The women I gravitated toward in the Northeast had their own versions of the riotous years of the 1960s and ’70s, but the demands of adulthood had banked their fires. My friendships in Boston had a tendency to be more distant, less profound. In the predominantly male province of the Globe newsroom, where I was hired in the mid-eighties, most of the women I knew were too busy covering wars or politics—sweet cost of victory!—to give much time to close interactions. My independence and solitude gave proof to this: Most of my emotional resources had gone into making my way as a writer, which had solidified my life and maybe even saved it.
I had also realized, gradually but surefootedly, that I didn’t want to have children. I had glimpsed this possibility early on, I think, even though I’d grown up in the conservative Texas Panhandle, where marriage and motherhood were as implicit as prayer and football. My parents had each come from large families—my father the ninth of ten, my mother the oldest of six—and their crowded childhoods had convinced them of the calmer luxury of having a small family. My mother, Ruby, had a younger sibling hoisted on her hip throughout her youth, and I suspect she was weary of the job by the time she left the farm, at eighteen, during the height of the Great Depression. She’d made her way in the workforce for a decade before marrying my dad, then waited until her late thirties to have children—a radical gesture for mid-twentieth-century America. She celebrated any route toward contentment: When my sister had her daughter, Ruby was out of her mind with joy; when I left Texas for the East and became a writer, she acted as though I’d climbed Kilimanjaro.
Whatever alternate paths my mother may have envisioned for me, feminism broadened into a four-lane highway. I knew a number of women whose emotional choices were closely linked to the idea of motherhood; because that wasn’t a piece of my particular dream, I was free to base my mating calls on love alone. As part of the great wave of women who no longer needed to marry for social or economic status or for children, I had liberated myself right into the wide, bland pastures of noncommitment. This was the good news and occasionally the bad. I’d made my little odyssey to the East alone and unencumbered, and I knew I’d avoided the yoke of an unhappy marriage or being hostage to someone else’s paycheck. On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as hell. Sick of my Calvinist fortitude, an old friend in Texas sent me a postcard on which she’d scribbled a three-word imperative: “LOWER YOUR STANDARDS.”
Thrilling or tiresome, single women’s love narratives tend to be desultory stories: Reader, I moved on. I’d had several relationships through my twenties and thirties that ranged from high drama to cosmic misfires, but they belonged to the same era as my rabble-rouser freedom—they were fleeting and fierce, or faux revolutionary and unfulfilling, or decent matches with bad timing. Most of them were wrapped in the amber mist of alcohol, which meant that they rarely stood a chance of trumping my affection for the bottle. With whiskey in the picture, it was always a ménage à trois.
Even for a while after I got sober, I had a tendency to choose passionately and badly. I laughed off the advances of a young reporter who’d been hanging around my desk at the Globe until he got a foreign bureau assignment; as soon as I learned he was heading for a hot zone in six weeks, where he would be stationed for years, I had an affair with him. Then I met a journalist for a big-city daily who lived five hundred miles away; when he told me he was suffering shell shock from a bad divorce, I decided we were meant for each other.
If they weren’t unavailable or leaving the country, I favored the Pygmalion slow-death trap: choosing a wise, usually narcissistic mentor who wanted to pull me into his orbit. My last serious relationship, with a man named Sam who was a decade older, had fit this template so thoroughly that it probably rid me of the inclination forever. We spent two years together, a small eternity of good and bad, and while I like to believe I would have summoned the strength to leave him of my own accord, his moving to another city was what finally broke the spell.
The night I left him I said goodbye in a crowded airport, tears streaming down my face, then boarded a late shuttle back to Boston. When I woke up the next morning, instead of feeling shattered, I felt safe for the first time in months. The sensation was physical, as though I’d just gotten off a sickening sailboat ride through bad weather. I had to go to a holiday party that evening, and I put on a velvet shirt and cowboy boots and threw cold water on my face. When the hostess met me at the door, she furrowed her brow with worry, and so I said, simply, “I left him.”
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“No,” I said, my no longer tragic smile in place. “But I will be.”
I found myself a good therapist: a soft-spoken man so largehearted and inimitably wry that my initial fondness for him very soon grew to include trust. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who quoted to me from Baudelaire and the Song of Solomon; he laughed at my jokes, but he didn’t laugh when I was being a wiseass to hide my pain. When I wept and told him I was afraid I was too intense, too much, he interrupted my tears and said, “If someone came down from above and told me I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.”
So began one of the finest connections of my life, which charted, sometimes guided, my navigation toward the light. I turned forty and quit smoking—a twenty-year pack-a-day habit—two days later. My life seemed spartan but solid: If Freud promised work and love to the well-integrated soul, I was attempting a modern-day version of both. The work sustained me; the love belonged to a constellation of friends instead of the trials and consolations of a romantic partner. It was a bit hard on the bones at night, but the rock I had climbed onto at this point in the journey still had a pretty good view.
AND THEN, IN THE SPRING OF 1995, CAME A DOG named Clementine—an experience so emotionally humbling that it rocked my austere world. I had wanted a Samoyed for as long as I could remember—I even found an old training guide for the breed, a book that I’d had as a child—but because they were large sled dogs, I’d assumed it would be unfair to keep one in the city; I was also loath to leave a dog alone while I spent long days in the newsroom. Around the same time that I started working at home, my downstairs neighbors, a young surgeon and a lawyer, brought home an eight-week-old Labrador retriever puppy. I offered to look in on her during the day and soon got into the habit of carrying her upstairs each morning. She would sleep in my lap while I read, an arrangement of such mutual reward that it opened the door onto my old sled dog fantasy. My aging Persian cat tolerated the Lab, a reception that convinced me I could introduce another puppy into his domain. So began a Samoyed research expedition that took me all over New England. I talked to dog trainers who assured me it was acceptable to have a Sam in the city; I sought out breed rescue and breeder-referral people who grilled me to determine whether I would measure up. Whenever I saw a Samoyed being walked on the street, I stopped its owner and pestered him or her with questions. I drove a hundred miles to see a breeder whose blue ribbon dogs were national champions; her kennels were so crowded and obviously profit-oriented that I fled in distress. Then I went to Connecticut; more grilling, this round made pleasurable by the five adult Samoyeds vying for space in my lap. Finally, after a series of mishaps and unexpectedly small litters, I found a woman in upstate New York with a five-week-old litter of seven. She had a yearlong waiting list for her puppies, she told me, but someone had dropped out that morning, two hours before I called. I’ve never known whether this was fate or good salesmanship. But two days later, I drove the two hundred miles to Kingston, New York, with a reservation in place at the nearly empty local Holiday Inn. My heart had already left the stratosphere.
That trip was only to meet the pups, and to give the breeder a chance to meet me—to see if I was worthy to pair with one of her dogs. Anyone who has taken the labyrinthine journey into the world of purebred dogs will recognize this as a normal course of action from reputable breeders, though for the novitiate, it is both intimid
ating and thrilling. I’ve gotten jobs and mortgages more easily than I got Clementine. The breeder had her human candidates choose two puppies, then she matched us with the dog she thought would be the best fit. I chose a feisty troublemaker who had stormed her way onto my lap the moment I met her, and a big, sleepy girl who napped during most of the visit. I laughed when the breeder called to tell me I was getting the troublemaker.
Two weeks later, I made the round trip to Kingston and back in a day, with a friend driving her Saab while I stayed in the back seat with Clementine, who weighed eleven pounds and within a year would grow to be five times that size. I brought her home and began the frantic reorientation that a new animal always ensures: It seemed as though I had let a wolf cub loose on the place. She was unstoppable, stubborn, and fearless; when a 120-pound Irish wolfhound came to visit, Clemmie stood underneath the dog, barking furiously, undaunted by being outweighed by a factor of ten. After the first sleep-deprived twenty-four hours of her invasion, I sat on the back porch with her sprawled asleep in my lap—She has white eyelashes! I thought—and tears started streaming down my face. I had had animals all my life, but never had my heart been seized with such unequivocal love.
I UNDERSTOOD THIS attachment for what it was: the instinctive and deep, probably maternal, feelings for a being who depends on you for her very survival. My respect for the human-animal connection was well earned; dogs had always gravitated toward my dad, and I had grown up with animals. My sister in Texas had an Airedale and a Border collie. So I was no stranger to cross-species attachments; that mine to Clementine came when and how it did—single woman, doesn’t want kids, loves dogs—offered a providential answer to the primary relationships that we all require. This mysterious, intelligent animal I had brought into my life seemed to me not a stand-in, but a blessing.
My life changed in the most gratifying and mundane ways. Instead of having dinner out with friends, I joined neighborhood dog groups in the park at night, hanging out with an array of people whose paths weren’t likely to cross in a dogless world. An inveterate night owl, I started rising at six a.m. to keep to the housebreaking schedule; my apartment, a once orderly world of old Persian rugs and bookcases, was now littered with squeaky toys and stuffed lemurs. I postponed the idea of the trip abroad I’d been planning and rented a house on a Wellfleet pond instead, where I taught Clementine to swim. Having come of age in the Panhandle, where you could smell the stockyards from ten miles away, I had missed that roughhewn lifestyle ever since I’d moved to the urban Northeast. Now I was back in uniform, in jeans and boots, with dirt on my knees, and I felt as if I’d returned to some long-forgotten place of shelter.
My new friends—the subterranean enclave of dog people—could entertain themselves for hours with talk of fear-aggressive behavior or socialization techniques; if we were seen as insane or tedious by our non-dog friends, we pitied them for what they were missing. Long summer nights were now spent outside, lolling in the fields watching baseball or walking the neighborhood. My priorities had changed, often to the chagrin of others: At a classy soiree in Newton, I irritated my hosts by ignoring the guests and playing in the backyard with their golden retriever. I signed up for obedience classes, then a second round and a third, and looked forward to them all week, reveling in the clarity of communication that training an independent sled dog entailed. Bullying revealed itself immediately for what it was; equally useless were mixed signals, irony, or indecision. Dogs craved and responded to straightforward instruction, recognition, and praise, all of it the direct-arrow language of the heart. For a writer, who spent hours of each day thinking through the intricacies and beauty of words, this link between the species was a place of ease and liberation.
SO WHEN CAROLINE told me, not long after we met, that she was in love with her dog, it didn’t require any explanation. While I had been immersed in the challenges of Clementine, Caroline’s life was being upended by Lucille, an experience later captured in Pack of Two, the book she had just contracted to write. She too had taken on training as though she were undergoing a mission for NASA. I went over to the Concord Armory in Cambridge for two rounds of obedience work with an exmarine who was convinced Clementine was a blackguard male; every time she misbehaved, he would shout at me, battalion-style, “Tell him he’s a rascal!” Caroline was so infatuated with the famous monks of New Skete, New York, masters of German shepherd dogs and the authors of seminal training guides, that she found the monastery’s phone number and begged them to let her bring Lucille to visit. We were privately snobbish about our canine knowledge and raised an eyebrow to each other when we saw people making mistakes with their dogs—saying “no” when they meant “stay,” or using the “come” command too loosely. But we kept our superiority to ourselves, showing off only to each other. Caroline won the match on the day she saw a soft-coated, pretty ambler at Fresh Pond, and called out to the dog’s owner, “Is that a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever?”
Each of us had this devotion put to the test in the first few months of our friendship: We had coincidentally signed up for the same weeklong session in October at a dog camp in Vermont. Hordes of dog lovers convened at a camp and barracks set on sprawling green acres, where people and dogs got to experience full immersion in training, agility, group meals, and organized play. In the mid-1990s, such places were an anomaly, and Caroline had scoped out the place as an opportunity for research. I was simply there on a lark. It was like a nudist camp for dog lovers, where one might indulge in a natural state away from the inhibiting pressures of normal society. If you wanted to dress your dog in funny costumes, or practice agility with an Afghan hound, no one would laugh at you there, at least not overtly.
From any reasonable perspective, the camp was bedlam. About eighty people and their dogs showed up for the fall session, and the carnival-like atmosphere of the place was probably easier on the humans than on the dogs. Border collies charged around in Frisbee competition, their eyes shining with evangelical focus. Welsh corgis marched up the hill determined as soldiers. I watched my dog run a lure course at what looked to be forty miles an hour; the CBS morning show was there filming, so Clementine had her media day in the sun. Evenings, Caroline and I endured a cafeteria-style supper and then slipped out before the scheduled lectures, heading for our off-site rooms to hash over the absurdities of the day. Near the end of the week, on a group hike over the rolling Vermont terrain, I looked behind me to see some twenty wildly energetic dogs charging up the hill, half of them on retractable leads, their owners trying helplessly to contain them. It looked like a Disney movie gone haywire. Caroline and I sneaked away, found an isolated trail with switchbacks, and let the dogs run. Clementine spotted a deer on the rise and went charging after it; to my astonished joy, she stopped in her tracks when I whistled my long-range recall—she looked down at me, then up toward the deer, and came charging back in my direction. This was enough to convince me that I was doing fine on my own; by then, I’d had enough of the summer camp agenda. I ducked out on the last day’s events, forfeited a night at the nearby B&B, and headed for Boston. Caroline, ever the A student, was unnerved but impressed by my mutiny and took it as a cue for her own retreat, though she politely sought out the staff (who couldn’t have cared less) to let them know she was leaving.
This was one of the dynamics between us we came to value: She was the good girl and I was the rebel, and each of us learned enough from the other to expand our respective territories. As the daughter of liberal intellectuals who had worshipped Freud and art instead of God, she often complained that she’d had little to rebel against. In the Bible Belt, I’d had a bounty of possible reasons for my insurgency. My mother had come from such a strict Baptist upbringing that she eschewed card-playing on Sunday; my dad was a Nixon Democrat who, protective of his teenage daughters, had patrolled our suburban street with a shotgun—unloaded but effective, particularly when the quarry was a group of adolescent boys. Caroline loved hearing these stories. Her own father, faced with such
rivals for his girls, would have brandished a Rorschach test instead of a gun.
THAT AUTUMN WE were walking the fire trails near Sheepfold Meadow at Middlesex Fells; it was a glorious Sunday afternoon, and dozens of people had wandered out of bounds, past the No Trespassing signs near the verboten reservoir, to avail themselves of the view. A town police officer arrived and rounded up only the people with dogs, ignoring the families with strollers and the solitary amblers. He herded us into a queue as though we were a group of delinquents and began writing citations for criminal trespassing. I was planning on using a fake name, which seemed to me the obvious course of action, but Caroline, who was standing in front of me, dutifully announced who she was and where she lived. I sighed and made the decision to go down with her.
A few weeks later we were summoned to court in the neighboring town of Stoneham, where all of us—nineteen offenders—were given a comically harsh lecture for our offense and sentenced to six months’ probation. (“Where is Stoneham?” Caroline called to ask, the morning before court.) I stood to address the judge and began complaining of discriminatory treatment, as only the dog owners had been cited. The judge made a cursory note of my objection; Caroline looked embarrassed to be with me. Our friend Tom, having seen the particular humor in her being arrested, made her a silk-screened T-shirt with a picture of Lucille behind bars, bearing the legend FREE THE SHEEPFOLD 19.
KATHY, THE DOG TRAINER who had first told the two of us to get in touch, had done so based on a hunch; she was a deeply intuitive person who spent her days observing dogs and humans for all sorts of behavioral cues. A small, soft-spoken woman who had two German shepherd dogs, she could stop a wayward or dominant dog in its tracks with her calm demeanor and no-nonsense voice. She was equally perceptive with people and had spotted something in Caroline and me before we ever became friends. One day a few months later, when we were at a joint training session in Kathy’s backyard, I reached over to fiddle with Caroline’s collar and said, “Oh my God, I have that same vest!”
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