White Dog Fell from the Sky

11



Five days a week Isaac worked at the sunken garden, hardly stopping to eat. He came early in the morning and worked late. His tools were a pick and shovel and a wheelbarrow, which he used to bring dirt out from the floor of the garden to the mounded lip. Every hour, he moved great piles of earth. Alice worried he’d get sunstroke and told him not to work so hard. She didn’t know what drove him. All she knew was that he couldn’t go back home, and he had no future she could see.

It was a late Friday afternoon. Isaac had dug down six or eight feet. The hole was already ten feet long and six feet wide. She’d agreed to go out the following day and buy some small trees with him to plant on the perimeter of the hole. She was inside with the doors and windows shut against the hot wind. Suddenly, his voice was at the door facing the garden. “Something has happened, mma. I have broken the water pipe with the pickax.” Behind him, water geysered skyward.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It looks bad, but it’ll be okay.”

He jumped down in the hole and turned in circles. Alice ran inside to call the water people. For once, the phone was working, a kind of miracle. She came back out and told Isaac that the people would soon be coming.

She tried to stuff an old nightgown into the pipe and was holding it there with the handle of a rake when the water blew past the nightgown and shot back skyward. She climbed out of the hole. “Well, that sure didn’t work.” Daphne paddled around at the bottom of the hole in the mud while water erupted above her head.

A pickup truck drove into the driveway. At first she thought it was the water people, but then she saw that the driver was Peter Ashton, and beside him, Lawrence. In the back of the truck was Peter’s Alsatian dog, chained to the bar behind the rear window, straining toward Daphne.

“Isaac hit the water main,” Alice said to Lawrence. “What’s that dog doing here?”

“It’s the one the Moretons recommended.”

“You’re going to set him loose on her?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“The two of you were just going to stand here and watch him screw her?”

“They’re dogs, Alice. This is what dogs do.”

“Get him out of here!” she yelled. “Get your goddamn dog out of here, Peter Ashton, or I’ll take him out with a rake!”

“For god’s sake, Alice, get control of yourself!” said Lawrence.

“I’m in control of myself. Get that dog out of here.”

Lawrence turned and climbed into Peter’s truck, and the two of them drove away.

“I’m very sorry, mma,” Isaac said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s all right. It could have happened to anyone. The water people will be coming soon.”

He looked toward the geyser. “I must go, madam. I’m very sorry to cause you trouble. I hope you understand why I cannot stay.”

She didn’t understand, not then, but she said yes, of course, go if you need to.

She fed Daphne and shut her in the kitchen. A government truck pulled into the yard, and three men got out, two whites and a Motswana. The Motswana clicked his tongue. “Oh shame,” he said. One of the Europeans said it would take them some time to get the water shut off and the pipe mended and suggested she might like to sleep elsewhere that night. There’d be no water at least until the following day, maybe several days. She left a note for Lawrence, telling him that there was no telling when the water would be back on, that she’d be staying with the Gordons for a few days. She ended with, “I can’t see you right now. Please drop a note in the mailbox if you won’t be here, and I’ll feed Daphne.”

She walked next door with her pillow and a few clothes in a paper bag. She was covered with mud. “What a mess you are,” Lillian said, peering out the door at her.

“Isaac punctured the water main with a pickax. The men are over there fixing it. There won’t be any water, probably for a few days. Can I come in?”

“Stay as long as you like. Gerald’s away. You better take off your shoes, and I’d say a bath is in order.” She dug out a blue towel and pointed her toward the bathroom. Alice turned on the faucet. The walls were a shouting shade of blue. The sink, bathtub, and toilet, all blue.

The bathroom reminded her of Lillian’s last dinner party, when she’d served Jell-O eggs on a bed of lettuce for one of the courses. To make them, she’d blown out real eggs, sealed one end of each shell, and filled them with different colors of Jell-O. When they’d set, she’d peeled them painstakingly. Like the bathroom, they were absurd, a kind of parody of a dinner party. The guests had been impressed, at least they said they were, and Alice had watched Lillian watching them, one eyebrow cocked.

The tub filled, and she sank into the water, which instantly turned brown. Had she just left Lawrence for good? She didn’t know.

At the moment, she had to admit she didn’t care where he spent the night, and she wouldn’t care if he didn’t come back. Something had snapped, seeing him there with Peter Ashton’s dog straining after Daphne, the two men ready to set him loose. She couldn’t put a finger on why it had bothered her so. It had to do with Daphne not having a choice. At least with the neighborhood ruffians, there was a kind of natural selection. But to will it, to set it up … Alice plunged under the water, rinsed her hair, let out the muddy water, and filled the tub again. Lillian had dozens of lotions arrayed on shelves. The shampoo was creamy and smelled of peaches. She lay back and breathed. Her body had not felt her own since the night at the Lunquists’. She’d felt defensive, under siege, sad, unlovely. A gray hair stuck to her belly and she went underwater and floated it away.

Lillian was in the kitchen when she came out. “I never cook when Gerald’s away,” she said.

“What do you eat?”

“Whatever I feel like. Mayonnaise out of a jar. Canned sardines.”

Alice laughed. “Yuck.”

“But tonight, I thought we’d have this.” She set a plate of toast on the table, and two boiled eggs upright in egg cups. “Speaking of food, how was your dinner the other night?”

“The Lunquists? It was a disaster.”

“I’ve always hated dinner parties.”

“I thought you liked entertaining.”

Lillian huffed out of the side of her mouth. “So what happened?”

“It turns out Lawrence has been sleeping with the hostess. Her husband told me that night.”

“Ah, not a fun evening.”

While Alice talked, Lillian whacked off the top of her egg with a knife, sprinkled salt, and dug in with a small spoon. Between bites, she broke off bits of toast and ate them. Alice loved watching her eat; she got such immense pleasure from the simplest food. Her profile was a fallen glory, her breasts sagging. Her face was a ruin, wrinkled to lizard skin by years of African sun. She took a sip of tea and looked at Alice. “So, what will you do?”

“Leave him?” asked Alice in a small voice.

“Is this the first time?”

“Yes.”

“Does he love her?”

“He’s infatuated.”

“People get over it. No one’s perfect,” Lillian said. “He seems decent enough.”

No one’s perfect, Alice said in her head, rolling it around like a marble. She felt as though she were seeing the world through Lillian’s glaze of disappointment and compromise and something harder to define. Not resignation, not joy. If the feeling were a color, it would be gray green, the color of moss on the north side of large trees, the thing that endures, that softens edges.

Next door, the house was dark. She went home to check on Daphne, and shut the door firmly against marauding dogs.

She and Lawrence met a couple of days later over the back fence. The water had drained halfway out of the hole. Five orioles called, weela-weeoo, weela-weeoo, as though they’d flown into paradise. Lawrence was wearing the shorts of his safari suit and a T-shirt with a smear of toothpaste down the front. “I’m finished with her,” he said. “I told her last night it was over. I never loved her. You know that, don’t you, Alice? I was obsessed, I can’t explain it.”

How did she know he wasn’t still obsessed?

“It was like a drug,” he said hanging onto the fence like a criminal. “I didn’t want it, well I did. Yes, I did very much, the way you’d want a cup of coffee after not having one for three days. No, stronger than that, much stronger. Do you hate me?”

She considered his question. His hair was rumpled and needed to be washed. “No. But I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust that it’s over.”

“It’s over. I swear it. I miss you. Will you come home?”

She studied him a moment and smiled at him for the first time in weeks. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well if you don’t hate me, do you like me?” He touched her finger through the fence.

“That’s not really the question.”

“What is?”

“We didn’t make a nest for ourselves. It’s dry sticks. We couldn’t make a baby.” Her eyes filled.

“Do you want to go home, I mean home home?”

“No.”

Their fingertips touched once more, and she returned to Lillian’s house. It was quiet inside, and the white-walled rooms were cool and peace filled. A faint smell of veldt rose from the grass rugs. Martha, the Gordons’ servant, was in the kitchen humming a song, pulling it from low down. Alice saw the back of her, the motion of her arm whipping something in a bowl. She walked into the guest room and sat on the bed. The orioles still called. They didn’t know that the water was sinking into the earth, more each day. She looked down at her hands resting in her lap, one on top of the other.

Lillian was having a bath. “Well?” she called through the door.

“He wants us to try again. Do you think I should?”

“It has nothing to do with me,” Lillian said. It was quiet behind the door as though she was thinking. “Why don’t you come in?”

“In there?”

“What do I have to hide?”

Lillian was wearing a white bath turban and her face was rosy from the rising heat. Under the water, shimmering just under the surface, were stretch marks crisscrossing her belly. Hope, and hope again. “Sit down,” she said. Her breasts were flattened out, draped softly to each side. Alice perched on the edge of the tub, near her feet.

“What does your heart say?” Lillian asked.

“My heart?” As though she’d never asked it anything.

Lillian slid underwater and sliced up through, her face shining with droplets. “That’s all that matters. Do you want to go back or not?”

She wasn’t sure.

Lillian sat up in the bath and said, “It’s none of my business, but when I was your age, I thought my life was over. I’ll dry off and we’ll have a cup of tea, and then you can sleep on it.”

The water came back on. Isaac had disappeared without a trace. Each afternoon after work, Alice drove to Naledi, parked the truck, and walked around looking for him. She went down one path then another. The place stretched out in all directions, shacks and cardboard houses as far as you could see. She was ashamed she didn’t even know his last name. One day, she thought she saw him on the road. She stopped the truck, rolled down the window and shouted, “Dumela, rra!” A stranger turned his face to hers, and that’s when she stopped her search. He’d come back, or he wouldn’t.

Gradually, the mud subsided. The orioles and their sweet song disappeared.