All this did nothing for the reputation of Dalmatians. Gulliver was a poster dog for all the negative ideas people already had about the breed. At the marina Christmas party that year, someone made a derogatory remark about Dalmatians and their nasty temperaments, and I started a heated argument.
I insisted that generally Dals were neither anxiety-ridden nor aggressive and walked off in a huff. When the victim of my bad temper followed me to apologize, I found myself tearfully explaining that I hadn’t meant to start an argument, I just had to stick up for my dog.
•••
At the local boating store Gulliver soon became a favorite. He accompanied us through the electronic swinging doors fearlessly, tail held high to be allowed in a place filled with two-legged beings rather than those with four, like the pet store. Patiently he waited as we walked up and down the aisles. When it was time to leave, he stood tolerantly by the register, ready for his due. And each time, the checker would pull out her bag of treats and hand the cookie to us, because Gulliver just couldn’t resist jumping for the treat and nearly taking off your hand. No matter how hard we worked on this, he never seemed to get the hang of waiting until the cookie was in front of his nose.
And he wasn’t much different with pizza crusts, or maybe that was where he got the habit. If so, our fault. As soon as he saw Brad and the big white box coming through the back door, he began to pace in circles. His nose told him what was up. And sure enough, after we demolished first one slice and then another—which we ate down only so far that a good-size piece was left—we tossed the crusts to him and he caught them with a satisfying snap, right out of the air. The click of his jaws was audible. We were nauseatingly proud of this.
Food in general brought on an extreme response, whether it was breakfast, dinner, or someone else’s snack. At seven o’clock in the morning, or five o’clock in the evening, or sometimes even a little earlier, he began to pace in front of the pantry door where his kibble was kept.
“Who’s hungry?” I would tease him. “Are you hungry?”
He would begin to turn in little circles, as though chasing his tail.
We were a family of three now that Gabe and Nathaniel were off to college. Maybe Gulliver took on even more importance because of the gap left in my life when mothering took up less of my time. I was reduced to reproving the kids, who rarely called home from their dormitories, and entreating them to call home. It was always up to me to initiate the phone contact, and I resented it, even though I heard other mothers complain about the same difficulties. I knew they were busy with social lives and homework, but it bothered me nevertheless. So I poured even more loving into Gulliver.
On the other hand, the kids’ absence did free us up for different activities.
In addition to boating, we began to go car camping, packing in everything we thought we would need and a lot that we never did. Gulliver accompanied us as well, of course, and into the car went his supplies: dog food in a bin, his bed rolled like a sleeping bag, a thick sweater for cold nights, a chain on which to stake him out so we wouldn’t have to hold him when we were assembling the tent or cooking dinner. And of course, his crate, in case he became a pest and we needed his den to calm him down and make him comfortable.
On our first foray out, to the spectacular beaches in Big Sur, we pulled in under the redwoods that would be our home for the next few days with anticipation. Even though our hands were full, the first thing we did was to install Gulliver’s chain with its big spiral anchor so that he didn’t need to be shut up in the car. We had a lot of work to do before dark. Nathaniel and his girlfriend had taken time out of their summer vacations and joined us but were, predictably, taking “a break” after our arduous three-hour drive.
It didn’t take long before a dog passed our way along the path in front of our site. Gulliver took off and ran up against the end of his chain in seconds. Up came the anchor right out of the ground. On he went, teeth bared and growling, eyes locked onto his strolling and unaware target, in this case a small Pekinese. Fortunately, the startled and angry owner easily lifted the smaller dog in the air. Gulliver’s fire quickly quenched itself when someone other than us yelled at him. He didn’t look in the least bit contrite as we marched him back into camp.
He was banished to the tent and not allowed out until dinnertime.
Later, with plates sticky from steak and baked beans, he licked the paper Chinet absolutely bare, saving us a lot of scraping time as he cleaned up everything that would later have to be washed in a bucket of cold water. Apparently he thought he had been forgiven for his bad behavior—and, of course, he had.
For a few hours, Nathaniel strummed away on his guitar. It reminded me of summers at Highlawn when the head counselor would pull her instrument out of its case and get all the girls to sing, even those who were shy, and Sherlock settled in beside us to snuggle.
When we all finally went to bed, reluctant to leave the warmth of a campfire now reduced to a glowing heap of coals, Brad put Gulliver in his crate. Clad in his sweater, with a blanket draped over him, he looked snug enough. But sometime in the middle of a night, lit only by the moonshine filtering through the tent’s screened window, I woke to the sensation of the nylon side vibrating against my head. Feeling my way around the tent and trying not to wake Brad, I discovered that Gulliver was shivering violently enough to shake the back wall against his crate. That was the last time we took it with us. From then on, he was wedged between Brad and me, crammed in the double sleeping bag.
•••
When he turned six, we took him to the vet to see if there was anything we could do about his aggression toward other dogs. The days of consulting a psychic were over.
“Well, you could neuter him,” she suggested.
“Would that make a difference?” I was surprised. “He’s already six.”
“It might help. Sometimes it does.”
In desperation, we made the appointment, but I was secretly heartbroken about the idea of cutting him. He looked so natural the way he was. Probably, in reality, I just didn’t want to change even one aspect about him.
“I hate the way it looks,” I confided to the vet, secretly ashamed. It was obviously the practical thing to do.
She shrugged. “Well, there are Neuticles. If you want to go that far.”
“What are Neuticles?”
“Fake testicles.”
“You’ve got to be joking!” I was simultaneously horrified and curious.
“Nope. We just insert them after the real ones are removed, and they look as natural as if he had never been altered.”
After a consultation with Brad, who thought I was crazy but didn’t object, Gulliver received his fake set of balls. The Neuticles looked totally natural, as the vet had said. But they felt as hard as rocks. I regretted it from the moment I brought him home from the animal hospital. The entire family laughed at me. Especially Brad. And, predictably, Dawn.
It didn’t help Gulliver’s aggression one little bit.
•••
Once we began to renovate the new house, I had a special bath built for him in the laundry room. It was a deep steeping tub, with a set of steps leading up to it, tiled all the way to the ceiling, and a heavy duty, restaurant-size handheld sprayer. Every visitor snickered at such extravagance, but it seemed to be the best part of the tour as we showed people around the renovation. Pat threatened to bring her troupe over weekly. Everyone had a dog who needed to be washed, and everyone wished they had a place better than the shower, with the dog at their feet, shaking his hairy coat all over their naked legs.
But Gulliver never got used to being in the water, any more than he ever got used to the pool at the other house. He stood with his face averted as the water flowed over him from the big spray nozzle and shook, vigorously, as often as possible. He always had a triumphant look when he got me as wet as he was, and I soon learned to bathe him without a shirt or bra.
When Nathaniel finished college and came home to
stay with us for a while during his first job, Gulliver would bound up the steep stairs to the apartment over the garage and scarf around looking for table scraps. Table scraps were prized—more eagerly anticipated than his nightly food bowl at 5:00 PM. Nikki, Nathaniel’s girlfriend, loved Gulliver and would occasionally cuddle with him on the couch as they watched DVDs after supper.
“He’s the most human dog I ever met,” she said. I smiled, thinking that this described Gulliver perfectly. Having both Nathaniel and Nikki around so much was another move back toward the life I had once known as a mother, a healthy upward pull. The family had increased again, and once more, a dog was at the center of it.
He continued to counter-cruise, as food was still his number one hobby, and he waited anxiously for any plates to lick after supper. He scorned nothing, not even salad, not even raw mushrooms. There wasn’t a single thing he didn’t like, except dry, undressed lettuce.
Once, when Brad’s sister was visiting from Chicago, he raided her suitcase in search of the food he was certain was hidden in there. He discovered a treasure—a huge, oversize bar of dark chocolate. Happily, he chowed down, though Debbie caught him midway and dragged him upstairs to the kitchen.
Dark chocolate is toxic to dogs, and we quickly poured a stream of table salt down his throat to induce him to vomit. He spent the rest of the day coughing, a hoarse, sore noise that quite nearly made me regret what I had done.
After that, though, he had a persistent cough and a wheeze, especially on hot days. We associated it with the episode when he’d had the salt, but when it persisted, a visit to the vet proved us wrong.
“He’s got a frozen larynx,” she diagnosed, “and needs surgery to open his trachea back up so he can breathe freely again.”
Then she went on to explain the side effects of the operation. “With his larynx pinned open like that, there will be nothing to keep food and water from going down into his lungs. You’ll have to have him eat from an elevated bowl. And keep an eagle’s eye out to make sure he doesn’t aspirate anything. Especially vomit. He could get pneumonia, and that can kill—fast.”
Dogs vomited all the time, I thought, especially after they ate grass, and Gulliver loved to graze.
I worried about it all, especially every time he ate or drank, but Brad said I worried about everything anyway.
The frozen larynx was the first real sign of his aging. But to my sorrow, age he did. At eleven, his muzzle began to gray. Bounding up the back hill from my office was replaced with sleeping on the couch, and he would only look up with enthusiasm when I came into the room, or when it was suppertime and I picked up his bowl. His haunches stiffened, and it became difficult for him to leap up onto the bed to cuddle with me at night. We settled on a new command, “Pawsers!” for when I wanted to lift him up and get him settled on the blanket. He would rise on his rear legs and put his front feet up, and I would give him a boost. Soon he began to sit every night at the side of the bed, waiting patiently for his command and my helpful hands. I didn’t have to say a word.
As he grew older, he needed to stretch out more. This made having him sleep on the bed very difficult, as there was no room for me and Brad. Gulliver settled for a new spot in the best chair in the bedroom, a thickly padded, wide bergère. There he would cuddle up, his chin on the overstuffed armrest, and watch me until his observant eyes closed. I never washed that armrest, despite the grime that accumulated over time from his chin. That reminded me of my Nana, who had had her dining room table redone but counseled the refinisher not to remove the little teeth marks along one edge, made by my father when he was an investigative toddler.
At night, before bedtime, Brad and I often sat out on the back deck, with sweaters on even in summer, as the fog that came across the mountain ridge opposite us cooled the fading day rapidly. “Nature’s air conditioner,” as it is known in the Bay Area, made for comfortable sleeping even when it followed a day with temperatures in the 90s.
Gulliver lay at our feet as we sat back in our wooden chairs, waiting for the sound that would call him. After a while, the coyotes began to wail back and forth to each other. He raised his head while listening to his brothers, ears pricked forward, though he did not answer them. The moon rose over the canyon. And then I thought what a perfect evening it was for us all—a dog and his family.
•••
One late winter’s afternoon, Pat called to tell me she had just been diagnosed with colon cancer. “Don’t worry,” she said in her typically cheerful voice, “I’m going to beat it. If you have to have cancer, this is the best one to get.”
This was true, and I knew it. Caught early, colon cancer could often be curable. But my friend had waited too long, never having had the requisite colonoscopy at fifty, allowing her fear of hospitals and doctors to overwhelm her common sense. In her late sixties, she began experiencing rapidly worsening symptoms. Nevertheless, in typical fashion, she ignored them until one day she fainted with severely low blood pressure caused by internal bleeding. At last she allowed John to drive her to the hospital. But it was too late: rectal carcinoma, Stage 4.
Only a year went by, all too fast, as Dawn and I watched her slip quickly from a vibrant woman filled with laughter to a gray shadow who faded away without words. I paid frequent visits during her illness and brought the requisite casseroles and salads, but the last time I went to see her, a few days before her death, I was not able to sit and hold her hand. I was taken aback at how close death actually was. I had never had to face it head on in this way. All of my family had died quite suddenly: my mother’s suicide; both my grandfathers’ and my Aunt Joan’s car crashes; my maternal grandmother’s late diagnosis of breast cancer. And then there was my close friend Rose, who lived in New York City and succumbed to her lung cancer quickly, only a few years before Pat’s passing. She had been a mother to me during the years of Nathaniel and Gabe’s early childhood and, unlike other friends, did not fall out of touch when I moved to California. Her death came as a shock because she was so far away, and I did not watch the stages progress or witness her final days.
There had also been the sudden death of Diane Middlebrook, my mother’s biographer, with whom I had had an intense friendship that lasted well beyond her work on the controversial book Anne Sexton: A Biography. There, too, I had not been able to be near her in the days preceding the end of her struggle as she lived abroad, returning to San Francisco only immediately before her death. Pat’s passing was thus unique. In the space of ten years, three of my women friends had died of cancer, and then there were the other four friends who were fighting breast and pancreatic cancers as well. My father contracted prostate cancer and underwent the usual radiation therapy, which rendered him weak and angry.
It was a frightening time, yet in a different way. My own dance with death was past. I no longer had any suicidal thoughts. They had been replaced with a desire not to die from a case of cells gone awry—for the first time in many years, I just wanted to live. There was triumph in this, but loss moved through my memory, building on the sorrow that those previous deaths had brought as I mourned Pat. Once again, Gulliver fulfilled his role as therapy dog.
At her funeral, with Brad and Dawn at my side, I delivered only one of the several eulogies offered. I spoke of her generous nature and how we had become friends, so quickly. How we had shared the dogs and traveled far and wide. We had built our friendship around our animals—but then it all had moved, so quickly, so far, beyond just that. She had taught me much about persistence and humor, and that a family could be made up of friends of the same persuasion: in this case, one that was black-and-white and quite naturally bespotted.
PART V
new beginnings
{IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE}
Breeze, a.k.a. GCH SunnyOaks Saint Florian Literati’s Compass Rose
thirteen
OVER TIME, PAT’S DEATH wasn’t quite so wrenching. Brad had helped. Gulliver had helped. By 2007, I was deep into work on what had turned out to be a boo
k after all.
My days had changed radically. I was no longer living in the land of the bed or on the land of the couch—but was up on my feet again. Once again, I was back to writing about family. I began to accept that this might always be so.
I had reduced my sessions with my psychiatrist to once a week and took my medications with determined exactitude. I depended less on Gulliver for constant companionship to counter depression and more on his company just to spend my days writing, or reading a book, with him curled at my feet, rather than cuddling me on the sheets. Brad’s nurturing had taken hold, and I no longer dreaded waking. Every week I improved, and even the boys were encouraged, and told me so.
Yet I worried that Gulliver had grown too isolated and wondered if that might be the reason he was so aggressive with other dogs. We couldn’t exactly take him to the dog park, and even with Dawn’s dogs, he looked as if he was spoiling for a fight. So we enrolled him in a class at Planet Pooch called “Grumpy Puppy,” even though he was a senior citizen, and we practiced stuffing him full of cheese every time he made eye contact with another dog and didn’t growl. No big surprise that he loved going to that class, but if you didn’t have the cheese in your hand, he still looked as if he was going to kill the dog walking toward him.
I was also ready to have a second dog again, and Brad was quite eager for one he could call his own, just as I always called Gulliver my own, despite how much and how often we shared him. I missed the world of having a dog in the show ring, and though sailing was still a large part of our lives, I wanted more than just the wind in my hair every weekend.
We didn’t know if it would be too risky to bring another dog into our home, but we thought we would at least give it a try. It would have to be a female, and a puppy, for obvious reasons. And in this way, when Gulliver was eleven, Breeze came to live with us.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 12
