Why Can’t This Be Love?
/By Jennifer McGaha
Pisgah Forest, North Carolina
It was 1985, and I was living in a single dorm room in a complex dubbed “The Village” at UNC-Asheville. The only other person on my floor was a divorced woman in her 30s. We did not have much in common and she was friendly enough, but I was lonely. I wore blue mascara and a puffy perm, but they couldn’t mask how lonesome I felt as I transitioned to life away from home. So, the first pets I got as an adult, if one can consider a college freshman an adult, were two mice I named after Eddie Van Halen and his wife, Valerie Bertinelli. I would have preferred a dog, but pets were strictly forbidden in the dorms. I figured a couple of mice would be less obvious than, say, a golden retriever.
The Van Halens were ideal roommates: quiet, demure, agreeable. Eddie was chubby, gray-haired, and distinguished, while Valerie was a squiggle-nosed, white-haired beauty. I kept them on the desk by my bed. As I studied, they nibbled the newspaper clippings lining their cage. When I went home to my parents on weekends, I carted them with me. Under ordinary circumstances, my mother would have forbidden the mice entirely, but I was having a hard time adjusting to college, and it was clear to us both they were helping to ease my transition. So, the mice stayed downstairs on my father’s workbench in the basement.
I did not anticipate Eddie and Valerie would naturally develop an affection. Valerie soon ended up in the family way. Later that winter, she gave birth to 12 pencil erasers: furless, spongy masses who scrambled blindly around in search of their mother’s nipples.
By then, I was friends with my upstairs neighbors, the entire girls' basketball team, plus a gray-haired, hacky-sack-playing hippy named Coolie, who always happened to be around. Coolie, the basketball girls, and I watched in fascination as the baby mice nursed, began to crawl, and grew fur in all different patterns and colors of gray, tan, brown, and white.
In retrospect, I can see that I was lonely, needy, unsure of who I was or who I wanted to be. I needed something to love and nurture, something of my own. The baby mice proved to be good company. I learned to distinguish one mouse from the other, and I named them all, like the laying hens I would get years later. On Saturday mornings, after a rousing night of tequila shots at a bar on Charlotte Street, I sat on my bed and pulled the babies, one by one, from their cage. Their tiny bodies warmed my palms and distracted me from my nausea and regret.
Then one day, over break, when I was staying with my parents, I went down to the basement to check on the happy family. I flicked on the light to check on the cage that sat on the corner of my dad’s work bench. Just past the old Planters Peanuts cans that held, screws, nails, nuts, and bolts. The light was dim, so I thought Eddie and Valerie were sitting in front of the babies. Then I noticed Valerie looked strange. She was swollen, especially around the middle. That’s when I realized what had happened to her offspring.
“You didn’t,” I said to her.
But the lumps in her belly were conclusive evidence she had. I would like to say that she looked guilty, perhaps a bit nauseated, but, the truth was, she had that glassy, satisfied look of someone who had just finished an exquisite, twelve course meal.
“Jesus,” I said, turning away.
I had loved each baby mouse, as much as one can love a mouse, which, for me, at this moment in my life, was more than one might think. I was too disgusted to be tearful, too shocked, both at the circumstances and at my own lack of foresight. A couple of days later, I found Valerie dead in her cage, which I both grieved and took as a sort of divine punishment for filial cannibalism. After the tragedies, Eddie was allowed to roam free in my dorm room. He spent a few mournful days strolling along my desk, sniffing the windowsill, depositing mouse pellets wherever he pleased. And then he’d had enough. A few days after Valerie’s untimely demise, he “just jumped,” like the Van Halen song, off the radiator and hit the concrete floor. Splat.
“It was suicide,” I told the basketball girls and Coolie.
“That’s rough,” Coolie said, lighting up a joint. We were at a party at the complex next door. Even though it was February, he was barefoot with a Grateful Dead T-shirt, cut-off jean shorts, and my suite-mate draped over one arm.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m thinking of getting a dog.”
Two years later, I was still in college, many months pregnant and living in a small, clapboard rental house above the River District in Asheville, in a relationship doomed to fail. My brand-new, 21-year-old husband and I found a dog standing in the road near campus. With black and white patches and large, brown eyes, she looked just like the children’s book character, Harry the Dirty Dog. She cowered in the road as cars swerved around her. We waited for a break in the traffic and called her. Tail down, long ears flopping, she ran toward us. She had no collar or tags. When she followed us back to our car, we took that as a sign she should be ours. We named her Aggie, short for Agatha. Aggie was sweet, demure, gentle, and I loved her immensely for the brief time I had her, which was slightly longer than I had the husband.
Shortly after my daughter was born, I moved back in with my parents. Though my parents were willing to take in my baby and me, they already had one dog, and they had no intention of harboring another. So a few weeks after my baby and I settled in, Aggie went to live on a farm across town. As the farmer shook my father’s hand and loaded Aggie into his pick-up truck, I sobbed mightily. I knew that my sadness was complicated, tinged with the sorrow of the other, more tangled leaving. Still, something in me had shifted.
I was a mother now, done with childhood, done with men who weren’t worth my time and pets that devoured their offspring. Eddie and Valerie had rocked my world, but Aggie had split it clean open. As soon as I could get through the eighties, I was going to grow out my perm, ditch the blue mascara, move into my own place, and find myself a pack of wayward dogs to love.