Year of the Dog (9 page)

Turning off Church Street, I headed along the quiet sidewalk toward the Pharmacy. Beulah, confident because we often came this way, trotted by my side. The air had a fall feel though it was still September, still pleasant, but with a crispness, and across the street in the Methodist Church yard I saw in the dusk yellow leaves already on the maple. I thought I might find something to mention to Mr. Sturgis when I wrote him, something to let him know I appreciated his call, and really was just on a sabbatical and definitely planning to come back, that I was following all the new drugs mentioned in the paper that were in early trials and how they looked as possibilities. Though I guess what I really wanted to do was just hang out inside a pharmacy tonight, just be there, the way some people hung out in discount stores or book chains, places where you could spend hours and you didn't have to buy anything, or really even speak to anyone.

Inside, where Beulah was welcome in her Companion Dog vest, I studied the Herbal Wellness shelves, a much larger section than we had at home, with their familiar products—kava-kava for calmness, L-arginine for male dysfunction, St. John's wort for depression. I picked up something I hadn't seen before, called Senior Moment, and read, in the tiny-print
listing, the primary ingredient:
porcine phospholipids.
Hog lard for brain food? How could a company do that, letting anybody buy it without a warning, someone who might be a vegetarian or Jewish or Muslim, that they were eating pig fat?

Then, with Beulah attentive at my side, I wandered the aisles. I did the wall-hung cosmetic displays and the shelves of body lotions and soaps that promised moisture without additives. I checked men's shaving supplies and the legions of dental products. I looked at the raft of cold remedies, on which you could spend a whole evening and people did.

Alone, I might have stood in the back by the chairs reserved for people waiting and watched to see what prescriptions ailing people got filled. Listening to how, just the same as at home, the old people complained about the cost, the handicapped in wheelchairs complained about access, and young girls filling two or more prescriptions blew their noses a lot. Such drama I was missing. Such lives exposed down to the lining of the nasal passages and the gut, such discomfort, such disappointment, such hope.

16

THE PUPPY EVALUATION had me in a state of anxiety. This time it wasn't the local Companions looking over our puppies to see how they were progressing: this time the real evaluators from the Companion Dog Kennels in Massachusetts were coming to assess each of our dog's potential to be trained in earnest to work with the blind. This was a hurdle we raisers would have to go through three times before our dogs went for the final tests at the Kennels at the end of the training year.

Driving by PACIFIC VIEW, I pulled the car in for a minute, just to stop and catch my breath. I'd dressed in khaki pants and a black cotton jacket, so I wouldn't look like I thought this was play. To my surprise, every parking place in the motel held a car, half of them from Quebec, and the NO VACANCY sign flashed on and off. Crowds already pouring into Vermont to see the fall leaves. In late September! When I'd stayed here at the end of May, the place had been virtually empty.

At the former Country Day School, Edgar and his person, Sylvia, greeted us in the parking lot, and we both felt good seeing the two dogs recognize each other, them getting excited the way toddlers did when they saw another small person they knew, and we let them nip and play a bit. Sylvia had been worried about Edgar being the only golden retriever in the class of labs, and, lately, worried that maybe he had a cold. Did dogs
get colds? I didn't know. I'd read in the Puppy Manual all the warnings about ear infections, itchy skin, fleas and ticks, urinary infections, lameness, accidental breeding (!), but nothing about colds.

In the cheerful primary room, Sylvia and I sat next to each other for support, and talked in a general way about how things were going. Then the evaluators arrived and introduced themselves. Patsy, in jeans and boots, explained she would be the one walking our dogs through their paces. As her eyes roamed the room, she seemed not to see the persons at all, but to be studying the dogs as possible Companions. Deirdre, also in jeans, a braid down her back, told us she would be the one scoring our checklists. That a perfect score was five, but that no dog ever received a five.

And then our dogs were called out one by one.

“Tory,” Patsy spoke the frisky black lab's name firmly and his person led him out. He actually wagged his tail when he stood by her—and it looked good to see a doggy dog. “Bring him to attention and turn him around,” Patsy instructed.

The woman tugged at his leash, at the same time saying, “
Tor-y.
” But the dog didn't move. Patsy said crisply, “He needs to know it's time to work. Do you use his Companion Dog vest when you go out? Do you differentiate when he's working from when he can relax? Here, let's give it a try.” Then Tory's raiser had to go through the excruciating drill of watching the evaluator walk the puppy around in a circle, keeping him close by her left leg, then stopping him, having him, “Sit,” then “Stay,” then being handed back the dog for her to do the same thing, without success.

Help me, Jesus,
I thought, using Mom's phrase, my stomach knotting up.

While Tory's woman got her checklist from Deirdre, Patsy called out, “Vijay.” I and everyone else had seen that the huge yellow lab still had his mounting problem. All the time we'd
been having sympathy for Tory, Vijay had been trying to hump first Edgar and then Naomi. Patsy spoke to his raiser, a cocky sort of jock guy, who seemed to think it smart, his big dog trying to be a stud. But to my regret, Vijay did great once Patsy took his leash. He stood attentive, held himself well, looked straight ahead. Twice he led the evaluator up and down the wide stairs in the back of the room, then he stayed, alert, when she dropped the leash and disappeared from his sight into the bathroom. “How is he in traffic?” Deirdre asked. “No problem,” the young man said, “except when there's another dog.” “We like tough, confident dogs,” she told him. “But stop that problem before it becomes a habit.” When Edgar's turn came, Sylvia got up quickly, leading him forward, expecting he would do well. We all did—everyone responded to his wide golden trusting face. But right away, we could see something was wrong. Patsy motioned to Deirdre to kneel down at dog level with her. “Listen. Do you hear that?”

“I think he has a cold—,” Sylvia said, biting her lip, as if any canine respiratory problem must be her fault.

“I hear it,” Deirdre said, and then the two evaluators spoke in low voices while Sylvia, close enough to listen, turned from red to ashen, and looked ready to cry.

Patsy got to her feet and took Sylvia's arm. “He has a tracheal weakness. Most likely in his male breeding line. We should have caught that, although it's sometimes not expressed. He will have to be released from the program.” She leaned down to hold Edgar's throat in both her hands, and, even from our small wooden seats, we could hear a wheeze, almost as if he was being choked.

The four of us who were left couldn't go outside with Sylvia and console her, but my heart broke watching her leave.
Good dog. Good boy.
How could you work so hard with a dog and then have it dropped, when it wasn't your fault? Next to me, Rhonda, already a nervous puppy, tucked her tail in
and began to pee.

“Beulah,” Patsy read the next name on the list. “Let's see how she's doing.” She had me walk her around the large room with its bright shiny floor, stop her, have her “sit,” go “down” when I swept my hand under her front legs, “stay,” which I told her, and then let her walk me across the room. “Good girl,” I praised, “Good girl,” breathing out in relief. Then Patsy took the leash, and, at every command, Beulah turned to look at me, to see if she was doing the right thing. When she got to the stairs—which she'd been going up and down out back at home since I first got her,
open stairs
at our place—she turned as if waiting for me to come along. Patsy gave me the leash, saying, “Tell her to go.” “Let's go,” I said, giving a little shake, and up Beulah went, without a pause, and then came as easily down again.

“She's too solicitous,” the evaluator said. “She can't look to the blind person for approval; remember that. Wean her.” She waved me to her partner.

Deirdre confirmed, “You take her on an outing at least three times a week?” “Yes.” “She rides in a car, on the floor?” “Yes.” I wanted to get credit for letting her go off to play with Edgar for whole afternoons and for having him over to our place, too. “Is she fearful?” I shook my head. “Let's see,” the woman said, suddenly banging an umbrella against the metal radiator, at which Beulah jumped backward. Then she popped the same umbrella open in Beulah's face, at which my sweet dog ran between my legs.

“Bang on a few dumpsters on your walks,” Deirdre instructed. “Let her hear traffic. Let her get close to a few scary people.”

Patsy grinned and stuck her hands in her jeans pockets. “We're doing evaluation in downtown Burlington next time; scary shouldn't be too difficult.”

Let her get close to scary people? I had them living right
upstairs. But I held my tongue and could feel my face burning from their comments.

“Rhonda,” Patsy called, as I sat down with my dog and my marked-up checklist. The rest of the afternoon became a blur. Rhonda's person got a discussion of some of the underlying issues involved in the dog's failure to hold her bladder until the designated spot. Sherry, the pale skittish young lab, who was next, froze halfway up the wide wooden stairs, refusing to budge up or down, having, finally, to be picked up and carried. Patsy warned that the puppy could become too anxious to function. “She's building worry, which results in her being less responsive.” Finally, the last raiser, who belonged to Naomi, the frisky inquisitive black lab, got a lecture on how to guard against the dangers of distraction.

Yet all three of these dogs went
willingly
along with Patsy, and then, when the two evaluators changed places, with Deirdre as well, going upstairs, out of the building, and back in, and never once checked on their people to see how they were doing.

All the while I sat there with my cheeks hot, looking at the bold handwriting on my sheet of paper:

anxious
—note tight ears

solicits approval
—looks to raiser for confirmation

lacks confidence
—startles easily, look for shedding

* * *

Outside, in the parking lot, we compared notes. My overall score of 2.8 was just as good (or bad) as everyone else's. But we forgot our problems at the sight of Edgar and his caretaker, who was wiping her eyes on her colorful sleeve, still standing by her car, and we all went together to tell Sylvia how sorry we were.

17

THE NEXT DAY, I called and invited Sylvia for lunch downtown, thinking she might need cheering up.

“Why don't you come here for coffee instead?” she suggested, sounding glad to hear from me. “We could let the dogs play, if you brought your puppy. I need to stick around here after I take the kids to school.”

“Sure,” I said, and promised to bring us some pastries.

I felt happy not to have to leave Beulah alone in the apartment while I was gone, which I'd been practicing doing. I could never bring myself to put her in the crate—anyway, I figured at her age, six months, that was just for if you had somebody over where she'd be in the way, such as a plumber, and instead I'd leave her on her long umbilical cord, with a rolled-up pair of socks and the yellow tennis ball to play with, and try not to smother her with hugs, so this would get to seem routine:
person leaves; person comes back.

I took us on a walk to Church Street early, so I could pick up something personal for Sylvia, although I hoped it wouldn't seem like a consolation present. And I found something nice, some apricot-scented shampoo, right away at the Body Shop, which I knew opened before ten, the only place that did, and that kept a sign in the window which said DOG-HOSPITABLE ESTABLISHMENT, so Beulah didn't have to wear
her orange vest. Then, heading back to my car, I went into a pastry shop called Plum's. I'd passed by it a lot, but never gone in, probably because it happened to be right next door to a sort of transvestite thrift shop that featured leather and metal along with fancy second-hand ballgowns, and which tended to be distracting. Plum's had cranberry and cherry scones, but, a surprise, they also had big square
hot buttermilk biscuits,
and I got three—so I could take one home in case we didn't eat them all.

Sylvia lived on a street not too far from the lake, in an area on the way to Charlotte, on a winding unpaved road with a lot of trees that were starting to turn, and with those street signs that had Pvt. before their names—hers was Pvt. Ethan Albertson. At first I'd thought these were named for privates in some war, but she explained they were just private roads. Beulah sat, patient, on her towel on the passenger seat floor, and that made me wistful, that she couldn't ride up front looking out the window, or even with her head sticking out into the wind, the way you saw ordinary dogs do.

I pulled off the dirt road into the driveway of the weathered two-story house, where Sylvia and Edgar were waiting for us. The dogs seemed so happy to see one another that I wished I could just take Edgar myself, now that he couldn't stay in the companion program. I really loved the idea of Good Dog having a playmate all the time. But I had called and asked Betty about that, and she had said that wouldn't do. That he'd been placed already in the Released Dog Program and there would be a nice home for him on a farm in early summer.

Sylvia seemed to like watching the dogs, too, and we took them off leash to run around her living room. She had dressed up, it looked like, wearing a long green skirt and a loose purple blouse with embroidered sleeves, deep colors which reminded me of her art cards, and the room had the same
colors and a big pot of dried purple flowers on the mantle. She put out a tray for the buttermilk biscuits—still warm—with a cup of decaf latte for herself and regular Colombian coffee for me, indicating she knew my preference, and that seemed so thoughtful I was touched.