My daughter scrutinizes the doll as though she cannot fathom what she is seeing with her own eyes. She looks back at me in the same way.
On the walk home, as if to twist the knife, the kid talks about all of the things we’re going to have to buy for her new (pre-owned!) American Girl doll—the clothes, accessories, visits to the café, and the friggin salon—because this used doll, for which I paid way too much, BTW, is just the gateway drug. I see now that I have failed my cheapskate self in more ways than one.
I tune out the child to say a small, silent prayer that, like every other toy in the history of her, she’ll lose interest in it after ten minutes.
The child does not put the doll down for the rest of the day. She goes to sleep, holding it tightly, like a motherless rhesus monkey.
When she is finally asleep, I sneak back into her room to inspect the toy; so help me if I find one mite or spider on it, I will walk straight to that woman’s house, set fire to the doll’s hair, and lob it through her bedroom window.
I gently pry the doll from my daughter’s arm. It’s heavier and more substantial than I’d imagined—and I take it into the bathroom, where I give it a wipe-down with a wet washcloth. The pen mark comes right off the foot, the toes of which are very detailed, it turns out. Giving it a once-over, I verify that all the parts are in working order. The arms and legs rotate as they should, and I manage to work the shut eye open, though it still blinks a little slowly, like maybe she’s winking because she thinks she pulled a fast one on me.
I take the doll into the living room, where I go to work on her hair, brushing carefully from the bottom and working up so as not to pull out too many strands. Looking closely at her face, I realize I hadn’t noticed before the little space between her teeth, or the tiny gold hoop earrings encircling her little earlobes.
The hair is now untangled, but I keep brushing until it is glossy and smooth to the touch. It’s so soft—now I’m just stroking her hair, marveling at how nice it feels against my hand.
My husband walks past and looks at me funny. “Get a room,” he says and then laughs loudly at his own joke as he goes to the fridge for a snack. “Good one,” I think but don’t say. (If I gave him every laugh he deserved, he’d be unbearable.)
I pull the doll close to my face and lay my cheek on it. She smells of nylon and toy plastic. It’s a sickeningly sweet, industrial smell, and it opens the curtains wide on my own childhood memories and of countless toys I’ve loved and coveted from afar.
I understand this doll. I like this doll. I want this doll. I—
“MAMA?”
I turn to see my daughter looking at me, sleepy betrayal on her face.
“WHY DID YOU TAKE MY AMERICAN DOLL, MAMA?”
“I—I was just cleaning her for you.” I say, not very convincingly. I hand over the doll—though not easily—and send the child back to bed. She walks sleepily upstairs, accidentally bonking its freshly brushed head on the banister. I make a note to take it to the American Girl salon one afternoon while the kid is at school. Maybe I’ll even grab myself a seven-dollar coffee at the café while the doll gets her hair styled to the tune of forty dollars. Because sometimes we turn into our mothers. And sometimes we turn into our daughters.
nineteen
THE FIRST BABY
The child was in deep mourning for the Chicago Cubs.
After a four-year stint in Chicago we moved back to Los Angeles, and the kid was torn with grief. I’d wake up at two o clock in the morning to find her standing next to our bed, cradling a giant foam finger and sobbing, “I MISS THE CUBBIEEZ!” At four years old, I figured, she wasn’t pining for Chicago’s losingest professional baseball team so much as she was grieving the personal loss of their concessions stand. But that didn’t make her grief any less real, because it doesn’t matter how old you are, the heart wants what the heart wants, i.e., Wrigley Field hot dogs and bags of cotton candy the size of a grown man’s head.
In lieu of picking up our lives and moving all the way back to Chicago just for the ballpark snacks, we considered the next most obvious solution: we would get a dog. Because if I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that nothing soothes change and upheaval like a shitload more upheaval and change.
We decided to let the kid choose from a group of preapproved-by-me dogs. I’d clicked through a nice array of candidates posted on the local Humane Society’s website; one of the featured dogs was a small black mutt that looked like what you might end up with if you were to peel the face off a human boy and staple it onto the body of a Pomeranian. Of course I put Dogboy on the short list and then headed over to the shelter to interview him and a few other possibilities.
Once there I narrowed it down to three contenders: an apparently stoned shih tzu, an incontinent Maltese, and Dogboy (who wasn’t quite so weird-looking in person, much to my disappointment), which is when the husband brought the kid in to make her selection.
The kid picked Dogboy.
Dogboy turned out to be a good dog (boy), especially after he got past his credit-card-and-couch-eating phase. He was attentive, sweet tempered, and well behaved. But good as he was, Dogboy was at a huge disadvantage coming into our family. He didn’t know it, but he had some very big paw prints to fill.
It was 1994. I’d been in L.A. for just over a year and had lived through riots, fires, and a robbery/shooting in my front yard, all of which left me feeling that the city was one long amusement-park ride with a bad record of safety violations.
It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was awake, watching a bad reality show, at a time when “bad reality show” had not yet proved redundant.
My roommate was in France for the winter, and so when the floor began to roll and the cupboards began to vibrate and the vacuum cleaner leaped out of the pantry, there was no one to witness the sight of me leaping naked into my bedroom doorway where, just as the thought “so this is where it all ends” crossed my synapses, my ovaries commanded EVACUATE! and I spontaneously started my period and proceeded to bleed all over the rolling floor.
I didn’t die in the Northridge earthquake. I lived to see the next day, and after some cleaning up of broken dishes and stained carpets, I had one of those epiphanies you have when you make it to other side of a near-death experience, and it had clarified two things for me: (1) if/when the world was going to end, I didn’t want to be alone; and (2) Los Angeles is no place to be sleeping in the nude.
I toyed briefly with the idea of having a baby,* but as my romantic/fertilization prospects were less than ideal (i.e., I was half-dating a guy whose idea of foreplay was a forty-five-minute conversation about how much his foot resembled William Shatner), I settled on the next best thing. I would get a dog.
I’d never had a dog before—the closest I’d ever gotten was when I was a kid and my dad would fling open the front door and yell “SCREW YOU!” at the neighbor’s German shepherd as it frolicked in our yard, gleefully covering it with lawn bombs.
When I ran the idea up the flagpoles of my friends, I was surprised at how many of them disapproved. They showered me with such warnings as:
“You’ll lose your spontaneity.”
True, I won’t be able to jet off to Paris at the drop of a hat, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue considering that, for me, a big night out means a meatball dinner at IKEA.
“A dog will make your apartment smell.”
Perhaps. But worse than it already does? Doubtful.
“You’ll become one of those creepy women that French-kisses her dog.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
“It’ll tear your throat out while you sleep.”
Good point: I’ll stock up on turtleneck negligees.
Their arguments notwithstanding, I refused to be dissuaded.
I visited shelters, scoured local ads, and petted my way through dog adoption events. In a moment of alcohol-induced spirituality, I determined that the winning applicant would be the first dog who responded to one of t
he five following names: Sparky, Lucky, Eddie, Sam, and Donut (I was secretly praying, of course, for a Donut).
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.
Edd
ie 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.
How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane Page 13