Dog House

by Carol Prisant

  What he does remember is the day he came home from school about a month after we got the dog (I hope it was a month, although I’m afraid it was more like two weeks) and was told in the gentlest fashion that Tippy had run away.

  I didn’t tell him what had actually happened until he was in his twenties, because Barden has developed into a man with a marshmallow heart and I didn’t want to hurt him. Besides, he can really hold a grudge.

  Here’s how it was.

  Basically, I guess, I hadn’t had lessons in Dog, and Tippy hadn’t had lessons in Good Dog.

  He, cute, happy puppy that he was, was just being a dog; while at the same time, stubborn, tinkly puppy that he was, he was destroying and despoiling my longed-for first house. What I didn’t realize was that a solid ten sessions with a trainer would have changed both our lives, but I didn’t know about trainers or dog schools then. I didn’t grow up in a dog house.

  And that’s why, at last, in an act of desperation as impulsive as my original adoption of destructive, independent, shedding, unhousebreakable, busy-being-himself, darling, terrible Tippy, I’d called the ASPCA to come and pick him up.

  What stays clearly in Barden’s mind is that he and I drove around and around the neighborhood that first day with the car windows down while he called, in a voice growing fainter as the evening drew on: “Tippy! Tippy!” When I mention it now, he regards me with narrowed eyes and a reproachful smile, and I recognize, for the umpteenth time, that I did to him what my mother did to me.

  I was just like her.

  Minus the golf.

  Chapter Three

  Underdog

  And yet ... and yet.

  I still found myself, somehow, stopping to pet every dog I saw. Perplexingly, it seemed necessary to my mental well-being. I found I couldn’t keep away, either, from those page-turners at the library like Raising Your Dog with the Monks of Skete. Or Dog Fancy magazine. Or even the most saccharine of the Pup-A-Day calendars. Occasionally, too, as time passed and the painful memory of the Tippy fiasco faded, I’d find myself hanging around the entrance to the neighborhood vet’s ... like some compulsive, smiley dog stalker.

  In the sequencing of the human genome, do you suppose they’ll ever find whatever it is about dog addicts that sends them back for more? Could there be something in our DNA, perhaps, that cries out for those muddy paw prints on the new white pants or a barefoot walk through drool? Could this be why, no matter how many times you wipe up the dog-sick or are slurped on the lips by some fetid tongue (“DO YOU KNOW WHERE THAT TONGUE HAS BEEN?!!”), you keep returning to the AKC, the animal shelter, the rescue group, the backyard breeder, the grocery deliveryman’s wife (see p. 172), for more? And could it possibly have been this as-yet-undiscovered gene (not from my mother’s side of the family, you can be sure. That was her, yelling up there) that propelled me, two years later, back to the pound?

  But wait. Before I cover myself in ersatz glory and collie hair, I have to backtrack a bit and explain, briefly, about my antiques business and those eight or so dogless years—before the hapless Tippy.

  In 1965, back when Barden was only five and fmally in school all day, my mother, the proud new owner of a moderately successful travel agency, came to visit us on Long Island, where Millard, having forsaken the world of unreliable missiles and nuclear submarine cruises to Holy Loch, had taken a promising job in the burgeoning electronics industry. We were still in our twenties then, and had been dazzled by the combined inducements of earning a little more money and living the Fabulous Life in New York.

  Interspersed by not-nearly-enough horseshoeshaped parking lots, the raw new development in a bleak part of Queens that we picked to live in was pretty much of a comedown. Every faceless redbrick building had its own asphalt playground, however, and there, on autumn afternoons, I’d sit on chilly benches exchanging canned mushroom soup recipes with women I seemed to have nothing in common with. Other days, when I could afford a babysitter, I’d dress in heels and a girdle and white gloves and take the train to The City to browse Best‘s, Bonwit’s, and Peck & Peck and walk the Met until my toes blistered. Then I’d limp back to Penn Station for the dreary ride home. Though once, a car full of Iowans took pity on the overdressed young woman hobbling down Fifth Avenue and offered me a ride.

  I took it.

  I’m from out of town.

  Across the street from our apartment building was a scruffy field where Millard would take Barden to fly kites on weekends while I, grateful for a couple of childless hours, would greedily pore over the Ladies Home Journal, tuned in to the Saturday opera, or every now and then (and these were the guiltiest pleasures), cruise the local junk shops or get a temporary fix at the pet store. There, if I pretended I might buy one, they’d let me hold a puppy or two. This was before Tippy. Before our first house. Before Real Life began.

  When my mother came to visit, she usually took us out to dinner at least once and had me drive her to Loehmann’s in the Bronx at least once, where she’d treat me to a dress. This particular trip, however, after a day or so of rearranging my furniture and dodging all those fissionable issues between us—why she walked all over my father and why Millard didn’t seem to like her and why she was so relentlessly competitive—she turned to me, and with the zeal of the newly converted, said, “You need something to do.”

  Still trying to run my life. Still gorgeously blond, hazel-eyed and beautifully dressed while I was still brown, brown and brown. Still intimidating.

  But (damn it) ... right?

  Had five years of stay-at-home motherhood and onion-soup dips blurred my never-too-crisp self image? I’d thought I really enjoyed the playground every day because I knew I was supposed to. I’d thought “Living near New York” was great, though okay, “near” wasn’t “in.” Was I poised yet? Adult yet? “Fulfilled” (see Redbook, 1965).

  Um.

  Naturally, I went on the defensive.

  What I wanted to say to her was, “What do you mean ‘something to do’? Some of us, you know, like being moms and wives! Some folks even find it ‘rewarding.’” (Yay, Ladies Home Journal, although “moms”—along with “folks”—wasn’t universal then. “Mothers” was the operative word and “folks” lived in places like Arkansas.) But I had always been afraid to argue with my mother-who-wasn’ t-my-mom, so all these conversations took place in my head.

  I became very silent.

  I was proud and happy to be a mother, I wanted to tell her. Hadn’t I worked hard to be among the last of that pitied and despised generation that had gone to college to get married and achieve motherhood as simultaneously as respectably possible? Hadn’t I washed diapers, spiked my child’s orange juice with daily fluoride and pushed his stroller to the drugstore soda fountain for a pair of lonely ice creams? Wasn’t that what Life was about?

  Relaxed and beautifully groomed and sipping coffee in our L-shaped living room, my mother thought not. She may have been overly critical (she didn’t like the way I smiled), hypocritical (she disliked all her girlfriends but told only me) and every so often off-the-wall mean; but she’d also become, unexpectedly, a walking, world-traveling proof of the merits of “something to do.” Narrowing her eyes at the glass celery holders, Currier & Ives prints and owl paperweights that I’d been buying for three or twelve dollars or whatever I could save from my grocery money, and then at me, still wearing my New England pleated skirts, tortoiseshell glasses and frizzly hair, she had my eureka moment. “Maybe you should go into the antiques business.”

  In the sixties, married women who worked had to work. Put another way, they worked because their husbands couldn’t support them. That was true for my mother and true, at that moment, for me. My adored father, who’d in fact been my mother, was dear, hard up, funny and (oh, I’m sorry, Daddy—in so many ways) under her thumb. Millard was only the first two of these—though he got a smidgen funnier over the years.

  I knew nothing whatsoever about antiques, but I was electrified by her suggestion. Empowere
d, you might say, because she would stake me, she said, to a serious amount of money—two hundred dollars. And I could buy anything I wanted.

  I would learn about antiques! Read a book or two! (Like I would, down the road, with dogs.) Could I fail? Are giant turtles roaming Queens parks?

  Then, having made things right in the pre-pre-feminist world by dropping this bomb, my mother flew home to Pittsburgh and out of this book, and my little family and I drove back to Boston as fast as Millard could get a Friday off: Why Boston? Because I’d found my first “buys” there, and there were surely more. Still I did spend a little of my windfall in New York, or rather, in the five or so stores within a half hour’s drive of our Queens apartment (one named Aunt Tiques and Uncle Junques). I shopped so carefully and with such focus, taste and discrimination, in fact, that it took me a full three months to spend my start-up two hundred dollars on sure-to-sell treasures like little gilt cups and saucers; a French bulldog pull toy; a Turkish shoe-shine kit (all of fifteen dollars by itself!); a needlepoint footstool; a seated milk glass dog with one broken ear and glass eyes; and an assortment of flowered plates, several with chips. (Have you spotted that canine leitmotif?)

  You’d think that Millard might have made some comment on, say, the shoe-shine kit. Something on the order of “Who in god’s name do you think is going to want that?” But from our very first apartment on, he’d taken absolutely no interest in any of my curtains, paint chips, crafts projects or furnishings, vintage or new—except for his own, highly sacred, fifty-dollar mahogany desk. He was completely happy with anything I brought home. It wasn’t that he had no taste. It was just that he didn’t see Beauty. Which, if you think about it, is a good thing in a husband.

  When I was at last tapped out, having added maybe another sixty-seven dollars’ worth of inventory including, from my father, the much appreciated and sentimental gift of a box of my grandfather’s unsold gold and semiprecious stone rings (my family were jewelers), Millard and I found a Sunday antiques show that for twelve dollars would allow me to peddle my “antiques” in a local parking lot.

  That first day, we loaded an aluminum picnic table and a folding bridge chair in the trunk of our car, piled my treasures on top, each carefully wrapped in newspaper and stacked in the too-small boxes I’d begged from the supermarket (Millard was one of your all-star packers), and at around six A.M.—and on rainless summer weekends thereafter—he and I and little Barden (who began that day a major and worthless collection of discarded antiques show ticket stubs) left for some soon-to-be sun-baked parking lot, where the three of us would unload my “inventory.” Then Millard and Barden would take off together for the day, while I would spend the hours from nine to five getting suntanned, learning that New Yorkers like to bargain and consequently, crying a lot.

  “How much is that big Royal Worcester bowl?” says the stocky middle-aged woman with the balding husband in the cap and short-sleeved Dacron shirt.

  “It’s nine dollars.”

  “What the dealer’s price?”

  “Uh, eight dollars?”

  “That’s all? I usually get twenty percent.”

  “Yes, but I paid seven dollars for it.” (Squeaky here.)

  “But it’s chipped. See! See on this edge?! Feel it. Maybe it’s hard to see.”

  She holds the bowl up close to my face.

  “Put your finger here. You can feel it, can’t you? ”

  She grabs my hand, puts it on the foot of the bowl underneath. I think I may feel a little something.

  “Well, okay. But really, it’s not that expensive, and maybe you can have the chip ground down.” (The sun is hot. I’ve finished the Coke.)

  “What if I pay cash? How much for cash?”

  “It still has to be eight dollars. I’m only making a dollar.”

  (Whining here?)

  “Yeah, yeah. What do you think, Harry? Do you like it? You wouldn’t have a pair, wouldyou?”

  “Gee, no.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I really wanted a pair.”

  She starts to walk away.

  “Wait,” I call after her. “Look, I haven’t sold anything all day. You can have it for seven dollars.”

  I somehow haven’t noticed that the husband hasn’t left.

  “I don’t have to pay sales tax, do I?”

  “Not if you have a resale number.”

  “Well, but you gave me a dealer’s discount, so why do I have to pay sales tax?”

  “Are you a dealer?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Then you have a resale number.”

  “But I don’t have it on me.”

  “Then I have to charge you sales tax.”

  “Look, forget it. I don’t need a chipped bowl anyway. ”

  And it’s over.

  “Oh, all right. Take it. I’ll pay the sales tax myself.”

  Which is how I lost money and cried a lot.

  I liked the suntan, though (we did, back then), and I eventually learned to price everything a good deal higher than I really wanted to sell it for so I could reduce it. That’s when I began to make some money, although it may just have been because I stopped buying cups and saucers and chipped plates and began to buy things that people really needed, like marrow scoops and snuff boxes.

  By the time we’d moved from “our building” in Queens to that first house with the Japanese maple, Barden was eight and I had parlayed my start-up capital into a real business, a business that paid my dental bills and actually bought me the first of my old Humbers (i.e., English cars). In addition, conveniently near Barden’s new school, I’d found myself a business partner; a nice old woman (she was forty-five) who thought she might be able to use a little help in her long-established antiques store in a pretty little town called Locust Valley—a town that reminded me of the silver-screen Brigadoon—utterly bucolic, complacently obsolescent and so difficult to find that you wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it disappeared each time you drove away.

  And that was how—and where—I became a shopkeeper. That was why my poor kid was forced to sit in the store every day from three fifteen until my four thirty closing—doing homework, eating the guilt junk I let him eat and reading the guilt comic books I let him buy. Not to mention those weekends he got dragged along for the shlepping and unpacking on the hot asphalt parking lots, and the frantic early buying at local school fairs where I made him sit on what I’d picked so it wouldn’t get away. All of which explains why I began to feel he needed—no, deserved—another dog.

  Have you ever been to the pound? Back in 1970, it looked like a prison camp and probably still does. Everything in the pound could be nicely hosed down because everything was cinder block except the fences, which were chain link and six feet tall. Each of the abandoned dogs lived in a concrete-floored pen with a metal bowl of water and a pan of permanently half-eaten moist food dotted with flies. As you walked down the aisle between the pens, all the dogs barked and yapped, but without real conviction: sort of like “Well, if you other guys think there’s something to bark at, I guess I do, too.” That is, all the dogs except the shy, sad-eyed ones who retreated to the backs of their cages and stared fearfully and never barked at all and the few mildly curious, silent pups that put their noses to the wire. Every time I stopped by the pound (I needed, sometimes, to pet a dog), I’d be reminded of those 1930s prison films where the inmates run their cups across their bars to noisily confirm their own existence, aware, surely, that it’s an exercise in futility, though no guard would dare approach without a wood baton or gun. Here, moreover, you were permitted to, wanted to, reach a naked hand in to brush a cold nose or slide an ear or two between your fingers.

  My pound’s wardens allowed a kind of canine speed-dating. You could walk a candidate out on a leash to an enclosed exercise space where, ostensibly, you and your potential responsibility for the next ten or fifteen years could get to know each other. But you couldn’t get to know each other, of course; either because the poo
r animal was mad with excitement at being let out of its pen or because it was spooked and made instantly catatonic by the unexpected nearness of its cellmates and large, inept you, who was incredibly nervous about whether you were holding its leash too tight or not tight enough; about the fact that, jeez, this dog looks a lot bigger out here than it did in there; about whether you appeared to its watchful keepers like someone who’d never had a pet and didn’t deserve one.

  They knew about Pretty Boy. And Tippy.

  Out of this hygienic meat market, though, came Barden’s beloved Fluffy, a needle-nosed purebred collie: smallish, but, well—fluffy. He’d been left at the pound by a family whose newest child was allergic to dog hair. They said. Because who, after all, would willingly give up a beautiful, year-old, housebroken (!!!!) collie? Worse, who would name such a noble creature Fluffy? Not a name I’d have chosen. Not when he could have been “King’s Golden Knight,” the grandish kennel name that appeared on his papers from the grander AKC. Yes, our Fluffy had a genuine pedigree, which impressed ten-year-old Barden greatly, as did the fact that this dog truly looked like—well, you remember—the-dog-that-scrambled-through-raging-rivers-and-forests-and-escaped- the-clutches-of-dognappers-(with god knows what in mind!)-to-return-after-much-suffering-to-the-happy-domesticity-of carrying-books-and-rescuing-children-who’ d-fallen-down-a-well.

  Nevertheless, remembering our noncompliant Tippy, I figured we might have a better shot at being listened to if we didn’t confuse the dog with a name change. So Fluffy he came to us, and Fluffy he remained. Although as time passed and we knew him better, he grew a few extra names (as did all our dogs), and wound up as “King’s Golden Knight Fluffy Crusher Dry Toast.” (“Crusher” was Barden’s; “Dry Toast” was mine. Predictably, Millard liked “Fluffy.”)