Dog House (10 page)

But to have him laugh like that every day for the rest of our lives, I'd have swept up old plaster forever.

His own most challenging jobs turned out to be the mere placing of a lally column under the sagging ceiling of the garage; the putting in of hooks and screw eyes on the lower halves of those tall, warped screen doors that didn't completely close and latch; the locating and repair of the open sewage pipe (yes, sewage pipe) that had been mucking up the lawn; the carrying of some HEAVY new telephone poles down to reinforce the bulkhead—at low tide, of course, with plenty of male help; and finally, the simple installation of our new dishwasher and the repair of some plaster that had fallen from the living room ceiling because the pipes had once burst, and ...

Hey, there we were, with nothing to do but cosmetics!

We'd never been much for new kitchens and bathrooms, anyway. We were all about moldings and clapboards, faux graining and correct wallpapers, so we didn't mind the 1955 stove or the 1915 flush-o-matic toilets—all seven of them.

Cosi took the move in stride. She weed in every room, upstairs and down, and pooped only in the rooms we hadn't started to work on yet.

Thus, finally, with the exception of the unique, dank Spring Room that housed an artesian well in the basement and seemed to be permanently under three inches of water, most of the scary repair was enough under control that we began to congratulate ourselves on our “bargain.” Or rather, I congratulated ourselves. Millard never would admit to me that he loved the house. Never. Although he carried not one, but two pictures of it in his wallet, which were two more than he carried of Barden or me.

By the Fourth of July, 1986, the house was working sufficiently well that we could think of inviting his recently remarried father and stepmother for a visit. We had no air-conditioning, but we did have a million numbered screens that we hurried to hoist up before they arrived. Millard and his father were Georgia-born and never-no-minded the heat. I could be an occasional good sport, depending on the humidity. Joan, the new wife, we weren't sure about. She had been my mother's friend (bridge, not golf), and my own darling father, whom I'd lost just that spring, had once hinted to me that he wasn't so fond of Joan. This was so unlike my father that I'd remembered the comment but decided to reserve my own judgment.

They arrived on a scorching afternoon, and after the five-dollar tour, during which they tried really hard to be polite about our elderly, eccentric project, we all sat back and relaxed on our sparsely furnished wraparound porch, sipping iced drinks and admiring the egrets. lVlillard's father, courteous and cheerful as always, had his usual fastidious napkin wrapped around the omnipresent glass of scotch and, beaming proprietarily at his bride, good-naturedly boasted that everywhere he'd asked in Pittsburgh, he'd heard the same thing about her: “Joan was a real lady.”

Oh dear.

She was something of a cipher as well: attractive, of course, slim, pleasant, sure of herself, but with an abrasive Pittsburgh accent (e.g., “hoss” instead of “house,” and “dahn tahun,” not “downtown”) and little to add as we small-talked our way through the crabgrass and the heat and how much it might cost to fix up our bargain and whether we could afford it and the curiously empty house across the street, where they'd recently discovered a leaky oil tank buried in the lawn. EPA restrictions were just becoming effective then, and we'd heard that the absentee owners had been forced to spend seventy-five thousand just to dig up the old tank and put in a new one. Millard's father was appalled. As the gorgeous light of what one of our sniffier friends once referred to as our “vulgar sunset” flickered to dusk in the west, Millard and I made up our minds that the next day—if it was all right with our houseguests—we'd take half an hour or so to run over to the empty house to learn what we could about oily lawns. We were worried. If a contemporary house could have oil tank trouble, imagine what
we
might be in for.

Also, after only a day, we were anxious to be by ourselves.

So late the next afternoon, leaving careful instructions with Joan to hook the screen door high and low so Cosi couldn't get out, we walked across the street.

 

 

You know what's coming.

As Millard and I kneeled side by side, examining a telltale patch of blackened grass in the late-day sun, there was a terrific
bang
on the street. A hedge hid our view, but someone was screaming out there, and people were yelling. Millard stood up and ran to see.

I stood up, too. Sunstruck. My mind ice white.

 

 

Only the upper catch of the screen door had been hooked, you see, so that Cosi had gotten out the bottom, where it opened just enough to let an insufficiently plump little dog squeeze through in search of her people (why hadn't we gone for ice cream more?); onto the porch, down the steps, up the driveway and across the street; a gutsy little dog who had never crossed a street, never been out on a street and never been left in the care of anyone who didn't understand that one could want to kiss a dog. She was hit by a carful of kids taking a curve too fast, and they never even stopped.

 

 

Arms around each other, we found our way back into our house, where I climbed the stairs and didn't come down for two days.

 

 

Millard wrapped our Cosi in a soft old blanket and buried her where we could always see her: down a short flight of stairs at the corner of the veranda, looking toward the harbor.

And our houseguests wouldn't leave.

Not only didn't they leave, but Joan—who'd never had dogs or children—seemed determined to overlook how crushingly bereft we were. She kept smiling her smarmy lady-smile and wanting to chat and trying to get me to eat something or have a drink of water. Why do they always offer you water?

I was galled by her cheerful insensitivity.

She hadn't hooked the screen.

I never forgave her for that.

Much later, a friend, a dog lover who came to visit and condole, told me she had never seen a man as devastated as Millard was that day.

 

 

How intense, the emotional investment we have in our dogs. Neither Millard nor I—and at that time we'd been married almost thirty years—had ever left ourselves as entirely vulnerable to each other as each of us had been to that little dog. Long marriages develop comfortable areas of opacity and restraint. And raw bits, of course. So when he left for work in the morning for the rest of that summer, I could see from the kitchen window that he was doing his best not to look at that sickening spot in the road as he swung his car out of the drive. I never mentioned it though.

For myself, I eventually took to approaching the house from the opposite direction, despite its being very much out of my way. For almost two years, I couldn't look at that curve. Then one day, I could.

 

 

Three months before Cosi died, I'd lost my beloved father. I may have told you that. He and I hadn't shared a life in decades, and his death, though unbearably wrenching, seemed an old one somehow—a death of a childhood love.

A pet's loss can't compare with human loss; yet we love our pets with such utter transparency; with joy and naïveté. That's why the love and death of dogs (and I stretch here, to include cats and ferrets and guinea pigs—but not snakes) remains forever tender. And keeps alive in us some lasting scraps of our valuable, childlike hearts.

Good dogs.

Cosi was slow to leave our house. There we'd be, thinking we were over it, when we'd come across some hairy half-chewed rawhide behind a chair, or some half-chewed chair.

From the scatterings of white hairs on our blankets to the irreparably scratched vinyl in the back of the station wagon to the thin leather leash limp by the door to the occasional nugget of dried old poop, she was with us every day. Even the Dairy Queen lost its frozen luster. Not to mention sex, which wasn't fun somehow, without its customary canine soundtrack. Or was it sorrow?

Our house was as bleak as our hearts, since we'd really just moved in. Odd brooms and single work gloves and stacked cardboard boxes jammed the corners of our unused and unusable dining room-to-be and hid our kitchen counters. In the space that was meant to become the living room, scratched and scuffed wood floors were fortunately invisible beneath piles of book-filled boxes that had one further advantage: They'd been stacked high enough to prevent our having to look at sad curls of peeling paint. It would be months—actually, years—before we'd get the bookcases built in that room; the bookcases on top of which I would eventually put my enlightened yet pretentious busts of the Greek philosophers; of Mozart and Robbie Burns; before I painted the room a particularly subtle Bazooka pink; before we got our books unpacked at last, and put away.

But Cosi wasn't there, even though Millard had a nice big workshop in the basement where she'd have loved to squat. In the fifties, this had been a cool-man-cool knotty pine rec room with the requisite wet bar. Except for its being currently strewn with several sizes of drill bit, odd angles of chrome plumbing parts, a hundred thicknesses and colors of electrical wires, and unmanageable coils of scrunchy BX, it almost still was. Had we preferred recreation to grief and repair, our partying would have had to take place amid the newly dangerous gray rags of asbestos hanging from heating pipes (Millard eventually redid them with shrink-wrap) plus the brown water seeping through the otherwise picturesque rubble walls in the adjacent furnace room that had turned the rec room's strip oak floors, well—spongy. Jitterbug on sponge? Not really.

There was nothing here we couldn't handle, of course, but without the accustomed leavening of our Cosi, we felt overwhelmed. Forlorn. Depressed, actually.

 

 

It must be human nature to yearn to immediately replace some very dear thing that you've lost; or even to believe you can.

“Damn,” you say to yourself. “I can't find my favorite warm scarf. I guess I'll have to go down to that department store where I found it four years ago and buy another one.”

And you actually expect this exact beloved scarf—without its tattered fringe and coffee stains—to be still in production and still in stock. It's only been four years, after all.

And it's not that you'd be satisfied with a nicer scarf than the one you've lost, either. You want that familiar feel against your neck, that color for a wintry day. You want
that
scarf back. Now.

Which is what Millard and I tried to do about five months after we lost Cosi.

First, though, let me confess that I would have tried to clone her in a shot, ferociousness and all. But cloning was science fiction in 1986. Had it been an option, I'd have been first in line because, as dubious as the procedure seems and doubtless is, I have vast sympathy for anyone who hopes to replace a loved one that way.