T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

“Those jeans,” Gretchen said, narrowing her eyes. “Are they new?”

The dog squirming, squirming. “I, well — I’m going to set him down a minute, okay?”

“Of course, of course. Do what you do, what you normally do.”

An impatient wave. “Or what you used to do, I mean.”

They both watched as the pup fell back on its haunches, rolled briefly in the grass and sprang up to clutch Nisha’s right leg in a clumsy embrace. “I just couldn’t find any of my old jeans — my mother probably threw them all out long ago. Plus”—a laugh—“I don’t think I could fit into them anymore.” She gave Gretchen a moment to ruminate on the deeper implications here — time passing, adolescents grown into womanhood, flesh expanding, that sort of thing — then gently pushed the dog down and murmured, “But I am wearing — right here, under the jacket? — this T-shirt I know I used to wear back then.”

Nothing. Gretchen just stood there, looking distracted.

“It’s been washed, of course, and sitting in the back of the top drawer of my dresser where my mother left it, so I don’t know if there’ll be any scent or anything, but I’m sure I used to wear it because Tupac really used to drive my engine back then, if you know what I mean.” She gave it a beat. “But hey, we were all fourteen once, huh?”

Gretchen made no sign that she’d heard her — either that or she denied the proposition outright. “You’re going to be all right with this, aren’t you?” she said, looking her in the eye. “Is there anything we didn’t cover?”

The afternoon before, during her interview — but it wasn’t really an interview because the Strikers had already made up their minds and if she’d refused them they would have kept raising the hourly till she capitulated — the two of them, Gretchen and Cliff, had positioned themselves on either side of her and leaned into the bar over caramel-colored scotches and a platter of ebi and maguro sushi to explain the situation. Just so that she was clear on it. “You know what cloning is, right?” Gretchen said. “Or what it involves? You remember Dolly?”

Nisha was holding fast to her drink, her left elbow pressed to the brass rail of the bar in the family room. She’d just reached out her twinned chopsticks for a second piece of the shrimp, but withdrew her hand. “You mean the country singer?”

“The sheep,” the husband said.

“The first cloned mammal,” Gretchen put in. “Or larger mammal.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Sure. I guess.”

What followed was a short course in genetics and the method of somatic cell nuclear transplant that had given the world Dolly, various replicated cattle, pigs and hamsters, and now Admiral II, the first cloned dog made available commercially through SalvaPet, Inc., the genetic engineering firm with offices in Seoul, San Juan and Cleveland. Gretchen’s voice constricted as she described how they’d taken a cell from the lining of Admiral’s ear just after the accident and inserted it into a donor egg, which had had its nucleus removed, stimulated the cell to divide through the application of an electric current, and then inserted the developing embryo into the uterus of a host mother—“The sweetest golden retriever you ever saw. What was her name, Cliff? Some flower, wasn’t it?”

“Peony.”

“Peony? Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I thought it was — oh, I don’t know. You sure it wasn’t Iris?”

“The point is,” he said, setting his glass down and leveling his gaze on Nisha, “you can get a genetic copy of the animal, a kind of three-dimensional Xerox, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be like the one you, well, the one you lost.”

“It was so sad,” Gretchen said.

“It’s nurture that counts. You’ve got to reproduce the animal’s experiences, as nearly as possible.” He gave a shrug, reached for the bottle. “You want another?” he asked, and she held out her glass. “Of course we’re both older now — and so are you, we realize that — but we want to come as close as possible to replicating the exact conditions that made Admiral what he was, right down to the toys we gave him, the food, the schedule of walks and play and all the rest. Which is where you come in—”

“We need a commitment here, Nisha,” Gretchen breathed, leaning in so close Nisha could smell the scotch coming back at her.

“Four years. That’s how long you were with him last time. Or with Admiral, I mean. The original Admiral.”

The focus of all this deliberation had fallen asleep in Gretchen’s lap. A single probing finger of sunlight stabbed through the window to illuminate the pale fluff over the dog’s eyes. At that moment, in that light, little Admiral looked like some strange conjunction of ostrich and ape. Nisha couldn’t help thinking of The Island of Dr.

Moreau, the cheesy version with Marlon Brando looking as if he’d been genetically manipulated himself, and she would have grinned a private grin, fueled by the scotch and the thundering absurdity of the moment, but she had to hide everything she thought or felt behind a mask of impassivity. She wasn’t committing to anything for four years — four years? If she was still living here in this craphole of a town four years from now she promised herself she’d go out and buy a gun and eliminate all her problems with a single, very personal squeeze of the trigger.

That was what she was thinking when Gretchen said, “We’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour,” and the husband said, “With health care — and dental,” and they both stared at her so fiercely she had to look down into her glass before she found her voice. “Twenty-five,”

she said.

And oh, how they loved that dog, because they never hesitated.

“Twenty-five it is,” the husband said, and Gretchen, a closer’s smile blooming on her face, produced a contract from the folder at her elbow, “fust sign here,” she said.

After Gretchen had climbed into her car and the car had slid through the gate and vanished down the street, Nisha sprawled out on the grass and lifted her face to the sun. She was feeling the bliss of deja vu — or no, not deja vu, but a virtual return to the past, when life was just a construct and there was nothing she couldn’t have done or been and nothing beyond the thought of clothes and boys and the occasional term paper to hamper her. Here she was, gone back in time, lying on the grass at quarter of eight in the morning on a sunstruck June day, playing with a puppy while everybody else was going to work — it was hilarious, that’s what it was. Like something you’d read about in the paper — a behest from some crazed millionaire. Or in this case, two crazed millionaires. She felt so good she let out a laugh, even as the pup came charging across the lawn to slam headfirst into her, all feet and pink panting tongue, and he was Admiral all right, Admiral in the flesh, born and made and resurrected for the mere little pittance of a quarter million dollars.

For a long while she wrestled with him, flipping him over on his back each time he charged, scratching his belly and baby-talking him, enjoying the novelty of it, but by quarter past eight she was bored and she pushed herself up to go on into the house and find something to eat. Do what you used to do, Gretchen had told her, but what she used to do, summers especially, was nap and read and watch TV and sneak her friends in to tip a bottle of the husband’s forty-year-old scotch to their adolescent lips and make faces at one another before descending into giggles. Twice a day she’d take the dog to the doggie park and watch him squat and crap and run wild with the other mutts till his muzzle was streaked with drool and he dodged at her feet to snatch up mouthfuls of the Evian the Strikers insisted he drink. Now, though, she just wanted to feel the weight of the past a bit, and she went in the back door, the dog at her heels, thinking to make herself a sandwich — the Strikers always had cold cuts in the fridge, mounds of pastrami, capicolla, smoked turkey and Swiss, individual slices of which went to Admiral each time he did his business outside where he was supposed to or barked in the right cadence or just stuck his goofy head in the door. She could already see the sandwich she was going to make — a whole deli’s worth of meat and cheese piled up on Jewish rye; they always had Jewish rye — and she was halfway to the refrigerator before she remembered the maid.