Free A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas Page A

leftover brisket, apples, orange juice, butter, milk. Lettuce and tomatoes and onions and potatoes. For a while my freezer contained a bottle of vodka with a wisp of buffalo grass inside, and for a few bad years I took swigs of this syrupy concoction all day long.
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    Still, the WASP theory dies hard. I have only to remember taking my old friend Jerry to my mother's house in East Hampton. I heard a cry from the kitchen and went to see what was wrong. He was standing in front of the open refrigerator, pointing to its contents—a bottle of champagne and a jar of bitter marmalade, both sitting on doilies. And then there's the memory of my mother's frantic cry when any of us children headed toward the kitchen. "Don't eat anything!" In her later years as a great grandmother she plied us all with baked Brie and pâté and cookies. She broke off big pieces of chocolate bar beseeching us to eat. In the old days perhaps she had bought only enough food to last through supper. Maybe what we were eating were the ingredients of the evening meal. She was a good cook but sometimes meat was on the chewy side. On these occasions she glared at us as we valiantly gnawed our way through strips of beef. "Good tough meat," she would say in a challenging tone.
    At the same time my refrigerator arrived I collapsed the dining room table and lined the walls with bookcases. I don't have a dining room sort of life—we eat on our laps in the kitchen if I have company—and this was a room I passed through to get somewhere else. It was useless, really, except for Thanksgiving. And now we're headed into fall, my favorite season, and there are empty bookcases all around me, and boxes of books in New York City waiting to be moved up here. I sit in this new room, trying it on for size, and discover that my house doesn't fit me anymore. Maybe it's because from here I can see into the empty kitchen, and then turn my head and look into the empty living room. On either side are these uninhabited rooms, quiet, waiting, but only for me, and I can't sit everywhere at once.
    It occurs to me that eating is a social occasion. Living alone I don't have the energy for shopping, for cooking meals. The dogs and I do fine with me eating standing up and dropping bits of my makeshift supper—often this is buttered toast—into their mouths. But Rich comes on Thursdays, and Sally with Nora, and we have lunch together. Rich lost his sense of smell with the accident, and with it much of his ability to taste. Of all the catastrophic losses he suffered this one seemed gratuitous, and just plain mean. We'd had our favorite meals—baby flounder fried in butter and oil, which we ate with new potatoes and peas; home fries on a rainy afternoon. All this past winter I roasted chickens for Thursdays, or made omelets, but summer has been hot, and nowadays it's mostly deli takeout. Rich still loves to eat, but I don't know what he tastes.
    This Thursday he was anxious. A new doctor had taken him off two of his medications—why do they mess with what works?—and when I went to pick him up he was agitated and miserable, he couldn't come with me, he had plans, there were things he had to do. I wondered if he thought he was back at work. For a couple of years after his accident, he would get desperate, believing he was supposed to be covering a news story he couldn't remember. "We can do everything in Woodstock," I said, but no, no, he had to stay, if he left now nothing would get done and he couldn't put it off any longer. He was sitting on the chair in his little room; a copy of the new
American Heritage Dictionary
I'd given him was on the bed. "Let's go," I said. "Sally is waiting with the baby," but to no effect. He stood up and felt in his pockets. "I'm looking for something and I don't know what it is. I won't even know it when I find it," he said.
    How did I convince him to leave with me? A mix of cajoling and bullying. We got to the house, where Sally