How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (30 page)

Then I found a listing for a young rescued Dalmatian that sounded suspiciously like it might be a Donut. I phoned the dog rescuer, a woman named Maude, who proved to be, like 99.25 percent of dog rescuers in this world, kind, caring, and certifiably insane. No matter, I figured, I'm an experienced and dedicated suck-up from way back; as a kid, there wasn't a teacher or parent alive I couldn't win over.

Maude told me how she'd come to find “Spot” wandering, collarless, in a park that she frequents with her metal-detecting group (“The Heavy Metals”) and that he was house trained, healthy, and playful. Maude and I had been enjoying a pleasant conversation for nearly thirty minutes—me sharing details of my daily work schedule and prior pet experience, her sharing details of how alien abduction proves the existence of reincarnation—when Maude stopped me midsentence and said, “I've just had a sensation. This is not the dog for you.”

“Wait—what do you mean? Was it something I said—?”

“Sorry. This is not going to work.” Click. Dial tone.

I looked around the empty living room for someone to validate my horror at being so harshly rejected, then realized this would have been an ideal moment to share with a dog with expressive eyebrows.

Forty minutes later the phone rang. It was Maude.

“I have another dog for you. I'm coming over.”

“Now?” It was ten thirty at night. I was already in my pajamas (as I said, I wasn't taking any more chances with disaster-induced streaking).

“Tomorrow morning. I'll be there at seven. With Spot.” She paused. “Not the same Spot. A different one.” Click. Dial tone.

Seven o'clock the next morning the doorbell rang.

I opened the door to a burly woman with piercing eyes and a grave expression, and immediately I recognized the error of my ways: Maude was no dog rescuer. She was a serial killer who preyed on wannabe dog owners. Our thirty-minute phone interview last night had given her everything she needed to know—it would be easy for her to kill me and cover her tracks. My friends had been right—getting a dog was a dumb idea, and now I was going to die for it.

“You Johanna? I'll get Spot.”

I watched as Maude walked back to her dust-covered Volvo, reached in, pulled out a small armload of fur, and then came into my apartment and set it on the floor.

I sat cross-legged on the carpet so as to get a good, close look at the mutt. He looked like maybe he was part terrier. Black and white, with spots, like a Holstein cow. Fifteen pounds, give or take. And a face covered with wiry, scruffy hair, topped by a set of unruly, Abe Vigoda–esque eyebrows.

The dog trotted over to me, stared me up and down, turned his back to me, and sat on my lap.

Though it seemed he'd already made his decision, I wanted at least the illusion of having a say in the matter, so I ran through my List of Five: “Sparky? . . . Lucky? . . . Eddie? . . .” He turned and looked me in the eyes. “Donut? . . .” He looked away. I went through the List of Five
one more time, trying hard to get him to respond to Donut, but there was no question—Spot was an Eddie.

I thanked Maude, the non-serial-killing (as far as I knew, anyway) dog rescuer, and set out to bond with my new dog/surrogate baby/life enhancer.

Eddie was cool, slightly indignant, and somewhat intense—a cross between Charlie Sheen and Marlon Brando; like any minute he might lift a leg and pee on a wall, but if he did you'd know he probably had a good reason for it. I imagined that he was a tiny man in a dog suit, and that, late at night, he'd unzip himself and take long rides along the coast on a tiny Harley with no helmet, and a teeny unlit cigarette hanging out the side of his kibble-smelling mouth.

Eddie had a good sense of humor and an impeccable sense of timing. During our first week together, I took him to the beach. He trotted over to a group of thong-wearing sunbathing twenty-somethings and peed on the one with the biggest boobs.

When sirens wailed in the neighborhood, Eddie howled back dramatically, but not with the full-throated majesty of a wolf; he sounded more like a twelve-year-old boy whose voice was on the verge of cracking. It made me laugh till I cried, the way he turned strangers' tragedies into my personal amusement.

Eddie was smart and picked up commands easily. If you asked, “Are you the queen?” he'd delicately place his paw in your hand. And if you shot him with your finger gun and said “KAPOW,” he'd enact a long, slow death scene, laying down ever so gently on his back,
sticking his paws in the air, and then looking sideways at you with a pitiful expression on his fake-dying face.

He was not a licker; he would not stoop to such obvious pandering. Instead, he liked to cart my shoes around—not chew them, just carry them around in his mouth like some weird IT guy with a foot fetish. On days that I was late for work, running around the house with five mismatched shoes in hand could get annoying, but mostly I just found it flattering.

Eddie wasn't perfect—he barked ferociously at tall men with dark complexions. And on top of his racist leanings, he was known to hump—never humans, only other dogs (usually in the ear), and very occasionally unsuspecting inanimate objects. I was not a fan of the way his lipstick would unfurl at those times; nor was I fan of the way he'd occasionally drag his anus along the carpet and smile seductively as he did—not that I could blame him, as I imagine the feeling must have been heavenly.

But Eddie's imperfections did not repel me; they just endeared him to me as we made our way hand-in-paw through roommates, apartments, jobs, and friends. Through ups, downs, and way-the-hell-deep-downs. And boyfriends. Lots and lots and lots of those. Because through it all, Eddie was family. He was my baby.

When I brought home the guy who would eventually become the husband, I was nervous that he wouldn't take to Eddie. But he did, even after Eddie created a flea infestation in his apartment that required a two-day evacuation. And though I worried that Eddie wouldn't take to the guy,
he did. So well, in fact, there were times I'd enter a room to see Eddie laying in his lap, gazing up into his eyes, and clearly thinking, “Oh, how I wish that I were a woman.”

Even after we got married, Eddie retained a place of honor in our home. He slept in bed with us and developed the polite habit of jumping onto the floor and sequestering himself in the closet whenever the bed started to get a little too bouncy for his liking.

By the time I got knocked up, Eddie was a spry twelve years old—and as essential to me as my right arm, or that woman who shaves the dry skin off my heels once a year.

But friends shook their heads knowingly. “You'll see,” they'd say. “Once that baby comes, it won't be the same. He'll fall down the priority list. He won't be your baby anymore—he'll just be a dog.”

“How dare they!” I'd say to myself. They don't know us. They don't know how strong our bond is. They don't know that sometimes, often after a glass or two of wine, I start to believe that Eddie's communicating with me telepathically. (And yes, I realize how crazy that sounds, which is probably why I only ever said it to myself.)

Still, for Eddie's sake, we prepared for the transition, doing everything the books tell you to do. We showered him with treats and extra-long walks—and when he got tired on those walks, I'd carry him in my arms, like Dickens's Tiny Tim. We got him a special dog bed for the baby's room and didn't even color coordinate it to match her room, because screw the baby—Eddie was a winter and his color was red.

On the day we checked into the hospital, Eddie stayed with a friend. As we drove home two days later with our new human, I was nervous and unsure. Would Eddie attempt to eat the baby? Hump her? Urinate on her and mark her as his territory?

When we walked in the door I brought the sleeping baby down to his level so that he could get a sniff—making sure not to get too close just in case he chose that moment to lose his mind and try to rip out her brand-spanking-new throat.

Eddie didn't rip out her throat. He didn't even look at her. He just stared into my eyes and then walked past us and into our bedroom, where he flopped down on the rug. He wouldn't even acknowledge the child's existence. It was beyond disdain. It was as though he was experiencing some sort of rare mental disease (“Baby Blindness”) that Oliver Sacks might write about.

And that's how it went. For weeks. I thought that maybe this was some manipulative ploy of his and that one morning we would walk into the baby's room to find her gone, replaced with a replica of her made entirely from kibble. But no, Eddie just continued his tactic of baby ignoring. Until one day, sometime in her eighth month, she spastically reached for his tail and caught it—and he growled at her. I, of course, lost my shit on him like Shirley MacLaine (crossed with a three-headed Hydra) screaming at the nurse in
Terms of Endearment
. Eddie cowered and shivered. And then he crept toward me, licked my hand—and then he licked the baby.

I felt horrible about how I'd lost my cool. But Eddie didn't hold a grudge, and from that moment on, his attitude changed. Perhaps it was his survivor's memory, or maybe it was because it happened around the time she began handling food and dropping pounds of it daily on the floor below her high chair, but almost immediately he began sleeping in her room.

It was also around that time that Eddie developed a loud, phlegmy hack, like some old guy at a bus stop trying to cough out a lung.

At first I thought Eddie was just being dramatic and trying to horn in on all the attention the baby was getting. Then he started urinating in strange and random spots in the house, like a confused, drunk teenager pissing into his gym bag, convinced that it's a urinal. The vet diagnosed him with an enlarged heart and wondered did we want to put him on some medication, the side effects of which could include incontinence, drowsiness, orneriness, and a whole list of other -nesses of the unpleasant sort.

The husband and I agreed we didn't want to drag Eddie through endless procedures and treatments. So we decided that we'd just try to make the rest of his life comfortable, however long that might be. And besides, I figured, the best-case scenario would be if his heart just continued to grow, up to the point that he simply dropped dead of a heart attack, preferably with his face in one of my shoes.

Then that cross-country move from Los Angeles to Chicago in the dead of winter presented itself, and we took it. We worried the change might kill our old, hacky,
incontinent dog. Not only did it not kill him, but damn it all if that old bugger didn't catch himself a second wind.

The first time we took a walk to the shore of Lake Michigan, we watched with gaping mouths and puffs of steam pouring out of them as this suddenly frisky senior-citizen dog began goofily frolicking in the deep snow with our equally goofy year-old baby.

It seemed surprising yet totally inevitable that our dog would be so inspired by this late-life change. He even picked up his humping habits with renewed vigor, focusing his romantic interests on a St. Bernard puppy who lived in the apartment next door.

Then, four months after moving to Chicago, we left Eddie with a friend while we buzzed out of town for a quick weekend with the in-laws. On the second day the dog sitter called. She was in hysterics.

“Slow down, I can't hear you . . .”

“EDDIE'S DEAD! HE'S DEAD!”

Slipping into my control-freak default position, I assumed she must be wrong. “Hang on. Are you
sure
he's dead?”

She was sure, she sobbed. She'd gone out to the store and had come home to find Eddie on the floor in the living room, dead, with his head not in my shoes but in a box of Triscuits.

The little bastard, he died like he lived. On his own terms, and with snacks.

He was fourteen years old.

Though there wasn't any real urgency as (a) Eddie was waiting for us in the vet's freezer, and (b) he wasn't going
to get any more dead than he already was, we cut our trip short and returned home immediately. It just seemed wrong to leave him stuck on ice next to some unworthy, shitty cat.

At the vet's office a technician pulled Eddie out of the freezer and dropped him onto the counter, then gave us his condolences and shut the door behind him. Eddie looked surprisingly good for a dead dog, just a pink petrified tongue sticking out the side of his mouth giving any indication as to his permanent state of deadness. We petted and hugged our beautiful dead doggie-pop, with our snotty tears setting onto his ice-cold fur, and the knowledge that if he were alive, he'd probably be horrified by our sad, sentimental display.

I was devastated by his death. I cried and cried, and then I changed a diaper and played peek-a-boo and cut the crusts off a peanut butter sandwich, and then I cried some more. My plans to be wracked by grief and sit shivah for a week were not to be. Sure, there was time for me to lay my head and sob into Eddie's still Cheeto-smelling dog bed, but it turns out that sixteen-month-old babies have some fairly pressing needs.

Which illuminated something: now that I actually had a child, I could see quite clearly that having a dog was nothing like having a baby. Sure, they were roughly the same size, and both had figured out how to leave their fecal cleanup to the tall humans with opposable thumbs. But that's pretty much where the comparison ended. If anything, Eddie was more like a brother to me, maybe even a first husband (minus the consummation, of course).
Ours was a relationship of choice, not dependence. Eddie didn't “need” me, and there's no question that if we were to have been separated, within days he'd have been living with some Russian heiress, sitting on a pillow made of spun alpaca, eating veal treats, and having his nethers scratched from morning till night by the hired help. And in retrospect, if Eddie knew that I had ever called him my “baby,” he'd probably have bitten off my left tit, just to prove a point.