The Youth in Asia
IN THE EARLY 1960s, during what my mother referred to as “the tail end of the Lassie years,” my parents were given two collies, which they named Rastus and Duchess. We were living in New York State, out in the country, and the dogs were free to race through the forest. They napped in meadows and stood knee-deep in frigid streams, costars in their own private dog-food commercial. According to our father, anyone could tell that the two of them were in love.
Late one evening, while lying on a blanket in the garage, Duchess gave birth to a litter of slick, potato-size puppies. When it looked as though one of them had died, our mother arranged the puppy in a casserole dish and popped it in the oven, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
“Oh, keep your shirts on,” she said. “It’s only set on two hundred. I’m not baking anyone, this is just to keep him warm.”
The heat revived the sick puppy and left us believing that our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.
Faced with the responsibilities of fatherhood, Rastus took off. The puppies were given away and we moved south, where the heat and humidity worked against a collie’s best interests. Duchess’s once beautiful coat now hung in ragged patches. Age set in and she limped about the house, clearing rooms with her suffocating farts. When finally, full of worms, she collapsed in the ravine beside our house, we reevaluated our mother’s healing powers. The entire animal kingdom was beyond her scope; apparently she could resurrect only the cute dead.
The oven trick was performed on half a dozen peakish hamsters but failed to work on my first guinea pig, who died after eating a couple of cigarettes and an entire pack of matches.
“Don’t take it too hard,” my mother said, removing her oven mitts. “The world is full of guinea pigs: you can get another one tomorrow.”
Eulogies tended to be brief, our motto being Another day, another collar.
A short time after Duchess died, our father came home with a German shepherd puppy. For reasons that were never fully explained, the privilege of naming the dog went to a friend of my older sister’s, a fourteen-year-old girl named Cindy. She was studying German at the time, and after carefully examining the puppy and weighing it in her hands, she announced that it would be called Mädchen, which apparently meant “girl” to the Volks back in the Vaterland. We weren’t wild about the name but considered ourselves lucky that Cindy wasn’t studying one of the hard-to-pronounce Asian languages.
When she was six months old, Mädchen was hit by a car and killed. Her food was still in the bowl when our father brought home an identical German shepherd, which the same Cindy thoughtfully christened Mädchen II. This tag-team progression was disconcerting, especially to the new dog, which was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor.
“Mädchen One would never have wet the floor like that,” my father would scold, and the dog would sigh, knowing she was the canine equivalent of a rebound.
Mädchen Two never accompanied us to the beach and rarely posed in any of the family photographs. Once her puppyhood was spent, we lost all interest. “We ought to get a dog,” we’d sometimes say, completely forgetting that we already had one. She came inside to eat, but most of her time was spent outside in the pen, slumped in the A-frame doghouse our father had designed and crafted from scrap pieces of redwood.
“Hey,” he’d ask, “how many dogs can say they live in a redwood house?”
This always led to my mother’s exhausted “Oh, Lou, how many dogs can say that they don’t live in a goddamn redwood house?”
Throughout the collie and shepherd years we kept a succession of drowsy, secretive cats that seemed to enjoy a unique bond with our mother. “It’s because I open their cans,” she’d say, though we all knew it ran deeper than that. What they really had in common was their claws. That and a primal urge to destroy my father’s golf bags. The first cat ran away, and the second one was hit by a car. The third passed into a disagreeable old age and died hissing at the kitten that had prematurely arrived to replace her. When, at the age of seven, the fourth cat was diagnosed with feline leukemia, my mother was devastated.
“I’m going to have Sadie put to sleep,” she said. “It’s for her own good, and I don’t want to hear a word about it from any of you. This is hard enough as it is.”
The cat was put down, and then came a series of crank phone calls and anonymous postcards orchestrated by my sisters and me. The cards announced a miraculous new cure for feline leukemia, and the callers identified themselves as representatives from Cat Fancy magazine. “We’d like to use Sadie as our September cover story and were hoping to schedule a photo shoot as soon as possible. Do you think you could have her ready by tomorrow?”
We thought a kitten might lift our mother’s spirits, but she declined all offers. “That’s it,” she said. “My cat days are over.”
When Mädchen Two developed splenic tumors, my father dropped everything and ran to her side. Evenings were spent at the animal hospital, lying on a mat outside of her cage and adjusting her IV. He’d never afforded her much attention when she was healthy, but her impending death awoke in him a great sense of duty. He was holding her paw when she died, and he spent the next several weeks asking us how many dogs could say they’d lived in a redwood house.
Our mother, in turn, frequently paused beside my father’s tattered, urine-stained golf bag and relived memories of her own.
After spending a petless year with only one child still living at home, my parents visited a breeder and returned with a Great Dane they named Melina. They loved this dog in proportion to its size, and soon their hearts had no room for anyone else. In terms of mutual respect and admiration, their six children had been nothing more than a failed experiment. Melina was the real thing. The house was given over to the dog, rooms redecorated to suit her fancy. Enter your former bedroom and you’d be told, “You’d better not let Melina catch you in here,” or, “This is where we come to peepee when there’s nobody home to let us outside, right, girl!” The knobs on our dressers were whittled down to damp stumps, and our beds were matted with fine, short hairs. Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. “That’s what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.”
The dog was their first genuine common interest, and they loved it equally, each in his or her own way. Our mother’s love tended toward the horizontal, a pet being little more than a napping companion, something she could look at and say, “That seems like a good idea. Scoot over, why don’t you.” A stranger peeking through the window might think that the two of them had entered a suicide pact. She and the dog sprawled like corpses, their limbs arranged in an eternal embrace. “God, that felt good,” my mom would say, the two of them waking for a brief scratch. “Now let’s go try it on the living-room floor.”
My father loved the Great Dane for its size, and frequently took her on long, aimless drives, during which she’d stick her heavy, anvil-sized head out the window and leak great quantities of foamy saliva. Other drivers pointed and stared, rolling down their windows to shout, “Hey, you got a saddle for that thing?” When out for a walk there was the inevitable “Are you walking her, or is it the other way ’round?”
“Ha-ha!” our father always laughed, as if it were the first time he’d heard it. The attention was addictive, and he enjoyed a pride of accomplishment he never felt with any of us. It was as if he were somehow responsible for her beauty and stature, as if he’d personally designed her spots and trained her to grow to the size of a pony. When out with the dog, he carried a leash in one hand and a shovel in the other. “Just in case,” he said.
“Just in case, what, she dies of a heart attack and you need to bury her?” I didn’t get it.
“No,” he said, “the shovel is for, you know, her… business.”
My father was retired, but the dog had business.
I was living in Chicago when they first got Melin
“Down, girl,” my parents would chuckle as the dog jumped up, panting for my attention. Her great padded paws reached my waist, then my chest and shoulders, until eventually, her arms wrapped around my neck and, her head towering above my own, she came to resemble a dance partner scouting the room for a better offer.
“That’s just her way of saying hello,” my mother would chirp, handing me a towel to wipe off the dog’s bubbling seepage. “Here, you missed a spot on the back of your head.”
Among us children, Melina’s diploma from obedience school was seen as the biggest joke since our brother’s graduation from Sanderson High.
“So she’s not book-smart,” our mother said. “Big deal. I can fetch my own goddamn newspaper.”
The dog’s growth was monitored on a daily basis and every small accomplishment was captured on film. One could find few pictures of my sister Tiffany, but Melina had entire albums devoted to her terrible twos.
“Hit me,” my mother said on one of my return visits home from Chicago. “No, wait, let me go get my camera.” She left the room and returned a few moments later. “Okay, now you can hit me. Better yet, why don’t you just pretend to hit me.”
I raised my hand, and my mother cried out in pain. “Ow!” she yelled. “Somebody help me. This stranger is trying to hurt me and I don’t know why.”
I caught an advancing blur moving in from the left, and the next thing I knew I was down on the ground, the dog ripping significant holes in the neck of my sweater.
The camera flashed and my mother screamed with delight. “God, I love that trick.”
I rolled over to protect my face. “It’s not a trick.”
My mother snapped another picture. “Oh, don’t be so critical. It’s close enough.”
With us grown and out of the house, my sisters and I reasonably expected our parents’ lives to stand still. Their assignment was to stagnate and live in the past. We were supposed to be the center of their lives, but instead, they had constructed a new family consisting of Melina and the founding members of her fan club. Someone who obviously didn’t know her too well had given my mother a cheerful stuffed bear with a calico heart stitched to its chest. According to the manufacturer, the bear’s name was Mumbles, and all it needed in order to thrive were two double-A batteries and a regular diet of hugs.
“Where’s Mumbles?” my mother would ask, and the dog would jump up and snatch the bear from its hiding place on top of the refrigerator, yanking its body this way and that in hopes of breaking its neck. Occasionally her teeth would press against the on switch, and the doomed thing would flail its arms, whispering one of its five recorded messages of goodwill.
“That’s my girl,” my mother would say. “We don’t like Mumbles, do we?”
“We?”
During the final years of Mädchen Two and the first half of the Melina administration, I lived with a female cat named Neil. Dull gray in color, she’d been abandoned by a spooky alcoholic with long fingernails and a large collection of kimonos. He was a hateful man, and after he moved, the cat was taken in and renamed by my sister Gretchen, who later passed the animal on to me. My mother looked after Neil when I moved from Raleigh, and flew her to Chicago once I’d found a place and settled in. I’d taken the cheapest apartment I could find, and it showed. Though they were nice, my immigrant neighbors could see no connection between their personal habits and the armies of mice and roaches aggressively occupying the building. Welcoming the little change of scenery, entire families would regularly snack and picnic in the hallways, leaving behind candied fruits and half-eaten tacos. Neil caught fourteen mice, and scores of others escaped with missing limbs and tails. In Raleigh she’d just lain around the house doing nothing, but now she had a real job.
Her interests broadened and she listened intently to the radio, captivated by the political and financial stories, which failed to engage me. “One more word about the Iran-Contra hearings, and you’ll be sleeping next door with the aliens,” I’d say, though we both knew that I didn’t really mean it.
Neil was old when she moved to Chicago, and then she got older. The Oliver North testimony now behind her, she started leaving teeth in her bowl and developed the sort of breath that could remove paint. She stopped cleaning herself, and I took to bathing her in the sink. When she was soaking wet, I could see just how thin and brittle she really was. Her kidneys shrank to the size of raisins, and although I wanted what was best for her, I naturally assumed the vet was joking when he suggested dialysis. In addition to being elderly, toothless, and incontinent, it seemed that, for the cost of a few thousand dollars, she could also spend three days a week hooked up to a machine. “Sounds awfully tempting,” I said. “Just give us a few days to think it over.” I took her for a second opinion. Vet number two tested her blood and phoned me a few days later suggesting I consider euthanasia.
I hadn’t heard that word since childhood and immediately recalled a mismatched pair of Japanese schoolboys standing alone in a deserted school yard. One of the boys, grossly obese, was attempting to climb a flagpole that towered high above him. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, he hoisted himself a few feet off the ground and clung there, trembling and out of breath. “I can’t do it,” he said. “This is too hard for me.”
His friend, a gaunt and serious boy named Komatsu, stood below him, offering encouragement. “Oh, but you can do it. You must,” he said. “It is required.”
This was a scene I had long forgotten, and thinking of it made me unbearably sad. The boys were characters from Fatty and Skinny, a Japanese movie regularly presented on The CBS Children’s Film Festival, a weekly TV series hosted by two puppets and a very patient woman who pretended to laugh at their jokes. My sisters and I had watched the program every Saturday afternoon, our gasbag of a collie imposing frequent intermissions.
Having shimmied a few more inches up the flagpole, Fatty lost his grip and fell down into the sand. As he brushed himself off, Skinny ran down the mountain toward the fragile, papery house he shared with his family. This had been Fatty’s last chance to prove himself. He’d thought his friend’s patience was unlimited, but now he knew he was wrong. “Komatsuuuuuuuuuu!” he yelled. “Komatsu, please give me one more chance.”
The doctor’s voice called me back from the Japanese playground. “So the euthanasia,” he said. “Are you giving it some thought?”
“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
In the end I returned to the animal hospital and had her put to sleep. When the vet injected the sodium pentobarbital, Neil fluttered her eyes, assumed a nap position, and died. My then boyfriend stayed to make arrangements, and I ran outside to blubber beside the parked and, unfortunately, locked car. Neil had gotten into her cat carrier believing she would eventually return to our apartment, and that tore me up. Someone had finally been naive enough to trust me, and I’d rewarded her with death. Racked by guilt, the youth in Asia sat at their desks and wept bitter tears.
A week after putting her to sleep, I received Neil’s ashes in a forest green can. She’d never expressed any great interest in the outdoors, so I scattered her remains on the carpet and then vacuumed her back up. The cat’s death struck me as the end of an era. It was, of course, the end of her era, but with the death of a pet there’s always that urge to string black crepe over an entire ten- or twenty-year period. The end of my safe college life, the last of my thirty-inch waist, my faltering relationship with my first real boyfriend: I cried for it all and wondered why so few songs were written about cats.
My mother sent a consoling letter along with a check to cover the cost of the cremation. In the left-hand corner, on the line marked MEMO, she’d written, “Pet Burning.” I had it coming.
When my mother died and was cremated herself, we worried that, acting on instinct, our father might run out and immediately replace her. Returning from the funeral, my brother, sisters, and I half expected to find some vaguely familiar Sharon Two standing at the kitchen counter and working the puzzle in TV Guide. “Sharon One would have gotten five across,” our father would have scolded. “Come on, baby, get with it.”
With my mother gone, my father and Melina had each other all to themselves. Though she now occupied the side of the bed left vacant by her former mistress, the dog knew she could never pass as a viable replacement. Her love was too fierce and simple, and she had no talent for argument. Yet she and my father honored their pledge to adore and protect each other. They celebrated anniversaries, regularly renewed their vows, and growled when challenged by outside forces.
“You want me to go where?” When invited to visit one of his children, my father would beg off, saying, “But I can’t leave town. Who’d take care of Melina?” Mention a kennel, and he’d laugh. “You’ve got to be out of your mind. A kennel, ha! Hey, did you hear that, Melina? They want me to put you in prison.”
Due to their size, Great Danes generally don’t live very long. There are cheeses with a longer shelf life. At the age of twelve, gray bearded and teetering, Melina was a wonder of science. My father massaged her arthritic legs, carried her up the stairs, and lifted her in and out of bed. He treated her the way that men in movies treat their ailing wives, the way he might have treated my mother had she allowed such naked displays of helplessness and affection. Melina’s era spanned the final dozen years of his married life. The dog had ridden in the family’s last station wagon, attended my father’s retirement party, and celebrated the elections of two Republican presidents. She grew weaker and lost her appetite, but against all advice, my father simply could not bear to let her go.
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