My father is singing.
High above Cayuga’s waters, there’s an awful smell.
Some say it’s Cayuga’s waters, some say it’s Cornell.
He always sings in the car. He has a low voice scraped out by cigarettes and all the yelling he does. His big pointy Adam’s apple bobs up and down, turning the tanned skin white wherever it moves.
He reaches over to the puppy in my lap. “You’s a good little rascal. Yes you is,” he says in his dog voice, a happy, hopeful voice he doesn’t use much on people.
The puppy was a surprise for my eleventh birthday, which was yesterday. I chose the ugliest puppy in the shop. My father and the owner tried to tempt me with the full-breed Newfoundlands, scooping up the silky black sacks of fur and pressing their big heavy heads against my cheek. But I held fast. A dog like that would make leaving even harder. I pushed them away and pointed to the twenty-five dollar wire-haired mutt that had been in the corner cage since winter.
My father dropped the last Newfoundland back in its bed of shavings. “Well, it’s her birthday,” he said slowly, with all the bitterness of a boy whose birthday it was not.
He didn’t speak to me again until we got into the car. Then, before he started the engine, he touched the dog for the first time, pressing its ungainly ears flat to its head. “I’m not saying you’s not ugly because you is ugly. But you’s a keeper.”
“From the halls of Montezuma,” he sings out to the granite boulders that lined the highway home, “to the shores of Tripoli!”
We have both forgotten about Project Genesis. The blue van is in our driveway, blocking my father’s path into the garage.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he says in his fake crying voice, banging his forehead on the steering wheel. “Why me?” He turns slightly to make sure I was laughing, then moans again, “Why me?”
We hear them before we see them, shrieks truncated by thuds and slaps, a girl hollering “William! William!” over and over, nearly all of them screaming, “Watch me! Watch this!”
“I’s you new neighba,” my father says to me, but not in his happy dog voice.
I carry the puppy and my father follows with the bed, bowls and food. My pool is unrecognizable. There are waves, real waves, like out in the ocean, with white caps. The cement squares along its edge, which are usually hot and dry and sizzle when you lay your wet stomach on them, are soaked from the breakers washing over the sides.
It’s my pool because my father had it built for me. On the morning of my fifth birthday my father took me to our club to go swimming. Just as we put our feet on the first wide step of the shallow end and looked out toward the dark deep end and the thick blue and red lines painted on the bottom, the lifeguard hollered from his perch that there were still fifteen minutes left of adult swim. My father, who’d belonged to the club for at least twenty years, who ran and won all the tennis tournaments, explained that it was his daughter’s birthday.
The boy, Thomas Novak, shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Amory. She’ll have to wait fifteen minutes like everyone else,” he called down.
“But there’s no one in the pool!”
“I’m sorry. It’s the rules.”
“Fine,” my father said, his neck blotching purple, “I’m going home and building my own pool.”
My father spent that afternoon on the telephone, yellow pages and a pad of paper on his lap, talking to contractors and writing down numbers. As I lay in bed that night, I could hear him in the den with my mother. “It’s the rules,” he mimicked in a baby voice, saying over and over that a kid like that would never be allowed through the club’s gates if he didn’t work there, imitating Mrs. Novak’s “Hiya” down at the drug store where she worked. In the next few weeks, trees were sawed down, and a huge hole dug, cemented, painted, and filled with water. A little house went up beside it with changing rooms, a machine room, and a bathroom with a sign my father hung on the door that read, “We don’t swim in your toilet—Please don’t pee in our pool.” I always thought of it as my pool. My father had it built for me.
My mother, in a pink shift and big sunglasses, waves me over to where she’s sitting on the grass with her friend Bob Wuzzy who runs Project Genesis. But I hold up the puppy and keep moving toward the house. I’m angry at her. Because of her I can’t have a Newfoundland.
“Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,” my father says as he set down his load on the kitchen counter. “Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.” He looks out the window at the pool. “Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?”
My father hates all my mother’s friends.
Charlie, Ajax and Elsie smell the new dog immediately. They circle around me, tails thwapping hard, and my father shoos them out harshly into the dining room and shuts the door. Then he hurries across the kitchen in a playful goosestep to the living room door and shuts that just before the dogs have made the loop around. They scratch and whine, then settle against the other side of the door. I set the puppy down on the linoleum. He scrabbles for purchase then bolts to a small place between the refrigerator and the wall. It’s a warm spot. I used to hide there and play Harriet the Spy when I could fit. His fur sticks out like quills and his skin is rippling in fear.
“Poor little fellow.” My father squats beside the fridge, his long legs rising up on either side of him like a frog’s, his knees sharp and bony through his khakis. “It’s okay, little guy. It’s okay.” He turned to me. “What should we call him?”
The shaking dog in the corner makes what I agreed to with my mother real in a way nothing else has. Gone, I thought. Call him Gone.
Three days ago my mother told me she was going to go live with my grandparents for the summer. We were standing in our nightgowns in her bathroom. My father had just left for work. Her face was shiny from Moondrops, the lotion she put on every morning and night. “I want you to come with me, if you’d like,” she said.
“But what about sailing classes and that art camp?” I was signed up for all sorts of things that began next week, after the Fourth of July.
“You can take sailing lessons there. They live on a lake.”
“But not with Mallory and Patrick.”
She pressed her lips together, and her eyes, which were brown and round, nothing like my father’s yellow-green slits, brimmed with tears and I said yes, I’d go with her.
My father reaches in and pulls the puppy out. “We’ll wait and see what you’s like before we gives you a name. How’s that?” The puppy burrows between his neck and shoulder, licking and sniffing, and my father laughs his high-pitched being tickled laugh and I wish he knew everything that was going to happen.
I set up the bed by the door and the two bowls beside it. I fill one bowl with water and leave the other empty because my father feeds all the dogs at the same time, five o’clock, just before his first drink.
I go upstairs and get on my bathing suit. From my brother’s window I see my mother and Bob Wuzzy, in chairs now, sipping iced tea with fat lemon rounds an
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