The next time we met she set me to The Odyssey, not going in any order but picking out parts she particularly liked. On my first day with Mr. Homer I found the Sirens busy trying to draw Odysseus and his men onto the wreckage-strewn rocks around their island, luring the sailors to destruction with their beautiful voices. Of course, Odysseus survives to fight another day, out-tricking the singers by plugging his crew’s ears with wax so they couldn’t hear him howling to be taken closer, closer, to the Sirens in their ring of broken boats.
I knew I was supposed to hate those damn Sirens, but I didn’t. I figured that a person takes his chances with Sirens because he wants to—maybe has to. He crosses his fingers and ties himself to a mast and says, Keep going, everybody—I’m not missing this—and that made sense to me.
NEAVE
Mr. Boppit, Wonder Dog
That summer we came upon Mr. Boppit waiting patiently outside George’s Sweetheart Market for a person who was never going to return to him. This kind of thing happened to dogs back in 1936 if feeding them got too expensive. Bop was there at ten a.m. when Snyder and Jane were sent to the store for milk. He was there at five p.m. when Lilly rode her bicycle by. He was discussed at dinner, and all of us trooped back to see if he was still there at seven. Yup—alert and patient, attending his betrayer. I suggested that his owner maybe had suffered a heart attack in aisle three and the dog hadn’t actually been dumped. Lilly mocked this hopeful view. “The mutt was ditched by somebody who lost his job or left town. He hasn’t even gotten his full growth yet and he probably already eats a pound of dog food a day. Look at the size of those paws.”
We walked slowly home, but once everybody seemed to have gotten busy with something else I snuck an enamel pan out of the kitchen along with what leftovers I thought I could liberate without drawing any attention to myself and I walked back. He was still there, and pleased to accept the meal. His manners were good and he greeted me civilly—not a jump-on-you-chew-everything kind of dog. He watched as I set the food down and he looked up at my face for permission before he ate, though when he did tuck in it was clear that it’d been a long time between meals. A good dog. I asked George if I could use his tap and an old pan and I set out some water for him. When I walked away I kept looking back to see if he was watching me. He was. The tail would lift and sway when I turned toward him, droop when I started to turn away.
The next day I went back with a ham bone and some vegetable-cheese casserole. He was still there, still polite, and pretty cheerful considering his situation. I sat down next to him this time as he ate, and when he was done he sat down next to me and set a paw on my knee. I described my day. He listened attentively. If I walked away right then I thought maybe George would drive him off and we’d come upon him in a week trying to tip over trash cans behind the Breakfast Nook Spa. Boys would attach things to him or drag him around with ropes tied to his overly loyal furry neck. He would be hungry, maybe scared, all alone.
I took a few steps away, but I looked back at him and his tail lifted. Our eyes met—the tail swayed a little. “Well, come on,” I said. He looked at the door of Sweetheart Market. He looked at me. “I’m not going to try to explain ratfinks to you,” I said, “or back doors. But I don’t think your owner is coming back, no matter how long you sit there.” He stood and I swear he sighed. Then he fell into step by my right knee and we walked home in companionable silence.
Janey fell on the poor dog like he was her last friend on Earth, and he didn’t object when she climbed on him and yanked at his ears and tail. She named him Boppit, and I added the “Mr.” because he just looked too sober a creature to give him a name that called up the sound a cartoon mallet made hitting a cartoon head. Mr. Boppit’s manners were elegant, not something you’d expect from a goofy style of dog. But dogs don’t always match their looks any more than people do. I’ve seen three-pound lapdoggish ones attack a horse and giant fang-toothed ones hide under porches when the ice man’s bell goes by. Mr. Boppit was neither. When Jane got calmer and stepped away from him, Bop sat down quietly and held up one paw for her to shake. She took it and he didn’t budge until she was done pumping it up and down. Mom saw that and it decided her in Mr. Boppit’s favor.
He was initially my dog, not because anybody discussed it but because I’d brought him home. He was also partly Janey’s by default because she was the baby and he’d given her his paw to shake. Snyder wasn’t usually moved by animal magnetism, and Mr. Boppit wasn’t the kind of dog who imposed himself on you if you weren’t interested. Lilly outright disliked him. She claimed he smelled like a dog, but then, he was a dog. Exactly what was he supposed to do about that, I asked her. He also shed and liked to sleep on our bed, which Lilly hated, but his major offense was what he did to Lilly’s shoes. Bop could push any door in the house open easily, even manipulate a simple latch, so getting into our closet was not beyond him. Lilly’d find him there sitting in a pile of chewed-up remains and she’d whack him. He’d stand there and take it, tail down, looking as ashamed as any dog ever looked, but the next week he’d do it all over again.
Aside from his feelings about shoes, he was a perfect dog. He let Jane tie bonnets on his head and sat at her doll table with her for tea. He walked by our sides and guarded us on our trips to the end of the block to buy penny candy at the corner spa. The winter after he came to us, he was walking with Lilly and me through some marshy fields by the beach. A little whisper of snow that had just fallen made it hard to see what was underfoot, and I was skidding along on the icy skin that had frozen over some standing water. I broke through and got a foot jammed in the shattered ice, which didn’t put me in any danger but Mr. Boppit couldn’t tell that from the volume of my yelling. The water was icy, only seven inches deep, but it sloshed in over the top of my boot. Worse, when I yanked the boot up it caught on the edge of the hole I’d made and pulled the boot right off my foot, which sank in the still unfrozen muck as I struggled.