Stepdog (20 page)

Jim was starting to sound like me. Now what?

“He peed in the freaking living room because he was mad at us for going out without him,” Jim said as he ripped off half the roll of paper towel on the kitchen counter.

“Where?”

“Right smack square in the middle of the living room. You can't miss it.”

“That is kind of passive-aggressive.”

I walked to the closet to put away my coat with the indifference of someone who wouldn't be cleaning up the mess.

“What's so passive about it?” Jim said, irritated. He was looking in the utility closet for the bottle of Fantastik.

Ooooh, this was going to be good. Eddie was going to get his just deserts.

“What are you going to do, baby?”

“I'm going to tell him he's a very bad dog.”

“And then you'll pet him?”

“No, I won't pet him.”

“Or scratch him?”

“No, no scratching.”

“Are you sure? Because that's giving him mixed messages.”

“I'm going to whack him with a newspaper.”

And he really did, but by then I had gone upstairs. It was late and I had already seen enough entertainment for the night.

“What did he do?” I asked Jim when he came to bed. “Did he look contrite?”

“He said if you don't want peeing in the living room, don't go out without me. If you don't like it, fix it.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

What he did was spread newspapers all over the living room. Always giving his dog the benefit of the doubt, Jim thought Eddie may have developed incontinence. Our living room, already covered with plastic, now looked like the inside of a dog crate. (And some friends still had the chutzpah to question why I kept my apartment in the city.)

One day, while putting on eye shadow, I noticed flakes and some bumpiness on my right eyelid. It didn't go away as the days passed, so I went to the dermatologist, who diagnosed some sort of eczema and tested me for fungus. The results came back positive.

“Do you have a dog?” she asked casually.

“I don't, but my husband sure does.”

The doctor said it could have been passed on from the dog. Jim pet him and then pet me. He also sometimes picked me up at the train station with Eddie in the backseat of the car. Eddie always got all ruffled and would snort and try to get in the front seat as I got in, showering me with his bodily fluids. Eddie was literally making me sick. From then on, I made Jim wash his hands about twenty times a day.

Blame the dog, don't blame the dog, blame Jim—I didn't know how to feel other than fed up. I was still smarting from the medical news when we went over to Jim's boss's place on the Upper West Side for dinner. A former neighbor of Jim's from Fort Lauderdale, who also used to be friends with Jim's brother Arthur, was among the guests. Inevitably—I didn't know how it happened but it always did—the conversation turned to dogs and Eddie.

“What breed?” the boss asked.

Before I could catch myself, I blurted out: “A mix of heeler and asshole.”

Shit. Now I had really done it. I was afraid to look at Jim. I really didn't mean to embarrass him in front of his editor. The words just flew out of my mouth. I concentrated on the halibut on my plate not daring to look up.

Then I heard Jim say: “Mostly asshole.”

Everybody laughed.

I laughed the hardest.

A few days later, all laughing stopped. Eddie, so annoying, so conniving, so indestructible, looked like he was not going to make it.

Epiphanies

E
ddie wasn't looking so hot. I came home from work and found Jim cooking a roasted chicken and potatoes with garlic brussels sprouts for our Passover dinner. Uncharacteristically, Eddie was not with him. I kissed Jim hello and headed for the closet to drop off my coat. On my way, I saw Eddie slumped in his bed in the dining room, glassy eyes open.

“What's wrong with Eddie?”

“He's been going downhill all afternoon,” Jim said from the kitchen. “He's been getting more lethargic. And this violent vomiting. He's vomited three or four times yellow bile.”

Like the experienced father he was, Jim was worried, but not terribly so. He'd dealt with the occasional canine gastrointestinal problem and thought Eddie would snap out of it as usual. He'd throw up a few times, eat some grass, be okay.

But after our lovely Seder, just the two of us, Jim took Eddie out for a walk and noticed blood in his feces.

Jim looked a tad more worried when they came back. “He may have been poisoned.”

I looked at Eddie and he was standing frozen in place, looking at us with a “This sucks” expression. He didn't seem to have the energy to move forward or to lie down. I had never seen him this listless. We tried to figure out what he could have possibly eaten. Could he have gotten poisoned from licking the grease at the bottom of the grill, a favorite forbidden pastime of his?

I didn't tell Jim, but I went upstairs to Google “dog poisoning.” I was truly worried. Dead Eddie had never been part of my plan. I'd always wanted him to be far away but far away and alive, happily bugging someone else. Jim was supposed to leave early the next day for Florida for a week to work on his book with Dr. Marks, who headed south in the winter months. I wanted to make sure we knew what was going on before his plane took off.

The animal websites told me all I needed to know—vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy equaled an emergency. We needed to call the animal hospital.

I rushed downstairs and found Jim at the dining room table, watching over his ailing dog. Eddie was now lying on his cushion.

“Baby, I think you should take him to the hospital.”

I summarized my findings. As usual, Jim took his time debating in his head the next step. He said that he didn't want to overreact. He thought it could pass and he was inclined to give Eddie the night to recover and see how he looked in the morning.

“When you have a dog, you don't want to take him in for every little problem,” he said.

Yes, I knew, expensive, but I was actually terrified Jim would go on his trip and the mutt would die on me. Who would believe he died of natural causes under my watch?

“Baby, let's call the vet and see if you can postpone the trip. If Eddie gets sicker, you should be here when it happens. Don't take any chances.”

Jim relented. He went online to look for a twenty-four-hour veterinary hospital close by. He found one in Fairfield, a town west of us less than half an hour away.

“I have a very sick dog,” I heard Jim tell the hospital. “It appears he has some kind of bowel problem. He's passing blood. Can I bring him over right now?” Jim got some plastic bags and towels to put in the backseat of the car. It was almost midnight when he picked up his dog to carry him into the car.

At the hospital, blood tests and an examination showed that Eddie was severely dehydrated and at risk of kidney failure. His blood was like jam, really dense. They sedated him and put him on an IV to rehydrate him. It appeared there was some kind of major blockage in his bowels, but they didn't see an obvious cause. Jim came home close to two a.m., alone.

His face said it all.

“They said he needs to stay probably a couple of days at least. It doesn't look good.”

We went to bed wondering if Eddie would last the night. Jim postponed the trip to Florida. We were on a deathwatch. Jim looked spent as we grappled with the possibility that Eddie would not get better.

“It's kind of like growing older, closing a chapter,” he said. “Kind of saying farewell to a big, meaningful chunk of my life.”

I couldn't sleep. I was reminded of my dear Mami—how a stupid, not even so serious fall in the bathroom set off a horrible chain of events and, within days, she was gone. And of my friend Dolores, who earlier in the year left the twentieth-anniversary party of my Latina group, Lips, saying she wasn't feeling well and who died the very same night after telling the paramedics, “I was at a party, dancing, for happiness.” It was the dramatic exit of a playwright's last act as she succumbed to cardiac arrest.

“Where is that exit, exactly, and how do you sign up?” another Lipster, Michele, asked as we mourned.

Before the year was over, the Lipsters would lose another beloved
“hermana,”
Elaine, a journalist and college professor who died of cirrhosis of the liver at fifty-four.

Here today, where tomorrow? I tossed and turned, thinking about mortality and about how Jim would take the death of his loyal companion of the last ten years. I knew Jim would have perspective on the death of his dog—“He's just a dog,” as he often remarked himself—but there was no escaping the pain.

I imagined Jim telling the kids and their reaction. Arielle and Henry would be crushed. And me? I'd finally be released from a dog's annoyances, but I was not ready for no Eddie at all either. I was especially not ready for the guilt, which kicked in abruptly.

Eddie had been a fixture in the household, always there when we came home. The relentless companion—even in the bathroom—who wouldn't take no for an answer. He had been the topic of conversation, the icebreaker, the safe subject when the rest of our stepfamily had been too mad or too distant to talk about anything else at the dinner table. He no longer drew our attention by squirming to scratch his back on the carpet like he used to in the Palisades—because we had no carpet in Montclair—but he still snored through dinner in his corner of the dining room or got up five times to sneak under the table. He was so adept that we wouldn't notice until one of us crossed our legs and bumped into him or felt a slight brush as he scrounged around our laps for crumbs.

We had all shared his dog-walking adventures, the same disgust when he smelled, even though the farting was not always his fault no matter what the other males in the house might have you believe. He'd been the one common denominator that everyone loved. Yes, even me. It is not true that he had given me no pleasure, I realized now. I had reached for the leash every time I needed to take a deep breath. “Come on, Eddie. Let's walk.” Eddie had been a calming companion, my therapy dog. He'd offered me temporary allegiance. He'd revealed to me the innocence behind a teenager's sullen front. He'd helped me get to know my husband better and exposed his tender side. How could I not love my husband more when Eddie barked and Jim thanked him for protecting us? Eddie had been a unifier. He had connected us.

And what was Eddie's big sin, after all? Loving my husband. Guarding him against threats, real and imagined. Being his friend—needy as hell, yes, but loyal.

Shit.

After the battles that raged on for years between us, the mutt was playing his last card to win.

“He was in great pain,” Jim said as we lay in bed. He couldn't sleep either. “He was really unhappy. He just had a very melancholy look on his face. He was passing blood. He knew he was sick. He felt awful. I felt terrible for him. He was so stricken.”

I knew what Jim was thinking. If Eddie had to go, he—we—hoped it would be fast.

We had friends who had gone through hell with their sick dogs. My friend Tammy went through a long ordeal with her dog Sophie, who deteriorated slowly until she stopped walking altogether. At first, Tammy treated Sophie's arthritis with expensive meds. She also took her to acupuncture appointments every month. She bought a ramp to help the dog get up and down the three steps to the den.

“People make comments because of how funny she walks,” Tammy said during one of her calls from Oakland, California, where she lived in a house not far from a lake with a footpath popular with joggers and dog walkers.

Sophie, a fifty-eight-pound boxer–pit bull–beagle mix, suffered from severe separation anxiety that didn't lessen as she grew more infirm. She would start hyperventilating and howling if she saw Tammy leaving. But now Sophie could barely walk.

“She likes to go places, but a lot of places I can't take her because I have to carry her,” Tammy said. “The other day I threw out my back.”

Tammy bought straps to lift the dog up from under the stomach, but Sophie was too heavy. She also got pieces of rug that she tossed around the house. She was hoping they would give Sophie some traction on the tile floors so she would be able to stand up. Nothing was effective in getting Sophie moving.

The vet told Tammy, “You know what's going to happen, right?”

“No, what?”

“It's going to get hard to clean up after her and that's going to be the time to put her to sleep.”

But Tammy wouldn't hear of it.

“She's like an old person,” Tammy said.

And Sophie still enjoyed going out. Tammy was not about to spend seven hundred dollars on a wheelchair with four wheels, so she got her a little wagon for eighty dollars at Target. She got Sophie a blanket and off they'd go for a roll around Lake Merritt.

But one day Sophie couldn't get up. She could only relieve herself lying down on her side. Tammy got her a big pee pad. She and her mom took the dog to a canine orthopedic specialist, after waiting three weeks for an appointment.

“They were jam-booked with other crazy parents,” Tammy told me.

During the consultation, the specialist produced a big rubber ball. Tammy was instructed to balance Sophie on the ball—with her stomach over the ball and legs on the ground—and bounce her up and down to exercise her legs. Tammy bought the ball. But Sophie hated it and refused to cooperate. The ball went to the junk heap.

“If they don't think she's a candidate for hydrotherapy or something else that could get her up on her feet, at least able to go to the bathroom and walk a little, I'm going to have to put her to sleep pretty soon,” Tammy said, and I could feel her dread over the line.

“At least she doesn't seem to be in any pain. There's certainly nothing wrong with her nose or appetite, which is good.”

Despite all efforts, Sophie became completely incontinent and started to whine pitifully. The day before Labor Day weekend, Tammy took her to the vet and said good-bye to her friend.

“It was basically a progressive descent into hell,” Tammy said much later. “If there is one lesson I learned, it's that you should put them to sleep before it gets to that foul point.”

“Sounds nuts as I look at it in retrospect.”

Sophie was thirteen, Eddie's contemporary.

But Eddie survived the night.

When Jim went back in the morning to see him, they told him they wanted to keep the dog on the IV. They urged him not to see him. He'd get too excited, too agitated. Eddie stayed one more night and day before Jim took him to his regular vet, Dr. Cameron, closer to us, on Bloomfield Avenue. Dr. Cameron wanted to keep Eddie for observation. Eddie stayed, getting nutrients and antibiotics, another four nights.

“How's Eddie, honey?” I asked Jim on the phone from work after he'd had his daily morning chat with the vet.

“Better. The vet may let him come home.”

They never learned why exactly his bowels were blocked. That would have required surgery. It could have been that he ate something awful and got an infection. A few months earlier Jim had gotten him leather bones to chew on. It could have been that. Eddie wasn't supposed to eat them, but he gobbled them down. We were now supposed to feed him only some medicinal canned food the doctor ordered, some prescription diet for canine gastrointestinal health. After a week, we could start feeding him with a mixture of dry and regular canned food. Jim said the dry food was not sitting well with Eddie and he was getting diarrhea periodically.

“I'll help you nurse him back to health, baby.”

Yes. I would make it up to the mutt. I hadn't been too horrible to him, right? In my defense, there were worse dog owners than I am. We had a friend who was much more disdainful of the family dog, a cute little thing named Lola. He got steamrolled by his wife and kids and ended up with a poodle mix he refused to look after in any way and called “Stupid.” I knew of another case where the wife made the husband give up the dog. I never gave Jim an it's-me-or-the-dog ultimatum. (Wonder what Jim . . . Nah.) My conscience, for the most part, was clear.

But Eddie and I had to try harder. Our hate-hate relationship needed to evolve into at least love-hate.

Eddie came home from the hospital a bit thinner, but like his old self—all tongue and spots and hysterical tail. He immediately went to his bed in the dining room, positioned himself head down and butt aloft, waiting for Jim and their scratching ritual.