About Alice by Calvin Trillin Page A

memoirists late at night at some memoirist hangout.
    After talking about their own upbringings for a while—the gluesniffing and sporadically violent grandmother, for instance, or the family tapeworm—they look toward me. Their looks are not totally respectful. They are aware that I’ve admitted in print that I never heard my parents raise their voices to each other. They have reason to suspect, from bits of information I’ve let drop from time to time, that I was happy in high school. I try desperately to think of a dark secret in my upbringing. All I can think of is Chubby, the collie dog.
    â€œWell, there’s Chubby, the collie dog,” I say, tentatively.
    â€œChubby, the collie dog?” they repeat.
    There really was a collie named Chubby. I wouldn’t claim that the secret about him qualifies as certifiably traumatic, but maybe it explains an otherwise mysterious loyalty I had as a boy to the collie stories of Albert Payson Terhune. We owned Chubby when I was two or three years old. He was sickly. One day Chubby disappeared. My parents told my sister, Sukey, and me that he had been given to some friends who lived on a farm, so that he could thrive in the healthy country air. Many years later—as I remember, I was home on vacation from college—Chubby’s name came up while my parents and Sukey and I were having dinner. I asked why we’d never gone to visit him on the farm. Sukey looked at me as if I had suddenly announced that I was thinking about eating the mashed potatoes with my hands for a while, just for a change of pace.
    â€œThere wasn’t any farm,” she said. “That was just what they told us. Chubby had to be put to sleep.”
    â€œPut to sleep!” I said. “Chubby’s gone?”
    Somebody—my mother, I think—pointed out that Chubby would have been gone in any case, since collies didn’t ordinarily live to the age of eighteen.
    â€œIsn’t it sort of late for me to be finding this out?” I said.
    â€œIt’s not our fault if you’re slow on the uptake,” my father said.
    I never found myself in a memoirist gathering that required me to tell the story of Chubby, but, as it happened, I did relate the story in a book. A week or so later, I got a phone call from Sukey.
    â€œThe collie was not called Chubby,” she said. “The collie was called George.
You
were called Chubby.”
    1998
    Geography
    Geography was my best subject. You can imagine how I feel when I read that the average American high school student is likely to identify Alabama as the capital of Chicago. I knew all the state capitals. I knew major mineral resources. Missouri: lead and zinc. (That’s just an example.) I learned so many geographical facts that I’ve had to spend a lot of time in recent years trying to forget them so I’ll have room in my brain for some things that may be more useful. I don’t hold with the theory that everyone is just using a little bit of his gray matter. I think we’re all going flat out.
    For instance, I’ve worked hard to forget the longest word in the English language, which I had to learn for a high school club. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It isn’t a word that’s easy to work into conversations. There are only so many times you can say, “Speaking of diseases usually contracted through the inhalation of quartz dust …” I finally managed to forget how to spell it, and I was able to remember my Army serial number.
    I think my interest in geography grew from the long automobile trips across the country I used to take with my family as a child. I grew up in Kansas City, which is what the real estate people would call equally convenient to either coast. We usually went west. My father would be in the front seat, pointing out buttes and mesas, and my sister, Sukey, and I would be in the back, protecting our territory. We had an invisible