Sleeps with Dogs

by Lindsey Grant

  It was the final paragraph that stopped me short. In an effort to lift Sara’s spirits, Andy contacted his friend who ran a cat rescue. They’d already adopted a three-month-old named Rhoda. Can’t wait for you to meet her. Simpson and Leilani are already warming up to her, she wrote in closing. It seemed, then, that they were moving right on, and at lightning speed.

  For my part, I would have to figure out a way to get beyond it. He wasn’t mine, after all. But the loss felt acutely personal nevertheless.

  After Biscuit’s sudden departure from our family, we tried to commemorate her legacy. I had written a very maudlin poem about “the unstoppable, rebel force” of her cancer, and how she was “my big white tissue, absorbing my sadness with her gentle brown eyes,” which we framed alongside favorite photos of her—carrying a giant branch around in her mouth as though it were nothing more than a stick; frolicking in a rare Atlanta snowfall; lounging on her blanket in the utilitarian doghouse my dad made out of plywood with a sheet metal roof; sitting next to me on the front porch, the wild white blond hair I had in my youth an impressive match to the creamy shock of fur that forever hung in her eyes; and a top-ten list of her best characteristics. She let rats eat her dog food without objection; she always pooped in the ivy; she loved to roll in grass, but most especially in our neighbors’ zoysia. I still had her blue canvas collar, white fur tangled in the buckle, with her rabies tag and our address in case she ever wandered too far afield, which she never did.

  I was strangely insulted by the rapidity of Larry’s replacement. Did his loss not warrant a grieving period? Or was the loss so great, or so long-anticipated, that the best and only salve was a brand-new kitten to fill the Larry-shaped hole in their home? I didn’t have that luxury. I had a Larry-shaped hole, too, but only an uncooked ten-pound turkey to fill it.

  His death cast a pall over what was an otherwise pretty serviceable Thanksgiving. We had two last-minute additions to the guest list: a guy from the newcomers’ group that I’d tried and failed to date, and his colleague-maybe-girlfriend. The potential awkwardness of that scenario was overshadowed only by events of the night before, in which I’d made a pass at my ex. Out of loneliness, for old time’s sake, because we were great friends and I knew it wouldn’t screw anything up. As it happened, he was back with his ex, and they’d just moved in together, so he’d remained on the sofa in his sleeping bag instead of sharing my bed.

  But no one said a word about the slightly charred casserole and stuffing, which I’d accidentally scorched while attempting to warm it in the broiler. And—due to the unexpected extra mouths—we ran out of turkey before we’d eaten our fill. But everyone politely claimed they’d had plenty. To me, a post-Thanksgiving Friday without ample turkey leftovers was unnatural. A failure. But I kept this criticism to myself, relieved as I was that everybody else seemed satisfied with the fare.

  After the table was cleared and the dishes mostly cleaned, my mind was filled with Biscuit, and Larry, and the unshakeable question of whether—and how—he’d be memorialized. And, too, a nagging sense of humiliation and aloneness. My ex, out there asleep on our bony uncomfortable couch, had his ex; my friend left with her boyfriend; Ian was with his girlfriend on the other side of the wall; and then there was the guy I’d tried making out with after all on my sister’s advice, and his “friend,” who’d walked off together into the evening full on my semi-successful first attempt at a Thanksgiving feast. I had plenty to be grateful for; I knew that. I just wanted—more than anything—to have someone to share it with.

  In my one act of defiance—and in secret solidarity with Larry and his memory—I never again took care of Leilani or Simpson or Rhoda. I always came up with an excuse as to why I was unavailable for the dates they requested coverage for, gracious in my apologies and always agreeing—through the proxy of my fellow pet sitters—that I just had to meet Rhoda-the-wonder-cat, who was apparently fast friends with Simpson in a way Larry never had been.

  My avoidance allowed Larry to remain in memory as he’d always been. He sat there by the porch as night descended, surveying the world with his steady gaze, a gentleman tomcat ready for some dinner and a petting before he departed again to lead his quiet cat life.

  To: “Smitty”, “SB”, “TBug”, “LTat”

  Subject: Insta-love

  My dearest, best girls,

  “I can’t believe it. I am in love! I am love with a handsome, talented duke!” (That’s from Moulin Rouge, in case you didn’t catch it.) Against all odds and out of nowhere, I have met someone, and he is one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever clapped eyes on. I am outta my league here, so if anyone has a copy of “How to wrangle a man one trillion times better looking than you, never letting him know that you want to be his personal baby-maker,” can I borrow it?? If I can figure out a way to see him again, I will lick his snout in gratefulness for subverting my recent and truly terrible opinion of men.

  I love him. I love love! La la la.

  LDogg

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bachelors

  The dog was Baxter, a mixed breed six ways to Sunday that purportedly included traces of Rottweiler, some variety of shepherd, ditto for terrier, and maybe chow somewhere in there, which seemed dubious but for the dense-to-frizzy quality of his coat, and a faint purplish hue to his tongue. He was cute as he could be at his advanced age and with the myriad end-of-life issues he struggled with. His breath could kill a dragon. His stomach was concave from a botched excavation of a foxtail that had traveled through his nostril and wormed its way into his stomach. He was arthritic, his bark sounded like a smoker’s cough, and he was so deaf I’d have to shake him awake when I arrived at his house. Even the vibration from my feet on the floorboards or the door shutting behind me did nothing to alert him to my arrival.

  His owner, Drew, lived in a chimney-shaped house set high above Berkeley. It was mere steps from a maze of densely wooded hiking and jogging trails where we did our walking, or in Bax’s case, shuffling. It was a great house: two stories, perfectly square, timber frame, with a wide view of the bay and city below. Until recently, he’d shared it with a wife and her Tibetan terrier, Matilda, as well as their marmalade Garfield, who was missing his ears and tail from a long-ago run-in with frostbite. The cat was still in residence, but the wife and her dog had fled in the wake of a trial separation.

  I met her once, when she was dropping Matilda off on her way out of town. She was blond, tough looking, and rode a scooter with a bin in the back that Matilda occupied. For his part, Drew was white blond, rosy cheeked, round in the belly, and spoke to Baxter in the most awful baby talk. His voice would go all high and squeaky, and he’d say things like, “Who’s the cutie-wootiest Baxter boy?” I mean, we all talk to animals—I am as guilty as the next person—but he might’ve reserved the special voice for private moments alone with Baxter. I couldn’t honestly say that I saw the attraction for either of them—Drew or his erstwhile blushing bride. The dog-talking voice alone made my ovaries shrivel into hard little infertile pellets.

  In the absence of a wife, Drew eventually took on a roommate, presumably to help with the rent. I can’t figure any other reason he’d have welcomed this guy into his tiny house. The new roomie was a full head shorter than me, wore braces, had a bong that stood almost as tall as he did, and had no job that I could readily detect. He was often on the couch, stoned, watching basketball and hollering at the screen when I’d come by for Baxter. Why he couldn’t mind the dog and save Drew some money, or himself some rent, was beyond me. Not that I was complaining; five-days-a-week walks were my bread and butter, and I was more than grateful to have Baxter locked into my regular schedule.

  When the ex-wife’s Tibetan terrier was staying over, which happened occasionally, my normally sedate stroll with Bax was a slightly more fraught undertaking. But it was also slightly more money. Matilda absolutely refused to go on-leash, which made me nervous. Baxter wasn’t leashed either, but he could barely move without assistance, so
I had little fear that he was going to escape into the woods. Matilda, on the other hand, was fast. When she moved, she seemed to leave those streaky graphics in her wake that you see in cartoons when Road Runner takes off at speed.

  On more than one occasion, she leapt from the front porch onto the trail and didn’t reappear for fifteen minutes or more, during which time my heart was lodged up near my uvula. To rally her, I had to trill, “Matilda, Matilda, Matilda,” three times fast and then vibrate my lips, as though I were giving someone a raspberry, at a high pitch. How Drew and his wife determined that this was the most effective way to summon the dog was beyond me. It certainly wasn’t dignified, and it wasn’t even consistently effective. But this was the only way to make her come back to me.

  When she reappeared, tearing up the trail toward Baxter and me, who always shuffled along at least twenty paces behind, it was no guarantee that she wouldn’t take off again, so I just kept repeating the same absurd four-part call to keep her engaged. She liked to jump from the ground up to my chest and into my arms in one impressive leap and lick my lips when I made the raspberry sound.

  I was surprised to find that, as humiliating as it was to do this in front of the assorted Cal students and outdoor enthusiasts that passed, it was still preferable to chasing her around until she finally got worn out or I was able to pin her to the ground.

  Drew was one of a new crop of bachelors I’d taken on recently. There was no accounting for why so many simultaneously single men were in need of pet care. Or, rather, I understood why the newly single would need some help covering for their fur babies, but I couldn’t account for the sudden rash of singletons.

  Far worse off than Drew and his stoned Doogie Howser of a roommate was a one-time pet-sitting job I took up near Orinda. The house was enormous, part of new construction that had sprung up along the highway. The owner, like Drew, had recently lost his wife, though it wasn’t entirely clear how or why. When I met him for the first time at the front door, it was one of the first things out his mouth, part of his apology for the state of the once-grand house.

  “Sorry about the house. My wife isn’t here.” And hadn’t been for some time, from what I gathered by the complete and unmitigated disaster that this man and his two enormous and poorly kept Akitas lived in. Pizza boxes were stacked on the kitchen floor, leaning crazily into the cabinets, dishes so long unwashed that they were actually stuck to the marble countertop. Dusty clumps of dog fur the size of my head littered the living room floor, which was empty save for the dogs and a lone leather couch facing a flat-screen TV that took up most of the far wall. The whole place looked like the end of an empire.

  He wanted to pay me up front, and in cash, which was rare. I was used to invoicing at the end of pet-sitting jobs and seeing a check in the mail after thirty or so days. At the eleventh hour, he asked if I could come an extra day; he’d leave the additional cash with my payment by the front door. He was going to a motorcycle show and wanted to extend his stay.

  I was grateful for the cash payment and thrilled at the sudden and unexpected extra day of pay. It was funny scooping up that stack of cash, as though I was a woman of ill repute, leaving by way of the garage with my earnings. I’d grown so used to crisp, carefully penned checks; this stack of cash without so much as an envelope was jarring.

  With the cash, the owner left his garage-door opener, so that I could take the dogs in and out for their walks that way instead of via the rather ostentatious and very steep staircase leading to his front door. I wondered if this was because the dogs couldn’t manage the climb. Even though they’d been described as “young, four or five years old,” they moved like ancient and infirm shadows of the dogs they might once have been. Their fur was matted, their breath ungodly, and, like most Akitas I’ve met, they were pretty ornery. But unlike most Akitas, they didn’t seem to have much energy—or any at all. Once I had them on-leash, it took some extreme prodding and wheedling on my part to get them off the leather couch. I gave up pretty quickly trying to connect with them, both because they seemed completely immune to, and even a little annoyed by, my pets and ear-and-butt scratches, but also because I quickly discovered that no amount of scrubbing could remove their distinctive stench from my hands.

  The stairs within the house itself were almost as plentiful and steep as the ones outside that led to the front door; the house totaled four stories from basement to attic. There were spiderwebs in the stairwell, housing some of the biggest spiders I have ever seen in my life. I wondered if this guy left them there for the company. Arachnophobic to my very core, it took all of my will to ignore them and focus instead on making it down the steps without hyperventilating. My fear is bad enough that I might have declined the job had I known there’d be mammoth spiders in the mix. The stairs themselves did provide a bit of a distraction from the horrors above—the thick pile of the carpet might have once been a creamy white but had since turned the color of old snow.

  The owner presumably rode one of his motorcycles to the show, but he had two more in mint condition sitting in his immaculate garage. Clearly he spent the balance of his time here in the basement, and not in the ruins of the rest of the house.

  The dogs shat like horses: while they walked, and with even less warning than a horse might give. No tail-lifting, just wet clods of dog shit hitting the pavement behind them. On our first walk, I kept waiting for the telltale pause-and-hunch that signaled a normal dog emission was on its way. None came, and, after we’d turned and walked home, I was appalled to find that someone had not picked up after their dogs, wondering how I’d missed the big piles at near-regular intervals like ellipses along the sidewalk. Trying to avoid the mess, I fell behind the dogs, and only then did I witness their unique and inconvenient method of crapping. What was more, they just plowed through their poop like it was nothing, leaving brown paw prints in their collective wake. No wonder the carpet in the house was a muddy beige.

  Over the long weekend of visits, I became adept at trailing behind the dogs, scooping up the loose leavings as best I could. I couldn’t really help the marks left behind on the pavement, illustrating graphically the path we’d taken on our walk like the fecal equivalent of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail.

  I tried to avoid touching the dogs—and anything else in the house—as much as possible, and to keep the damage to the public walkways to a minimum. On the rare occasion that I passed another pedestrian, I pretended I had no idea where all that shit was coming from and tried to look appropriately annoyed and disgusted by the liberally soiled sidewalk.

  The client never called me again, and I was relieved. I knew it wasn’t anything I’d done wrong, but more likely his inability to remember my name or find my contact information amidst the garbage and fur and dishes that were slowly overtaking his once-enviable house.

  I was grateful, too, that he never requested an overnight stay. The money might have swayed me toward a yes, which would have been the wrong answer. I did, however, spend the night at Drew’s, just once, for a weekend, which was one too many.

  This was before the roommate was there; the second bedroom still stood empty but for a few boxes that I guessed his wife had yet to collect. I had the presence of mind to bring my own linens to drape over Drew’s. His mattress sat directly on the floor under the kind of poly-fill comforter you buy in a bag with a matching pair of coarse sheets for your first year of college. His wife must have gotten the bed frame in the separation. I wished I’d just brought a sleeping bag and slept on the floor of the spare room. Marginally less cushioning, to be sure, but the intimacy of staying in Drew’s room, sleeping on his mattress, was far more uncomfortable. The space was a study in depression: not his own, but the emotion his surroundings evoked in me.

  He had a piece of paper taped to his mirrored closet door titled “Goals for Life,” broken down into one-year increments; his underwear was tightly rolled and sorted by color in a bin in the closet, left open for me or anyone else to see. But nothing got my nose ou
t of joint quite as much as the condom—unwrapped and seemingly unused, sitting atop the dresser. I didn’t investigate too closely, and instead tried and failed to explain away its presence there. Did he forget he’d unwrapped it and left it there? Why did he unwrap it and put it there in the first place? How could he possibly overlook this before leaving for the weekend? I slept very poorly those two nights, wishing more than I have wished for almost anything else that I had not needed to accept this overnight job.

  Amongst these unfortunate encounters with love’s disenfranchised, I met someone. My roommate from college had recently moved to San Francisco from Atlanta for a position with HGTV, and we were out in the city celebrating her first day at the new job. Her new roommate was there, a British guy who seemed to have taken a shine to her in the few days she’d been living in their shared Western Addition walk-up. His friend was to join us at some point, and, in the meantime, I was letting their roommate romance play out while I sipped the cheapest beer the bar had to offer.

  It wasn’t beer goggles or lowered inhibitions that suggested to me that this friend, who finally showed up, was a catch. He was quiet and unassuming, buying us all a round of drinks with little fanfare and an earnestness that seemed out of place in the packed, noisy bar. He had dimples, and a job, and he asked me questions about my job and the dogs I looked after with genuine interest, which made me blush profusely. No one outside of my family ever asked me about work, and in such detail. Certainly not devastatingly handsome strangers. At the end of the night, he donned my coat, wrapped my black chenille scarf around his neck, and walked out the bar. I had no choice but to follow.