You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (19 page)

They had such a funny relationship. Sometimes I’d open the front door in the morning to get the paper, and they’d amble into the hallway.

“Okay, come back in,” I’d say, and Wisteria would, but Fiorello would keep sniffing around. So Wisteria would go into the hall and wrangle him into the apartment. We were endlessly correcting Wisteria’s teething on us. “No biting! Wisteria, no biting!” She didn’t really stop, but Fiorello would start yelling at her—he had a real voice, gruff and growly like an angry bear in a tiny puppy cave mixed with Billy Bob Thornton in
Sling Blade
, and he would lecture her—“Rururrruu RuRuRuRruurururururRURURURURU urrrrr”—until she was a huddled, apologetic mass.

Puppies are constantly inventing new ways to be bad. It’s fascinating. You come into a room they’ve been in and see pieces of debris and try to figure out what you had that was made from wicker or what had been stuffed with fluff. Violet would regrettably leave her bin of dolls open and the puppies would systematically eat the hands and feet off of all of them. They would not swallow them; they would just bite them off and leave them around like Hawkeye’s
M*A*S*H
nightmare. One morning I walked into the living room and found Violet’s finely crafted
Wizard of Oz
pop-up book open on the floor. The puppies had eaten the whole tornado. It was now a very different story.

The first springlike day was a Saturday. Paul was home, so we decided to take everyone outside. We got ready to take the puppies out for their first walk. We put new batteries in the camera and spent an absurd amount of time getting all the dogs’ halters on. I remembered from Beatrice’s puppy-hood that being good on a leash is not an innate trait. It takes time to learn. But when I taught her to behave on a leash, she was one puppy, and I lived right by a park. Now we were taking out two adult dogs and two puppies, and it was on crazy Broadway, where, more often than not, there were loud noises and traffic. A bus stop was just in front of our building, and frequently the sitting bus would emit this loud exhalation sound. The puppies just might be a little frightened. Well, in reality they were flat-out petrified. Fiorello glued himself in between my feet, like he was in an armored ankle car, and shook. Wisteria sobbed. Though Paul, Violet, and I were walking the four of them, somehow three people just weren’t enough for four dogs. Not by a long shot. It seemed like we would need two people per dog. Ultimately I carried Fiorello, while Wisteria steeled herself to persevere.

After that, Fiorello refused to go on walks. When he heard the leashes rattling he would hide under the bed. I didn’t want to push him, and I wasn’t dying to walk four dogs, so I just took Wisteria with Bea and Dahlia. Wisteria liked it a lot and found the whole experience to be great fun; she just didn’t understand she was supposed to go to the bathroom outside. We’d take these long walks and she’d trot in and head for the newspaper to relieve herself. Curiosity ultimately got the best of Fiorello, and he would start coming out to watch us get ready to go and then he would allow a harness to be put on him. Before I knew it, he was going out, too.

He went from being a timid hider to being the chief big-mouth pain in the ass, barking and barking and barking his brains out anytime we passed another dog. He was a total embarrassment.

Paul walked the four dogs a couple of times, but then he didn’t want to anymore. He would come in and say, “I hate having four dogs,” as if I had sneaked them in under my coat. He called Dahlia the Trojan Dog. She was falling slightly out of favor because she had gone from being a loving mother to a crotchety old dog, at times really aggressive. She bit all of us and attacked Bea daily. I still knew there was no way I could let her go to another home. I just couldn’t do it to her. When she was lying quietly on the couch, my heart broke for her, but when I passed by her in what she considered a too abrupt fashion, she’d lash out and chomp on my leg. “I hate you!” I’d shout. And then she’d look at me with her soft brown eyes and I knew she hadn’t meant it. Every time she fought with Bea, which was more and more often, additional teeth fell out. (One night Paul thought she had cottage cheese on her lip—but it was a tooth.) So technically speaking, the bites shouldn’t have hurt that much, but her remaining choppers were fierce weapons. It was an unhappy situation in our house and I was to blame. The dog thing had been my idea. One morning Paul woke up and stepped into a dump in bare feet. “Next time,” he said, glaring at me, “you should rescue cakes.”

Mostly, it was just me walking them. My own private Iditarod. And it wasn’t a picnic. Just so you know, if you ever see a person walking four dogs, there are two things you can cross off your list of what to exclaim: (1) “Who’s walking who?” and (2) “Looks like you got your hands full.” Both lines are stupid and someone else has already said them. You might consider saying, “Hey, pretty girl!” or “Wow, four dogs sure make you look thin!”

This was what happened when we went out:

I have a theory about my dogs’ behavior issues. It’s that saying “All dogs go to heaven.” They hear it all the time. Why bother curbing yourself if you have this Get Out of Hell Free card?

In between those times there are a lot of laughs. Paul, Violet, and I sing songs about the dogs like, “Wisteria has bigger ears than any doggie should; Wisteria is prettier than an old block of wood” to the tune of “Born Free.” I yell at the dogs in a Carmela Soprano voice, “Dahlia Marie, get ya little ass down heah!” We give the dogs full names—Fiorello Luigi Parmegiana and Wisteria Louis-Dreyfus (sometimes Wisteria Louise Johnson and sometimes I can’t deal with the mouthful that is Wisteria so I call her Francine)—and we announce their entrance into the debutante ball in our living room.

Violet treated Wisteria like a sibling. There were days when she would say she hated Wisteria and others when she couldn’t wait to torment her. But Fiorello was the love of her life. She carried him around awkwardly from a cozy spot on the couch to sit on her lap in the bathroom while she went. Whatever he did, she had a good explanation.

Violet is a true dog person. She doesn’t mind being licked on the mouth or jumped on. She thinks about the dogs’ feelings and tells me that when she grows up, along with being an artist, she’s going to rescue puppies, too. I explain to her that she already is.

At other times, I’m breaking up fights between Bea and Dahlia and always getting bitten. I tell my friend Robin that as much as I love them, the four dogs are getting impossible. Dahlia had become flagrantly incontinent, regularly walking up and taking a giant pee by my feet. It was a lot and even I was getting tired of our apartment smelling like the corridors of the Union Square subway station. Robin told me about how she had two old dogs, a male and a female. The female couldn’t stand to be away from the male so Robin, an Emmy Award-winning TV writer, sat her down one day and said, “Listen, I want you to know that if he dies, you’re going to have to die, too.” The next day, the female was standing in the living room and she looked at Robin, took a breath, and keeled over onto the floor, two X’s in her eyes. It was good to have someone to laugh about it all with.

 

 

 

 

WHEN DAHLIA’S PUPPIES HIT
eight months, she still licked their ears and nuzzled them. She yelled at them for being annoying, but she was never, ever aggressive toward them. She was still a wonderful mother, and for that alone I had to love her.

Paul and I had the discussion on a daily basis. Four dogs are too many. What are we going to do? Let’s let my brother have Wisteria. We can’t. Let’s let Uncle Dan take Beatrice. We can’t. Let’s find a new home through Petfinder and try to place Dahlia and one of her puppies. We can’t. There wasn’t a solution. The best I could do was keep talking about possibilities. I hoped that my parents might take one (or two), but my father didn’t want them because he likes fuzzy dogs whose coats suit his winter sporting habit. We continued to discuss future maybes, but in the end, we just couldn’t let any one of them go.

I have a saying: “In every life a little dog you don’t want must fall, and that’s probably going to be the one that buries you.”

These puppies, whom we’ll probably call “the puppies” until they’re fifteen, chew our shoes and piss up our rugs; when you yell, “No!” at them, they wiggle around like you just told them they hit the lotto. And it’s messy, very messy, but it’s miraculous. And if I get up to go to the bathroom at 4 A.M. or come home at four in the afternoon, they’re as happy to see me as if I just came back from a tour of Vietnam.

One week, Dahlia and Beatrice got into a bad scuffle. For the first time in a long time, Dahlia was the one who got hurt. A gash in her leg. Fiorello, now fully grown, sat beside her, licking her wound and tending to her like a good Italian son.

Wisteria became my shadow. Wherever I went, she was right behind me, and then she insisted I take her into bed at night. When the same thing happened with Violet, I realized it was simpler to cave in and let her sleep with us than spend nights going back and forth with her. I’m of the same mind with the little black dog. I remember the point when Otto stopped sleeping with me. One day he just didn’t have the energy to hop up. I relish the warm dog by my feet, and feel like if she wants to be near me that badly, I should let her.

One night I got into bed alone. Then Wisteria came up, and Bea came up and Violet jumped in and Paul got in. And Violet went to get Fiorello, though he only stayed for a minute because he wanted to go back to his mother.

“There are too many heartbeats in this bed!” Paul said. “We’ve got to do something about this.”

And Wisteria jumped up and started furiously licking him and I realized that was the answer I should have been giving him all along.

 

 

 

 

WE SPENT THE FOLLOWING
summer taking trips with the dogs to the beach and my parents’ house. It was an exceptionally lovely summer, perfect weather and lots of fun visits with family.

Toward the end of August, Violet and I went to my parents’ house, and Paul stayed in Manhattan to work. The first day there, Dahlia seemed uncomfortable to me. I planned to take her to the vet, but I had an idea that it wasn’t any one thing. I spoke to Sheryl on the phone, and we both thought that having the puppies had just taken too much of a toll on her poor body. I sat down next to her on the couch and petted her and kissed her and she fell asleep. We lost Dahlia the next day.

It was one day short of her one-year anniversary with us. Though it had been probably the most intensely hard on her physically, I also believed it was the best year of her life. She had her puppies and got to keep them and she knew they were safe.

Walking through my parents’ fields of wildflowers, I explained to Violet what happened, emphasizing that Dahlia was quite old. Once again we were talking about heaven. Violet was so very sad, most upset at the idea that the puppies were now orphaned. They’d never had a dad and now their mom was gone. When I suggested to her that Paul and I could be their mommy and daddy, too, she was profoundly relieved. I think I was as well.

In that amazing way that kids do, she started elaborating on the images I’d given her of heaven—not the heaven I imagine now, but the one I believed in as a kid. She named all the people we’d lost who would be waiting for Dahlia there: Grandpa Roger and Baba Jean and Uncle Ernest and Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Susie and Aunt Iris and Otto and Moses. Dahlia would be healthy and not old and have anything she wanted to eat and all the toys she wanted to play with and the days would all be bright and warm. “Oh!” she said, remembering, “and Dahlia can have all of her teeth again!”