Pug Hill - Alison Pace [5]
At Seventy-sixth Street, I turn right and walk into the park. I see the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, the one with the mushroom and Alice and the Mad Hatter and the rabbit. I remember how for so long I thought the story was about someone named Allison Wonderland, and how even after I knew that it wasn’t, I always thought it should be. I always thought it made so much more sense that way.
I turn left and step over a low wrought-iron fence. I stand for a full minute, just over the fence, and listen to my breathing as it slows down. Slowly, I walk up Pug Hill through the wet leaves; Central Park is so quiet and I think it smells so much like mulch.
I don’t know why I think mulch because I don’t know if I’ve ever smelled mulch before. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t. As I walk, I look down at my feet, at my Ugg boots, and I feel a twinge of disappointment, not because they’re already out of style, but because I’ve gotten water spots on them from walking through the wet leaves. I’m struck by that not completely unfamiliar feeling, that feeling like maybe I’m about to cry. And I know it’s not the dark marks all over the shearling boots that make me feel like I want to cry, but The Speech, the Great White Shark, the BIG SCARY THING.
I get to the top of the hill and I sit down on one of the benches that I sit on when it’s too cold or too wet to sit on the grass by the pine tree. The grass by the pine tree is better. There, you get so many more of the renegade pugs, the ones who will break away from the group and run toward you, panting hard, running as fast as they can in their little harnesses—purple, and green, and pink, and even once I saw a zebra-striped harness on a beautiful black pug. There, by the tree, you get the pugs who’ll stop to sit with you for a moment, tongues out, heads bobbing, looking up at you and then in the same direction as you, back at all their pug compatriots.
It isn’t until I’ve been sitting for a moment that the silence I was thinking about before, right before the mulch, hits me.
There is no snorting. No panting. No “Jasper!” No “Fresa!” No “Derby, Roxy, Buster, Vince, come here!”
No pugs. Not even one. I lean back against the bench, hoping it might help me not sink under the heavy weight that is the gravity of the situation. I close my eyes.
There are no pugs at Pug Hill.
Not today, I think. Today is not the day I want to learn that there aren’t always pugs at Pug Hill. I don’t want this knowledge. What I want is to go back in time; back to before there was a speech, back to when I lived in a world where the pugs would be here any instant I needed them. I guess I’ve just never thought about it before. I guess they just come here on the weekends. I count back in my head: nine years. Nine years I’ve lived in New York and I don’t think I’ve ever been in Central Park during the week.
I close my eyes. I try not to think about the speech. Because the speech, you see, it’s too big of a problem. I try to think about other things. Sometimes I’ve found that when you are faced with what seems like an unsolvable problem, it helps to take stock of the other problems in your life. I’ve found that if you look at the other problems, ones that are maybe, possibly, if you really put your mind to it, solvable, you’ll feel a little bit better about the problem you can’t ever imagine solving. While not necessarily the most cheering of pursuits, it does take your mind off the unsolvable problem for a little while.
Okay. I mean, it’s not like I woke up this morning and felt very much like a light, carefree person, like a person who wanted to lie on her back and kick her feet in the air with delight. It’s not like I woke up this morning feeling like a person without some problems that needed solving. Lately, to be truthful, there have been a few.
There’s my boyfriend, Evan, for starters. I don’t think it’s working out with Evan. I have been trying to ignore this fact. I have been trying to believe that we are just going through