The Wicked Flea

skull-shattering ways to concuss myself.
    The crack on the head was one of the twin traumas I’d suffered about two months earlier. While hiking with the dogs at Acadia National Park, I’d plummeted down a rocky little mountainside only to collide with a boulder. The damage suggests that I landed head first. When I regained consciousness, the fragmentary remains of my memory left me unable to retrieve an alarming number of ordinary words that would’ve come in handy. Amnesia, for instance, and Holly Winter. Forgetting my own name wasn’t necessarily all that big a deal, but as a real dog person, I’m still horrified at my initial failure to recognize Rowdy and Kimi as my own dogs. Their names were lost to me, too. But I did, of course, know that they were show-quality Alaskan malamutes.
    The other trauma was a broken heart. My lover, also my vet, Steve Delaney had married someone else, and not just any old someone else, either, and not just a young, beautiful someone else, but a damned disbarred lawyer. Her name was Anita Fairley. I can’t bring myself to say more about Steve or Anita right now, except that I needed a new vet and that I hated Anita as ferociously as she hated dogs.
    “Even so, I think I can probably manage to make it from here to Harvard Yard,” I told Gabrielle.
    Consequently, on the following evening, a bleak and weirdly mild one for mid-November, Gabrielle and I set out on foot for what’s known as Tercentenary Theater, which, in Harvardian fashion (“When I use a word, ” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”), isn’t a theater by any normal definition of the term, lacking as it does such theater-defining essentials as a stage and seats, for instance. In fact, it’s the flat, grassy area of Harvard Yard between Memorial Church and Widener Library, which are, respectively, a church and a library, perhaps by mistake. It’s called a theater, I suppose, because it’s the venue for Harvard’s graduation ceremonies, which are known as commencements, another term that baffles me. For most alumni, going to Harvard is the apex, like reaching the summit of Everest, and leaving Harvard is the commencement of the descent into the dreary, litter-strewn base camp below.
    Theater or no theater, the area between Memorial Church and Widener is, indeed, a spot fair to the eye, a quadrangle bounded on the other two sides by Sever and University halls and planted with numerous species of deciduous trees, all of which were indistinguishable from one another when Gabrielle and I arrived, because they had lost their leaves, and the lights shone on the paved walks and the entrances to the buildings, not on the treetops.
    “Not that I can tell one tree from another,” I told Gabrielle. “Maybe you can. Did Walter have a favorite species? Kimi, not there!” I used to think that the leg-lifting frequently observed in female malamutes was a sign of dominance, but someone who works with wolves told me it had nothing to do with dominant or submissive rank within a pack and everything to do with self-confidence. Kimi would have made a great suffragist. Any male who’d tried to deny her the vote would’ve found himself pounced on, knocked to the ground, and pinned there until he not only conceded her right to cast a ballot, but promised to help elect her. Anyway, Kimi marks her turf all the time, but the prospect of having her drench a funeral marker struck me as unseemly. I’d left Rowdy at home. If you want to be dismissed as just one more dog walker, an Alaskan malamute is already a poor choice of breed to walk. And in a populous area like Harvard Yard, Rowdy is a shameless, hopeless, uncontrollable attention-grabber. Both dogs are wolf-gray, with plumy white tails, stand-off coats, and lovely little ears. But Rowdy is bigger than Kimi—about eighty-eight pounds to her seventy-five—and he’s a better show dog than she is, not because judges necessarily prefer his white face to her black facial markings, but because Rowdy radiates an animal magnetism that dares people to look elsewhere when he’s around. Also, Kimi can sometimes be persuaded to mind her own business, whereas Rowdy will not be stopped from singing loud peals of woo-woo-woo. We didn’t have the Yard to ourselves. Students passed by, alone, in couples, and in groups.
    “Walter was partial to pines,” Gabrielle said, “but there aren’t any here.” For