I was aware of this with Lucille from the beginning, too, aware that in the midst of all that giddy, heady puppy love, a lot of my ideals about dogs—the warm fuzzy associations—were turning out to be just that: fantasies, dreams that bore little relationship to the reality of opening your life to another species. The most basic things threw me. Two minutes after I unlocked the front door to let us in, Lucille trotted through the living room and into the kitchen, squatted down, and defecated on the tile. There was nothing inherently surprising about this—the dog was only two months old, I knew she wasn’t housebroken—but the sight seemed to take whatever vague image of the warm, snuggly puppy I’d formed on our drive home and blow it right up, as if to say, See? She really isn’t programmed with perfect puppy software.
Nor was she programmed with well-behaved adult dog software, which managed to jar me, too. If I’d had snapshots of my expectations in my wallet, they probably would have pictured candidates for awards in obedience: dogs coming when called, dogs trotting along in a perfect heel, dogs wearing that beloved expression of willing expectancy, awaiting further instructions. Mature dogs. Trained dogs.
Lucille, of course, frustrated those expectations one by one, just felled them like trees. She peed everywhere. I’d see her start to squat—in the middle of the kitchen, the living room, the hall, wherever—and I’d shriek: “No! Not there! Outside! Outside!” And then I’d scoop her up and swoop her out the back door, and she’d look at me like, Huh? What’s the problem? She did not speak English. I’d crouch across from her on the patio and open my arms and say, “C’mere, you; come over here,” and sometimes she’d head right for me and sometimes she’d just roam around, sniffing a patch of dirt here, a fallen leaf there, and I’d feel lost: language failed me with the dog, perhaps for the first time. On walks she’d be all over the place. I had no idea how much exercise a puppy required, but I assumed it was a lot, so I took her out constantly, little jaunts around the neighborhood every two or three hours. She was like a twelve-pound mosquito, flitting this way and that. She strained against the leash, and she lagged behind, and she tried to poke her nose in all manner of inappropriate places—into recycling bins, through chain-link fences, down into gutters—and whatever vague image of dog walking I had (dog following my lead; dog trotting calmly by my side) went right out the window.
And right along with it went my fantasy about dog love as easy, as simple and emotionally uncomplicated. Ignorant as I was, I think I imagined a dog would be like a large, fun version of a household cat: more interesting and relational than a feline, but not necessarily any more taxing on the psyche. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I am a person who worries about relationships, and I worried about ours from the get-go. What is she doing? Why is she sleeping so much? Is she eating enough? Is she happy, sad, scared, bored, lonely, amused? How is she adjusting? I worried about my ability to anticipate her needs (every time Lucille peed in the house, I considered the accident a personal failure), and I worried about my basic character, my capacity for giving and nurturing, and I worried about failing her in some fundamental way, scarring her for life. I worried, in short, about everything from her mental health to the consistency of her stool, and once, about six weeks in and convinced that I needed to find her the very best trainer—a top-of-the-line trainer, from the Harvard equivalent of puppy schools—I actually called up the renowned Monks of New Skete and asked them if I could drive six hours to upstate New York for a little private instruction. (They said no.)
In short order, I also entered the dark and murky world of projection, a place every dog owner visits from time to time. Lucille has the serious face and demeanor of a German shepherd dog, and I could read volumes into those sober eyes. I’d think: She’s just lying there, staring at me; can she tell what an idiot I am? From day one, I harbored terrible anxiety about leaving her alone. I’d make a move toward the door—even just to whisk outside and get the paper from the front stoop—and I’d see her look up at me, and I’d read fifteen tons of alarm into that expression: Oh, God, she thinks I’m abandoning her. Bubbling up alongside all that early joy and delight were all my deepest fears: She won’t love me as much as I love her, I’m inadequate to the task of caring for her; I’ll fuck this up.
I have not had an easy time of relationships. I grew up with the feeling, deep in my bones, that the world was a frightening place and that of all the scary things in it (wars, natural disasters, car crashes), the scariest thing was other people. People, with their odd, unfathomable agendas and their complicated, often insatiable needs and their mysterious, changeable ways. My family held to an aesceticism, an emotional spareness and rigidity that kept the exterior looking clean and polished, any sign of turbulence and storm carefully cloaked and hidden from view. You’re angry, clench your teeth, bite your tongue. You’re sorrowful or sad, you disappear behind a closed door and weep in private. You have overwhelming needs or urges or desires, you save them up and keep them to yourself, and once a week for fifty minutes at a shot, you discuss them with your therapist.
This is why I drank: I didn’t know how else to deal with feelings, with the pushes and pulls and strains of a full, unfettered emotional life. Feelings? No thanks; way too scary. My mother hugged me the day I graduated from college, for the first time ever that I could recall. That same summer, a few months later, my father confessed that he’d been having an affair for ten years. So this is what I learned about emotion: very dicey stuff, difficult to express, dangerous to act on. Keep emotion hidden: from others, from yourself.
I drank and drank. The drinking accomplished two paradoxical goals, anesthetized feeling and gave me access to it at the same time. When I drank, the fear diminished, the anxieties and insecurities and dark suspicions I always harbored in relation to others just eased out of my bones and were replaced instead with a feeling of courage and protection. Two drinks: This isn’t so hard, being out in the world. Three drinks, four: No, it’s easy; it’s fun. See? I can interact with people, I can laugh and talk, I can even let my guard down. Drinking was my fastest and most reliable route to intimacy, the substance that opened me up to others, gave me a voice, allowed me to share my ideas and my feelings and my body.
Of course, the courage was artificial, and the sense of protection it gave me never lasted, because it never took root in my bones. The story is old and familiar: I drank and I lost control over drinking and my life got very messy and I had to quit. Less familiar, in literature and in life, is the aftermath, what happens when you no longer have access to that bridge or the self-protection it offers. This is what happens: the fear returns, it creeps back up on you, and it leaves you struggling mightily, with varying degrees of success and self-awareness, with the question of alternatives. How to cultivate a sense of safety without drink? How to connect to others without it? How to fend off, or even merely tolerate, the range of difficult and conflicted feelings that come up in close relationships, the longings and the fears and vulnerabilities?
I suppose you could say that there, on my patio, I began to see the outlines of some answers. You take a risk, you allow yourself to feel, you don’t flee. I’d sit outside with Lucille day after day, and I’d feel that torrent of emotion—joy and delight and surprise along with self-doubt and anxiety and confusion—and I’d think: This is love, pure but not simple, not at all.
NINETIES DOG
THE PUPPY BAFFLES. Lucille and I are out for a walk when suddenly, for no reason I can fathom, she simply sits down in the middle of the sidewalk. Plunk: there she is, immobile. I give her leash a gentle tug. Her neck cranes toward me, but the body is fixed, as though she’s glued there.
I use my most upbeat puppy voice: “C’mon, Lucille, let’s go!”
She sits and sits. I stop for a moment and regard her. From my vantage point above her, she looks hilarious: soft round puppy body; disproportionately large ears that seem to loom up above her little black face; tail curled against the sidewalk like a long, skinny piece of rope. At this age her fur abru
ptly changes color at the crown of her head, shifting from jet black to a soft brown, and this gives her a comical look, as though she’s accidentally dipped her muzzle in paint. And yet the puppy also appears quite composed, planted there on the pavement. Despite her youth Lucille has established herself already as a creature of eminent dignity and restraint, a serious, watchful presence who always knows exactly what’s going on in a room—who’s there, what they’re doing, whether food is involved—but never comments on it, never barks or yips or jumps unless she’s provoked to do so by something that strikes her as extraordinary: a sudden noise, or the emergence of a biscuit. So there she sits, tiny and earnest, as though pondering a matter of grave import.
I tug some more, but she’s like a bag of flour: dead weight, forelegs locked in front of her. “Let’s go, Lucille!” At this she lies down, becoming more immobile still, and I realize I have two options: Stand there and implore, or literally drag her down the sidewalk by the neck. What is this about? So much insistence in such a tiny, fuzzy body! Is she tired? Preoccupied? What is she thinking?
This is the kind of minor occurrence that causes strangers to stop on the street and talk to you, briefly making the world feel like a warmer, more jovial place. They stop and they gush and coo, “Oh, a puppy! How old? How cute!” But I also notice something else: people are asking me the strangest questions, broaching matters I hadn’t even thought to consider.
While Lucille is plastered to the pavement, refusing to budge, a woman comes up and dotes on her briefly, then asks: “Are you taking her to a puppy play group? There’s a group at Radcliffe Yard, every weekend at nine A.M.”
A puppy play group?
Later that same day, someone else stops and says, “Have you found a puppy kindergarten class yet? I know a really good one.”
Kindergarten? For Lucille?
I stare blankly. I blink down at my dog. I feel like I’ve wandered into a foreign country, a place where people are speaking a different language. “Buy her cow hooves!” A man in a leather jacket corrals me on a street corner and tells me this with great authority. “They’re really smelly, but dogs love to chew on them.” “You need a crate.” Every dog owner I talk to says this, in terms absolute and uncertain. “Gotta have a crate.” Questions abound; so do opinions. What are you feeding her? Iams is best: lamb-and-rice. No, Eukanuba’s best. No, Hills Science Diet. Who’s your vet? Are you brushing her teeth?
Wait a minute: brushing her teeth?
When I was growing up, the dogs in our household lived simple lives and seemed to require proportionately simple treatment. They ate Alpo, purchased at the local grocery store. They hung out in the yard for much of the day, slept on the floor outside my parents’ bedroom at night. They came in, went out, and save for an occasional walk around the block, they lived fairly bounded and routine lives. This is not to say the dogs weren’t loved, even adored, or deeply valued, just that my parents, like most dog owners I observed, didn’t seem to jump through hoops to make them happy.
Less than a decade later (my mother’s last dog died in 1990), the dog owners I ran into were jumping through lots of hoops, often big expensive ones. They were enrolling their dogs in puppy socialization classes and canine summer camp and doggie day care. They were shopping at pet stores the size of Kmart, and they were trotting their dogs into all manner of places that would have been unthinkable ten years earlier—bookstores, cafés, resort hotels. They were quoting Brian Kilcommons and Carol Benjamin the way new mothers quote T. Berry Brazelton and Dr. Spock. And yes, they were getting down on their knees every evening and massaging their dogs’ gums.
I was astonished by this, but I was also in the throes of puppy love, desperate to ensure this new creature’s well-being, and so I plunged right in. I shopped like a madwoman in those early months: bought Lucille a little doggie dental kit, and a big fluffy bed, and an elegant set of porcelain food bowls, and a lovely fleece blanket smartly embossed with paw prints. I became obsessed with her social life, started rising at dawn to get her to a seven A.M. play group, and found myself standing around the park with other dog owners like so many moms in the playground, engaged in intense discussions about house training and feeding schedules and the proper color of stool. I acquired new gear (training collars, grooming brushes, nail clippers), and I developed new fears (kennel cough, whipworm), and I became preoccupied with new questions (kibble or canned food? regular or retractable lead?), and every once in a while, when I’d catch myself poring over a copy of Dog Fancy magazine at the pet shop instead of sitting at home with The New Yorker, or examining the protein content on the back of a bag of dog food instead of making my own dinner, or wanting to curl up in bed with the puppy instead of my boyfriend, I’d look up and think: What happened to my life? Have I gone completely mad?
The facile answer is: Yes. Absolutely. I am precisely the kind of dog owner the media likes to make fun of: over the top and heading for the deep end. You see evidence of this everywhere, snappy little stories about indulgence and excess. USA Today writes about people who book their pets rooms in hotels that offer bone-shaped beds and special doggie room-service menus; The New York Times reports on Manhattan dog owners who are spending up to $10,000 per year on their dogs, springing for everything from catered birthday parties to canine lingerie; People magazine gushes over a health-and-fitness center for dogs in Westwood, California, that features treadmills, Jacuzzis, and swimming pools specifically designed for dogs. The message: those wacky Americans, gone from pet rocks to pet dogs.
The real answer, of course, is more complicated; it has to do not with American obsessionality or faddism or caprice but with need, and with the emotional niches a lot of modern-day dog owners are asking their animals to occupy. Not long ago I had a long conversation on the phone with a woman named Vicky, a forty-one-year-old photographer who lives in Manhattan with her dog, a two-year-old chocolate Lab named Thurston, and we got to talking about how much the world of people and dogs has changed since we were growing up. Our talk was peppered with precisely the kinds of silly, indulgent details you read about in the press (both our dogs have celebrated their birthdays with parties in which Frosty Paws, a canine version of ice cream cups, are served; both our dogs like to sleep under the covers; both our dogs attend regular play groups and have frequent dog “dates” with their best friends; and no, our parents’ dogs never enjoyed perks like this), but the underlying content was more serious: at heart we were talking about social change and the urbanization of America, about a new reality in which the emotional roles dogs play have been thrown into increasingly stark relief.
Vicky grew up the way I did, in the era of the yard dog. “We didn’t have dogs hanging around inside with us all day,” she says. “They pretty much lived outside. My mom let the dogs out in the morning, and they hung out in the yard all day, or someone left a gate open and they went roaming around the neighborhood until dinnertime. Sometimes the cops would call and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got your dog,’ and he’d be, like, in another town. We didn’t have leash laws. We didn’t really have to think about exercising the dog. We didn’t have to think about training the dog, for that matter. The dogs were just—you know, there. They just weren’t in our faces the way they are today.”
Thurston, by contrast, is very much in Vicky’s face. She lives in a small one-bedroom apartment, on the fifth floor, and Thurston is a big, noisy dog: she is far more conscious of his presence, his needs, the quality of his life and of their relationship. If he doesn’t get exercise, he’s at her constantly: nudging her, trotting up and shaking a toy at her, barking. If the dog needs to go out, he has to ask, and she has to bring him outside, on a leash. If she hadn’t taken the dog to obedience classes, her life would be a living hell. “Imagine living with a seventy-pound Lab who doesn’t understand the words ‘stay’ or ‘off’ or ‘quiet,’” she says. “I’d be out of my mind.”
Thurston is also a big emotional presence in Vicky’s life, as well as a physical presence, and she
says this strikes her as a radical change from the past, too: it’s the part of our conversation that has to do with social change. Like me—and like one-quarter of the U.S. population—Vicky lives alone, without the emotional or financial support of family, and she often feels isolated, prone to fits of loneliness. Like me (like all of us), Vicky also lives in a time of transience and instability, in a culture in which one in two marriages end in divorce and 21 million women are divorced or single mothers, and this has left her with a kind of big-picture confusion about relationships: Does she want to get married? Not sure. Have kids? Doesn’t know. Continue to live alone? Maybe; who knows? We talked for a while about our mutual sense of rootlessness—about living in an environment where friends relocate to new cities and new jobs every other year, where you yourself might change apartments six times in a decade, where you barely recognize your neighbors when you pass them on the street—and then we talked about the extent to which dogs can offset this feeling, about how profoundly stabilizing their presence can feel. As if to illustrate the point, Vicky stopped midsentence and asked me, “Where’s Lucille right now?”
I looked down: dog at my feet, lying flat on her side, fast asleep. “Right here,” I said. “Sleeping.”
“Same here,” she said. “Big old Lab, snoring on the floor.”
And there you have it: in the midst of uncertainty, there is the dog, one sure thing, stability in fur.
The personal voids that dominated my landscape when I ventured out to the shelter to find Lucille are in many ways cultural voids as well, ones that have been blasted open by thirty years of social upheaval. Loneliness. Transience. The breakdown of family and the search for alternative sources of support. The stresses of life in urban America, which is at once more crowded and more isolated. And, in the midst of that, 55 million pet dogs. As indulgent and fanatical as the modern dog owner can seem (even to me, as I’m doling out the Frosty Paws), I understand the impulses behind such behavior: you give a lot because you have ended up with a creature who seems to give back so much in return, who’s literally thrilled to see you every single time you walk in the door, who’s always in a good mood, who’s always there. “I’d do anything for my dog,” Vicky says. “Thurston is like … well, for lack of a better term, he’s like my boyfriend. He’s there on the sofa when I watch a movie. He’s there on the bed when I go to sleep. He’s who I hold when I’ve had a bad day, when I cry. It’s really very intimate, and I think that’s something dog people just didn’t experience when I was growing up.”
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