Pug Hill - Alison Pace [104]
After two laps, I stand waiting in the driveway with Betsy and Annabelle. Betsy is barking and running back and forth across the entrance to the driveway, and Annabelle is panting, lying on the cement. Dad emerges from the house a few minutes later, with Captain, also in his harness, walking lopsidedly alongside him. At the sight of him, Betsy starts to screech, and Annabelle sits up slightly and utters one soft, “Whoa.” We pick up each of the dogs, and put them down in the back of the Jeep, onto the green plaid blankets that are always there, always laid out across the seats. The Jeep, my dad will tell you, it’s really the dogs’ car, they just let him drive it.
The dogs all sit remarkably quietly, all three in a row, all seemingly very patient and not grousing at all with each other. I look at them back there and really, they do look happy, at least to me they do. We head out of the driveway, and drive the half-mile down the hill, to the beach, because even though it’s so close, Captain can no longer walk it.
There’s a big grass field to the side of the beach, and this is where we pull up with the car.
“All right, guys,” Dad says to them after we’ve lifted them all down from the car and off Betsy goes, running across the field like a whippet, just as graceful, just as free. Captain galumphs after her, and I watch him as he goes. I try not to think how he used to run across this field, just like a slightly stockier version of a whippet himself, when we were all younger. Annabelle sits down and leans herself, lumpen, against the front tire of the Jeep. Dad picks her up and she reaches up to his face, all long slimy pink tongue, and licks him. “No, no, Annabelle, you don’t have to kiss,” he tells her, and we all walk together, Dad carrying Annabelle like a football, out to the center of the field.
I keep my eyes on Captain, gimping across the field, off-balance because of his goiter. And I know it’s not really a goiter, I know it’s something so much worse than that; I know that it is really a malignant sarcoma. But I prefer to call it the goiter because even though I imagine there is nothing funny about goiters per se, especially, I’m sure, if let’s say, you happen to have a goiter, I think it doesn’t sound as bad. It’s easier this way; easier when you think of the malignant sarcoma as a goiter, to believe what the vet says when he says Captain is not in any pain.
“Do you think we’re a dysfunctional family?” My dad asks me, breaking the silence.
“I’m sorry?” I say, startled not so much by the breaking of the silence, as by the peculiarity of the question. Dad’s never struck me before as being the type of person to bandy about psychological words like dysfunctional. But then I remember that Dad now knows how to Google.
“Dysfunctional. Do you think we’re a dysfunctional family? I read that people who join communes tend to come from dysfunctional families.”
“Um, I’ve never really thought about it before,” I say and look out, across the field, at the water. To tell you the truth, I never really have. And I know that might sound absolutely insane, that someone who spends as much time thinking about so many things as I tend to do, that someone who’s part of a family that spends as much time as we all do talking about a commune, has never once thought of her family and felt the desire to use the word dysfunctional.
Though, I must admit, I have had my moments in which I might have come close. I have sometimes asked myself why it seems that everyone has a sister who is just their very best friend, that everyone has a mother who tells them how beautiful they are four hundred times a day, but I don’t. I wonder if that’s sort of the McNeill family way of thinking we are dysfunctional.