When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  As we settled down to our sparkling water with cherry concentrate, Carol said, “I’ve got something for you.” Her fingers shaking more than I’d seen before, she reached in her ever-present carryall, full of strange things, very Mary Poppins. She pulled out a drawstring pouch and handed it to me. It was corduroy, nearly black, lined in red. I opened it and saw a little lead bull terrier, a couple of inches long. Like an antique toy soldier, I thought. Once upon a time, it had been white, but the paint had peeled and worn, so the finish was patchy. Part of its tail had broken off. There was a tiny dot of red in each eye. It was wonderful, old, and made me think of a well-loved stuffed animal. Carol said, “I’ve had this so long, I don’t even remember where I got it. Maybe Paris, when Violet was alive.” I pictured her in Paris, cruising up and down the aisles of the famous flea market, knowing style when she saw it. I thanked her, hoping she realized how fully I understood her gift and valued it. She had given away, given to me, another of her treasures.

  Harry wasn’t himself. One of the pads on his right front foot had split. He was limping badly and in pain. He didn’t want to play, not even with his bowl and ball. Carol asked me whether I had one of those awful Elizabethan collars vets put on dogs to keep them from licking wounds. I did, two in fact, one hard, clear plastic, the miserable kind, the other soft and a little floppy, made out of some sort of blue, coated cloth divided into sections. When Minnie wore it, she looked like a petunia. Carol chose that one, held it over Harry, and said dramatically, “The cone of shame.”

  We chatted for a while, then Carol told Stephen to take Harry out in the garden. “Go, go!” She waved her hand toward the back door. It took him a minute to understand that she wanted to tell me something.

  First, she said that the following Saturday was Stephen’s birthday. When they brought Harry over, she wanted to surprise him with a cake. Easy, I thought. She always brought her bag full of Harry’s stuff. She could hide anything in it. I said I would have plates and forks ready.

  Then she told me that she’d had a rough week. On Monday she’d gone to her lawyer’s office “to get my affairs in order … so I don’t leave my friends with … a mess.” Next, she went to four of her doctors, one of them three different times. I asked her what sort of doctors. “My GP, my palliative-care doctor, my shrink, and a psychopharmacologist.” I had never heard of psychopharmacology. Later I looked it up and discovered that it’s the study of how drugs affect mood, sensation, thinking, and behavior. Carol said the psychopharmacologist was working with the palliative-care doctor to improve her quality of life.

  “In my GP’s office, I was crying and crying. I love him. I’ve known him for years. I was telling him about going to the lawyer. He said, ‘Try to look at this another way. Your friends may need to go through your things and settle your affairs to help them grieve.’ I told him I have no joy in my life right now. It’s too much. I’m just tired, exhausted all the time. So he told me, ‘Every day, do something that brings you joy.’” I asked her what she’d been doing. “Now,” she said, “every day I lie down on the floor next to Harry. I stay there with him and pet him. That brings me joy.”

  The psychopharmacologist, she said, had prescribed a drug called Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that apparently helps people with their energy level. “I think it’s beginning to help, but being tired all the time is really upsetting me, me, the girl who always did fifteen things a day.”

  As she said all of this, she looked away, as she had when she’d first told me about her cancer. She couldn’t ever meet my eyes when she discussed her “situation.”

  “I’ve asked the lawyers.… I’ve put aside money for you to take care of Harry.” At first I said nothing. I had never actually told her I would take Harry. We were planning to leave the dogs alone together and then to try sleepovers. Harry and Minnie were getting along, but there were still risks, I thought, more tests to pass. For Carol, though, it was a done deal. She was sure. Until then, my position had been I would take him if all continued to go well. From that moment on, it was, yes, I would take him unless something disastrous happened.

  I said, “You don’t have to.… It’s not necessary.”

  She looked at me. “I know.… I need to.” She sighed. “When something happens to him, if there’s any left, please give it to the Bull Terrier Club of America rescue fund.”

  I nodded. “Of course.” She didn’t say how much she was leaving. I didn’t ask. Knowing that she was having trouble paying her bills, I wondered where the money would come from, whether it even existed. She had applied to what was then the more than $7 billion 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, authorized by Congress to help individuals or the families of individuals who had gotten sick or died because of their exposure to the toxic haze at Ground Zero, both first responders and private citizens. An administrator called a special master was appointed to determine who qualified for compensation and how much each payout would be, according to a complicated calculus based on lifetime earning potential, degree of pain and suffering, number of dependents, and other factors. In other words, a formula to decide how much a life is worth. Each time the deadline for applying has been close to expiring, it’s been extended, and Congress has agreed to replenish the fund, so it won’t run out.

  Carol’s doctors were sure her cancer was the result of living near Ground Zero. Her lawyers were optimistic her claim would be approved, but how much she’d get and when, they had no idea.

  When Stephen came back inside with the dogs, Carol suggested leaving me alone with them again. Harry and Minnie lay by the back door catching the breeze from the garden, sleeping side by side with their front paws intertwined, apparently unaware that Carol and Stephen had gone for a walk.

  Harry didn’t know it, but I had plans for him in their absence. I rummaged around in a cupboard until I found nonstick gauze squares, stretchy tape, antibiotic ointment, and cotton pads. I have a stash of dog snow booties in at least four sizes. I picked one I thought might fit Harry and filled a pot with warm water and a slug of iodine. Shaking Minnie’s treat bag under his nose, I woke him up and lured him, limping, into the kitchen. I put his painful foot in the pot to soak and stood back, expecting him to knock the pot over, splashing water everywhere. He didn’t. He just stood there. So far so good. I washed his toes with soap, rinsed, and dried them. I made a little stack of cotton pads and topped it with a gauze square, then squeezed out a little worm of antibiotic ointment on it, held it under Harry’s paw, and was just wrapping the stretchy tape around it when the doorbell rang. As I buzzed Carol and Stephen into the building, Harry got loose. His bandage completely unraveled. He was trailing the whole roll of tape after him as he went to the door, and it only got worse when he discovered who was there. The tape got tangled up between his feet as he greeted the two of them. With Stephen’s help holding the squirming dog, I retrieved the tape, rerolled it, and tried again, but only managed to tape Stephen’s finger to Harry’s foot. When I finally got the bandage and bootie on, Harry stepped down on the floor, realized that his foot didn’t hurt, and immediately started to romp and play. He was a dog transformed. We were all amazed to see the immediate difference in him, once he could put weight on his foot without pain. Wearing his bootie, he reminded me of Michael Jackson wearing one glove. I explained that in the last few months of Piggy’s life, one of his pads had cracked, too, and wouldn’t heal. Every day, I did the same thing for him.

  As Stephen and Carol got ready to leave, Stephen announced, “Next Saturday is my fifty-eighth birthday.” Carol and I glanced at each other. Stephen pulled up his shirt a little. “I guess it’s a sign of my age. I’ve developed a paunch.” He stuck out his stomach as if he had a basketball in it. “I always had a six-pack. The paunch is something new, just in the last few months.” I said I was sixty-eight. I asked Carol how old she was. She said, “Oh, I never tell anyone,” then immediately told us she was seventy. Stephen seemed startled. “You should have said something. I would have had a party.” Carol
laughed. “Stop talking and take me home, please.” I handed her another big bottle of cherry concentrate. She seemed a bit disoriented as she tried to figure out what she needed to gather up … the cherry juice, the bowl and balls, the petunia cone of shame, her purse.

  A happy Harry, walking without a limp, led the way out to the street. I followed with an unhappy Minnie, who did not want to go out. As she locked her legs and lowered her head in protest, Stephen pointed out the low-slung Tesla sports car parked directly in front of my stoop. Bright orange, jack-o’-lantern colored. “Really ugly,” he said. “If anyone wanted to see how old I am, all they’d have to do is watch me try and get into a car like that.” Carol’s retort, “No, all they’d have to do is see you try to get out.”

  seven

  A PERFECT ENGLISH TEA

  The minute I set foot in a big electronics box store, I’m like a deer in the headlights. Those rows and rows of televisions, inches apart, assault my eyes with way-too-bright pictures of skiers or something, the same skier slaloming down the same mountain at the same time on dozens and dozens of screens, tiny on the twenty-four-inch models, enormous on the home-theater-size models. It’s like being in a surreal, HD hall of mirrors, my vision of hell.

  The doggy cams were right next to the TVs.

  Why was I even in one of those stores? An invitation to tea. The night of the party on the roof, Carol had told Ann King that the next step with Minnie and Harry was to leave them alone together and that we wanted to get a doggy cam so that wherever we went, we could watch them, spy on them, to see what they would do. We had to pick a spot not too far away, so that if they started to fight, we could get back before they killed each other. Ann said, “Come to tea!” She reminded Carol that she lived right around the corner from me. “Sunday, two weeks from now, anytime after three.” The only problem was, we didn’t have a doggy cam.

  The BarkBox people had recommended several brands for different reasons: price, picture quality, ease of operation. The salesman, when I finally found one, took me through the features of each type. I said, “I need really easy.” He pointed me toward the most expensive one. “It’s very simple.” His description of how it worked seemed intuitive enough. Easy to use was written all over the packaging, but I worry about such claims.

  At the very beginning of my CBS career, through the winter of 1978, I covered a national strike by coal miners. I spent three months in the Appalachian “hollers” of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southern Ohio, which are notorious for their winding, unmarked roads. Finding your way around, if you’re not from there, isn’t easy even now. Then, before GPS devices or Google Maps, it was ridiculous. You’d ask somebody for directions, and the person would start rattling off a list of left turns, right turns, by this creek or that house with a recliner on the front porch, or a field with a horse in it. At the end of one of those convoluted recitations, the direction giver invariably said with a smile, “Cain’t miss it.” And invariably you’d get lost.

  So, when I heard, “Easy,” I was suspicious, but being over twenty-five and tech tentative, I had to rely on somebody. As far as easy was concerned, I was easy prey. I went home with the expensive model. I emailed Carol that I had it. About getting it working, her advice was “Let Stephen figure it out. He knows how to do that sort of thing.”

  The following Saturday, when Carol arrived with Harry, she brought a Mary Poppins carryall with her as usual, but this one was unusually large. While Stephen tried to find a parking space, she unloaded Harry’s bowl and balls, a supply of cut-up pieces of chicken, a thumb drive with Minnie’s armorial on it, a mysterious orange Hermès gift box, a plastic bag filled with something that made a rustling noise, a pint of vanilla ice cream, and a cherry pie. She explained that Stephen preferred birthday pie to birthday cake. She’d emailed me to have the oven on warm, so she stashed the pie in the oven and the ice cream in the freezer. I’d gone birthday-candle shopping a few nights before. I went to three different places and bought five different kinds for Carol to consider.

  When Stephen arrived, she put him to work on the doggy cam setup. He downloaded the app onto my phone and Carol’s. That seemed to work. Nothing else did. Weren’t we the picture of middle-aged, baby-boomer technological incompetence, proof that stereotypes can be accurate? Except that Stephen really did know what he was doing where computers were concerned. Even figuring out what password the app and the computer required confounded us. The underside of my modem had a string of letters and numbers listed as PASSWORD, but of course that wasn’t it. What the app wanted was another list of numbers called the WEP key. Carol and I took turns reading the directions to Stephen, who uttered strange grunts and bleats as he tried to figure out what the words meant. An hour into this losing battle, we started phoning customer service lines, which involved navigating multiple menus and enduring long waits on hold, first with the company that was my internet/phone provider, then Nest, the maker of the doggy cam. We tried moving the modem from its usual home in my au pair’s bedroom to the living room. After more than two hours of trying, the best picture we were able to get was a freeze frame of my living room or pixilation, not streaming video of Harry and Minnie. Carol and I watched as Stephen lost patience. His grunts and bleats turned into sighs. Soon his sighs turned into swear words.

  Finally, we gave up. Carol studied the birthday-candle choices. She put two rows of candles on the pie, a row of five and a row of eight. I set the table. We sang “Happy Birthday” to Stephen, who seemed embarrassed and grinned like a kid, before blowing out the candles, all in one noisy go. We ate cherry pie and ice cream. The dogs got pieces of chicken, and for the moment technology was forgotten.

  As we talked, Stephen spotted Minnie and Harry nose to nose nuzzling each other. We fell silent and watched until they noticed us and stopped. Carol said that in her mind, Harry was like a rough-and-tumble working-class boy, the kind who might fold a pack of cigarettes in his T-shirt sleeve, but that Minnie was definitely a princess. “But she was a homeless girl,” I reminded her. Carol replied, “She must have been kidnapped at birth, because she is a princess.” Stephen added, “The Lindbergh baby.” I can’t remember who pointed out that the Lindbergh baby was a boy and that the kidnapping didn’t end well.

  I asked Carol about the square Hermès box that was still sitting on the table. I thought it might be a present for Stephen. “Oh,” she said, “that’s the capsule-making machine for Harry’s colitis medicine. I brought it over to give you a lesson.” I remembered the collection of Hermès boxes in her apartment, and it dawned on me she kept things in them. I opened the box and lifted back sheets of tissue paper, layered as if there really were a present inside. I saw a small white plastic form with what looked like pegs and another matching form with holes in it, sitting on some sort of frame. A page of instructions was neatly folded underneath. Carol opened the plastic bag that had made the rustling noise. Inside were two pouches, each one containing hundreds of little, clear capsule parts, like empty husks, longer ones and shorter ones. I opened one of the pouches, and capsule parts bounced out all over the table and onto the floor. We gathered up as many as we could find, but for weeks I found myself stepping on them, hearing a crunch as they broke into dozens of tiny pieces.

  Suddenly, Carol turned to me and said, “Do you think we could wait and do the lesson another time? I’m really getting tired. I need to go home.”

  * * *

  THE ISSUE WITH the doggy cam turned out to be my Wi-Fi. It wasn’t good enough to support the thing. In my neighborhood, my provider, my phone company, couldn’t offer me anything better, so I had one week to change providers if we were going to be able to watch Harry and Minnie when we went to tea.

  I called as soon as Carol and Stephen left to take Harry home that Saturday, and my cable TV company sent someone out on Monday, to my amazement. The technician looked around and informed me he needed to drill a hole through my bedroom wall to my living room so he could install wiring. “It’s one hole, st
raight through, easiest way,” he assured me as he made a few quick measurements and knocked on my walls. Why didn’t I trust him? “It’s no problem,” he insisted. He got out a bit that was several feet long and started drilling on the living room side behind my couch. Soon the drill started making a high, whining noise. He turned it off and pulled out the bit. “Hmmm,” he said. He went into my bedroom, pulled my bed away from the wall, knelt down, and prepared to drill another hole. Standing over him, I asked, “How do you know the two holes will match up?” His measurements hadn’t seemed exact. He looked up at me and said, “They should.”

  Well, they didn’t. The drill made the same high, whining noise again. It had met some sort of resistance—a brick wall, I suspected, since two brownstones had been combined to make the apartments in our building. He pulled his drill out of the wall and once again said, “Hmmmm,” but this second hmmmm lasted longer than the first one. “I need to go to my truck.”

  I stood in my living room seething, unable to speak, feeling stupid and helpless as he walked out my front door.

  About five minutes later, he came back with a large spool of white cable and a staple gun. “We have to do it this way,” he said as he started stapling the white cable to the top of the baseboards along three of the four walls in my bedroom, crawling on his hands and knees out the door, around the hallway, behind a table in my living room and the couch, until finally he stopped, more or less, where I planned to put the new modem. When he was finished connecting everything, my internet worked, but a hill of white dust rose like a little pyramid on the floor under each of the two useless holes he’d made in my walls with no apology.