Her cancer was terminal, and she knew it. She said she wanted Winkie put down after her death, his ashes buried with hers. In addition to his skin problems, he was ten and had cataracts. He was another dog with “issues.” No one wanted him either. I couldn’t take him. I already had a dog, and I wasn’t sure Winkie, with so many health concerns, would even survive the mandatory six-month quarantine England required then before admitting pets.
I was with my mother when she died and then stayed on in South Carolina for a few weeks to clear up her affairs. Winkie and I spent time together. Having him near me was a comfort. I think he was glad to have company. I cuddled him and tried to make him feel loved. I made calls, lots of them, trying, hoping, somehow to find a home for him, but my mother had been right. No one wanted him. I put off following her wishes until I couldn’t anymore. I had to go back to work, back to London. Time was up.
On the morning of the appointment with the vet, I fed Winkie a whole meal of ground sirloin and took him to the beach to play, something he hadn’t been allowed to do for years because of his allergies. We spent hours there. I didn’t want to leave because I knew what was next. I stood over him sobbing, my eyes blurred as I watched him. Was I crying for him, for my mother, or for myself? He poked his little nose in the sand and then sneezed. He ran and sniffed and peed and seemed surprised to find out that the ocean was wet and was delighted to be outside and free.
And then I had him killed. The vet wouldn’t let me hold him. She said, “No, I’m taking him to the back.” I begged, but she was firm. I stood at the receptionist’s desk waiting, imagining, knowing exactly what was happening behind the door that was closed to me. Maybe five minutes later, the receptionist’s phone rang. She answered it, listened, then looked up at me. “It’s done,” she said. I paid and left. How could it be that ending his life would appear as an entry on my credit card statement?
My next stop was a travel agency, to arrange taking my mother’s ashes and Winkie’s to northern Michigan, to be buried next to my father, not far from where I’d lived as a child. When the travel agent greeted me, I tried to speak but couldn’t. My jaws hurt, I’d been clenching them so hard.
Nearly thirty years later, I still cry when I think about what I did to that poor, sad little dog. I know that’s why I hoped with all my heart that Minnie and Harry would get along, no matter what happened then.
I asked myself whether I should tell Carol about Winkie when she came over with Harry and then decided … no, too soon. It might upset her, or she might assume I would automatically take Harry out of guilt.
As the day of the meeting approached, I found myself wondering how time seemed to Carol. Her days had become a measurable countdown to the end. When I saw her, would she look and act like a dying woman?
* * *
AND THEN IT was Saturday … Saturday, July 30, 2016, the big day. I took Minnie to the farmers market as usual, feeling giddy, excited. I came home to emails from Carol, logistics mainly. One o’clock at my front door. Stephen set to arrive at her building at 12:30 P.M. The drive shouldn’t take long, but Carol pointed out that Stephen was notorious for being late. Did she feel giddy and excited, too? When you know you’ll be dead in a few months, is it possible to get excited about anything? I found out the answer was yes.
About noon, I emailed Carol that I’d given Minnie a bath so she would be shiny and white, alluring for her “blind date.” Carol replied that she offered to put some Eau Sauvage behind Harry’s ears, but he’d refused. Not only excited, I thought, but capable of being silly. We were two hopeless romantics, matchmaking.
three
HARRY MEETS MINNIE
One o’clock came and went. No Carol. No Harry. No Stephen. I fussed. I petted Minnie. I looked out my front windows. I checked my cell phone. I paced. I tried to read the newspaper. Two o’clock came and went. My fussing notched up. Finally, I got a text from Carol. Stephen was late. I heard from her again. Horrific traffic on the West Side Highway. There are other routes, but normally, as long as it’s not rush hour, this expressway along the Hudson River was the quickest, twenty minutes between Carol’s place and mine, no more. At two-thirty, she texted to say they were still on the West Side Highway. They were stuck. No way to exit. I began pacing and fussing all over again. Where were they? Why was I so anxious?
Finally, just before three, Carol phoned to tell me they were on my block, looking for a parking space. I grabbed my keys, rushed outside, and stood on the top step looking around. Nothing. I kept looking. Now what? Maybe five minutes later, I saw a woman a few buildings along, squeezing her way between parked cars onto the sidewalk. She was looking down. She stopped and started, tugging at something, coaxing, pleading with whatever it was in a high voice. A large black-and-white bull terrier appeared, stepping out from the flowers around one of the trees that line the street, a little garden fenced to keep dogs away. He took his time to pee and sniff as the two of them made their way slowly in my direction. Carol and Harry had arrived. I saw Stephen in the distance standing by the open tailgate of an old Land Rover staring after them.
I knew what Carol looked like from my online search, but she was much taller than I realized, six feet or very close to it, full-figured but not fat. She was wearing huge black glasses, even owlier than the ones in the pictures I’d seen, and a loose gray dress with sleeves just covering her shoulders, a thin white T-shirt underneath. I wondered whether it was one of her own designs. Something about her demanded attention, to how she looked, to what she had on. I, on the other hand, was wearing my customary black leggings and a black jacket with a bandanna at the neck. Not exactly the ideal outfit for someone with a white dog.
Carol’s gray ringlets circled her head like a cap, springy in the summer humidity. She had a long neck, and for some reason the way she carried herself—head held high, chin and jaw erect—reminded me of the famous bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum. No one would ever have called Carol pretty. She was arresting, with her nearly nonexistent eyebrows carefully penciled in, with her very red lipstick, her long face, long nose.
Her voice was the surprise. It was high and wistful, vulnerable as she introduced herself. Such a soft, almost girlish sound coming from someone so imposing; not what I expected. When I’d heard her trying to get Harry out of the flowers, I assumed she was talking dog baby-talk to him, but I was wrong.
Harry was handsome, much taller than Minnie, lean. He had a big white splotch on his back. I can’t decide whether it looked like a boomerang or Harry Potter’s lightning scar. Maybe that’s why his name was Harry. Bull terriers are supposed to have large, egg-shaped heads. Harry’s was perfect, and he had lovely, soulful eyes, but as he reached my front stoop, I saw he was limping, favoring his right front foot. What was that about? And there was the matter of his three collars. Three. One was a serious black-leather, punk number at least two inches wide, studded with inch-square brass pyramids. Another was a necklace of linked steel prongs intended to dig into his neck whenever he tried to pull. Yikes. The third was the kind of braided cord dog handlers use in the show ring, also black. Did he belong to a gang? Was this dog dangerous? He reminded me of the front door of a New York City apartment with three hulking dead bolts to keep intruders out.
By this time, Stephen had caught up and said hello. He and Carol and Harry settled themselves on the stoop outside the brownstone where my apartment is, a brownstone being a row house faced with soft brown stone or stucco. A stoop, for anyone who doesn’t live in New York City, is the staircase leading to the front door. New Yorkers hang out on their stoops or on other people’s, eat on their stoops, people watch on their stoops. On this particular Saturday, my stoop was meant to be neutral territory; in theory, a safe place to introduce the two dogs.
Looking at Harry, I wondered whether it was safe to bring Minnie out to meet him. What had I gotten myself into?
Minnie had no intention of cooperating as I hooked on her leash. When bull terriers don’t want to move, so h
elp me, they lower their center of gravity and make themselves heavier. Wrangling her out my front door and through the lobby was an ordeal. Minnie didn’t seem particularly eager to meet anyone. Outside, she took one look at Harry, turned around, and plopped down with her backside to his face. Very rude. I sat on the top step. Harry ignored Minnie’s slight and stuck his nose in my pocket, where the treats were.
Stephen, by his own admission, talks a lot, which was good on this occasion, since none of us was too sure how to handle the meeting. Was it an interview? A social occasion? A dog date? At first, we were all a little tense, except for Harry and Minnie.
Harry, Carol informed me, was from Bedlam bull terriers, a famous line of champions. His breeder had won the Bull Terrier Club of America’s Silverwood Competition, the most important event for the breed in the United States, where the top dog each year is judged the best-bred bull terrier in the country. Harry came from the last litter of Bedlam puppies before the breeder retired. Carol couldn’t remember his formal, registered name and had lost his pedigree papers.
I told her what I repeat to anyone who asks, that although Minnie was from a dog pound, her bloodlines unknown, she was convinced she was a glamorous movie star or maybe a princess.
Every bull terrier owner has a “how I fell in love with bull terriers in the first place” story, since most people look at a BT and wonder why on earth anyone would choose such an animal. I’ve been told they look prehistoric. Four different times, I’ve been asked whether my dog was an anteater.
While I was based in South Africa, I did a story on a star rugby-player-turned-winemaker who had a red bull terrier. The dog followed me around the winery. When I sat down, he sat down, too, on my feet. My hands just naturally found his soft ears. When I stood up, he leaned against my leg. I liked his sturdy body. I’d been wanting a dog. This was the kind of dog I had to have. His name was Petrus. I assumed he was named for Château Pétrus, one of the most expensive and sought-after red wines in the world, but, no, the dog’s name was not the winemaker’s in-joke. The name was from the Afrikaans word for “rock” or “hard place.” How odd, I thought at the time. Only later, when I had a rock-hard-headed, stubborn bull terrier of my own, did I understand.
Carol’s story: She sees a BT and thinks it’s so extraordinary looking, just from a design perspective, she has to have one. She does some research and discovers that the person most closely associated with bull terriers in the United States is a breeder and show judge named Mary Remer. Carol makes an appointment and goes to see her at her home in Pennsylvania, along suburban Philadelphia’s elite suburban rail corridor known as the Main Line. Carol finds herself outside elaborate wrought-iron gates, which open slowly and majestically to a tree-lined drive. The reveal at the end: Ardrossan, the grand fifty-room mansion that was once home to socialite Hope Montgomery Scott, the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn’s character in the play and Academy Award–winning film The Philadelphia Story. Carol described walking into a house straight out of the English countryside, baronial, filled with antiques and paintings and beautiful woodwork. Mary Remer is Hope Montgomery Scott’s granddaughter and lives in the house with a few of her relatives and many bull terriers. In fact, Carol said, bull terriers were everywhere. In a dining room that suggested Downton Abbey, dog beds and crates were lined up side by side against the walls, like extra chairs. Violet, Carol’s first bull terrier, was the result of her visit. Carol’s story was much better than mine.
I told her I’d met her before, for a few minutes, with Violet at the outdoor restaurant all those years ago. Then she startled me with a revelation of her own, about another curious coincidence, another uncanny bit of serendipity connected with this adventure. Carol was at the vet’s office once with Harry when someone was picking up one of my dogs. Probably Goose, I thought. She heard the vet tech call out my name, looked up, and saw a BT. “Martha Teichner has a bull terrier,” Carol noted to herself. “Huh, what do you know?” She was aware of who I was because she was a fan of CBS Sunday Morning. “When I was diagnosed,” she went on, “when my situation became clear, one of the first things I thought, fantasized really, was ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Martha Teichner took Harry?’ I couldn’t believe it when Stephen called and said that you’d lost Goose and were looking for an older male to keep Minnie company.”
I don’t use the word freaky often, but this was freaky.
Carol explained her Sunday ritual. She and Harry slept in. She recorded CBS Sunday Morning. Late in the day, she watched the show while she assembled Harry’s Tylan capsules. What? One of his “issues” was chronic colitis. At breakfast and dinner, he had to take Tylan, a medication I’d never heard of. At the local compounding pharmacy for animals, Tylan capsules are expensive, Carol told me, so she ordered a capsule-making kit online and bought jars of powdered Tylan from our mutual vet. While watching Sunday Morning on Sunday afternoon, while watching me, she pressed empty capsule shells into holes in two plastic frames, poured in the yellow Tylan powder, then pressed the two frames together. Presto, capsules that pop out onto a plate perfectly formed. Not so hard.
Carol took a plastic bag out of her handbag and pulled out wedges of something orangey-colored, shriveled up, and tinged with black. I noticed the slight tremor in her fingers. “Sweet potato treats. High fiber, good for colitis. I bake them. If you decide to take Harry, I’ll show you how,” she said, then realized she might be scaring me off. She sounded a little desperate, a little sad. “I hope you’ll think about taking him anyway. He’s very sweet.”
I admired Harry’s brass-studded collar. Carol admired Minnie’s “jewels.”
“I want to keep him till the very end,” Carol said abruptly.
When would that be? Dr. Farber said she’d been told six months to a year. Carol had spoken only of her “situation.” She was diagnosed in May. We were at the end of July. Somehow I’d thought that if I agreed to take Harry, it would happen right away. But for Carol, having Harry with her was about hanging on to Life itself. So I said nothing. What was there to say? If I were the one dying, I wouldn’t want to let go, not until I had no choice. Anyway, it was far from clear that I’d take Harry. We didn’t know yet whether the two dogs would even get along.
“By the way, who takes care of Minnie when you travel?” Carol asked. I explained that I had a “dog au pair,” someone who lives in and does dog care when I need it in exchange for room and board. “Of course you do,” she replied, and laughed. I saw a shiny, clear plastic patch stuck to the back of her left forearm and thought … Ah, for pain.
Suddenly, Minnie got up and turned around, startling Harry. They settled back down, but now Minnie was side by side with Harry. Carol and Stephen and I shifted a little on the hard steps. We all laughed and began to talk politics, all three of us news junkies. It was an election-year summer. The Republican National Convention had just taken place. Donald Trump had been nominated by the Republican Party to run for president against Hillary Clinton. Lots to talk about and much more fun than talking about death. We relaxed.
It started to rain. Carol and Stephen decided it was time to leave. Before they left, Carol took a cell phone picture of me with Harry and Minnie. Later, it occurred to me that, instead, we should have gotten Stephen to take a picture of both Carol and me with the dogs.
The next day, Harry sent Minnie an email (with Carol’s help) saying how much he liked her, although he wasn’t sure she liked him. He hoped she would invite him back. A courtship of sorts was underway.
four
ANOTHER, VERY DIFFERENT CHANCE ENCOUNTER
The story I’m going to tell you now has nothing whatsoever to do with Harry and Minnie, except that it’s about another chance encounter that changed my life.
In 2005, right after New Year’s, while I was in South Carolina for the holidays, I was introduced to Jeannie and Gordon Hillock, who own a home near Traverse City, Michigan, where I was born. We became friends. They invited me to visit them in Michigan that summer, along w
ith Frank Manganello, the mutual friend who’d introduced us. I wonder now, what if I hadn’t met them just when I did? What if I hadn’t taken them up on their invitation?
Hold the back of your left hand in front of your face, little finger spread to the left, thumb spread to the right, three middle fingers together. You know real Michiganders by this gesture, the way you know Trekkies by theirs. Ask Michiganders where they’re from, and they’ll thrust out their left hands and point at the freckle or the vein or the fingernail that coincides with their hometown on flesh-and-blood maps of Michigan they can slip out of their pockets anytime. Traverse City is at the bottom of the V between the ring finger and the pinkie. The space in between, the spread, is Grand Traverse Bay, which opens out into Lake Michigan.
Downtown Traverse City isn’t any bigger than it was when I was a child, but there are trendy restaurants on Front Street now. A gathering of food trucks is called the Little Fleet. The social gadfly and filmmaker Michael Moore has moved to Traverse City, restored the old State Theatre, and started a wildly popular film festival. Development is rippling outward, creating small-time sprawl, but driving into town around the curve of the lake is still thrilling and beautiful. You can still watch storm clouds form and take over the sky in minutes, turning the bay from brilliant blue to black, from gentle to mean. Sometimes, on clear nights, you can look out over the lake and see the northern lights paint the sky with curtains and swirls of eerie color, purple and green and red, bright enough so they reflect in the water. Traverse City calls itself the Cherry Capital of the World because the area produces more sour cherries, pie cherries, than anywhere else, but it’s known for its wineries as well. It’s the center of the region’s tourist universe.
When Harry Met Minnie Page 3
