wolves and snakes and spiders

In the daylight, my neighborhood is mostly quiet. Birds chirp and children bellow out from nearby yards and occassionally a bus roars by. But at night, the streets come alive with an entirely new soundtrack. A downstairs neighbor blares pop music and bad movies. A group of men clink beers from their front steps. The air expands with the hum of friends and what I imagine to be a drunken game of croquet.

Driving home one night, I take a wrong turn while looking for parking. My neighborhood is still new to me and full of one-way streets that lead to dead ends. I drive with my windows down and my arm stretched out, brushing against the heat. I love nights like this, when the air is so thick it feels like you can lie back in its grasp or walk through it as if swimming. I’m looping my way back to the main street when an enormous, wolf-like dog comes lumbering out from the darkness between two houses. It steps out into the street where it wavers for a moment and then slowly, slowly, slumps down to its stomach. One of its front legs is bent strangely and can’t seem to take much weight. I stop my car, I don’t know what else to do. Even from the other side of the street, I can practically feel the dog’s fur- thick and greasy. I imagine the sensation of it beneath my hand.

I’m hovering near the dog, half out of my car and halfway still inside. I’m speaking to it, despire my better judgement, I’m saying, dog, are you okay? Another car drives close, drives away, and then circles back and I can hardly recognize the strangeness when it finally pulls over and out steps Keith, a friend I hardly see anymore. There seems to be no room for coincidences amdist the dark air and the bubbling heat and this wolfdog lying on its side in the middle of the street. We both hover nearby, a step forward, a step back. Don’t get too close, Keith says, you can’t be sure. He wanders off to find a neighbor, and I sit on my haunches a few feet from the dog. Its breathing is slow and occassionally it nips at that same front leg.

I hardly realize that I’ve already planned this dog’s new life, its new home in my home and its visit to the vet tomorrow, when Keith comes back with a neighbor who explains that it’s a local dog, a neighborhood dog. The main points up towards the hills. It belongs to someone up there, he says. And then we all look at the dog, still lying on its side in the middle of the street, a long, stumbling distance from those houses up in the hills. He does this sometimes, the man says. He shrugs. I don’t know.

I remember my father saving turtles and spiders and birds and once, when I was six or seven, he returned from a hike with an enormous snake. Years later I would get the full story, that he’d been driving home and the snake had been stretched out across the entire length of the road. After trying to coax it along, my dad had finally somehow gathered it into his car and brought it back to our suburban townhouse. I remember standing with my face pressed against the screendoor, refusing to go any further. My dad unfurled the snake across our front yard, its thick, waxy body requiring both of his hands. Richard, my mother said from behind me, her voice rising in a panic. Richard, what is that?

There’s a strange shame that comes with the impulse to rescue- to rescue a person, an animal, anything, really. The shame comes after the high, after the heroic sense of it all, when inevitably the emotions crash and you look out at the snake now filling the front yard, its scaly stomach rough on the concrete, and realize how far it is from any sort of home. Or you look up at that house high in the hills and you look back at the wolfdog with its greasy fur and its lumbering breath and realize that it’s probably dying.  And you remember how small you really are and how insignificant these saving gestures can be. Most things don’t need rescuing. They just need a cool spot of asphalt amidst the early summer heat wave, a little peace at the height of the evening and a way to come quietly to an end.

overgrown


There’s just something about chopping off all your hair- I can’t really explain it.

I remember being ten or eleven and crying as the hairdresser cut my waist-length hair up to my shoulders. Her own hair was cropped so short it was nearly buzzed and she made fun of my tears like some short-tempered, humourless mother. But all I could see when I looked at myself was a lack, a part of myself that was missing.  I felt overwhelmed by the temporary misery of knowing that the way people now saw me wasn’t at all who or what I felt myself to be.

I remembered this yesterday as I cut off all my hair again. Only instead of tears, this time it was a wave of immense, warming relief. I looked in the mirror and saw myself, nothing else. Women’s hair holds memories and weight. Entire fears and desires and loves and confusions can disappear inside all that long, thick hair. I can count my experiences by its waves and when it starts to grow too long- when it hangs around my shoulders in a messy haze or stays knotted on top of my head for days at a time- I know there’s something I’m holding on to unnecessarily.

The last time I cut my hair short was two weeks into a rehearsal process for a play I’d written about a teenage girl that sets her town on fire.  I was nearing the halfway point of grad school and everything in my life was hovering in a strange sort of pause.  I cut off all my hair impulsively the night before a Halloween party and the next morning, even though we pushed rehearsals back until nearly noon, the actors all slunk in hung-over and stinking of sweat.  I’d only known the director for those two short weeks but it was the sort of deep, immediate bond that can feel as if you’ve been preparing for it your entire life.  He touched the fresh, new ends of my hair and smiled mischievously.  You know what they say, he said.  A woman who cuts off her hair is about to change her life.

I don’t like to think too much about what I look like or how I present myself and I definitely don’t like to write about it. Why bother? The world is so full and words are good for so much more than just appearances. I like it all to be simple- striped shirts and a musky perfume and worn-in denim and the old 1950s leather schoolbag I got from the flea market last summer.  Delicate bits of jewelry from my grandfather. Old men’s hats made of heavy, dirt-colored textiles. White sheets. White dishes. Plain walls. Piles and piles of books. I want my objects, like my life, to be uncomplicated, masculine, refined and full of history. And my hair?  I want it short.  Short enough that it brushes against my jaw line. Short enough that I can suddenly feel the breeze cooling against the back of my neck.