We could see glimpses of Mr. Workman’s elfish house. I loved that house, with its peaked small windows that resembled its owner’s small eyes and the roof over the front door that extended widely like an upper lip. A carpenter’s bench stood at one side of the front door and a handmade table on the other. You’d think that Mr. Workman was a Wood Workman, and in fact making furniture was his hobby, but he was a lawyer by profession. He practiced in a one-room office near the courthouse. He was a bachelor, and lived with a dog I did not like — a large noisy hybrid named John Marshall. John Marshall had a pointed snout and black gums. To me he looked like a wolf — no, he looked like a dog who had reverted to wolfdom and then reverted farther back to whatever lupine species had preceded wolves. I knew nothing of Darwin then except what my father had revealed to me: that once nothing on earth was as it is now, that everything we see descended from something else — sycamores from ferns, sparrows from flying dinosaurs, Mr. Workman from a chimpanzee (but Dad didn’t say that last). There was something called evolution and something else called natural selection.
John Marshall barked at all Mr. Workman’s visitors, strangers or not. He bounded toward them and put his paws up on the newcomer’s shoulders and, delicately refraining from licking, gave the visitor a whiff of his dreadful breath. In this way he resembled not the wolves his ancestors had been but the dancers his species might become in a few more centuries of evolution.
“He is saying hello,” Mr. Workman often explained to me. “He’s overfriendly but harmless.” But he frightened me — I sensed that his harmlessness was only a ploy, like my pretending to play outdoors when I was really listening at the window. And so, out of sympathy with my timidity, Mr. Workman kept John Marshall tethered to a post when I was expected.
But today he had forgotten to tie up John Marshall. Or perhaps John Marshall had learned to undo knots. At any rate, we heard the animal barking as soon as we parked the car, and his barks grew louder as we walked up the path, my father going first with his bag attached to his hand and his box of medicines under his left arm. I knew that if I kept close to him he would protect me from John Marshall; but the increasingly louder barks rattled me — this crescendo had never happened before — and in an access of terror I wheeled, turned my back on my father, and ran in the other direction. I would reach the car before John Marshall; I would leap onto its curved roof, meanwhile transforming myself into a cat; I would arch my back and hiss, I would frighten him. But in my hurry to change species I neglected to grow the necessary forelegs. Two-legged, slipping first with one and then with the other, feeling one of my sneakers loosening, I fell on my all-too-human knees and then fell farther forward, ending up prone on the wet path. I slipped ahead an inch or two, wiggling like a primitive fish. Then I lay still. John Marshall yapped at my useless feet.
This was the end. I knew there was an end to everything — I had lost grandparents to old age and a schoolmate to accident, and I had seen diseased vegetation, and I had wept more than once over the death of Black Beauty. But this was the end of me. John Marshall would choose a way — would drag his canines across the back of my neck, severing my head from my body; or hurl his own body on top of mine and gnaw me to extinction; or simply bite me in an available place and infect me with fatal rabies that he himself had caught from a bat.
I was calm. If one of these cruel ends was in store for me, there was nothing to do. John Marshall had stopped barking. I could hear him panting first behind me and then by my side. He panted into my ear, perhaps singing a doggy lullaby or even a waltz, maybe “The Merry Widow,” my parents’ favorite, though the three/four beat seemed to be beyond him. Perhaps this was a doggy extreme unction.
Then I stopped considering him or his feelings. I had fallen in such a way that my nose was touching a maple leaf. I followed its periphery, I traveled its veins, I remembered that deciduous plants evolved later than earlier plants, well, naturally later was later than earlier, I was no longer making sense, the rabies was already affecting my brain…
“Emma!” And his strong hands with their soap-and-tobacco fragrance picked me up under the arms and lifted me and turned me at the same time, so my chest was pressed to his, my cheek to his, our two hearts beat as one. I think there was a waltz of that name. “Why did you run, you know John Marshall would never hurt you.” And indeed there was John Marshall, my sneaker in his smiling mouth, and Sam Workman, panting a little himself but only slightly; his heart was probably okay this time, as it usually was. I had run because I had to…but I couldn’t explain that, so I didn’t. I had run because I wanted to be caught, not by John Marshall but by the country doctor who had fathered me, who would always rescue me from danger.
I will never forget that day. I had never been so happy before. I have never been so happy since.
Honeydew
Caldicott Academy, a private day school for girls, had not expelled a student in decades. There were few prohibitions. Drinking and drugging and having sex right there on the campus could supposedly get you kicked out; turning up pregnant likewise; that was the long and short of it. There was a rule against climbing down the ravine on the west side of the school, where a suicide had occurred a century earlier, but the punishment was only a scolding.
Alice Toomey, headmistress, would have welcomed a rule against excessive skinniness. Emily Knapp, all ninety pounds of her, was making Alice feel enraged and, worse yet, incompetent — she, Alice, awarded the prize for Most Effective Director two years in a row by the Association of Private Day Schools. This tall bundle of twigs that called itself a girl — Alice’s palms ached to spank her.
Emily: eleventh grade, all As, active member of various extracurricular clubs, excused from sports for obvious reasons. Once a month she visited a psychiatrist, and once a week a nutrition doctor who emptied her pockets of rocks and insisted that she urinate before stepping on the scale. She had been hospitalized only twice. But according to her mother, Emily was never more than two milligrams away from an emergency admission.
She displayed other signs of disorder. Hair loss. Skin stretched like a membrane over the bones of the face. A voice as harsh as a saw. But her conversation, unless the subject was her own body mass, was intelligent and reasonable. Alice had endured a series of painful meetings with Dr. Richard Knapp, physician and professor of anatomy, and his wife, Ghiselle. The three met in Alice’s dowdy office. The atmosphere was one of helplessness.
On one of those occasions, “I worry about death,” Alice dared to say.
“Her death, if it occurs, will be accidental,” said Emily’s father evenly.
Ghiselle flew at him. “You are discussing some stranger’s case history, yes?” Despite twenty-five years in Massachusetts, she retained a French accent and French syntax, not to mention French chic and French beauty.
Richard said: “It is helpful to keep a physician’s distance.”
Husband and wife now exchanged a look that the unmarried Alice labeled enmity. Then Richard placed his fingers on Ghiselle’s chiffon arm, but it was Alice he looked at. “Emily doesn’t want to die,” he said.
“That is so?” scoffed Ghiselle.
“She doesn’t want a needle fixed to her vein. She doesn’t want an IV pole as a companion.”
“That is so?”
“She doesn’t want to drive us all crazy.”
“What does she want?” Alice said. And there was a brief silence as if the heavy questions about Emily’s condition and the condition of like sufferers were about to be answered, here, now, in Godolphin, Massachusetts.