Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  Pet cemeteries and pet insurance? Just like Rebecca, he was always ahead of his time.* Even though we’re talking about something that happened more than forty years ago, I can see how much it still pains her.

  “Maybe it was all for the best. The bosom of your family can be comforting but it can also be smothering,” I tell her, wondering if she considers me to be one of those people who work in the media and dress like a nafka.

  “Sometimes your family can know too much about you,” she says, and we kiss each other good-bye on the Shalom Y’all doormat.

  I call my dad on the drive to the airport and ask him to fill in the blanks of the story.

  He and a business partner were funding a small housing development in Toulminville. Dad’s partner discovered that my grandfather Ike, who also had a stake in the business, was funneling a considerable amount of supplies and workers to make improvements on his home. You might call it embezzling. It’s so horrible that I try to make up a clever axiom about this, but I can’t think of any word that rhymes with “embezzling.”

  Mobile was burned for him. No wonder he said, “Whatever happens, don’t send me back.”

  When he tells me this, I remember that someone, maybe my mother, once told me how just after Dad graduated from Vanderbilt, where he made money by leasing pinball machines to his fraternity, he started law school at the University of Alabama. He received a call from Becca. Ike had suffered a heart attack and he needed to come home and help his family.*

  “I didn’t know you were in business with Ike,” I say, and he explains that he’d always been in business with his dad in Mobile. Ike had raked up so many debts that when he turned sixteen, all of his father’s assets had to be put in his name.

  Our cousins climbed that crooked ladder, but my dad had gotten stuck with his father on a lower rung.

  I tell him that I learned that I wasn’t Rebecca’s favorite. “You know, Rebecca wasn’t exactly anyone’s favorite,” he says. “People thought she was putting on airs. Uncle Sam felt responsible for taking care of his baby sister, Rebecca, the youngest of his siblings, who’d been left behind in Russia all those years before. They’d underwritten Ike’s business for years, ponied up for her fashion sprees in New York. They even paid for the membership to the Standard Club in Atlanta. After they died, she tried to cash a check from them for three thousand dollars but the family wouldn’t honor it. She carried that check in her purse for years after that, hoping they’d change their minds.”

  I tell my father that everyone was kind to me, that I might have even experienced that elusive “sense of place,” that I love him and I will call him soon. I return my rental car and pull up the picture of Rebecca, the one my cousin Michael and I found in Bert’s microwave, on my phone, only she doesn’t look eccentric and glamorously dramatic. All I can see is the damage. Ahead of her time? More like behind the times, caught between the old world and new. A Blanche DuBois who depended on the kindness of family.

  It takes me all of three minutes to clear airport security, so I send shots of Dauphin Island to the cousins who couldn’t make it down. I think of how proud I am of all of us who emerged from a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. My sister and cousins are do-gooders who work for charitable organizations, the majority of us are on speaking terms, and none of us have served time. Yet. Having gone into showbiz and with a proclivity for putting on airs, I have the most in common with our huckster ancestors. I’m the black sheep of my generation!

  Waiting to board, I get a text from my husband: Are we moving to Dauphin Island?

  I text back: Only the ibis can go home again.

  Huh? he writes.

  I’ll explain when I get home, I dash off before the plane takes flight.

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Kanas and eight others, representing three generations of his family, and I are digging into homemade Syrian delicacies at his townhouse in Burbank.* Fadwa, Kanas’s sister-in-law, explains that her family and Kanas’s are intermarried in as confusing a configuration as my own family. Most of the family lives close by, except for a few of the first generation of American-born who have moved to Northern California. Nahla, his wife, explains how to make her signature dish; it’s intestines stuffed with ground beef, tomatoes, and rice, and is not unlike the stuffed cabbages Rebecca regularly sent to my dorm in New York City.

  “I love masareen,” Amanda says. She’s Kanas’s niece, one of the first generation in the family to be born in America. She’s twenty-one, impeccably groomed, and between bites is sucking on a hookah filled with strawberry-flavored tobacco. When Nahla explains that it takes four hours to prepare the dish, Amanda sheepishly protests, “But you know, I’m studying to become a dentist. I’ll never make it myself.” Another of the aunties pipes in, “No, you can do it! You’ll come home at night . . .” and as she talks through the preparation of the rice and beef, Amanda listens and nods with a smile frozen on her face and I realize that for all my claiming to love gumbo, I’ve never once attempted to make Dad’s recipe. She’s never making that masareen, I think as I smile and nod assurances.

  Things move slowly in the South and even slower in my family. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get that will probated. Wouldn’t that be just like my family, if I passed on to my son property taxes for a piece of land he’ll never visit? Maybe it will be the ocean that ultimately brings resolution.*

  Meanwhile, there are second- and third-generation things to attend to. Sandy’s grandsons are becoming B’nai Mitzvah in a month in Las Vegas, and the descendants of Goldie and Sugar, Rebecca’s favorites, all of us, will be there to witness the occasion.

  What would those intrepid souls who crossed the Plains in covered wagons make of a world where you can purchase half-million-dollar canine compounds equipped with temperature-controlled daybeds and quick-drying doggie nail polish?

  outward hound

  I will never dance at Callie’s wedding. I will not cheer at Tucker’s college graduation. I won’t meet Mia’s children or enjoy a girls’ night out with Mary, but I will be expected to mourn them when they shuffle off this mortal coil, because they are the four-legged family members of people I love. Some days, it appears a pet genocide is taking place on my social media feeds. There are not only pictures of adorable antics but pleas for intercessory prayers and news of the impending demise, precipitous decline, and inevitable deaths of Copernicus Q. Cutiepie, Mr. McMugglepuss, and Sir Barks-a-Lot.

  Their departures will unleash an outpouring of emotion from their caretakers. I’m bereft. Heart is broken. We’ve lost our angel. This will be followed by a collective grieving that I am not keen to participate in because I am an unfeeling cad. I can find a depth of feeling for your human family even if I’ve never met them, but I have a hard time summoning that same emotion for your fur babies.

  I’m all for the humane treatment of all animals. I’ve committed to eating lower on the food chain. I rarely eat red meat, gave up veal, and am foie gras free, but I wear leather, wool, and cashmere. Even worse: I subject the cats that live with me to baby talk, silly nicknames, and stream-of-consciousness musings about their cuteness. I also force them to submit to hours of merciless petting and then confine them to the crook of my arm.

  To the purest adherents of the tenets promoted by the Pets Are People Too movement and PETA, my conduct is unenlightened and tantamount to the enslavement of animals.*

  It wasn’t always this way, this sentimentalized relationship with animals. Looking out over the San Gabriel Mountains from my bedroom window, I often contemplate the steeliness of those intrepid souls who crossed the Plains in covered wagons, most of them accompanied by working dogs pulling sleds loaded with wood and other goods, in addition to performing their hunting duties. What would those settlers make of a world where you can purchase half-million-dollar canine compounds equipped with temperature-controlled daybeds or quick-drying doggie nail polish, or o
pen your home to a potbellied pig without bacon on the brain?

  A conspiracy nut might even suggest that videos of telegenic mammals doing the darnedest things have replaced religion as the opiate of the masses, allowing governments and corporations greater control over our lives while we’re home oohing and ahhing over a kitten nestled in the arms of a gorilla. But what’s landed me in the doghouse with many of the folks I share my life with is that I don’t consider animal companions to be family members. They are like family but aren’t actually family. In the same way that carob, with its dry, lintlike texture, is not even a distant cousin once removed to chocolate.

  The depth of the interspecies familial bonding was brought home when Lauren, a family friend, showed up at my sister Lisa’s formal Thanksgiving dinner “wearing” her Chihuahua, Mia, in a dog carrier modeled on a baby sling. Lauren neglected to mention she was bringing the pooch and didn’t seem to register the look on my perfectionista sister’s face that I know means: This is mildly amusing but you are dead to me now. Mia, not surprisingly, looks a lot like her “mommy,” Lauren. Both are petite, are fine boned, and have the same hair/fur color. Mia was dressed in a Mondrian-patterned nylon number that had more ruffles but was otherwise identical to Mommy’s outfit. We all giggled upon learning the sling was made by a company called Outward Hound—pet people are so clever with wordplay*—but I thought Lisa was going to have a stroke when Lauren seated baby Mia at the dining room table and served her on our grandmother Rebecca’s Royal Crown Derby china. That dinner is now affectionately referred to as the Mama Mia Incident by our clan.

  But it wasn’t until my friend Craig waxed poetic about his Labrador retriever at a dinner party that I considered I might be the problem. Craig announced that Boo’s presence in his life had convinced him that everything in the universe happens for a reason.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the videos I make with Boo have helped raise money for children who have cancer.”

  “That’s funny, Craig,” I said, “because children who have cancer are why I’m convinced that nothing in the universe happens for a reason.” Our dinner companions looked at me like I’d just stabbed Craig in the eye with my fork. Was I undervaluing the bond between my friends and their pets? I’m always saying my friends are my chosen family, so shouldn’t I accept their chosen family members unconditionally? I resolved that night to forge relationships with my friends’ fur-bound children with the same enthusiasm and sincerity with which I celebrate their human offspring.

  1. CALLIE’S BITCHY RESTING FELINE FACE™

  Dinah is my age, is single, and has a wicked sense of humor, five sisters who live in Pennsylvania, and an adorable daughter whose favorite color is purple. She shares her home with Calico, a cat with whom I’ve never taken the time to establish a meaningful rapport. Until now.

  When I show up at her place, Dinah launches into her list. She loves cats and has shared her life with a lot of them. “Fluffy, Daisy, Dandy, Dave, Dusty, Stan, Roger, Fluffy Muffin, and Flutter Nutter.” The list is so long, it’s possible that Flutter Nutter and Fluffy Muffin were the same cat, but when I ask for clarification, even she’s not sure anymore. She can’t imagine a life without cats, a determination that precipitated the dissolution of her marriage. She tells me that she and Callie have “an understanding.”

  “We spend hours staring deeply into each other’s eyes.”

  I too have lost hours gazing into those mysterious marbles, imagining a connection of sorts, but what does a cat (average human IQ equivalent: negative 25) think about when staring us down? Perhaps it’s similar to an experience I had binge-watching The Walking Dead. After three episodes, I wasn’t sure I even liked the show, but I felt compelled to watch the next five seasons to find out if Rick makes it out of that town, that church, that cannibal compound, and that pair of pants. With a captive feline, we’re the only channel they’ve got, so there’s a good chance they’re tuning in to see how long it will take until we stop moving and they can feast on our eyeballs.

  Callie is three years old, so I brought gifts just like I would when visiting a friend’s toddler. The cat eyes me warily as we attempt to get her into the brown cotton vest with rabbit ears, which looks very much like the bear and tiger getups I put my son in when he was Calico’s age, except that my son was much more compliant.* Is Callie unhappy to be wearing a garment that transforms her into another species, or is it that brown isn’t her color? There might be a scowl on her face, but do cats have facial expressions? Internet sensation Grumpy Cat is actually frowning. He suffers from feline dwarfism and has a severe underbite. Callie’s scowl might be her Bitchy Resting Feline Face.™ What is undeniable is that she wriggles out of the vest, scampers off, and hides under Dinah’s bed.

  I suggest a little one-on-one playtime with Callie. As I dangle a faux mouse on a plastic fishing pole over the edge of the mattress, trying to lure her out, I feel like I’m on To Catch a Predator and any minute Chris Hansen will emerge from a hallway to arrest me. I don’t even score a pity pet. It takes a lot of time to develop “an understanding” with a cat you’re not sleeping with, though I am confident that every cat person reading this sentence will think, You would instantly fall in love with my cat if you met them, myself included.

  2. THE REAL HOUSE DOG OF STUDIO CITY

  My friend Gia’s terrier, Tucker, appears so frequently on her Instagram account, it seems like the dog’s exploits are being documented as a reality TV show. There’s Tucker eating dinner. There he is getting groomed. I’m certain the day will come when he’ll be filmed tossing a glass of wine in another canine’s face. So when I show up at her home in Hollywood, I’m flabbergasted to discover that she’s got another dog. “Who is this?” I ask, like I caught her cheating on her husband. “Bailey is my heart,” she tells me. It turns out that the Rottweiler is so precious to her that she prefers to keep that relationship private. Also, Bailey is elderly while Tucker is young and spry, so there’s that.

  Bailey has been with her for fifteen years, and Gia’s favorite thing about him is that he’s an enthusiastic licker. “He licks everything—people, silverware, the floor, shoes, even furniture!” I know right then that we will not be BFFs. I’ve never understood the appeal of a doggy sponge bath. The dampness reminds me of reaching for a handhold on public transportation and encountering moisture of unknown provenance. With dogs you can pretty well assume that tongue has been surveying his own genitals, if not the genitals of most neighboring canines, before giving you a good shellacking. Seeing Bailey lying listless at her feet reminds me of when Stinky, my cat who lived twenty-one years, began spending her days stretched out in pools of sunlight. Our family accepted that she’d retired to Florida and we prepared for the end. I might have come too late in the game to get to know Bailey, so I focus back on Tucker.

  Tucker joined the family as an unofficial comfort animal for her husband, Dan, who was in a traumatizing car accident. “People like Tuck’s photos so much that even total strangers ask me to post more,” Gia says. I was planning to accompany Gia on a walk with Tucker and then build a relationship over a series of visits, but she doesn’t want to leave Bailey today, so we cut the visit short and she proposes I stop in next week. There is something different about Tucker in person from his public persona, but I can’t put my finger on it. I also can’t stop myself from inquiring about it.

  “I Photoshop his fur. I make it just a bit whiter. I’m really not sure why,” she confesses. When I tell her that he looks cuter in pictures, Gia glares at me like I’ve suggested her child is ugly.

  “I’m kidding! Kidding!” I assure her as she ushers me out the door.

  By the time I get home, she has already posted on Instagram that someone said her dog wasn’t as cute in person. Commenters posit that this insensitive infidel should be drawn and quartered. Thank goodness she didn’t mention my name or a lynch mob might have gathered outside my home. Two weeks lat
er I receive an e-mail informing me that not only do I owe her an apology but I won’t be granted another playdate with the Tuckster.

  3. ALONG CAME MARY

  “We’re not those people!” Glenn exclaims as I enter the home he shares with his husband, Mark; Mary, a cocker spaniel; and Mr. Mooney, a pug; and I instantly know that not only are they “those people,” but I’ve gone upriver.

  During the ten years of our acquaintance I’ve never been to Glenn’s home. We take a quick tour of the house. “Don’t mind the mess, we didn’t clean up because you’re family!”*

  Glenn is Mommy and Mark is Daddy to the pooches, and every surface is a testament to their parental devotion. Sofas and chairs are covered with sheets to protect them from dog hair. Mark is particularly proud of the sliding kitchen shelving he had designed for dog food and medications. They’re a blended family, so there are framed photos of the dogs in both yarmulkes and Easter bonnets. I see what unmistakably appear to be two containers of ashes on a shelf, one labeled Lorna and the other Doris. “Your mothers?”

  “Doris was Mark’s mother and Lorna was one of our dogs, but she was even more maternal than Doris.”

  The monikers Glenn and Mark have given their dogs, besides being a total hoot, serve as a testament to the utterly pointless ridiculousness of gay conversion therapy. Glenn’s dogs have included Lucy (Ball), Ricky (Ricardo), Judy (Garland), Liza (Minnelli), Lorna (Luft, Liza’s well-known sibling), and Joey (Luft, Liza’s sibling that nobody likes all that much, which also went for the dog named for him). Currently, they share their home with Mr. Mooney, named for the president of the local bank frequented by Lucy Carmichael on The Lucy Show, and a male dog named Mary. Mary?