Dog House Page 7

  It tells you something about us, I suppose, that this was the kind of adventure that made Millard proud of me. In his usual nonverbal way, of course. And it tells you, too, that he expected no less of me. This had been clear from the day we met. Millard had always assumed that men and women were absolute equals. A woman could run a business, hoist a ladder, paint a house, climb a thirty-foot scaffolding, move a sofa, dig a hole. I was seventeen when we met, you’ll recall, so I never knew I couldn’t.

  But as we parked in front of the new house that evening, it was just getting dark. In the gloaming, the house looked more ramshackle, daunting and brutally irreparable than ever and Millard’s face, happy and expectant till then, went dark. He was going to stop talking to me again. Right now.

  There were some twenty-five keys to this house and I kept smiling and trying to distract him as I struggled to find the right one fast enough to get him inside before he could look too long at the roof, the flaking paint, the sagging porch and on it, the stained sofa that our predecessor had left for the Salvation Army that they wouldn’t take.

  I got all babbly and coercive. I was selling an antique.

  “C’mon, Mill. Wait till you see! Just let me get this door open.” (“I know this table has a few dents and nicks and is missing most of its hardware and has three legs replaced and woodworm, but it’s just what you’ve been looking for!” Or not.)

  Finally, I found the key, and we were through the door and safely standing in the hall, and I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the kitchen where triumphantly, I flipped on the light switch.

  There was my dead man standing tall and true in the far corner.

  There was the wedge of canvas, sticking to that corner like glue.

  But the entire rest of the ceiling had fallen down.

  And Millard loved it.

  He loved being right about this money pit of a house. He loved knowing what I didn’t know: that a broom and some drywall would put all to rights. And despite his inherent feminism, he loved my ineptitude. Most of all, he loved the egg on my face. In some major, mysterious way, it eased his angst AND ... it would give him a really good story to tell on his impulsive, impossible, maladroit wife.

  But to have him laugh like that every day for the rest of our lives, I’d have swept up old plaster forever.

  His own most challenging jobs turned out to be the mere placing of a lally column under the sagging ceiling of the garage; the putting in of hooks and screw eyes on the lower halves of those tall, warped screen doors that didn’t completely close and latch; the locating and repair of the open sewage pipe (yes, sewage pipe) that had been mucking up the lawn; the carrying of some HEAVY new telephone poles down to reinforce the bulkhead—at low tide, of course, with plenty of male help; and finally, the simple installation of our new dishwasher and the repair of some plaster that had fallen from the living room ceiling because the pipes had once burst, and ...

  Hey, there we were, with nothing to do but cosmetics!

  We’d never been much for new kitchens and bathrooms, anyway. We were all about moldings and clapboards, faux graining and correct wallpapers, so we didn’t mind the 1955 stove or the 1915 flush-o-matic toilets—all seven of them.

  Cosi took the move in stride. She weed in every room, upstairs and down, and pooped only in the rooms we hadn’t started to work on yet.

  Thus, finally, with the exception of the unique, dank Spring Room that housed an artesian well in the basement and seemed to be permanently under three inches of water, most of the scary repair was enough under control that we began to congratulate ourselves on our “bargain.” Or rather, I congratulated ourselves. Millard never would admit to me that he loved the house. Never. Although he carried not one, but two pictures of it in his wallet, which were two more than he carried of Barden or me.

  By the Fourth of July, 1986, the house was working sufficiently well that we could think of inviting his recently remarried father and stepmother for a visit. We had no air-conditioning, but we did have a million numbered screens that we hurried to hoist up before they arrived. Millard and his father were Georgia-born and never-no-minded the heat. I could be an occasional good sport, depending on the humidity. Joan, the new wife, we weren’t sure about. She had been my mother’s friend (bridge, not golf), and my own darling father, whom I’d lost just that spring, had once hinted to me that he wasn’t so fond of Joan. This was so unlike my father that I’d remembered the comment but decided to reserve my own judgment.

  They arrived on a scorching afternoon, and after the five-dollar tour, during which they tried really hard to be polite about our elderly, eccentric project, we all sat back and relaxed on our sparsely furnished wraparound porch, sipping iced drinks and admiring the egrets. lVlillard’s father, courteous and cheerful as always, had his usual fastidious napkin wrapped around the omnipresent glass of scotch and, beaming proprietarily at his bride, good-naturedly boasted that everywhere he’d asked in Pittsburgh, he’d heard the same thing about her: “Joan was a real lady.”

  Oh dear.

  She was something of a cipher as well: attractive, of course, slim, pleasant, sure of herself, but with an abrasive Pittsburgh accent (e.g., “hoss” instead of “house,” and “dahn tahun,” not “downtown”) and little to add as we small-talked our way through the crabgrass and the heat and how much it might cost to fix up our bargain and whether we could afford it and the curiously empty house across the street, where they’d recently discovered a leaky oil tank buried in the lawn. EPA restrictions were just becoming effective then, and we’d heard that the absentee owners had been forced to spend seventy-five thousand just to dig up the old tank and put in a new one. Millard’s father was appalled. As the gorgeous light of what one of our sniffier friends once referred to as our “vulgar sunset” flickered to dusk in the west, Millard and I made up our minds that the next day—if it was all right with our houseguests—we’d take half an hour or so to run over to the empty house to learn what we could about oily lawns. We were worried. If a contemporary house could have oil tank trouble, imagine what we might be in for.

  Also, after only a day, we were anxious to be by ourselves.

  So late the next afternoon, leaving careful instructions with Joan to hook the screen door high and low so Cosi couldn’t get out, we walked across the street.

  You know what’s coming.

  As Millard and I kneeled side by side, examining a telltale patch of blackened grass in the late-day sun, there was a terrific bang on the street. A hedge hid our view, but someone was screaming out there, and people were yelling. Millard stood up and ran to see.

  I stood up, too. Sunstruck. My mind ice white.

  Only the upper catch of the screen door had been hooked, you see, so that Cosi had gotten out the bottom, where it opened just enough to let an insufficiently plump little dog squeeze through in search of her people (why hadn’t we gone for ice cream more?); onto the porch, down the steps, up the driveway and across the street; a gutsy little dog who had never crossed a street, never been out on a street and never been left in the care of anyone who didn’t understand that one could want to kiss a dog. She was hit by a carful of kids taking a curve too fast, and they never even stopped.

  Arms around each other, we found our way back into our house, where I climbed the stairs and didn’t come down for two days.

  Millard wrapped our Cosi in a soft old blanket and buried her where we could always see her: down a short flight of stairs at the corner of the veranda, looking toward the harbor.

  And our houseguests wouldn’t leave.

  Not only didn’t they leave, but Joan—who’d never had dogs or children—seemed determined to overlook how crushingly bereft we were. She kept smiling her smarmy lady-smile and wanting to chat and trying to get me to eat something or have a drink of water. Why do they always offer you water?

  I was galled by her cheerful insensitivity.

  She hadn’t hooked the screen.

  I never forgave her for
that.

  Much later, a friend, a dog lover who came to visit and condole, told me she had never seen a man as devastated as Millard was that day.

  How intense, the emotional investment we have in our dogs. Neither Millard nor I—and at that time we’d been married almost thirty years—had ever left ourselves as entirely vulnerable to each other as each of us had been to that little dog. Long marriages develop comfortable areas of opacity and restraint. And raw bits, of course. So when he left for work in the morning for the rest of that summer, I could see from the kitchen window that he was doing his best not to look at that sickening spot in the road as he swung his car out of the drive. I never mentioned it though.

  For myself, I eventually took to approaching the house from the opposite direction, despite its being very much out of my way. For almost two years, I couldn’t look at that curve. Then one day, I could.

  Three months before Cosi died, I’d lost my beloved father. I may have told you that. He and I hadn’t shared a life in decades, and his death, though unbearably wrenching, seemed an old one somehow—a death of a childhood love.

  A pet’s loss can’t compare with human loss; yet we love our pets with such utter transparency; with joy and naïveté. That’s why the love and death of dogs (and I stretch here, to include cats and ferrets and guinea pigs—but not snakes) remains forever tender. And keeps alive in us some lasting scraps of our valuable, childlike hearts.

  Good dogs.

  Chapter Five

  Devil Dogs

  Cosi was slow to leave our house. There we’d be, thinking we were over it, when we’d come across some hairy half-chewed rawhide behind a chair, or some half-chewed chair.

  From the scatterings of white hairs on our blankets to the irreparably scratched vinyl in the back of the station wagon to the thin leather leash limp by the door to the occasional nugget of dried old poop, she was with us every day. Even the Dairy Queen lost its frozen luster. Not to mention sex, which wasn’t fun somehow, without its customary canine soundtrack. Or was it sorrow?

  Our house was as bleak as our hearts, since we’d really just moved in. Odd brooms and single work gloves and stacked cardboard boxes jammed the corners of our unused and unusable dining room-to-be and hid our kitchen counters. In the space that was meant to become the living room, scratched and scuffed wood floors were fortunately invisible beneath piles of book-filled boxes that had one further advantage: They’d been stacked high enough to prevent our having to look at sad curls of peeling paint. It would be months—actually, years—before we’d get the bookcases built in that room; the bookcases on top of which I would eventually put my enlightened yet pretentious busts of the Greek philosophers; of Mozart and Robbie Burns; before I painted the room a particularly subtle Bazooka pink; before we got our books unpacked at last, and put away.

  But Cosi wasn’t there, even though Millard had a nice big workshop in the basement where she’d have loved to squat. In the fifties, this had been a cool-man-cool knotty pine rec room with the requisite wet bar. Except for its being currently strewn with several sizes of drill bit, odd angles of chrome plumbing parts, a hundred thicknesses and colors of electrical wires, and unmanageable coils of scrunchy BX, it almost still was. Had we preferred recreation to grief and repair, our partying would have had to take place amid the newly dangerous gray rags of asbestos hanging from heating pipes (Millard eventually redid them with shrink-wrap) plus the brown water seeping through the otherwise picturesque rubble walls in the adjacent furnace room that had turned the rec room’s strip oak floors, well—spongy. Jitterbug on sponge? Not really.

  There was nothing here we couldn’t handle, of course, but without the accustomed leavening of our Cosi, we felt overwhelmed. Forlorn. Depressed, actually.

  It must be human nature to yearn to immediately replace some very dear thing that you’ve lost; or even to believe you can.

  “Damn,” you say to yourself. “I can’t find my favorite warm scarf. I guess I’ll have to go down to that department store where I found it four years ago and buy another one.”

  And you actually expect this exact beloved scarf—without its tattered fringe and coffee stains—to be still in production and still in stock. It’s only been four years, after all.

  And it’s not that you’d be satisfied with a nicer scarf than the one you’ve lost, either. You want that familiar feel against your neck, that color for a wintry day. You want that scarf back. Now.

  Which is what Millard and I tried to do about five months after we lost Cosi.

  First, though, let me confess that I would have tried to clone her in a shot, ferociousness and all. But cloning was science fiction in 1986. Had it been an option, I’d have been first in line because, as dubious as the procedure seems and doubtless is, I have vast sympathy for anyone who hopes to replace a loved one that way.

  (I confess, too, that I’ve saved two strips of tape and a piece of gauze that they left on Millard’s arm. You know, just in case.)

  And while science hasn’t worked out all the bugs yet, they will surely get it right someday and oh, I’d love to be around to see it. Because then, ah joy, millions upon millions of beloved dogs and husbands will rise again to complain that it’s too cold to go out for a walk and where’s that leftover steak?

  So we started to look around for another Jack Russell puppy. Or rather, I started to look around, since, as you know by now, I was ever the designated shopper. It was the sort of job I was born for, anyhow. All those years of antiquing the East Coast, picking out what I thought I could resell, had made me good at it.

  I wish I could have done things right, though: called the august American Kennel Club, for instance, which is where one would ordinarily start the search for breeder recommendations. But it didn’t like “us,” you remember. So I tried Texas again and discovered that, for some strange reason, Texas wasn’t taking my calls. Closer to home, I heard about one Long Island breeder who didn’t have a litter but was expecting one next spring. Spring? ! We wouldn’t last till spring.

  And then, finally, I talked to someone who talked to someone who knew a breeder in England.

  Wow, I loved that idea from the get-go. Our very own new puppy arriving straight from the cradle of Jacks! An Imported Dog, so to speak. Made in England. Like our china.

  But here’s where I went wrong.

  In my haste to fill the chasm where our love-dog used to be, I didn’t follow the drill. I didn’t ask for pictures of the puppy’s parents, didn’t see a decent photo of her or her littermates or her great uncle on her dam’s side.

  And here’s an interesting sidebar, one you may not be aware of yet.

  What I’ve described above is exactly how, before that mandatory “first year” is up, widows wind up marrying old family friends who seem to walk the walk and talk the talk. They’re in such a grieving hurry to replace what they’ve lost that they forget to ask about the compulsive gambling, or the brother in Leavenworth or the wife who was “outgrown.” They take the undemanding route. As do widowers, who are possibly even less discriminating, and heedlessly (disappointingly) happy to wind up with the bringer of the seventh casserole.

  Which must be why, in my own urgency to stopper the hole in our hearts, I mailed off a not unreasonable sum of money to an unknown breeder in one of those picturesque-sounding shires of the UK, trusting that I’d receive, in turn, a small crate at La Guardia’s freight depot bearing your typical twelve-week-old, brown-spotted Jack Russell bitch.

  I began to live for that day.

  Freight depot parking at La Guardia is not for the fainthearted.

  On an overcast, coolish October day, just as they laughably do in the movies, I left my car right in front at the curb because there was nowhere else to park, and in the dim freight office, after much exchanging of paper and photo IDs, took avid possession of a small green plastic case randomly slapped with scarlet LIVE ANIMAL stickers. Hurrying with my treasure to my—hey!—ticketless car, I realized that amidst the paperw
ork and stress, I’d barely found time to peek through the door’s wire grill for more than a glimpse of three or four squares of smooth white fur. Only when I put the crate on the backseat did I notice that said white fur seemed unusually quiet. She was taking this well, I decided, while I, on the other hand, wasn’t. I was dying see what she looked like, not to mention dying to hold her. So several times a minute on our ride home—seriously endangering scores of fellow drivers on the LIE—I rubber-necked in hopes of catching some key body part in the rearview mirror, a bright eye, a black nose, an ear, maybe.

  But I saw little and heard less.

  Could this pup, who had just flown from Heathrow in the freezing belly of BOAC, be thirsty or hungry or ... severely traumatized? Or—and here I flashed on my first days with my newborn son—was she even breathing in there? I needed to get home.

  At the front door at last, I wrestled the travel crate out of the car and into the empty kitchen, closed the kitchen door ever so gently, hoping not to startle little Blue (don’t ask), and breathlessly unlatched and dropped the wire door of the dog carrier. Out stepped—shaking herself and smelling really rank—a tiny, pure white terrier, the spit and image of a Chihuahua: bulging brown eyes, pointy upright ears, skinny white body on long, sticklike legs.

  Yikes.

  Which doesn’t begin to express my misgivings.

  I checked the label on the crate, but I had the right dog. And as I stared, unbelieving and unnerved, she confidently weed on the floor and explored a handy electrical socket. This non-Jack. This mutant. This pogo.