The Blurred Lines of Work/Life and Beagle That Binds Them
Published in Little Patuxent Review
MARY BETH STULLER
The Blurred Lines of Work/Life and the Beagle That Binds Them
For my students at Hereford High School
A tiny ceramic beagle stands on my desk, beside the laptop screen, and looks at me as I look at you, framed in your bedroom squares. It measures two inches, nose to tail, and its glossy coat reflects the window light. A whimsical thing for a woman to have, it’s a gift from my grandmother, long dead now. We called her Dooda, a name my sister babbled, and it stuck.
Dooda lived in Ventnor City, a coastal town in South Jersey. Its streets, in grids that connect it to Atlantic City to the north and Margate and Longport to the south, are the same streets that populate a Monopoly board. From her house, I crossed Ventnor and Atlantic avenues to get to the beach.
My family never went on vacations; we’d go visit Dooda— two blocks from the ocean. This was before Airbnbs, and weekly rentals were not allowed there. Dooda looked down at renters who booked houses for summer. Each year she complained,“Another family from Philadelphia to use our beach and leave . . .” Ventnor was a residential town, and that’s how she liked it. Envious of my friends who vacationed in tourist-tacky Ocean City, Maryland, where aqua- hued motels lined Coastal Highway, I spent late afternoons riding my aunt’s old bike down the edged sidewalks of Ventnor, past blue hydrangeas that anchored porch fronts.
Sometimes my parents would take me, their youngest, to Ocean City, New Jersey, where the boardwalk featured amusement rides and junk shops. The nighttime trek over the Longport/Ocean City Bridge revealed a kaleidoscope of colored lights, their reflection on the water doubly enticing. There’s a scene in The Great Gatsby when Jay drives Nick Carraway in the yellow coupe from Long Island to Manhattan. Nick says, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world.” That’s how I felt as a kid in the backseat of my dad’s Toyota, watching the lights full of promise, the electric beauty of childhood.
On at least one trip I must’ve cried over a disappointment. A dropped cone? An overthrown ring-toss? But mostly, I remember riding the Tilt-a-Whirl with my dad. The two of us.The centrifugal force pulling us together. In a family with seven kids, alone time with Dad was a big deal. He’s dead now, too.
After the Tilt-a-Whirl, we strolled the boards, and this is where Dooda bought me my little beagle in a shop full of knick- knacks and decaled souvenirs. A menagerie of animals stood silent on shelves, their feet secured to manila-colored squares, a price scrawled in the corner.
In the olden days, when people shopped used bookstores and leafed through musty pages grabbed from dusty shelves, they’d handle the tomes with germy fingers and breathe the stale air in cramped aisles, content to slip in and out of novels, histories, art. Some customers leaned on tables stacked with merchandise; others squatted before low shelves; the nimble and committed sat cross-legged on the floor. And inside the cover of each book was written the cost in a sure but hurried hand. That’s how the price appeared on this beagle’s placard—a large two—and then fifty a bit smaller, underscored with a lead stripe.
Dooda bought me this token to remember my visit and because I loved beagles. I longed for a dog but was denied any pet. It was the ’70s and, with nine mouths to feed, my parents had no money for nonhumans. The instant Carnation milk—its powder clumped in my glass—was proof enough.
Beagles were adorable, with big eyes and long, perky ears, and unlike a lab they were smaller than me when they jumped in greeting. A neighbor’s grown son owned one. Whenever the son came to visit, I entertained the dog. We played fetch and tug of war, and when the dog tired I sat in the grass and pet her suede-soft ears. I vowed when I grew up, I’d get a beagle of my own.
The day my husband and I settled on our first home, we drove to the breeder and picked up the beagle puppy who’d been waiting for us. We named her Dempsey, and she loved our attention. Every night my husband lobbed balls for her, and I’d rub her tummy when she reclined in my lap. After our son was born, she’d sit beside his carrier or, later, his high chair and lick the sticky fingers he willingly put in her mouth. She even let him rest his head on her side as they lounged in a panel of sunlight.
But when we left the house, Dempsey rebelled. She’d chew up toys and mess the floor. We took her out constantly, afraid of more accidents, and she’d tug the leash till it hurt—as if all she wanted was freedom. A couple times when my husband clipped her nails, she bared her teeth. We wondered what might provoke her to bite. A toddler’s tug of a tail? Once our daughter arrived, Dempsey’s behavior got worse.
One day, as I played on the floor with the children, Dempsey up and died. She convulsed, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, then nothing.
When my husband came home, I told him, “Dempsey’s dead.”
“Why? What’d she do this time?”
“No, I mean she’s not alive anymore.” He beamed.
Funny how dreams play out.
And still I have this beagle from Dooda that traveled from house to house. I found it in a tiny box when I reorganized my home office for the new school year. A lot of people have home offices, but I waited decades to get what Virginia Woolf called “a room of one’s own.”
As a kid I shared a room with two sisters. Once they moved out, my private space morphed into a hamper, a place to dump clothes as I hustled from school to practice to work. College, marriage, and babies soon occupied my life and left little time for sleep, let alone privacy.
Once the nest emptied—twenty-some years later—I created a room full of pictures and posters, cards and mementos, books shelved and stacked, and it’s meant to be my place to write and read and contemplate.
But now, crammed in the space, stands a stout bookcase packed with binders from school, their spines labeled with units: Hamlet, Jane Eyre, College Application Essays. It had taken me years to learn to leave work at school, that papers lugged home and plopped on the mudroom bench would get lugged back ungraded. The guilt of those papers ruined my nights from September to June. Finally, with no kids to shuttle to practice or rehearsals, I stayed at school—as long as I could bear, longer than some of you stayed for sports practice— and came home unburdened. The evening became mine to write.
Since home is now my workplace, the diptych I created of a work/life balance has smudged. “The colours have run,” as Woolf would say.
And my desk—once my writing sanctuary—is now my classroom, cluttered with lesson plans and Post-it notes—even a second computer. And Dooda’s beagle. A gift I’d never have told you about—never written about—in a nonpandemic world.
LITTLE PATUXENT REVIEW