by Julie Klam
The other question people asked after hearing the story was, “Do you know who the father is?”
Do we know who the father is? She was dumped, pregnant, in a shelter in East New York, Brooklyn. Unfortunately, he never called or wrote or sent flowers. Paul said whoever he was, he must have had his beer goggles on that night. Poor Black Dahlia.
“Yeah, but who do you think the father was?” they’d press.
“Um, Brad Pitt?”
They wanted answers. They wanted to know what kind of dog the father was. Well, what kind did we think he was? What kind of dogs are they?
“Holsteins.”
MORE AND MORE BEATRICE was trying to reassert her role. One morning she was bustling with curiosity and went too close to the whelping box. Dahlia growled and Bea growled back and they got into a nasty scuffle. Beatrice was bleeding around the neck, but after it was cleaned up she was fine. Dahlia was squinting. Her left eye had been hurt. I was about to go to Miami for work for two days (everything always happened this way) and I raced her to the vet. After checking her eye, he said she had a deep scratch and uveitis, a condition where part of the uvea, the part of the eye that supplies blood to the retina, becomes inflamed. The inflammation causes proteins to leak out, resulting in cloudiness in the eye. If left untreated, Dahlia could lose her eye. She needed topical drops and antibiotics, which meant we would need to stop her from nursing the puppies and we’d have to go back to feeding them again. So, sorry, the vet said, she just can’t nurse. My first thought was, How the hell are we going to keep them from nursing? Separate her from her puppies? AY! And then my mind flashed to Paul, who would be taking care of Violet and Dahlia and Beatrice and the two puppies for two days. Various unpleasant visuals passed through my brain, all of them ending in a very large, angry Paul head. “No,” I said. Just flat-out no. There had to be another option. The vet said he could call a specialist to see if she could come up with an alternative. He called a doctor friend and explained the situation. He said I had two small children, and I decided not to contradict that. What if it was that extra kid that made my situation sound that much more dire? Violet was easy, but our little lame Tiny Tim, with the tubercular cough, well, that was just too much for any dad.
I took Dahlia to the emergency specialist and forked over a lot of dough, but it was worth anything—anything—because she said (1) she just needed eyedrops, and (2) she would still be able to nurse. I told the emergency vet that I loved her and she was the new beneficiary in my will.
The eye healed, and the puppies grew. And watching them develop was breathtaking. Human children’s changes are remarkable, but animals grow up so much faster. From bumbling blindly around the box with their little fat bodies bumping into things and then, slowly, opening their eyes. We picked them up more and more, socializing them with kisses and receiving immeasurable joy from them. Countless times I found myself walking around the house thinking, Happiness really is a warm puppy!
PAUL, WHO WASN’T QUITE as earnest, kept reenacting the scene from Apocalypse Now where they find the puppy in the barrel on the boat. “Look what she was hiding. See what she was running for. A fucking puppy.”
OUR NEXT - DOOR NEIGHBORS, John and Elisabeth, were pretty serious dog people. They became like the godparents, frequently stopping by for a little “puppy time.” Our apartments had back doors from the kitchens into a common hallway, and often when I’d open the door to take out the trash, their door would whip open. “Oh, hey, can we see the puppies?” or “We’re having a dinner party. Is it okay if we show everyone the puppies?” It was so charming and fun even if their guests, who were not necessarily dog people, were not quite as engaged as John and Elisabeth.
The puppies weren’t going outside yet. In New York City, puppies have to have all of their inoculations before they can go out on the street with other dogs. So they just stayed in the box, and they occasionally came out into the room. It was easy. It wasn’t like having extra dogs; it was more like having guinea pigs.
As they grew, their distinct personalities emerged, and wouldn’t you know it? Although I wasn’t supposed to, I had fallen for the female, the one we weren’t keeping. She was so incredibly sweet that she had charmed me, but I kept it to myself. It was absolutely impossible to consider having four dogs in a New York City apartment. I started to talk to Matthew about adopting Wisteria. I felt like I could manage losing her if she stayed in the family.
Matt’s wife, Lara, definitely wanted her, but Matt remained harder to convince. Then Lara and Pixie, Matt’s three-year-old daughter, came to New York City for a visit. I gave Wisteria to Pixie to hold and she loved her; I captured the moment on digital film and e-mailed it to Matt. “Say no to this!” I wrote. I felt him beginning to come around, though I was careful not to mention anything to Pixie about it. Violet brought it up, though, since she thought it was a good idea.
Meanwhile, Paul was discussing Wisteria’s potential adoption with his brother, uncle, and best friend, Mike. There were a lot of people who wanted her, and that was before they even saw her picture.
I e-mailed Paul after getting off the phone with Matt.
Julie: “I think Matt is going to take Wisteria!”
Paul: “Great! Did you send him the picture of Pixie holding her?”
Julie: “Yes, he thought it was adorable!!”
Paul: “Of course!”
Julie: “It’s perfect!”
Five minutes passed and I wrote back to him again.Julie: “Except, now I want to keep her.”
Paul: “Me too.”
Julie: “Really? I am so happy! So we’re keeping her?”
Paul: “I guess we are.”
Julie: “Yay!!!!!!!!!”
Paul: “We do what we feel is right, but we don’t always do what’s best for us.”
So we took Wisteria off the market and we let everyone know. It just seemed impossible to break up the puppies, no matter what anyone said. They were two peas in a pod! They slept huddled together, and when Wisteria got a little adventurous and went out of the box, Fiorello wept for her to return and vice versa. All of the breeder and veterinary people told us that this didn’t mean anything. They would do perfectly fine apart; it happened all the time. Dahlia was a doting mother, they said, but as soon as she finished nursing she’d be kickin’ them to the curb. I didn’t disbelieve this, but I felt like our situation was different. Our mother dog was different, and our puppies were different. She may have had to say good-bye to her children before, but she wouldn’t have to now. She had a home, and she should be able to keep her children there with her.
Just like when you have a baby, when you get used to one phase of puppy development, suddenly everything changes. I thought they’d live in that UPS box forever, but one day they were just done with it. They didn’t want to go in it again for any reason. Dahlia was ready to roam the house as well, and the puppies had some serious exploring to do, since among Paul, Violet, and me, there were plenty of shoes that were just begging to be chewed up.
We kept them in the pen at night and when we went out, but the rest of the time they had free rein. Dahlia would try to get away from them more and more, but not totally. They had started to eat little puppy meals, but they still nursed when they wanted to, sharp teeth and all. And Dahlia withstood it. Everyone said she would let them know when she was finished having them suckle, but she never did. Eventually they weaned themselves, but she still assiduously minded them, even when they were pretty much done nursing. Sometimes I thought she was through with them and then I’d see her giving them a full inner-ear bath and nuzzling their tummies. When they were big enough, they slept with her on the couch, one tucked into her front paws and the other nestled into her stomach. If she got up, they glommed together, but when she came back they returned to position.
Four dogs. Four dogs. Cuatro perros. Quatre chiens. Fir hun-ten. Vier honden. Vier Hunde, fire hunde, quattro cani, quatro cães, yonhiki inu ken, mbwa nne, Arbaa klavim, keturi suniai, tesseres sk
eeli, char kutte, négy kutyá, chetiri sobaki. It sounds crazy in any language, doesn’t it? It’s quite something to wrap your head around—you have one dog and then it’s four. Like you’re a size small one day and the next you’re XXXL. You have one head—then four. One apple, then an orchard. One goldfish, then a herd of elephants.
We were starting to get it. We were not getting comfortable with it, but getting used to it. I was talking to a new friend of mine, Deb, whom I had met recently at a book festival in San Jose. It was one of those cosmic meetings where you find a person and the way they look and sound is so familiar that you keep trying to figure out how you must know them. Within five minutes, we discovered we had one very close friend in common and lived five blocks from each other on the Upper West Side, where we both had kids and husbands named Paul. We had that immediate openness that you sometimes feel when you meet a friend in a strange land. I found out she was going through a very hard time; her beloved father had been recently diagnosed with cancer and it was just a harsh, swift blow. He had only a matter of months to live.
Right before Thanksgiving, I ran into Deb when she was walking Lucas, her cute little Havanese puppy. She was filling me in on the stuff with her dad and I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could do. As it turned out, they were going to Delaware and someone in the house where they were staying was allergic to dogs. They would be away for only a few days, and I happily offered to keep Lucas. It was one thing I was completely capable of handling.
So for a few days we had five dogs, and only one of them, Bea, was housebroken. Dahlia’s birth had left her incontinent, and everyone else was still learning. It was like living in a giant litter box. I walked Dahlia and Bea with Lucas and thought, This is only three dogs; I will be walking four.
A few weeks later Deb’s father passed away, and we took Lucas in for a week. I was heartbroken for Deb and her family, and it was a blessing to actually be able to help them.
When Lucas left, we went back to having “just” four dogs. It was like that old story about the guy complaining that his house is too small and the town elder keeps telling him to move his cows, then his sheep, then his chickens, then his horses into the house and finally when he can’t stand it anymore the town elder tells him to move them back out and suddenly his house seems huge. Well, it was almost like that.
It was overwhelming, but we were still not even taking the puppies outside—and that future prospect just hung over me like a roof of dread. When the day finally came that their inoculations were complete and they were ready to go out for walks, I delayed it some more. It was still winter, and cold and windy when I’d taken them to the vet. They had been so terrified to be out of the apartment that we decided it would be better to wait until the weather improved. Sun and warmth would be so much more welcoming. In the meantime, they were paper trained and really pretty good! I thought about the crazy, unsocialized puppies of John, the man in Washington Heights. Our puppies were lovely! They had also grown into their own personalities. Wisteria was what you’d call “mouthy.” She was a biter, but Fiorello was as gentle as a lamb. He never bit, though he started to pee on everything, which Wisteria never did.
They had such a funny relationship. Sometimes I’d open the front door in the morning to get the paper, and they’d amble into the hallway.
“Okay, come back in,” I’d say, and Wisteria would, but Fiorello would keep sniffing around. So Wisteria would go into the hall and wrangle him into the apartment. We were endlessly correcting Wisteria’s teething on us. “No biting! Wisteria, no biting!” She didn’t really stop, but Fiorello would start yelling at her—he had a real voice, gruff and growly like an angry bear in a tiny puppy cave mixed with Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, and he would lecture her—“Rururrruu RuRuRuRruurururururRURURURURU urrrrr”—until she was a huddled, apologetic mass.
Puppies are constantly inventing new ways to be bad. It’s fascinating. You come into a room they’ve been in and see pieces of debris and try to figure out what you had that was made from wicker or what had been stuffed with fluff. Violet would regrettably leave her bin of dolls open and the puppies would systematically eat the hands and feet off of all of them. They would not swallow them; they would just bite them off and leave them around like Hawkeye’s M*A*S*H nightmare. One morning I walked into the living room and found Violet’s finely crafted Wizard of Oz pop-up book open on the floor. The puppies had eaten the whole tornado. It was now a very different story.
The first springlike day was a Saturday. Paul was home, so we decided to take everyone outside. We got ready to take the puppies out for their first walk. We put new batteries in the camera and spent an absurd amount of time getting all the dogs’ halters on. I remembered from Beatrice’s puppy-hood that being good on a leash is not an innate trait. It takes time to learn. But when I taught her to behave on a leash, she was one puppy, and I lived right by a park. Now we were taking out two adult dogs and two puppies, and it was on crazy Broadway, where, more often than not, there were loud noises and traffic. A bus stop was just in front of our building, and frequently the sitting bus would emit this loud exhalation sound. The puppies just might be a little frightened. Well, in reality they were flat-out petrified. Fiorello glued himself in between my feet, like he was in an armored ankle car, and shook. Wisteria sobbed. Though Paul, Violet, and I were walking the four of them, somehow three people just weren’t enough for four dogs. Not by a long shot. It seemed like we would need two people per dog. Ultimately I carried Fiorello, while Wisteria steeled herself to persevere.
After that, Fiorello refused to go on walks. When he heard the leashes rattling he would hide under the bed. I didn’t want to push him, and I wasn’t dying to walk four dogs, so I just took Wisteria with Bea and Dahlia. Wisteria liked it a lot and found the whole experience to be great fun; she just didn’t understand she was supposed to go to the bathroom outside. We’d take these long walks and she’d trot in and head for the newspaper to relieve herself. Curiosity ultimately got the best of Fiorello, and he would start coming out to watch us get ready to go and then he would allow a harness to be put on him. Before I knew it, he was going out, too.
He went from being a timid hider to being the chief big-mouth pain in the ass, barking and barking and barking his brains out anytime we passed another dog. He was a total embarrassment.
Paul walked the four dogs a couple of times, but then he didn’t want to anymore. He would come in and say, “I hate having four dogs,” as if I had sneaked them in under my coat. He called Dahlia the Trojan Dog. She was falling slightly out of favor because she had gone from being a loving mother to a crotchety old dog, at times really aggressive. She bit all of us and attacked Bea daily. I still knew there was no way I could let her go to another home. I just couldn’t do it to her. When she was lying quietly on the couch, my heart broke for her, but when I passed by her in what she considered a too abrupt fashion, she’d lash out and chomp on my leg. “I hate you!” I’d shout. And then she’d look at me with her soft brown eyes and I knew she hadn’t meant it. Every time she fought with Bea, which was more and more often, additional teeth fell out. (One night Paul thought she had cottage cheese on her lip—but it was a tooth.) So technically speaking, the bites shouldn’t have hurt that much, but her remaining choppers were fierce weapons. It was an unhappy situation in our house and I was to blame. The dog thing had been my idea. One morning Paul woke up and stepped into a dump in bare feet. “Next time,” he said, glaring at me, “you should rescue cakes.”
Mostly, it was just me walking them. My own private Iditarod. And it wasn’t a picnic. Just so you know, if you ever see a person walking four dogs, there are two things you can cross off your list of what to exclaim: (1) “Who’s walking who?” and (2) “Looks like you got your hands full.” Both lines are stupid and someone else has already said them. You might consider saying, “Hey, pretty girl!” or “Wow, four dogs sure make you look thin!”
This was what happened when we we
nt out:1. I pick up and untangle the leashes that are all woven together like a macramé plant hanger.
2. Wisteria bites, bites, bites my hands and runs around crazily (“Mom, Wisteria has sticking-out teeth, like a bear!”), then she bites a hole in my sweatpants.
3. Fiorello BARKS, BARKS, BARKS in case anyone might forget to take him.
4. Beatrice shivers, anxious that somehow she’s going to be hurt.
5. Dahlia stays in her bed waiting for an engraved invitation.
6. I tell (a) Wisteria to stop biting, (b) Fiorello to stop barking, (c) Dahlia to get over here, and (d) Bea to relax.
7. We finally get everyone leashed up and they nearly take my arm out of the socket lunging into the hall.
8. The elevator finally comes, and since we’re on the sixteenth floor, it stops for other people to get on; the people look at us grimly and say they’ll wait for the next one.
9. We arrive at the lobby and one of the dogs decides it’s close enough to the outside and pees or poops on the floor. The doormen glare at me.
10. We go outside, and I can see an elderly man with his two Lab mixes coming down the street. One is as old as Methuselah, blind and deaf. He looks like Balto compared to his companion, who is in one of those doggie wheelchairs. I take my pack of a-holes in the other direction because I know they want to rumble with the Geriatric Gang.
11. My cell phone rings, and even though it’s Barack Obama asking me to dinner at the White House, I just can’t get to it in time.
12. They all poop in unison (except Wisteria, who will wait until we get back into the apartment), but my baggies fly out of my pocket into the wind. I run after the bags and get them and then I can’t remember where the pile is so I walk around like I’ve lost a diamond stud till I’m able to find the “present.”
13. We walk farther. Fiorello yells at everyone, and Wisteria still refuses to use the outside when there’s a perfectly good newspaper waiting in Violet’s room.
