Dog House

by Carol Prisant

  “You know, Carol,” she began, “I don’t quite know how to say this, but some people just aren’t right for our terriers. They’re peppery and tough. They need a lot of space to run in so they can tire themselves out and work off some of that extra energy. Do you have a lot of space for them to run?”

  Well, we did, but the electric fence we’d put in after Cosi died kept being compromised by our happy and endless gardening. (In other words, we kept cutting those underground wires.)

  “We do have space, but they don’t run much,” I replied sheepishly, smarting at the suggestion that I wasn’t up to owning a Jack. That we weren’t two of “the right sort.”

  “The Dog is the Dog,” she offered. Politely.

  And since the problem could never be the Dog, it must be us. Most likely, me.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “Anytime,” she offered. “Call anytime.”

  Yeah.

  Well I wasn’t planning on giving up my garden. And wasn’t going to give up on petting one dog for the rest of our Jack Russells’ natural lives (something like fifteen years.) So reluctantly, I began the hardhearted process of adopting Blue out. Billy, the more normal dog, the milder dog—and all right, the better-looking dog—we opted to keep.

  And, reader, it wasn’t at all hard to give Blue away, because who doesn’t want a free Jack Russell? Even a peculiar one.

  You’ll be pleased to know that I found a nice home for her, with children and a fenced-in yard and no other pets. I hoped, for her sake, there was plenty of historic wood in her new digs and hoped she’d find someone, someday, to love. But you know what? As we watched that car drive away, she never looked back once.

  Neither did we.

  Chapter Six

  Dog Star

  Bloodied now, we needed to fall back and redeploy.

  It wasn’t that I’d secretly come to agree with the judgmental breeder who’d suggested we weren’t cut out for Jack Russells. We were hanging on to Billy after all, who seemed disconcertingly unmoved by the disappearance of his tormentor. Somehow I’d assumed he’d become an altogether different dog without Blue around. Slim down some; perk up; do a little stand-up, maybe. But Billy remained bland, epicurean. He appeared in my dreams, sometimes, as George IV

  I wasn’t giving up on “pets” instead of “pet,” either, because I’d kind of liked that two-dog life. One warming dog per lap still seemed cozier and homier than passing one fur ball from lap to lap. So it wasn’t too long afterward that I sortied out to find Billy a gentler, kinder companion—a butterscotch-colored Norfolk terrier—still a terrier, and still a bitch. Merely in gender though, now.

  We called her Emma, because there was something sweet and old-fashioned about her face and sturdy little body that made our mouths want to be filled with mmmms.

  But before we could bring our confection home for excessive spoiling and fussing over, I heard from her breeder—an international terrier powerhouse who showed her Norfolks at Westminster and who, shockingly, actually lived nearby—that Millard and I would be expected to submit to her version of a college admissions interview. She informed me that she thought she could find time to see us one weekend afternoon three weeks hence.

  Be interviewed for a dog?

  The scary breeder made clear to me that while Emma wasn’t quite dog show royalty (she was a “pet quality” puppy; we never learned why), she was very closely related to royalty, so we were going to be subjected to a thorough Q and A to establish, basically, whether we were good enough for the dog. Given my history, I was justifiably nervous. That, and the fact that the woman’s kennels were cleaner than my house.

  But in those splendid kennels we got to meet Emma’s relatives and siblings for a change, and a handsome bunch they were, all blocky and cinnamon and bursting with feist. Though I found myself thinking ... “Wait, offspring seldom look like their parents.” (Ours didn’t. Did yours?) And they can’t actually be counted on to inherit the choicest parental traits. Oh, all right, there are your occasional Mozarts, father and son, and a Bach or two or twenty, but I neither look nor behave like my mother, I think (though any success I’ve had in that department took years of concerted effort). But what about Einstein’s children? Or Tolstoy’s? Or Michelangelo’s? (I know. Yes, I know.) Why, exactly, should meeting parents and sibs relieve anyone’s anxious heart? Yet, the obsessive tracing of bloodlines seems to be of vital import to those who follow horse racing, for instance, or British sovereigns, or the breeding of dogs. And I suppose that’s because line breeding, inbreeding and out-breeding outcomes are easier to analyze and correctly predict than the stock market, say. Because you always know just where to lay the blame for those prick ears or that Hapsburg lip.

  Eventually, after an hour-and-forty-five-minute grilling, we were qualified as Emma-worthy and presented with our darling little pup. Plus an eight-page listing of vitamins, of vets suitable for vetting Norfolks (only one or two in all of Long Island, naturally), dog groomers with the proper training (because the breed must be “stripped,” not cut) and several brands of prohibitively expensive dog food. Conveniently missing was the page on housebreaking.

  Housebreaking requires focus and commitment, and we’d only tried any kind of formal training once before, with Cosi, who was housebroken if you got her out the door on time. But in those days, this was far from our major problem. That was Cosi’s temper. And for that small failing specifically, we’d been put in touch with an “aggression specialist”; a well-recommended teacher and dog expert who’d devoted himself solely to “humane” dog training.

  When, with relief and childlike hope, we’d opened our door to him back then, Cosi had taken one look at his copious facial hair (second only in her tiny mind to a Texaco uniform) and made for his ankles. After a rough fifteen minutes, toward the end of which we finally got a leash on her, the three of us hurried outdoors for her introductory “training walk”—if you can call the guy’s non-stop dancing away from an enraged little terrier “walking.” I think it was then that he became very afraid, because our paragon of compassion wound up “hanging” Cosi from her leash.

  Not part of any dog training manual I’d ever read, and none too “humane” to boot. And that was the end of that.

  But so ... housebreaking. We seemed never to have acquired the knack.

  And curiously, while the famous Norfolk breeder’s dogs had tidily modern living quarters outdoors in impeccable kennels, her house smelled distinctly of pee. Shortly afterward, so did ours.

  Somewhere in between Billy and Blue, I’d begun to write about antiques and design, and with my ill-gotten gains—ill-gotten because I would have written (ungrammatically, if admissibly) “for free”—I began adding loving touches to our Ph.D. thesis of a historic house: a fitted carpet woven from original nineteenth-century point-papers, for example; several needlepoint Gothic chairs; a silk-covered settee. Need I limn the irregular yellow stains on them all?

  Thankfully, however, Emma wasn’t evil with Billy, and everything might have been tickety-boo if it weren’t for the fact that—with Billy having grown completely into his, albeit compromised, dogness—he suddenly felt compelled to lift his leg on top of Emma’s pee. Sometimes, on top of Emma. She didn’t “make” much, of course, but she made it in every part of every room, so Billy’s growing insistence on primacy resulted in my having to do much careful reading of the fine print on labels of stain-remover products and eventually to the reluctant purchase of a few mildly electrified plastic mats. Then, just when we were sure we’d got it all nailed down—our very own version of the time-honored family of Mom and Dad, one boy and one girl and a lot of plastic mats—Billy turned up with some very bad manners that he’d certainly learned from Blue.

  Now as dogs go, Billy was small. But he was bigger than Emma. And he began by bullying her. Taking her food and growling when she tried to come near; scrapping with her over a little squeaky lamb and who was going to sit on a particularly comfy chair and who w
as going to eat not just his own delicious cookie but someone else’s as well. Just like kids ... with fewer inhibitions and many more teeth. How had laid-back Billy become King Kong? What was wrong (once more) with us?

  But that’s how we came to own our first crate.

  Are there hymns in praise of the dog crate? Are there paeans? Sonnets? Doggerel?

  Then I’m forced to resort to cliché: “Where have you been all my life?”

  Tippy. Fluffy. Cosi. They’d all been in need of the crate. Oh god, I’d needed the crate.

  And yes, I know what “crate” sounds like. Like pet abuse and Sing Sing. But a dog’s crate is its playpen.

  Really.

  Because if the thing is well-equipped, with a knurly white fleece for curling up on and plenty of toys and water, and if it’s big and airy and put in a room where everyone lives, well, dogs will love their crates. They’re cozy there, in little nests, all enclosed and so secure; their den, if you will, like a wolf’s. PLUS, it’s the best of all “housebreaking” aids, because amazingly, when you leave a crated dog at home while you go out to eat or play, the safety of your furniture, woodwork, and carpets, along with your shoes, used Kleenexes, mail, mattresses and underpants is 100-percent guaranteed.

  What we got our first crate for, however, wasn’t actually housebreaking. It was to protect Emma from Billy, who seemed shockingly ready to hurt her. Or at least, after our recent brush with Nature, we were fearful of his intent. Millard and I had accepted the fact that we would never make good vets. We were very bad with animals-and-blood. Even worse than we were with people-and-blood. And while it may well be that dogs and bitches won’t fight to the death, we took great comfort in knowing that this crate, this wonderful crate, was preventing any and all near-death experiences.

  Much, much later, when I’d read many more books and watched too much cable TV, I realized that the two terriers were establishing who was going to be the Alpha Dog. Every family has one, of course. Even families with no pets. Humans don’t often get so physical about things, though, and it was the physical that scared us. So we kept innocent, dumped-on little Emma crated when Billy was in the kitchen, hoping he’d get used to her “behind bars, so to speak, where he couldn’t get at her. And we wondered—Is it her scent? The smell of her urine? Her uncomplicated, frolicsome self? Or was this just the canine version of sort-of sibling rivalry that would work itself out and they’d wind up on that Thurber dog’s shrink couch someday, blaming it all on me?

  Belatedly, I’d begun to realize how peoplelike dogs are. How each has its own personality.

  Like us, each dog is born with its own temperament and preferences. Some like watermelon. Some like carrots. (Some actually like kibble.) Some are gay. Some couldn’t care less about gender. Or humans (see: Blue). Some will mourn a lifetime at their owners’ graves. Some dogs want to work as hunters or herders or ratters, while others want only to snarf down liver snaps and lie around in the sun (see: Billy). Some—shall I say it?—eat poop. Some drive you crazy. Some you just love. All drive you crazy. All you just love.

  And it was true that Millard had a thing for scrappy dogs, but he also grew faint at the sight of a syringe and was really, really bad with blood. Even fake Halloween blood. So one thing was sure. We really, really weren’t going to spend a chunk of our lives monitoring gladiatorial terriers and our own adrenaline levels. And that’s why, when poor Emma had been living in the crate for close to two months off and on, and when Billy showed no signs of liking her one jot better, we sat down for our second serious dog talk, the upshot of which was:

  Reader, we divorced him.

  Or less literarily, I found a nice new home for Billy with responsible people (I had recently, you’ll recall, a memorable lesson in owner-interview technique) .

  If I sound flip, it’s possibly because all this was very painful, and that’s sometimes how I manage painful. We had just given up on Blue. And now we had failed again. I’d proved beyond a doubt, once more, that I wasn’t very good at caring. So I wasn’t feeling at all good about myself when we once more became the less-stressed owners of an only dog.

  I think I hear you out there muttering that I hadn’t tried hard enough with Blue; that I could have worked with Billy; that I give up too easily in general; that I have no stick-to-itiveness (Ah, mother—did you make that word up?); that I overreact to confrontations; that I’m too girly and generally, a coward.

  You’re probably right.

  But it was us and Emma now. Emma on the bed, Emma on the lawn, Emma on my shoulder, Emma on my lap, Emma being sick in the car, Emma being sick on the carpet, Emma refusing to chase a ball, Emma refusing to relinquish the remains of a noisome chipmunk, Emma rolling in rabbit poop/squirrel poop/fox poop ... none of which we’d known were on our lawn and all of which we knew were on the body of this small dear dog with whom we shared a bed. So ... Emma in the kitchen sink. Emma wrapped in towels. Emma, bathed and clean and warm. Emma.

  Tearing around the lawn, chasing birds and butterflies and sniffing rancid rodent poop, Emma kept us company while we gardened in the sun. Till at some point, when our heads were safely down, she’d cautiously work her way along the lawn to the far corner of the house, where—stealthily—she’d edge around the big spirea bush and take off as fast as her runty little legs could carry her. Out of the corner of my eye I’d catch the flick of her disappearing tail, and Millard and I would have a bickery moment about who hadn’t been paying attention before running like mad to get her. We never got over our fear of the road.

  Though Emma was becoming more my dog than Millard’s, perhaps for the simple reason that I was at home more now. Writing, by some lucky fluke, had turned into a second career for me. (Despite which, I sometimes can’t resist the satisfying cliché. Though, really, what is a fluke?) And when I was sitting at my word processor, Emma’s coarse-haired body a lovely warm weight on my lap ... how to write about heaven?

  It’s not at all hard to type with a dog in your lap, you know. If I owned a small dog now, I’d be doing it as I write this. And if this were a memoir - which it isn’t—I’d probably wax poetic over that. Suffice it to say that there may be nothing in life so blissful as being paid to do something you love with a dog in your lap.

  Monday—Sunday—Monday—Sunday. Weeks, months, years streamed past. In some two-and-a-half star forties film of our life, pages flew off the calendar on the wall. We were both over fifty now. Millard had become almost embarrassingly proud of my work (note the “almost”), bragging to strangers about me, asking random captive visitors at his plant to read my articles, even going so far as to say he wished his dragonet mother were still alive so he could show her how wrong she’d been about me.

  Did I share that wish about the woman who, with relentless criticisms in letters to her son, had broken my heart while inadvertently teaching me to be kind to my own daughter-in-law? She was right about one thing, though. She’d told Millard not to marry me because I had bad teeth.

  Really.

  Which is why I always paid for them myself.

  Not only was Millard proud of my work, but sometimes he’d even ask if he could come along when I did interviews. He’d want to come along especially when my interviews were somewhere picturesque, like Nantucket or Sag Harbor. Once, we drove out east together to a little house owned by a talented and eccentric single mother, and while all my interviewees tended to be talented and eccentric, they weren’t often humble and self supporting.

  I greeted the photographer, took out my pad of paper, asked my subject to sit down, and began. Millard looked around.

  “Anything here you need to have fixed?” he asked.

  That interviewee told me years later that she’d assumed we three would be arbiters of the most refined taste, and here was this lovely guy just offering to repair her home. So she got up and brought out her toaster, her fan, her portable radio, her table lamps, and if she’d been able to get it in the house, she would have brought him her car. Millard “tink
ered,” as she put it, till my job was done. And she never forgot him. One of her few “Good Man” memories, she tells me.

  I was proud of that and, in my turn, proud of his success as a manufacturer of—I know you remember the old conversation-stopper—aircraft indicator cases.

  He loved to tell the story of how he came to have a business manufacturing such an arcane, not to say singular, product:

  He had been running a job shop in the early years, designing and crafting aluminum “cans” for various industries. When a can was too tricky for any other metal shop to make, the big guys called Millard. Then one day he took a phone call from a sales rep at a large and important firm who asked him if his shop made “aircraft indicator cases.”

  “Sure we do,” Millard responded instantly. “What are they?”

  (Oh, all right. They’re the metal containers that all those cockpit dials and beeping-light things fit into.)

  I was proud then, too, of his having opened a second plant in Phoenix; of his having successfully done the single thing that, way back when he was twenty-one, he’d told me he’d always wanted to do. Make something.

  He was making many complicated somethings now. Beautifully.

  Meanwhile, at our increasingly magical house, on what had previously been the top of a pergola over the semicircular drive, we’d created a small platform for dining that allowed us to eat on the prow of a great ship every fme night between May and October. Metaphorically. The grass and the water and the sunset spread themselves before us, and at nine out of ten of our twilit dinners, as the swans (yes, the swans) sailed down the harbor to their nests, we’d linger over coffee and marvel at our great good luck. Though it wasn’t just over the beauty of our immediate surroundings. The town had finally blown up the incinerator smokestack. The coast guard had dredged the scores of decaying hulks from World War II. And our once-mucky lawn had become a smooth purl of green right down to the water’s edge, where pink and white roses trimmed a bulkhead that was manfully keeping the whole from being swept out to sea. Sometimes Millard would take his fishing rod down to the harbor at dusk, and sometimes catch a sunny or two. (He’d also indulged in a used, two-person dinghy with sails, and I’d occasionally receive a chagrined phone call from some isolated spot miles up the harbor where he’d run his boat aground. He never quite developed a “feel” for the wind.)