Dog House Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One - Pseudo-Dogs

  Chapter Two - Starter Dog

  Chapter Three - Underdog

  Chapter Four - Bitch

  Chapter Five - Devil Dogs

  Chapter Six - Dog Star

  Chapter Seven - Dogged

  Chapter Eight - Dog People

  Chapter Nine - Dog Person

  Acknowledgments

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  Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, May 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Carol Prisant

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-42741-5

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  For

  Tucker Velocity Prisant

  Author’s Note

  Because I realize it can be frustrating to the reader to suspect he’s mispronouncing the names of important characters—even in books that aren’t Russian novels—you might like to know that “Millard” is pronounced as if it were “Miller” with a “d.”

  And “Cosi” is “cozy.”

  And was.

  Our Juno____1994-2010

  Pre-Dogs

  True love is what we hope to be uncomplicatedly given by our parents and grandparents, by our children, our grandchildren, our husbands, our wives and our friends. We long to be beloved on this earth, and how lucky we are that most of us are born into a potential for unbounded love.

  In my time, I have been every one of the above except a husband, and I think you should know—in case you don’t already—that people are dauntingly prickly, and that true love ... the Real Thing ... isn’t easy at all to find. I suppose I won’t be delivering any news either if I mention that relationships are complex.

  Husband-love, though, is especially tricky.

  The polls tell us that marriages are most commonly imperiled by money, by sex and, to a lesser degree, by in-laws. Simple stupidity is in there somewhere, of course, though most polls overlook it. And while my own long marital experience included at least a smattering of all these things—plus a decent-size chunk of some—it was true love nonetheless.

  Which brings me to dogs and dog-love: the heart’s great balm.

  Dog-love is steadfast, unreserved and genuine.

  It’s wholehearted.

  It’s uncritical.

  It’s accommodating.

  Come home tired and cranky, for example, and your dog doesn’t care.

  Mix its kibble with chicken franks and kids’ yogurt and holler “dinner” and your dog will whine in happy anticipation and lick the bowl when it’s done. Make a tuna and pea casserole for your husband, on the other hand (and I only did it once), if you’re newlyweds, he may, manfully, eat it.

  My own husband, except for that tuna casserole, was singularly unspoiled about food. He didn’t care to know the given name of the fried chicken he ate as long as it was accompanied by lettuce sandwiches on buttered white bread. He didn’t expect a yellow and green vegetable every night, like a friend’s husband (they’re divorced now), and he didn’t even mind that I didn’t like to cook.

  He did mind about money, though, unlike dogs, which never care how much you spend on them or on yourself.

  Says Rover (and where is Rover these days, not to mention Fido and Rex?):

  “You want to buy that fancy fleece-lined double doughnut heated dog bed? Go ahead. I’ll be happy to sleep on it when the sofa isn’t free.”

  Says the husband, “You want to buy a what?!!!”

  Dogs don’t care who you have sex with, either, as long as you aren’t intruding into their space on the bed and as long as you don’t kick them accidentally.

  In-laws? In-laws just don’t play a big part in the lives of dogs unless their owners are deeply involved in dog shows and pedigrees.

  And dogs are simply never stupid. They wouldn’t dream of telling you you’re looking old today or getting “a little thick maybe.” They always like your hair and clothes. They like their hair on your clothes.

  Your dog—unlike your friends, who let you down; your children, who leave you; your grandparents, who leave you, too; your parents, who disappoint you—will love you faithfully, devotedly, unquestioningly, unto death.

  If you get lucky, your husband will, too.

  That’s why this book is about true love and dogs and husbands. And dogs and life.

  And dogs.

  I know other people’s dog books usually begin with some delightful tale of their first dog, the one they owned and loved through blissful, doggy childhoods and have enshrined in memory’s pantheon. Maybe you had one of those dogs: always soft and fluffy, always clean; a dog that met you after school and carried your books home in her teeth and crawled across thin ice to grab you by the coat sleeve when you’d fallen through. I wish I’d had one of those dogs.

  But this book has to begin with three half-dogs; the dogs that never quite made it, mostly because of my beautiful, inflexible, devious mother.

  So it begins, then, with Sparky, a black-and-white long-haired mutt who scratched on our kitchen door one day, came in for a bowl of bread and milk, stayed for—was it three days or six?—and then was gone from my life forever. Sparky was a dream dog. He could sit and lie down and he could “shake,” which meant that someone had civilized him long before we met. I loved his ever-alert ears and I loved his nonjudgmental affection fo
r a five-year-old who dropped milk bottles a lot. Yet it seemed to have become quickly apparent to the key people in my house (myself not among them) that Sparky could also shed like crazy and howl like a lonely wolf, and that these traits were undesirable enough that his continued presence in our kitchen was becoming an issue. You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that my heart crumbled in my chest when my mother told me he had run away.

  How could he have left me and my bread and milk and devoted attention? And how could he have run away? He hadn’t been out alone since he’d trotted into my kitchen.

  I looked everywhere for him (without crossing streets alone, of course) and brooded on his loss for weeks.

  Of course he’d been a stray to begin with, my mother explained quasi-consolingly; why would I think he wouldn’t stray again? But I had gathered from the reliable six-year-old source who lived next door that dogs were being poisoned in our neighborhood by a mysterious old man who hated dogs, and in my heart, I was certain—and am still certain in some childlike corner of my mind—that my mother, one rainy day when she wasn’t playing golf—had put Sparky outside and the man came along and fed him poison wrapped in raw hamburger meat.

  She liked dogs, she always said. And it was true that when we walked together down our street—she in her chic heels and a beautifully fitted suit and hat; me in my fitted scarlet coat and hat—and met a dog, she’d bend down to give it a gracious little pat. Though she wasn’t comfortable about that pat, I could tell. She didn’t seem to know a thing about good behind-the-ear scratches or bottom-wiggling tushie rubs. My dazzlingly pretty but frequently scary mother hadn’t had dogs herself, and she wasn’t at home with them. This was mainly, I’d concluded, because my mother liked a really clean house and a really clean little girl’s room. (“Immaculate” was the operative word. I think she just liked to say it.) And dogs don’t do immaculate. Nor do little girls.

  Yet my next try was with a specimen that was as far from immaculate as dogdom gets. He was a big red Irish setter—golden retriever mix that I arranged to have “follow me home” from school one day. I don’t think he had a collar, but I wasn’t above taking a collar off and throwing it down the sewer. Anyway, this dog had a matted coat studded with burrs and big, mud-covered paws, and was only a little slobbery. Perfect for a sneak-a-dog, I decided. Though even stranger than my choice was my belief that the followed-home routine could slip past my mother’s no-dog radar.

  Hands on hips, frilly apron bristling, she stood in the kitchen beaming fury at us both.

  “Look, Mommy, I’m not trying to bring this dog into the house. It was the dog’s idea.”

  And possibly because the dog had such a big goofy smile, or possibly because I was so transparent, it actually worked for a few weeks—despite the fur and paws. She seemed charmed. And that was why I sat really still, nodding solemnly for the big, serious lecture about Responsibility and

  Walking and Feeding, and then ran up to my bedroom to giggle deliriously and name my very own dog Rusty.

  Ah well. Rusty turned out to be more than a little wild and not at all rusty, especially when you tried to walk him. Because he didn’t exactly understand “walk.” He was deeply engaged in “pull,” “lunge” and “yank,” and as happily as I’d envisioned the two of us trotting together down the street, the envy of all the neighborhood kids, he was simply too full of beans. Which was another problem.

  Rusty didn’t digest his dog food very effectively. In fact, if he was in the room at dinnertime, no one could summon much appetite for my mother’s excellent cooking, and no one lingered over dessert. Nights that he slept on the floor next to my bed were spent with a pillow over my head and my face turned toward the fully opened window. Rusty’s manners were equally off-putting and were, in the end, his downfall.

  I think he might have even made it into a third week with us when, just before dinner one night, my mother caught eighty pounds of dog standing on the dining room table, long, golden tail sweeping majestically across the tops of the water glasses and just clearing the bread basket as Rusty polished off a quarter pound of butter and a bowl of Parmesan cheese.

  “That’s it! That’s the end!!!” she shrieked. “He’s out of this house tomorrow.” And none of my tearful promises to be good, to keep him away from the table, to keep him in my room, to keep him—Just to keep him—changed her mind. Rusty was gone when I came home from school the next day. I never knew where.

  I only tried with my mother once more, and this time, the dog that “followed me home” was small, blond and appealingly cocker-esque. Also, it was a girl dog, which gave me reason to believe that this time, it could work. Everyone knows that girl dogs are smarter and more biddable than boy dogs. Easier to teach to carry your books and rescue you from frozen rivers. Easier to housebreak. Though the fact that I can’t remember what I named her tells you how long she was allowed to stay.

  Did you know that you can’t get female dog urine out of wool carpets? Especially light-colored wool carpets? Until the day my parents sold their house (I was in college), that salad-plate-size, rust-colored stain remained on the bedroom carpet, about a foot from the right front leg of the chair my mother sat in to watch television. Who would have thought that little dog to have had so much urine in her?

  Chapter One

  Pseudo-Dogs

  It was eighteen years before I got another dog. That was because, for the first ten years of my married life, we lived in apartments. Which is also why I attempted only two pets, both non-dogs. Not because the apartment buildings we lived in didn’t allow dogs. They did. But because I thought a real pet—a dog, for example—needed to live in a real house where it could go outside and play or dig or find friends or something.

  So I was twenty when I first undertook the sole care of a living creature. It was the late 1950s and I was a newlywed; a novice housewife complete with my very own ruffled apron and my Dansk stainless flatware and my deviled eggs. I had just fixed up our first apartment, on the third floor of what my dazzling new husband Millard and I referred to as our Victorian mansion.

  In the intervening years, I had grown rather tall, and Millard was just enough taller that I could—wow—wear heels. He was really, really smart, too (of utmost importance), and surpassingly gentle, like my father. He had grown up in a town of five thousand in Georgia and that may have been why his first Northern report card referred to a “speech impediment.” He said things like sireen instead of siren, and mahls instead of miles and y’all, of course. Not on his report card was the fact that he also had a lovable gap between his two front teeth and chewed with his eyes closed and ate ice. Noisily. But he pronounced Victorian just fine.

  Though ours wasn’t really a mansion, and it wasn’t ours.

  It was a substantial, gingerbready country house whose current owners, an older-than-we-were couple with three children, had cut into several apartments. Ours was the least grand, but its being the servant’s quarters on the top floor made it the most romantic. Which is why, with the last of our five rooms painted in the colors du jour—I especially liked the part where one wall in every room was painted a different color (royal blue, sunshine yellow, and lavender in the john)—and with the plywood-door table lending us manifest magazine chic, I decided it was time to get a trial dog: a bird.

  Found at Woolworth’s five-and-ten and chosen from among twenty-five or so chirpy and much less attractive contenders, the parakeet I carefully carried home was shimmery blue with touches of mauve, and it pains me now to admit that I gave more than a thought to how well she would go with the living room walls. I named her Pretty Boy, after my grandmother’s parakeet, although she was much too pretty to be a boy. Neither Millard nor I had ever had a bird before, but how hard could a bird be? Within a day or two of bringing her home, we knew we’d never have one again. Because one of her gray, wrinkly toes had fallen off. Just fallen off! I couldn’t believe it.

  Fortunately, along with my bird, I’d bought the twenty-five-cent How to Trai
n Your Bird booklet, but found nothing in it about toes or feet or legs. There was a good deal about drafts, however. Had I set the cage near a drafty window? I didn’t think so, but slammed each window twice, just in case.

  Was the bird in pain? How could losing a toe not be painful? Panicked, I threw on my coat and sped back to Woolworth’s for advice.

  The flustered high school girl I collared at the pet counter quickly called over her nineteen-and-a-half-year-old manager, a smallish, acned boy, determined not to fluster. He looked me up and down. Was I trying to return a bird? Did I have a receipt? Was I a bird abuser?

  No, no and no. I fell at his feet and wept. Metaphorically.

  “Can you suggest anything? Do you have any pills? Any drops? We can’t let her die!”

  “You’re probably not keeping the bird warm enough,” he ventured, blinking rapidly and cracking a knuckle behind his back, with which it became instantly clear to me that he was out of his depth.

  He set me thinking, though, for if warmth was what was needed, I could sleep with Pretty Boy if I had to. Driving home, however, I flashed on the image of one of us rolling over on a sick bird during the night, and changed my mind. So when I found her all fluffed up on the bottom of the cage (that couldn’t be good), I gingerly carried the cage to the kitchen, our warmest room, and placed her as near to the stove as counter space allowed. Then I added some hopeful seed to a barely depleted cup plus a splash of fresh water. I felt a little better.