Dog House (2 page)

Hands on hips, frilly apron bristling, she stood in the kitchen beaming fury at us both.

“Look, Mommy,
I'm
not trying to bring this dog into the house. It was the dog's idea.”

And possibly because the dog had such a big goofy smile, or possibly because I was so transparent, it actually worked for a few weeks—despite the fur and paws. She seemed charmed. And that was why I sat really still, nodding solemnly for the big, serious lecture about Responsibility and

Walking and Feeding, and then ran up to my bedroom to giggle deliriously and name my very own dog Rusty.

Ah well. Rusty turned out to be more than a little wild and not at all rusty, especially when you tried to walk him. Because he didn't exactly understand “walk.” He was deeply engaged in “pull,” “lunge” and “yank,” and as happily as I'd envisioned the two of us trotting together down the street, the envy of all the neighborhood kids, he was simply too full of beans. Which was another problem.

Rusty didn't digest his dog food very effectively. In fact, if he was in the room at dinnertime, no one could summon much appetite for my mother's excellent cooking, and no one lingered over dessert. Nights that he slept on the floor next to my bed were spent with a pillow over my head and my face turned toward the fully opened window. Rusty's manners were equally off-putting and were, in the end, his downfall.

I think he might have even made it into a third week with us when, just before dinner one night, my mother caught eighty pounds of dog standing on the dining room table, long, golden tail sweeping majestically across the tops of the water glasses and just clearing the bread basket as Rusty polished off a quarter pound of butter and a bowl of Parmesan cheese.

“That's it! That's the end!!!” she shrieked. “He's out of this house tomorrow.” And none of my tearful promises to be good, to keep him away from the table, to keep him in my room, to keep him—Just to keep him—changed her mind. Rusty was gone when I came home from school the next day. I never knew where.

 

 

I only tried with my mother once more, and this time, the dog that “followed me home” was small, blond and appealingly cocker-esque. Also, it was a girl dog, which gave me reason to believe that
this
time, it could work. Everyone knows that girl dogs are smarter and more biddable than boy dogs. Easier to teach to carry your books and rescue you from frozen rivers. Easier to housebreak. Though the fact that I can't remember what I named her tells you how long she was allowed to stay.

Did you know that you can't get female dog urine out of wool carpets? Especially light-colored wool carpets? Until the day my parents sold their house (I was in college), that salad-plate-size, rust-colored stain remained on the bedroom carpet, about a foot from the right front leg of the chair my mother sat in to watch television. Who would have thought that little dog to have had so much urine in her?

It was eighteen years before I got another dog. That was because, for the first ten years of my married life, we lived in apartments. Which is also why I attempted only two pets, both non-dogs. Not because the apartment buildings we lived in didn't allow dogs. They did. But because I thought a
real
pet—a dog, for example—needed to live in a real house where it could go outside and play or dig or find friends or something.

So I was twenty when I first undertook the sole care of a living creature. It was the late 1950s and I was a newlywed; a novice housewife complete with my very own ruffled apron and my Dansk stainless flatware and my deviled eggs. I had just fixed up our first apartment, on the third floor of what my dazzling new husband Millard and I referred to as our Victorian mansion.

In the intervening years, I had grown rather tall, and Millard was just enough taller that I could—wow—wear heels. He was really, really smart, too (of utmost importance), and surpassingly gentle, like my father. He had grown up in a town of five thousand in Georgia and that may have been why his first Northern report card referred to a “speech impediment.” He said things like
sireen
instead of siren, and
mahls
instead of miles and y'all, of course. Not on his report card was the fact that he also had a lovable gap between his two front teeth and chewed with his eyes closed and ate ice. Noisily. But he pronounced Victorian just fine.

Though ours wasn't really a mansion, and it wasn't ours.

It was a substantial, gingerbready country house whose current owners, an older-than-we-were couple with three children, had cut into several apartments. Ours was the least grand, but its being the servant's quarters on the top floor made it the most romantic. Which is why, with the last of our five rooms painted in the colors du jour—I especially liked the part where one wall in every room was painted a different color (royal blue, sunshine yellow, and lavender in the john)—and with the plywood-door table lending us manifest magazine chic, I decided it was time to get a trial dog: a bird.

Found at Woolworth's five-and-ten and chosen from among twenty-five or so chirpy and much less attractive contenders, the parakeet I carefully carried home was shimmery blue with touches of mauve, and it pains me now to admit that I gave more than a thought to how well she would go with the living room walls. I named her Pretty Boy, after my grandmother's parakeet, although she was much too pretty to be a boy. Neither Millard nor I had ever had a bird before, but how hard could a bird be? Within a day or two of bringing her home, we knew we'd never have one again. Because one of her gray, wrinkly toes had fallen off.
Just fallen off!
I couldn't believe it.

 

 

Fortunately, along with my bird, I'd bought the twenty-five-cent
How to Train Your Bird
booklet, but found nothing in it about toes or feet or legs. There was a good deal about drafts, however. Had I set the cage near a drafty window? I didn't think so, but slammed each window twice, just in case.

Was the bird in pain? How could losing a toe not be painful? Panicked, I threw on my coat and sped back to Woolworth's for advice.

The flustered high school girl I collared at the pet counter quickly called over her nineteen-and-a-half-year-old manager, a smallish, acned boy, determined not to fluster. He looked me up and down. Was I trying to return a bird? Did I have a receipt? Was I a bird abuser?

No, no and no. I fell at his feet and wept. Metaphorically.

“Can you suggest anything? Do you have any pills? Any drops? We can't let her die!”

“You're probably not keeping the bird warm enough,” he ventured, blinking rapidly and cracking a knuckle behind his back, with which it became instantly clear to me that he was out of his depth.

He set me thinking, though, for if warmth was what was needed, I could sleep with Pretty Boy if I had to. Driving home, however, I flashed on the image of one of us rolling over on a sick bird during the night, and changed my mind. So when I found her all fluffed up on the bottom of the cage
(that
couldn't be good), I gingerly carried the cage to the kitchen, our warmest room, and placed her as near to the stove as counter space allowed. Then I added some hopeful seed to a barely depleted cup plus a splash of fresh water. I felt a little better.

Pretty Boy didn't, though. By the following morning, with her seed tray still full and water untouched, she allowed me to cup her trembling body in my hands while I placed her, ever so gently, on a washcloth I'd spread between the four burners of the stove, right over the pilot light. There she sat all day, unmoving, uncomplaining. But wasn't she breathing much too fast? Even for a bird?

Within days, despite my care,
all
her toes had fallen off.

It was painful merely to
see,
and Millard and I had a worried discussion at dinner about how to handle our failure in bird husbandry.

“Don't blame yourself for this,” he suggested sympathetically. “Perhaps the bird was sick when you bought it. It will probably be better tomorrow. ”

But I didn't want cheap absolution. Even my grandmother could keep a bird alive, for god's sake, and by eleven that night, we'd decided to find a vet and pay for help—a real stretch for us. Though none of the Yellow Pages ads seemed to mention the treatment of birds. (Would you believe I didn't think to call one ad and ask?) The next day, at our local library, I looked for manuals on sick birds. But there was nothing. Or, at least, nothing that mentioned legs or toes.

In frustration, I sped back to Woolworth's, where, after a second pointless conversation with the manager:

“Can you tell me what's wrong with my bird? She's dying.”

“I don't know, lady” (defensively). “No other customer has ever complained of a problem like that. Why don't you try calling a vet?”

I concluded that five-and-tens shouldn't be selling pets to begin with. Shortly thereafter, they agreed.

And then, because Millard had escaped to Cape Canaveral on business, I was alone with that poor failing creature for three more days, beside myself with guilt. On the fourth morning, Pretty Boy was gone, and I buried her beneath a bush at the back of the yard.

 

 

After that, I stayed away from pet shops and five-and-tens for another two years. And the next time I went to a pet store, I was pregnant—and my new trial dog was a monkey.

 

 

A psychiatrist would probably tell you I was practicing: that the monkey wasn't a trial dog, it was a trial baby. The psychiatrist would be right.

Yet here was my rationale.

Because I was scared and inexperienced and had managed to kill or otherwise lose the only living things I'd ever had in my care, I thought a monkey might be a sturdier, safer, luckier choice.

In the movies, monkeys are models of self-sufficiency. Strew a few bananas around and they feed themselves; they're smart (a couple of hundred, left alone, might type
King Lear)
and well—like babies and dogs—they're mammals. And I'd never heard of a mammal getting fatal foot disease.

Besides (forgive me), I was bored.

 

 

You might wonder why I didn't buy a dog.

Well, I wasn't ready for a dog yet because we were still living in an apartment. This time, we were living just down the highway from Cape Canaveral at Cocoa Beach, where Millard, who worked for MIT, was on field duty. Sadly, he was spending what I jealously thought were far too many nights sleeping out at the Cape when there were “shoots.” (Once or twice, to his great and lifelong delight, he actually slept right on top of the nuclear missiles whose guidance systems he was helping to design.) And often—too often to suit me—he would go out for a few days' cruise on a Polaris submarine. Therefore I was forced to spend much too much time by myself, contemplating the vast and boring Atlantic through the sliding glass doors of my second-floor cinder-block flat. Or sitting alone on our graceless concrete terrace, smoking (ah, yes, we smoked when pregnant then, and drank what we wanted, and on the whole, gave birth to babies that, despite our carelessness, somehow grew into six-foot-five, smart and handsome men with lots of wavy brown hair and absolutely no visible flaws). So there I sat, pregnant and smoking, gazing across the narrow beach, or “up-range,” toward the Cape while I waited for a Thor or Atlas missile to blow up. They weren't meant to blow up, of course, but in my darkest heart I unfailingly hoped they would. It was always a much better show than a successful launch.

Anyhow, that's why I got a monkey. We were in Florida, in an undeveloped section encroached upon by tangled reminders of, if not deepest jungle, then kudzu, at least, and I was longing for a bit of close-to-human company. Monkeys, re Darwin, were closer to humans than birds, and possibly smarter, even, than dogs.

 

 

I got my primate at a local pet store in the kind of cinder-block strip mall where beach sand meets asphalt, and he came with no instructions. I supposed that when you live in a place where banana palms grow wild, it's taken for granted that you know how to care for monkeys. So there was no booklet this time. No leash. No cage. No one even to share the fun, since Millard was away again.

That meant I had to bring this adorably furry brown baby monkey home to an empty apartment, and immediately on entering the hallway, he ran into an open closet and crouched down under our clothes, holding his long tail between his legs and rocking back and forth and making this sound—a sound like a hurt child crying—that rent my heart. But then, as miserably unhappy as the pitiable thing seemed to be, he also didn't seem to be losing parts, and this was altogether a better beginning than I'd made with Pretty Boy.