In Cahoots
My son looked at his plate and looked at the dog and said he needed to go. I was still serving myself, my wrist flicking out sauce from a pot with a spoon. I sighed, placed my half-filled plate on the table, and took his hand in mine. After finding the key that had fallen from its hook into a shoe, we locked the door behind us, then unlocked the one in the hall where two toilets—thank god, two—faced the stairs. In time! We both clapped with happiness afterwards. However, on re-opening our door, the dog, with big teeth-cleaning licks across his chops, jumped from the table. Our plates: completely bare. I said All gone in a tone that translated to fury.
But sadness and admonishment will not get you supper. This was the saw I was reciting when down on the street in search of groceries. The Apple Lady, just then packing her wares into her double shopping cart with only three good wheels, stopped us with an offering of free fruit in full knowledge of our food-stamped life, and insisted we take it. My son had just heard a fairytale in which apples played a big part, but instead of a screech and the word poison out loud, he acted enchanted in the best sense, saying thank you unprompted. Was he actually hungry? No. He held the apple up to her so shyly, and called her princess.
The smile on the Apple Lady was nearly worth the trouble with the dog that had forced us down the four flights of stairs with the stroller. She said you can have an apple any time, and trundled away with a light step for someone so crouched over, heaving her shopping cart’s unsold produce behind her. We turned toward the tiny store on the corner of Thompson and Prince. We frequented it because the dog tied to the newsstand could be seen from the inside, and they didn’t ask that I fold the stroller and carry it with my son and the shopping basket all at once down its narrow aisles. The store’s only drawback was its priciness, but that was overcome by being only four blocks away—and surely it had grapes, said my son. He had definite culinary prejudices, none of which had matched a replacement dinner of a nice cheese sandwich with pickle and mayo and mustard—the dog hated pickles—that I proposed, no, I purchased, despite his protests. The dog, still looking sated, wagged his tail at the sight of us approaching checkout, but stopped at the sight of the poet.
He’d grinned himself into our lives as the inhabitant of the floor below us and insisted on quoting his work on the stairs whenever we met, my son, the dog, the stroller, and whatever parcel our errand had me hauling up together. He had wine to pick up now, he informed us, and perhaps me, his grin said without saying. Well-groomed for a poet, his white button-down shirt had one arm reaching for a top shelf of bottles, which blocked us from exit, the other wandering toward my waist. He’d used similar tactics on the stairs that gave him ample time for a full performance, and his repertoire was prodigious. Mercifully short when appearing on paper, his work had been published in big magazines, the biggest. I was a mere peon poet, although now and then lucky. Did I tell him I too had put pen to paper? That would be asking for more. But I always listened to him, my son less often, the dog never. Clutching his new bottle of wine and perhaps filled with the contents of another, he now launched into another impromptu recitation. Those in the store and the owner could not help but hear. Could the poem, ending “the last word is mine,” with all its seriousness and assonance have been selected just for me, indeed, even composed for me on the spot? The dog’s ears pricked up outside. Thank you, I said and my son clapped, fine-attuned to all performance, bowel or otherwise.
Before we could organize ourselves to leave, the poet found himself a quarter short for his purchase and looked to me meaningfully. I obliged, given that his back would be turned during the sacking long enough for our escape.
I pushed the stroller fast to the closest park to give the poet time to climb the stairs to the top of the building without us. We were a large group to hide, my son and dog and stroller and I, and we had to settle for a shadow behind the Girl’s Bathroom where the pigeons paraded. There we ate the apple the Apple Lady had gifted us, the dog barely able to find room in his previous gluttony for the core. We talked about all the creatures that preferred this shadow, as evidenced by their poop that my son pointed to, with enthusiasm. I asked exactly how many of those cuddly elephant-sized clouds above us could be tucked into the stroller rack with the groceries? The dog woofed twice, giving us the happy eye because he was so full and still out and not inside, anything but that, and he’d spotted the neighborhood cat coming to claw him.
We fled the shadows. The diehard second graders were pumping on their swings in the playground, and their mothers, known by sight but no more, were saying it was time to go and aren’t you tired? The kids jumped off the swings and stumbled, almost skinning their faces, yelling No, no way. My son noted every word, and cheered their resistance. That’s when I decided it was time to climb back up to our apartment with the wrapped sandwich and son in one arm, the dog’s leash in hand, and the folded stroller under the armpit. While we rested on the third landing, admiring the dark that made the dirty hall window look friendlier but whispering, given that the poet’s apartment was but three steps away, a neighbor at the very top, hearing the dog straining at his leash with a gargled bark, shouted down that she had wiener schnitzel she had to get rid of, did we want it?
We wanted it.
This time, after I placed the second plate, my own, on the table, and my son made his request for the bathroom once again, I caught his sly look to the dog, and clipped on its leash. We all went together.
Mini-interview with Terese Svoboda
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
TS: The magic of the IBM Selectric, its whirling ball looking for letters.
HFR: What are you reading?
TS: Karla Kelsey’s new wonderful Transcendental Factory: for Mina Loy, a heady blend of Kelsey-plus-Loy-biography. A curious assemblage.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “In Chaoots”?
TS: A sly new dog. A missing sandwich. Samuel Menashe.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
TS: A novel about captagon in the Middle East and a fairytale about geese in the Little Ice Age.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
TS: Climate is all.
Terese Svoboda’s eighth novel and first speculative—Roxy and Coco—and her third collection, The Long Swim, winner of the Juniper Prize, was published this year and received a full page review in the NYTBR. Her second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, will be published next year by OR Books.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 