After the initial two months of weekend movies and picnics in Stern Grove, where the symphony gave Sunday-afternoon concerts, he asked me to join him on a road trip to Florida, where his older daughter was stationed in the navy. She needed her car, and he had offered to drive it to her in Pensacola.
I agreed. Myrna was shocked: “You barely know him,” she protested. “He could be an ax murderer!” Dawn and Pat laughed, and they thought I was equally nuts.
But I had never seen the Grand Canyon, or the Painted Desert, or the stretches of towns and cities we would travel through on our way to Florida. Even my psychiatrist thought I should take the risk. We had to leave Gulliver behind, but I hired a good babysitter for him, and Jim agreed to take the kids. I really didn’t like the idea of leaving my dog (and neither did Brad), but the small two-seater car didn’t have room for him, and it wasn’t practical in any case. I would just have to have fun without him, for a short time.
And I did, my spirits lifted by something new as we motored through small towns and big cities, dining on grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk shakes for both lunch and supper at one Denny’s after another, and staying in cheap motels. The miles sped by, and the little Mazda’s air conditioner broke down, so we traveled with the windows open, singing sixties tunes loudly over the hot wind. We passed through Albuquerque, spent several nights with Brad’s relatives in Dallas and Houston, and then finally reached Memphis, where we floated down the Mississippi on a paddleboat and met up with Brad’s daughter and her drill team, the Navy Crackerjacks, who were performing there. Afterward, we trailed their bus back down to Pensacola, where we spent time visiting with her and rolling around in the warm waters of the Gulf.
When we returned, Gulliver was of course ecstatic (naturally the boys were less so, having been thrilled with all the freedom while being at Jim’s house). And I had learned that I could indeed survive—if only for a little while—without Gulliver.
•••
I wasn’t so alone anymore. On the weekends when the kids were with Jim, Brad stayed overnight, in secret. My depression persisted but loosened its grip a bit. In addition to relying on Gulliver, I now could rely on Brad. Still, Gulliver didn’t leave my side and insisted that if Brad wanted to be a part of the family, he would have to accept a dog’s well-earned spot on the bed. Brad didn’t mind at all. It had been many years since he had had a dog in his life, and he took Gully into his heart as fully as Gully took Brad into his. It looked as if we had added another stable person to our quartet.
Gulliver had a way of worming himself into your soul, not only with the honesty and integrity in his limitless gaze, which made him seem so human. But there were also the continuing antics as he aged, antics that belied the fact that he was no longer a youngster: after we bought a sailboat in 2000, he would bark furiously at Jet Skis—even though the enormous oil tankers and container ships, which rose up a mile high beside us on the San Francisco Bay, didn’t intimidate him at all; he persistently snuggled between Brad and me on the bed so that he could claim strokes from both sides; he was so determined to be near me that he squashed himself into the kink of my bent legs as I lay watching prime time.
In the morning, his cold nose roused me from sleep and nudged me upright, leaving me no choice but to go and feed him, urging me on as he sacked me behind my knees in a rugby tackle. After breakfast, he went eagerly to the back door, but then, if it was raining, he changed his mind and would refuse to go out, no matter how desperately he needed to pee. When I went up the driveway to get the newspaper, Gulliver rollicked beside me happily, with his ears flying in the wind, his body curving back and forth in a rocking horse motion reminiscent of a Lippizaner. Late in the afternoon, having been curled in the overstuffed and dilapidated armchair beside my computer as he put in a “hard day’s work” alongside me, he would “smile” his special Dalmatian grin from where he turned to wait for me on the top step of the steep stairs down to my writing cottage.
Still, I often worried that something would happen to Gulliver. The loss of Tia and Rhiannon—so recent—continued to plague me. Nighttimes, trying to sleep, terrible pictures of what might happen to him if he got himself tangled up with a bigger, more vicious dog, or if we had an earthquake and he was trapped beneath the house, or if the boat tipped over on the bay and he was carried away by the currents—all sorts of ridiculous scenarios invaded my mind to torture me. I would roll over and will myself to sleep. The fact was that I could not imagine my life without him.
twelve
SLOWLY, AS THE YEARS of the new century began to pass, life once again came to seem more precious. Little by little, I started to shake off my dark moods. Occasional work on what would turn out to be a new memoir, long therapy sessions, continual monitoring of my medication, and the love of Brad and Gulliver began to pull me back from the edge. My children still stood beside me. However, my sister remained wary—slower to warm up—not trusting me to make the changes permanent, and not willing to commit herself to love again until I was truly well. My struggles reminded her of my mother’s illness, and she confused the two without even realizing it. And my father was still crippled by worry, an attitude that felt like a reproach to me.
Brad and I had moved out of the house that Jim and I had bought back in 1989, when we first moved to California. It was filled with memories of my marriage, of my life as a young mother with our family, and I felt I couldn’t move on again until I was in a new place, making a new beginning. We found a much smaller home with beautiful views of the rolling and deeply forested mountains from every window, mountains that were undisturbed by any houses high up on their peaks. Myrna, who was an interior designer in her free time, helped us to sort through the oversize furniture that was too big, and to find new chairs and tables that would fit.
Nathaniel and Gabe had gone off to college, so Gully was the only one accompanying us to our new home, where he resumed his usual spot by my side, using up all the space on the bed. He hugged closer to me, even though my shrink questioned the wisdom of allowing a dog to sleep between us. He loved Brad in a way he hadn’t loved Jim, perhaps because Jim had not loved him back in quite that manner.
•••
We built a fence around the property, hating to interfere with our spectacular views of the mountains around us, but needing to keep Gulliver in as he displayed a new propensity to wander. The fence, however, did not stop him from digging under the chain-link and escaping out into the canyon below. When I went out onto the deck to discover where he had gotten himself to, Gulliver always looked up from munching on a fat patch of grass with a look of contentment and smugness. Fortunately, he never went very far and would always come back as I called him with the sound of a metal rod on a triangle, just the way I had watched the cook call the ranch hands for supper on the television show Bonanza. Gulliver would bound up the slope and was always rewarded either with his food pan or a cookie.
In time, we gave up on the chain-link and put up an “invisible” fence, which ran a wire around the yard to keep him from trespassing across the boundaries either by digging under or flying over. Gulliver wore a collar with a little box on it, one that made two loud warning tones and then administered a buzz against the throat (once again, I strapped the collar on my arm to determine how much of a jolt it actually delivered, and finally approved the level at which it was set). With just one buzz, Gulliver learned not to venture farther than the line marked with red flags and shortly became an expert at determining where the warning tone would sound. If I went up the steeply winding driveway to get the mail from the box on the road, he paced back and forth between the two flags. He’d whine, anxious for me to come back down, but never once breaking across the invisible barrier.
Now I had a full-fledged writing cottage instead of a room in the house, a little gray-shingled studio down the steep hill that led to the bottom of the property. We revamped it with an inexpensive built-in desk and bookshelves, and Myrna approved my choice of a warm yellow
paint for the walls. I had shaken off the blanket of depression enough to begin clacking away on my computer, writing just a bit every other day or so, in my mind calling it a journal, rather than a book. I kept rewriting, revising material tirelessly as a way of keeping my sense of creativity alive, even when I was too blue to do anything new. Gulliver curled up in the worn armchair I had set in the sun by the double French doors.
I despaired that I would ever go back to writing full-time. Sometimes I commented to Brad that I wasn’t getting any work done, and he would say, “Your only job is to get well.” And with that he would clap his hands, and Gulliver would jump up to curl at my feet on the couch, to which I had moved after graduating from sleeping on the bed all day. I was learning, hour by hour, how love could build a net beneath you to keep you from falling, as both Brad and Gulliver helped me see. Gulliver never surrendered his role as caretaker, but he especially seemed genuinely happy when I began coming to my feet once again. As I grew older and better, he relaxed into middle age.
•••
One of the things we did as I got better was buy a sailboat. It wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small, either, and we could sleep comfortably on its queen-size bed. Gulliver slept on the couch in the salon, even though every night he tried to weasel his way onto the bed, but he was just too big not to crowd us, so we always kicked him off. I didn’t allow myself to feel sorry for him: he did have a thick rug on which to curl up. Gradually, sailing every weekend replaced what dog shows had meant in my life. It was something Brad and I shared, and so my love of it grew with my love of him.
To our surprise, Gulliver enjoyed being out on the water as much as we did. Despite his tethering chain, he would hunker down on one of the cushions in the cockpit, up under the windscreen, and put his chin down on the pile of coats that were heaped up there, ready for the cold winds of San Francisco Bay that blew year-round. Within seconds, he would be oblivious, with his big paws curled beneath his chin. He did sleep a lot on the boat, and at home, and Brad said he wanted a dog’s life: just sleeping, eating, and pooping.
After a long nap, Gulliver would put his head out into the breeze, and his ears flew back even further than they did when riding in the car, but I suspected that it was the same sensation that drew him to do it. He would attentively sit and watch the huge cargo ships go by, or the other sailboats as they heeled over in the sharp wind. At lunchtime, he hunkered down on the sole of the boat, waiting for a bite of sandwich to fall. My tuna, thick with mayonnaise, was his favorite.
While Gulliver was happy to watch the trawlers and the tugboats and the huge cargo containers, he drew the line at the smaller motorboats, Jet Skis, and parasailers. As they passed us with a hiss and unexpected speed, not looking like anything he’d ever seen before, he barked wildly and tried to climb out of the cockpit and attack them. I would always pull him back in and scold him, but for once he ignored me and just struggled against his tether, despite my admonitions.
Once a humpback whale breached right beside us, but even Gulliver was silent at the awesome sight as it spouted out through its blowhole, dove, came up to spout once more, and then disappeared forever. It was an experience neither Brad nor I would ever forget.
Our first weekend on the water together took us to China Camp, so called because of the Asian population who gravitated there in the early part of the century to make their livelihood harvesting shrimp. We lowered the dingy for the first time to take Gulliver ashore to potty. We got halfway to the sandy beach when the engine quit. We had oars, but Brad yelled at me to grab the emergency sail bag. I felt for it with both hands under the seat, but when I at last retrieved it, it was empty. In our amateur’s enthusiasm, we had forgotten to bring with us either a cell phone or our handheld radio, or even the dinghy’s small anchor.
The current began to move us farther and farther away from the boat, farther and farther away from shore. Gulliver huddled in the bow and made not a sound, seeming to sense what a dangerous situation we were in. Luckily, with Brad rowing all out, I was able to just catch the handhold on the stern of the boat as the dingy swirled toward the ocean. It was one of the most harrowing experiences we ever had on the boat. “We’ll never forget that stuff again,” commented Brad in a shaky voice, as he wiped the sweat from his forehead.
That night, because the engine had failed, we were unable to take Gulliver to shore to potty. Many other sailors had dogs on their boats, especially the liveaboards, and all had advised us that we ought to teach him how to potty on the deck for those times when we were unable to get to shore, such as a dark, late night. Of course, we hadn’t done that. We decided that we would give him a try before calling it a day and agreed that if he didn’t potty onboard, we would pack up and go home.
The first night passed, with us entreating him, “Potty, potty,” on the deck, my anxiety over the situation deepening. He had been well house-trained, and the deck was part of the boat and the boat was part of home, and so he refused to go. And on it went through the next morning and afternoon. By now I was really worried and couldn’t even concentrate on enjoying myself. I convinced Brad, who was resolved to try to wait him out a little bit longer, that we would leave by five o’clock if he hadn’t given in.
Then, as we were getting ready to pull the anchor, Gulliver neatly raised one leg and peed right over the side of the deck. He hadn’t given in and soiled on the boat—but instead had figured out a way to relieve himself over the lifeline. Over the years, he never would poop onboard, preferring to hold it till our weekend jaunts either brought us to some shore or back to the slip. In later years, there was another sandy beach at Paradise Cove, which we dubbed “Gulliver’s Beach,” where we would often take him to pee and romp—largely because the China Camp beach seemed so difficult to land on with its swift currents. But whenever we tried China Camp, we made certain that the engine was always carefully primed and pretested.
Back at the slip, to get up onto the boat, he was meant, like a human, to carefully climb the three steps we had installed for people and dogs alike, so that you didn’t have to hike yourself up so high or jump down so hard when getting on or off. Gulliver refused those steps, as if they were beneath his dignity, and would use only the very top step as a platform from which to leap onto the boat. This was fine when he was a young dog, but as he aged, he couldn’t always make the deck. Several times he fell into the water and had to be rescued by me pulling him up by his collar with all my strength. Then he stood on the dock, shaking the salty water from his coat. Nevertheless, we had to turn the hose on him, dousing him with freezing water to rinse him down.
His aggression toward other dogs grew, worsened by the confines of the narrow, crowded docks. When he encountered another dog walking toward him, we had to take him down the walkway of a nearby slip and face away as the other dog progressed onward, holding him tightly by the leash. Yet, he seemed to know exactly when it was passing behind him and wanted to lunge, straining against his collar. All this made my heart race triple-time, but there was nothing I could do except hang on to the Flexi-lead. It was interesting to me that Gulliver was well loved on the dock despite his nasty temperament toward other canines, perhaps because he was such a sweetheart with people. He always approached with tail wagging and a Dalmatian smile for those who held their hands out. But with dogs—it was a different story entirely.
One Sunday we left the boat, navigating down the steps with our hands full of laundry, laptops, and trash. With the Flexi gripped only loosely in my fingers, I was balancing my way precariously down the narrow staircase. Two unleashed Jack Russells suddenly bounded up our slip from a neighboring boat. (These two were affectionate, but as I often told people we met on the street who insisted on allowing their dog to approach us, “Your dog may be friendly, but mine isn’t!”) They came right to Gulliver where he stood on the top step, ready to greet him.
Greet them he did—by jumping off the steps and chasing after them with a loud snarl and then a stream of vicious barking. When
he took off, I had the Flexi in my hand snapped down in the off position and was dragged along behind him down the steps, fighting for balance. I couldn’t begin to stop his sixty-five-pound lunge.
He cut the corner of the slip and hung suspended in the air for just a second before he plunged down into the water. I called to Brad, who was busy locking the cabin’s hatch, and then I tried to pull the flailing dog out of the water. The two Jack Russells had managed to make a quick exit, and dimly in the distance I could hear their owner shouting for them to come. Gulliver was wet and therefore heavy, and I was not successful in getting him up out of the water. For a moment I thought he was going to drown, as he was slipping under the neighboring boat.
Brad managed to haul him upward. Gulliver stood there shivering. Brad uncoiled the hose and began to spray him down, despite his scurried attempts to get away from the cold water. The stream of water widened as it descended over Gulliver, and Brad began to spray me. With a cry of distress, I stepped back to get away from the icy cascade and went right out into space, off the edge of the dock, just as Gulliver had done. Down I went, into the freezing 50-degree water.
Struggling, I surfaced and spat out the sea, clinging to the edge of the dock, kicking desperately. I remained hanging by my hands, the dock still high above my head, as it was low tide. I couldn’t get an adequate grip. Stupidly, I kept worrying that I was going to lose my shoes if I kept kicking. And without treading water, I was going to sink.
Brad had Gulliver with one hand and me with the other, and because he was holding us both, he was unable to pull me up. Eventually I told him to put down the Flexi. Gulliver, who was whining with distress at the dock’s edge, would undoubtedly go nowhere because he was worried about me. It was only then that Brad was able to hoist me up, me and all the water that had penetrated my jeans, my thick woolen turtleneck, and my heavy winter jacket. Back onto the boat I went to strip down and towel off, while Brad finished rinsing the dog. We did not speak to the owners of the Jack Russells for a very long time.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 11
