M.E. Breen

Not, for once, about the dog. Well, sort of about the dog. When I first adopted Truckstop I made a big fussy deal in my head about how the inevitable cute-ification of her name should be spelled. Truckstop’s original name, now her middle name, is Arizona Courage, for the truck stop at Fort Courage where Amy and Rosanna (much blessed, much envied) picked her up.  I have never been to Fort Courage, but I picture a baking Martian tundra with terrifying extras from Road Warrior wandering around in metal studs and leather boots.

We have a long history in my family of naming our pets after the places we find them: Canterbury, Balboa, the kittens Nineteenth and Holloway, plucked from the traffic island at the intersection of two busy roads. But I didn’t find Truckstop, and she struck me right away as a creature who carries her past in her teeth, something to drop or pick up as she sees fit. She needed a name both specific and general, fixed and placeless, rough and dear. But I also wanted a name that would tie us together, so I decided her nickname would honor a place from my own past: Truckee, CA.

Of course it didn’t work. Anyone who takes the trouble to inquire after my dog’s welfare can spell her name however they damn well please: Trucki, Trucky, Truckie, Truckstopie, Truckstoppy, Truckstanky, Trucknugget . . . I love them all. But this weekend, we took Truckee to Truckee for the first time. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid.

My mom used to take me and my sister to Truckee once or twice each winter to ski. I remembered a scruffy little town with train tracks running through it. We always stayed at the same moth-smelling hotel, the kind of place with mismatched cotton bedspreads where you shared a bathroom (this was where I first encountered the mystery of the initials “W.C.”) and kept your milk and cereal in a communal kitchen. Most mornings my mom hustled us up and out, but at least once each trip we got to have breakfast at the Squeeze In, across the tracks on the main street of town.

The Squeeze In was so small it felt like a secret. You sat in your ski bib and long underwear top, too hot but not minding, the windows all steamed up, everything smelling of syrup. The waitress brought orange juice in a tiny glass and a big plate of pancakes. Mom had coffee and eggs.

The restaurant is still open 25 years later. We had breakfast there on Monday morning, after a long weekend of hammock-swinging and mystery-reading and dog-rambling and swimming in Donner Lake. Needless to say, Truckee was not as I remembered it. It looked like the set designer for The Gates had been put in charge of property development, that queer combination of bloat and uniformity that makes a place look unlike itself without quite managing the transition into something else. It’s as though Truckee asked Park City over for dinner and Park City set up a squat in the living room and never left. The main street is now the downtown historic district, and there is a dog treats bakery and a skin spa and an antiques shop.

The Squeeze In has not turned twee, but its funkiness is self-conscious now. There are lines out the door on the weekend. The omelettes have names. Instead of being smaller than I remembered, like an old house or classroom, it seemed bigger. It made me think of the fuschia I over-fertilized, all blossoms and no leaves.

Of course I have no idea if the Squeeze In has actually changed. I’m the one who is bigger than she was, more self-conscious, more artificial. I asked my mom what she remembered about it and she didn’t remember it at all. She did remember the hotel, and a wedding that took place while we were staying there, and how excited we were as little girls. I don’t know. The past seems so fragile. If you poke it, if you so much as open the door and admit the light, it breaks apart. A memory is really just a thing, an object:  it has certain dimensions and a certain weight. It’s subject to tarnish and decay. Is this a trailer full of things I’m towing behind me? Will they all break? What will happen if they do?

And then there is Truckee the dog. Since arriving from Arizona this was her first trip out of the city. Everything is new to her. She anticipates nothing, expects everything. She has no idea if she will go home again, or if this is the new place, the new home. She had the time of her life.

I have a confession to make. It’s a TV confession, and it’s serious: I like to watch this show called The Gates. It’s a bad show. I mean, it’s a bad, bad, bad, bad show. It’s about all these people who live in a gated community in some weird place where there is never any weather. The air is always warm enough to permit sleeveless dresses and plenty of daytime decolletage but cool enough that no one ever breaks a sweat. Or an expression. It’s supposed to be a show full of grimaces and gasps: there are wampyres! and werewolves! succubi and witches! But the actors, men, women, even, I fear, the children, have all gone in for such an incredible combination of injectables, of lip plumpification and brow-freezeration, that no one can move any part except their eyeballs, and their eyeballs mostly roll around in confusion. One time this one lady who plays a British vampire was supposed to register outrage that she quickly has to mask with a look of warm welcome, and it was the same face both times.

Everyone on the show drives an SUV the size of my house and the wives all run bake sales and the husbands run rabdillion dollar multinational blood labs, or maybe synthetic wolf-fur manufacturing emporiums, I’m not sure. They don’t work very hard, in any case, because they are always cruising around the Gates in their giant black cars or staring blankly at each other across California King-size marble kitchen islands. It’s like Nero designed the sets, I swear.

I worry sometimes that the show thinks it’s revealing new things about the suburbs: sometimes a perfect lawn does not indicate a perfect character. Sometimes it indicates. . . creepy bones and stuff are buried under there! And then I worry that the show is just a cynical mishmash of money-making tropes. Maybe those things are true, but most of all I think the show is out of its mind. Characters appear and disappear willy nilly. Someone shows up at the start of what you think is going to be a major arc and then, wham! Dead due to wampyre! It sort of wants to be True Blood, but because it’s on network TV, it’s all ridiculously constrained and full of the dorky innuendo I remember from my pre-teen days watching Dynasty and The Colbys and Falcon Crest. Lorenzo Lamas, I loved you.

And I think that’s why I like it. Sometimes I get tired of seeing everything, either because the sex or blood or misery is over the top and gratuitous, or because it isn’t. The Gates is so randomly cut and pieced together but so uniformly shot and acted you feel you could watch any scene from any episode in any order and it would make the same amount of sense. It’s like one of those kids’ puzzles where all the pieces are perfect squares and the point is to make the picture whole of, say, a parrot or a giraffe, but even if you put the piece with the giraffe’s face where his foot should go, you still know it’s a giraffe’s face. The other shows I watch are more like one of those puzzles made out of a Seurat or a Turner painting, a piece of blue shadow with a brown blur on one prong that might be the sky or might be the water or might be the ship’s sails or the fabric of the lady’s dress or the bank of flowers, and anyway even when you have the whole puzzle done the scene will never make sense or stop breaking your heart.

So I guess sometimes I want my TV like a giraffe puzzle, especially when I am a little sick or a little blue, or just worn out in the ways it feels like only painless TV can fix. TV and rice pudding I overcooked myself, and dog and cat and the old WindChaser oscillating heater, and, to end with a confession as bad as I began, The Cure. The album? Disintegration.

Fridge options dire: a slab of something called Sprout!Tofu, parsley, a bagel of ancient type. I mash these together, plus mustard, plus mustard on my sweatshirt = lunch.

I eat on the back steps where the dog is having her sunbath. She’ll come over to investigate if I’m eating a saltine, cantaloupe, muesli, spicy cashews, but no interest at all in the tofuwich. Next comes dessert, a plum, which I eat pretty fast because after fake dessert is real dessert. Chocolate! But that is kind of sad, too, because it’s only plain chocolate, not the dark chocolate full of almonds and sea salt and persimmon chips or whatever that I think of as fancy Snickers, or, really, an overblown version of Cadbury Fruit&Nut, which I discovered in 1984, the year we lived in England, and have not tasted since. I think you can buy it here, but what if I try some and it turns out that whole year wasn’t as great as I remember? What if Daniel, small as a jockey, smallest as a jockey, I should say, since after all this was fifth grade, beloved by all the girls at Park House Elementary for his white blond hair and shy smile –what if angelic Daniel didn’t really like me best?

He did, though.

There are only so many times in life you get to hear that, and of those an even smaller number when you get to believe it. Of all of us, he liked me best. There was Elaine, who had the most beautiful name, and Frances, sandy with freckles, and Uns, who looked like Natalie Wood if only I’d known to make the comparison, and Nusrat, who held things in reserve. I galloped through that scene like a horse. If you had Uns ride piggy-back on Frances and put all the girls together under a blanket and made them run around the school yard, then basically that was how big and wild and horsey and American I was. Oh, Daniel! You had a pure heart.

There was no relationship that I can recall. There was nothing to screw up the declaration or its acknowledgment, breathed into the mustard-colored phone from the floor at the foot of my mom’s bed. I don’t know why the Sprout!Tofu has sent me down memory lane. Or wait, I do. There’s something about my life now that feels at once shrunk and expanded, as though the only people in the world are the people I know, the only rooms the rooms I occupy. When I leave the house I feel like an explorer.

J and I were talking about vacations we took with our families to resorts or family camps, where the kids form a pack and the parents go off and swim laps or play cards, trusting to the security of the setting and the safety of numbers. There was that queasy, giddy feeling of running with kids a few years older than you, kids who might be liking each other, kids who used slang you didn’t know, and then at the end of a long day of running you would return to the family cabin after dark, and as soon as you ducked through that flap of canvas you would just be your old self again, sleeping in the usual bunk, your sister her old self as well, your mom in the same t-shirt she had on that morning, a million years ago.

Some wild stuff has happened to us in the last month, but I don’t think this sense of the world’s newness, its threat and possibility, has to do with that. I think it has to do with the safety of home. J calls our apartment the Minnow. She’s snug, her walls are brown wood, she even has hatches and a sun-drunk, hairy, inarticulate crew. Our bikes, our skiffs, are on deck, ready to drop over the side when we need them. Provisions of food and comics get low and we restock. It’s the best.

I wanted to use a futbol metaphor to tell this story but it felt like trying to tell a joke in another language. My enthusiasm for the game way outstrips my understanding. Never mind. I’ll just tell it like it is: I’m back at the beach! I never left. I thought I was writing the story of this move. Correction: I thought I was co-authoring the story, but one of the minor characters came along and hijacked the whole plot. Oh, hey, I’m using a writing metaphor instead.

Anyway, point is, we thought we were moving into a new apartment, and due to a shocking, then worrying, then baffling, then dismaying, and ultimately tedious turn of events, we are staying here.

A few nights after all this went down, when we were still baffled but edging toward dismay, we took the dog for a walk. Here’s how it works at Ocean Beach: first you cross the Old Great Highway, which has houses and last-chance motels and coffee shops on its east side and what I suspect is a man-made hill on its west side. The hill runs almost two miles north-south and is covered in ice-plants and tea trees and twisty native pines that look like Brobdingnagian bonsai, all crammed together into a wad of vegetation that does a marvelous job blocking the wind and sand that blow off the beach. A path runs along the top of the hill. About a zillion joggers, cyclists, roller-bladers (stalwart few!), stroller-pushers, dog-walkers, and dogs-in-strollers-pushers use the path every day. West of the hill is the New Great Highway, a big lumpy road of four lanes and traffic lights. On the other side of that road is another path, and then the dunes, and then the beach, and then the water.

We were preparing to cross the New Great Highway when we saw a fox. It was across the road on the path by the dunes. Truckstop is not enfolded by this “we,” by the way. Truckstop was too busy investigating someone’s old hot-dog-2-go box from the 7-11 to notice the fox. But the fox noticed us, and as we started to cross it crossed in the opposite direction, back to the bike path and the twisty pines.

Now, I have seen a fox at a distance, and I have seen a fox that has been killed by a car, and I have seen plenty of photographs of foxes and even a few animated foxes, but somehow this fox looked nothing like any of those. It was big, and had a long body and long legs and absolutely giant ears, and it was sort of yellowish grayish. It looked like a member of a hyper-intelligent and bloodthirsty alien race that lulls heroes into passivity with its furry cuteness. It looked like my dog and cat fell asleep in the sun and melted and pooled together and woke up as a single animal. It looked like it knew more than we did, about everything.

Once it had crossed to the opposite side from us, it watched us. It would be safe to say it saw us off. We walked a few yards. It walked a few yards. We walked a few yards more. It trotted along, stopped, watched. The poor co-evolved dog never spotted the fox at all, though she did nearly give herself a strain trying to follow its scent. And even though the fox was an alien of impossible genius, I couldn’t help wringing my hands whenever a wave of traffic went by. What if its babies are on this side? What if our presence here drives it to some desperate act! We are the interlopers! This is not our galaxy to invade!

When we’d gotten far enough along down the path, the fox crossed back over to the dune side and continued to stare after us until the dark swallowed its shape. Then I imagine it went back to its regularly scheduled nightly activities: assembly of the Nova Corps via the Worldmind,* plus gopher hunting.

Of course we Googled “California fox” when we got home. Gray foxes do almost as well around people as rats and pigeons. They nest in trees near human habitation. They eat just about anything. They are wily canids. Still, the picture on the site didn’t look like the animal we saw. And so of course, here it is, my metaphor: the most ordinary things assume the strangest shapes. Things that happen between people every day, ordinary human failures and deceptions, become so improbable, so hard to grasp, when they happen to you. The world seems knowable, mappable, and then all of a sudden it seems like outer space. There are no laws, not even the law of gravity.

So we are back where we started, in the summer fog, the weird soft air, that one corner that always stinks, the shoes dangling from the telephone wire at the end of the block, the cactus on our steps that never stops blooming. The fox set the whole thing in motion from the start. The great mind grew bored in its nest in the trees. It sent us out and it brought us home.

*Marvel’s Annihilation: Book One. Fun!

Remember a few posts back I wrote about how Truckstop at long last caught a rat? And how I sort of admired her easy-going pride around the whole event? Well, okay. Things have changed. In the past week she has caught, killed and eaten not one, not two, but three gophers. To be fair, or, I suppose, to be honest, we are in the midst of a gopher population explosion. Twice in this same week I’ve stumbled across a hawk just sitting on the ground (the ground!) with a gopher in its talons, looking all hunched and greedy and suspicious of its own good fortune, like the not-wicked wicked old dust man from Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Hawk!  Redeem yourself.

These are awfully small gophers, and awfully dense, since they don’t seem to have figured out the main fact of gopher life: it takes place underground. Also, this particular group survives on the roots of dune grass and iceplants, which don’t seem like they’d be very nutritious. When I think of ice plant roots I think of mint jelly, which falls into the same category of almost-food as gummy bears and tapioca pudding. I love almost-food because it seems composed partly of plastic and as a kid I always wanted to eat silly putty, red egg and all.

Huh? Oh: the murdering dog. I feel about ten things at once when she eats a gopher. Pity for the animal, though it all happens very, very fast; relief that there are too many gophers in California, not too few; creeped-outness; interest; skepticism about my own motives: how is it that I have allowed this to happen more than once? What sort of dark experiment am I running? Which last question leads me to my most prominent feeling: murky pride.

I like it that my dog can fend for herself, and that she takes what the land provides, and that eating the gophers doesn’t make her sick to her stomach. The Wysong Maintenance Diet, the special armpit shampoo, the endless inquiry into her emotional state (are you sad? are you worried?), the resourceful projection (you’re sad we didn’t get the job, you’re worried about moving), has not stopped her from being an animal.

I think I’m hoping her self-determination is contagious. Being without a paying job is weird, because it means you really are what you do. When you have a job-job you often have to do things you wouldn’t freely choose, like call someone up to ask them for money or enter something into Excel, which means you can always imagine another version of yourself, your real self, doing something different. That different activity is the thing that defines you, but it isn’t a thing at all, is it? Only a fantasy of a thing. This comes up all the time with writing, of course. When I have an office job I imagine an alternative self who, given no rules and no limits, would build a city. Instead I find myself with a heap of preliminary sketches.

Work-work can be a dispiriting grind, but it’s also the thing that lets you off the hook for failing to lead an outstanding life. You could be doing anything right now I sometimes tell myself when I am doing precisely the thing I did the day before, usually something involving my pajamas and a cup of coffee and a laptop. For someone who spends most of her time in the present wondering about the future (except when I am writing, which is why I can never give it up), I am shockingly unprepared for the future when it actually hits.

I’m moving at the end of the month. Goodbye ocean. Goodbye crows. Goodbye surfers. Goodbye man with bandaged feet outside the Sea View Inn. Goodbye iceplant alley. Goodbye organic co-op. Goodbye filthy 7-11.

My street runs north-south. There’s a sign on the street that runs perpendicular to mine, east-west: Tsunami Evacuation Route. I lie in bed sometimes and think about how I’d get all the animals out if we had to evacuate. Would I have time to stuff the cats in their carrier? How far and how fast could I carry them? Should I keep the dog on her leash? Should I let them all fend for themselves? I never imagine a car in this scenario. It’s gone already, towed off by another current, and it’s just us on our feet. Do I carry them? Do I let them run? But this is not an escape. I’ve had plenty of time. I packed everything. The world is flooded but the ark floats.