Paws before dying (2 page)

“I know what SATs are,” I said. “Believe it or not, I even took them.”

“And then there’s Cambridge,” Cassie said. “Of course, we always hoped that Arthur would get the call, but...”

Don’t be misled. Although Arthur went to graduate school down the street from my house—at Harvard, in other words— he didn’t go to theological school. He and Cassie both think that the entire institution is divine.

“But the trumpets never sounded,” I said gracelessly, mostly because I realized that Cambridge was simply Arthur’s idea of a classy-sounding boarding kennel. I wouldn’t trust my dogs to someone I knew as slightly as Arthur and Cassie knew me. “How old is she?”

“Sixteen.”

“And she didn’t, uh, inherit...?”

“She is in robust health,” Cassie said. I took that to mean that she was fat. “And she
is
your niece.”

“Cousin.”

“But she does call you Aunt Holly. Because of the age difference?

“I’m not that much older than she is, you know. I’m only a little over thirty.” And why would Leah have an occasion to call me anything? She hadn’t seen me for ten years. My promotion to aunt was probably one of Arthur’s transparent ploys to finagle two months of room and board. If Leah’s species and breed had been what my mother originally supposed, I wouldn’t have given in. Much as I adore golden retrievers, I’d have had to explain to Cassie that the first time her bitch tried to drink out of Kimi’s or Rowdy’s water bowl, one of my malamutes, probably my own bitch, Kimi, would crush her muzzle. But Leah wasn’t, after all, a golden retriever, and I’m not Kimi. I said yes.

“So if you feel that way about these people, why didn’t you tell her no?” Steve Delaney, Rowdy and Kimi’s vet, has a quiet, reasonable voice. He is tall and lean, with curly brown hair and blue eyes that change to green. He’d arrived soon after I talked to Cassie and was sitting at my kitchen table fooling around with the dogs while I scrambled some eggs and toasted an English muffin for him. He doesn’t really like breakfast for dinner, but I can’t cook much else and hadn’t been to the store recently, anyway. The alternative that night was IAMS Mini Chunks, which is more nutritious than my cooking and, in fact, may well taste better, too.

“Why? Probably because she sounds like my mother.” By the time I was born, my mother had spent years obedience-training spirited dogs. A mere small person was no challenge. Don’t think that she was harsh, though. She never raised her voice, but her tone made you want to do whatever she wanted. I lost her more than ten years ago, and, in case it isn’t obvious already,

I’ll tell you that I miss her all the time. “Also, I guess I felt sorry for this poor ugly, fat kid, with her parents taking off for Europe and obviously just wanting to get rid of her for the summer.” I buttered the muffin, scraped the eggs out of the two skillets onto the plate, plunked Steve’s food in front of him, and let the pans cool so the dogs wouldn’t burn their tongues. When Kimi first entered our household, I tried to keep track of whose turn it was to lick pans, but the concept of taking turns is somewhat abstract even for Alaskan malamutes, dogdom’s geniuses— hence two pans. The concession stands at dog shows sell sweatshirts embellished with stylized paw prints and the words “My dogs walk all over me.” I own one.

“I thought you hadn’t seen her for ten years,” Steve said. “I haven’t, but Cassie says she’s robust, and that’s got to be a euphemism, right? And the last time I saw her, she looked like Arthur, I think. Okay, guys. Here you go.”

They didn’t need to be told. Malamutes always know what’s meant for them, and if it isn’t, they try to convince you that it should be. Before the pans reached the floor, the dogs’ red tongues were scouring them, and each dog’s big dark brown eyes were scanning the other dog’s booty to calculate the chance of finishing first and stealing what the other had left. All malamutes have brown eyes, of course, and the darker, the better. In case you didn’t know, the blue-eyed sled dogs are Siberian huskies, although some Siberians have brown eyes. Malamutes, of course, are much bigger than Siberians, with strong bulky muzzles and rounded triangular ears set wide apart. At that time, Kimi, the bitch, weighed an ideal seventy-five pounds, and Rowdy was somewhere between eighty-five and ninety pounds, but don’t go by weight. Malamutes have a thick undercoat of soft, short fur covered by a long outer coat of coarse guard hair, so they look bigger than they are, and they’re even stronger than they look, bitches included.

“And,” I added, “can you imagine? Here is a member of my own family—my mother’s niece—who grew up without dogs. I mean, it’s practically inconceivable. So obviously, she’s kind of pathetic. She must sense this void in her life and not know what’s supposed to fill it. So this idea crossed my mind that she could handle Kimi for me—you know, as a kind of therapy.”

“For you?”

“She isn’t driving me that crazy, and you have to admit, she’s improved a lot. Haven’t you, Kimi?”

Both dogs were sprawled on the floor with the pans clutched between their big snowshoe front paws. I’d painted the kitchen cream with terra-cotta trim when I had golden retrievers, but if I ever had the money, I intended to do it in silvery gray and white with a real slate floor, not more fake-tile linoleum. In the meantime, though, Rowdy and Kimi’s wolf gray and white didn’t clash, and, in any case, they’d have graced a hovel. Bonnie, who edits my column, won’t let me say it in print, but Alaskan malamutes are the most beautiful dogs on earth.

When Kimi heard her name, she raised her eyes, but didn’t release her grip on the pan. She growled softly.

“Her attention is much better,” I added. “And, of course, I’ll find a class for Leah to take her to. There’s one in Newton, in some park. Rose Engleman called me about it the other day. I’ll take Rowdy. She can take Kimi. It’ll be a sort of emotional reeducation. As it is, she’s probably terrified of dogs, and I’m sure she has no idea what to do with them. And mais aren’t one-person dogs.”

“It’s generous of you,” Steve said, as if generosity to my fellow human beings were as foreign to me as dogs were to Leah. “So? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“So it’s nice of you. That’s all.”

Then we washed the dishes and went to bed. Doesn’t
your
vet make house calls?

Chapter 2

ON the day Leah arrived, the thermometer outside my kitchen window hit ninety, and the air was so saturated with moisture that the scribbled draft pages of my new column stuck together, the windows and mirrors clouded up, and my clean, odorless malamutes smelled like dogs. In the late afternoon, the pale gray cloud cover turned deep charcoal, and thunder began to roll. The downpour let loose just as Arthur’s academically correct medium-blue Volvo station wagon pulled into the driveway at the back of my house, which is the barn-red wood-frame tripledecker on the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue. The wagon was obviously a professor’s car, five or six years old and dented, with a multihued collection of campus parking permits stuck on one of the rear windows. If Harvard had seen Arthur’s car, he’d have heard the celestial brass, after all.

“Holly Winter?” It sounded like a genuine question, probably because he expected to find the yard filled with dog runs, the air rich with yelps, and a clone of one of my parents exuding dander in his direction. I’m not much like either one. Maybe that’s too bad, maybe not. Marissa was spectacular, but Buck is a human moose.

“Arthur,” I said.

I hadn’t remembered how tall he was, and I’d forgotten his face because there was nothing memorable about it. He was wearing one of those complicated British intellectual trench coats with dozens of flaps, pockets, buttons, fasteners, and miniature epaulets, and his face, eyes, and hair were the same bland English beige. His head was disproportionately large and remarkably oval, his body long, thin, and straight. He looked quite a lot like a wooden spoon.

Leah did not, which is why her arrival is somewhat blurred in my memory. I remember inviting Arthur in, and I’m positive that he declined the invitation. If Kimi and Rowdy had escaped from my bedroom, where they were temporarily jailed to protect them from Arthur’s hostility to their species, I’m sure I would recall the event. Arthur, I believe, stood in the rain yanking out Leah’s gear and handing it to us, and we ferried it through the downpour and into my kitchen. We must both have said good-bye to him.

I clearly recall planting my wet feet on the muddy kitchen floor next to the pile of Leah’s sodden belongings and staring at her. As a child, it seemed to me, she had had light hair, but as sometimes happens in golden retrievers, the color had deepened to a rich red, much deeper than mine. My eyes are brown like Buck’s. Hers were blue. Her face was not oval like Arthur’s, but triangular, and in envisioning her as ugly, I had been entirely wrong. And robust? She had what my grandmother used to call an hourglass figure. I haven’t heard her use the phrase since Marissa died. The only glass object my own figure resembles is a test tube. Except for the shades of red in our hair that echo the blaze of Marissa’s, Leah and I were nothing alike. I don’t look like my mother. Leah did. The similarity was particularly amazing because it transcended the style of Leah’s times. Her long, wavy hair was pulled into a lopsided topknot, and she wore a black tank top over a blue T-shirt over a white long-sleeved shirt above a pair of knee-length metallic blue and black shorts intended for the Tour de France.

“Is something wrong?” She sounded like Cassie, who, of course, sounds like Marissa, but her voice was higher pitched and less throaty than theirs.

“No, nothing. I’m glad to see you. I’m just... I want you to meet my dogs.”

“Golden retrievers, right?”

“I used to have goldens,” I said. “But I’ve had a conversion experience.”

When I opened the bedroom door, somewhat over a hundred and sixty pounds of Alaskan malamute barged into the kitchen and ignored me. I have owned a lot of dogs, and not one has ever been allowed to jump on people, but I hadn’t had Kimi very long, and before that, she’d had a laissez-faire puppyhood. Besides, anyone who knows anything will tell you that northern breeds are a challenge to train. Kimi wasn’t trying to knock Leah over. Her aim was simply to get close to Leah’s face, and since Leah didn’t kneel down, Kimi rose up. Rowdy knew not to jump. He dropped to the floor at Leah’s feet, rolled onto his back, and foolishly waved his great, powerful legs in the air.

“Wow! Huskies!” At least she sounded happy about it, and although I observed her carefully for signs of what my father believes to be satanic stigmata—watery red eyes, a dripping nose, blotches, and sneezing—I saw none. She rubbed Kimi’s neck vigorously and looked down at Rowdy. “Is that one having some kind of fit?”

“No. And they’re malamutes.” If you own a malamute, so many people tell you what a beautiful husky you have that the response becomes automatic. I didn’t mean to begin our relationship on a note of correction, especially because I was relieved to hear her say something that would never have passed through the speech center of my mother’s brain, Marissa would even have known which strain of malamute they were: Kotzebue. “Alaskan malamutes. This is Rowdy,” I said as I rubbed his belly, “and the bitch is Kimi. The female. The one with the black markings on her face. Rowdy, sit.” He did. “Give your paw.” Leah lowered Kimi, gravely waved her hand in front of Rowdy, and grasped his massive foot. He already knew the trick when I got him. I’d avoided teaching it to Kimi because pawing is dominance behavior, and no malamute needs instruction in bossing people around.

“Kimi, sit,” Leah said. She made the same handshaking gesture that had prompted Rowdy. “Give your paw.”

Kimi, who didn’t know the routine, sat squarely in front of Leah, flattened her ears against her head in a display of dutiful submission, and gently raised a forepaw. She didn’t squirm and didn’t rake her claws on Leah’s legs.

“Good for you,” Leah told her. “Wha
t
a goo
d d
og!”

The Julia Child of dog training was the late Barbara Woodhouse, a British woman whose TV series promoted the belief that dogs adore the sounds of
d
and
t
and that the correct way to praise a dog is to sing out: “Wha
t
a goo
d d
og! ” I was pretty sure that Leah had never heard of Barbara Woodhouse. Kimi kept staring up at her as if begging to be told what to do next.

“Kimi, okay,” I said. That’s the release word I always use, the word that tells my dogs that they’re free to do what they want. Kimi didn’t move. “Okay!” I repeated happily. Kimi didn’t even look at me.

“Okay!” Leah said, and Kimi bounced into the air.

“Leah, have you ever trained a dog before?” I asked.

“You mean dog school?” The voice was my mother’s, but not the tone of incredulity. Heftily degreed parents like Leah’s should have instilled a proper respect for institutions of higher learning, but she sounded as if I’d asked whether she had an M.A. in découpage or a diploma from an accredited academy of miniature golf.

I let the subject drop and helped her to transfer the pile of possessions to the guest room. The house belongs to me, or will eventually, but I inhabit only the first floor and rent the second-and third-floor apartments. (In spite of the fresh Sheetrock, good floors, and new kitchens and baths in the apartments—and absent from my own place—I rent only to pet owners.) As I watched Leah haphazardly unpack, I realized that her lukewarm response to the prospect of obedience training stemmed from the sport’s failure to require human participants to wear a uniform or costume. Collars are strictly regulated, of course— no tags, no pinch collars, and, obviously, nothing electronic— but handlers wear whatever they want.