Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  As Gretchen closed on her now, the pup wriggling in her arms, Nisha could see her smile flutter and die. No doubt she was already envisioning the cream-leather interior of her BMW (a 750i in Don’t-Even-Think-About-It Black) and the commute to the office and whatever was going down there, court sessions, the piles of documents, contention at every turn. Mr. Striker—Nisha would never be able to call him Cliff, even if she lived to be eighty, but then he’d have to be a hundred and ten and probably wouldn’t hear her, anyway—was already gone, in his matching Beemer, his and hers. Gretchen didn’t say good morning or hi or how are you?or thanks for coming, but just enfolded her in the umbrella of her perfume and handed her the dog. Which went immediately heavy in Nisha’s arms, fighting for the ground with four flailing paws and the little white ghoul’s teeth that fastened on the top button of her jacket. Nisha held on. Gave Gretchen a big grateful-for-the-job-and-the-health-care smile, no worries, no worries at all.

  “Those jeans,” Gretchen said, narrowing her eyes. “Are they new?”

  The dog squirming, squirming. “I, well—I’m going to set him down a minute, okay?”

  “Of course, of course. Do what you do, what you normally do.” An impatient wave. “Or what you used to do, I mean.”

  They both watched as the pup fell back on its haunches, rolled briefly in the grass and sprang up to clutch Nisha’s right leg in a clumsy embrace. “I just couldn’t find any of my old jeans—my mother probably threw them all out long ago. Plus”—a laugh—“I don’t think I could fit into them anymore.” She gave Gretchen a moment to ruminate on the deeper implications here—time passing, adolescents grown into womanhood, flesh expanding, that sort of thing—then gently pushed the dog down and murmured, “But I am wearing—right here, under the jacket?—this T-shirt I know I used to wear back then.”

  Nothing. Gretchen just stood there, looking distracted.

  “It’s been washed, of course, and sitting in the back of the top drawer of my dresser where my mother left it, so I don’t know if there’ll be any scent or anything, but I’m sure I used to wear it because Tupac really used to drive my engine back then, if you know what I mean.” She gave it a beat. “But hey, we were all fourteen once, huh?”

  Gretchen made no sign that she’d heard her—either that or she denied the proposition outright. “You’re going to be all right with this, aren’t you?” she said, looking her in the eye. “Is there anything we didn’t cover?”

  The afternoon before, during her interview—but it wasn’t really an interview because the Strikers had already made up their minds and if she’d refused them they would have kept raising the hourly till she capitulated—the two of them, Gretchen and Cliff, had positioned themselves on either side of her and leaned into the bar over caramel-colored scotches and a platter of ebi and maguro sushi to explain the situation. Just so that she was clear on it. “You know what cloning is, right?” Gretchen said. “Or what it involves? You remember Dolly?”

  Nisha was holding fast to her drink, her left elbow pressed to the brass rail of the bar in the family room. She’d just reached out her twinned chopsticks for a second piece of the shrimp, but withdrew her hand. “You mean the country singer?”

  “The sheep,” the husband said.

  “The first cloned mammal,” Gretchen put in. “Or larger mammal.”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Sure. I guess.”

  What followed was a short course in genetics and the method of somatic cell nuclear transplant that had given the world Dolly, various replicated cattle, pigs and hamsters, and now Admiral II, the first cloned dog made available commercially through SalvaPet, Inc., the genetic engineering firm with offices in Seoul, San Juan and Cleveland. Gretchen’s voice constricted as she described how they’d taken a cell from the lining of Admiral’s ear just after the accident and inserted it into a donor egg, which had had its nucleus removed, stimulated the cell to divide through the application of an electric current, and then inserted the developing embryo into the uterus of a host mother—“The sweetest golden retriever you ever saw. What was her name, Cliff? Some flower, wasn’t it?”

  “Peony.”

  “Peony? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “I thought it was—oh, I don’t know. You sure it wasn’t Iris?”

  “The point is,” he said, setting his glass down and leveling his gaze on Nisha, “you can get a genetic copy of the animal, a kind of three-dimensional Xerox, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be like the one you, well, the one you lost.”

  “It was so sad,” Gretchen said.

  “It’s nurture that counts. You’ve got to reproduce the animal’s experiences, as nearly as possible.” He gave a shrug, reached for the bottle. “You want another?” he asked, and she held out her glass. “Of course we’re both older now—and so are you, we realize that—but we want to come as close as possible to replicating the exact conditions that made Admiral what he was, right down to the toys we gave him, the food, the schedule of walks and play and all the rest. Which is where you come in—”

  “We need a commitment here, Nisha,” Gretchen breathed, leaning in so close Nisha could smell the scotch coming back at her. “Four years. That’s how long you were with him last time. Or with Admiral, I mean. The original Admiral.”

  The focus of all this deliberation had fallen asleep in Gretchen’s lap. A single probing finger of sunlight stabbed through the window to illuminate the pale fluff over the dog’s eyes. At that moment, in that light, little Admiral looked like some strange conjunction of ostrich and ape. Nisha couldn’t help thinking of The Island of Dr. Moreau,the cheesy version with Marlon Brando looking as if he’d been genetically manipulated himself, and she would have grinned a private grin, fueled by the scotch and the thundering absurdity of the moment, but she had to hide everything she thought or felt behind a mask of impassivity. She wasn’t committing to anything for four years—four years? If she was still living here in this craphole of a town four years from now she promised herself she’d go out and buy a gun and eliminate all her problems with a single, very personal squeeze of the trigger.

  That was what she was thinking when Gretchen said, “We’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour,” and the husband said, “With health care—and dental,” and they both stared at her so fiercely she had to look down into her glass before she found her voice. “Twenty-five,” she said.

  And oh, how they loved that dog, because they never hesitated. “Twenty-five it is,” the husband said, and Gretchen, a closer’s smile blooming on her face, produced a contract from the folder at her elbow. “Just sign here,” she said.

  After Gretchen had climbed into her car and the car had slid through the gate and vanished down the street, Nisha sprawled out on the grass and lifted her face to the sun. She was feeling the bliss of déjà vu—or no, not déjà vu, but a virtual return to the past, when life was just a construct and there was nothing she couldn’t have done or been and nothing beyond the thought of clothes and boys and the occasional term paper to hamper her. Here she was, gone back in time, lying on the grass at quarter of eight in the morning on a sunstruck June day, playing with a puppy while everybody else was going to work—it was hilarious, that’s what it was. Like something you’d read about in the paper—a behest from some crazed millionaire. Or in this case, two crazed millionaires. She felt so good she let out a laugh, even as the pup came charging across the lawn to slam headfirst into her, all feet and pink panting tongue, and he was Admiral all right, Admiral in the flesh, born and made and resurrected for the mere little pittance of a quarter million dollars.

  For a long while she wrestled with him, flipping him over on his back each time he charged, scratching his belly and baby-talking him, enjoying the novelty of it, but by quarter past eight she was bored and she pushed herself up to go on into the house and find something to eat. Do what you used to do, Gretchen had told her, but what she used to do, summers especially, was nap and read and watch
TV and sneak her friends in to tip a bottle of the husband’s forty-year-old scotch to their adolescent lips and make faces at one another before descending into giggles. Twice a day she’d take the dog to the doggie park and watch him squat and crap and run wild with the other mutts till his muzzle was streaked with drool and he dodged at her feet to snatch up mouthfuls of the Evian the Strikers insisted he drink. Now, though, she just wanted to feel the weight of the past a bit, and she went in the back door, the dog at her heels, thinking to make herself a sandwich—the Strikers always had cold cuts in the fridge, mounds of pastrami, capicolla, smoked turkey and Swiss, individual slices of which went to Admiral each time he did his business outside where he was supposed to or barked in the right cadence or just stuck his goofy head in the door. She could already see the sandwich she was going to make—a whole deli’s worth of meat and cheese piled up on Jewish rye; they always had Jewish rye—and she was halfway to the refrigerator before she remembered the maid.

  There she was, in her maid’s outfit, sitting at the kitchen table with her feet up and the newspaper spread out before her, spooning something out of a cup. “Don’t you bring that filthy animal in here,” she said, glancing up sharply.

  Nisha was startled. There didn’t used to be a maid. There was no one in the house, in fact, till Mrs. Yamashita, the cook, came in around four, and that was part of the beauty of it. “Oh, hi,” she said, “hi, I didn’t know you were going to be—I just . . . I was going to make a sandwich, I guess.” There was a silence. The dog slunk around the kitchen, looking wary. “What was your name again?”

  “Frankie,” the maid said, swallowing the syllables as if she weren’t ready to give them up, “and I’m the one has to clean up all these paw marks off the floor—and did you see what he did to that throw pillow in the guest room?”

  “No,” Nisha said, “I didn’t,” and she was at the refrigerator now, sliding back the tray of the meat compartment. This would go easier if they were friends, no doubt about it, and she was willing, more than willing. “You want anything?” she said. “A sandwich—or, or something?”

  Frankie just stared at her. “I don’t know what they’re paying you,” she said, “but to me? This is the craziest shit I ever heard of in my life. You think I couldn’t let the dog out the door a couple times a day? Or what, take him to the park—that’s what you do, right, take him to the doggie park over on Sycamore?”

  The refrigerator door swung shut, the little light blinking out, the heft of the meat satisfying in her hand. “It’s insane, I admit it—hey, I’m with you. You think I wanted to grow up to be a dogsitter?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you. Except you got your degree—you need a degree for that, dogsitting, I mean?” She hadn’t moved, not a muscle, her feet propped up, the cup in one hand, spoon in the other.

  “No,” Nisha said, feeling the blood rise to her face, “no, you don’t. But what about you—you need a degree to be a maid?”

  That hit home. For a moment, Frankie said nothing, just looked from her to the dog—which was begging now, clawing at Nisha’s leg with his forepaws—and back again. “This is just temporary,” she said finally.

  “Yeah, me too.” Nisha gave her a smile, no harm done, just establishing a little turf, that was all. “Totally.”

  For the first time, Frankie’s expression changed: she almost looked as if she were going to laugh. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said, “temporary help, that’s all we are. We’re the temps. And Mr. and Mrs. Striker—dog crazy, plain crazy, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar crazy—they’re permanent.”

  And now Nisha laughed, and so did Frankie—a low rumble of amusement that made the dog turn its head. The meat was on the counter now, the cellophane wrapper pulled back. Nisha selected a slice of Black Forest ham and held it out to him. “Sit!” she said. “Go ahead, sit!” And the dog, just like his father or progenitor or donor or whatever he was, looked at her stupidly till she dropped the meat on the tile and the wet plop of its arrival made him understand that here was something to eat.

  “You’re going to spoil that dog,” Frankie said.

  Nisha went unerringly to the cabinet where the bread was kept, and there it was, Jewish rye, a fresh loaf, springy to the touch. She gave Frankie a glance over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she said. “I think that’s the idea.”

  A month drifted by, as serene a month as Nisha could remember. She was making good money, putting in ten-hour days during the week and half days on the weekends, reading through all the books she hadn’t had time for in college, exhausting the Strikers’ DVD collection and opening her own account at the local video store, walking, lazing, napping the time away. She gained five pounds and vowed to start swimming regularly in the Strikers’ pool, but hadn’t got round to it yet. Some days she’d help Frankie with the cleaning and the laundry so the two of them could sit out on the back deck with their feet up, sharing a bottle of sweet wine or a joint. As for the dog, she tried to be conscientious about the whole business of imprinting it with the past—or apast—though she felt ridiculous. Four years of college for this? Wars were being fought, people were starving, there were diseases to conquer, children to educate, good to do in the world, and here she was reliving her adolescence in the company of an inbred semi-retarded clown of a cloned Afghan hound because two childless rich people decreed it should be so. All right. She knew she’d have to move on. Knew it was temporary. Swore that she’d work up a new résumé and start sending it out—but then the face of her mother, sick from vomiting and with her scalp as smooth and slick as an eggplant, would rise up to shame her. She threw the ball to the dog. Took him to the park. Let the days fall round her like leaves from a dying tree.

  And then one afternoon, on the way back from the dog park, Admiral jerking at the leash beside her and the sky opening up to a dazzle of sun and pure white tufts of cloud that made her feel as if she were floating untethered through the universe along with them, she noticed a figure stationed outside the gate of the Strikers’ house. As she got closer, she saw that it was a young man dressed in baggy jeans and a T-shirt, his hair fanning out in rusty blond dreads and a goatee of the same color clinging to his chin. He was peering over the fence. Her first thought was that he’d come to rob the place, but she dismissed it—he was harmless; you could see that a hundred yards off. Then she saw the paint smears on his jeans and wondered if he was a painting contractor come to put in a bid on the house, but that wasn’t it either. He looked more like an amateur artist—and here she had to laugh to herself—the kind who specializes in dog portraits. But she was nearly on him now, thinking to brush by him and slip through the gate before he could accost her, whatever he wanted, when he turned suddenly and his face caught fire. “Wow!” he said. “Wow, I can’t believe it! You’re her, aren’t you, the famous dog sitter? And this”—he went down on one knee and made a chirping sound deep in his throat—“this is Admiral. Right? Am I right?”

  Admiral went straight to him, lurching against the leash, and in the next instant he was flopping himself down on the hot pavement, submitting to the man’s caresses. The rope of a tail whapped and thrashed, the paws gyrated, the puppy teeth came into play. “Good boy,” the man crooned, his dreads riding a wave across his brow. “He likes that, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, boy?”

  Nisha didn’t say anything. She just watched, the smallest hole dug out of the canyon of her boredom, till the man rose to his feet and held out his hand even as Admiral sprang up to hump his leg with fresh enthusiasm. “I’m Erhard,” he said, grinning wide. “And you’re Nisha, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, taking his hand despite herself. She was on the verge of asking how he knew her name, but there was no point: she already understood. He was from the press. In the past month there must have been a dozen reporters on the property, the Strikers stroking their vanity and posing for pictures and answering the same idiotic questions over and over—A quarter million dollars: that’s a lot for a dog,
isn’t it?—and she herself had been interviewed twice already. Her mother had even found a fuzzy color photo of her and Admiral (couchant, lap) on the Web under the semi-hilarious rubric CLONE-SITTER. So this guy was a reporter—a foreign reporter, judging from the faint trace of an accent and the blue-eyed rearing height of him, German, she supposed. Or Austrian. And he wanted some of her time.

  “Yes,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I am from Die Weltwoche, and I wanted to ask of you—prevail upon you, beg you—for a few moments? Is that possible? For me? Just now?”

  She gave him a long slow appraisal, flirting with him, yes, definitely flirting. “I’ve got nothing but time,” she said. And then, watching his grin widen: “You want a sandwich?”

  They ate on the patio overlooking the pool. She was dressed casually in shorts and flip-flops and her old Tupac tee, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because the shirt—too small by half—lifted away from her hips when she leaned back in the chair, showing off her navel and the onyx ring she wore there. He was watching her, chattering on about the dog, lifting the sandwich to his lips and putting it down again, fooling with the lens on the battered old Hasselblad he extracted from the backpack at his feet. The sun made sequins on the surface of the pool. Admiral lounged beneath the table, worrying a rawhide bone. She was feeling good, better than good, sipping a beer and watching him back.

  They had a little conversation about the beer. “Sorry to offer you Miller, but that’s all we have—or the Strikers have, I mean.”

  “Miller High Life,” he said, lifting the bottle to his mouth. “Great name. What person would not want to live the high life? Even a dog. Even Admiral. He lives the high life, no?”