Topography

The following was written by Lydia Cruz for a writing class at Sarah Lawrence College.  The assignment was to write a profile on a person. Lydia chose to make it about our dog, Lennie.

He is sitting on the Salvation Army glider in the front porch, looking out through the storm windows onto an empty neighborhood street. He looks small sitting there, his legs seeming too short for his body. I tell him once I knew a man who could sit on the floor, straightbacked, legs fully extended, and touch his toes. He looks at me, but doesn’t say anything.
His name is Lennie, after Detective Lennie Briscoe, Jerry Orbach’s character on Law and Order. For a while he wore a little police badge pendent with his name engraved on the back around his neck. After a few years the name had worn down until it wasn’t much more than a shadow. He stopped wearing it then, because it was always more about the name than the badge.
He sneezes and a cloud of sneeze floats like fairy dust in the sunlight. He shakes his head and looks at me. He is a mouth breather, his lips always slightly parted, barrel chest rising and falling with staccato breaths. I look back at him and smile.
He never leaves the house alone. During the day, while everyone else is at work or in class, he stays home, the doors locked and Gregorian chants playing on the radio. He likes to sit on the stairs and watch people walk by, as long as they don’t come near the house. There’s the postwoman, always talking to someone on the phone stuck in her ear, the schoolchildren in their white polos and khaki pants and skirts, the elderly women walking their Pomeranians. Gangbangers roll by in their Ford F-150s and low riding Chevy Caprices, barely slowing at the four way stop by the rosebush—which he claims as his own—at the tip of the house’s corner lot. The zacateca man pushes his cart up one side of the house to the stop sign, turns right and continues on, walking slowly and ringing his bell. The bell drives him nuts.
His head snaps to the right, startles me, and I drop my pen. His eyes are wide and espresso brown, staring down the street at someone mowing their lawn. He has an underbite and sometimes, like now, his bottom teeth peek through his lips, tiny piano ivories.
They tell him he has anxiety problems. He sits in the shower during thunderstorms and fireworks, his hair slowly matting under the drip drip drip of the cracked showerhead. He thinks it sounds like the world is ripping apart.
They tell him he’s colorblind, but he can’t tell them whether or not they’re right. He supposes they must be because he can’t understand why they all hate the orange living room walls, but love the green ones in the kitchen.
They tell him his Russian counterpart is Leonid Brishnikof and his song is the theme from The Hunt for Red October.
They tell him he has expressive eyebrows.
They tell him they love him.
He often leaves his chair to make sure everything is in its proper place inside, toys, people, rooms. I let him come and go as he pleases, watching him when he’s sitting across from me, reading the book I brought when he’s not.
When he was little, he had an infection in his right ear that caused the outer cartilage to fill with fluid and puff up like a pillow. They called it hematoma and drained the blood with three syringes. It never filled back up, like they said it might, but scar tissue had already begun to form and his ear would always have a peculiar topography.
He is biting his nails, something he only does when they get too long. He can never get them down to the pink, can only chip away at them until they’re short enough to be innocuous. There have been times when I have walked through the living room, barefoot on the cropped shag carpet, and stepped on something sharp like a roadtack, but that was thick and white and jagged like a tooth.
He will not eat raw spinach or grapes or Skittles, but loves apples, turkey, and Sour Patch Kids. He drinks only water. When he drinks he drinks quickly and water trickles down his furry chin, dripping onto the floor.
There is some commotion outside—the zacatecca man is yelling after a Caprice—and he runs to the door, pressing his nose against the glass. His heavy breath fogs the window until neither of us can see and he sweeps his head from side to side, drawing nosetipped lines in the mist.
He wears a purple 80s fleece in the winter that velcros shut and has little squiggles of red and yellow on the collar. Chunks of snow hang on the jacket and his hair like pressed ornaments when he dives into drifts and they tell him he looks like an ewok.
He has disappeared into the kitchen and I call his name because I would like to sit with him for a while. I know he can hear me—he has always had especially acute hearing—and I know he is ignoring me. I call again, knowing he will not come unless I go into the kitchen and get him.
He loves to run, though has never been able to run much more than two miles. He has climbed Medicine Bow Peak, though—12, 014 ft elevation with a 1500 ft elevation gain. The exercise helps clear his head and keeps him from going stir crazy in the house. He always runs with someone else, side by side, the other person often on a bike so they can keep up. He runs until he cannot run any more and, as soon as they return to the house, collapses on the coolness of the tiled kitchen floor.