Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

by John Grogan

  “I’m glad you stopped by,” I said.

  “I’m glad I did, too,” Lisa answered.

  By the time she left, I had a good feeling about this girl. She was strong. She was tough. She would move forward. And indeed I found out years later, when I learned she had built a career for herself as a television broadcaster, that she had.

  CHAPTER 14

  An Early Arrival

  J ohn.” Through the fog of sleep, I gradually registered my name being called. “John. John, wake up.” It was Jenny; she was shaking me. “John, I think the baby might be coming.”

  I propped myself up on an elbow and rubbed my eyes. Jenny was lying on her side, knees pulled to her chest. “The baby what?”

  “I’m having bad cramps,” she said. “I’ve been lying here timing them. We need to call Dr. Sherman.”

  I was wide awake now. The baby was coming? I was wild with anticipation for the birth of our second child—another boy, we already knew from the sonogram. The timing, though, was wrong, terribly wrong. Jenny was twenty-one weeks into the pregnancy, barely halfway through the forty-week gestation period. Among her motherhood books was a collection of high-definition in vitro photographs showing a fetus at each week of development. Just days earlier we had sat with the book, studying the photos taken at twenty-one weeks and marveling at how our baby was coming along. At twenty-one weeks a fetus can fit in the palm of a hand. It weighs less than a pound. Its eyes are fused shut, its fingers like fragile little twigs, its lungs not yet developed enough to distill oxygen from air. At twenty-one weeks, a baby is barely viable. The chance of surviving outside the womb is small, and the chance of surviving without serious, long-term health problems smaller yet. There’s a reason nature keeps babies in the womb for nine long months. At twenty-one weeks, the odds are exceptionally long.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said. But I could feel my heart pounding as I speed-dialed the ob-gyn answering service. Two minutes later Dr. Sherman called back, sounding groggy himself. “It might just be gas,” he said, “but we better have a look.” He told me to get Jenny to the hospital immediately. I raced around the house, throwing items into an overnight bag for her, making baby bottles, packing the diaper bag. Jenny called her friend and coworker Sandy, another new mom who lived a few blocks away, and asked if we could drop Patrick off. Marley was up now, too, stretching, yawning, shaking. Late-night road trip! “Sorry, Mar,” I told him as I led him out to the garage, grave disappointment on his face. “You’ve got to hold down the fort.” I scooped Patrick out of his crib, buckled him into his car seat without waking him, and into the night we went.

  At St. Mary’s neonatal intensive care unit, the nurses quickly went to work. They got Jenny into a hospital gown and hooked her to a monitor that measured contractions and the baby’s heartbeat. Sure enough, Jenny was having a contraction every six minutes. This was definitely not gas. “Your baby wants to come out,” one of the nurses said. “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure he doesn’t just yet.”

  Over the phone Dr. Sherman asked them to check whether she was dilating. A nurse inserted a gloved finger and reported that Jenny was dilated one centimeter. Even I knew this was not good. At ten centimeters the cervix is fully dilated, the point at which, in a normal delivery, the mother begins to push. With each painful cramp, Jenny’s body was pushing her one step closer to the point of no return.

  Dr. Sherman ordered an intravenous saline drip and an injection of the labor inhibitor Brethine. The contractions leveled out, but less than two hours later they were back again with a fury, requiring a second shot, then a third.

  For the next twelve days Jenny remained hospitalized, poked and prodded by a parade of perinatalogists and tethered to monitors and intravenous drips. I took vacation time and played single parent to Patrick, doing my best to hold everything together—the laundry, the feedings, meals, bills, housework, the yard. Oh, yes, and that other living creature in our home. Poor Marley’s status dropped precipitously from second fiddle to not even in the orchestra. Even as I ignored him, he kept up his end of the relationship, never letting me out of his sight. He faithfully followed me as I careened through the house with Patrick in one arm, vacuuming or toting laundry or fixing a meal with the other. I would stop in the kitchen to toss a few dirty plates into the dishwasher, and Marley would plod in after me, circle around a half dozen times trying to pinpoint the exact perfect location, and then drop to the floor. No sooner had he settled in than I would dart to the laundry room to move the clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. He would follow after me, circle around, paw at the throw rugs until they were arranged to his liking, and plop down again, only to have me head for the living room to pick up the newspapers. So it would go. If he was lucky, I would pause in my mad dash to give him a quick pat.

  One night after I finally got Patrick to sleep, I fell back on the couch, exhausted. Marley pranced over and dropped his rope tug toy in my lap and looked up at me with those giant brown eyes of his. “Aw, Marley,” I said. “I’m beat.” He put his snout under the rope toy and flicked it up in the air, waiting for me to try to grab it, ready to beat me to the draw. “Sorry, pal,” I said. “Not tonight.” He crinkled his brow and cocked his head. Suddenly, his comfortable daily routine was in tatters. His mistress was mysteriously absent, his master no fun, and nothing the same. He let out a little whine, and I could see he was trying to figure it out. Why doesn’t John want to play anymore? What happened to the morning walks? Why no more wrestling on the floor? And where exactly is Jenny, anyway? She hasn’t run off with that Dalmatian in the next block, has she?

  Life wasn’t completely bleak for Marley. On the bright side, I had quickly reverted to my premarriage (read: slovenly) lifestyle. By the power vested in me as the only adult in the house, I suspended the Married Couple Domesticity Act and proclaimed the once banished Bachelor Rules to be the law of the land. While Jenny was in the hospital, shirts would be worn twice, even three times, barring obvious mustard stains, between washes; milk could be drunk directly from the carton, and toilet seats would remain in the upright position unless being sat on. Much to Marley’s delight, I instituted a 24/7 open-door policy for the bathroom. After all, it was just us guys. This gave Marley yet a new opportunity for closeness in a confined space. From there, it only made sense to let him start drinking from the bathtub tap. Jenny would have been appalled, but the way I saw it, it sure beat the toilet. Now that the Seat-Up Policy was firmly in place (and thus, by definition, the Lid-Up Policy, too), I needed to offer Marley a viable alternative to that attractive porcelain pool of water just begging him to play submarine with his snout.

  I got into the habit of turning the bathtub faucet on at a trickle while I was in the bathroom so Marley could lap up some cool, fresh water. The dog could not have been more thrilled had I built him an exact replica of Splash Mountain. He would twist his head up under the faucet and lap away, tail banging the sink behind him. His thirst had no bounds, and I became convinced he had been a camel in an earlier life. I soon realized I had created a bathtub monster; pretty soon Marley began going into the bathroom alone without me and standing there, staring forlornly at the faucet, licking at it for any lingering drop, flicking the drain knob with his nose until I couldn’t stand it any longer and would come in and turn it on for him. Suddenly the water in his bowl was somehow beneath him.

  The next step on our descent into barbarity came when I was showering. Marley figured out he could shove his head past the shower curtain and get not just a trickle but a whole waterfall. I’d be lathering up and without warning his big tawny head would pop in and he’d begin lapping at the shower spray. “Just don’t tell Mom,” I said.

  I tried to fool Jenny into thinking I had everything effortlessly under control. “Oh, we’re totally fine,” I told her, and then, turning to Patrick, I would add, “aren’t we, partner?” To which he would give his standard reply: “Dada!” and then, pointing at the ceiling fan: “Fannnnn!
” She knew better. One day when I arrived with Patrick for our daily visit, she stared at us in disbelief and asked, “What in God’s name did you do to him?”

  “What do you mean, what did I do to him?” I replied. “He’s great. You’re great, aren’t you?”

  “Dada! Fannnn!”

  “His outfit,” she said. “How on earth—”

  Only then did I see. Something was amiss with Patrick’s snap-on one-piece, or “onesie” as we manly dads like to call it. His chubby thighs, I now realized, were squeezed into the armholes, which were so tight they must have been cutting off his circulation. The collared neck hung between his legs like an udder. Up top, Patrick’s head stuck out through the unsnapped crotch, and his arms were lost somewhere in the billowing pant legs. It was quite a look.

  “You goof,” she said. “You’ve got it on him upside down.”

  “That’s your opinion,” I said.

  But the game was up. Jenny began working the phone from her hospital bed, and a couple of days later my sweet, dear aunt Anita, a retired nurse who had come to America from Ireland as a teenager and now lived across the state from us, magically appeared, suitcase in hand, and cheerfully went about restoring order. The Bachelor Rules were history.

  When her doctors finally let Jenny come home, it was with the strictest of orders. If she wanted to deliver a healthy baby, she was to remain in bed, as still as possible. The only time she was allowed on her feet was to go to the bathroom. She could take one quick shower a day, then back into bed. No cooking, no changing diapers, no walking out for the mail, no lifting anything heavier than a toothbrush—and that meant her baby, a stipulation that nearly killed her. Complete bed rest, no cheating. Jenny’s doctors had successfully shut down the early labor; their goal now was to keep it shut down for the next twelve weeks minimum. By then the baby would be thirty-five weeks along, still a little puny but fully developed and able to meet the outside world on its own terms. That meant keeping Jenny as still as a glacier. Aunt Anita, bless her charitable soul, settled in for the long haul. Marley was tickled to have a new playmate. Pretty soon he had Aunt Anita trained, too, to turn on the bathtub faucet for him.

  A hospital technician came to our home and inserted a catheter into Jenny’s thigh; this she attached to a small battery-powered pump that strapped to Jenny’s leg and delivered a continuous trickle of labor-inhibiting drugs into her bloodstream. As if that weren’t enough, she rigged Jenny with a monitoring system that looked like a torture device—an oversized suction cup attached to a tangle of wires that hooked into the telephone. The suction cup attached to Jenny’s belly with an elastic band and registered the baby’s heartbeat and any contractions, sending them via phone line three times a day to a nurse who watched for the first hint of trouble. I ran down to the bookstore and returned with a small fortune in reading materials, which Jenny devoured in the first three days. She was trying to keep her spirits up, but the boredom, the tedium, the hourly uncertainty about the health of her unborn child, were conspiring to drag her down. Worst of all, she was a mother with a fifteen-month-old son whom she was not allowed to lift, to run to, to feed when he was hungry, to bathe when he was dirty, to scoop up and kiss when he was sad. I would drop him on top of her on the bed, where he would pull her hair and stick his fingers into her mouth. He’d point to the whirling paddles above the bed, and say, “Mama! Fannnnn!” It made her smile, but it wasn’t the same. She was slowly going stir-crazy.

  Her constant companion through it all, of course, was Marley. He set up camp on the floor beside her, surrounding himself with a wide assortment of chew toys and rawhide bones just in case Jenny changed her mind and decided to jump out of bed and engage in a little spur-of-the-moment tug-of-war. There he held vigil, day and night. I would come home from work and find Aunt Anita in the kitchen cooking dinner, Patrick in his bouncy seat beside her. Then I would walk into the bedroom to find Marley standing beside the bed, chin on the mattress, tail wagging, nose nuzzled into Jenny’s neck as she read or snoozed or merely stared at the ceiling, her arm draped over his back. I marked off each day on the calendar to help her track her progress, but it only served as a reminder of how slowly each minute, each hour, passed. Some people are content to spend their lives in idle recline; Jenny was not one of them. She was born to bustle, and the forced idleness dragged her down by imperceptible degrees, a little more each day. She was like a sailor caught in the doldrums, waiting with increasing desperation for the faintest hint of a breeze to fill the sails and let the journey continue. I tried to be encouraging, saying things like “A year from now we’re going to look back on this and laugh,” but I could tell part of her was slipping from me. Some days her eyes were very far away.

  When Jenny had a full month of bed rest still to go, Aunt Anita packed her suitcase and kissed us good-bye. She had stayed as long as she could, in fact extending her visit several times, but she had a husband at home who she only half jokingly fretted was quite possibly turning feral as he survived alone on TV dinners and ESPN. Once again, we were on our own.

  I did my best to keep the ship afloat, rising at dawn to bathe and dress Patrick, feed him oatmeal and puréed carrots, and take him and Marley for at least a short walk. Then I would drop Patrick at Sandy’s house for the day while I worked, picking him up again in the evening. I would come home on my lunch hour to make Jenny her lunch, bring her the mail—the highlight of her day—throw sticks to Marley, and straighten up the house, which was slowly taking on a patina of neglect. The grass went uncut, the laundry unwashed, and the screen on the back porch remained unrepaired after Marley crashed through it, cartoon-style, in pursuit of a squirrel. For weeks the shredded screen flapped in the breeze, becoming a de facto doggie door that allowed Marley to come and go as he pleased between the backyard and house during the long hours home alone with the bedridden Jenny. “I’m going to fix it,” I promised her. “It’s on the list.” But I could see dismay in her eyes. It took all of her self-control not to jump out of bed and whip her home back into shape. I grocery-shopped after Patrick was asleep for the night, sometimes walking the aisles at midnight. We survived on carry-outs, Cheerios, and pots of pasta. The journal I had faithfully kept for years abruptly went silent. There was simply no time and less energy. In the last brief entry, I wrote only: “Life is a little overwhelming right now.”

  Then one day, as we approached Jenny’s thirty-fifth week of pregnancy, the hospital technician arrived at our door and said, “Congratulations, girl, you’ve made it. You’re free again.” She unhooked the medicine pump, removed the catheter, packed up the fetal monitor, and went over the doctor’s written orders. Jenny was free to return to her regular lifestyle. No restrictions. No more medications. We could even have sex again. The baby was fully viable now. Labor would come when it would come. “Have fun,” she said. “You deserve it.”

  Jenny tossed Patrick over her head, romped with Marley in the backyard, tore into the housework. That night we celebrated by going out for Indian food and catching a show at a local comedy club. The next day the three of us continued the festivities by having lunch at a Greek restaurant. Before the gyros ever made it to our table, however, Jenny was in full-blown labor. The cramps had begun the night before as she ate curried lamb, but she had ignored them. She wasn’t going to let a few contractions interrupt her hard-earned night on the town. Now each contraction nearly doubled her over. We raced home, where Sandy was on standby to take Patrick and keep an eye on Marley. Jenny waited in the car, puffing her way through the pain with sharp, shallow breaths as I grabbed her overnight bag. By the time we got to the hospital and checked into a room, Jenny was dilated to seven centimeters. Less than an hour later, I held our new son in my arms. Jenny counted his fingers and toes. His eyes were open and alert, his cheeks blushed.

  “You did it,” Dr. Sherman declared. “He’s perfect.”

  Conor Richard Grogan, five pounds and thirteen ounces, was born October 10, 1993. I was so happy I barely gave a se
cond thought to the cruel irony that for this pregnancy we had rated one of the luxury suites but had hardly a moment to enjoy it. If the delivery had been any quicker, Jenny would have given birth in the parking lot of the Texaco station. I hadn’t even had time to stretch out on the Dad Couch.

  Considering what we had been through to bring him safely into this world, we thought the birth of our son was big news—but not so big that the local news media would turn out for it. Below our window, though, a crush of television news trucks gathered in the parking lot, their satellite dishes poking into the sky. I could see reporters with microphones doing their stand-ups in front of the cameras. “Hey, honey,” I said, “the paparazzi have turned out for you.”

  A nurse, who was in the room attending to the baby, said, “Can you believe it? Donald Trump is right down the hall.”

  “Donald Trump?” Jenny asked. “I didn’t know he was pregnant.”

  The real estate tycoon had caused quite a stir when he moved to Palm Beach several years earlier, setting up house in the sprawling former mansion of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the late cereal heiress. The estate was named Mar-a-Lago, meaning “Sea to Lake,” and as the name implied, the property stretched for seventeen acres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway and included a nine-hole golf course. From the foot of our street we could look across the water and see the fifty-eight-bedroom mansion’s Moorish-influenced spires rising above the palm trees. The Trumps and the Grogans were practically neighbors.