Dog Days

9 Apr 2010

Jocelyn Meermans

I had heard the term “hillbilly” when I was growing up in Cleveland, and though I didn’t understand what it meant, my parents made sure I believed that our family was not. We didn’t have dogs chained in our front yard. We didn’t have stray cats searching for food on our porch. We didn’t have roosters living in our garage. We didn’t have fleas in our house, and we certainly didn’t have shit in our yard. So even though Dad came home with oil under his fingernails and spent weekends under the hood of whatever used car he had in the driveway, they made sure I knew that our family was different. Jackie’s dad was always drunk, Carol’s mom dressed like a tramp, the kids across the street rarely bathed, and all of their houses stunk like dogs.

We lived on 118^th Street in the heart of the Rust Belt, at a time when steel mills were still common in northern Ohio. My parents told everyone it was supposed to be a starter home—somewhere they had planned to stay until my older brother started kindergarten. I was born and added a few years to that equation, and when my sister came along their escape plan was pushed back even more. Then Mom crushed her neck in a car accident when another driver ran a red light, and everything was put on hold. Every year was the year we were “gonna move this summer,” and though I remember things like birthday parties with paper hats and inflatable pools, the things I remember most vividly about that street are the dogs.

“I just don’t think it’s safe to have kids here,” Grandma would say when she came over. “Those dogs could jump the fence.”

“They’re fine,” my mom would say, “and I know how to raise my kids.”

I was never sure which dogs Grandma was talking about, but I knew they weren’t the kinds my cousins had for pets. There were Pit Bulls across the street, a Doberman who had chased me onto our porch and barked viciously as I pinned myself between the screen and the deadbolted front door, banging violently for someone to open the other side. My daily walks to the library, Leader Drugstore, and the playground were mapped with houses to avoid for fear of the dogs whose territory I would be invading. There was a snarly Boxer, the appropriately named Kujo who even Dad wouldn’t cross, and countless mangy strays who prowled the park at the end of the street.

I was afraid of the dogs but didn’t consider the real fears I should have had about why they were there in the first place. Those dogs were tools, not pets, and their job was to protect their owners. They were patrolmen, bodyguards, and prize fighters. And even with my hair in pigtails and my school books on my back, I was a threat. Sometimes they would just chase me as I walked along the edge of their owner’s property, barking wildly and rattling the chain link fences with their menacing claws. Other times, their gates would be carelessly left open. I would turn around hoping they hadn’t seen me, scan the street for trees whose limbs I could climb, garbage cans I could use as weapons, and return home as fast as possible. My heart would thump and all my thoughts would be reduced to a loop replaying in my mind: keep walking, keep walking, keep walking. I was as small as they were big, and no matter how many times I’d walked past before, they treated me like an intruder who’d disregarded the warning “Beware of Dog.”

When I complained, Mom would tell me never to look a dog in the eye—that they could sense fear—and I should stand perfectly still and look straight ahead if I thought they were going to attack. “You shouldn’t let fear control your life,” Mom would say when I told her I didn’t want to play outside. I was conditioned to believe that fear was a weakness, and choosing not to show weaknesses was one of the only things in life a person could control. So for every errand I needed to run, every book I wanted to read, and every swing I wanted to swing on, I pretended at least to show those dogs I was in control. I walked past their fences pretending they were ghosts, that they didn’t exist and weren’t worth caring about. Though I was terrified of our inevitable encounters, I trained myself to project a relaxed coolness in their presence, trying hard to keep my knees from exposing the crippling fear that ran through my body. They were ghosts. They weren’t worth caring about. Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.

It didn’t occur to me until I was older that in the same way I hid my fear from the dogs, my parents hid their fears from me. Just as they had never been quiet about the ways they wanted me to believe our family was better off than we really were, they made no effort to conceal their elation when the summer we were gonna move finally happened. They were right—we must have been better than the other people on 118th Street because we were leaving and they were not. After six years of court dates, Mom’s accident settlement came through in the form of a down payment on a house in the suburbs. There was no picket fence, but there were no chain link fences either.

“Tell people you lived in West Park,” Mom coached me as we wrapped dishes in newspaper and packed boxes with books and toys, “it sounds better than Cleveland.” Though it was still in the city, West Park was a neighborhood of Cleveland whose upper borders rivaled the appearance of middle class suburbs. So even though the lower end was like a different world and stopped just a block away at 117^th Street, we weren’t technically lying. We spent most of July that year making cosmetic repairs in preparation for our August move. When a crack that had been inching across the ceiling began dropping snowflakes of plaster on the rug below, we were warned not to slam doors. “This house needs to look new for someone else,” my parents said. “We just need to get till August.”

That same summer, a stray cat showed up in our yard with its tail missing. “It must have been an accident,” Mom said when I asked what happened. When more strays appeared with oozing, chopped-off stumps in place of phantom limbs and missing appendages, the accident excuse was quickly dropped. It was clearly the handiwork of a violent neighbor, and even at eleven, my parents knew that I wouldn’t be fooled. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” I heard Mom say to her sisters on the phone, Dad when he came home from work, and herself when no one was around. And when she would catch me eavesdropping, she would give me a knowing shrug, ask me to pack a box, and remind me to tell people that we had lived in West Park.