You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (16 page)

I shaved her age a little, just because we really didn’t know. And everyone judged her age by her teeth, which were totally rotten. When I got Otto, they told me he was a year and a half old. The first vet I took him to said he was four years old. It was a guess, and I just wanted the guess to be on the younger end so she would have a chance.

After I sent the Petfinder ad, I sat with Dahlia. I had no idea what her life had been like; we knew she’d had multiple litters, but beyond that, not much. She had belonged to someone who felt it was acceptable to put her in a shelter where they had been told she would be killed. My guess was that her life had been hard. I started thinking about her age and her looks and how that would be held against her. When I walked her no one ever stopped to pet her. She had the invisibility of an aging woman with a bad self-image.

There was something about her expression, her eyes, that reminded me of
Migrant Mother
, Dorothea Lange’s famous portrait of a farm laborer in the dust bowl of the Depression. The woman, Florence Owens Thompson, was thirty-two in the picture, but she looked to be in her mid-fifties. Maybe Dahlia was younger than she looked; maybe she’d been beaten down by life, too.

Remarkably, we got responses to the Petfinder ad. It was illuminating for me to learn that just as I’d been looking on the site years before for a dog who resembled bulgy-walleyed Otto, there were people out there looking for a dog like Dahlia, too.

And sure enough, the woman who absolutely wanted to have her most of all was someone who’d owned and lost a dog who looked just like her. Her dog, Moonlight, lived to be seventeen. She had gotten her from a neighbor whose dog had puppies right before her husband went overseas during World War II. Moonlight was a mix, also. As for the woman, she was a retired schoolteacher who lived in a small town in upstate New York in a house with a fenced-in yard. She really wanted to meet Moonlight II.

I was utterly charmed by the letter, but I always worried about someone who saw a dog as the return of their long-lost friend. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it could happen. I just didn’t want her to get Dahlia, find out she wasn’t Moonlight, be disappointed, and send her packing again. That was not the reason we didn’t let her adopt Dahlia. The reason was when I told Violet, she got terribly upset. She said we couldn’t give Dahlia away. Dahlia was her sister! I had really never seen her so emphatic, and she was having such a hard time with school that I thought maybe Dahlia was serving some emotional purpose for her. I was certainly willing to hold off.

We tried to broach the subject with her and frame it in a way that would make her feel comfortable or at least willing to let Dahlia go.

“There is a lonely lady who has no dog to love her and she saw Dahlia’s picture and she thinks Dahlia would be the best dog for her.”

“Tell her to get her own dog.”

“Violet, someone called today and said they have a big yard and a shady tree perfect for Dahlia to lie under.”

“Dahlia likes her bed.”

“If Dahlia goes to her new home, we will have room to take a new foster, maybe a puppy, maybe we could keep it.”

“I don’t want a puppy, I want Dahlia.”

And so we let it go for a while. At night after she went to bed, we talked about how Violet had become a tireless advocate for this homeless wretch. Was there something this child was seeing that wasn’t apparent to us?

She was really unhappy in her school. It was just a bad fit, and I was inexorably pursuing possible alternatives. The other choices were Gifted and Talented for first grade or one of the coveted but filled-to-capacity schools in our district. We’d been in the lottery and didn’t get in anywhere. Now the only chance to switch was if a kid moved and a spot opened up. Since there wasn’t a waiting list, I just called all of the principals all of the time.

Walking home from school on a Thursday, I told Violet that I had to go to a meeting that night and she’d be having a babysitter. She was exhausted and frustrated and started really crying. I had a hard time responding to her because I agreed with everything she felt. I didn’t want to tell her I was trying to find her a new school, in case it didn’t happen. I thought we needed a nice distraction. So I told her that if she really wanted to, we would keep Dahlia. While she was jumping up and down and cheering I was kicking myself. How could I have said that without talking to Paul? How could I have said that without thinking of my own feelings? The best we could say was Dahlia was almost no trouble. Pretty much 24/7, she lay in her bed. Though she had come around some, and there were times she even wagged her tail (when Violet came home), she was still kind of a nothing.

I told Paul it reminded me of when I was a kid growing up and a friend of mine had a grandmother who lived with her family. She didn’t talk much, or wear flashy jewelry, or have her hair done, or smell good, like my grandmother; she just sat in a chair with her silver bed hair and a frayed men’s cardigan, just watching us, and every so often saying, “You shouldn’t play so close to the tree,” or “Watch it by the pachysandra,” or “I don’t think your mother wants you running in the house.” It was always kind of a bummer when you went there and realized she was out of her room. That was Dahlia to me, the unwanted, kvetchy grandmother.

Paul fake-cried when I told him what I’d done. He said maybe we could trick Violet into changing her mind. Say we found her owner like “Mr. Man/Chip/Shaggy.” I said that while I found it admirable that he was working so hard to find a way to cheat our daughter out of her beloved pet, I didn’t think we could go back on my word. I got a lot of squinty evil eyes from him, kind of a “just you wait” thing. But I told him if he’d been in the same position that I was, he’d have done the same thing. He said no, it never would have occurred to him. “Couldn’t you have gotten her an ice cream or cupcakes?”

I got a call out of the blue that the most desirable of the public schools I’d been nudging might have an upcoming opening. Something was afoot and I could be getting a call any day now. I was elated. This thing that I’d been worrying myself into knots about night and day might magically turn out okay. Sure enough, it did. A spot opened up and we just had to wait until the end of the month for Violet to start.

So I went back to my other work that wasn’t my job: trying to get a urine sample from Queen Dahlia.

It was a Friday morning, and I dropped Violet at school. I took the dogs with me so I could walk and drop all in one shot. I was on my cell phone with my mother waiting for Dahlia to pee, and when she went it was like two drips. So I took the dogs home and tried again around noon; this time when she squatted, a gelatinous substance came out. I called the vet while we were walking and I said, “It looks like mucus.”

And she said, “Sounds like a urinary tract infection. If it doesn’t clear up in the next couple of days, bring her in.”

And I hung up and thought, Sure, I’ll drop another three hundred bucks to hear “inconclusive.”

That weekend we talked up the new school with Violet and went shopping for non-uniform clothes she could wear. We were focused on that change coming in Violet’s life, and once I saw that Dahlia was peeing normally, I figured I’d go back to trying to trap it on Monday. Truthfully, we weren’t paying that much attention to her. So on Sunday when Dahlia was acting totally crazy, I still didn’t think much about it, though I noticed she was eating bathroom garbage and flipping her bed all over the living room. She turned it upside down and around and dragged it into different places and finally put it back where it was, facing the wall instead of the TV. I watched her with my eyebrows wrinkled, thinking, and finally I realized. She was preparing to die. She was very disconnected from us in general, but now it was even more evident. She seemed okay to me, but I didn’t hold out hope that she’d make it through the week. A couple of times she got very anxious and agitated, furiously barking at nothing, and I wondered if the Grim Reaper was by her bed. We had Violet stay away from her and told her to skip the good night kiss, so she blew a kiss to her from across the room. Then we read and all went to sleep.

At about four in the morning I woke up in sort of a half-dream state. I had a very strong feeling that Dahlia had passed over. I didn’t get up, I just waited. About a half hour later I went to the bathroom and looked out. Dahlia was in her bed, alive. So much for my psychic sense. I went back to sleep, and at 5:30 I was up again. This time I went to the living room. I was really sleepy, my eyes were not all the way open, and I went to the kitchen first to get a drink of water. When I turned on the light I saw Dahlia had had a bad case of diarrhea on the floor. I started unrolling paper towels and heard what sounded like a squeak from the living room. I kept cleaning, and then I heard something else, so I just peeked out to see what was going on. There, inside Dahlia’s bed, were some kind of creatures. My first unconscious thought was that they were mice, and then I realized they were black and white and they were puppies. I stood looking at her in shock, like she would turn to me and explain. Dahlia was very peaceful and the puppies were nursing. I ran into the bedroom and said pretty loudly, “Paul, wake up. Dahlia had puppies!” And my husband, who moves especially slowly in the morning, was up like a shot and Violet was right behind him. We all stood around blinking our eyes like it was a crazy dream. Dahlia had been pregnant when we got her from the shelter! All that had been happening with her had to do with the fact that she was getting ready to give birth! It was nothing short of miraculous.

The first thing I whispered to Paul was, “Check and make sure they’re not dead.”

He went over and looked. There were only two. One was all black and one was black and white like a Boston terrier. And they were both very much alive.

We all sat and looked at them and kept repeating, “I can’t believe it.” Dahlia was like a seventy-two-year-old woman. My first thought was that I was right about the vet; she was a moron. I was anxious to call Sheryl and find out what I was supposed to do. It was immediately evident that Dahlia was a pro. She had given birth and cleaned up everything while we all slept. She knew she wanted to do this alone, and she did. It explained why she was going so nuts with the bed; she was trying to “nest.”

I waited until 7:30 to call my parents’ house, where Mattie was visiting. There were several rounds of exclamations of disbelief. After I took Violet to school, I called Sheryl at her home upstate. She didn’t answer, and I didn’t leave a message, but she saw the caller ID and about one minute later she phoned me back.

“Sheryl? I have some news.”

“Oh? Yes?”

“Dahlia didn’t have Cushing’s disease.”

“Oh, great!”

“She had puppies.”

(
Pause
.) “I’m sorry?”

I repeated the shocking revelation and we both laughed and laughed. It was the last thing we expected from this old girl.

She did this thing, something so incredibly rare: giving birth as a senior. It made me think about my own misgivings about having a child over forty, and the fearlessness with which Dahlia moved. And what about Violet? Had she known? I had to think she must have had a sense—perhaps Dahlia had communicated it to her—because if it wasn’t for Violet, this event would have taken place elsewhere. It was all sorts of amazing. I had a real “right on!” feeling about Dahlia. I had jump-started my career later in life, and I’d been completely astonished by the turns my own life took. When I told various women what had happened, they all gasped and laughed. We were all happy to know that life could surprise us just when we thought we were done.

LESSON TEN

How to Find Happiness

Shock was all we felt. That first day we could not stop repeating, “I can’t believe Dahlia had puppies!” “Can you believe Dahlia had puppies?” “How is it possible that Dahlia had puppies?” She did it all herself and cleaned up everything. Ev-ery-thing. And with that Dahlia went from the old annoying grandmother to Eleanor Roosevelt in my eyes.

According to Sheryl, there were a couple of things we needed to do for her. First, make a whelping box (a clean, safe, secluded space for her to take care of her puppies) and then make sure she was assuming her role okay. I learned that a mother of pups needs to nurse and clean up after them and lick their privates to stimulate their ability to go to the bathroom on their own.

I went to the UPS store near my home on Broadway and asked for the largest box they had, which was a square moving box. (I was tempted to get the guitar box so that Dahlia could have a hipper, more modern home.) I followed the directions for putting it together slowly, thinking as I went, How many Jews does it take to make a box? It turned out that it took just one a ridiculously long time. I generously patted myself on the back for being able to do it all by myself. For a doorway, I cut a U shape several inches off the ground so when the puppies were mobile, they wouldn’t be able to make the Great Escape. The bottom was lined with multiple layers of the
New York Times
, and on top of that was a baby comforter, and then plush bath sheets that I could easily take out and wash. Across the top, I laid one of Violet’s old crib sheets for a canopy, so the dogs would feel cloistered and out of harm’s way. I also imagined that they would like the subtle darkness, being ever so slightly removed from the window’s light.

All of this was per Sheryl’s instructions. She also told me to look under the puppies to see what sex they were. Up until that moment, I didn’t want to pick them up. I had thought it was like with baby birds: if I handled them too much, the mother would lose interest in them. But when I moved Dahlia to her stylish new digs, I had to move the babies, too, so I looked then. Not quite as easy as it is with human babies; both dogs had “something” down there. Sheryl told me the girl would look like she had a walnut and the boy, well, a tiny peepee.