Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  Dogs as cherished companions, dogs as aesthetic wonders, dogs as devoted family members: those themes predate my own preoccupation with Lucille by centuries, and it’s probably no surprise that when I set out to the pound to find her, I carted the hopes and longings they represent right along with me.

  Of course, I didn’t set out to fill those longings deliberately. Certainly I didn’t sit back one day and think: Gee, I’ve lost both parents and quit drinking and my life is full of gaping holes; guess it’s time to get a puppy. Instead, I woke up on a Sunday morning in August, an unplanned day looming before me, and I thought: What the hell. Maybe I’ll go to the pound and just look. I wasn’t sufficiently wedded to the idea of a dog to launch a full-scale investigation of breeds and breeders, and I had an instinctive aversion to pet store puppies (a good instinct, as it turns out, since an alarming proportion of pet store dogs come from puppy mills, which churn them out for volume and profit and with little regard for health or breeding). I also liked the idea of rescuing a dog, so I mulled the notion over, and I got up off my sofa and headed out the door.

  One thing I’ve noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you’re sober—if you’re alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them—you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life. Some people in AA define this as their higher power, as though there’s a part of each of us, a kind of higher self, that wants to be healthy and well, that can set us on the right path if only we heed its messages. I felt that scratching that morning, as though an invisible thread were attached to my soul and tugging at me ever so gently. Do it. Just go look. Of course, the part of me that wants to resist a healthy impulse can be incredibly strong, so looking back, I’m still surprised that I actually got in my car and came home with a puppy. But the thread kept tugging, and I managed not to dismiss it.

  I drove out to Sudbury, Mass., first, where my sister lived, and she took me to an animal shelter near her house. We didn’t find anything there—the kennel consisted of about two dozen pens, a dozen on each side of a long hall, and none of the dogs struck me in quite the right way. There were some large, loud, lunging dogs who looked like too much to take on; a few small, hyper-looking dogs who seemed too high strung and yippy; and a few others who were too old, or too funny looking, or too sickly, or somehow just not what I had in mind. It’s a weird feeling, walking down a hallway of rejected animals and rejecting them all over again, and the experience made me feel guilty and uncomfortable, as though I lacked some requisite degree of altruism or humanity. That feeling gnawed at me and almost turned me off the idea entirely, but when I got back to my sister’s house, the thread tugged again. Go somewhere else. And so it was that an hour later, I walked into the Animal Rescue League in downtown Boston, equipped with the ID and documentation required to adopt a pet, ready, I guess, to find my dog.

  Lucille is a remarkably serene dog, poised even as a puppy, and that struck me about her from the start. When I first saw her, she was in a small cage in a corner of the shelter, with barking, yelping, yowling dogs on all sides. A spaniel in the cage beside hers kept charging at its cage door, up and back, up and back. A large husky mix in a bigger cage barked and clawed at the door. Eyes beseeched, nails scratched against metal, I found myself not wanting to look. But there she was. Amid all the noise and chaos, Lucille was lying calmly in her cage with a pink chew toy between her front paws. She looked utterly focused on that chew toy, as though she was quite capable of entertaining herself, thank you, and didn’t need to claw and clamor for attention like the others, and the sight of that appealed to me in a visceral way: it spoke to a kind of grace under pressure, a quality of endurance I suppose I was looking to cultivate in my own life.

  Still, she was not my ideal of the perfect dog, at least not in an obvious way. My aesthetic ideal tends toward the sleek and muscular: Rhodesian ridgebacks and Doberman pinschers. I like big dogs, athletic dogs, and in the days and weeks before I got Lucille, I’d formed a picture of an elegant animal with wide searching eyes and a fine coat, short-haired and suede-like and earth-toned, a dog (here’s an embarrassingly telling concern) that would match my furniture. Lucille does not look like this, nor did she promise to as a puppy. An information-bearing card over her cage identified her simply as a “shepherd mix,” which I’ve come to understand is a euphemism for We Really Have No Idea, and looking at her that first day, I couldn’t tell if she’d grow up to be beautiful or homely: she had dainty paws and nice proportions for a pup, but she was a bit on the runty side, her coat a somewhat mousy brown, and she looked like she might be kind of stumpy when she grew up, her legs too short for her body. Mostly she was tiny and funny looking, like an oversized rodent. I stood there looking at her. My dog? I am not at all sure.

  I crouched down at the cage and watched her. She looked up happily enough, and I poked my finger between the bars. She gave it a curious sniff. Lucille has shepherd ears, and they were flopped over at the time, two small triangles pointing in either direction. Very cute, but I still didn’t fall in love with her right then and there. I sat and thought: Can I do this?

  This was one of those crossroads moments, when you understand that something potentially life-altering is in front of you, and you know you could go either way, take the plunge and upset everything or cast a vote for stasis and go home to your sofa. A woman I know named Helen first saw her dog, now a four-year-old cairn terrier whom she adores, in the window of a pet store, passing by on her way to meet a friend for lunch. She stood at the window and looked at him. She went in, looked more closely, poked her finger through the bars of the cage the same way I did. The puppy licked her hand, wagged his tail. She left, went back, left again. Then she spent the entire lunch obsessed with the idea, dragged her friend in and out of the pet store, and walked around the block four times. She still doesn’t know what tipped the scales for her, but she remembers the questions: Should I? Shouldn’t I? Can I? Why? Why not?

  The scales in my case went up and down (and up and down again) on the matter of puppyhood, the responsibility it implied. After a lot of circling, my dog thoughts had landed on the side of caution, and I pretty much figured I’d get a mature dog, maybe a year or two old, who’d arrive housetrained and equipped with a mastery of the basic commands. Naive as that logic seems to me today, it sounded like an easy enough adjustment at the time: just let the dog in, learn its ways, incorporate it into my routines. But something about seeing a puppy, so small and undeveloped, also spoke to those yearnings of mine, to the part of me that seemed to want a deeper sort of experience, a fuller involvement, a relationship that might feel more special somehow.

  Special. That’s what I really wondered about: Can I do special? Can I love this creature the way she’s meant to be loved? Can I get her to love me? Am I capable of forming the right sort of relationship here, creating the kind of bond I saw between the man and dog at the café that day? I tend to be such a fearful person when it comes to intimacy, so self-protective and locked into my routines, so averse to commitment. How would a small vulnerable pup affect all that?

  A few minutes passed. A shelter employee came up to me while I was kneeling at Lucille’s cage and told me I could take her out and play with her a bit if I filled out an adoption form first. I went into an adjoining reception area and did that; she came out a few minutes later carrying Lucille in her arms. Lucille’s head rested on the woman’s shoulders, and she was looking around the room in a curious, peaceful way, a picture of trust and composure. The employee handed her to me, and we settled down in a corner, me sitting cross-legged on the floor and Lucille sliding about in front of me on the linoleum. She looked calm and active and alert, happy to be out of the cage and able to sniff about freely. She sniffed here and she sniffed there, puppy nails scratching on the floor. I watched her. I debated. Can I do this? I’m not sure I can
do this. Can I?

  Just then, Lucille did a little canine jig, lifting her two front paws one after the other and sort of hurling her whole body forward on the floor into a play bow, one of those tiny motions that’s so cute, it looks like a parody of puppy behavior. Then she squatted down and peed on the floor, a yellow puddle widening beneath her. My dog trainer once asked me why I chose Lucille—why her, out of all the other potential puppies in the universe—and that image sprang to mind: a little puppy making a big old mess. The sight struck some note of familiarity in me. No one at the shelter knew where Lucille had come from or why she’d been abandoned. She’d been left there the day before, no litter mates, no explanation, no story, and looking back, I can see that she looked exactly like I felt: unmoored; in need of care; a young female pup unattached to home or family. I suppose that’s what clinched the decision for me. Her vulnerability spoke to my deepest fantasy: together we would form an attachment, create some semblance of home and family, a pack of two.

  I stood up, walked over to the shelter employee, and said, “I’ll take her.”

  There is nothing quite like a puppy to wrench your mind away from the darkness, especially if you’ve stumbled toward one as blindly as I did. Ten minutes in, all those voids and anxieties and existential worries of mine were shelved, knocked into distant corners by a much more urgent awareness: I was utterly, woefully ignorant about dogs, I knew nothing at all about raising a puppy, I could expose myself in this situation—to her, to myself, to the world at large—as even more inadequate than I already thought I was. I am a person who loathes imperfection, and I did everything imperfectly, dithered my way through the most elemental questions. Where will she sleep? The first night I was so unprepared and stupid about puppy care, I shut her in the downstairs bathroom, in a cardboard box turned on its side and padded with a blanket. Highly imperfect. From the get-go, I had no equipment for puppies, no medical understanding of puppies, no sense of what to expect from puppies, and for someone who’s by nature very cautious and controlled—disciplined, orderly, deliberate—this was very imperfect indeed.

  I was the blind leading the canine, and the first weeks with her were a blur of chaos and distraction: racing off to the bookstore to buy books about training, racing off to the pet store to buy a crate, racing back to the pet store because the crate was too big, finding a vet, calling every person I knew who had a dog, soaking up scraps of advice: Is it really okay to give a dog a smoked pig’s ear? What’s a training collar? The Monks of who?

  Yet in the midst of all that frenzy, I was also aware of something lighter, almost wondrous: a sense of thaw, a budding and glorious sense of connection. I was struck by this from the first day, by the speed and intensity with which Lucille rang all those internal canine bells—puppy! love! fuzzy! warm! She was such a trusting thing, just eight weeks old when I took her home, weighing in at a mere twelve pounds. The shelter employees handed her over to me on a little red leash, and we walked out of the building and into the sun toward my car, and she just trotted along after me, blinking in the light and sniffing at the sidewalk. This amazed me, that this animal would so willingly follow me into the unknown.

  When we got into the car, she climbed up into my lap and sat there the whole way home, pressed up against my stomach. I petted her and tried to keep my eyes on the road, and I thought about my father. When my parents got their first dog, Tom, they picked him up from a breeder in New Hampshire and took him home in the car, an hour and a half drive. Tom was just a ball of gray fluff at the time, the same age as Lucille when I got her, and terrified. He spent the whole trip curled up in my father’s coat pocket, and although he always loved my mother, he revered my father after that, in an awestruck, slightly intimidated, approval-coveting way that I understood completely because I shared it. Driving home with Lucille, I thought about Tom, and I secretly hoped that our jaunt across town together would instill depth of feeling in that same way.

  Maybe it did. Lucille followed me everywhere that first night, from kitchen to living room to bathroom, and every time I left a room, she got an anxious, alert look on her face, as though she were saying, Where’s the girl? Where’d that girl go? Within days friends were dropping by, and cooing at Lucille, and saying, “She’s so bonded to you!” “She’s so attached!” and my heart would swell with a private little burst of pride: until she provided it, I hadn’t fully understood how badly I’d wanted that sense of connection.

  One of the remarkable things about dogs, one of the reasons humans have loved dogs so well and so long, is that they are singularly well equipped to make us feel loved in return. Descendants of wolves, highly social animals who live in well-organized groups and maintain strict adherence to the group’s hierarchy, dogs appear to approach relationships in much the same way we do. They have similar needs for attachment. They bond to us. They look to us for leadership, and they are remarkably adept at figuring out what their place in our lives is to be, what we want from them. Dogs even seem to communicate in many of the same ways we do, exhibiting gestures and behaviors we can read and understand, the wagging tail connoting happiness, the bared teeth connoting anger, the canine gaze suggesting everything from adoration to alarm to guilt. Before I got Lucille, I had a rough working knowledge of the dog’s wolfish heritage and a basic understanding of pack theory (translation: I knew the leader was called the alpha dog), but I had no idea how it would feel to be part of a dog’s pack, to be followed like that, and bonded to, and needed. Her attachment to me, so quick and unquestioning, melted me.

  Melted and astonished me. Dogs possess a quality that’s rare among humans—the ability to make you feel valued just by being you—and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn’t care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I’d led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I’d let her up onto the bed with me. She’d writhe with joy at that. She’d wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I’d just lie there, and I’d feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I’d hear myself laugh out loud.

  Dogs are fantasies that don’t disappoint. I know this sounds wildly improbable, but sometimes I look back and think the dog trotted in, sniffed out that itemized emotional shopping list I’d been carrying around, and said, Okay, you want love without ambivalence? Intimacy? A sense of family? I can do that. We’d sit outside on my patio for hours at a stretch, and I’d watch her wander about, sniff a blade of grass here or a weed there, and I’d feel like some chamber in my heart had been blasted open, a compartment labeled “love” that had been sealed shut for years. I’d pick her up and carry her inside, and she’d rest her front paws against my shoulder, all willing and trusting and tiny, and a wave of devotion would come over me, a feeling I don’t think I’d experienced before even once. The emotional purity of those early days and weeks was like discovering a map where the varied elements and sensations of love were marked and identified, as if by colored flags. I’d hold her on my lap and stroke her fur, and I’d feel a profound contentment and I’d think: Oh, this is the comforting part of love, as opposed to the scary part. I’d take her to the park and watch her play with other dogs, see the abandon with which she threw herself into a chase or leaped up on another dog, and I’d think: Ah, this is the joyful part, the part where I feel delight. I’d roll around on the floor with her, and scratch her belly and squeal at her in a high voice, and I’d think: Right, the part where you get to act silly. All these new-mother sensations seemed to stir and then blossom—nurturance and protectiveness and a cooing, cuddly affection—and each one astonished me with its clarity because, honestly, I wasn’t sure I had them in me. “How’s Lucille?” Friends would ask me this, and I’d be
am and say, “Oh, great: we’re in love.” I’d say that in a joking way, but I also meant it, and I treasured the meaning behind it—the love I felt—like a jewel.

  When you drink, you anesthetize yourself to the frightening parts of intimacy, but also to the gratifying, giddy parts, to the fun and excitement. Lucille answered a fantasy I hadn’t even acknowledged I harbored, one I didn’t understand was possible: to love another being in an utterly unfamiliar, sober way, with access to the full range of my own emotions.

  And yet here’s something else about canine fantasies: dogs can destroy them—can pee on them, chew them up, literally mangle and maim them—as quickly and readily as they live up to them. Dogs do this, of course, in very obvious ways: they bark and they howl and they defecate on your rug, and until they understand the rules, they can be like furry whirling dervishes, clawing and scraping and chewing a wide swath of destruction across your living room. I know of dogs who’ve eaten carpeting and drapes, hair scrunchies and Barbie heads, bicycle seats, trampolines, Christmas tree ornaments, and TV remote control units; I’ve heard of a ten-month-old beagle in Virginia who ate an entire box of jewelry, including the owner’s diamond engagement ring, her gold wedding band, a ruby brooch, and (of course) the box; a twenty-month-old Bouvier des Flandres who chewed through a waterbed in Florida, then ate a dustpan, a toilet bowl brush, and three rolls of toilet paper in the course of one afternoon; and a pair of Jack Russell terriers outside Boston who chewed a hole through the back of their owner’s couch, then took a left and dug a tunnel straight through to the sofa’s side. This can be very disconcerting indeed, particularly among those of us who are new to the world of dogs and who acquire them without a working knowledge of such terms as “puppy proofing” and “crate training.” You enter into the relationship with that soft-focus ideal of the devoted family pet, and instead of fetching your slippers, the dog eats them. You fantasize about the dog curled contentedly at the hearth, and then you watch in horror as he tears three feet of aluminum siding off the front of your house.