Dog House Page 2

  Pretty Boy didn’t, though. By the following morning, with her seed tray still full and water untouched, she allowed me to cup her trembling body in my hands while I placed her, ever so gently, on a washcloth I’d spread between the four burners of the stove, right over the pilot light. There she sat all day, unmoving, uncomplaining. But wasn’t she breathing much too fast? Even for a bird?

  Within days, despite my care, all her toes had fallen off.

  It was painful merely to see, and Millard and I had a worried discussion at dinner about how to handle our failure in bird husbandry.

  “Don’t blame yourself for this,” he suggested sympathetically. “Perhaps the bird was sick when you bought it. It will probably be better tomorrow. ”

  But I didn’t want cheap absolution. Even my grandmother could keep a bird alive, for god’s sake, and by eleven that night, we’d decided to find a vet and pay for help—a real stretch for us. Though none of the Yellow Pages ads seemed to mention the treatment of birds. (Would you believe I didn’t think to call one ad and ask?) The next day, at our local library, I looked for manuals on sick birds. But there was nothing. Or, at least, nothing that mentioned legs or toes.

  In frustration, I sped back to Woolworth’s, where, after a second pointless conversation with the manager:

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong with my bird? She’s dying.”

  “I don’t know, lady” (defensively). “No other customer has ever complained of a problem like that. Why don’t you try calling a vet?”

  I concluded that five-and-tens shouldn’t be selling pets to begin with. Shortly thereafter, they agreed.

  And then, because Millard had escaped to Cape Canaveral on business, I was alone with that poor failing creature for three more days, beside myself with guilt. On the fourth morning, Pretty Boy was gone, and I buried her beneath a bush at the back of the yard.

  After that, I stayed away from pet shops and five-and-tens for another two years. And the next time I went to a pet store, I was pregnant—and my new trial dog was a monkey.

  A psychiatrist would probably tell you I was practicing: that the monkey wasn’t a trial dog, it was a trial baby. The psychiatrist would be right.

  Yet here was my rationale.

  Because I was scared and inexperienced and had managed to kill or otherwise lose the only living things I’d ever had in my care, I thought a monkey might be a sturdier, safer, luckier choice.

  In the movies, monkeys are models of self-sufficiency. Strew a few bananas around and they feed themselves; they’re smart (a couple of hundred, left alone, might type King Lear) and well—like babies and dogs—they’re mammals. And I’d never heard of a mammal getting fatal foot disease.

  Besides (forgive me), I was bored.

  You might wonder why I didn’t buy a dog.

  Well, I wasn’t ready for a dog yet because we were still living in an apartment. This time, we were living just down the highway from Cape Canaveral at Cocoa Beach, where Millard, who worked for MIT, was on field duty. Sadly, he was spending what I jealously thought were far too many nights sleeping out at the Cape when there were “shoots.” (Once or twice, to his great and lifelong delight, he actually slept right on top of the nuclear missiles whose guidance systems he was helping to design.) And often—too often to suit me—he would go out for a few days’ cruise on a Polaris submarine. Therefore I was forced to spend much too much time by myself, contemplating the vast and boring Atlantic through the sliding glass doors of my second-floor cinder-block flat. Or sitting alone on our graceless concrete terrace, smoking (ah, yes, we smoked when pregnant then, and drank what we wanted, and on the whole, gave birth to babies that, despite our carelessness, somehow grew into six-foot-five, smart and handsome men with lots of wavy brown hair and absolutely no visible flaws). So there I sat, pregnant and smoking, gazing across the narrow beach, or “up-range,” toward the Cape while I waited for a Thor or Atlas missile to blow up. They weren’t meant to blow up, of course, but in my darkest heart I unfailingly hoped they would. It was always a much better show than a successful launch.

  Anyhow, that’s why I got a monkey. We were in Florida, in an undeveloped section encroached upon by tangled reminders of, if not deepest jungle, then kudzu, at least, and I was longing for a bit of close-to-human company. Monkeys, re Darwin, were closer to humans than birds, and possibly smarter, even, than dogs.

  I got my primate at a local pet store in the kind of cinder-block strip mall where beach sand meets asphalt, and he came with no instructions. I supposed that when you live in a place where banana palms grow wild, it’s taken for granted that you know how to care for monkeys. So there was no booklet this time. No leash. No cage. No one even to share the fun, since Millard was away again.

  That meant I had to bring this adorably furry brown baby monkey home to an empty apartment, and immediately on entering the hallway, he ran into an open closet and crouched down under our clothes, holding his long tail between his legs and rocking back and forth and making this sound—a sound like a hurt child crying—that rent my heart. But then, as miserably unhappy as the pitiable thing seemed to be, he also didn’t seem to be losing parts, and this was altogether a better beginning than I’d made with Pretty Boy.

  I got down on my hands and knees inside the closet, and reached out to comfort the little creature. He seemed to think I was some kind of huge, insufficiently hairy hostile, because he skittered off into the farthest, most shadowy corner, where, given what was then considered my “delicate condition,” I simply couldn’t reach him. And there, I’m sorry to say, he rocked and keened all night.

  You and that psychiatrist would conclude that if I’d been unconsciously looking for the pet that was most like a baby, I’d certainly found the ideal. I was up and down every hour that night, offering him cereal, cereal in milk, bananas (peeled), closet lights turned on, closet lights turned off, folding doors open all the way so he would know I was there, folding doors (almost) closed so I wouldn’t have to listen to him cry, but so he could breathe. I lay on my bed throughout that night and into the dawn, afraid that I couldn’t care for this animate, feeling being. Afraid that, like my mother, I might not actually know how to care.

  When Millard walked in next morning and learned what I’d done, he threw both hands in the air (in what would become a frequent gesture during our years together), and then he got down on the closet floor with me. With a little teamwork, we managed to coax the sad little thing out with some segments of orange.

  But oh, yay! Oranges! My monkey—it was, of course, my monkey because Millard wanted no part of this—unaware of any agreements we might have signed with the rental agent, snatched an orange section from each of us and holding one slice, humanlike, in each of his tiny hands, climbed up the (really unattractive) mushroom beige curtain on one side of the sliding doors and perched, in the safe middle of the rod, furiously gulping orange. After which, leaving sticky little handprints on the wall above, and holding on with his tiny prehensile feet, he walked across the metal balance beam of the curtain rod to rush headfirst down the other curtain, searching hungrily for more. But somehow, before we could feed him a few more segments, the monkey spied my husband’s modestly hairy leg. Hurling both his arms and legs around Millard’s calf and screeching, he held on tight with his sticky hands and peed, lengthily and joyously. After that long, terrible night alone in our closet, he had found his long-lost mother, and for an hour, nothing we tried to tempt him with could peel him away. No oranges; no fresh litchi nuts (my favorite snack); not even the bananas (what was it with the bananas, anyway?). Which was why Millard ate his breakfast that morning with the monkey strapped to his leg. He shaved and changed his shirt with the monkey strapped to his leg, and then I drove them both down to the pet store, where—when the monkey was ready and only then, and rather like the squid-thing that attached itself to John Hurt’s face in Alien—he allowed himself to be detached.

  That was my last pet for eight more years.

 
(Oh, all right, when our darling son Barden was four, we got a turtle. You bought turtles at the five-and-ten then, too—tiny green tanks with striped heads and red cheeks and decals on their backs of flowers or American flags. Until someone realized that decals were toxic; after which, they only came plain.)

  You remember how turtles smell, though it’s probably not exactly “turtle smell” you remember. More likely what you recall is the smell of those chopped-up dried flies in the cylindrical yellow box—the ones your child always forgot to sprinkle in the water so that, daily, you had to wonder how you were supposed to know if your reptile was starving. That’s why you always took the precaution of feeding it yourself, thinking all the while about standing there in your newly cleaned kitchen, sprinkling dead, chopped flies (they floated) on turtle water. This particular turtle, forever nameless, was eventually released into the local park, where ostensibly it still lives. Grown to four feet or so in diameter and frightening to small children, it’s sufficiently grown up, these days, to eat unchopped real flies.

  Chapter Two

  Starter Dog

  When I was thirty, after tenyears of living in apartments with no grass, no birds, no rustle of leaves (I swore I’d never live in one again), Millard and I found we could afford our first house. Rather, we couldn’t actually afford it. A bachelor uncle had died, and Millard’s mother, who had loathed me since I was seventeen and ensnared her only child, decided to use some of her inheritance to buy Millard—not me—a house. It was a homey Tudor in a prewar development—a little small, a little dark, with a one-car garage—but with a Japanese maple on the front lawn I could hardly believe was mine. Every leaf, every crooked bough, mine. I’d never owned a tree before, just as I’d never owned a kitchen or a fireplace, but after all those years in apartments, the treeness of that Japanese maple spoke to me of eight-year-old Barden playing in the backyard, of bikes in the garage, of Halloween, of neighborhood. And that’s probably why, in overwhelming and buoyant suburban joy, I decided that it was time for our son to own a dog. The all-American dream, right? A boy, a house, a dog? Our family’s moment to see Spot run?

  Besides, now that Millard and Barden and I were starting our Real Life. (Yes, I believed that people who lived in apartments didn’t live real lives. They were all just waiting in their various boxes—as I had waited—to be taken out and moved into their very own homes, with front and back lawns and a dog.) I needed that family dog to own and love till it got old, and thereby prove that my mother had been uncaring, selfish and an ill-treater of dogs. And children.

  I’d made up my mind long before I was married to be a better mother than my mother was. To always know where my child was going after school; not to make his life a misery over minutiae like clean rooms and put-away toys; to be the kind of mother who cares that her son has the basic and necessary experience of owning and caring for a dog. On this cloud of maternal virtuousness, I wafted into the local dog pound, because where I grew up, that’s where one went to get a dog. (These days they’re “animal shelters,” an accurate euphemism that rolls a good deal more easily off the tongue than “pound,” while also not punching out the mind’s eye with harrowing images of impound-ed pups.) That’s where I found our adorable little beagle—all floppy eared, small, short coated (no grooming!) and flatteringly licky. But before I committed my family to its first canine relationship, I took the time to look up “The Beagle” in the library. I was very much more mature now, and I wanted to know something substantial about our dog-to-be before I got him home.

  Curled in a chair in my stuccoed living room with The Survival Guide to Beagles and Beagle Training and a mug full of tea, I came across the first of several characteristics that seemed mildly troubling:

  “Slowness to learn.”

  Was that dog talk for “dumb,” or did that just mean I’d have to learn to be patient? (I’ve read somewhere that patience can be learned. It’s not, as I’d always supposed, an inborn trait.) Next, I found:

  “Slowness to housebreak.”

  Now that, I thought, could create a problem for a well-intentioned dog owner—even a newly patient one. (Don’t forget, this was before everyone did crate-training. See p. 114) But, hey, I was a capable, fully committed adult now: a wife, a mother and a paragon of stick-to-itiveness where mammals were concerned (yes, I’d forgotten the monkey). I knew I’d be good—probably talented, even—at housebreaking. It had only taken me three years to train Barden. In fact, his toilet training had finally reached a point where the pediatrician had delivered a nice little lecture to me that ended with “But, Mrs. Prisant, I’ve never seen a man walk down the aisle who wasn’t trained.”

  And you know, I found that comforting.

  But where dogs were concerned, my library books cheerily offered—because the books I’d picked were British—that all you had to do was take a puppy out whenever it “looked like” it had to go; or every three hours. Whichever came first.

  And there was this, too:

  “Beagles shed.”

  Okay, beagles shed. Didn’t all dogs shed?

  Furthermore, beagles were often known to be “independent.” Whatever that meant.

  Millard was independent. Barden was independent. We wanted an independent dog, didn’t we? Not a Velcro dog that wouldn’t let anyone go to the bathroom alone.

  This beagle puppy was adorable, though, and remembering the way his pink tongue had practically permanently attached itself to the back of my hand, I couldn’t begin to imagine that he’d ever show any sort of troubling independence.

  And that’s how, head full of imperfectly assimilated information, I went out and purchased the natty brown leather leash, the dog bowl, the Wee Wee pads (guaranteed to attract anything with a tail), a couple of cans of dog food, a squeaky Snoopy toy and a small bag of dog biscuits, and drove over to the pound where I’d pick up the dog my family so thoroughly deserved.

  My plan was to surprise Barden with the puppy. When he came dragging in from school that day, a messy welter of half-off jacket, ringleted brown hair, books, shoelaces and gum and hit me with his favorite question, “What’s for dinner, Mom?” (though it was the middle of the afternoon and, as usual, I hadn’t really thought about dinner at all), I vamped:

  “Spaghetti.”

  He grinned. Happy.

  “But, Barden, come outside for a minute. I have something I want you to see.”

  And turning him around by the shoulders, I marched him back out the front door and down the four steps to our attached garage. He looked back at me with puzzlement and maybe a touch of defensiveness. Had he done something?

  I reached down and hauled up the door to the carless garage and this little brown-and-white body came barreling out in a froth of fur and tongue and panting and paws. Catching the puppy up in his arms, Barden rolled happily onto the lawn as the day’s dirt and Twinkie crumbs were licked, tongued and lapped off a beloved face transported by joy.

  Is there anything like those first days with a new dog?

  Everything about this small thrilling being, from those white, needly teeth pulling at your sleeve to the bristly softness of its fur, to the abandon with which it chases after a rubber ball, a piece of biscuit tossed on the floor, or a gnat, is enchanting. Ah, we were so in love—even Millard—after the usual, knee-jerk grumbles about “new,” and “trouble” and “walking at night.” Had there ever been a more sweet-natured, energetic dog? Not for Barden. Not for me, except perhaps for the moment when those little teeth sort of shredded the bottom of the skirt on the just-reupholstered club chair.

  But Barden hadn’t had to drag home some baffled but vaguely willing stray, then lie about how it happened to be standing in my front hall (though now that I thought about it, stray dogs didn’t really exist anymore, not the way they had when I was small). I’d fulfilled his desires for the best little dog in the world even before he knew he had desires. I was unquestionably the World’s Best Mother. That night, he told me so himself.

  Natu
rally, I set down—or thought I set down—a few immutable laws. After school, without fail, Barden would have to walk his Tippy (now you know what his tail looked like) and feed his Tippy without fail at night. He might also have to bathe him. (Should dogs bathe?) This was just fair. If a kid was old enough to have a dog, he was old enough to care for it.

  “Right?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  He was out the door and gone, socks bunched around the ankles of his long skinny legs, and that was the end of that.

  But you know the rest. You’ve met Rusty. You’ve met my mother.

  Here’s the strange part, though. Barden’s a grown man now, and he says he doesn’t remember anything about Tippy. He doesn’t remember the surprise of that day, his joy; those fraught moments in the days to come when Tippy wouldn’t come to him or me to be walked—even though I’m standing two feet away with the leash in my hand, urging—in my most patient voice—“ Come, Tippy. Come on, good boy. We’ll go walkies.” (I learned that from those British books.) And he doesn’t remember this little bicolor streak tearing around the house and up and down the stairs, pursued by his patient mother in trying-not-to-swear mode. And he says he doesn’t remember me cornering Tippy at last, upstairs, in my newly carpeted bedroom, where he suddenly—intentionally?—made our walk unnecessary. Barden doesn’t remember that he forgot all about the taking-him-out-and-feeding-him thing. For that matter, Barden can’t recall a single one of those countless hot pursuits, or any of those walking, pooping, shredding, chewing phenomena.