The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne Read Free Book Online Page A

trudged across the field. “Give me five, Hannah. You were on fire!”
    â€œYou played well, honey,” Margaret told Julia.
    â€œNo, I didn’t,” said Julia. “Did you hear those planes?”
    In the café, after ordering a cup of coffee, Dr. Watkins opened her laptop to read the news online. She subscribed to four newspapers and scrolled now through each of them, clicking first on an article about a Libyan militia attacking a school with rocketpropelled grenades, then on an account of hearings on Afghan war atrocities. In the past hour, the sky to the east had turned a bruised, purplish color above Brooks Street while the sun continued to shine in the west. Behind the glowing red and yellow leaves, the shining telephone poles and chimneys and rooftops, the sullen sky hung like a flat scrim, as if the village were a stage set illuminated by klieg lights.
    Outside the café’s window, beyond the soccer-playing ghosts, a red-faced young father in a plaid flannel shirt held a crying toddler on a bench in front of the Dairy Barn as a thin, dark-haired boy pedaled furiously past on a green bicycle. Several yards away two young girls were texting on their cell phones under a crimson maple tree, both frowning, sunlight patchy on their shoulders.
    As she sat watching this mildly absorbing scene, it came to Dr. Watkins that behind the young father, behind the crying toddler, the texting girls—behind even the boy on the bicycle, that blank-faced boy, with the wind in his face, eyes narrowed, bike chain rattling, brown and orange leaves flying up from the gutters in his wake—behind all of them trailed shadows of previous citizens, previous lengthening, restless autumn Saturday afternoons.
    She opened a new document and began typing:
    For nearly three hundred years this village, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, has remained largely undisturbed by events consuming the rest of the world . . .
    Littlefield had come to her attention one morning six months earlier, when it appeared on a Wall Street Journal list of the Twenty Best Places to Live in America. Each was a small city or large town, most around fifty thousand residents, all boasting “natural beauty” and excellent public schools. “Good quality of life” was the general descriptor, along with “Quiet and safe.”
    As she read through the Wall Street Journal list at breakfast, she reflected that all around the world sociocultural anthropologists like herself were embedded in traumatized places, examining the effects of violence, oppression, need, fear. Why, she wondered, at first idly, then with quickening interest, was no one studying good quality of life?
    Three years ago Dr. Watkins had received high praise, and tenure, for her study of the effects of global destabilization on urban matriarchal structures, based on her fieldwork in Detroit’s inner-city neighborhoods and in the labyrinthine vecindades of Azcapotzalco, in Mexico City. (“A thoughtful new voice,” read a review in American Anthropologist .) But she’d published little since, engulfed by her teaching duties and by her students, who e-mailed her day and night with questions and pleas for extensions, visited her office to complain about their grades, then stayed to talk about demanding parents, drunken boyfriends, suicidal roommates—all of this so distracting that she had not been able to settle on a subject for another book. Recently several faculty members younger than she had published second books, and in one case, a third.
    Littlefield was sixth on the list. Leafy streets, old Victorian houses, fine public schools and a small university, and a pond in the middle of town, with a bathhouse and lifeguards in the summer. Littlefield was also, she discovered, home to roughly one percent of the nation’s psychotherapists.
    How did global destabilization, she wondered, register among what must be the world’s most