The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Read online

  It was Mr. Boppit who saved me. He charged in, barking like he thought that noise alone could stop the car, and when that didn’t work, he flung himself directly onto me, pushing me aside so the car just missed me on its way to the end of the driveway. The rear bumper caught the side of his silky head. Only on the one side, though, so when he fell, the broken half of his face was on the ground. He looked asleep until we turned him over. A dead dog is stiller than a barn in a field or a chair in an empty room.

  Snyder got the car to a full stop. I opened the driver’s-side door and dragged him right out onto the dirt. He was bigger than me but I was angrier, and faster. I pulled him to his feet so that just before I slammed my elbow into him he could see my face. I heard as well as felt the elbow drive directly into his left ear. By the time I whirled around to swing a closed fist into his nose, the ear itself as well as all the flesh around it was already swelling. Snyder and I had often fought but we had never fought like this. Before this, whenever we got near to anything that could lead to a broken nose, our mother could feel it happening. She’d materialize out of nowhere and she’d come to Snyder’s defense. A young lady controlled her feelings, she’d say. You should be ashamed! Look at yourself, she’d say, as if a good clear view of myself could be enough to stop the kind of feeling that had me between its thumb and forefinger.

  On this occasion, no parent was there to come save his bacon. Snyder and I fell away from each other, me satisfied for a full eight seconds or so before a darker feeling took over and I felt terrified by what I’d done to him; by what I’d felt when I was doing it. Boppit lay on the ground at our feet. I don’t know what was in Snyder’s mind, but he backed away from me and headed into the backyard, holding his ear with one hand and his nose with the other. If I could have disembodied myself, been me and not-me, I’d have backed away from myself too.

  Watching him retreat I had a black tar-blot kind of feeling, like I was behind his eyes instead of mine, walking unsteadily away with blood running down my face. I spun away and ran into the house, up to my bedroom on the second floor, where I propped myself in the windowsill overlooking the vegetable garden. I heard the kitchen door slam and looked down and there was my mother with a washcloth, following Snyder, sitting beside him and handing it to him, talking softly. He held the washcloth against his nose. I saw her put her arm around him. I thought, One of us has to say what happened to Mr. Boppit. One of us has to tell Mom and take her to his body in the driveway. I was breathing as though I’d just run a mile, fast.

  Snyder’s hand slowly dropped away from his face. The next day his nose would start to change colors, maybe to brown and purple. In about three days it would shift to green. His ear would swell to three times its normal size. His head drooped down and his whole body sagged. My throat closed. All along I’d thought I was desperate to see Snyder feel as bad as he looked right now, but here I was discovering that I hadn’t had any idea what I wanted. Poor Snyder, I thought. Poor Mr. Boppit.

  Mom left him. She climbed the stairs, walked into my room, and found me looking down at Snyder. “My, my,” she said, tilting my head to get a clear view of me. I had a few swollen places of my own, which I saw her taking note of and deciding not to talk about. She reached out a hand to touch me though and said, “Well, I guess you’ll clean up all right by your wedding day.” I pulled my head away, which surprised her. Hurt her, I’ll bet. That made me satisfied for the briefest little moment before it made me ashamed and sad. She stood studying me for a while before she went to the window to look down.

  “Neave,” she said finally, “I feel like I need to warn you about yourself. You think I don’t know, but I do, because I was like you. When I married your father, I was a person with real high highs and real low lows. Some days I see you dancing with that dog in the backyard when you think nobody’s looking, or getting silly with Lilly and I know you’ve got the highs. An hour later I see you in some rage about some nothing little thing Snyder might have done, clinging to a grudge like it was a life raft.”

  “They’re not ‘nothing little things.’” I admit I sounded sullen.

  “See? Exactly like that. If you could see yourself. Don’t get comfortable with a grudge. Don’t be the eternally aggrieved.”

  “I’m not!”

  “You’re sixteen years old and it’s time you listened to me say it. Happy women aren’t like that, Neave. They understand that others depend on them and they shape themselves to others. You’re just going to make yourself unhappy by insisting on your own way. Smart women don’t do that. I can see resentment on your face right this minute, and I’ve got some news for you—resentment is the poison we drink ourselves, hoping it will make the other fellow die. You’re going to have to start damping yourself down. You’ll do yourself mischief if you don’t. You’ll end up alone. You’ll be too hard to love.”

  She wasn’t looking at me while she talked. She stood by the window and looked down at Snyder and I understood when she got to the part about damping down that these were not words she was going to say to my brother. But neither would she be saying them to my sisters. Jane and Lilly would never be found sitting on a bed in the late afternoon covered in dirt and blood. That was more my role in the family.

  “Maybe facing up to your own nature wouldn’t make such a difference if you were beautiful, but it won’t help to sugarcoat the situation, because the fact is, that’s not the case,” she went on. “No matter, really. We all just work with what we have and that’s not tragic. Pretty girls lean on their looks so much they end up more stupid than God made them to begin with. Better to be on the sidelines watching. It’s a blessing to you even if it doesn’t feel like one now. But if you don’t want to end up alone, you’ll have to rein in a bit of what you are. Sweeten yourself. Do you understand me?”

  I have thought that if my mother had touched me or looked at me when she said these things that I would have received them very differently. It wouldn’t have burned so much. There would be no record shards at the back of my closet. Just the feel of her hip against mine would have cooled the bad news about my future, but she stood apart. Of course, I have also thought, if a child whipped her head away from your hand the last time you tried to touch her when she was in an agitated state, you’d hesitate to touch her the next time. Here I was in the next time, and we stood ten feet apart with her looking out the window and me looking at her and it could have been different but it wasn’t. She left me there to consider myself. That’s the expression she used.

  I considered myself right into a state where I wondered if my feelings could kill me. It felt like they would, so I guessed maybe she was right about the work that lay ahead of me. There was never going to be a way out of it. I would be alone.

  I got up. I peered out at Snyder, who had pulled himself together. I saw Mom go into the yard again with a new washcloth wound around some ice. They talked quietly while he held the ice against his ear. Standing there with Snyder in my sights I felt the purest most overwhelming hatred I had ever suffered in my life.

  I was afraid for myself then.

  * * *

  There was Mr. Boppit’s body to deal with, lying in the driveway behind the car’s rear wheels, and I couldn’t bear it. I left the bedroom with its dangerous view of Snyder and Mom and I got Lilly, who is good in messy situations. I led her to Mr. Boppit’s stiffening side and we wrapped him up in my sweater and an old quilt. Lilly threw him in the trunk of the car and told me to get in but I just could not. She told me to get away if I couldn’t do what had to be done and she climbed into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. Off she went. To this day I do not know what happened to the body of Mr. Boppit.

  But I know what happened to his reputation. That afternoon Lilly and I sat down with Jane and explained that Mr. Boppit had volunteered for the army dog corps and that he had shipped out for training that morning. She cried, but she was proud. She’d seen the newsreels of Dogs for Defense. All through the war she told everyone about Mr. Boppi
t’s contribution to the Allied forces, the sacrifices he was making for our freedom. I began to believe it myself. We imagined Mr. Boppit on patrol, his nose to the wind to capture the smell of Nazis, saving the sleeping soldiers whose lives he tirelessly protected. We could see Mr. Boppit sniffing for bombs and carrying medical supplies to men so deep in the thick of combat that other soldiers could not penetrate the rain of bullets keeping them from hurt buddies. But Mr. Boppit could.

  Lilly and I didn’t know she’d written off to the United States Army Dogs for Defense program to ask after Mr. Boppit’s assignment because she’d gone to Snyder for help and he gave it to her, keeping Mr. Boppit’s real fate from her for sake of her feelings. He wrote the letter with her but thought if he only gave her money for the stamp or an address to mail it to, that the letter would sit in her bedroom until the war was over. But our mailman loved Jane and helped her get the address. I don’t know how she got the envelope and the price of the stamp, but she did. And she made her way, all alone, to post the letter.

  Snyder was the one who answered the telephone when the apologetic lieutenant called, saying the army had no record of a canine Mr. Boppit Terhune’s service. Snyder made a decision on the spot—he laid it all out for the man. The lieutenant’s name was Jerry Hall. He listened carefully and said that he had a little sister himself. Then he wrote a letter to Jane on official army stationery, describing the heroism of Mr. Boppit and the gratitude our country felt toward him for locating over forty bombs before one detonated and did the courageous Mr. Boppit in at last. Janey sat right down and cried. So did I.

  Jane wrote a three-page description of the life and death of Mr. Boppit and mailed it off to the Herald. She included a picture of her and Bop on our front steps, the dog with what looked like a grin on his face and Jane draped over his unprotesting head. It ran on page one over the line “Mr. Boppit, Wonder Dog.” The AP wires picked it up and it ran all over the country. Letters and offers of new puppies came at us from all directions for weeks—people telling us about their own dogs, many of whom had actually served overseas.

  Daddy put the kibosh on the idea of a new puppy so that was that. Jane was unhappy about this, but in the end she accepted his decision with a lot more dignity than I could have mustered. She was content with the glory that she’d managed to secure for Mr. Boppit.

  LILLY

  Cape Ann. High Tide. Goodbye, Dog.

  You try lifting a fifty-pound mutt and dumping him over the side of a slimy dock. His head was still bleeding when I got to the back of the car and saw the body, so I pulled Neave’s sweater right off her back and wrapped him in that. It wasn’t her best sweater but I probably would have wrapped the bloody dog in it even if the thing were spun from gold. She just stood there and let me wind it around him. I could have told her to chop off her hair and wrap the dog in that, and she would’ve run for the scissors. So there I am, holding a dead dog wrapped up in a pilly sweater because Neave and Snyder were no use at all, thank you very much. Neave at least should be on this work detail but no, that wasn’t gonna happen. I stuffed him in the trunk and climbed into the driver’s seat. I was going to have to deal with the dog alone. I backed out of the driveway looking back at Neave’s poor face. That chuckleheaded dog and her were each other’s best company.

  I myself am not charmed by dogs. They smell. They shed. They pee on stuff and they find ways to break into your closet and, if they’re this particular dog, they chew your shoes. I didn’t expect to feel so strange, sliding the body into the water an hour after I drove away from our house. Just for a tiny little window I felt like everything good and beautiful had gone dark and something black was drifting over me. I looked down and there were his furry legs still looking like he was running in the water even though he was definitely dead, and the way his one remaining eye looked up at me—like he was really seeing me. I didn’t like it.

  I sat there for a while after he floated off. Then I got up and walked back down the stone quay to the car. I wadded Neave’s bloody sweater up and pitched it into the nearest trash can. I thought that was the end of my relationship with Mr. Boppit, the dog who jumped behind a moving car because he didn’t have the good sense God gave turnips.

  But it wasn’t the end of my relationship with Boppit. He was here when I got to Where I Am Now. I recognized him right off even though he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a dog—slurpy thing going on with the tongue, goofy cocked ears, a rear end that looked like it was wagging even though there wasn’t a tail. He was dressed in navy whites, which seemed right. So did his high heels. Here’s the surprising thing—it was like we’d had this meeting between our two dead selves a dozen times before, only we’d been different on the other occasions. We knew each other.

  “Well. Finally,” he greeted me.

  The thought that I should be frightened drifted by, but it was distant—a balloon thought floating over my head. I wasn’t frightened. “I’m dead?”

  “You are.”

  “And you’re dead?”

  “You dropped me over the side into the water yourself. So I’d say yes. I am.”

  I’d always thought that the one way to find out where you go after you die would just be to die, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Here I was, dead, and still I had no idea what was going on. Nothing around me was clear except Boppit. There was no horizon or foreground, no gravity.

  “It’ll clear,” he said, watching me look around. “Be patient.”

  A chair materialized behind me and I sat down. I stopped squinting and the air around me started to take on different thicknesses. Now there was a marble floor under my feet, and then a counter, a table, a row of shining spring sandals.

  “See it now?” Bop asked.

  I did! “Filene’s! We’re in Filene’s third-floor shoe department!”

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” A chair had popped into being behind Bop as well as me, and he sat down. “It’s a dream setting, my dear, a dream that you and I both share and cherish. Call it common ground. That’s why we find ourselves in it now when we’re first getting acquainted. You know it from firsthand experience. I’d only heard of it but I always knew it was here! I should tell you that I don’t think this little scene is going to last for long. Enjoy it while we’re here.”

  “It isn’t real?”

  “It is what it is.”

  “And what are you? I mean, I know who you are. I don’t know what you are.”

  “You know what I am. I’m Mr. Boppit. And the other common ground that’s most common between you and me besides our feelings about shoes is Neave. I’m Neave’s protector, and now she’s in trouble. Your job here is to help me help her.”

  “But we’re dead.”

  “Where we are and where she is are much closer than you think. There are even places where they occupy the same spot. You have a lot of Neave in your head, and she has a lot of you in hers. Shared, common ground. Cherished ground. That’s why I’m here to collect you. Also, the kind of trouble that Neave’s in right now is trouble that you put her in. It’s your trouble, slid over onto her life.”

  I knew what the dog meant. He meant Ricky.

  “We’re going to put ourselves between her and him,” Boppit said.

  “So … what do I do?”

  “Well, while we’re here, why don’t we look at those silver strappy numbers by the first display table? Then we’re going to sit down and think about Neave.”

  “Just think?”

  “That’s usually the best start.”

  LILLY

  Arnold Strato’s War

  Oddly, 1942 is much clearer to me from Where I Am Now than it was when I was in 1942 itself. Snyder reached his eighteenth birthday, reported for the draft, and was discovered to be almost entirely deaf in his left ear. Maybe Neave did it when she clobbered him. Or his hearing in that ear might always have been bad or absent, and he’d just gotten used to it. He was designated 4F, and Daddy was furious. Mommy told him that there was no one to blame. But
he did blame. He blamed Snyder.

  My brother joined the thousands of women and older men working in munitions factories, and in his free hours he disappeared inside his comic books. The entire population of his comic book world was fighting the war and the BLAM!BOP!BANG! on the pages Snyder read always meant victory for the Forces of Good. Just a little inconvenient resistance to make the ultimate victory meaningful and BLAM!BOP!BANG!

  We’d sit in dark movie theaters and watch the newsreels, good-looking pilots with girls dangling from their elbows, beautiful uniforms and devil-may-care expressions, cigarettes dangling from their lips, hearty laughter. Very sexy.

  War, the newsreels, the prospect of brave boys dying to defend our homes. Girls who the month before would slap a boy for slipping a hand under a waistband now allowed liberties to heroic young men facing death. Our parents’ idea of the future—the far-away place with a family gathered around a meat loaf and a good mortgage rate on the house—it just shrank away. There was more Now, less Later. Love (In These Times) got a lot of people between its teeth and shook them hard, and that’s how it got Arnold Strato.

  I knew that Arnold had come to those first stupid Monsters in the Movies meetings because he was interested in me. I’d let him kiss me behind the gym one Friday afternoon after school just to test-drive the experience. Arnold was at a point in his life where girls took up lots of the room in his head, but he didn’t see them as people. He saw them as romantic objects, which is sweet but dumb. I brushed him off. After all, cute as he was, he’d still showed up at a Monsters in the Movies club meeting. Not sexy.

  Then in his junior year Susie Brink caught his eye and he fell like a bird shot out of the sky: Susie Brink, who was as pretty and empty as a Christmas ornament. Having no personality of her own to speak of, she was perfectly happy being some boy’s standard factory-line romantic object. Arnold didn’t know that when she leaned over his desk in advanced algebra class to tell him she so much needed his help with problem number seven that she was making sure he had an uninterrupted view of her new brassiere’s lace details. Pitiful cliché move. Any boy smart enough to get my attention would have seen it for exactly what it was and been merely amused. But Arnold was pure and stupid. The girl poleaxed him.