Pug Hill - Alison Pace [107]
“Bos was really magnificent, wasn’t she?” My mother asks me, looking back down at the picture frame in her hand. Perhaps I am not quite as psychic as I so briefly believed myself to be.
“Yes,” I agree, “she was magnificent.”
“She was. She really was. But, see, look here,” she says holding the picture out toward me. I lean in to get a closer look. My mother whispers loudly, it is too terrible to say at a normal volume, “I had a chain collar on her!”
“Yes,” I say and I’m not sure; I’m not sure where this is going so I wait, to let it go there.
“I just don’t know what I was thinking,” Mom laments. “How could I have had a chain on her? It’s so undignified! So cruel! She was never even on her leash, why would I have her in a chain collar?”
“Well she was very big, she probably needed it,” I offer.
“But she was so gentle!”
“Yes, she was, Mom,” I say, because I really don’t know what else to say. “She really was.”
“It’s just one of those things, one of those things that you’d never do if you’d known everything that was wrong about it when you were doing it,” my mother explains, as much to me I realize, as to Boswell. I nod my head in agreement.
Rod Stewart is playing in the background. I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger. But he’s not just playing in the background of my mind. I glance over at the stereo, and see the Rod Stewart Greatest Hits CD lying in front of it, the CD player turned on. Mom’s really going with this; she has gotten out Rod Stewart to accompany the moment lyrically. I look at the CD there, and think, This is where I get it from. I look over at the dog table, and think exactly the same thing.
“I’m sure she didn’t mind, Mom,” I say. “She had such a lovely, lovely life.”
“You think?” she asks me. I have never known Mom to need reassuring before this instant. I have always been the one so badly in need of reassuring, the sometimes close-to-the-edge-and-not-wanting-to-turn-around wreck, with all my insecurities and fears and issues and flaws. I want right now, more than anything, to be sure Mom knows that Boswell never minded for a second about the chain.
“Oh, I’m absolutely positive. I’m sure of it,” is all I come up with at first; I don’t want to hesitate for too long because hesitation can sometimes seem like doubt; it could seem like maybe I did think that Boswell was oppressed.
“And she really was magnificent,” I add on in a flash.
“Yes,” says my never-wistful mother wistfully, “she really was.”
We stand side by side for a while, listening to Rod Stewart and looking at all the photographs. At one point my mother sighs. And I sigh, too, because it’ll be afternoon soon enough, and then evening, and then it’ll be tonight, and I’ll be making a speech.
chapter thirty-four
Do You Want To Dance Under the Moonlight?
Clapping.
Clapping.
There is clapping, and the clapping is for me. I am standing on a stage, just to the left of the band, next to a microphone, and I’ve just finished my speech.
People aren’t gasping in horror at how bad I was. People aren’t stifling embarrassed smiles because they feel so bad for me. There isn’t even anyone running up to the stage with a towel to clean up the throw-up at my feet. All there is, all there is right now in the world, is clapping.
This afternoon, Darcy and C.P. disassembled the non-L.L. Bean, non-REI, non-objectionable tent they’d put up last night in the backyard. Once their tent was taken down, people came and set up a much bigger tent, a much more festive tent, a tent that didn’t drive my parents slowly insane but rather made them quite happy as they looked outside, watching as it went up.
Up in my room, as I got ready for the party, I looked out my window and saw the band arriving. I noticed