Underdog by Marilyn Sachs Page A

waited.
    “Izzy,” she said, smiling as she came through the door of the guest room, “I wanted to ask you if ... ”
    She never asked me. Instead, she froze in place when she saw him. “Oh, my God,” she said, “who is that?”
    “It’s Gus,” I told her. “My dog, Gus.”
    She looked around the clean white guest room, at the white bedspread, at the pigeon-dropping painting, and she said, “He can’t stay here.”
    “I know,” I told her. “And neither can I.”
    Then I began crying. Now, I’m generally pretty careful when I cry. I like to do it when nobody’s there to see. And I like to throw a few things around, things I can pick up later and put back in place, like towels or pillows. I don’t like to cry in front of other people, but this time I didn’t care.
    “You’re not going to separate us,” I told her, hugging Gus against me. “Not anymore. You can send me anywhere you like but he’s got to go with me.”
    “I don’t understand,” she said, backing away from me. “Where did he come from?”
    “I found him,” I said. “In the S.P.C.A. They would have killed him if I didn’t take him. Because nobody wants him. Nobody ever wanted him.”
    I was crying so hard I guess it wasn’t clear exactly what I was saying. She said, “Izzy, Izzy ... ” and I looked at her in her spotless beige-and-white suit and it made me so angry I yelled, “It’s not okay, this time. And I’ll say okay as much as I like. It’s not okay. You can’t make me stop saying okay even if it’s not okay.”
    “Now, Izzy, just calm down!” said my aunt.
    But then Gus began whimpering too —not that terrible, scared howl back in Mrs. Firestone’s house—but a sort of sympathetic whimper for me. Because he felt sorry for me. He licked my face again and I began crying buckets. I tried to tell Aunt Alice that I would start packing immediately but suddenly she turned around and hurried out of the room. I knew she was going to telephone my uncle so it didn’t surprise me when he came flying into my room, all out of breath, maybe a half hour later. I wasn’t sitting on the bed anymore. I was packing my clothes and Gus was down on the floor, watching me. When my uncle came charging into the room, Gus hurled himself against me and I picked him up and stood there, still crying.
    “What’s going on here?” my uncle said sternly. “I was right in the middle of an important meeting and I had to drop everything and rush home.”
    “It won’t happen again,” I told him, “because I’m not going to be living here anymore. I’m going away with Gus.”
    “Where did this dog come from?” my uncle asked angrily.
    “Oh, I’ll tell you,” I said. I was angry too. Even though I was crying, I was angry —at him, at Aunt Alice, at my father, my mother, at Loretta, Mrs. Firestone, the Kap lans, at Sandy, Karen, Mr. Bailey, Jeremy, Mrs. Doyle, and the singer who lived upstairs. I was angry at everybody in the whole world except for Gus.
    I was shaking all the time I was talking. And sometimes I was crying so hard my words came out all wet and fuzzy. “Calm down, Izzy,” my uncle kept saying and “Pull yourself together.” But I didn’t stop.
    I told him what I thought of him and Aunt Alice and their clean white house and this big world with all its people who had no place for Gus.
    When I was finished my uncle said, “Do I understand from what you have said that you have not been at school all this week?”
    “Yes,” I said. “No, I have not been at school.”
    “That you have played hooky from school these past four days?”
    “Yes, yes, yes!” I shouted.
    “That you have deceived your aunt and myself and gone traipsing all over the city and talked to all kinds of strangers knowing that we would never have approved.”
    “Yes,” I said. “You never would have approved.”
    “And you also knew, Izzy,” said my uncle, “that I would have taken you over to see Mrs. Firestone on Saturday. You knew that