Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

you a student. You’ll be teaching me easily as much, if not more, than I’ll ever be able to show you.” And then he did this thing with his hair – he has super-long hair that’s white as white because of being part Native American and he has to keep flipping it back to get it out of his way – flipping it back and then with one hand gathering it up and twisting it into a pretty little rough ponytail or bun, talking all the while. “So teach me,” he was saying. “I’ll be paying attention to you all.”

      For my part, I couldn’t listen hard enough, pay attention close enough … “Reed Garner. Just say his name out loud, Kitty,” I used to murmur to myself as I was walking home, those first few classes. Not even thinking about going for a run or working out. Just going over ideas about fiction and prose and Reed Garner, saying his name. One day he cycled past me as I was in this kind of daydream and when I lunged out of my thoughts to shout “Hi!” he nearly fell off his bike, took a sort of tumble to avoid hitting me, but then went on his way.

      Already that feels like a long time ago, when we sort of crashed into each other like that on the street … But I know it’s got nothing to do with my “gateway” and “Something that really happened that has far-reaching consequences”, so I’d better get on with all that now.

      Well, I was running, as I do every morning, through the park, coming back around seven, getting to the front gates, and there up ahead I saw, seven o’clock in the morning, remember, a gang of kids, teenagers I thought at first but more like in their early twenties, and they were laughing at something, a shouting and jeering that sounded like a crowd – though I saw when I got closer that there were only four of them. The thing they were all looking down at was a dog, a pit bull terrier, with a black, flat expression in its eyes. Its ears were back, and its head down, its tail level, and it was pretty unhappy, twitching and twisting on a chain because those kids were tormenting it. One was bent over and jeering at the dog and poking him with a stick to make him mad and he was spinning around and snapping at it. Another was yanking on the chain. “Nah, Rocky!” one of the kids sneered at him, and tickled his balls when the chain was pulled back so tight I could see the little dog was nearly choking. “Yah, pussy!” the kid said, and made to kick him when his friend released his grip.

      Now I may be a personal trainer and strong, but actually I’m quite small. And I may be super-fit, I am, but I wouldn’t describe myself as brawny. Still I hate to see a dog being taunted – any animal, but dogs especially. Perhaps that’s because I’d always had dogs as a kid and my parents, when they were still alive, used to take in strays and mutts, “orphan anything”, my mother used to say – I was an orphan myself, you see, and my mother and father took me in – and I’d always thought I’d have a dog one day, when I quit the personal training … Anyhow, when I saw those kids, well, young men really, they weren’t kids at all, when I saw them taunting that little dog so that he was snapping and growling and starting to look as if any minute he was going to slip his chain and make a lunge and then there’d be trouble … Well, I saw red.

      Professor Garner – just joking: I mean, Reed – says we must never use clichés in a story. “Do anything to avoid ’em, kids,” he says, in his American way. Yet sometimes, like just then, it seems there is no way around them. Because I did … see red. We’d been reading Jane Eyre in class, as part of a study of “the intersection between Life Writing and Fiction”, and looking at how that novel by Charlotte Brontë seems for all the world to be just the story of a particular woman’s life, a study of Jane, and not the usual kind of fiction with a plot that has been figured out in advance to make it seem exciting. The red room in that book – it’s there towards the beginning when Jane is being punished by her terrible aunt – and the idea that it might surround a person, that colour, might make her see things in a particular way … well, that detail stayed with me. All that opening section, actually, because I related to it, maybe, with being an orphan too and my parents only adopting me when I was four so I can remember that other part of my life, not in detail, maybe, the orphanage or “home”, as people always called it, but I can remember my mother and father walking towards me that day they came to collect me, and my mother getting down on her knees in front of me and opening her arms and I ran towards her … And I can remember, too, exactly how I felt, being held in her arms that first time … So yes, the early section of Jane Eyre, it stayed with me, how it must have been for Jane to have that terrible aunt and not someone like my mother and what it must have been like, growing up so alone … And “seeing red”, well, altogether it seems a likely expression for me to use – cliché or not – when that book had been so clearly in my mind.

      I saw red with what those kids were doing. So instead of walking on, I went straight up to those boys, young men, whatever, and said, “What on earth are you doing?”

      Let me tell you, that was a moment. A moment, right then, of silence. Then one of the men said, “Fuck off, bitch,” and the one beside him, “Yeah. Fuck off,” and then someone else said, in a low and dangerous voice, “Get her, Rocky. Get her,” and the dog turned.

      Now again, as I say, I’m not tall and what do I know? And I’m not brawny in any way and I’m not confrontational with strangers, but neither do I believe anyone is inherently mean, human or animal, boy or dog … I just don’t believe it. It’s like bodies. You can be overweight or your tone can be shot to hell or you’ve got no endurance, no core strength … but I can work with you on that. Take my classes and you’ll see, straight away, how together we can improve things. I’m saying all this as a kind of metaphor, I guess, as a way of showing that I wasn’t about to walk away from that situation, even though the boy who held the dog lengthened the chain and the dog lit out at me and someone said, “Get her, Rocky,” again, but then the boy with the chain pulled it back just in time, so that nothing happened, even though the little guy’s teeth were bared and his eyes like a shark because he was ready to get me all right, he’d been commanded.

      “You’re being very cruel to that dog,” I said then. “How old are you all, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? You should know better. Here …” and at that point I got down on my knees, just like my mother got down on her knees that day at the orphanage, and the little dog looked at me, and his expression changed. His ears went up. He put his head to one side.

      “Look at him,” I said to the boys, for now I could see that they were just boys, I’d kind of made that up about them being twenty or thirty, just to flatter them, because they wanted to be very, very tough. “Look,” I said again, from down there, though one of them was lashing some other chain he had, and another was muttering over and over in a dark low voice, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” just like that, and another turned to spit.

      “Look,” I said again, for the third time. And then I put out my balled fist and the dog stretched his head towards me. Then he stood up, took a step or two, his head still tilted to one side, while all the time I kept my fist in front of him, quite steady. Then he let out a little whimper and sat down again. He had a lovely face. His eyes, which had been black and scary-flat like a killer fish, were now full of thoughts and interest. He gave a little bark, like a puppy. He was really just a puppy. He put out his head towards my hand and smelled my hand all over and then he licked it. And I opened my hand then to let him sniff my palm and then, when he’d done that, too, I gave him a little scratch around his ears and fondled his muzzle.

      “There,” I said to him, and sort of to the boys as well. “There, you see? Everything’s all right.”

      The boys kind of shuffled, reassembled slightly. The one with the chain just let the chain hang.

      “You see,” I said, “you think you’ve got a mean dog here, boys. But” – I wasn’t looking at them as I spoke. I was just looking at the dog – “he’s not mean at all.”

      “He should be fucking mean,” said one of them, the one who had been swinging a length of chain attached to his jeans, though he wasn’t swinging it now. “He should fucking be.”

      “But he’s not, Steve,” said the guy holding the actual dog chain. “Look at him. He’s a pussy. He’s a mummy’s dog.”

      “My old mum wouldn’t