In 1993, the summer after my second-grade year, my mother became a saleswoman for a company selling leashes for children and took me door-to-door as an “illustrative example” of how the product worked. “It’s not a real leash,” she would say, “not like you would put on a dog,” fitting the harness over my body and tightening the straps that looped beneath my armpits and around my waist. “It doesn’t go around the neck, see. That would be a choking hazard.”
She sold mostly to other mothers. They watched our demonstration on their porches or front lawns. Sometimes they invited us into their sitting rooms. We were taken seriously by more people than you might think. It was the era of lost children on the sides of milk cartons. The good people at Life Harness had correctly identified the product for the age. “It lays so softly on the wrist, you won’t know it’s there,” my mother said, “until, of course, your kid tries to run off or, you know…” a sudden, solemn look, “someone tries to take them.” letting that last thought linger like gasoline haze around a dripping pump. We played catch with a rubber ball to display the leash’s surprising length.
Occasionally, one of the houses we visited turned to out to be the home of a classmate of mine. When Mom became an official Life Harness Product Ambassador they provided her with a list of addresses known to “contain children.” Pulling up to the curb in front of one or another home, she would stop the car, half-turn to me in the back seat—doubly restrained by both leash and lap-belt—and ask if I recognized, say, the name Archibald. I would shake my head no. “Well, this is the Archibald residence.”
In fact, I knew the last names of very few of my classmates. Last names were a meaningless currency in second grade. I usually wouldn’t know I was about to see someone familiar until a small face peeped out from behind the adult body swamping the doorway. My mother, who had a great mind for faces, would see the child and say, “Oh, aren’t you in school with my boy?” The classmate would be forced to confirm this terrible fact, the two of us then expected to perform an awkward little greeting ceremony in which each asked how the other was while our mothers looked on approvingly at the fruits of our shared socialization. Sometimes, this familiarity would be enough to get us invited into the living room and asked whether we were hungry or thirsty. Mom would sidle into her sales pitch after a few minutes of small talk, coaxing the conversation from subject to subject, tacking ever closer to her ultimate goal. How often did I watch her navigate from the topic of school to the topic of homework to home life to summer break to needing to get children outside of the home because all they do is break things to finding things to do once one was outside the home to what a tremendously dangerous world we occupy in this “unprecedented era of human cruelty”—inserting, here, the implication that the approach of the twenty-first century aligned with a marked increase in pedophilic activity—to the “deep and profound sense of well-being” one felt knowing that one’s child was physically connected to one’s person via the Life Harness?
According to her, there were two kinds of mothers: Freudian and Lazy. (She never identified with either type.) She could spot a parent’s type, she claimed, within seconds of meeting them. When selling to a Freudian, the product should be described like an umbilical cord. The sense of connectedness. The vibrations felt in the wrist as your child orbited you, the sun to their satellite. If a mother was a Lazy, you talked about how the Life Harness saved you work. “No looking for them. No worrying that they might be making trouble. And if you see them doing anything you don’t like, just tug.” Oddly, no classmate encountered during a pitch that summer ever brought it up at school the following year. It was as though the sight of me, strapped into the product, performing various tasks to display “the surprising amount of freedom available to the child” was so toxically shameful that they wanted no part of even tangential association with it. This was especially the case for those students whose parents became customers. I was only part of the sales team. They would be using it for real.
In mid-August, our work brought us to the home of yet another classmate of mine, a girl I didn’t really know. It was a big house. The mother invited us into the living room—tall ceilings, dark-wood coffee table, black electric scent diffuser heckling us with its lemon verbena hiss—and arranged herself in a chair to watch the pitch. She slyly listened to almost Mom’s full spiel before blindsiding her. Then, out of nowhere, “Are you paid to do this?”
Mom squinted at her, the question illegible, then said, “Um, yes. This is my job.”
The wood of the coffee table matched the bookshelves. The woman’s daughter, nameless in memory, had snuck off to consume a snack with the texture of slate, to judge by the crashing of teeth from the next room. They’d been watching CNN and the TV was still on, the volume turned down. A child killer in El Paso was causing fits for local law enforcement. The ticker tape moved too fast for my reading level.
Blond with a bright blue butterfly clip above her left ear, this woman. She repeated the question: were we being paid?
“I said yes,” said Mom. I considered the carpet’s color. It was a sleek grey, soft, unstained, thin as a summer pelt. The woman asked Mom if she was ashamed. Mom said, “What?”
My classmate came pattering back in to ask for some milk. I was surprised her construction-site mouth could form neat words. The woman told us she’d be right back. She said we shouldn’t go anywhere. We waited there, petrified, arranged as our work had arranged us: Mom holding the leash, facing away from me; I in a half-hunched posture on the opposite end of the room, about to display how quickly the Life Harness allowed a child to be extricated from dangerous situations, a feature we modeled by having Mom turn her back and me leaning over and saying, to a patch of open floor, “Hey, what a cool snake,” sticking out my hand as though to touch it, at which point Mom would spin around, giving the leash a good yank, and I would leap in her direction like an activated magnet. We were frozen like that, anticipating the tug and jump. I wanted to reach out to my mother, who was experiencing some intense iteration of shock, and say, “Hey, let’s just leave.” But I didn’t. I felt oddly removed from the situation. It was a feeling given to me by the Life Harness. The security of its ensnarement instilled a sense of calm. It made an objective observer of me. I was safe, and therefore removed. I should’ve at least tugged the leash. She would’ve understood. But it was slack, and the woman came back, and said, “So, where was I?” like we were an unfinished chore.
She said that it was against the law for a mother to be making her son work like this, using me as a prop in her sales pitch when what I should’ve been doing was attending summer camp or playing with friends. She would have to contact the company producing the Life Harness and inform them, she said. My mother said, “Oh, please don’t. I need this.” She fell to her knees on the soft grey carpet, then stood back up again and put a hand against the wall. “Please.”
The woman repeated that she was sorry, there was nothing else she could do; her hands were tied.
~
I got a puppy for Christmas in 1996, a Labrador/Australian Shepherd mix. Mom explained that she’d gotten him three days before our Savior’s birth and kept him in a box in the pickle room in the basement—the scariest room in the house (with its dirt floor and eroded wall), on the scariest floor of the house: a place I never went—taking him outside only at night after I’d gone to bed. I could not name him. She’d started calling him George and now feared that he identified with it. To change it might unsettle him. I asked if I could give him a last name. “His last name is our last name,” she said. I could give him a middle name, though. I chose Panther, and so his full name was George Panther Quinn. That morning, after eggnog French toast, Mom installed an invisible fence in the yard that would signal to George’s collar when he’d gone too far and administer a shock. The fence consisted of a number of tall rods with bulbous metal heads each inset with a red light.
“So it’s not really invisible?” I said.
“No,” said Mom.
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mom, “but not as much as being hit by a car. You know how people drive around here.”
(As a quick aside, we saw very little traffic. Still, Mom promised that if I ever crossed the street without looking both ways, a car would instantly teleport on top of me, crushing me to death.)
When I took him outside, George curled into me, whining, trying to escape the bright winter light. “He’ll get used to it,” said Mom. She let us play outside for fifteen minutes, which was enough for George. He was very small and the winter was very cold. Through the kitchen window, she heard me calling him Panther. She poked her head out. “George likes going by his first name,” she said.
In 1997, Mom found work as the secretary for a local therapist. She often worked weekends, managing bookings and appointments, leaving George and me alone with the understanding that I carried pepper spray on my keychain and knew the code to the lockbox beneath her bed, in which we kept a loaded handgun for the “more likely than you might think” event of a home invasion. Our house bordered a large patch of woodland crisscrossed with paths connecting various suburban cul-de-sacs—long stems of road ending in heavy round asphalt fruit around which houses clustered like bees. If the weather was nice, I would strip George of his shock collar, give him a normal one with a leash, and take him out walking on the paths. I was eleven by then. If you knew which way to go, you could do a four- or five-mile loop without seeing any houses. Occasionally, we would bump into a family or couple out for a stroll and I would nod to them in greeting and they wouldn’t question the boy wandering without a parent. I would bring a backpack with a few dog treats, a Ziplock bag filled with crackers or Goldfish, and a juice pouch. If Mom had known what I was doing, she would’ve locked me in the pickle room, I’m sure.
George, while not yet at full size, was certainly energetic. He quickly exhausted my thin arms, which often resulted in our walks being shorter than I liked. I pondered this issue for some time, feeling that I could not count on myself becoming stronger. I’d always been “a stick” and nothing about my physical development suggested I would ever be otherwise. One day, struck by a stray bit of inspiration, an impulse, I sought out the Life Harness. I checked the dusty basement shelves where we kept boxes of canned goods. I fought the dresses in Mom’s closet. Finally, I found it under her bed: a contorted black carapace left by some unimaginably large beetle. I strapped it on and tied the end of its leash to George’s. Together we circumambulated the house a few times, testing our new system. Its great advantage was that when George, who always ran ahead, gave me a tug, I could take the force of it with my whole body. Once or twice he caught me mid-stride and in such a way that I almost toppled over, but I quickly learned to brace against him. I could grasp the leash with a hand or release it as I liked. If I wanted to shorten the leash, I could wrap it around my torso, twisting myself up like a ball of yarn. We began taking our walks like this. Each harnessed. Strapped to one another.
The Life Harness, added to the length of George’s leash, allowed him a huge radius of accessible space around me, and he took full advantage of it: leaping over logs, clawing at the earth, investigating strange mushrooms with the tip of his nose. The leash wrapped around trees. It snagged branches, pulled them back, snapping them at me as I sought to follow. Its path would become so convoluted, winding through the woods, that following it felt like completing one of those “trace the thread” puzzles in activity books. Nevertheless, we had fun, and there was no risk of a sudden yank causing George to get free, initiating a frantic chase, one hand reaching for the leash’s trailing end, my panting punctuated by begging, by calling for George, convinced that now, finally, he would run away as my mother once warned he would.
I’m thinking of mid-October. George ran through a thick patch of grass growing along a shallow embankment. He yipped and pranced. I lowered myself onto all fours and chased him, laughing. I scrambled through the forest like that, slapping roots and rusty half-buried rocks. My body bruised its way through damp sheets of fallen leaves—half crawling, half yanked by the animal in front of me. I would giggle until I was hiccupping. I grabbed the leash and reeled it in until George was on top of me, nuzzling with his wet nose and tasting my face with his wide tongue. We were a pack, us two. We went way off the trails, as far afield as that small forest allowed. I barked at squirrels and encouraged George to join me. We encountered a giant wood spider and we both watched it, sitting on our haunches, cringing as it swaggered along a fallen log, its eight long limbs upholstered in spiky crew-cut hair.
We galloped through the forest. I followed him, hips high, feet pendulating.
George stopped. I stopped. I saw him look at something and I followed his look. The shape of a man standing down by a little creek below us, staring up in our direction. I looked back at him and he smiled and waved our way, a big stubbled fellow wearing good hiking boots, crisp jeans, and a collared shirt, tucked in, with the two top buttons undone to show a swirl of chest hair.
“You,” he said, “what are you doing out here?” I was on my hands and knees, above him on the slope.
I stood, searched out my own voice for a moment, said, “Nothing.”
“That’s what you were doing? Nothing? Roaming around on all fours like that?”
He stared at me. I didn’t answer.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Do you come out here all the time?”
I said yes.
“Without your parent with you?”
I said that my parent didn’t mind. I had George with me.
He considered George for a moment, a mid-sized dog sticking his nose into a gap between two tree roots and licking what he found there. “Just a puppy,” said the man.
The man walked to me, walking up the hill. First looking up at me, then eye to eye, then he was above me, looking down.
He picked me up. I could not believe what he was doing. I did not move. Slack, I let him carry me back down the slope. His strong arms locked around me. George, barking, tried to run at us. The man waved him off, yelled, “Get away, dog.” George came at us again. Stiff tail, black peeled-back lips. The man hit him, an open hand hard across the snout. George ran, running until the leash snapped suddenly taut and I jerked in the man’s arms. He swore and dropped me to the ground, face first. A rock punched up into my stomach. He had a hand in the center of my back, pressing. It was hard to take a breath. His other hand wormed beneath me, seeking the clasp at my chest where the Life Harness connected boy and dog. George came back again. He was growling. “Go away,” said the man. He was having trouble. His fumbling fingers could not find the latch, could not comprehend its geography. His pressing and seeking hands worked at cross purposes. Why did he not just flip me over? George made a lame sort of attack and flopped onto the man’s back, yipping. The man swore and knocked him off, standing and turning. I rolled to the side. The leash twined around the man’s ankles. He tried to take a step, to follow me, and fell. He was on the ground. George bit at his face. The man thrashed. His shirt came untucked. A shard of white hip flesh flashed at me. I attacked it with my teeth, gripping and tugging. The man screamed, rolled over. His left arm was pinned by the leash, his own weight holding it down. The man’s nose was in George’s mouth. He kicked like a mermaid, his legs locked together. I grasped a finger of the man’s loose hand with my teeth and bit down hard. I tasted iron. The man was making an incredible noise. His arm knocked me up and back. I lay on the ground for a moment. George and the man were fighting. I fumbled with the Life Harness, unhooked the lead, and ran. George caught up with me when I was halfway home, trailing loose leash, teeth stained red. I had to clean out his mouth with a wet rag so Mom wouldn’t know.
~
I started climbing in college, after being invited by two friends to their gym’s open house. Since the event was catered, they were confident I wouldn’t say no. I’d gotten a reputation as a thrifty sort, always looking for free food. This was 2006. Mom was still a secretary. George had died in 2002, from cancer.
The building’s interior surprised me with its yawning, cathedral quality. The employees were all obviously adept athletes, wearing uniforms in which they could really move. Chalky white handprints added texture to the pizza boxes. I slicked my lips with oily red sauce and slipped into a harness. When the carabiner clicked into place at my hip, I felt a sudden warmth at my core. I was leashed again. It had been eight years since I’d last worn the Life Harness.
I climbed for two hours. The straps hugging my hips and thighs gave me a greater sense of security, even at five stories high, almost to the room’s ribbed, corrugated metal ceiling, than I’d felt standing unmoored on the mats below. My favorite part was coming loose, either by a sudden slip or when I reached the top, when the harness took my weight, grasping hard, almost cutting—a grip equal to gravity.
I purchased a gym membership with the money I made working as an Events Assistant for the college as part of the work-study program. I climbed once a week. I have heard other climbers describe their time in the gym as therapeutic. It was just the same for me. As soon as I strapped myself into the safety harness, I felt a great rush of wellness, which originated in my core and spread to my extremities like a drop of red color causing a whole bath to blush rose. Standing quite still on the floor of the gym, I would close my eyes and allow myself to feel the straps of the harness encircling my thighs, waist, crotch, feel my feet pressing into the mat below, dimpling the fabric, sighing into a moment without personhood.
Every few months, I went climbing with the friends who’d first introduced me to it. They were a sweet couple, pre-med students with long fingers and shallow lines in their palms. They often brought along other friends of theirs, people I did not know. Some were seasoned climbers, some were testing the sport to see if they liked it. They were wonderful ambassadors for the climbing gym. I once joked that they should be getting paid commission for all the memberships they’d had a hand in. Secretly, I wished they’d stop. I wanted to say, “Look, there are only so many routes. Let’s not turn this into a traffic jam.”
One day, they invited a fellow pre-med student with a slippery voice. His ascents were molasses-slow. We climbed the big walls in tandem: first the couple, then the two of us. We started on the easiest wall, giving the new guy a chance with the fundamentals. “Whoa,” he said at the top, “this is quite the view.” We completed it twice before switching to something more substantial. He started asking me about myself as the others went up. We circled around to my Life Harness days via a conversation that moved from our majors to our career goals to what our parents’ careers had been. His father wrote scripts for TV ads. His mom stayed at home. I described my own mother’s professional life as “miscellaneous.” When we got to the part that involved the two of us going door-to-door, he said, “I bet that was embarrassing.” I said it wasn’t so bad. “No parent should do that to their kid,” he said.
When it was our turn on the wall, I climbed faster than the new guy. I was remembering the face he’d made when he’d spoken about my mother. My hands shook slightly, sweating; it was difficult to grip. But I had months and months of practice on my side. I was able to get a lead on him and maintain that gap, watching him over my shoulder until I saw him grasp a particularly flat, sloping hold with his left hand.
I came loose, twisting and launching in his direction. I hit him, knocked him free.
We went spinning through the air. The ropes brought our shoulders slamming back into the wall. My hip clipped a hold, would bruise later. He was screaming—not yelling at me, screaming—his voice high and wild. Why are you so scared? I wondered. Our harnesses had a good grip us. Would not let us fall. Were solid as the earth. Were in love with saving us.
