Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

  Still, I needed to make it up to this cranky old fart. In our competitive relationship, it was no longer all about my feelings.

  For the first time, I wanted to do something I never cared for before. I was going to try to understand this dog. His aging had softened me up enough to care about what was in his head. Maybe empathy would be less stressful. I wanted to learn about the psyche of dogs. What motivated them other than food, walks, and finding a soft surface for snoring? How could they be so lovable yet so stupid? How did you win them over?

  Of course, there was no shortage of material. A cursory check on Amazon produced The Dog’s Mind, Inside of a Dog, Think Dog!, Dog Psychology, You Are a Dog, Why Do Dogs Drink Out of the Toilet?, and so on. I ordered the least deranged-sounding titles and, I had to admit, I was fascinated by some of what I read. Dogs, as most people into dogs already know, evolved from wolves centuries ago. They became domesticated after they began hanging out with humans. Soon tired of their pets’ wolfish appearance, the humans began breeding them into many shapes and looks, until they finally got Trouble, the cute Maltese that inherited twelve million dollars from hotel chain empress Leona Helmsley. (A judge thought that was crazy and later reduced the inheritance down to two million dollars.) As I read on, some of Eddie’s nutty behavior started to make sense. He sometimes kicked dirt after relieving himself because he wanted the odor to waft farther away, signaling to other dogs that he was the man. The importance of smell to a dog explained almost everything, in fact. It was why they made a beeline for crotches and one another’s rumps.

  Some things, like the appetite for other dogs’ feces, were still a mystery, though. Even the ASPCA was flummoxed. “There is no apparent reason for this strange behavior,” its website said.

  And dogs could bark for all sorts of reasons—as a greeting or to get attention—not necessarily hostility, I learned. But I knew my Eddie. Could he have just been saying “Hello!” all these years? Nah. It was more like “Scram!,” “Don’t touch him!,” “Take that!,” “And that!,” “I’m going to bite you any minute now!” He tried to intimidate me. He wanted me gone.

  How could I stop the hate? A Lipster, Rose, referred me to a friend who worked at the San Francisco Society for the Protection of Animals. She in turn referred me to Jeannine Berger, the director of behavior resources at the San Francisco SPCA’s Veterinary Hospital. She’s a DVM and DACVB, which I had to look up. A doctor of veterinary medicine and a diplomate, or board-certified specialist, of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists. A pet shrink! After couples therapy, could I now be entertaining the notion of going to therapy with my husband’s dog? What the heck. Nothing to lose but my dignity.

  I e-mailed her, asking if we could talk about the issues that may arise when someone fell in love with a dog owner and the dog acted like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

  The good doctor wrote back:

  “Dear Mia. Many of my clients experience similar feelings like you. The issues are usually not ‘dog wars’—they are ‘people wars’ and the dogs are the innocent casualties that suffer from the inconsistency in the home.”

  All aboard! As if I could ever doubt whose side she was going to take.

  But I tried not to be defensive. I put on my reporter’s cap and called the expert. Dr. Berger told me she commonly heard from couples and roommates complaining that the dog had become a source of conflict in the household, much like housekeeping chores or loud snoring. She set me straight about the term “jealous dogs.” That was an anthropomorphism, she said, meaning I was attributing human characteristics to an animal.

  “Jealousy is usually how the other human feels, the one that does not have that close relationship with the dog,” she said.

  Bah.

  If a dog was very close to one person in the home and disliked others in the family, she explained, then usually one of two things was going on. One, the dog was fearful of that person, or two, the dog considered the person a competitor for a resource, in this case our shared man. Either way, she said, the problem was fairly easy to address in most cases. She suggested I look up an animal behaviorist in my area to assess Eddie’s needs and devise a treatment plan “from the dog’s point of view.”

  Right, like I was about to bring another Eddie ally into our home.

  “From Eddie’s point of view, all that needs to happen is for me to disappear,” I joked.

  Dr. Berger calmly explained that dogs make a strong connection to one family member, they feel an affiliation “like a child or a person would.” Hostility happened frequently. A couple got a dog and the dog bonded with one person. The other person might trigger fear. It was up to this person to alleviate the fear or make it worse.

  That was me.

  I came in after Eddie, an unfamiliar human in the household. And in his beady eyes, apparently, I became a competitor for resources like attention and love. To turn things around, I could start by becoming a “provider” of resources, Dr. Berger suggested.

  “You just have to find out what’s high-value for Eddie.”

  That was easy. Food. What else? We’re talking a dog that once rose on his hind legs to reach a box of fund-raising chocolate bars on the kitchen counter and ate all ten bars. He pooped aluminum foil for days. I could become the “food dispenser,” Dr. Berger suggested. And I could make more of an impression, she said, if I bestowed enticing treats like cheese, chicken, or Cheerios.

  That’d work, I agreed. Eddie would definitely reconsider his animosity if I surprised him with a tasty morsel. I had one concern, though. Eddie followed many of my orders more or less without treats, even if he forgot two minutes later. He still obeyed me, eventually, after he feigned a limp or deafness. Exposed to a system of rewards, would he become an even bigger pain in the ass? And if I stop feeding him, would he go back to his old ways? “Do I have to reward him all the time?”

  “Would you work for no pay?” Dr. Berger replied.

  Well, no, but I loved for no pay. Whatever happened to the dog was like a child? Weren’t dogs supposed to offer unconditional love like their smitten owners kept saying? Weren’t they innocent, selfless teachers? You couldn’t have it both ways. Either dogs were like innocent children or they were shameless extortionists.

  But I kept quiet. At this point, I just wanted a permanent truce. I was skeptical that a geezer like Eddie could still learn new tricks. Dr. Berger said an old dog could indeed change. As if in passing, she mentioned that she often found that the real problem was usually not the dog but the couple’s relationship. She had seen many examples of this. Dig a little deeper, she said, and soon you’d find something else gnawing at the partners.

  “Do couples ever break up over the dog?” I asked, a bit taken aback.

  “I wouldn’t know, but I’ve seen couples come in and fight over the dog and you know that the dog is not the real issue.”

  I hung up with my throat constricting. This harmless fact-finding mission had backed me into a corner. No more denial. We were, of course, one of those couples. We just found it much easier to ignore the real tension in the marriage and deal with the sporadic fight without ever solving anything. But true happiness had eluded us because it came down to this: I loved Jim deeply, and he loved me, but we had failed at negotiating my place in the family. He still felt a conflict between his role as father and that of husband. I’d yet to fit his children into my life. Even now that the kids were adults, there was a code of silence. We talked about them peripherally, avoiding the land mines. When they visited, we were all automatically transported back to the Palisades. They inhabited their world with Jim, and I inhabited mine. We had suffered the fate of many stepfamilies—alienation, cordial relations at best. It had been our collective loss. Eddie’s hostility, or even worse, his indifference, was a constant reminder of what didn’t work in my blended family. Eddie had been an easy scapegoat, my voodoo doll. The kids were untouchable, the husba
nd unwavering, but I could go on and on about the dog.

  It had taken a pet shrink to face the truth and make me want to do something about it. I so wished to embrace stepmotherhood. I spoke to Jim’s kids infrequently now that we were apart. I knew about their lives mostly as relayed by their father. But if I could reinvent my relationship with the dog, could the kids be next? I was not sure if building substantial relationships with my adult stepchildren would ever be possible. Even if we all wanted to give it a shot, distance was an issue now. Henry lived with his mother in California while working and going to college. Arielle was working abroad. But Eddie was still here. I could at least give him a break. There was no denying that the dog was an inescapable relationship within my family. He was my stepdog. I could still be a good stepmother. I would strive to end a ten-year conflict.

  Yes, I would become the food dispenser!

  Jim immediately nixed the idea of giving Eddie human food.

  “People have the crazy idea that if you feed human food to dogs that you’re doing them a favor, that it’s making them part of the family, and from everything I know, it’s terrible for dogs,” he told me. “Eddie, his stomach gets screwed up. It’s way too rich for him and he gets diarrhea.”

  Thank you, Dr. Sterngold. I didn’t know Jim was so passionate about what went into Eddie’s mouth. I reminded myself we almost lost him to poisoning.

  “Sometimes he’ll find crap on the ground and, if he manages to wolf down a piece of a sandwich or pizza, more often than not he’ll get diarrhea,” Jim went on. “I’m not going to clean up the diarrhea.”

  Me neither.

  I really didn’t feel that strongly about it. I was okay with bribing Eddie with dog treats instead. I was eager to start, but the food dispensing needed to be postponed until Jim and I returned from a long-planned trip to Vietnam. It would be an unusually long kennel stay for our senior doggie—twelve days. But the kennel loved him and had become his second home.

  A few days later, Jim and I bobbed in the waters of spectacular Ha Long Bay on a junk. We found Vietnam surprisingly welcoming of Americans—they were more preoccupied with China now—and well recovered physically from the war. Vital signs like a market economy and a population that skewed young were clearly healthy. We made long visits to the war museum in Saigon and the perplexing Cu Chi tunnels where the Vietcong hid and showed steely determination. Jim and I fired a gun for the first time in an open-air shooting gallery where visitors could pick the war weapon of their choice. We chose the M16 used by American soldiers and became even more anti-gun.

  In Hanoi, we came across a board sign outside a café.

  “Doggie-style tour,” it read. “Includes dog meat and local dishes. Beer and rice wine. Sunset over West Lake.”

  American dogs. When they were overweight, their owners sent them to the gym. Their Vietnamese brethren on the other side of the world were instead skinned, seasoned, and served to anyone willing to cough up a few dong. (Dogs supposedly were good for virility and warmth in the winter months; cats were spared because they eat rats.)

  “I wonder how Eddie is,” I mentioned to Jim one night over a dinner.

  “Plotting his revenge,” Jim said. “‘I’m going to shit on his bed, and then I’m going to piss on his sofa.’”

  But when we got back from our trip, Eddie was as meek as could be, back to his clingy, whimpery self after a face-saving period of indifference to punish Jim. As usual, he looked at me with a you’re-still-here look of resignation and behaved as if it were such a chore to be around me.

  But Edweirdo was in for a surprise. He’d have to rely on me from now on for his sustenance. His routine was to be fed twice a day, after his morning and evening walks. The delicious menu consisted of Science Diet’s ground “gourmet chicken (or beef) entrée” and Eukanuba’s “maintenance” formula, dry pellets that had the added benefit of also reducing tartar and plaque buildup (but, apparently, not bad breath). Eddie liked the wet food much better, so he was prone to eat around the pellets and leave the dry food on the dish. He didn’t eat the dry food unless he was bored as a clam—usually after he’d licked his paws, taken a nap, scratched himself behind the ears, paced around the house sniffing corners, and banged against closed doors. As the new food dispenser, I was determined to mash the two kinds of food so thoroughly that he had to eat it all. On the first day of my new job, a Sunday, I slept in. By the time I made it to the kitchen shortly before ten a.m., Jim was more anxious than the dog.

  “He’s jumping out of his skin waiting for his breakfast,” he announced.

  I looked at Eddie, sprawled on the floor looking at us, and he seemed all right. In fact, he had gotten up to let me pet him by way of greeting—no growling—so he was better than all right. You never knew with his moods.

  I took a cupful of his dry food and mixed it with a half can of wet food, smashing the dry pellets into the soft glob. I placed the bowl down and he almost bit my fingers off to get to it. Yum-yum. He loved his food. He inhaled it. Soon I saw the effect of my effort. I was upstairs, reading in the bedroom, while Jim was out running errands, when I heard Eddie whimpering outside the bedroom door. What? The mutt has breached the off-limits area again!

  “Eddie!” I screamed.

  He knew he’d been a bad dog and headed back for the stairs, but, again, the poor thing was scared to go down the steps. He didn’t think ahead as usual. I prodded him gently, holding his collar, so he was reassured he wouldn’t tumble down. As we stepped down I wondered—could this breach be a sign of new affection?

  Sure thing! Between the second and third food-dispensing weeks most barking at me stopped as if we had turned off a switch.

  What a feeling of accomplishment that first bark-free morning. I came down the stairs and Eddie was in his usual spot in the kitchen, behind his boyfriend’s legs. Now that he didn’t hear so well he sometimes didn’t sense me until I was right next to him. As I leaned in to kiss Jim, Eddie began to grunt but caught himself, as if he just remembered that I served breakfast. He looked away sheepishly and pretended he had found something interesting to sniff on the floor.

  The next morning, I came down to the dining room and he didn’t leap to bark at me as I passed his inert body. He was in his bed, his eyes were wide open, but I heard nary a peep as I leaned in to kiss Jim. This was awesome. How ignorant we had been. People should all go to doggie school before they are allowed to own a dog. It’d avert so much misery.

  “There’s nothing in between—either he’s in love with you and he can’t live a moment without you,” Jim said with a chuckle, “or he’s going to eat your face off if you fall asleep.”

  A loving Eddie, of course, brought its own irritations. For one thing, this new appreciation for his stepmom didn’t seem genuine. I fed him and all of a sudden he found me acceptable? But my worries were for naught because Jim began sabotaging my food dispensing soon into the new routine.

  “I fed Eddie,” he chirped from the dining room as I entered the kitchen to make my morning coffee a few days later.

  “Why?”

  “Sorry, it’s my routine. I forget sometimes.”

  “I forget” were fighting words. They instantly put me in a bad mood. They took me back to the Palisades years when I was always out of the loop, when he’d ask me to help one of the kids with homework and then sit within earshot “reading” a book, as if to say: “I’m here nearby, don’t worry, in case stepmom attacks.” It felt then like he was sabotaging my efforts to bond. Now he was doing it again.

  Was it possible Jim purposely didn’t want to let go of Eddie, even this little allowance? I’d also noticed he always found something to do in the kitchen—make a snack, empty out the dishwasher—while I prepared Eddie’s meal. Maybe I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  “You are undermining me,” I told him. “It’s a pattern.”

  Jim laughed it off. �
��Now you think you’re the dog Freud,” he said.

  But he did it again, always ready with an excuse for feeding Eddie.

  “I didn’t want to wake you and he seemed uncomfortable.”

  Or: “He’s gotten into this thing where he scratches the floor. He was driving me crazy.”

  When I approached Jim one morning, Eddie growled and barked. It was the first time he returned to his old habit since I started feeding him.

  “No!” Jim commanded. “You’re not going to start that again. You’re a new dog.”

  Eddie waited for a pat, but there was no petting or mercy this time from Jim, who knew I was pissed.

  “Stop sabotaging me,” I warned him. “If we’re not going to do it well, I shouldn’t bother.”

  “You should bother. I’ll do my best.”

  “Don’t do your best. Just do it.”

  “I’m with you one hundred percent.”

  Jim fulfilled his promise. He stopped feeding Eddie and started nagging me.

  “Eddie needs his breakfast!”

  • • •

  That was my husband’s new “Good morning” for a few days, until we found our food-dispensing groove.

  Ultimately, Eddie remained hot and cold with me, which was better than mostly cold. One evening, as I was watching TV in the den, he came over and sat quietly in front of me. He didn’t have the psycho look he got when he was desperate for a walk. And he wasn’t giving me his back like he did when he was ready to race me to Jim. It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on. He was waiting for his dinner! I was taken aback by how good it felt to have him sitting there needing me. Now I got it. This was what Jim cherished the most and maybe had been afraid to lose, to let go of—feeling needed. Oy. I was brimming with dog-fueled insights, but it wasn’t all good. I had to work hard to let go of new waves of resentment, of the shoulda, woulda, coulda. What was done was done.

  I would find a way to assuage Jim’s fears, if in fact he harbored them, and to make him understand I stood no chance to replace him with the dog or kids because that had never been my intention.