Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

show it to the collie, who stands up immediately and tries to get it.
    Caroline patches the hole where they got in, cutting wood with a power saw down in the basement. She comes up wearing a toolbelt and lugging a ladder. I’ve seen a scrapbook of photos of her wearing evening gowns with a banner across her chest and a crown on her head. Curled hair, lipstick. She climbs down and puts the tools away. We eat nachos.
    “I only make food that’s boiled or melted these days,” I tell her.
    “I know,” she replies.
    We smoke cigarettes and think. The phone rings again but whoever it is hangs up.
    “Is it him?” she asks.
    “Nope.”
    The collie sleeps on her blankets while the other two dogs sit next to Caroline on the couch. She’s looking through their ears for mites. At some point she gestures to the sleeping dog on the blanket and remarks that it seems like just two days ago she was a puppy.
    “She was never a puppy,” I say. “She’s always been older than me.”
    When they say goodbye, she holds the collie’s long nose in one hand and kisses her on the forehead; the collie stares back at her gravely. Caroline is crying when she leaves, a combination of squirrel adrenaline, and sadness. I cry, too, although I don’t feel particularly bad about anything. I hand her the zucchini through the window and she pulls away from the curb.
    The house is starting to get dark in that terrible early-evening twilit way. I turn on lights, get a cigarette, and go upstairs to the former squirrel room. The black dog comes with me and circles the room, snorting loudly, nose to floor. There is a spot of turmoil in an open box — they made a nest in some old disco shirts from the seventies. I suspect that’s where the baby one slept. The mean landlady has evicted them.
    Downstairs, I turn the lights back off and let evening have its way with me. Waves of pre-nighttime nervousness are coming from the collie’s blanket. I sit next to her in the dimness, touching her ears, and listen for feet at the top of the stairs.
     
       
    They’re speaking in physics so I’m left out of the conversation. Chris apologetically erases one of the pictures I’ve drawn on the blackboard and replaces it with a curving blue arrow surrounded by radiating chalk waves of green.
    “If it’s plasma, make it in red,” I suggest helpfully. We’re all smoking illegally in the journal office with the door closed and the window open. We’re having a plasma party.
    “We aren’t discussing plasma ,” Bob says condescendingly. He’s smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels like I’m breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don’t get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could be fired, which drove me to tell him he was already fired, and both of us stomped into our offices and slammed our doors.
    “I had to fire Bob,” I tell Chris later.
    “I heard,” he says noncommittally. Bob is his best friend. They spend at least half of each day standing in front of chalkboards, writing equations and arguing about outer space. Then they write theoretical papers about what they come up with. They’re actually quite a big deal in the space physics community, but around here they’re just two guys who keep erasing my pictures.
    Someone knocks on the door and we put our cigarettes out. Bob hides his pipe in the palm of his hand and opens the door.
    It’s Gang Lu, one of their students. Everyone lights up again. Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. I give him a sugary smile and he gives me one back. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify