Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

  So many firsts for Eddie. I almost felt sorry for him.

  No more sunbathing in the backyard, no more twisting on his back on the grass. No carpet to buff his coat with paws up in the air while we had dinner. No mail carrier to bark at. City living had its trade-offs, after all.

  For weeks he continued to act strange. One night, when Jim couldn’t stand the whimpering outside our bedroom door, he took him down thirty floors for a midnight walk. But the whimpering continued until Jim gave him an ultimatum in harsh tones. Eddie was not used to harsh words from Jim. He got the message and finally went to sleep.

  One bright spot for Eddie was getting his first professional walker. After the neighborhood kids in the Palisades who charged five dollars per walk, Eddie became the charge of Amanda, a young woman from a dog-walking service that charged twelve dollars per fifteen-minute walk with another dog. Jim told Amanda that Eddie would go out only with submissive females. That’s right. Just what New York’s singles scene needed—another asshole.

  On Amanda’s first day, Jim left her a note on the kitchen counter. “Hi, Amanda. Thanks for walking Eddie. He loves people but is finicky around other dogs. Watch him closely. Please let me know how he does and we’ll talk later.”

  “Hello,” Amanda wrote back on the same piece of paper. “Wow! Eddie’s a cool dog. He peed today!”

  Easy-to-impress Amanda left cheerful notes signed with a heart one day, a happy face the next. When I met her, I asked her professional opinion about etiquette. She acted like she had never given it a passing thought.

  “Pee is supposed to be bad for trees,” she said. She scrunched up her face, trying to think of other rules. Apparently there were none except for common sense. “As long as you pick up, no one says anything,” she said. “Obviously, you want to keep him away from merchandise.”

  Obviously.

  Amanda and Eddie got along super.

  “Eddieboy peed and it turned out to be a beautiful day,” said another Amanda-gram left on the kitchen counter.

  And they kept coming.

  “Eddie did great with Eloise. They got along like old pals. He only peed. Didn’t like any of the bushes we tried, I guess.”

  Jim also found his groove walking his mutt first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

  Eddie seemed to be quite the sensation in Madison Square Park, according to his biased owner.

  “Eddie’s got a dog walker. He walks with a little dog named Eloise. He’s sweet on Eloise. Life is good,” Jim said one night while we watched TV.

  The relocation, I had to admit, was going better than I ever imagined. My poor, battle-worn husband was breathing easy—until day ten. On this day Amanda reported that you-know-who just tried to get a chunk of Eloise. Nothing serious, though, so he wasn’t dumped.

  The next day Jim left Amanda a note. “Amanda, are you still walking Eddie with Eloise? How’s that going?”

  “Fantastic,” she wrote back on the same piece of paper. “She’s out of town ’til next week, so he’s flying solo for now. Also walking with Truffles, another little female, also out of town. He peed.”

  Thank God for rich New York City dogs with second homes in the Hamptons.

  But Jim and I would soon be moving into our permanent apartment and we needed to find the right kennel for our peculiar dog. After much discussion, Jim and I had agreed to house hunt in New Jersey, where we could afford to live. He wanted a house for Arielle and Henry to call home. I was okay with this as long as we also kept my apartment. Jim tried to get me to consider the money we’d save by having just one household. It was an added expense, for sure, but I had reasons for wanting to keep a foothold in the city. We both worked in Manhattan and would make use of the apartment whenever we stayed in the city until late for work or fun. I also pictured us old and retired with this second home, spending winters in warm weather and coming back to the apartment for four or five months of the year. I was thinking about convenience, and that if we sold we’d be forever priced out.

  Some of my girlfriends were suspicious.

  “You just don’t want to be married,” said Dana.

  If anything, it was just the opposite. The apartment would certainly help the marriage if we found each other at odds again over the kids. I recognized that I was afraid or unable to give up that last part of the old me because the situation at home was often more complex than I was able to handle. I believed we were still working without a playbook. A refuge could still come in handy, with the added benefit that it would also be the ultimate Eddie-free zone.

  “You’re like Carrie and Mr. Big in the Sex and the City movie,” said Taja-Nia, a member of my book club.

  “It’s not like that at all,” I said.

  In that movie, Mr. Big suggested spending a couple days a week apart—with one of them staying in Carrie’s old apartment, the other one in their new luxurious one—so that they could pursue their own interests without feeling marriage was cramping their style. But for the most part, Jim and I would be together in either place. I knew Jim worried that I’d be spending more time in the city than in the house. He wasn’t thrilled about the thought of spending any time apart again after the long-distance marriage. So we picked at least two firm city days—Wednesdays and Fridays—and the rest of the week we would go to the house in New Jersey. Eddie, however, would be restricted to the house and Jim would pay for extra walks when we were in New York. Now, more than ever, I didn’t want our uncooperative psycho mutt to go anywhere near the new apartment. He had failed his first New York City test—living tight.

  This was as good a compromise as any, although it still gnawed at me that we could do without the house if there was no dog in the picture. The visits from Arielle and Henry would be so sporadic that we could easily accommodate them in the apartment. Let’s face it. The house was really for Eddie.

  “What do you want me to do?” Jim said when I needled him about having a house mostly for the dog. “He’s a responsibility.”

  We started our search in Montclair, where many colleagues lived. It would take a couple months to find the house, so Jim spent one weekend telling lies on the phone as he searched for the perfect temporary home for Eddie.

  “He’s a very sweet guy,” he told one boarder as I read the paper across from him at the dinner table. “His vet thinks he’s a cattle dog, an Australian heeler. He’s short-haired, forty pounds, and nine and a half years old, but very active.”

  Pause. “Yes, he’s up on all his shots.”

  Pause. “He’s a neutered male but does have problems with alpha-type male dogs, but with other dogs he’s generally okay.”

  I chuckled at all the double-talk. “Generally okay” meant it was a crapshoot; we all knew what “problems” meant.

  “I hope to visit him on weekends, take him out for walks,” Jim said.

  When he hung up, Jim looked at me wistfully, as if dreading the separation. For a second I wondered if he looked that miserable when I left California. He settled on Hal Wheeler’s pet hotel, canine salon, and grooming academy in the Jersey town of Cedar Grove, which charged thirty-nine dollars a day but gave a ten percent discount for thirty days or more.

  “They’ll take good care of him, baby,” I reassured him.

  My upcoming Eddie-free vacation put me in a great mood. I looked forward to sleeping full nights for a change and coming home to a normal-looking sofa, with cushions where they belonged. Once Eddie was in his new temporary home, we moved to the apartment in Washington Heights and it felt like I was finally in our New York home. The Hudson and the George Washington Bridge were as majestic as ever. Mike, the night doorman, had much gossip about my neighbors and my former tenants. The hood had come up, with new restaurants and a spiffed-up liquor store that now held wine tastings, a sure sign of gentrification even in upstate Manhattan.

  We eased into our cozy home. I planned to
have the kitchen redone, as soon as we got the house, to accommodate more cooking, since Jim was such a good chef. Our daily commute was a cinch—a twenty-minute straight shot to our Midtown offices on the express A train. Cab fare from Midtown was now almost thirty dollars with tip, up by almost eight dollars since I left, so we took the subway even when we stayed out late. On the way home, we were usually in the company of musicians from Broadway shows carrying their cellos, saxophones, and big basses after the theater let out.

  I didn’t miss Eddie, but Jim longed for him in the worst way. “I miss my scoundrel.”

  The first reports back from the kennel were that Eddie was not eating. When we visited him the first weekend, Jim worried that Eddie would be mad at him and not forgive him. As we waited, a screen in the lobby showed the area where the dogs were kept. The confines were roomy and the dogs could see one another through the chain-link cages. Jim handed an attendant Eddie’s leash and a few minutes later a door opened and Eddie appeared, pulling at the leash toward us. He sniffed us, jumped up Jim’s leg, sneezed a few times, and seemed elated to see us. He wagged his tail forcefully, butt in full swing. He even jumped up to greet me with paws on my belly and snuck a lick on the tip of my nose—a first! I was relieved to see him so happy. We took him to the car for an outing in a park nearby and he whimpered in the backseat, trying to get to the front seat between us.

  “Sit, Eddie, sit!” I commanded, but instead he licked my face.

  Jim looked just as excited, steering with one hand and scratching his buddy with the other. “Did you give her a big, wet kiss?” he asked the dog. “Poor guy. He’s lost in the world. Soon enough, Eddie, soon enough.”

  I noticed something. “His paws are orange. Why is that?”

  We couldn’t figure it out. Eddie was also noticeably thinner.

  We drove to a trail popular with dogs in the vicinity of the kennel. The afternoon was cold and it was drizzling, but Jim and Eddie were happily oblivious to the weather. When we got back to the kennel, there was no drama. Eddie went up the entrance steps eagerly, as if recognizing the place as his new home.

  We asked about the raw paws and the keeper at the kennel told us they were orange from all the pacing dogs did while caged. I felt bad, but not bad enough to change my mind and bring Eddie with us to the apartment. Jim fed Eddie a biscuit from a jar on the counter and we said our good-byes. When the attendant came for him, Eddie went willingly. No whimpers.

  I gained more respect for Jim’s bond to his dog during those visits. I saw true love in their reunions.

  “I just miss having my buddy around,” Jim said back in the car.

  “What do you miss?”

  “He wags his tail. He never talks back. He thinks my ideas are brilliant. He laughs at my jokes.”

  Ouch.

  Jim understood the hassles we avoided by having Eddie tucked away. But he felt it made life more difficult just the same. “There’s six more things to do,” he said.

  And, like your typical unreasonable dog owner, he was in denial. Eddie being a pest in the Bloomberg News apartment, he was convinced, was just a reaction to being in unfamiliar surroundings after the trauma of cross-country flying. Things would be different in our apartment. “He would be perfectly behaved,” he told me with a straight face. “He’s our dog and he should be with us in our living space.”

  I was not without empathy, but no. As we left Hal Wheeler’s in the distance, I tried to lighten the mood. “Is this your way of saying I should wag my tail more?”

  “Among other things.”

  I kissed my husband’s lips. We were good, mostly because even in his temporarily resentful state, Jim knew I was resigned to coexist with my nemesis. Their separation anxiety would last only a few months, after all. My cross to bear looked indefinite.

  Eleven

  New Beginnings (A Dog Gets Old)

  Eddie had been the constant in Jim’s life as everybody else relocated away from him. I was the first one to leave. While we were separated, Jim took Henry to his boarding school. He left him with a heavy heart after spending days meeting teachers and other students and their families, familiarizing himself with his son’s new surroundings. And after taking Arielle to visit colleges, he took her to her new school in Maryland, where he got to know her roommates and shopped with her at Target for everything from comforters, sheets, and pillows to toothpaste, shampoo, and rugs. Then he moved to New York. With just the two of us, and Eddie, we no longer had to whisper when we argued.

  I felt for Jim and recognized the importance of his dog—his spotted rock—through the rites of passage. Eddie was still the same Eddie, though, so while my husband looked for a convenient location to the city as we went house hunting, I looked for houses with a layout that could be easily dog-proofed. I used my veto power wisely, narrowing down the choices to houses with features that facilitated keeping Eddie contained and away from me—such as two floors and a staircase that could be gated. It didn’t take long to find the perfect place on the southern edge of Montclair. The house was an Arts and Crafts–style four-bedroom, like a William Morris cottage, with rusticated brick outside and chestnut wood trim. Nice backyard, ample closet space, great fireplace and, best of all, a door to the upstairs. An Eddie-free floor at last.

  Montclair was a liberal oasis surrounded by mostly white, mostly Republican towns where residents used McCain/Palin signs as porch décor. Leafy, pro-Obama/Biden Montclair, with its racially diverse population of about forty thousand residents, was particularly popular for its good schools and short commute to New York’s Penn Station and the Port Authority.

  Half the New York media world—and Stephen Colbert—went home to Montclair. We had so many friends and acquaintances there who worked for the Times, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, and other news outlets, I worried that I would have to hide in the ethnic foods aisle at Kings food market to avoid being seen shopping without makeup in my sweats. Most restaurants in Montclair were BYOB and nicely casual. Montclair State University presented A-list music and dance shows for fifteen dollars a pop. Our neighbors put on a block party every year. What’s not to love?

  The commute by trains and buses, that’s what. You had to deal with fixed schedules and not-so-frequent rides. On weekends, the train to Montclair ran every two hours instead of hourly as it did during the workweek. The subway, by contrast, ran every ten minutes or less, depending on your timing. The pace of the burbs didn’t slow us down as much as it required us to become better planners and more efficient. That was a bit of a challenge for a certain someone who lived up to the Latino stereotype—I was always late.

  But we took to our new surroundings in no time, and so did Eddie.

  The day we moved in, Jim went to spring Eddie free from the kennel. He came back beaming like a proud papa. The report card for “Eddie Sterngold” was impeccable, as it befitted a dog kept fenced in, away from other dogs and under constant watch with surveillance cameras.

  The card read:

  Temperament: “Friendly. Outgoing. Happy.”

  Appetite: “Good.”

  General Health and Appearance: “Good.”

  Additional Comments: “Eddie did very well in the kennel. Happy and social. He will be missed by the staff.”

  With any luck, the staff wouldn’t be missing him for too long and would see him often.

  I read somewhere to be mindful of how to introduce a dog to a new house. You are not supposed to let the dog loose in the house so he could check it out on his own and feel like he was in charge. When Eddie came home, I had him sit outside the front door in the screened-in porch while Jim and I went in first. We came out and put him on the leash and I took him inside, from room to room, only downstairs, giving him the message that I was granting him permission to be in the house, that I was in charge. The memories of our first day in the Palisades still stung. But my controlled tour was such a failure tha
t I was soon buying plastic sofa and chair covers—and an alarm that gave out piercing beeps whenever it sensed motion from a spotted dog—to keep Eddie in check. (Plastic seemed more upscale than boxes and books.)

  While I customized our new house, Jim picked a new dog walker. It was important to find one who could take care of Eddie overnight when we stayed in the city, or who would at least drive him to the kennel and back if need be. The lucky gal was Karin, who like all other walkers and sitters, had to go through a hazing to show her mettle.

  It all started sweetly enough.

  “Eddie pooped for me today. K.,” read the first note on the kitchen counter.

  She had the habit of giving Eddie a biscuit at the end of each walk.

  “Bye, Eddie. I love you,” I overheard her saying to her client. “See you tomorrow. Have a good afternoon.”

  Another day, another note.

  “Pooped again today. I guess he likes me.”

  And another one: “Hi, Jim. Eddie pooped for me. May I take a picture of Eddie and use it on my website?”

  Wait for it, wait for it.

  Three weeks in, Karin kept Eddie overnight and he bit two other dogs she was boarding, a black Lab and some kind of terrier, both bigger than he was.

  “Don’t know what happened,” she told us. “He just went after them last night and this morning. No big deal. I just separated them.”

  But when Eddie did it again during another stay, sweet Karin said enough. What she actually said, extremely apologetically, was: “I’m really sorry things did not work out at my house.”

  Seasoned dad that he was, Jim understood. He left Karin Godiva milk chocolates on the kitchen counter.

  “The chocolates are from Eddie,” the note read.

  Then he asked me: “What’s the canine equivalent of a misanthrope?”

  Overnight stays were rare, though. We needed the walker mostly for midday, while we were both at work in Manhattan. Eddie’s routine was pretty much what it was in L.A. A walk with Jim and a cupful of dry food in the morning. Repeat in the evening. New neighborhood meant new friends and foes. His first New Jersey friend was Linus the beagle.