Benjamin and I worked hard to keep up with the accumulating costs of providing a middle-class education. Because we live in an urban area where the schools are poor, our goal was to save enough for private school, to the tune of $70,000 a year for two, not counting looming college costs. And forget about retirement. We doubted we’d survive the stress.
It was at some point during these difficult years that Ben developed that mysterious arm ailment that defied precise diagnosis. The pain began at first as an intermittent throb, but over time it escalated until, at last, it claimed him almost completely. Thoracic outlet syndrome, carpal tunnel, whatever it was, the ailment resulted from the computer, which he used most moments of his sixty- to seventy-hour work week. Unresponsive to any type of treatment except morphine, the pain, eventually, drained his face, beat in the back of his neck, his burning arms hanging useless by his sides. There were visits to pain clinics, so many I cannot count, each one exactly like the other, hushed and cold, tiled and white. There were visits to pharmacologists, psychologists, neurologists, chiropractors, while for the children there were yearly checkups, dental appointments, ear infections, strep throat, stomach bugs, vomit vomit vomit. If I told you we ever had fun during these years, you would not believe it; neither would I. We did. When Clara was five, we received a reminder card from our veterinarian: time for the canines’ various vaccines, the Heartgard medication, time for the toenail clipping, the teeth cleaning, the fecal tests. “We spend,” said Benjamin, when Clara was five, “thousands of dollars on these animals. One of these days, I’m going to get a calculator and figure the precise cost.”
We were in the kitchen. I was spooning mash into our secondborn’s mouth. “They’re worth it,” I said. This a conversation we’d had, in one form or another, since we first wed, both with and without the calculator, going round and round through the course of our marriage, our childrens’ lives, never growing stale, this, our old perpetual hot spot.
“To me,” I added.
“But to us?” he said.
“These dogs have taught our children a lot,” I said, and they had. From them our daughter had learned gentleness (suavo, suavo) and a certain perspicacity.
“Yes,” said Benjamin. “They have taught our children a lot. I agree.” He didn’t say anything after that.
“What?” I said.
“They just seem … I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of things. We have limited resources.”
“If we can afford cable,” I said, “then I think we can afford our pets.”
“We can,” he said. “But,” and then again he stopped. I sensed, suddenly and for the first time, that the conversation was about to change. Benjamin seemed to want to say something hard, something true for him. I could sense him running straight into the hot heart of a feeling, at the last second scuttering to a stop. When he spoke again, he had, to my disappointment, assumed his professorial stance.
“Pets,” he said, “are a product of bourgeois culture. Communist cultures abhorred pet keeping, and for a real reason. It is a sign of indulgence to spend so much money on dog food and diamond-studded collars and high-tech medical care when the world has such serious issues. It is wrong. It is a problem of priority. And we only do it because we can.”
“No,” I said. In fact I said this much later, months later, having by then armed myself with the research I might need in order to defend the dogs and their place in our family. What I found: people rich and poor alike all throughout history have kept pets. Far from being a bourgeois indulgence there have been many plainly impoverished societies where companion animals were prevalent. Writes James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, in his In the Company of Animals:
The existence of pet-keeping among so called “primitive” peoples poses a problem for those who choose to believe that such behaviour is … a by-product of western decadence or bourgeois sentimentality. Doubtless, when one looks exclusively at pet-keeping in prosperous cultures such as our own, it is easy to conclude that the practice is a manifestation of some eccentric cultural aberration. The fact that we squander vast resources on the habit is also of little significance since conspicuous waste is a common feature of our society. But this line of reasoning runs into serious difficulties when we contemplate precisely the same phenomenon among, say, the Semang Negritos or numerous Amerindian groups. These people are predominantly hunter-gatherers or subsistence horticulturists … and they are not in a position to waste resources on gratuitous luxuries. Nevertheless, they seem to be prepared to invest as much time, energy, and emotion in economically useless pets as the average middle-class European or North American.
I scanned library shelves and tore into cyberspace, looking for—what? The anthropological studies of pet-keeping across cultures and classes has always reliably fascinated me, but I think what I really wanted was some way to justify what it was I was feeling, what I could not quite say out loud. Looking back, I see that my research had a frantic feel, because at some unspecified point during these years of birthing and raising babies—at some point I cannot locate on my timeline—I think I must have admitted to myself that when it came to hierarchies of caring, I couldn’t quite construct them. Perhaps the realization occurred when, one day, in a park, I lost track of my dog and daughter both, and for a split second, before I caught sight of them, I could not quite figure out who to search for first. Or perhaps it happened when Clara was two and I learned with equal horror, and within the same two-day period, of the brutal rape and murder of Samantha Runyon, a five-year-old girl whose abduction was widely televised, and the less televised but to me equally devastating footage of dogs, millions of them being clubbed to death in Beijing for no reason except their status, the panning camera capturing the cracking of canine skulls, the buckling of broken knees, the keening cries of pure unmitigated pain. Yes. I am talking about pain. In the end, pain is pain is pain, and its repetition has no poetic possibilities.
Does this then mean that if forced to choose between my children and my dogs I would have to stop, to consider? If I were to say yes, then who would I be but one of the beasts my husband hates, fit for the soup pot surely. Why is it, I’d like to know, that philosophical questions always come down to this point, the bared bone, the crux we never live in? I am, thank god or Gaia, not forced to make this choice, but nor do I wish to dodge this particular bullet in my high-minded hunt. If forced to make the choice (big sigh) I would, of course and without reflection, choose my children, my babies, my darling, my doves, but not because I love them more. I would choose them because their humanity comes prepackaged with a particular prize, booby prize: the future. We know it’s out there while other animals we think do not. For this reason, I believe the human species suffers more at the sight of the final door.
Chronic pain is its own form of hell. My husband’s arms grew gimpy. His hands got spastic and simple tasks—twisting the top off a can—became impossible. Sometimes, in the nights, I would wake up and find Benjamin lying on his back, his flaming arms stuck straight up in the air, staring at the dark through his splayed fingers. The man with the elfin humor—well, eventually he went away and someone distant took his place. I remember the night he stood in the living room holding our young sleeping son. I was in the kitchen, fixing dinner. I heard a crash and came running. What I found: Benjamin standing stricken on the floor, his arms held out in front of him as though they were dripping poison. On the floor Lucas screamed himself blue. “I dropped our baby,” Benjamin whispered, tears I had never seen before coming, copiously, from his eyes.
There is nothing that can be said for a situation such as this. My husband stopped working for two years; he was doped on drugs he used and then misused. “Get a job,” I said. I screamed. “Doing what?” he said. “Drive a FedEx truck if you have to,” I said. “Get disability; do something.” Nothing. The pain claimed him completely, was worth nothing to us but the zero balance it brought into our li
ves. I had my animals and my children. I had, we had, that stolid, solid zero.
Nevertheless, inside every zero is an aperture one hopes to never have to fill. Eventually (so slowly!) I saw small things go into my husband’s hole, or perhaps I created these things for my own comfort. After six years of pain he said to me one evening, “I have not had the life I wish I’d had.”
What I thought: I am not what you wished for. What I said: “For what did you wish?”
“I could have lived in Indonesia,” he said. “I could have stayed in graduate school. I could have become an ethnobotanist. I could have—” A sentence he failed to finish.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was stung and small. But I was also grateful for his words, the plain, straight, simple words, words in need of no numbers because they are of the infinite sort.
We both turned forty that year. His birthday was in October, a particularly virulent fall full of fevered trees, delirious leaves of dark wine and ochre. The world was so saturated with pain and color and noise and rush that our white hairs stood out stark and obvious. On a Monday Benjamin took out a calendar and a calculator. “Do you realize,” he said to me after some time punching numbers, “we have about 20,000 days left?” On Tuesday, when we had only 19,999 days left, Benjamin gave his great whistle, and the dogs, who once would have bounded over at the sound, stretched creakily and came cautiously trotting. “Lila, girl,” he said. He cupped her bony chin in his hand. She turned her brown eyes up to him. “Look,” he said. “She’s got some gray on the muzzle,” and indeed she did. So did her brother. Ben nodded, as though inwardly confirming an obvious but until then unseen fact. Like us, they live and die.
Like us.
There is just one more part to this story, which will go on past this page and end at another point in the future. I came downstairs the next day, our children, growing fast, now in school, Clara in first grade, Lucas in pre-school, and it was then that I found Lila, rushed her to the vet—glaucoma—her eyes marbled over, her face so empty of expression that I saw what so many scientists deny; dogs can scowl, smirk, and smile; their faces are mobile maps of reaction, of feeling, yes; the presence and variety of canine expression becomes terribly obvious to humans perhaps only in its absence.
I have not yet said the whole story about the day my dog went blind. That I brought her home, for instance, on a Sunday, in the evening, the streets blue with dusk; that I stopped the car and sat for a while on the side of the road, by the brackish river, where the thick cattails made a hush-sh rush-sh sound; that Lila’s ears pricked forward and she turned her head, looking left, then right, smelling skunk, the car windows down and the wind hitting us hard, here and there, the way I wanted it. I wanted her to have as many senses as she could; the smells, the touch, the taste, I offering her my palm, putting it flat against her nose, her tongue, so tentative, taking salt from my skin. How we came home when it was dark and the house blazed in every window and I said, “Home,” as if she might somehow, now, learn language, a silly wish. I knew the brain was plastic and capable of rewiring. I knew that eventually her sense of smell would sharpen, as would her ability to hear and perhaps taste, too. What I did not know was that, after a traumatic loss, it is not only the victim whose brain changes. Those around the victim also change, and, at least in our case, in some quite surprising ways.
And so I walked in with our now-blind dog and set her on the floor, and we all called to her and she couldn’t come, veering off to the right or walking, instead, into a wall, and then Ben stepped forward. See? I have not yet told the whole story. “Let me try,” he said, and then he knelt down and held out his hand and called “Lila, Lila,” in a soft, singsong-y way, and Lila, well, she started towards him, and he kept calling, the sound a string between them, his voice reeling her in, and that was the first time I realized he had a hidden fondness for his hounds. “Lilalila,” he called, he crooned, and the dog kept coming, his hand held out, and then halfway there she suddenly stopped, sat down, and a rank pool of urine puddled beneath her. Ben’s face fell. I brought the dog upstairs, then, and lay with her on the bed, burying my nose in her fur. A little while later Benjamin came in, stood in the doorframe, watching. It was so quiet. “Poor Lila,” he finally said, rubbing his arms. “Poor Lila.” He paused, held his lame hand up in the air. “Our dog,” he said. “Our [italics mine] dog has gone blind as a bat.”
Bats, of course, have echolocation, but dogs, even with their superior sense of smell, have nothing of the sort. For one week Lila didn’t move and because I hated to see her suffer I considered Ben’s suggestion that we put her down. When the veterinary ophthalmologist strongly opposed the idea I thought I saw relief in my husband’s face. If she could make it, could not also he?
“So we’ll give her some time,” Benjamin said. He had a startled look in his eyes, white hair on his head: “Give me some time,” is maybe what he meant.
And so I did. And something strange began to happen in our house. It all took time, and was subtle and slow, but I saw it, with my own eyes. Benjamin began to watch our dog. It was a simple sort of seeing, but different from anything he had ever done before. Suddenly, now, Lila was an object of interest. I caught him standing in the hall, just studying her, his own head cocked like a curious canine’s. I caught him holding her chin in his palm and looking into her dead eyes. When she took her first blind steps, we hooted and clapped. He hooted and clapped the most.
After that, her changes came quickly. I took her outside on a leash. Ben took to training her and she reaped his edible rewards, his huge chunks of cheese and bread. As for Ben, well, he started to cheer for her, to hope for her in a way he never had before. He put the calculator away. As the months went by it became no longer about how much she cost but rather about how much she’d done. “Did you see her?” he’d ask me, “did you see what she just did?” Blind as a bat, under my husband’s tutelage, she learned to shake hands, and to turn on her hind legs. With his help, she braved the front stairs, and then the stairs leading out back. Six months after the glaucoma diagnosis, she started chasing birds she couldn’t see, hunting solely by smell and sound. Sometimes her abilities were so precise we swore she had some vision left, but she didn’t; stone blind, the vet said. “Stone blind,” Ben repeated, as though this were some sign of triumph, and in its own way, perhaps it was.
Without a doubt her burgeoning abilities impressed my husband who had jettisoned his own talents, stopped working, and let pain take its prominent place. I remember well the evening he threw a ball into the dining room. Strewn in the path were the objects of chaotic family life: dolls and toy trucks, a sock, a jutting chair. “Ball,” Ben shouted, and at the sound of the rubbery smack Lila bounded towards it, like a skier expertly maneuvering the twisted trail; she swerved cleanly around the furniture, sidestepped the toys, and locked onto the ball with her open maw in a series of seconds. She then turned, trotted calmly back to Benjamin, and dropped the ball at his feet, head turned upwards, half coquettish, half challenging, as though she were saying, “See what I can do? Now it’s your turn.”
And it was. Benjamin, by the way, would deny my interpretation, accuse me of poetic license, and he may be right. But then again, the facts are the facts. “Did I say she was worth 60k?” he asked. “That seems a little low.”
“You can always re-figure,” I said.
“70k?” he said.
“Maybe there is no number,” I said, and he said, he actually said, my husband said, “You could be correct on that.”
In my memory of that time, Lila’s blindness and her subsequent grace coincides with Benjamin’s return to work, which happened about eight months after Lila lost her sight. It coincides with his desire to go beyond his cerebral pursuits, his books and computer code and his calculations, because one day months and months after our dog’s demise and return, he told me he would like to have an orchard. “Fruit trees,” Benjamin said. There was some subtle shift about his eyes, a look impossible to measure, certainly
to prove, a tiny crack in a closed door, the single line of light all the more brilliant because of the darkness that defines it.
Lila returned and proved her courage and Ben went with her. He began to chop wood as a way to strengthen his arms, and find his fire too. He stopped most of his pain medications. I can think of many other examples to set down here, but then I stop. I don’t. I want to resist the neat nature of my conclusions, my desire to fuse our dog’s recovery with my husband’s, but this is what makes me human, as opposed to fish or fowl; I seek my squares of meaning. Therefore, allow me to mention Ben’s mysterious desire for a goat that surfaced just as the blind dog was learning to dance on her hind legs. “I need physical activity,” Benjamin started to say, he who had sat in a chair for the past several years; and he went walking.
In our educated middle- and upper-middle-class American culture, sentimentality is akin to sin. We judge intelligence by the presence of sentimentality’s opposite: irony. Animals, especially of the domestic sort, appear to lack irony, and perhaps this is what makes them ineligible for most academic discourse. And yet, why do we so resist sentimentality and its accouterments? Maybe because at its extreme, sentimentality leads to a dangerous simplicity, the sort of simplicity that allows one to make pernicious and reductive conclusions about the world. The Nazis are a prime example of sentimentality’s dark side; they pined for a pure Nordic race in a pure Nordic land lined with lupines and lakes. It is therefore all the more interesting, and frightening, to learn that the Nazis were also avid animal lovers; they burned human beings but kept beautiful zoos. Hitler’s palace was populated by dogs he treated regally until at the end of his life, before he killed himself, he snuck outside his bunker so he could walk his dog Blondie, the despot’s best-beloved purebred, whom he then later poisoned with cyanide.
The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals Page 25
