With or Without You: A Memoir (27 page)

And, like me, Jagger rightly identified Nonna as the alpha female that she was—present, sober, forgiving, and always ready to cook a hearty meal at a moment’s notice. I like to imagine her lying in bed with that wet dog and ringing up my father—not yet my father, my mother’s boyfriend, her teenage daughter’s boyfriend.

ALL THE DOGS I’VE
lived with were exceptional in their way, but only one is truly epic. Her name is Zazy. She is part dachshund, part beagle, part something else, or many other things, for sure. Judging by her ability to leap into the air from a solid all-four-on-the-ground stance, I suspect some strain of terrier. Her ears suggest the possibility of Rottweiler in her past, though I cringe to imagine the romantic pairing of a Rottweiler and a dachshund. I can’t shake the feeling that there is nobility in her blood, so I did a little research. Nabokov grew up with dachshunds, and Nabokov’s mother’s dachshund was the grandwiener of Chekhov’s dog, which leads me to believe that dachshunds are the chosen breed of literary greatness. I’ve tried to make a case for Zazy’s genetic lineage to the jackal, sidekick of the Egyptian pharaohs, the dogs who attended the likes of Cleopatra in the afterlife, but these theories are usually met by accusations of insanity and megalomania.

Zazy has coarse, shiny black fur with brown eyebrows and cheeks, a white bib of fur on her chest, and white-tipped paws that look as if she’s wearing ankle socks. She is not a small dog, but she isn’t especially huge, either. The small end of medium is the category I cling to. She was born a stray on the streets of Dorado, Puerto Rico. She and her mother lived in alleyways, surviving on scraps and trash until they found their way to an artist’s studio. This man, a wood-carver, made a phone call to an organization called Save a Sato (
sato
is
Puerto Rican slang for street dog). Thus began Zazy’s life in the system. She was three months old. Her insides were crawling with parasites from all the rotten food she’d eaten. The organization flew Zazy, her mother, and her surviving siblings to a shelter in Salem, Massachusetts, where they were all dewormed, spayed, and sold to families. The first family to adopt Zazy changed her name to Daisy, according to her files. They kept her for a couple of months and almost certainly beat her. When they decided that they didn’t want her anymore, they returned her to the shelter.

Meanwhile, I was living with my college sweetheart in Boston. One Saturday, the day before Father’s Day, I got incredibly drunk and announced that I wanted to get a dog. I was overwhelmed with the inexpressible woe that defined my twenties, and I thought a dog would fix me. “Okay,” Dave said. He’d trained himself to wait out my impulses, as I usually forgot about them after I sobered up. “Tomorrow,” I said. “We’re going to get a dog tomorrow.” The next morning, I woke up bright and refreshed. I hadn’t changed my mind. We drove to the same shelter in Salem from which Woody and Jagger and all my family’s dogs have been adopted (except my mother’s overweight, neurotic Dalmatian, who came from a breeder). We walked around the cages, considering each one of their baleful yelps, until we came across a cage with a piece of paper taped to the bars. It said
CAUTION! THIS DOG IS
NOT
FRIENDLY. DO
NOT
PUT HANDS NEAR CAGE
. Like moths to the flame, the two of us pressed our fingers against the bars. With a ferocious roar, the beast inside lunged for us. Its head slammed against the metal bars, and I could feel the warmth of its breath on my hands, which surely would have been shredded by this creature’s teeth if it weren’t for the cage door between us.

“This one,” I said to the woman who worked at the shelter. “I’d like to see what this one’s like outside.”

What emerged from the cage was not at all what I expected—a shark with fur, a distempered mountain lion crossbred with a weasel—certainly not this skinny, shivering mutt. Her head hung low as though she were ashamed, and her ribs poked through her fur so sharply that we could count each one. We walked her out of the shelter
and into the fenced-in yard. She was very suspicious. She didn’t seem to like being petted. For the first month that we lived with her she wouldn’t look us in the eye. She would carry a mouthful of food from her bowl and hide it behind the couch, hoarding it for later.

She doesn’t do that anymore, but she still assaults a bowl of food faster than any other dog I’ve seen. I regard this as an improvement. Since I was a little kid, I’ve attacked my food like a stray dog. As a toddler, my mother said, I used to pull out the drawers of our kitchen and climb into them like stair steps to get to the food in the upper cabinets. Once she found me licking peanut butter off a broken glass jar. I don’t remember if the jar had fallen or if I’d broken it on purpose, but I can tell you, as a woman in my thirties, that kind of hunger never goes away. When a plate of food is laid before me, my brain shuts down all higher intellectual and motor functions except hand-to-mouth coordination. I will inhale everything before me and not blink or breathe until it’s gone.

The one and only time I left Zazy alone with my mother, the dog came dangerously close to overdosing on OxyContin. I was out West visiting my boyfriend’s cousins for Christmas. I called every day to check on the dog, but when I called on Christmas Day no one was home. My mother and Michael never left the house in those days, and where would they go on Christmas? I called the taxi company and spoke to the dispatcher, who said the words I never wanted to hear:

“Your mother’s at the vet. That dog she’s watching ate some of her pills or something.”

My boyfriend and I called every animal hospital in Massachusetts trying to find Zazy. My mother refused to answer her cell phone. Once the dog’s stomach had been pumped and it was clear that she would live, Kathi’s plan, she told me when I got home, was never to let me know what had happened.

“Oh, Nikki, it was awful. We were in the car driving to the hospital and Zazy’s little eyes kept shutting. I kept shaking her, and Michael said, ‘Don’t go to the light, Zazy! Don’t go to the light!’ ”

As soon as I saw my dog, I curled up with her on the floor and
held her close, wishing that I could tie us together with a magical knot that only the likes of Daedalus could unravel. “I know exactly how you feel,” I whispered to her. “When I was younger, and I thought I would have to live with Kathi forever, I tried to off myself, too.”

Anthropomorphism at its worst, I can see this now, but that December I was higher than a rocket on the very pills that had nearly killed my dog, and the mental channel to wild interpretations was pretty wide. Years later, in sobriety and recovering a semblance of human sanity, I know that Zazy’s brain is the size of a crab apple—that it is (almost) exclusively confined to one single quadrant within the empirical axes of stimulus and response. However, what this dog and I have in common is a little uncanny, and many, many other dogs and their owners share similar synchronicities. The fact that a unique human life can be reflected, albeit in miniature, through the life of a dog, the fact that our lives ever intersected at all, is not a coincidence to me. It never will be.

“KNUCKLES,” MY FATHER CALLS
her. “Pound for pound, she’s the toughest little dog I’ve ever met.”

Zeke loves his grandpet so much that it makes him insecure, so he does the only thing he knows how to do, and twists his affection into a ruthless competition. “It must kill you, Nik, that your dog loves me so much more than she loves you,” he said one day as he lay on his living-room couch and scratched Zazy behind the ears. She rolled over onto her back so he could scratch her stomach. “Oh, that’s awful, Zazy, come on. Stop it. You’re making your mother feel bad. Would you stop loving me so much? It’s embarrassing for her.”

My father looked back at me to make sure I was witnessing all this. There was an impish grin on his face. I’ve worked hard in my adulthood to recover a healthy relationship with my old man. Watching this scene, I thought, If this is as good as it gets between us, I’ll consider myself lucky and leave it at that.

Zeke ran his fingers through the folds of fur around Zazy’s neck
and massaged her throat until her eyes closed dreamily. “Let me ask you a question, Nik,” he said, this time not turning around to look at me. I watched him take the suede flaps of her ears between his fingers and knead them gently. “If I’m such a terrible person, why does your dog love me so much?”

I was stunned. When confronted about our violent past, my father will say with all seriousness that he doesn’t remember. Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defense, tossed out the same line when asked about his approval of the use of napalm. I used to think it was a political excuse, and a piss-poor one at that, but as I drank and even afterward in total sobriety, there have been times when my own violent episodes evacuated my consciousness in much the same way. Maybe Zeke really doesn’t remember punching holes in the wall, or maybe he’s ashamed and doesn’t want to remember. Right there in the living room, however, the old man was acknowledging this and, in his dense and juvenile way, trying to say that he was sorry.

I’m not sure how you’re supposed to respond in these situations. I don’t know that I ever will. Again, I have to credit a Higher Power or a clever flickering of neurons—probably both of those things—for the words I found just in time.

“Yeah, Dad, she loves goose shit, dead squirrels, and you.”

“That’s big of you, Nikki. Really. My God. I never raised you to be the jealous type.”

Indeed.

ZAZY IS A CREATURE
who seeks comfort after having a nightmare. She has them regularly and, like me, always will, though she has them far less frequently than she used to. There have been times when I was writing at my desk and I’d see her leap from the bed where she was asleep, snarling and snapping at an imaginary enemy. I would approach her as she fought off this invisible monster, and she’d try to attack me, too. It was obvious from the glazed, hallucinatory look in her eyes that she was awake but still dreaming.
(“You’ve had that same look,” Dave once said to me.) Then suddenly her face would soften and the hackles in her fur would settle as though an invisible hand had smoothed them out. Awake now, she’d shake it off, turn herself around, and return wearily to her bed.

At night I feel her panting in her sleep. Her paws twitter as she runs toward or away from an image in her dream. Sometimes she wakes me up with her quiet dream-yelp and I watch her ride out the nightmare and break free of it on her own. She is always confused when she first wakes up. As she reenters the world, the light in her eyes is dull and demented. She sniffs the bed, gets a drink of water, and shakes it off. When she returns to the bed, she brings her nose close to my mouth and sniffs the particular fragrance of my breath. Okay, she decides, it’s
you
. Satisfied, she turns around and curls up in my arms, pushing herself against my body so that every inch of her spine is touching me. She licks my hands and returns to the even breath of sleep. I don’t need to know what she dreams of. It is what everyone dreams of: being helpless, being chased, losing a loved one, getting lost. Relics of her traumatic past mingle with common details of the present day—squirrels and broomsticks, her mother and me.

———

T
HE AMERICAN ECONOMY TANKS IN A WAY THAT IS SUSPICIOUSLY
similar to the Reagan years of my childhood. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are national news, and in the church basements of my small town someone reports a new drug overdose, suicide, or drunk-driving accident almost every morning. The luckier ones among us are soberly battling cancer, unemployment, and divorce. I consider myself fortunate for simple things like my health and having a steady job. A kind, generous family pays me to hang out with their mentally handicapped son, Jimmy, for twenty hours a week. It’s not a glamorous job, but I make enough money doing this to live comfortably without getting into trouble.

Jimmy is a quiet, enchanting forty-year-old. He wears two hooded sweatshirts pulled over his baseball cap and the thickest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen. Early on, I discover a pretty big overlap in our musical tastes. We both freak out when Prince or the Zombies come on the radio, though any bighearted rock ballad will snap our hands reflexively toward the volume dial. Jimmy won me over the first time we drove down Route 1, and a song came on the radio that made him gasp. For a split second, I was afraid that he had choked on one of the wads of Kleenex he likes to chew on
throughout the day. Then he clapped his hands and squealed, “Turn it up, please!”

Music is second only to a sense of smell in its ability to hurtle us out of the present into a past still living in the central stalk of our brains. For me, and apparently for Jimmy, too, the song that does this is Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger.” We barrel down Route 1 toward Boston, past the steak house with the fiberglass Holsteins out front, past the car dealerships with their hysterically waving pennants, past the fake pagoda that failed as a Chinese restaurant and the one down the road from it that survived as a bar—past all the tacky, familiar highway stops we’ve both known all our lives. The song’s tempo builds, and Jimmy rocks faster and faster. “Turn it up, please,” he says again and again. I do. The windows of the station wagon are rattling, and people in the cars around us crane their necks to stare. Jimmy shrieks and claps. He rolls down the window, sticks his head out, and howls. I start rocking back and forth, too, singing along. I can’t help it. What choice do we have in moments like these except to surrender to joy?

On Mondays I take Jimmy to the movies, and on Tuesdays we try to do something cultural or cardiovascular. I’ll drive him to a sculpture garden or a museum, where we walk around for as long as Jimmy is willing to tolerate, a span lasting between ninety seconds and ninety minutes, depending on the day. When the weather is bad or Jimmy’s feeling antisocial, we just drive around and listen to music. I have a loop I follow obsessively every morning that passes by Walden Pond.