Photograph by Amy Hart
When I think about Nick now, more than thirty years later, what I remember first is how easily he laughed. He laughed with his whole body, head tipped back, one hand braced on the table, as if the world had already agreed with him. In workshop, he spoke with confidence and charm, quick to quote a line from Rilke or Baldwin, generous with praise when it suited him. Professors leaned toward him. Students circled. People liked him. I did too, at first.
Nick was the one who offered me a ride to campus. We were the youngest students in a prestigious creative writing program long dominated by famous male writers—men who wrote about war, violence, and masculine endurance. Their reputations loomed over us. The program felt sealed off from the rest of the university, its own private kingdom. We were special. Or so we were told.
Nick’s car was a battered Volkswagen with cracked vinyl seats and a radio that worked only intermittently. I didn’t know how to drive. Public transportation required two buses, a commuter train, and then my bike—twice stolen in the first month. Nick and I were the only ones in our program who lived in the city. When Nick said, I’m heading that way anyway, he made it sound casual, even kind. I felt lucky. Chosen. Dependent, but grateful.
It was on one of those early drives that I met the dog.
Nick said he’d found him wandering near a trash dump, half-starved and feral. He spoke of the rescue with pride, as if the dog were evidence of his character. The animal was the color of mud—dark gray, with patches of missing hair—and smelled of wet fur and garbage. Ill-tempered, foul-smelling. Nick never washed him. He claimed the dog hated water, said it with a shrug, amused. The dog hated people and barely tolerated Nick, though he followed him everywhere. On our drives to the university, he crouched in the back seat, eyes tracking movement, growling softly when we stopped at lights.
Nick talked over the sound of the dog’s panting. He had a talent for making himself easy to listen to. He told stories about writers he admired, about the professors—who was brilliant, who was overrated, who drank too much. He asked about my work and seemed to listen to the answers. I remember thinking he was different from the others, less rigid, more curious. When he told me I wasn’t his type, it came almost as a relief. A boundary, I thought. A declaration of safety.
The dog shifted constantly, claws clicking against the metal floor. When Nick reached back to quiet him, the dog stiffened but stayed. Loyalty, I told myself. Or fear. I didn’t yet know the difference.
Nick never touched me. He didn’t threaten me physically. He didn’t even open doors. What made me dread those drives were his stories—always about sex. Suddenly, after three months, he started talking about his sexual conquests. Which women he had “screwed” in our graduate writing program. Some of them I knew. Since Nick was a writer, his descriptions were precise and relentless: how many times she came, how rough she liked it, what parts of her body were unusual. He spoke with enthusiasm, as if advertising cuts of meat.
One woman—a poet I admired—was supposedly his girlfriend. He cheated on her constantly and explained, in detail, why she disappointed him sexually. He spoke as if he were doing her a favor by telling the truth. I never responded. I don’t think he expected me to. This was performance, not conversation.
The car had no air conditioning. Heat pressed in from all sides. When I opened the window, the air felt like a hair dryer. The floor was littered with abandoned novel drafts. In the back sat open cans of dog food, sour and metallic. As Nick talked, the dog panted along, his breath ragged, his body taut, as if bracing for something. More than once, I imagined opening the car door and throwing myself onto the highway.
I tried to change the subject. Books. Professors. The work. That was why I was here—or so I believed. Nick had no interest in tennis or politics or literature. He wanted to describe the nipples of a woman I’d recently heard read poems at a coffeehouse.
Nick believed he was doing me a favor by driving me to campus twice a week. And in a way, he was. I depended on him. Why did I endure those rides? Why didn’t I refuse?
I think that, at the time, I believed I deserved it. I had always been the girl men confided in. A “good gal,” as one boy had put it years earlier, for listening. Support systems for women barely existed then, or if they did, I didn’t know where to find them. What would I have said—that a fellow student verbally assaulted me twice a week? I imagined how that would sound in workshop. Hysterical. No man had ever been called that.
One of the heads of the program—whom I will call Professor James—made his feelings about me clear on the first day. He told me he had personally rejected my application and believed I wasn’t mature enough for the program. Another male professor had championed my work, which was why I was there at all, but he soon became ill and was rarely present. I was left in a workshop led by a man who disliked my writing and made little effort to conceal it.
My stories were about adolescent girls. They had been published and awarded, yet in that room they felt small. Professor James favored war stories. He lingered over descriptions of blood and explosions. My work—quiet, interior, female—seemed to disappear.
Nick, meanwhile, took up all the oxygen. He struggled publicly with his novel about spiritual enlightenment abroad. He was intelligent, witty, tortured. Watching him in class, it was difficult to reconcile this man with the one who filled his car with obscenities. The dog lay at his feet during workshop, unmoving, watchful.
One afternoon, I walked into a hair salon and told the stylist to cut my hair short. When I left, I barely recognized myself. My face looked exposed, defenseless. I believe that was the day I gave up.
I dropped out of the program and lost my fellowship. Professor James lectured me about wasted money, his disappointment sharp and personal. I stopped riding with Nick.
Around that time, the dog disappeared. Nick never explained whether he’d died or simply wandered off. When I asked once, lightly, Nick shrugged. Some things don’t last, he said, already turning the conversation elsewhere.
Years later, I read a review praising Nick’s remarkable gift for understanding adolescent girls. The critic admired his insight into their secret lives. I felt something close to grief—not for him, but for the version of myself who once mistook charm for kindness, endurance for strength.
I did not disappear. I kept writing. I learned, slowly, to trust my own discomfort, to read it as information rather than weakness. The stories I write now are still quiet, still interior, still about girls and women learning where the danger is—and how to leave. When I think of the dog, I no longer think only of fear. I think of survival. Of the instinct to watch, to wait, and finally, to run.
Penny Jackson’s writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies here and abroad including The Edinburgh Review, StoryQuarterly, Lilith, Real Fiction and The Croton Review. Awards for her work include a Pushcart Prize and a MacDowell Fellowship. Follow her at pennybrandtjackson.com.