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SHORT LEASH

A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance

Michigan State University Press

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

OCTOBER 2001

The engine is off. The seatbelt unbuckled. The windows all rolled up. There's nothing left to do except get out of the car. But I don't. Instead, I sit there, staring out the windshield at the woods beyond the parking lot, my right hand squeezed into a fist around fourteen keys, a string of beads spelling "S.O.B.," a solid brass circle, and a Big Boy juggling a hamburger in his chubby plastic hand.

Most of these keys are so old I can hardly remember what they unlock—an office at a job I no longer have, a house in a city I don't live in anymore. It doesn't matter. What matters is the weight, the heft of the brass and steel, the fact that this key ring once was taken from my hands in the basement of a church by a self-defense instructor and held up for all the women in the room to see. "Take a look," she said. "Now this is an example of an excellent weapon."

It's also a liability. My purse is ungodly heavy. Most of my coat pockets have holes in them. The ignition tumbler on my car has had to be replaced. Twice. "You need to lighten this thing up," the mechanic told me.

Not gonna happen.

Outside, leaves tumble across a browning meadow. Trees bow and bend in the breeze. In the backseat, a ninety-five pound dog paces back and forth, his tail thumping against the cloth seatbacks in a kind of canine Morse code: Wow! Oh wow! The park! I can't believe we're here.

I can't believe it either. I've been avoiding the place for years.

Walking a dog in a park should be simple. But for me and Barney, there's nothing simple about it. We're handicapped, the two of us, in ways that are invisible. To see us walking down the road, you would never guess that the smiling black Lab at the end of the leash is a fur-covered time bomb or that the athletic-looking woman behind him is incapable of walking without a four-legged crutch. There would be no way of knowing that if a dog comes too close to Barney, he turns into a killing machine. Or that if I find myself in an isolated area or an empty street late at night, my mind enters a war zone where the enemies are everywhere and nowhere.

Barney sticks his head between the bucket seats and gently nudges my shoulder. "Alright alright," I say. "I get the message."

He's the reason I'm here, after all.

I stash the keys and a canister of Mace in my pocket and reach back to hook the leash onto Barney's collar. As soon as the door opens, he leaps onto the tarmac, pulling the retractable cord out to its full length so he can anoint a small bush at the edge of the lot. We set off in the direction of the picnic tables, following the tree line abutting the meadow. While he runs as far as the leash will let him, I move slowly, straining to catch any sound that will indicate the presence of a person or a dog. Birdcalls float through the air. Leaves scuttle across the ground. We're alone. At least I think so. No one else around except for me and my dog-shaped shadow.

With Barney leading the way, we walk a few yards and then a few yards more, and before I know it we're almost to the picnic area. My steps are lighter, my breathing easier, when, suddenly, I hear the sound of shuffling leaves coming from the direction of the woods. Panic shoots through every nerve ending. I reach for the Mace in my coat pocket. As my fingers wrap around the canister, a squirrel darts out of the woods.

For a moment, all I can do is stand there, shock mixing with disbelief. Jesus, I'm thinking. Spooked by a squirrel. The animal stops several yards away and watches Barney and me as he nervously gnaws on an acorn. His eyes keep flitting back and forth, and it's obvious what's on his mind: Am I safe? Should I stay? Or should I run? I study his face, noting the flat eyes set wide apart so he can watch for predators on either side.

"No need to worry," I say to him. His eyes dart to the left. To the right. He's not buying it. And I don't blame him.

We turn toward the meadow, leaving the squirrel to his foraging. While Barney stops to sniff the leaves of a small holly, I take a deep breath and look around, amazed at how beautiful this place is, even on a gray day. My heart is still beating from the squirrel panic, but I hear the breeze moving through the treetops, shoosh, shoosh, like a mother calming a baby. My breathing slows down. I slow down.

A few minutes later, I'm about to pull the keys out of my pocket to head back to the car when I'm stopped by the slow-motion dance of a leaf in the wind. Even though the sky is cloudy, even though the leaves are yellowed and dull and beginning to curl at the edges, there is a profound beauty to this place. As I stand there, I hear branches dropping, squirrels running. And something else, something I haven't heard for a long time: the sound of silence in my head.

For a moment, I drink in the quiet like water, like a woman who has been thirsty for ages. The wind washes over the leaves—a great wave signaling something coming. Not a bad thing. Not a good thing. Just change.

I usually don't welcome fall in Maryland. In fact, I dread it. As the light wanes, the dark begins pressing in against me. Sometimes it takes over.

This time though, it's different. The leaves aren't falling, they're twirling and gliding, diving off branches like acrobats without a net. The sky is cloudy but alive, filled with birds moving in practiced groups among the treetops. Squirrels chide each other to get moving. The park is readying itself for a season of quiet. It feels like I'm being readied, too, though for what I'm not sure.

As we make our way toward the parking lot, Barney pulls ahead (an alpha habit I have tolerated, even encouraged, over the years), steering us back to the edge of the woods. When we approach the tree line, I pull him back. He looks at the woods, then at me, his eyes pleading, telegraphing the words he cannot say: There's important information here; we must go on. He's trying so hard to be understood that I can't refuse him. Despite my doubts about moving away from the meadow, I let his leash out and follow along. While he stops and sniffs a fringe of sticker bushes, my eyes wander into the woods. The wine-like scent of fermenting leaves and earth overwhelms my senses, and before I know it, I'm reeling like a drunken sailor on the decks to another time, another forest, and the roads and towns beyond it where there were no leashes, no collars, and no limits to where I would go.

When I was a girl, I dreamed away whole afternoons in the woods, setting up household in trees, listening to the symphonies of streams, making pretend castles out of termite-infested stumps. I looked into the soft brown eyes of deer before they ran, saw fox slink into bushes, watched snakes slither across sun-warmed rocks. When the sound of guns popped in the distance, I was scared only for the deer, never for myself. Nearby, acres of apple and pear orchards bloomed in the spring, and when fall came I picked as much as I could eat, stepping around the bees that swarmed in great numbers over rotted fruit on the ground. Later, I climbed out of bedroom windows to walk under the stars, rode around town in hippie vans, traveled out west with two pairs of jeans and $70.00 in my pocket. I camped under velvet skies in the desert, crashed in seedy apartments in strange cities, bummed cigarettes, bummed money, bummed rides with questionable men, and rode off with only the clothes on my back and some weed in my pocket. I was wildly, willingly, stupidly free.

And now, look at me. Afraid to walk in a park with my dog.

I'm a woman on a very short leash.

CHAPTER 2

FALL 2001

Barney and I return to the park the next day and the day after that. And we keep coming back until three weeks of walks have piled up behind us. One morning, as we drive into the park, I see a new banner on the entrance gazebo announcing the upcoming Halloween Barkin' Bash. It's a dog party, complete with costume contests, prize giveaways, and free treats, but it's a party we can't attend. I make a mental note to stay far away from the park next Saturday.

When we get out of the car, the air smells of apples and earth. As usual, I head toward the picnic area, but Barney reels his leash out in the opposite direction, hot on the trail of a good, fresh scent. Since there's no one else around, I figure what the heck—why not let him go where he wants? Nose to the ground, he sniffs his way across the field to a concrete drainage ditch at the side of the road, no doubt tracking some critter who has made his home in the pipe. While Barney sticks his head in the culvert, my eyes wander to the forest across the road where the trees sway back and forth in unison like a line of dancers.

Several minutes go by as Barney investigates the sewer pipe. The movement of the trees is hypnotic; it's as if they're beckoning to me with their twiggy fingers. I step into the road toward the woods. Then I take a few more steps. Barney, done with his inspection, walks right past me, his leash unspooling enough for him to cross over to the other side. Without even thinking about it, I follow. And just like that, our walking grounds have expanded.

Standing on the grassy strip between the road and the forest, I'm rather stunned at what has just happened. Before now, I've been careful not to venture beyond the small patch of meadow just beyond the park entrance. Day after day, it's been the same routine: pulling into the same parking lot, parking in the same parking space, walking in the same picnic area. Now that I'm across the street, I see things I've never seen before: a long slope of woods, the outline of a picnic pavilion in the distance, mountain laurels sparkling in the sun.

The road is six feet wide at best, but for the past three weeks it might as well have been the Grand Canyon. It's startling to realize how boxed in I've become, relying—insisting, actually—on the worn patterns of my habits to move me through the days. There's nothing wrong with indulging in the same routines every day: drinking your favorite tea at the same time or having the same breakfast every morning. But I'm well aware that some of my routines go beyond preference or habit, often entering another realm altogether, like when I have to fold my clothes just so or else; or when I can't go back inside my house once the door is locked or else. If I don't obey these ridiculous commands, something bad will happen. Or something good won't.

There is a desperate, obsessive quality to these thoughts. I know it, but that doesn't mean I can let them go. Sometimes, I'm held captive by my own thoughts for days, weeks, until I fight back and refuse to obey the whispering warnings in my head. Coming to the park for the first time was one of those acts of defiance. And coming back the next day was another.

Barney stops to examine a pine branch while the woods unspool before me. As I stare into space, my mind wanders back to when I thought nothing of leaping across continents, much less a road—any road, anywhere. I was a girl running as far as possible from her past. A girl who believed that such a thing was even possible.

In the spring of 1972, my freshman year at Ohio University had just ended. Out of forty-five credits taken that year, thirty had a grade of "PR," which meant pending requirements, which meant I spent more time smoking pot, writing songs, and hanging out in the southern Ohio countryside than in class. Not that I cared. I wanted to be a musician—a singer, a rock star. It seems foolish now—not exactly the best career move for a young woman—but then it felt like the right thing to do, the first step of a trajectory I had been planning my whole life. I moved back home for the summer and tried to keep up my hippie lifestyle, smoking pot in the bathroom with the fan on and listening to Procol Harum and Rolling Stones records for hours on end. At night, after my mother had passed out on the downstairs couch and my sister and brother were asleep, I'd slip out the window of my second floor bedroom and hitch rides into town. When a friend invited me to join her on a short trip out west to California, I joined her, bringing only the money in my pocket and the clothes on my back. When I got back, I returned to Athens and Ohio University, but only to live with friends and to make up a year's worth of incompletes.

The following summer, I found myself living at home again. My mother bought me an old Ford Galaxie, which I drove back and forth from the Cincinnati suburbs to Clifton, home of the University of Cincinnati and the town's resident hippie population. I spent long, lazy afternoons there, hanging out with musicians and periodically crashing in their roach-infested apartments. I briefly considered returning to Athens. Then, I came up with a better plan. I would move to California, find a band, and climb my way to the stars. All I needed was a little start-up cash.

When September came around, instead of registering for classes, I took a job waitressing at a Perkins Pancake House off I-71 outside Cincinnati. For five long months, from midnight until 6 a.m., I served platters of eggs and waffles to truckers, drunks, and insomniacs until enough money was saved to put the plan in motion. By February, I was ready. There was only one thing left to do.

Locking my bedroom door from the prying eyes of my mother and younger siblings, I cleared off the top of the nightstand next to my canopy bed and placed a candle, three brass coins, and the I Ching/Book of Changes on it. Rubbing the coins between my palms, I silently repeated a single question before flinging the brass disks onto the table where they skittered across the painted surface before settling to rest, two face-side up and one blank-side up: young yang.

I had discovered the coins in a small shop in San Francisco's Chinatown the summer before. According to the sages, the responses from the Book of Changes were of such import that they could save one from a lifetime of folly. I wanted to believe that was true, but consulting the pages of the I Ching was more an act of willfulness than of faith—a desperate attempt to influence forces beyond my control, the same forces that had already buffeted me around like a kite in a March sky.

Four years earlier, my father had died. His death was a sudden and shocking event that set in motion a series of events that I could never have predicted. We moved from New Jersey to Ohio to be near my aunt. My mother, who had never handled the family finances, was suddenly flush with cash from my father's life insurance. She bought a new house, a new car, a new everything. Loosened from my father's tight grip and supported by my mother's loose purse, I set out to make a new life of my own. Out went the Villager clothes and polite good girl manners. In came the ripped jeans, ironed hair, and hippie lifestyle. It was as if all the fences had been taken down around me and I was a wild horse, not concerned or even cognizant of the dangers of running off into the world unbridled. But as much as I tried to divert myself from the truth, it was there, lying just beneath the surface of my fuck-you persona: I was flying blind. And I knew it.

I threw the coins five more times, marking a solid line for yang and an open line for yin in my journal, until there were six lines stacked up over one another, representing one of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. The question I asked was this: Should I move to California? The answer was Hexagram 36: Ming I/Darkening of the Light. Injury.

Not exactly what I was hoping for.

The image aligned with Hexagram 36 was that of the sun sinking below the earth. The sequence read: Expansion will certainly encounter resistance and injury. Hence there follows the hexagram of Darkening of the Light. Darkening means damage, injury.

I could feel my heart sinking like the sun in the hexagram. It didn't sound like a good omen. But maybe I hadn't read it right. Like most I Ching revelations, the pithy commentary in the hexagram contradicted itself with each line, foretelling of disaster in one but perseverance in the next. I combed the lines—one representing King Wen, another Prince Chi, all battling for control and confusing the hell out of me. No matter how I interpreted it, though, most of the lines foretold of disaster. It was a mistake. It had to be. The truth was, I had already made my decision. All I wanted was for the I Ching to back me up.

I repeated the question and threw the coins again. This time, I got Hexagram Number 4: Meng/Youthful Folly.

The young fool seeks me. At the first oracle I inform him. If he asks two or three times, it is importunity. If he importunes, I give him no information. Perseverance follows.

For a moment I sat there stunned, as if someone had just slapped me across the face. How could a stupid book and stupid fake ching coins know that this was my second try? I looked around the room half expecting to see someone floating in the air above me. I read on. The first line spoke of humiliation, as did another one four lines down. But the fifth line said child-like folly brings good fortune. And the second line stated to know how to take women brings good fortune. I didn't know about the taking women part, but the line mentioned fortune, so it couldn't be all bad.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from SHORT LEASH by Janice Gary. Copyright © 2013 by Janice Gary. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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