More Nonfiction: "Heroin(e)" | "A Blessing"
“Domesticated Animals”
Edward
In late April of 2000, some four months after moving to West Texas, I picked up the newspaper and scanned the Want Ads. I was looking for a lawnmower, but my eyes kept returning to the Pet Section. And why not when I’d lived without a lawnmower for all of my adult life whereas my only years without a dog were my college years at the University of Chicago? “What do you know,” I told Bill, the man I’d moved to Texas to be with. “Someone in this town actually has a litter of corgis.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten Odie?” Bill said, blue eyes skeptical behind the glint of wire-rimmed glasses.
No, I hadn’t forgotten Odie, the sheepdog and god-knows-what-else mix who’d followed me home from campus two months ago. Three weeks with the boisterous, un-house-broken stray was all it took for me to give up (though I did manage to find a new owner); for I was driving two hundred miles round trip twice a week to teach at a university in New Mexico in between juggling a part-time job at the Texas Tech University Press.
Bill continued to name all the reasons why I should not take on the responsibility of a puppy right now, and I found myself asking: ‘When has discouragement ever stopped me?’ After all, my father had identified half a dozen logical reasons for me not moving to West Texas. What my father hadn’t taken into account was love. It was love that compelled me to pack my belongings into my 1990 Volvo and drive 2,000 miles to West Texas from Chicago. Now it was the possibility of love of a different kind—unquestioning, absolutely devoted, not to mention dependent—that was again overriding the practical.
Back at my own house, I telephoned the dog breeder.
Two hours later, I met Edward, then an unnamed, eight-week-old, tri-colored Pembroke welsh corgi. He was the only one of the nine puppies left.
“He’s so serious,” I said to Cherry, the petite private detective turned dog breeder, as Edward sat on her white couch eyeing me with caution.
She just shrugged. “He’ll grow out of it.”
Of course he didn’t grow out of his gravity during that first hour, though he did allow me to rub his tummy and bat a rubber ball back and forth along the linoleum.
I brought Bill back to meet him the following afternoon.
When Cherry showed us the birth certificate with the AKC registration, I realized the puppy’s birthday was the same date as Bill’s. “Like you, he’s one of nine.” After that, not even Bill could come up with a reason good enough to dissuade me from buying Edward, though I preferred to consider the four hundred dollar exchange an adoption fee.
Richard
Richard first moved into our tiny back house in September of 2001. He was a shaggy forty-something Brooklyn native with a law degree and an ex-wife and child living in Austin, and he’d come to Lubbock to study medicine at Texas Tech. Richard spent the first six weeks of medical school living in a campground while he waited for his student loans to come through. Once they did, he found our ad in the student union and immediately drove over. As Bill turned the key in the rental unit’s door, he anticipated the previous prospective tenants’ laments of ‘It’s so small.’ But Richard, who had to round his shoulders to pass through the front door, straightened up inside to happily survey the one hundred and fifty square foot single room, pronounce it ‘spacious,’ then sign a year-long lease.
Richard was allergic to cats and dogs and had therefore never had a pet, so it surprised me to watch him befriend our own. There was Spanky, a rambunctious, fluffy Siamese mix and former stray that moved in after figuring out the cat door; Zero, Bill’s much beloved beige tabby, now fourteen; and Edward, who had recently celebrated his first birthday. After coming home from the hospital emergency room where he dealt with everything from gastritis to gunshot wounds, Richard would often sit on the stoop stroking one of the cats; or he would stand spread-eagle on the lawn and toss one of Edward’s balls back and forth. Only after Bill installed a new air conditioner for Richard did we learn about the boxes of cat and dog treats he’d placed on a convenient shelf right beside the door.
Almost two years ago, Richard returned from a residency in Amarillo with a year old orange tabby he named Alley and three of her kittens: two females and one male. Richard never asked us if they could live in the alley adjacent to our back house. No, one day they were just ‘there,’ scrambling up the fence, exploring the shed, and eventually taking on the challenge of the roof. Richard did not intend to spay Alley or the two female kittens. Even when I did the math on a cat’s reproductive capacities, our future psychiatrist tenant still did not see the logic of birth control and therefore did not step forward and volunteer to spay Alley. So we did.
Buddy’s Forerunner
About a week after moving in to the house next door, Melissa, a blonde single mother with an equally blonde six-year-old daughter, brought a puppy home from the pound; an eight-week boxer/pit bull/retriever mix she named Raider after the university’s sports teams. After two days, I could no longer bear the puppy’s yelping in the yard. When I opened the gate and stepped into Melissa’s yard to try to comfort her, I discovered that she had been left without water or food on a scorching August day.
I scooped the puppy up, her heart battering my fingertips, and carried her to the front of Melissa’s house, and knocked on the door. No one answered. Afraid of how I might bond with the animal if I brought her into my home where I would be forced to meet her hazel eyes and acknowledge the responsibility of doing the right thing by her; and equally afraid of how easy it would be to convince myself to steal Raider (a terrible name for a dog, in my estimation) and ferry her into the comforting arms of my friend, Eileen, a kindergarten teacher who, I knew, could be counted on to help me find a decent home for her; afraid of all these things, I chose the path of least resistance. I chose to stay outside with the puppy and wait for Melissa to return.
When she did, I tried to say something not too direct about a puppy’s need for attention and supervision. Before I could finish, Melissa snatched back Raider and slammed the door in my face, the door slam prefaced by “Mind your own business!” uttered through clenched teeth.
I tried to, as did Bill, but how does one carry on when the four pound puppy-next-door grows into a neurotic, forty pound adolescent? On too many Fridays, Melissa would drive off for the weekend, leaving Raider entirely alone except for the woman who stopped by once a night to feed her. In Melissa’s absence, Raider scratched the white paint off the back door and gnawed her way through the garden hose, in the process flooding the neglected garden. She stripped the branches from the small trees and knocked down the trellises that had once supported the previous owner’s climbing roses. Towards the very end, she even ate the siding off the garage.
In early autumn, Melissa packed Raider into her SUV and drove her back to the shelter. No longer an adorable puppy, she was now seven months old and chock full of bad habits. “She was the wrong dog for us,” Melissa explained, her pale blonde face latticed by the chain link fence through which Bill and I viewed her.
Delia
This past summer I resolved to adopt a second corgi, possibly because a deep part of me yearns for a child to nurture; and certainly because Edward, now a precocious and debonair five, is so well-behaved that the idea of two corgis seemed to spell only double the pleasure.
Enter Delia who we found through the North Texas Pembroke Welsh Corgi Rescue. In my initial email exchanges with the organization, they identified Delia as an eighteen-month-old female who was supposedly given up because she didn’t get along with her owner’s other dog. Despite the red flag this set up in Bill’s mind, I determined to overlook it. “Let’s at least meet her,” I said.
Five days before the school year started, one of the rescuers, a breathless former Californian named Jane, drove over with Delia. They were supposed to come three days earlier, except that Delia had mysteriously disappeared from Jane’s yard. By the time she’d been recovered—and Jane wouldn’t say how—Delia had injured her left hind leg. Before they set foot in my yard, Jane had me convinced that Delia had been stolen, but given the way she hopped along on her three good but extremely short legs and checked out all possible exits in our back yard within the first five minutes of her arrival, it seemed far more likely that the injury had happened during Delia’s escape.
When Jane showed me the mangled dog collar in which Delia had arrived, the identification tag so badly scratched the words and numbers printed there were no longer legible, I knew that Delia had been neglected, if not abused, by her former owner. (Images of Raider, whose departure had taken place about a year ago, were still not far from my mind.) Delia’s vulnerability immediately endeared her to me as did her soft amber eyes. In those eyes, I saw the capacity for infinite faithfulness.
What did Edward think of Delia? He didn’t. Instead, all through that first two hour visit, Edward sat on the far side of the yard, and only occasionally looked up at Delia as he snuffled one of his many rubber balls or tried to coax Jane into a game of tug of war with his rope toy. As for Delia not getting along with Edward, it didn’t seem to be an issue. She seemed as little interested in him, as he was in her.
“She’s perfect,” I told Bill as soon as Jane packed Delia up into her van.
Bill, who rarely plunges into things with my own ‘you-only-live-once’ abandon, just frowned and said, “One step at a time.”
A reaction I read as ‘All roads clear ahead!’
At eight a.m. the next morning, Jane telephoned. “I’ve just heard from the vet. Delia has a sprained ankle and some torn ligaments, but there are no broken bones. You can pick her up and keep her for a few nights. A sort of trial run?”
I’ve never been an early morning person, but that sun-bright Tuesday I was in the car by 8:15. The veterinary technician who carried Delia out to my car said, “She must stay off her feet for a week, at least. And she’ll need to take two of these anti-inflammatories a day, preferably with food.”
When I pictured the first days with the new corgi, I pictured Edward, the newcomer and I romping in the park near our home, sunlight warming our shoulder blades, wind licking the backs of our necks. Afterwards, I would resume work at my desk while both dogs worked on a bone or snored at my feet. If the weather was fine, and the mosquitoes and flies weren’t biting, I imagined letting them loose in the yard where they would sit among the leaf-dappled patterns on the sun-sweet grass and listen to the birds.
Instead, I found myself trying to work with a wildly energetic animal who now, under Doctor’s orders, had to keep relatively still. To cope, I bought Delia chew toys and pigs ears and stuffed animals that squeaked. These contented her for a short while. But that first afternoon when I dared to take Edward on a walk by himself, I returned to find Delia barking unhappily beside the door. When she refused the offering of a liver treat and continued to bark, I clipped her leash to the new leather collar and walked her just to the corner. All the way there, she hopped energetically and with great focus on her three short legs.
Richard
How, we argued with Richard, can four cats possibly inhabit our alley, especially given the black male stray that used to start fights with Zero; not to mention our “good” neighbor Shirley’s three cats: the small, fierce huntress Leah; the fat but petite-footed Boots, and the elusive calico Kitty? Ten days after his return from Amarillo, Richard began to see the logic of what we were saying—or perhaps he just decided to give up arguing with his landlords.
Within the week, we placed the orange male with a jazz loving colleague. Someone else expressed interest in the scrawny black kitten with mottled red markings. But when the prospective owner phoned to come over and meet her, Richard stepped forward to tell us how badly he needed to keep Badfinger, who he’d named for the ‘70s rock band. “I’ve watched her ever since she was born. I can’t imagine giving her up now.”
“Only if you have Badfinger spayed,” we said.
Richard agreed.
The third kitten, a tabby with just a hint of red in her coat, Bill and I decided to keep. No, that’s not exactly correct. The jazz loving colleague’s wife wanted her and said she’d only take the male if the female tabby was already spoken for. That’s when I said we were keeping the tabby. And although the announcement came as a shock to Bill, taking in the tabby did seem the right thing to do, for Zero had died a few months earlier. As for Spanky, he’d developed the nasty habit of spraying the walls with urine and terrorized the aging Zero, the reason why he was now living with, or more appropriately on, an old lady’s lap somewhere on the outskirts of Austin.
We christened the kitten ‘Bea’, and over the next four months we bought her catnip mice which she dutifully batted around the wood floors. We doled out small saucers of cream, then watched her lap it up, her lithe body illuminated by morning sun. When she grew stronger, we rescued her from the low-hanging branches of the live oak, and later hoisted her down from the roof… until one night we came home to find her moaning on the kitchen floor, her body soaked with feces, her delicate and infinitely agile legs crumpled beneath her.
At the emergency veterinary clinic, we learned that Bea had been hit by a car. There was trauma to her spine as well as broken bones and the probability of severe nerve damage. How, we asked, had Bea managed to drag herself all the way from the street, around the back of the house, and in through the cat door before she collapsed on the kitchen tile? The momentousness of a question for which there was only one plausible answer compelled us to do all we could to save her.
Eight hundred dollars and six days later, our own veterinarian recommended a lethal injection to Bea’s damaged spine. Though the antibiotics and pain medications had restored her bright-eyed, playful spirit, she would never regain bowel function and was slowly being poisoned from within. It was Bill and not I who found the courage to sit with Bea and speak to her gently in the back room of the veterinary clinic on the last day of her life.
Buddy
Shortly after she got rid of Raider, Melissa got rid of her first live-in boyfriend. “It was an ugly breakup,” Melissa told me in the note she enclosed with the check for one of my books that the boyfriend had borrowed but never returned. By this time, we were on tentative speaking terms.
Enter boyfriend #2. Except for the fact that he was a little older and wore his clothes with less preppy swagger, I had a hard time distinguishing the new live-in—a slim, dark-haired, late thirties guy who drove an SUV—from his predecessor. Of course, boyfriends, in theory, I should care less about. The trouble stemmed from the arrival of a second dog in Melissa’s back yard.
“After Raider, I can’t believe she would even think of getting another dog,” I said, staring out the kitchen window at the good-natured late puppy, boxer-retriever mix (or so I identified the combination of breeds in a college town where, excepting toys like Yorkshire terriers and Chihuahuas, boxers and retrievers are the dogs of choice).
Bill was equally mystified, for we’d recently watched boyfriend #2 repair the door that Raider had scratched raw over the course of too many lonely weekends. We were aware of all the holes he had filled and the new trellises he’d installed. Boyfriend #2 had even told us that the new siding on the garage had cost $1,300 to replace. (“I got her a real sweet deal” were his actual words.) Given the disastrous outcome of the last situation, why bother to try again? “Maybe it’s like boyfriend #1…” I began.
Bill just scowled and said, “Really, Jackie, don’t go there.”
A few days later, it became apparent that the life of the new dog—ironically named Buddy—was not going to be much different from Raider’s. First thing in the morning, a hand would open the door and Buddy would bound into the yard. From eight a.m. until long past nightfall, Buddy was a fixture there. And when Melissa and boyfriend #2 went away for the weekend, Buddy would spend the entire weekend in the yard. Alone.
“He’s so adoptable at this point,” I told my friend Margaret, as we watched Buddy entertain himself with sticks and a few ratty toys. “I would steal him if I could and place him in a good home.”
Margaret encouraged the idea. Bill, however, pointed out that I could lose my job if got caught. “Texas Tech doesn’t want criminals on its faculty,” Bill said.
Enough said.
Over the summer, Buddy’s imaginativeness was finally pushed beyond the breaking point when he gave up on sticks and rope toys and the rawhides I pressed through the chain links of the fence, and turned to the garbage drum that Melissa or boyfriend #2 had left on the back porch.
Should I confess that I actually watched Buddy pry off the lid and tug the first plastic bag out of the container, then strew its contents all over the ground? Perhaps not, and yet I stood transfixed, as did Edward, who actually allotted a shred of respect to Buddy for the very first time as he watched the younger dog fling the contents of that plastic bag everywhere.
By six o’clock, there were yogurt and milk and cereal cartons all over the lawn. Browning lettuce leaves stuck to the creeping ivy. Colorful bits and pieces of plastic were scattered beneath the live oaks. A still legible condom box had even gotten rooted itself into the far side of the hedge.
I don’t know if Melissa ever knew the extent of the damage, for it was boyfriend #2 who arrived home first and proceeded to clean up. We watched him through the window, and once I stepped into my own yard to play ball with Edward. I behaved as if I knew nothing about what was taking place next door. Of course, boyfriend #2 and I both knew very well that I was keeping track of his stooped figure’s progress through the yard’s wreckage, and relishing every minute of it.
Delia
During Delia’s first weeks in our household, a typical morning went like this: while I would get dressed, she would follow me from closet—where I’d choose my clothes—to bed where I’d shimmy into stockings or shoes—to bathroom back to closet—for an adjustment or entire overhaul of the outfit—to front hall mirror—for a final look—back to bedroom again. And in the midst of this, she would lick any exposed skin and always managed to scurry under the bed with a sock or shoe I needed to put on before leaving for school.
This was Delia’s endearing side. At least her cloying devotion bordering on separation anxiety endeared her to Bill and to me, though it did not endear her to the graduate student who stayed with the dogs for a long weekend and still talks about Delia (several months later) as if she were a traumatic episode he will not soon get over.
What did not endear Delia to Bill or to me was her excessive and extremely loud barking. “She has no concept of an inside voice,” I’d apologetically tell someone who’d stop by, then try to make herself heard over the ear-piercing welcome that continued ten minutes into the visitor’s stay.
Always annoying, Delia’s barking morphed into a real problem when it came time to take the dogs for a walk. Sure, Edward always perked up when he’d hear his leash rattle. And yes, he barked a little before we’d make it out the door. Delia was another story. As soon as I’d creep towards the leashes, Delia would begin that machine gun rush of barking, the pitch and the loudness escalating as I tried to fit her harness onto her squirming body. As if pack behavior had at last set in with Edward, he now barked as loudly as he could. If there was any truth to the previous owner’s story about getting rid of Delia because of her troubles with other dogs, I now concluded that it must have been her bad influence. In bringing Delia into our lives, I asked myself, what—god help me—what had I done?
Edward
As soon as I force Edward through the doors of the Lubbock Animal Care Clinic, he begins growling. The other dogs usually just tremble a little, and then there are those rare few who wag their tails, as if the waiting room were a sort of social club. Not Edward. He growls and bares his teeth until the technician ushers us into an examination room defined by a stainless steel table and the eye-watering sting of ammonia.
While Edward and I wait for Dr. Hegi, a large Texan with white hair, thick black brows, big hands, and a fondness for drawing magic marker diagrams of his patients’ internal workings on an erasable board, I try to speak reasonably to Edward about the reasons we’re here. I try to explain that it would be much, much worse for him in the long run if Dr. Hegi didn’t check his ears, mouth, heart, and testicles; poke a thermometer into his rectum; and of course give him that annual barrage of shots.
The first time I took Edward to see Dr. Hegi, he placed his hand on nine-week-old Edward’s snout and attempted to open his mouth, and Edward growled. Dr. Hegi released Edward’s jaw, waited a moment, then tried again. This time Edward growled and snapped at Dr. Hegi who looked at me very sternly and in a soft but firm voice said, “You need to get this dog used to being handled. You need to show him that he’s not his own master. At least not all of the time.”
Dr. Hegi no longer says these things to me. Now, when he steps into the examination room and Edward snarls, and his back hairs stand on end, and he tries very hard to bite Dr. Hegi, our veterinarian silently slips a muzzle over Edward’s snout, then gives the technician some practical instructions about how to hold Edward still while he tries to examine him.
Richard
At the time of Bea’s death, Badfinger remained un-spayed. Every other week or so Bill would ask Richard to have the procedure taken care of, and every other week or so Richard would promise to do it. And so time passed, and nothing changed. Not to say that Richard neglected Badfinger. After long hours at the hospital, he’d come home and play with “Baddy”, as he called her, stroking her fur and talking to her in the most intimate of tones.
Richard loved the cats. Both Bill and I knew this, and despite the fact that Richard was older than me and superbly intelligent, I tended to think of him as a great big child or better yet, a great big dog with a few quirks that were the result of neglect or the misery that comes with a failed marriage.
Besides, I knew that Richard needed Alley and Badfinger the way I had needed Edward when I moved to West Texas from the Midwest. Without stout little Edward’s companionship, I don’t know how I would have grounded myself in a country where there are no native trees; a country where the wind can blow, days on end, forty miles an hour; a country where I had no roots.
Richard had been lonely up in Amarillo where his life had revolved around those long hours spent beneath the fluorescent lights of an emergency room. He’d told us as much after his joyful return to the one hundred and fifty square feet of our back house. Told us, too, that it was after one of those grueling shifts that he came back to his Amarillo apartment and encountered the pregnant Alley and brought her inside, despite his allergies. By the next morning, she’d given birth in his bathtub.
Despite the fact that several of Richard’s stories about the cats could be accompanied by violin, none of this changed the fact that Badfinger had to be spayed. “The point isn’t even up for discussion,” I told Richard one night when I saw the un-neutered black male skulking around and immediately pictured the stray mating with Alley’s surviving daughter.
“But Alley’s become really distant since she got spayed,” Richard said, as if this explained why he wasn’t taking care of a procedure that had now become a condition of his staying-on as our renter.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, no longer sure we were talking about a year and a half old cat.
“It’s like Alley’s become a post-menopausal female.”
I tried to explain that not a morning went by when I didn’t spread my yoga mat onto the back patio and see Alley shimmy her chubbier body through the space between gate and fence. “She loves to lie down on my mat when I do downward-facing dog pose. She makes such a pest of herself that I always wind up having to put her in one of the garden chairs. And then there’s the fact that she’s gotten really fat which means someone else is feeding her. So she’s got another friend somewhere in the neighborhood.”
“Jackie,” he said, drawing attention to the forty pounds he’d gained in Amarillo. “Food does not equal affection.”
“Well, if you want to live here, you have to do it,” I said. “Badfinger’s spaying is non-negotiable.”
By the time Richard and I parted, he had promised—and quite solemnly in my estimation—to take care of Badfinger’s reproductive capacities. “Just let me do it my way,” he said, then outlined a plan to find a veterinarian who would remove the uterus but leave Badfinger’s ovaries intact. The preservation of the ovaries, Richard insisted, was essential to ensuring the continuation of Badfinger’s affectionate nature.
“Fine,” I said. “Just do it.”
Delia
On my best days, I could laugh off the blast of Delia’s barking, even if the noise caused my teeth to tingle the way they did when I sucked on really cold ice after eating something hot. On my worst days, say when I was tired from a ten hour day at the university, or in bed with a cold, I could barely refrain from shouting “Shut up!” And on more than one occasion, my hand clamped down on Delia’s muzzle, and I told her, “Quiet!”
“Give her six months,” my friend Margaret said when I confessed that Delia was wearing me out, and I had actually begun to consider giving her away. The best part of me knew that Margaret was right. After all, Delia had been shuttled from her birthmother into a household where they had given up on her after eighteen months and a litter of puppies. She’d been with Jane for just a few weeks before she landed in our household. Now, just three months into the relationship, the workaday me was ready to hand her over to someone else, as long as that someone else could handle her.
That someone else, I believed, was Dewayne, a massage therapist and sixty year old ex-navy man who works as a nurse at one of the county hospitals when he isn’t kneading his clients’ knots. Dewayne lives out in the country with his wife, a herd of goats, and a hundred and twenty pound mastiff named Steve. Earlier, when I asked Dewayne if I should adopt a corgi through the rescue or invest in a puppy, Dewayne said, “I’d do both.” This answer was enough to assure me that Dewayne would now take Delia off my hands.
“I’m sorry, Jackie,” he said, after receiving the lengthy and hopefully not too desperate phone message I’d left on his machine. “I just can’t take on another animal right now.”
Into his response I heard, “I just can’t take Delia on right now.” And perhaps not even Dewayne, who sleeps five hours a night and regularly works twelve hour shifts in the emergency room, could handle a twenty-five-pound dog with six inch legs strong enough to run dizzying circles around Dewayne’s fifteen goats, while driving his mastiff to plaintive howls.
As I felt myself falling through endless black space, Dewayne said, “What I recommend you do is buy a bark collar.”
When I phoned my mother in Chicago to tell her what I had purchased, she expressed absolute horror at the very idea that I would resort to electric shock therapy.
“Your mother doesn’t live with her,” Bill said, trimming the red collar to fit, as Delia waited eagerly and enthusiastically for this ‘new treat’, her eyes absolutely focused on what he was doing.
An hour later, we retrieved the leashes from the bowl beside the front door. Delia began to bark and immediately cringed and yelped as the box lit up on the bark collar pressed against her throat. She barked again. And again she was shocked. And again.
Buddy
These days, we know what will happen when Melissa and boyfriend #2 disappear for the weekend. On the first day, Buddy will find imaginative ways of amusing himself. He will bat a stick around, throw his rope toy up in the air and catch it in his mouth, and increase the depth of each of the holes he manages throughout the yard.
By the second day, however, Buddy will begin to bark in a desperate way and continue to do so, with greater pitch and urgency, well into the evening hours, and sometimes long past midnight. To counteract the effects of listening to a barking dog, especially when trying to sleep, Bill now places four blue Unisom capsules into a hotdog. Or he embeds them in the cream cheese we now keep on hand for such occasions. Do I sanction drugging a dog? No; though I, too, have passed Unisom-stuffed cream cheese through the fence and into Buddy’s eager mouth, the moon and stars the only witnesses to my actions. Or so I hope, for how can it be possible that all my education, all my belief in the fundamental capacity of woman to rationally find and adhere to the right course, has wound up with me stooping in the shadows to feed over-the-counter sleep aids to someone else’s miserable dog?
If there’s anything redeeming about the current Buddy situation, it’s this dog’s tenacity when it comes to trust and love. When Buddy hears Melissa’s car in the drive, he begins running around in great, looping circles in anticipation of their reunion. No matter that Melissa gives him only a teaspoonful of sand from her hourglass of day, Buddy still wags his tail whenever she joins him in the yard to coo all sorts of sweet nothings before shuffling back inside after their five minutes of quality time are up. Unlike Raider, Buddy remains an endearing dog. And if I knew someone un-affiliated with the university who would take him, I’d pack that dog up in the backseat of my old Volvo and ferry him away.
If there is one person who might make a speck of difference in Buddy’s life, it is boyfriend #2’s five year old daughter who has on occasion made an appearance in the yard. I learned who she was after she stepped outside and immediately volunteered her age, her teacher’s name, and her favorite food. She was on the verge of telling me about her relationship with Melissa when someone called from the house, and she hurried inside. The single time I saw her after that, she didn’t say a word. And neither did I.
Still, I remember the playful way she interacted with Buddy. She tossed the ball to him, and didn’t mind too much when he didn’t bring it back. The memory of that dark-haired little girl stroking Buddy’s neck reassures me. But just a little.
Richard
Never again will I take someone’s word for it. Or so I vowed after I lifted up Badfinger and felt my fingers close around a swollen belly and even more swollen nipples. Within about five seconds, I was screaming for Bill who, after half a dozen shouts, stepped reluctantly onto the porch.
“You know,” I said, as I clutched Badfinger to my breast.
“Yes,” Bill said, directing his gaze toward the hedge. “I know.”
“So, when did you plan to let me know?”
“After Badfinger’s spayed.”
“What about the kittens?”
“Richard’s going to take Badfinger to Austin in a week. She’ll stay with his ex-wife for the birth. They’ll find homes for the kittens.”
“But the spaying,” I said, as Badfinger struggled to break free of my grasp. “When’s that going to happen?”
“While she’s in Austin. I told Richard that Badfinger couldn’t come back until she was spayed.”
“You’ve given him ultimatums before,” I said, a bit guiltily, for hadn’t I been placated and perhaps even conned by Richard’s circuitously effective method of putting us off?
“This time,” Bill said, “he knows I mean it.”
“Look Jackie, I respect how much you care about animals,” Richard said after I stormed over to his door and told him what I thought of the whole rotten mess. “The thing is you and I have fundamentally different philosophies when it comes to pet care.”
“Oh,” I said, mentally calling into question—on a whole new level—Richard’s future as a practitioner of mental health care and a dispenser of prescription pharmaceuticals.
“Yeah,” Richard said, stroking his thick black beard. “Your approach is very hands on, very controlling. Mine is more ‘live and let live.’”
When I pushed him further on this so-called laissez-faire attitude to pet care, he finally confessed that the real reason he hadn’t gotten Badfinger spayed was not because of his need to preserve her ovaries and her affectionate nature, though these, he stressed, remained legitimate long-term factors. No, the real reason was that he wanted his son to have the experience of watching kittens being born.
Delia
She still wears the bark collar, though I usually remove it before I take the two dogs for a walk, which means that Delia will resume her frenzied barking, with Eddie joining in as lower-pitched accompanist. That said, Delia’s voice, though still not an indoor one, is no longer an outdoor voice capable of projecting across several acres of cattle country.
It’s not just the electric shock therapy that’s had an impact on Delia, though. It’s the regular brushing on the front porch, the special treats of rice steeped in chicken broth, the bed all her own placed right beneath a sunny window. She and Eddie may squabble over food and toys and especially over bones and throwing sticks. Still, there’s a new ease to our life together, at least some of the time.
And then yesterday, my dream of my new life with two corgis—a dream I carried around as soon as I learned of Delia’s existence— actually came true. The sun was out, and despite the fact that it was the last day of February, the temperature must have been seventy degrees. I walked both dogs gleefully, joyfully, and fleetly across the park. We continued all the way to Nineteenth Street where we crossed onto campus, pausing only once beside the fountain two miles from my home. There, I hoisted the dogs into the cold water, then relished the pleased, chilly way they shook their bodies, their energy renewed by the bracing effect.
By the time we arrived home an hour and a half later, we’d covered a good four miles, and all three of us were panting. As I slipped off their leashes, I recalled a passage from a handbook on dog raising written by the Monks of New Skete, a passage I’d read during one of my darkest hours with Delia. According to the monks, the best thing a person can do with her pet is to practice ‘in-seeing,’ which involves placing oneself in the position of the dog so that one looks at the world as if through the dog’s eyes.
Filling up the dogs’ water bowls, I realized I had not only achieved in-seeing, I may even have gone beyond it, at least on this walk. For the first time in three months, with Delia and Eddie’s leashes attached to my hips, we moved across the neighborhood and the university campus as if we were one body. When I would break into a run, the dogs would, too. I’d slow down, and their footfalls would relax as well. And occasionally they would begin barking, not in an irritating way. No, they were simply broadcasting their joy in the most immediate way they knew how.
Had half a dozen roofers not been at work replacing the roof—their presence creating that initial necessity for getting the dogs and myself out of the house and onto that journey—I have no doubt that I could have settled down at my desk, Delia’s snores and Eddie’s deep breathing a lullaby I doubt I’ll ever grow tired of.
Coda: Richard
At the end of this semester, Richard will be a licensed psychiatrist. For the moment, though, he’s still sending out applications to hospitals throughout Texas so that he can stay close to Austin and his son. Alley and Badfinger will go with him. I will miss Richard, though he no longer plays with Edward, most likely because Delia has banned the cats from the yard. If it were up to Richard, Delia would be locked up—and not just in the yard. I know this because two weeks ago I heard someone yelping outside his apartment. “Richard,” I called out. “Is there another dog back there?”
“Yes,” Richard admitted, looking up from Windex-ing the windshield of his new cherry red import.
When I came close, I saw a dachshund imprisoned in the cat carrier.
“What are you doing with this dog?” I asked, not sure if I was about to scream or break into hysterical laughter.
“The dog was chasing Badfinger down the alley,” he explained, as if this were justification enough for putting a sleek, black dachshund in a shoebox-sized box. “I thought I’d see if my son wants him. He’ll be here in an hour.”
“Richard,” I said. “You can’t keep this dog. This dog isn’t lost.”
“But he doesn’t have a collar,” Richard said. (By this time, I was holding the trembling dachshund in my arms.)
“Come on, you don’t really believe that. I mean, this dog is in perfect condition. And he’s a pedigreed dachshund. Don’t tell me you think this dog has been surviving in the alley for the last few months? I wouldn’t give this dog a week in the alley,” I said, certain I’d seen this very same dachshund’s aquiline nose peering out the front seat window of his owner’s Range Rover.
Richard just shrugged, and for a moment I actually contemplated convincing him to help me steal Buddy and ferry him back to Austin where he could live with Richard’s son and his ex-wife or some kind-hearted neighbor like the old woman who took on Spanky. Instead, I told Richard I knew who the dog belonged to, then cut across the alley to the corner house where two Adonis-like twins live with a boxer puppy and a roommate who never seems to get fully dressed or go to school.
Once they recovered the dog—who had dug its way out—they thanked me. “You really should get him a collar,” I said, leaving out all talk of Richard and the cat-carrier.