Brute Strength

by Susan Conant

  Lynn, Lynn,

  City of sin,

  You never come out

  The way you went in.

  So far as I knew, Lynn was, in reality, no more sinful than dozens of other Massachusetts communities, and I’d known excellent dog owners who lived there. What made Jensen’s application one of my Hail Marys was that he’d stated that he didn’t believe in fences. Also, he was equally opposed to neutering dogs. Jensen and I spoke briefly.

  ‘All of our dogs are spayed or neutered,’ I informed him.

  ‘I want one that ain’t,’ he said.

  ‘That’s your privilege, but you can’t get one from us.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s the policy of my organization.’ I’d learned long ago that it was a waste of time to elaborate: breeding should be done selectively and seldom; we almost never knew the genetic history of our rescue dogs; we didn’t need to create business for ourselves; and so on. The valid points never convinced an applicant like Irving Jensen; on the contrary, they fueled arguments. I added, ‘Every other reputable rescue group has the same policy.’

  ‘You’re telling me you’re going to kill these dogs before you give one to me?’

  ‘We almost never have to euthanize dogs unless they’re sick and in pain.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said.

  Swear at a volunteer, and you don’t get a dog. I said goodbye and hung up. Jensen had been impossible, anyway. Among other things, although he’d stated on his application that he’d owned a lot of dogs over the years, he’d provided no vet reference. Instead, he’d written: ‘Dogs were healthy. Never needed a vet.’

  Before Rita and Quinn’s fight, in between grooming Sammy and Kimi, I’d replied to applications from a man named Hollis, a woman named Jenna, and a couple called Blatherwicke. The last of my Hail Mary calls was to Eldon Flood, whose application stated that he and his wife, Lucinda, wanted a dog to tag along with them on their farm the way their last dog, a Border collie mix, had done. According to the application, the Floods had no fenced yard, no kennel, and no dog crate. No vet reference was given. Calling the Floods might not even qualify as doing penance. Once they’d talked with me for a few minutes, they’d probably decide on their own to look for a different breed.

  As it turned out, when I reached Eldon Flood, he immediately asked, ‘How much you want for them?’

  ‘There are a few things we need to discuss,’ I said. ‘I see that you want a dog who’ll stay right with you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I gave a detailed explanation of the need to keep malamutes on leash except in fully-fenced areas, the same explanation that appears on the web.

  ‘That’s just if you don’t train ’em right,’ said Eldon Flood.

  Kudos to me! I was patient. I said that I’d been training dogs and showing in obedience since childhood; that two of my malamutes had advanced obedience titles; and that malamutes were radically different from the golden retrievers I’d had previously.

  ‘You gotta understand,’ he said. ‘I got a special knack with dogs. Like a gift, you know? I like the look of this one called Thunder. How much you want for him?’

  ‘I can’t approve your application,’ I said. ‘This is just not the right breed for you. If you want to read up on malamutes and reconsider, you’re welcome to get back to me.’ I gave him my home phone number. ‘But at the moment, I can’t approve your application.’ The phone went dead. At least he hadn’t sworn at me or accused me of murdering dogs.

  As if Rita and Quinn’s fight, the Di Bartolomeos, Irving Jensen, and Eldon Flood weren’t enough, I’d no sooner hung up than that damned Pippy Neff called me. Pippy was a somewhat disreputable malamute breeder who showed her dogs all the time, much to the irritation of those of us who also showed and who did so in the hope of having fun, a hope more easily realized in Pippy’s absence than in her presence. The second I heard her distinctive voice on the phone, I knew what she wanted. Her demands for Rowdy’s stud services had started at a show when she’d pointed at the gorgeous boy and announced, ‘I’m using him.’ As if I had no choice! When Pippy had followed up by calling and emailing me, I’d put her off by saying, truthfully, that I’d need information about Rowdy’s proposed mate: health clearances, hip and eye certifications, the results of a recent thyroid test, and so forth. While failing to send any such thing, Pippy had continued to plague me.

  ‘Pippy,’ I said, ‘I’ve told you that no one uses Rowdy until I’ve seen clearances. Send them, and we’ll talk.’

  ‘Goddamn it, there’s nothing wrong with Nifty’s hips,’ she said. Some people sing off-key. Pippy somehow managed to speak off-key. ‘You’ve seen Nifty.’ Tundrabilt’s Pretty Nifty. Pippy Neff used an egotistical system of nomenclature: Tundrabilt’s Perfectly Neat, Power Now, Pretty Nifty, and so on. Indeed, Positively Narcissistic. I had, in fact, seen Nifty in the show ring. I’d also tried to look her up in the online database maintained by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals. The database, available at http://www.offa.org, has information about eye exam results and other health matters, but OFA is principally known for its ratings of hip X-rays. Nifty’s absence didn’t necessarily mean that she had hip dysplasia. My guess was that Pippy had been too cheap to send hip X-rays to OFA or hadn’t had X-rays done at all. I’d have bet anything that she hadn’t paid for PennHip, which is an alternative system for evaluating hips. It’s excellent and costly.

  ‘Pippy, we’ve been through this,’ I said. ‘My mother was a breeder, and one thing she drilled into me is that any stud dog I own is unavailable unless I see those clearances. This has nothing to do with Nifty. She’s beautiful. She looks sound, but I don’t have X-ray vision. It’s just a policy I have. No exceptions. It’s nothing personal.’

  Pippy was obnoxious, but she wasn’t stupid. ‘Well, I take it personally. It’s an insult to Nifty, and it’s an insult to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry if you take it that way. That’s not how it’s meant.’

  ‘You entered on Saturday?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Rowdy and Sammy are both out of coat. But I might go anyway.’

  ‘If you do, we’ll talk,’ she said.

  Threat or promise?

  THREE

  In case any of my rejected applicants decided to call back and argue with me, I got out of the house. The rain had stopped, and the dogs and I needed exercise. My cousin Leah was supposed to take Kimi running, so Sammy and I set out by ourselves. We live at the corner of Concord Avenue and Appleton Street. At big-dog pace, we’re about twenty minutes from Harvard Square, Fresh Pond, or the Charles River. The square is the dogs’ favorite destination. It offers the delectable combination of a big potential audience and an ample supply of discarded food, but I felt like stretching my legs without having Sammy draw a crowd and try to wolf down trash. On a Saturday afternoon, the trail around Fresh Pond would be thick with off-leash dogs, including dog-aggressive dogs presumably turned loose on the theory that after repeatedly attacking innocent dogs like mine, the miscreants would mull over the folly of their behavior and spontaneously decide to reform: Geez, now that I’ve devoured two Yorkshire terriers, the left ear of a Lab, and miscellaneous body parts of six or eight other breeds, I’ve come to realize that other dogs are, after all, my dearest friends, and I have vowed henceforth to be Mr Socialization!

  So, Sammy and I headed up Appleton Street toward the river. Our block of Appleton was once part of a pleasant working-class and middle-class neighborhood, but the area has been glorified by proximity to the ivy-choked league-of-its-own institution from which my cousin Leah was about to graduate. Once you cross Huron and head uphill toward Brattle Street, however, you soon come to big, grand houses that beg to be gawked at. If I’m feeling powerless in real life, I imagine that any house of my choosing will be mine and that my task is to select and reject as I please: the mauve place with twenty or thirty rooms is tempting, but its yard is too small. The creamy-yellow colonial might make my cut if it were set farther from the
street. My dogs certainly do not share this fantasy. Rather, being dogs, they pay closer attention to scent than to sight. What they smell in the vicinity of Brattle Street just has to be money.

  So, Sammy was sniffing a utility pole, and I was making up my mind about selecting or rejecting a hotel-sized brick Victorian when a woman’s voice hailed me. ‘You! With the malamute! Wait up!’

  Caught! Spotted by the owner of the brick house just as I was about to accept it as a gift! Embarrassment practically sent me flying into the air. Sammy, however, rapidly returned me to earth by transferring his attention from the fascinating odors at the base of the utility pole to the tantalizing sight of a somewhat overweight black-and-white female malamute approaching from the direction of Brattle Street. At the human end of the leash was a fit-looking fiftyish woman who broke into a run and called out, ‘Another malamute! Wait!’

  Being half malamute myself, I disobeyed the order. Instead of standing still, I headed toward her and asked, ‘How is yours with other dogs?’

  ‘Fine with males. Yours?’ The woman had shoulder-length brown hair attractively shot with gray. She wore running shoes, tan cords, and a black sweatshirt with red letters across the front that spelled out Dog is my co-pilot. I owned the T-shirt version, which I’d ordered from Bark, a publication accurately self-described as ‘the modern dog culture magazine.’ Because I was afraid that the co-pilot slogan would give offense, I was selective about where I wore the T-shirt. The precaution was ridiculous in the sense that anyone offended by the sentiment would be even more offended by me, unless, of course, I took the time to explain the genuineness of my reverence for all creatures great, hairy, and woofy, but the time required would’ve been days or possibly even weeks, and besides, the average person who hates your T-shirt isn’t going to be interested in listening anyway. There’s a lot of religious intolerance in this world, isn’t there?

  Sammy answered the woman’s question about how he was with other dogs by giving a preparatory head-to-tail wiggle before puffing himself up and issuing a prolonged series of woo-woo-woo-woo-woos. In response, the object of his affection wagged her plump hind end and threw Sammy a lusty come-hither look.

  ‘OK if we walk with you?’ the woman asked. ‘Or do you live . . .?’ She gestured to the brick house.

  ‘I was afraid it was yours,’ I blurted out, ‘and that I’d been caught gaping. Or maybe it is yours?’

  ‘Ours isn’t anything so grand,’ she said.

  ‘Neither is ours,’ I said. ‘We’re at the wrong end of Appleton.’

  ‘So are we. As of last week.’

  ‘The humble end. Not that I’m complaining,’ I said. ‘Welcome to the neighborhood. Sammy and I are heading toward the river. Or maybe Brattle Street. If you—’

  ‘Oh, I love Brattle Street,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve been walking Ulla there and pretending I’ve won a contest and get to pick any house I want. I’m Vanessa Jones, by the way.’

  ‘Holly Winter. And this is Sammy.’

  By then we were moving at malamute speed with the dogs side by side in front of us. Everything was still damp from the rain, and the dogs were investigating the scent that clung to the moisture on the grass and shrubs we passed. Vanessa and I also explored shared interests. When I mentioned Bark, she complimented me on a short essay I’d published there and went on to say that she read my column in Dog’s Life magazine.

  ‘I knew you lived in Cambridge,’ she said. ‘I was hoping to meet you. You don’t mind?’

  ‘Why would I mind?’ I didn’t. On the contrary, I had the happy sense of encountering a kindred spirit. Before long, Vanessa and I had established that she lived only a half block from me. I’d known that the house had sold, but I’d been out of town on the day she and her family had moved in. She’d already met the McNamaras, who were her next-door neighbors. They had a charming puli named Persimmon. I knew them from Appleton Street and also from the Cambridge Dog Training Club. Vanessa had spent most of her life in Vermont, but her husband, Jim, had died of a heart attack during the winter, and she’d wanted to be near her son, Hatch, who was a resident in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, as was Hatch’s fiancée, Fiona. Vanessa’s father, Tom, and her daughter, Avery, lived with her.

  ‘We’ll have to see how that works out,’ she said. ‘My father’s been with me since my mother died, but in Vermont, he had his own little apartment. And then there’s Avery. Oh, my. I sometimes think that life would be easier if my relatives would all turn into dogs, preferably malamutes. Speaking of which, it’s as if these two have been friends for years.’

  After that, we talked malamutes and malamute rescue. Vanessa had always had dogs, but Ulla was her first malamute. ‘She’s sort of a rescue dog,’ Vanessa said. ‘I got her when her original owner died.’

  ‘Do you know anything about her background?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything! Ulla’s owner, Olympia, lived near us. Ulla was bred by a woman named Pippy Neff.’

  I limited myself to saying, ‘Pippy.’ Then I added, ‘I thought Ulla had a familiar look.’

  Vanessa laughed. ‘Aren’t you the soul of tact!’

  ‘Rarely,’ I said.

  For the remainder of what turned into a long walk up and down the side streets off Brattle, we continued to talk about Alaskan malamutes and then drifted to our shared admiration for Jane Austen. In retrospect, I realize that we could hardly have chanced on a more jarring juxtaposition of topics: the most prominent feature of the malamute character, the wild streak, is singularly absent from the civilized society of Jane Austen’s novels. As we were returning home by retracing our route down Appleton Street, we ran into my cousin Leah and Kimi, who were finishing their run. The humidity had turned Leah’s ponytail into red-gold corkscrew curls. Loose tendrils framed her face. Her cobalt spandex clung so tightly to her curves that she was safe running on her own only because she was accompanied by a big dog. When she stopped to say hello, Kimi came to a neat sit at her left side. Ulla had the good manners not to stare at Kimi; the two glanced at each other, and that was that.

  Meanwhile, I introduced Vanessa and Leah. ‘Leah is a senior,’ I said without specifying where. Just as traditional Jews avoid speaking God’s name, so do Cambridge types refrain from uttering the word Harvard aloud. Not that I’m a pure type. I’m just struggling to adapt. ‘Leah is going to Tufts Veterinary School in the fall. Leah, Vanessa and her family have just moved to our block of Appleton Street.’

  For all Leah’s considerable academic accomplishments, she has remained as friendly as ever. Her tendency toward high-handedness is also undiminished. After she and Vanessa had exchanged chit-chat and had admired each other’s dogs, Leah invited Vanessa and her family to have dinner with us the next evening. ‘Holly’s father and stepmother will be there,’ Leah said. ‘You can meet the family.’

  ‘What a lovely invitation,’ said Vanessa. ‘But I’m afraid that I’m committed to making dinner for my own family. My father, my daughter, my son, and his fiancée, Fiona. You don’t want the whole crew.’

  ‘Oh, yes we do!’ insisted Leah, who knew how unpredictable my father was.

  Still, I seconded the invitation. Vanessa accepted but insisted on contributing a salad and dessert. For all I knew, my father, Buck, might act charming. He and my stepmother, Gabrielle, would be stopping on their way home to Maine from Connecticut, where they were attending the memorial service of an ancient personage in the world of golden retrievers, a woman who had been a friend of my late mother’s and whom Buck was scheduled to eulogize. It was possible that whereas other people attending the service would be left with sad thoughts of loss and finality, Buck would emerge energized and cheered, especially because he’d have had a starring role. He tends to be at his most obnoxious when he’s happy. Gabrielle, I reminded myself, was reliably delightful. Fool that I am, I looked forward to the dinner.

  FOUR

  My father’s favorite food is aged venison. By ‘aged’ he means so rotten t
hat cooking it pollutes the house for a week. He also likes game birds peppered with lead, but he’ll settle for non-toxic shot. Fortunately, he and Gabrielle often arrive from Maine with lobster and clams. This time, they were returning from Connecticut, so Steve and I were providing the food, which would have to suit Vanessa’s family and Leah as well. Around here, it’s become increasingly impossible to plan a meal because almost everyone has a major food restriction. At the moment, Leah was a pesco-ovo-lacto vegetarian: fish, eggs, and milk, but no meat. Some member of Vanessa’s family was bound to be lactose intolerant or allergic to shellfish or committed to consuming no white foods or nothing but local produce. It often seems as if the only universally acceptable menu would consist of one course after another of distilled water, but there are probably people who’d object on grounds of health, ethics, or politics. Thank God for the Arctic heritage of Alaskan malamutes. If the entire US population shared the malamute’s genetically programmed determination to ward off starvation, it would be a lot easier than it is now to have friends in to dinner. You’d just throw any kind of old garbage at your guests, and they’d gulp it down and love you forever.

  In the hope of pleasing everyone, I had bought a leg of lamb and had made a trip to Watertown for Armenian goodies, including hummus, taramasalata, and lamejuns – Armenian pizzas – with and without meat. At about six o’clock on Sunday evening, Leah had just put a big rectangular spinach and cheese pie – spanakopita – into the oven and was cleaning up her work area. It was typical of her to invite dinner guests and then redeem herself by laboring over a work-intensive dish.

  ‘Now Leah, remember,’ I said. ‘Do not mention Steve’s fishing trip to my father!’

  Steve mimicked me in a voice two octaves higher than his normal bass: ‘Do not mention Steve’s fishing trip!’

  In pure-bred dogdom, when your dog has a big win, or even a small one, or earns a title or otherwise accomplishes something, you’re expected to brag. Otherwise, people feel that you’re disrespecting your dog by failing to show proper pride in his achievements. In that spirit, let me say that although Steve hasn’t had a win or earned a title beyond his DVM, his existence merits a boast. He is tall, lean, and muscular, with curly brown hair and eyes that change from green to blue and back again. Also, he’s a great vet. As if all that weren’t enough, he goes out of his way not to create housework and sometimes even helps with it. At the moment, he was unloading the dishwasher.