Dog

The sun set, and the beach closed, and so it was time to go. While we were leaving, after we had packed up the inflatable tubes and boogie boards and folding chairs, we saw the family standing barefoot on the pebbles. They were in misery. The mother had her arms wrapped around the two daughters, and her eyes were red and puffy, I could tell, even in the dim blue light of dusk. The girls were shaking and shivering and I couldn’t tell if it was just because of the tears or if it was the cold too—there was a nip coming into the air—but regardless they were shaking and looked unhappy. The dad was pacing up and down, talking wildly on the phone on speaker, shaking his hands and stomping and kicking up dirt. He still wore his bathing suit and an unbuttoned Tommy Bahama, with the Panama hat and Ray Bands. He didn’t seem to look at his wife or daughters at all, he was just talking on the phone angrily. I couldn’t tell if he was crying. I was at the age where I was fully convinced men don’t cry. And if you do cry, then you are not a man.

They were all barefoot, standing on the pebbles of the parking lot. I know from experience how much that hurts. I didn’t see any shoes, and I know that the bottoms of their feet were crusted with sticks and dirt and had a leopard-print made of indentations from the various stones underfoot. There is no spigot to wash off the parking-lot dirt. Only the ones on the beach for the sand. In the father’s hand was a leash.

I took all of this in in a second, and before I had the chance to roll my window down and yell out to them ‘what was wrong?’ and ‘could I help?’ and ‘I have a strong father myself who surely could make this go away, if you’d like?,’ my mother put the car in drive and we sped off and towards Scarborough.

I thought about that family often for a long time afterwards. And, evidently, I think about them still today. I am an anxious-ruminating internal-orator, and my time spent thinking about them was often expressed through me asking them questions, giving them answers. Of course I have immense difficulty giving them a voice in my brain, so their responses are just my guesses of what they may say, or my desires of what they may say. And all of this is tainted—tinted?—by the fact that I have never spoken to any of them. I only saw this family once in a parking lot of a beach who’s name I cannot remember, just one moment of a trip to Maine that was filled with moments.

I believe that they lost their dog. It would make sense. The general sadness, the anger in the fathers face and body language, the leash in his hands. That is what happened, at least in my eyes. I could be wrong, however.

The father was on the phone with the lifeguard’s office, or the sheriff, or the president of the HOA of the beach community. He was speaking in a tone of anger, directed at the people to whom he spoke, but the anger was really for himself. He was the one to blame, he was the father and the dog was his baby, the boy he always wanted. And he let it go. Dropped the ball, Screwed the pooch. So when he yells at the lifeguard who is packing his things up because the beach has now been closed for five minutes, he is really yelling at himself. And this does not make him bad, I think, just human. And while I would have preferred him to cry and feel a bit of shame and then self-forgiveness, we are all different. And everyone is tender in their own way.

The mother feels embarrassment. She feels embarrassment for her husband for the way he is expressing his guilt and sadness, and for herself for the fact that she has let her daughters down. But her daughters have grown up to be wonderful and forgiving women who regard this night as an unfortunate happening—one of them thinks about it as an act of God to give her an early taste of the cruelties and disappointments that await us all—so they see no good reason for her to be embarrassed. Even then, as children, they thought of the dog running off as sad, but in now way indicative of their father’s character, or as a let-down perpetrated by mom. But the mother still was embarrassed, and still is. So she held back the rest of her tears and put her arms around her daughters’ shoulders, pulling them tight and not letting go.

And the daughters cried. They shook the snot out of their noses and wet their cheeks with tears, their own tears and the tears of the other, and they chittered their teeth and were held by their mom. And the next day, while dad was looking at old pictures on the Mac and the daughters were thinking of what to do if not to play with their dog, mom went out and bought a stuffed animal that looked just like the lost puppy. And she brought it back and gave it to them, and they cried even more, and the snot ran down their face again and it was like they had never stopped at all.

I think about the dog, too. I imagine a golden retriever racing down the shore, stopping to sniff at the occasional tide-pool and all the while leaving little footprints behind. And it doesn’t know if it’s leaving the prints in order to be found more easily, or if they are to be used to help it find its way home—although they don’t lead back to the family’s house, and the dog doesn’t think about it. And it doesn’t worry about the little girls crying, faces slimy and green with snot. And it doesn’t think about hurting them.