The gravel pit had filled to its brim with melted snow and rain, so that Caro had to edge around it on her way to catch the school bus. It was a little lake, still and dazzling under the clear sky. Caro asked with not much hope if we could play in it.
    Our mother said not to be crazy. “It must be twenty feet deep,” she said.
    Neal said, “Maybe ten.”
    Caro said, “Right around the edge it wouldn’t be.”
    Our mother said yes it was. “It just drops off,” she said. “It’s not like going in at the beach, for fuck’s sake. Just stay away from it.”
    She had started saying “fuck” quite a lot, perhaps more than Neal did, and in a more exasperated tone of voice.
    “Should we keep the dog away from it, too?” she asked him.
    Neal said that that wasn’t a problem. “Dogs can swim.”
    A Saturday. Caro watched
The Friendly Giant
with me and made comments that spoiled it. Neal was lying on the couch, which unfolded into his and my mother’s bed. He was smoking his kind of cigarettes, which could not be smoked at work so had to be made the most of on weekends. Caro sometimes bothered him, asking to try one. Once he had let her, but told her not to tell our mother.
    I was there, though, so I told.
    There was alarm, though not quite a row.
    “You know he’d have those kids out of here like a shot,” our mother said. “Never again.”
    “Never again,” Neal said agreeably. “So what if he feeds them poison Rice Krispies crap?”
    In the beginning, we hadn’t seen our father at all. Then, after Christmas, a plan had been worked out for Saturdays. Our mother always asked afterwards if we had had a good time. I always said yes, and meant it, because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron, or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time. Caro said yes, too, but in a tone of voice that suggested that it was none of our mother’s business. Then my father went on a winter holiday to Cuba (my mother remarked on this with some surprise and maybe approval) and came back with a lingering sort of flu that caused the visits to lapse. They were supposed to resume in the spring, but so far they hadn’t.
    After the television was turned off, Caro and I were sent outside to run around, as our mother said, and get some fresh air. We took the dog with us.
    When we got outside, the first thing we did was loosen and let trail the scarves our mother had wrapped around our necks. (The fact was, though we may not have put the two things together, the deeper she got into her pregnancy the more she slipped back into behaving like an ordinary mother, at least when it was a matter of scarves we didn’t need or regular meals. There was not so much championing of wild ways as there had been in the fall.) Caro asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I didn’t know. This was a formality on her part but the honest truth on mine. We let the dog lead us, anyway, and Blitzee’s idea was to go and look at the gravel pit. The wind was whipping the water up into little waves, and very soon we got cold, so we wound our scarves back around our necks.
    I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.
    I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.
    That the dog had fallen into the water.
    The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.
    Blitzee. Drownded.
    Drowned.
    But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.
    She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.
    I believe