“Ball” by Tara Ison, recommended by Rick Moody
AN INTRODUCTION BY RICK MOODY
The best thing, really, is when your students are sort of better than you are. Often, and this can be a relief, it takes them a while to be better than you are, but when it does happen, there’s a soaring feeling that you get from it. And so: Tara Ison was my student in the low residency writing program at Bennington College, and she was in a very memorable period for me there, in which virtually every one of my students went on to publish remarkable work. Tara was then, and is now, a cool cat: not show-offy, but patient, warm, funny, and supremely gifted. She was a great pleasure to have in class because she was spot-on, but not aggressive or ungraceful about it. She used her powers for good. I think she published a novel around the time she got to Bennington, and so she was already launched and didn’t need my help much. “Ball” was actually a story I read in that workshop, but my feeling is that she has improved it since then, because while it was really great in those days, it is now astoundingly good.
“Ball,” as you are about to find out, is a truly outrageous story about contemporary relationships, sex, and dog ownership. It is about the way these things are very similar. And it is not breezy and light about sex and dog ownership, it is honest and tragicomic and astringent and provocative. There’s only one other literary dog vulva that is as good as the one described in the opening of “Ball,” namely in J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, and Ison’s literary dog vulva gives Ackerley a run for his money. Ison’s opening is an opening, as it were, and nothing could be more satisfying. The rest is great, too, after the opening, the grim unromantic coupling of adults who long for love, but are not necessarily prepared for its demands, unless, perhaps, the love comes from a dog instead. Read on! Tara Ison, for all her modesty and stealth, is a real voice for our times, and what she has to say is, e.g., that nothing is sacred, and desperation doesn’t have to be melodramatic, and that le mot juste is still the only acceptable approach. You will not forget having read this one.
Rick Moody
Author of Hotels of North America
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Recommended by Rick Moody
My sweet little dog, Tess, is what they call “apricot.” She has tiny blue eyes, almond-shaped and set close together like Barbra Streisand’s, and the prettiest little dog vagina. I spent twenty minutes examining and marveling at it once with my best friend, Dayna, before she had a boyfriend and we spent a lot of our time together appreciating Tess. Dayna is a biologist, which gave the experience a legitimizingly clinical spirit. It’s a tidy, quarter-inch slit in a pinky-tip protuberance of skin, delicate and irrelevant and veiled with fine, apricot hair. Tess rolled over and spread out happily, trustingly, for us; she lives almost pathetically for love, for attention, like a quivering heroine from some fifties romance novel. She also lives for food and naps, but mostly for Ball. Tennis balls, squishy rubber ones with bells inside, any spherical object to love will do. I’ve learned hard rubber balls are the best—the last time she had a flimsy plastic one she worked it down to bits, chewed it with such passion there was almost nothing left.
She came with a ball. I’d been living alone in my big new house with a fireplace for six days, came home on a Thursday evening to the still-lingering smell of paint and spackle and fresh-sliced carpet fibers and realized I can have a dog here. Apartment living hadn’t allowed for that, but now I had my own house with a fireplace and a small fiberglass jacuzzi in a small chlorine-scented backyard, all to myself. I was only twenty-five and very proud of having my own house. I walked around and around, and my heels clacked resoundingly on the hardwood floors. Dayna had mentioned maybe coming over, but we’d hung out together the last five nights out of six, she was in a needy, boyfriend-less phase, and her presence was becoming a cloying and oppressive force. She hated sleeping alone—she’s always scared of an earthquake, a fire combusting out of nowhere, a serial-killer-rapist-burglar breaking in—but I wanted my big, new house all to myself, and a dog, and a fire in the fireplace. I went right back out and bought a newspaper and called the first ad for a cockapoo: eleven mos, shots, fxd, hsbrkn, plyful. A cockapoo, to me, meant the large dark eyes of a baby harp seal and a silky spaniel coat, a body thick-limbed but compact and floppy. The true, Platonic image of a cockapoo. I drove to an apartment complex in Northridge. The dog was hideous, at first sight, more blurred, cross-bred terrier and toy poodle than anything else, with skinny, crooked legs that needed to be broken and reset, and those creepy blue eyes. A brown nose, faded like over-creamed coffee. And she was covered with fleas, little dark leaping specks visible through her beige fur. I made polite chat with the owner, a heavy sixtyish black woman named Gloria—That isn’t beige, dear, they call that color “apricot” on a poodle—who couldn’t be bothered with the dog anymore, and then told her that Yes, I knew the ad said she’d be eleven months, but I really did want a puppy. The dog dropped a soiled, shreddy, lime-colored tennis ball in front of me and looked up, her tiny eyes squinting with hope and expectation: You want to play with my ball? Here, look, here’s a ball! You want to play? Please, please! When I ignored her she pounced on the ball with her skinny front legs, her paws shoving it toward me—Ball! Ball! Ball!—until I gave in and threw it for her. But when I got up to leave, I suddenly realized that if I didn’t take her, it meant I would have to keep interviewing dogs. This seemed like an exhausting prospect: continuing to call deceptive ads, inquire about worms, meet imperfect dogs, choose. Also, it meant that I would be going home that night to my big house alone. I told Gloria I would take the dog, figuring that if it didn’t work out I would just get rid of it somehow. I wrote Gloria a check for seventy-five dollars—the cost of getting the dog fixed at five months, and the shots—and she gave me a leash, a quarter of a bag of Puppy Chow, and the dog. At the last moment, Gloria put the soiled tennis ball in the Puppy Chow bag, like a parting gift. The dog’s gotta have that ball, she said, or any kind of ball, you’ll see. I stopped at the drugstore on the way home with the dog, to buy flea shampoo and dog treats, and I dumped the dirty, lime-hairy ball in a dumpster. Through the window of the car the dog watched me do this, anxious, her squinty little eyes made wide and round by alarm.
At home she suffered submissively, mournfully, through the kitchen-sink flea bath and a towel-drying in front of a fire in the fireplace, then curled up tight as a snail shell at the foot of my bed, looking orphaned and weepy. She wouldn’t touch the doggy rag tug thing I’d bought, nor the faux-bone treats, nor the plastic squeaky toy shaped like a garish hamburger with the works. I went to bed wondering how to unload an ugly and sentient animal. Several hours later I heard a light thud sound, then a thump-roll, thump-roll, and I looked across my room to see the little dog trotting happily toward the bed with a Granny Smith apple in her mouth. She jumped up on the bed with it, dropped it, peered up squintily with hope and expectation, and shoved it toward me with her crooked apricot paws. I knew I’d bought apples during the week, but how she’d found one I had no idea—some desperate, biologically driven search for Ball. I threw the apple across the room for her for a while, and each time she brought it back to me, thrilled, suffused with intimate joy at our connection. She finally tired, snail-curled on the empty pillow next to me, and went to sleep. When I awoke in the morning her brown nose was breathing in my face and her almond-shaped blue eyes blinked at me with drowsy adoration, and I was abruptly slapped swollen with love. I went out first thing and bought her a real ball, periwinkle blue, hard rubber, just the right size and with a solid, stable bounce.
Now it isn’t just my echoing footsteps in the house, it’s her happy, scratchy nail-scrambles, the thud and roll of a ball that I hear.
I loved her so much it was numbing, and sometimes, to jab a feeling at myself, I fantasized about her dying. Getting hit by a car, drinking from a contaminated puddle of water when we went on walks (how my accountant Sue’s dog died), or succumbing to an attack of bloat (some disease my friend Lesley’s dog almost died of, when the intestines bunch up out of nowhere). Or I would whet the fantasy by imagining that I had to sacrifice her for some reason. Put her out of some misery. I’d have her dying of encroaching cancers, where I forced myself to give her a mercifully quick and lethal shot of morphine because keeping her alive and in pain would only fulfill my own selfish needs. This usually made me cry, and once, picturing that and crying, I called Dayna and made her promise me if Tess ever did get sick she’d get drugs and a syringe from the lab, and we’d take care of it so Tess would never suffer. Or I’d think about an epic disaster, a nuclear bomb or a 9-point earthquake that somehow destroyed all the food and left me with nothing but Tess, and would I be willing to starve to death instead of eat her. How bad something would have to get to force me to do such a thing. I wondered what Tess would taste like. I imagined her flesh was tender and sweet. Her paw pads were the color of cracked, grayish charcoal and smelled of burned popcorn. When she yawned I poked my nose into the gap of her jaw and inhaled. I ran my hands over the wiry pubic-like hairs at the base of her spine, the fine, clumped curls at her throat. She let her head fall all the way back when I did this, so trusting, her throat stretched to a soft, defenseless, apricot sweep. I just wanted to crawl inside of her sometimes, or have her crawl inside of me, keep her safe there forever.
