Dog House Page 6

  Mallards mated everywhere we looked.

  There was one three way, in particular, that were regulars; a group comprising two fat iridescent males and a scrawny, exhausted brown female. Why those pompous, sleek drakes thought she was hot, I never knew, but they pursued her relentlessly around our house and yard, and if one wasn’t ravishing her, the two of them were noisily fighting for her favors as she stood mildly, unconcernedly by, preening what was left of her tail. We called them May, Nage, and Trois, and they were our daily laugh, except that the beauteous May-May seemed to be kept so busy satisfying her admirers that she seldom found time to eat and was pitiably thin. So when we could get her off by herself, which wasn’t often, we fed her seven-grain bread and birdseed. To help her conserve her strength.

  It was a real coincidence that we’d attracted mallards particularly. There were other types of ducks around the village pond and in the park, mainly Muscovys and domestic white ducks, plus, which won’t surprise you, a hodgepodge of “blends” of the three. Multicultural ducks wandered in and out of our gate freely, but only the mallards stayed to play. This was coincidental because at fourteen, when Millard had been sent North to boarding school, the boys there had named him “Duck”; short for “Mallard Duck, the Georgia Quacker.”

  All right, it’s funny.

  But it always hurt me for the boy he was. I knew it hadn’t been meant kindly.

  “Duck” had mallards now.

  One spring weekend, I came back from a plant nursery with water lilies for the pond. About two feet below its near edge, there was a neat, narrow shelf, and Millard and I lovingly lowered onto it three heavy pots with their hopeful shoots, tamping down the soil, fluffing up the stems. Every evening for a week or so when he came home from work, we’d walk down to see a new leaf unfurled and floating on the water. And one day, we finally saw a bud, then another, till there were five, promising and green and long, like buoyant spindles. We could smell those star-white blooms.

  I was cutting scallions in the kitchen and happened to glance out the window at the pond when I saw—on the ledge by the lawn, May-May, Nage and Trois doing their thing in our prized aquatic plants. In fact, standing in the water, right in the lily pots, was Nage, holding May-May down by her now nearly featherless neck while Trois had his way with her. At the borders of their duckish frenzy, shreds of crisp pale leaves seemed to be ... loose and floating toward the center of the pond, and oh no ... was that a bud? I slammed out the screen door and charged down two flights of stairs, shooing furiously. Though I wasn’t in time. Our lilies were destroyed.

  Gasping and breathless, I raced back to the house, grabbed the phone and called Millard at work. (One of the unheralded joys of being married is always having someone to bitch to, for among a woman’s most basic needs is having a complaint department that’s always open.)

  “The ducks are in the water lilies,” I sobbed into the phone.

  Millard got it right away. “Are the buds gone? The leaves? What’s left?”

  “Nothing,” I whimpered. “Just a leaf or two.”

  He was silent.

  “Well, you know,” he said in his soothing, contemplative drawl, “I hope that the worst thing that ever happens to us in life is having ducks in our water lilies.”

  For the remainder of ouryears together, “ducks in the water lilies” became a family shorthand for anything we overreacted to.

  It got used a lot.

  And come July, there wasn’t a single water lily in our pond. Only seven fluffy peeps.

  While Millard alone doted on Cosi’s evil soul, we both agreed that she was nothing less than a paragon of Jackitude, and we began to show her off at the Jack Russell Terrier trials in New York’s horsey suburbs, where all the dogs seemed to be wholesome, muddy “outdoor dogs” that certainly had never had a Dairy Queen, and all their very fit owners clomped around in ancient wellies (ditto). Unquestionably, too, none of these dogs had ever slept in a bed. Plus, most had names like Jock and Tom. Mozart wasn’t in it.

  We discovered there were whole towns upstate, actually, where you couldn’t find a horse without its attendant working Jacks, all doing what tiny terriers have traditionally been bred to do: kill rats in stables by breaking their necks.

  Oh, this was one intriguing world. We’d known about Westminster, of course, the annual AKC beauty pageant at Madison Square Garden. Jack Russells were blackballed from show business back then, since basically, they were mutts. And Jack people were pretty proud of that. So they—we—held our own shows, where scores of incredibly noisy dogs competed to see who was shortest, podgiest, jauntiest, and most true to type. Not one, by the way, was ever voted Miss Congeniality.

  Showbiz tyros that we were, Millard and I were convinced that Cosi was a jewel of Jackish beauty, and with Millard on the sidelines admiring us both, I trotted her around the show ring a few times. Once, she actually took a second-place ribbon. We hung it in the kitchen.

  We entered her in the races, too, these hysterically funny runnings of several little dogs in mad pursuit of a lure that looked like a tail but “smelled like rabbit.” Or rat.

  At the end of the shortish track—these are mini-dogs, after all—great bales of hay are piled up with one Jack-size hole in the middle. The lure is dragged along the track back through the hole, and the first crazed dog to squeeze in after it, wins. Then there’s some scary action on the far side of the hay bales, where fearless human volunteers in elbow-length leather gauntlets try to separate overexcited barking, snarling little spotty dogs with razor teeth, before they rip one another apart. It wasn’t all just toughing it out in that pit, however. There was the occasional mild complaint when one or the other pup came away missing part of an ear.

  Cosi never won that either. Usually, when the chutes opened and all the other dogs ran like hell, she’d sort of wander off the course, snuffling. She was red-ribbon pretty, our girl, but a little, and lovably, dim.

  The third and most rigorous of the trials was the go-to-ground. Here, in a mown, scrubby field, the show managers had simulated a vermin hunt (so Brit) by slipping the canine contestants nose-first down a hole in the ground into a very black, very tight tunnel. To make things interesting, the organizers placed inside it a live mouse in a small cage. (How I bled for that mouse, its tiny heart pitterpattering in the dark). Each dog entered alone; the judge had a stopwatch; and the contestant that got to the mouse fastest and barked, won. (In real life, Jacks in hot pursuit of rodents sometimes get stuck in those holes. When this happens—if they can be reached—they’re pulled out by the short, docked tails that have been left just long enough for an owner to get a hand around.)

  While they never said anything to us overtly, never actually snickered, Millard and I decided that, after several Saturdays at these events, the regulars, those waxed-coat men and women who docked their own dog’s tails and casually employed terrified scapemice, were conveying to us, by example, how wimpy we were. So we never entered Cosi in the go-to-ground. She had merely the stub of a tail, anyway, and given the fact that we three slept in the same bed, Millard and I weren’t about to teach her how to scurry down grubby holes in our garden. I wasn’t much on teaching her to bring me gifts of dead vermin, either, unless they were minks. Millard, though, loved the whole manly hunt thing and so was enormously pleased when I eventually found an antique English watercolor depicting a trio of what, to our recently educated eyes, were clearly Jack Russell ratters. The frame bore a legend only mad Anglophiles could love: Three of the Right Sort.

  Cosi was adorable and fierce, but she was only human after all, and she’d begun to develop curiously human-type problems—bad breath being the most in-your-face, but hardly the strangest. The strangest was that she was going bald.

  Along about the end of our first year together, I’d begun to notice black spots, like very large freckles, becoming increasingly visible on the piggy pink skin beneath her fur. As more and more pink emerged, I phoned her breeder in Texas (who, undoubtedly, like
so many backyard breeders, had never planned on hearing from me again), only to have her swear up and down that she’d never seen such a thing on any of her dogs. Was I feeding Cosi the wrong thing? Had I traumatized her? Was she sick? (Did I have a receipt?) More to the point, was I being a rotten parent? Again?

  So more usefully, I called our vet, who recommended that I take her to be examined in Manhattan, to the best animal hospital in the area—some said in the country—since she might have a thyroid issue.

  A thyroid issue. That sounded dire. I tucked my balding Cosi under my arm, put her in the back of our newish station wagon with a few of what I hoped would be comforting blankets (all antiques dealers—even dormant dealers—drive station wagon—like cars with a blanket or two in the well) and left her loose behind the wire partition to enjoy an unobstructed view of passing gas station attendants. When I pulled onto the Long Island Expressway, it was a cloudless, sunny day.

  To get to Manhattan from Long Island, you must travel under or over the East River. Ostensibly, the most direct route is through the Midtown Tunnel, which was then very long and very dark, with the requisite allegorical light only at its far-away end. About a minute into its maw, I noticed a definite smell in my car. I sniffed.

  Potent.

  Familiar.

  Awful.

  And I realized that Cosi had pooped hugely in the back and that I was about to be trapped in the car with it and with her lurching around in it as I maneuvered through midtown traffic.

  Long afterward, I came to the conclusion that, to a little dog, when the car radio and the sun go out simultaneously, that’s plainly The End of the World.

  Anyone would poop.

  Back then, though, I just felt sorry for myself: three useful blankets undoubtedly shot, and so much for that new-car smell.

  Ultimately, though, it only reinforced my belief that she’d have been no good at all in the go-to-ground.

  They never found out what was wrong, by the way, and we just got used to having an almost-hairless terrier. In truth, I grew rather fond of that rounded pink belly with its dappled black spots. Millard did, too. In fact, I’d never seen Millard love any thing or person the way he loved Cosi, balding or furred.

  By today’s parenting standards, Millard hadn’t been much of a father, at least not in the caretaking, demonstrative sense. With the exception of their irregular weekend bondings, Barden’s feeding, clothing, worrying-about, schooling, embracing and socialization had been all Mom’s job. Dad did the pizza runs and bike-riding stuff, but babies and children, for some unfathomable reason, made Millard uneasy. And I was okay with that. Though if I occasionally hinted it was absolutely necessary, he would pick up a child. But he’d hold it gingerly, at a distance, the way you or I might hold a cute baby alligator. And I don’t think I ever saw him spontaneously hug or kiss Barden, but then, he didn’t hug or kiss me spontaneously, either. Though I yearned for him to.

  In essence, Millard was a sweet-tempered, slightly socially inept, none-too-demonstrative man. But he always had a smile on his face and he was perpetually curious. He was also partially deaf from a childhood illness, which meant that you couldn’t hope to talk to him if his back was turned, and you could never whisper. I used to kid him that if he’d ever been drafted and it was whispered from man to man along the trench that his unit should fall back, Millard would be the only hero. On the other hand, you should know that, as he aged, he was often mistaken for Harrison Ford. (We’d laugh about whether he ought to sign those autograph books or not, and it got us nice tables once or twice at Manhattan restaurants.)

  Eventually, it became evident to me that he’d been saving up all his love for Cosi: so tough, so small, so undemanding, so—compared to a wife and son—complication free. He didn’t begrudge me a little of her love, though, and I was allowed to love her in return. Thus, to planting gardens, restoring houses, tending ponds and Barden, we added one more mutual passion.

  We’d been refining the Main Street house for ten runaway years when I got the itch again. This time, it was for a Gothic Victorian on the water a half mile away.

  For me, it was key that the house was such a wreck.

  What a project!

  For Millard, it was key that the house was such a wreck.

  What a folly!

  In my favor:

  It was a ruin so architecturally remarkable; so inexpensive; so on the market for months. (Of course it had been on the market for months, the broker told us much, much later. Husbands turned and fled in the driveway.) But it was so full of potential; so, well ... pretty.

  In Millard’s favor:

  The money we needed to buy it.

  In the years since, friends have accused me of pushing a screaming and yelling Millard into buying “that wreck.” Heel marks on the road and all that. But they were only partially right. Truth is, we put a deposit on the house in the fall, then spent the winter doing our semi-Socratic thing.

  I’d argue the Pro:

  “It’s beautiful. It’s romantic. It needs us. It won’t be expensive, we can do it all ourselves. It needs us.” And oh, there was that water. And the little carriage house. And the falling-down boathouse. And the falling-down bulkhead. And the fallen-down trees all over the (strangely squishy) lawn.

  He’d argue the Con:

  “I love it where we are. I’m tired of fixing up. I’m fifty. I’m old. We can’t afford it. That rotten porch. That dicey slate roof. That incinerator smokestack across the harbor. Those rotting hulks by the shore. That’s a view?”

  Then I’d argue the Con:

  “Millard, if you don’t want to do this that much, we won’t. I never want to push you into anything. We just won’t.”

  And he’d argue the Pro:

  “Carol, if you want this so much, we’ll do it. I want you to be happy. We’ll just do it.”

  All winter, we worried the thing back and forth, and every time we went to look at the house again, he’d stop talking to me for a few days. Which was hard.

  Until May, when we moved in. And oddly, there wasn’t that much to do.

  We were both disappointed.

  To prove myself to Millard, however, and to justify this totally unnecessary move, I’d decided that, workwise, I would really outdo myself. So the day after we closed, I drove over to our extremely detached garage and, from its ceiling, hauled down a very tall ladder. Up in the old kitchen (well, not really the old kitchen, which was actually in the basement), the plaster walls and ceiling had once been canvassed over.

  Now canvas was, and still is, the traditional method for stabilizing cracked and crumbling plaster, since plaster—what with movement and settling and the passage of time—is always going to crack. You can patch it, you can replaster it, still, the time-honored method for fixing implacable plaster is covering the walls with canvas. Unfortunately, however, humidity and steam heat and continued movement cause canvas to buckle and blister and lift, so that in my new old kitchen—a lovely room with tall windows, 1940s cabinets and forest green Formica panels below the chair rail—a triangular hunk of limp old canvas was currently hanging down from a corner of the ceiling. This was the kind of thing that scared off husbands, and this was why I’d brought the ladder.

  Standing on its sturdy top step, I reached up, grabbed the offending flap in both my hands, and yanked. With a satisfying rrrip, it pulled down and away. And as I looked at my handiwork and stretched to my right to continue on, a few small chunks of plaster fell through my hair and shattered on the floor. Then, a few more. Then, suddenly, a scrim of plaster dust materialized around me in the morning sunlight.

  And I watched, the entire exposed triangle of ceiling began to break apart and fall. The whole thing was going to drop. It was about to be a disaster.

  But I would save the day.

  My hair powdered with white, my tongue dry with panic and grit, I fairly slid down the ladder and flew to the garage. In the old woodshed attached to the outside of its far wall, I’d noticed a l
ongish joist. I might be able to use it as a “dead man.” If I was lucky, its ten-foot length would reach both the ceiling and the floor and jam that canvas back in place. Grabbing one end of the grimy timber and struggling with its surprising weight, I maneuvered it out of the shed, through the garage, up the back stairs and, after some backings and forthings and swearings and bruisings, positioned it for entry through the kitchen door. Peering cautiously around the jamb, I could see, to my relief, that nothing more had fallen. So, holding the piece of wood like a battering ram, I entered the kitchen at an awkward trot and as swiftly as I could, eased it upright. Deftly, I caught the now-much-enlarged corner of hanging canvas with the timber’s flat top and quickly slammed it into place. Incredibly, the other end of the joist just reached the floor. I was saved.

  Panting, I wiped the sweat and dust from my face with my shirttail and left the kitchen, locked the house and, much subdued, drove home.

  As the day wore on though, I began to feel increasingly pleased with myself. I was competent. Capable. Resourceful, even. There was no question that I’d be able to do a good deal of work by myself; which meant that Millard would be less burdened, have less to feel responsible for, have less to complain about and less reason to be pissed with me.

  So I could hardly wait to tell him about my coup. (Actually, I didn’t. I called him at work.) At dinner, I described the whole scene in great detail, making it as sound as melodramatic as I’ve made it sound above. I was Wonder Woman. I was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I was Lara Croft with normal lips but older, wiser ... and more modest. Too impatient now for Millard to finish eating, I dragged him to the car with his coffee cup in hand and sped over to the “new” place to show him what I’d done.