Douglas W. Milliken

Sister of Dog Fear

(Wash & Sleep Journal, ‘72-’74)

On a Friday and I am content because I have dropped off the cleaned and pressed and folded laundry of the Breeders (not their real name) for the last time, as they have at long last bought for themselves a washer and dryer and no longer require my services, services I intentionally set out to render obsolete by planting the original washer-and-dryer seed in the fertile rot of Mrs. Breeder’s fallow head. Because it takes no time at all to grow weary of the embarrassment of scraping and rinsing hippie baby waste caked to hippie cloth diapers in the laundromat’s mess sink because Mrs. Breeder can’t be bothered to do the job right herself. But that is all in the past now. No more Breeders. No more diapers. Lead me away. Though it’s cold, I take my time walking home and stop at Mariah’s Diner for a coffee and pie along the way, feel my celebration with each bite. Proud to have discovered how much of myself a dollar is really worth. Get home and shuck off my boots and build a toasty little fire in the cast iron stove. Do I pour myself a little wine? Yes, please, I will enjoy a little wine. All freedom tastes sweet as freedom. But coming back to my fire from the kitchen, I stub my baby toe hard on the wood stove’s brick skirt, and all at once—near blind with pain and collapsing over the dumb travesty of my injury—I’d so rather be elbow deep in the diapers of lazy trust-fund bohemians. 

That was one month ago. Black-nailed and purpled, my baby toe still screams with every mincing step.

Awaken after midnight with a scream all but frozen in my throat. The phone. My secondhand black rotary phone. Which Li always illogically insisted on keeping next to the bed. Ringing one single hellish ring in the most silent part of the night, its last note singing down to nothing while the next ring never comes. So which is more stupid? To answer a phone that is not ringing? Or to stare it down with suspicion and fear as you wait for it to continue not ringing? With suspicion and fear and leg-tangled sheets, I stare down my unringing phone like a spooked boob in the dark. I swear, it’s forever before my heart reins in its gallop, before I can lie at last back among my pillows, before I can ever again hope to honest-to-God sleep.

Wednesday at the laundromat doing the Fitzgibbons’ wash. National Geographic flopped open in my lap to some pictures of a war-torn anywhere-but-here. As if in a dream and half asleep with dryer heat and the white noise of twenty dozen turning machines, I watch an old woman come in hunched beneath the heft of her laundry bag. Watch her drop her sack at a free machine. Watch her question-mark spine stay curved even freed from under the weight. Her process of loading the machine is timeless, and what I mean by that is: time stops. She cannot remember what goes in (all of it) and what comes out (none). She starts to measure out detergent, then freezes, sets the jug aside and counts out her quarters instead, but after paying the machine, she takes up the jug again and just holds it, just . . . holds it, and studies. As if there’s some answer she maybe—just maybe—can riddle from among the label’s too-small text. But ultimately, she does not measure any soap into the machine.

Through all of this, I cannot help thinking of Mama.

Throughout it all, I cannot help worrying about myself.

Once this lady so ancient and solitary creeps her eternal self on out the door into the April sun, I slap down the National Geographic on the seat beside mine. Cross to her still machine with too-early summertime laziness. Feed it the soap it’s long been waiting for. Deposit one more quarter. Thumb the button marked start. 

Maytime in the cemetery. Bunch of dripping lilac blooms to leave on Gramma’s grave. Hair done up and everything. Because even if she can’t see now, I can, and I remember. I guess this is the game we play when the living condescend to visit the dead. But when I get to her marker like I have twenty dozen times before and read her name—Beulah Everett Love—edged in fresh spring lichen, I feel the fear whip wicked up my throat just as though I’ve seen a snake, and the fear that speaks through me is stupid and obvious and like my own voice coon-hound baying in my ear: I am not ready to die.

All through June I’m asleep but my heart is awake, or maybe I’m simply trapped awake with worry each night, feeling the air cat-creep through my every open window as I worry like an unearthed mole that I’ll never fall sleep, unsleeping as I worry for sleep to a chorus of June bugs buzzing complaint against the screens until near dawn when I finally—pointlessly—begin to drift off to the paperboy’s bike chain sizzling up the street, to brown creeper and wood-pewees’ whistle and squeak, then shiver myself awake for fear I might sleep too long and miss all the things I’m resting to prepare for. To arise at last like the damned and condemned. To sleepwalk through my day. It is in this way that I completely ruin June.

A Monday and doing the wash for the Cheaters (not their real name) when one other woman like me comes in to wash another family’s laundry. She loads her machine then we sit and talk awhile—we can’t leave the laundromat because these aren’t our clothes and they are nice clothes that could get stolen—but we’ve each been doing this work so long this whole bit is familiar, is comfortable. We’re friends is all I’m trying to say. It’s nice chatting with my laundry room friend while the Cheaters’ whites churn and suds up next to the Cheaters’ colors, churning with suds. But something is wrong. Something is different. Yet it’s a thing I cannot pinpoint, can’t name. My friend looks happy and is happy. She tells me about her daughter’s new boy who really truly looks so much like a shocked and monkey-faced pinto bean, and I tell her how my Percy wants to be known as P-Rice now, which he claims is a Malcolm X thing but I’m convinced he thinks makes him seem more macho than his dusky elf-face and granddad’s old-fashioned name might otherwise suggest. We laugh and we sigh and we fall silent. Then we change over the wash. This is what a Monday is. But underneath everything, the wrong is there, there and lurking. And it’s only later, after I’ve left my friend to fold other people’s clothes, after I’ve ironed and refolded and delivered the Cheaters’ laundry and completed my day, only as I’m walking home does it hit me: her cheek. Something is growing on her cheek. And the grief of this realization paralyzes me—literally bowls me over, hands to knees—leaves me transfixed in mourning on the sidewalk of my neighborhood. Where children play in the street. Where dogs are trained to fetch the paper.

On a Friday after finishing the wash for the Hugos and the Raouls, I cross town to The Grape & Minnow to find not only all my widows already there and seated but served as well and deep in their red fish and boudin. I’m late. And what’s more, without even a free seat for me at the table, it’s clear no one even expected me to eventually show up. What a particular, childish sense of shame. So I arrive early the following Friday at the Cloche D’Argent—too early, in fact—I’m feeling loopy already off one glass of wine before anyone else shows up, I get shy among the widows and can make no sense of their chirping conversations and ultimately leave early without eating dinner at all, all to fall asleep on the couch with my shoes on before the sun has even set.

I am too old to be acting like such a child.

Found myself oddly midweek with a day off so spending it in the least interesting way I can. Washing dishes and wiping down counters. Scooping flour and sugar for a cake I have no intention of eating. But the sunshine is all up and splashing through every kitchen window, so in the lemon-scent of soap and the cake’s zested and squeezed lemons, it feels like TV domestic heaven. Ought I be shamefaced in this admission? All I’m saying is I’m enjoying my kitchen today. So it’s with a measuring spoon in one hand and a spatula in the other that I turn in time to see through one window a police cruiser pull into my driveway, blocking in my secondhand Cutlass and leaving me now frozen and dumb with implements of baking—uselessly—at hand while watching out the window for . . . what? The officer remains in his cruiser (or her cruiser, I guess). Tinted windows rolled up. Engine at an idle. I cannot see anything happening inside. Which makes each passing second a compounding of my fear until at last, the driver’s side window rolls down then back up before the cruiser backs out and away down the street. Leaving something on my lawn. A full minute passes before I let go my floury spatula and spoon. A full minute staring hard out my sunny and scary-now kitchen window. A full minute before I recognize the object in my yard—white marked with red and of an unnamable shape—is a crumpled-up Popeye’s bag.

On a Monday doing the wash for the Priolas. All the good magazines are in use or maybe just gone—not even a misarranged mess of last week’s paper—leaving only the most dated “women’s” journals for the taking, all battered and coverless with the questionnaires already filled out. Grab one at random and flip the slick pages open with the swipe of one hand like I’m shooing away a fly. Find myself confronted by, without my say-so, Survey: Are You Really as Happy as You Think? As if that question had a precisely measured answer. As if such knowledge could lend anyone an ounce of good. Yet some poor fool’s already penciled in their responses, without a doubt happier before than after they began.

Tell me, who comes up with these punishing fill-in-the-blanks? Who are these horrible, unmothered people?

Treated to that soft and sweet waking to the world where everything behind my shut eyes is some lovely and unexpected shade of blue or maybe indigo, really, while the morning-cool air wiggles its hips through the bedroom window to the tune of twenty dozen videos unselfconsciously lost in song. But I sour the moment by sliding my hand over Li’s side of the bed and feeling only cool bed beneath my seeking hand. He’s gone! But it only takes a moment for that wretched shock to ease back into the old and too-familiar ache of everyday sorrow. Thirteen years. 

Awaken from dreams of gas lines to find a gas line curling like a white grub in dirt around the block. But later I discover: the grocery store is a ghost town. Vacant aisles between fullystocked shelves, the mouse squeak of my nurse shoes actually echoes off the linoleum as I hunt and gather my groceries in the unhurried aloneness. Yet this boon for me still itches my mind. I mean, what exactly is it everyone thinks they’re doing?

On a Sunday before church, I go over for coffee and donuts with Mama. She makes the coffee. I bring the beignets. Sit in the comfy chairs in the living room because it’s still too cool for the sun porch yet. But this change in venue diminishes nothing. We are warm inside and the morning sun cuts strange geometries onto the carpet where her cats loll and soak it in. And since her windows are old—the panes of glass are old—the sun-shapes seem to ripple like river ice or spring water moving. It’s a lovely thing to see while sipping coffee and working to keep donut dust off your blouse. We chat for awhile about Percy and Bee and about my sister Evelyn, then Mama points at one of those diamonds of light and says to me, “Oh look! A fish!” And at first I think she’s joking, I laugh, but no: Mama is gazing with awe and delight at a sunbeam wavering over the carpet’s pattern and she asks me all breathless, “Do you see the fish, Junessa? I think it is a trout.” And she isn’t saying how a cloud looks like a bunny, and she isn’t saying the light reminds her of fish. My mother sees a trout swimming through the illuminated weave of her carpet, maybe rising in its mystery to the surface to nibble some at the world above. Lead me away. And without doubt, I can see that she loves—loves—what she sees. And as I see my whole future and our whole future rewrite itself under Sunday sun, I nod for my mama, blink hard and fast, tell her, “I think you’re right. I think it is a trout,” around a mouthful of beignet tasting now of nothing if not ash. 

What is it about seeing my daughter’s name on some mail—seeing her name written in her own bubblegum script, hovering in the corner above my name written in bubblegum script: what is it that makes me want to never tear this envelope open, never expose my heart and head to the mystery of the letter that’s inside?

Not that there’s ever a good time for combating fears to rise up and take hold, but I suppose I should be grateful that November was my season of hoarding and giving, of binging and purging within my private economy. I know ours is a nation deluded on plenty, but the gas rationing sometimes rattles me like old windows in a hard rain: I took to stocking up. Pantry shelves and drawers full of peanut butter and tuna fish, dried beans and rice, crushed tomatoes and potted meat and fruit cocktail and sardines. Great big cans of pasteurized juice. PET Milk. Olives and pickles and a couple other brined things I’m not quite sure yet how to eat. And it’s only when I’m packing away everyday cups and dishes to make room for this bounty that it hits me: I need to be hiding these things. Which is followed by a second realization hot on the heels of the first, one informed by the objective image of a middle-aged woman alone and stashing food in every corner of her house, beneath the floorboards and behind the drywall: I need to be giving this stuff away. I need to be sharing what so needlessly I have in abundance. If my children could see me, they’d wonder who I am. Load up the trunk with as many cans and jars as it can hold. Hustle it all to the Open Arms food bank downtown, which for weeks has been begging for holiday donations. It doesn’t even matter that my gas rations are out. I burn up my last gallons giving every morsel away. 

Waken on a Monday from dreams of swimming with cats into an early spring light giddy with flycatchers. Made oatmeal with a big melting daub of brown sugar and took my time with it and my coffee. Put together a lemon tart I have no intention of eating and wrote a letter to Sister Evelyn while the oven did its work and even read some Songs of Solomon after cleaning up the kitchen. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk. But even before I’ve dressed my feet and headed for the door, a little cold cape of dread wraps itself all around me. My only clients today are the Cheaters, and knowing that soon I will be in their home—be in their wash, be in their moods—and moreover, will end my day, too, in their house, dropping off their wash in their house where all their smug faces float around: this all like a gust fills me with a worry that this good day will end on a sour note, must end on a sour note. And in worrying so industriously on this sweet day’s threat of ruin, I ruin this damn sweet day.

Across the street from St. Jude’s is an outdoor café known for their crepes and other such little tasties. But I elect not to invest myself in anything of that nature. I sit for some while slowly lowering the tide on a glass of wine, feeling the purple linger on my teeth and tongue and lost in whatever confusion passes for revelry while staring blankly from an outdoor café across the street from St. Jude’s cemetery. 

Today over coffee, Mama asked after Li. This, after together waxing nostalgic about the days when it’d still sometimes snow. I told her Li was fine.

On a Friday I’m finished with the wash for the Hugos and Raouls but I’m stuck here in the laundromat because a woman’s come in and left her enormous, foam-jowled mutt tied to a rail outside, and it doesn’t matter how many times she tells me—tells everyone, inside and out, shouts it out the open door at any stranger passing on the sidewalk—“He’s friendly!” she shouts, “He’s a giant lover!” Maybe for you, lady. But don’t tell me I don’t recognize a fancified wolf when I see one.

Okay, so Solomon’s love sings her affections—her worshipful adorations—with such spectacle, such continuous unraveling, as if each metaphor calling forth the dimensions of her heart reveals even greater depths to her lusty devotion, depths even she is surprised and mesmerized to find defining the totality of her soul. And with each discovered depth, Solomon replies with the same repeated handful of incomprehensible attempts at flattery: you are a flock of sheep, you are a heap of wheat, you are a dove or a lily or some other pretty, brainless thing. Like he’s just biding his time until she tires herself out talking and finally unfastens his pants when in fact, it is she who is waiting for him—is inviting him with gold-leaf instructions—to devour her.

So which of these two roles have I ever played in love? Was I forever pulling apart to reveal the catacombs of my heart? Was I clueless in the face of passion? Or was I only ever waiting for Li to quit his blubbering and get to work loving me?

Has it really been so long that I’ve forgotten?

Awake and frittering in bed through a Wednesday night into Thursday because the repeating echo in the well of my worry finds no bottom and finds no end. And why should it? My daughter, Bee, who when I last saw her wore oversized sunglasses from 8 a.m. until well after dark. As if no one would notice, as if no one would know. Covering her teeth with a hand every time she laughed. Or maybe just trying to not resplit her lip, like manually holding herself together. And Percy, my boy Percy, who might be on drugs or might be insane. Relying too much on his exotic looks while somehow living off one white girl or another until finally chased away, never for a moment keeping in mind—never once seriously considering—that there is a war on and he too easily could be in it. What’s to become of these children, these perpetual toddlers, after I’m gone? What’s to become of them while I’m still alive and watching them from the sidelines, when whatever help I might offer very well could accelerate their end? I cannot fathom them stripped of the safety net of me, cannot help but hurt at the thought of their complete orphaning. Yet I cannot wish them gone before me, as likely an outcome as it may be. So which is the real worry? Which is the one to foster and which is the one to ignore? Or am I naïve to think I might possibly save either one, now or ever? To think I might have any impact over my children at all? Awake until the neighborhood birds and paperboy announce themselves to the new day, I cannot decide for which hellish relief exactly I’m supposed to pray.

The Cheaters—who lack for nothing, who’d replace me with machines without a second’s hesitation if they could find within their townhouse the bare square footage for machines—the Cheaters leave their pockets full of money. Not just change but folds of bills, tucked into trousers, jackets, breast pockets, even now and then pinned to a brassiere. As if its value was too negligible to consider let alone account. And always I collect their littered money in an envelope, always deliver each week their moneyed litter with the clean wash. And always—always—they accept back their lost money as if this too were another part of my job, to consistently and completely resist the temptation, to refuse even the slightest taste.

How am I supposed to feel about this? Returning faithfully what I could use to the people who don’t notice or care that it’s gone.

I feel like I’m tipping them for trusting me with their nothing.

August in St. Jude’s cemetery where the dust kicks up with every step in the blanched and flagging grass. Hydrangeas like spun honey—great big panicles clipped from the bush in the backyard—to leave on Gramma’s grave. But when I see the dried-up lichen like crumbs all over her stone, her name barely legible in this heat like something lost and all but forgotten, I feel my fear as a knife at my throat and even react that way, I touch my throat and hold my fingers protective as a hex above my vulnerability, gasp aloud, “I am not ready to die,” before in a moment realizing: I’ve already done all this before.

And maybe what I really need to accept is that I don’t care whether it’s childish or not. I won’t ever not be a child. I can’t. I cannot stop my animal heart from running in a gallop away from all reason. I cannot deny my embarrassment and shame each time I stumble, again and again stumble, over the obstacles that have never not been in my way. Age can ferry you past so much needless preoccupation. But not this. Never this. When the heat breaks and August’s afternoon folds into plaster-gray rain—thunder echoing madly off the lake and the levee while dogs run in a panic to nowhere known as safe—I’m alive in their panic, too. Lead me away. A sister of dog fear. Any beloved soul, please lead me away when it’s safe to go outside. Watching, praying, griped in my window and praying in wait for this uncaring storm to end.

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of two novels, To Sleep as Animals and Our Shadows’ Voice; the collection Blue of the World; and several chapbooks, including The Opposite of Prayer. His stories have been honored by the Maine Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and Glimmer Train, as well as published in dozens of journals, including Slice and The Believer. He lives with three diminutive mammals near a post-industrial dam on the Saco River. Visit him at www.douglaswmilliken.com.