A Three Dog Life (6 page)

Try another approach. At the earliest sign of an escalating growl, get up and leave the room. This is called
removing yourself from the equation
and try to remember what this has to do with mathematics. Fail. Discover that when you are gone they lose interest in fighting, and wonder whether everything is always all your fault. Enjoy a pointless thought about the tree falling in the forest. Notice and begin to appreciate the fact that dogs do not apologize. When the altercation is complete, they head across the bright green lawn tails high, bumping sides as they run. Lament the human addiction to apologies, and how easily they are botched. Be prepared when you hear from your estranged daughter. Be jubilant cautiously.

Try not to read too much into the news that she has just bought a dog.

Rosie needed to play, and I wasn't up to it. I'd grown weary of running after her to give up a soggy ball I didn't want in the first place, and she had no receptors for "drop it." Poor Harry stood stoically while Rosie ran around him barking, nipping his hind legs to give him a jump start. All in vain. She deserved an equal, and I looked at several dogs who needed homes: a rambunctious big black Lab mix who would have overwhelmed us; a pretty blue-eyed husky who hated men; a tiny little thing that looked like a silver eyebrow running around the house but Harry growled and snapped and that was that—the allergic owner swept her up in his arms and out they went. One rainy night I almost adopted a pregnant Dalmatian. The pet store owners offered to pay her vet bills and help with adoption of the puppies, they were so desperate to find her a home. I didn't ask the circumstances of her being knocked up, but the deed had been done, they told me, by a cocker spaniel. Elvina lay on the floor of Dog-a-Rama, raising her head with only minimal interest when stroked gently along her spine. She was in a fix and she knew it. The pet store owners were nice men with accents I couldn't place. They were visibly upset. People were interested in a free Dalmatian, they told me, but not a pregnant one.

I was about to teach my night class around the corner, and although I had nothing against bringing her to school, something stayed my hand. I had to think this through. Could I protect her? What if my exuberant Rosie wanted her to get up and play? What if Harry took a dislike to her puppies? When I was a girl, our dachshund, Max, ate a litter of kittens. Could I keep the babies safe? My class, when polled, was 100 percent for adoption—but they were writers, and writers suggest things just to see what happens next. My friends were more cautious, one of them laughing as if the words "a pregnant Dalmatian" were the punch line of an excellent joke. I got home at midnight and called my daughter Jen, who to my surprise was not encouraging. "Not a great idea, Ma," she said. I telephoned the store the following afternoon and learned Elvina had found a home.

Hallelujah.

And then a friend called. "You should go see this dog," Susan said. "I hear she's wonderful. I think she's some kind of beagle." So I called Jodi Judson and went for a visit.
You ain't nuthin but a hound dog,
I all but sang when I first laid eyes on her.

Carolina Bones was gangly and goofy, with a lugubrious expression that gave her a kind of ridiculous dignity. One look at her loping around the yard and I was in love. Jodi had found the dog living at a rest stop off I-95 somewhere in South Carolina. She was so skinny that her bones were working holes through her skin. Jodi says she thinks Carolina was near death that night, because she could barely stand. Jodi fed her all the food she and her husband had, but they were on their way back from vacation, and her husband was reluctant to take a strange dog in their car for the fourteen-hour trip ("Don't even think about it," he said) and they drove away. Jodi says she didn't say a word, but when they crossed the state line her husband said, "Oh, all right," and turned the car around.

These days all I talk about is dogs. For a while it was dogs and my poor health but I'm better so it's back to just dogs. I get nervous when I find myself answering the question "What's new?" by eagerly detailing the sleeping arrangements of the previous night—whether the four of us slept in the same bed or did Rosie go once again into the guest room. Sometimes I detect the tiniest pause before whoever it is murmurs a change of subject, then remembers an errand. But my dogs make me laugh, and they comfort me, and I'm never bored with them. When Rosie's head lies on my shoulder, Harry crams himself into my left side, and Carolina curls up like something folded by a Chinese laundry, impossibly small and neat, I am perfectly happy. We are the peaceable kingdom on a double bed. This is what it must have been like before the apple, when everything had a name but there wasn't so much discussion. I once asked my eldest daughter, Sarah, the mother of five, what it was about dogs that made loving them so easy. " They don't talk," she said.

They do communicate. When Carolina arrived there was the need to establish a pecking order. For the first week it was mostly a dog version of cussing, then one afternoon Rosie and Carolina had a fight, and when it was over Carolina's ear was bitten through. As I tended to the bleeding, I realized that like it or not, I was right in the middle of a wild and natural process. I was a card-carrying member of an animal pack, and to top it off, I was the alpha dog. I was the alpha dog, and the privilege of who sat next to me where, when, and how close, was up for grabs. Rosie triumphed over
Carolina that afternoon, although she was the smaller dog.

It's simpler than what humans go through. "Your voice sounds funny, are you mad at me?" a young woman speaks anxiously, cell phone pressed to ear, and I wonder how people ever manage to hook up. Dogs are never in a bad mood over something you said at breakfast. Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell. We talk too much.

A friend is visiting, and he has fallen asleep on the sofa. Carolina, leery of him from the git-go, is terrified when a book falls from his lap and hits the floor, and he wakes up with a jolt. "Was that me?" he asks, looking around. I nod. Carolina can't stop trembling. Harry loves my friend and Rosie leaps up for kisses, so it's not like he gives off bad vibes. I wish he'd get a dog. He isn't married anymore, and his life seems lonesome. He is my funniest, wisest, oldest pal.

"Have you ever considered suicide?" I asked years ago, when we were both still young enough to be talking about life and death. It was probably 1978.

"Of course," he replied, between bites of hot turkey sandwich.

"How would you do it?" I asked.

"I've always rather fancied hacking my own head off," he said. I was drinking coffee and laughed so hard it came out my nose.

"Difficult," I said, when I could speak again.

"That's the point," he said. "You wouldn't want it to be easy."

That's when I knew I would love him forever.

He arrived yesterday evening, after a late start. He probably almost didn't come. He has difficulty, he says, visiting friends. I notice he is happiest when he has spent enough time to qualify as a satisfactory house-guest—a night, a morning, most of an afternoon. Knowing he can leave any time now and not seem rude, he relaxes, dillydallies, engages in less workmanlike conversations. He reminds me of somebody standing next to the edge of the cliff after making the dangerous climb. He isn't going to stay, but he can peek at it.

"I think you should buy a house up here," I say. We are sitting in my backyard.

" That sounds nice," he says.

" You could come over for coffee all the time."

"And go into work three days a week," he says, as if he's actually considering it. The pretense is a courtesy, but I appreciate good manners.

"You could have a dog," I continue. It's a lovely evening, he's getting ready to go. "I could," he says.

The dogs churn around his ankles like surf when he says good-bye. I wave, I don't press him to stay. Then I close the door. "Naptime," I announce, and my pack and I scramble toward the sofa, where we will doze for a good long while, piled on top of each other like a bunch of puppies.

You will need three dogs, one of whom has caught the scent of something interesting wafting through the second-floor window. She is a hound. They are all hounds and the four of you sleep together on a double bed. When you open your eyes (her warm doggy breath on your face) she will be staring at you with such intensity that you burst out laughing. You will throw on yesterday's clothes (which are lying conveniently on the floor) and head downstairs without tripping over Rosie, Harry, or Carolina, all of whom are underfoot. When you open the kitchen door they will fly into the yard and immediately commence hunting, noses to the ground, some small creature whose zigzagging trail resembles an electrocardiogram. You follow them onto the wet green lawn. So now you're outdoors and it's five
A.M.

For the last month you've been inside while it rained. Perhaps you are a fan of rain, but this may have gone on too long. You have stopped answering your phone. You don't gather the mail. You have noticed that bad as it was when two dogs followed you from room to room, it's even worse with three. Every time you get up, they get up.
Please don't, it's not worth it,
you want to say as you rise from your soft red chair to wander into the kitchen on an errand you forget before arriving. You look out the window while the dogs settle down on a rug by the stove. They are so good-natured. Moments later you drift into the living room and again the dogs trail along behind, and if you do this often enough, the aimlessness of your day is driven home. From here it is but a hop, skip, and a jump to the pointlessness of your existence, which is why it is so excellent to be outdoors with your clothes on at five this morning.

Next, you will need a bed of nettles five feet high. Perhaps you already have a garden like this, having neglected it for the two years you have lived in the country. You have told yourself that you don't want to put anything into the ground so you will not have to hate the deer who will certainly eat it, but the fact is you are bone lazy and prefer drinking coffee and sitting on the stoop to weeding or raking or digging a hole. But nettles have closed over the heads of three pink peony bushes you could swear you saw two summers ago, and you are experiencing an unfamiliar surge of energy. You dash inside and good, there they are, the gardening gloves given to you as a housewarming present two years ago still stapled together. You rip them apart, don them, and charge back into the yard.

Your first nettle comes up with the perfect amount of resistance—none—you can yank it out by the roots and you do so, flinging it with joy behind you. You yank another and another, and pretty soon you are a madwoman, pulling nettles three at a time, caring nothing for the stinging on your arms and ankles, and the mound grows on the grass behind you. Sometimes you get a stubborn old grandfather and pulling as hard as you can you reach the big root snaking just under the surface and you get that too, dirt flying as you tear it out, and now you are
the old woman and the nettle,
destroyer and giver of life, and you understand the ferocity of the gardener.

After five or six minutes you will tire and stand back from your work. A tiny patch has been thinned. Perhaps you will now make coffee and bring the cup outside. If all goes well, a perfect pink peony bush will be revealed by lunchtime. There will be slim yellow irises too, and the big throaty purple ones that remind you, alas, of an old man's scrotum, but you will weed there too. By early afternoon the sun may burn through what has been a heavy mist, and should you not be ready to be dazzled, do not fret. It is time for a nap anyway. Inside you may notice that what you thought was dust is instead a layer of golden pollen blowing through the open windows.
If only life were more like this,
you will think, as you and the dogs traipse up to bed, and then you realize with a start that this
is
life.

My hound dog, Carolina, is sitting in the car, and I'm in the drugstore standing in an Aisle I haven't been down for fifteen years. Carolina is in heat. Such an archaic concept, heat. I'm looking for something to slip into the mesh pocket of a red Speedo-like contraption I've just bought for her. Who knew they made such things for dogs? I recall the flimsy little garter belts we girls got with our first box of sanitary napkins and the accompanying pamphlet regarding the human reproductive cycle. Light years ago. I pick an item that comes wrapped in pink and says mini and then I hobble over to Aisle 4b, Pain Relievers, where I'm more at home. My back hurts. I grab aspirin, pay for everything, and head for the car. Carolina's nose is smeared against the window. "Good dog," I say, "good dog," and manage to get myself sitting down without screaming and I pat her big head and nuzzle her neck, and her tail thwacks against the passenger seat. Carolina is halfway through her first treatment for heartworm and going into heat seems grossly unfair. "Jesus, yet more trouble," as some martyr said when the executioner reached in to yank out his intestines. (I can't remember which saint this was, but my mother loved to quote him.) Before I start the car I line up the arrows, take off the cap, stab a pen through the foil seal, and gobble down three aspirin.

This is my first experience with a dog in heat but the back pain arrived thirty years ago when I bent to pick a canned peach off the kitchen floor and couldn't straighten up. My second husband seemed familiar with the problem. "My god, what is this called?" I cried as he tried to help. "It's called my back is killing me," he said. This version of my back is killing me comes from wearing a pair of stylish new red shoes that pinch my left foot and make me walk lopsided. I don't know why I keep putting them on except they show off my ankles. At age sixty-three, ankles are my best feature unless you count cake.

When I get home I discover it's nearly impossible to put this thing on my dog. There is a place for her tail and Velcro fastenings that go over her haunches but try sticking a dog's long tail through the hole of a small slippery garment while the dog turns around and around in circles. It takes fifteen minutes and when I succeed, Carolina turns her baleful eyes on me and I want to apologize. She is a dog dressed like a monkey.