Initially, I rationalized keeping Rhiannon, my close friend and obedience champ. But then I worried that she might feel threatened by Gulliver as he grew older, just the way she now felt threatened by Tia. And exuberant Tia—who knew if she could be reliable with other dogs? I began a campaign among other breeders I knew, looking for a different spot for each dog, but no one would take them. I did not dare look to place them in the world of pet owners. How could I give away a dog that was unpredictable with aggression, and who had fought so viciously? I could not guarantee safety with other dogs or, perhaps eventually, with other people.
And then, miraculously it seemed, the dogs calmed down and accepted each other once again. One day, they didn’t seem so angry, and so after a week of watching them, I let them approach each other and sniff, on leash. Little by little, we all began to relax again. In the matter of a few weeks, they were sleeping together on their beds rather than in their crates, they ate from bowls side by side and drank water from the same dish. One day, I watched them run across the lawn, rising and falling in the natural rhythm of two dogs playing together as friends. Gulliver frisked along beside them. Happiness buoyed inside us all. And in this way, an entire year and a half passed, and the trauma of the past fights receded into an old memory.
However, one afternoon in October of 1997, without warning or provocation, the situation exploded once again. Rising in rage, the two girls went at each other with their teeth in a battle of renewed fury. This time it was nearly fatal, with terrible gashes in their snowy coats, deep puncture wounds on their heads and around their eyes. Tia locked onto Rhiannon’s ear, and when I tried to pry it from her mouth, it tore down to the very edge, hanging on by only a single strip of skin. I wrapped her head in a towel, shoved them both into their crates in the minivan, and sped to the vet. I was angry and I was scared. At last I knew I couldn’t save them. For the safety of others, these dogs, who had become so inexplicably aggressive, had to be put down.
I brought Tia in first. I knew it would be harder with Rhiannon. In an instant, Tia died in my arms. I cut off all my emotions and didn’t allow myself to feel. I don’t remember whether I cried, or how I stilled the clamor in my heart.
Then I struggled to lift Rhiannon and carry her in from the car. I refused the help of a vet tech. This was something I had to do on my own, from beginning to end. I sat down on the gray linoleum floor with her body drawn up close across my legs, put my arms around her, and cradled her head. Her ear was torn from her head, her pain obvious. The vet’s needle pricked through her coat and then found the vein in her front leg. As I looked deeply into her eyes, they went blank and her face relaxed. My special dog was gone.
The vet asked me if I wanted the dogs’ ashes after cremation. I was in a state of shock. Already I knew that I would never, ever, forgive myself. I shook my head and regretted the decision, always.
Jim came to pick me up. When we drove home together—abandoning my car in the parking lot temporarily—I couldn’t even cry. I felt dry inside and exhausted. The feeling reminded me of something. At first I couldn’t identify it. Then it came to me: the numbness I had felt at my mother’s death. The day I had stumbled, unable to feel either curb or pavement, to the place I would learn of her suicide. And then, the day we had buried Daisy in the backyard. All the days of loss. Jim put me into bed and pulled up the covers to stop my body from shaking. I pulled the sheet over my head to shut out the light, but I could hear him scrubbing as he began to wash the blood from the fight off the wall.
Gulliver jumped up to curl beside me. I pulled the sheet back and held on to him as tightly as I thought a young pup could bear. Surprisingly, he lay beside me for a very long time, comforting me with the warmth of his body. It would not be the last time he was there as a solace, or helped me continue to go on breathing despite emotion coursing through me. Perhaps I was comforting him as well: over the ensuing days, his fear and loneliness at the disappearance of Rhiannon and Tia was palpable.
The loss of my two beloved dogs was not my only trouble. Shortly before Rhiannon and Tia did their final lethal dance, my mood had plummeted after the rejection of my latest novel by various New York publishers. The positive reviews for my previous work seemed far behind me—not forgotten exactly, but just belonging to another part of my life. After I put Rhiannon and Tia down, I fell into a deep depression, part of a newly diagnosed bipolar disorder. My marriage began to disintegrate in earnest, and I despaired of ever righting myself again.
The world grew black, and I couldn’t shake my negative thoughts. My therapist diagnosed what I was going through as a clinical depression, which was far worse than the intermittent episodes I had experienced as a teenager and then as a new mother. That year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of my mother’s suicide, which had occurred when she was forty-five; I was approaching my own forty-fifth birthday, and I could not face my writing room or my kitchen. I could not look the world in the eye, and sometimes I went back to bed in the morning after I had made breakfast for the kids and driven them to school. In December, I made a suicide attempt, an act that devastated the family and drove Jim even further away. The children were shaken, angry, frightened, certain that they were the ones who must somehow keep me alive, despite my protestations that this was not so. Before the depression ended some seven years later, I tried to kill myself three times; despite intermittent moments of relief, the undertow always sucked at my ankles and threatened to bring me down.
Determined to keep the burden of my desperation from descending on anyone else, in my despair, I began to depend on Gulliver. He was willing to lie beside me on the bed every day for the hours I fled from the world. When friends drew back, repelled by difficulties with my newly diagnosed disorder, when family grew angry with me and let me know exactly how they felt, when Jim finally left me for another woman—Gulliver was the one who was there for me. Though he never had the opportunity to visit a nursing home or make his way through the corridors of a hospital to comfort a sick stranger, he had nevertheless become a therapy dog—my therapy dog—a role Daisy had once played for my mother.
Many days I lay on my bed without getting dressed. I rose only to do things for the children. I had stopped working. My mood had slipped down into a dark, grim “rabbit hole,” as I described it to my psychiatrist. The bedroom was my sanctuary, a place to feel safe, and Gulliver was the sentinel there. When I cried, he licked away the salt of my tears. Sometimes I would spend hours tracing the black spots that were scattered across the bridge of his nose, or beneath his eyes and his muzzle. For Gulliver, there was no such thing as too much bed. Or too much love. In either direction.
Some things would drive me up out of the sheets. Gulliver was my alarm clock for every deadline. 7:00 AM: Time to feed Gulliver and then rouse the boys for school. Noon: Time to let Gulliver out to potty, as he jumped from the bed and stood there staring at me expectantly by the bedroom door. 3:00 PM: Time to pick up the kids and drive them to after-school activities, as Gulliver now waited in the kitchen, ready to jump into the car, where he would then claw his way forward from the backseat, putting his paws onto the armrest of the driver’s seat and craning his neck to stick his nose out my window because the van didn’t have a second row that opened. 5:00 PM sharp: Once again time to feed Gulliver, who circled his food bowl with a variety of groans, and then time to start working on the kids’ dinner, even if it was just basic chicken and rice. 6:00 PM: Check-in, as Gulliver roused himself from his postprandial nap; if time had gotten away from me, he followed me with determination until I stopped wandering through the house aimlessly instead of setting the table and supervising homework.
I tried to keep up appearances, not to let neighbors and friends know how truly desperate I was, but with Gulliver, I held nothing back. And he didn’t mind. His eyes held sadness over my desolation, but he was not deterred by my need. True to his unspoken promise to stick around no matter what, he was there through each day, every day. Nothing about what I was enduring sc
ared or disgusted him. He loved me without reservation, the way I wished my family would. He’d bump up against my legs, leaning his weight against me to reassure both of us, just the way a cat twines itself in and around your calves as a way of showing affection.
I needed his vigilance, as he used his warmth to anchor me to reality. He provided me the comfort a friend, a child, or even a partner could not. He had become my best friend—someone with whom I could commune. Someone who loved me, no matter how far I had fallen or how unattractive I had become, and someone whom I could love back, no matter how imperfect the love I offered. I never disappointed him, and he never disappointed me. He never remembered my faults. He never failed to dial in to my mood.
Unlike my teenagers, who were entrenched in their own adolescent battles, he never fought with me, never mouthed off, and never muttered, “Fuck you!” behind my back. Without realizing it, I was beginning to learn something new and important: the lively countenance of a dog reminds us we are human, yet at a remove from the fact that we are mortal. With Gulliver’s help, I was very gradually beginning to rouse myself from my sheets and do more than just watch the stream of life beyond my bedroom window.
•••
We turned the corner into spring, and I made a greater effort to conquer the depression. Despite my grief over losing Rhiannon and Tia, despite the continuing cycle of mania and depression and the aftermath of the first suicide attempt, and even despite Jim’s absence, I picked up with Gulliver in the ring as the new show season began, with the encouragement of Pat and Dawn. I thought that perhaps getting back into showing Gulliver would help me get out of my own inner world, and so I entered him here and there whenever I could manage.
Showing was one of the only things that encouraged me to move from the psychological adhesive of my bedroom when the children were not around. Still, I made no attempt to start obedience training with him, as it was just too painful to remember how proficient Rhiannon had been.
My new psychiatric medications, designed to treat my bipolar disorder, proved to be a problem. Sleepiness often overwhelmed me, and to my embarrassment, I sometimes dozed off between classes as I waited for ours. Dawn and Pat couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me and grew puzzled and perhaps annoyed.
Despite this, I showed Gulliver intermittently throughout the summer months, piggybacking the two of us onto Pat and John’s attendance as a way of avoiding being by myself or of driving alone while sleepy from medication. But with time, the emotional trauma stemming from the previous aggression between Rhiannon and Tia began to create a problem for Gulliver. Though he had crawled under the big bed during that last fatal fight, he had nevertheless been a witness. And therefore a victim. When he hit adolescence, as we passed other dogs as we walked to and from show rings, he would growl, deep down in his throat, inaudibly—but I could feel the vibration come up the lead into my hand. He was frightened, I realized.
It was an autumn day in September, brilliantly clear and still warm, as California always is at that time of year. We entered the ring feeling confident: he had only another point to go to earn his championship. Stacked up before the judge, I thought he looked great, and I began to hope for the win.
But as we waited in line, another dog made his final circuit in front of the judge and then came up behind us full speed and crowded Gulliver against the ring rope. In defense (perhaps remembering another time, when his housemates had turned on each other), he swung around and lunged at the strange male. He was a big strong dog on a thin show lead, and I barely managed to keep hold of him. The other owner began to yell at me, and I told him it was his own fault for “running up” on us. Etiquette, and common sense, demands that you give the dog in front of you plenty of space. No one likes his territory to be encroached on, especially not show males who are already keyed up. The judge approached and asked the woman who preceded us in the line if she were having trouble with my dog. She answered no, quite honestly, and the man behind me subsided with a grumble. That ended the issue. But not for long.
Sunday, as Gulliver and I entered the ring for his class, I began to worry that—if it happened again—I wouldn’t be able to control him. We were in the same order in line as the day before, the same dog behind us. I took a lot of freeze-dried liver from my pocket to distract him. It was his favorite bait and kept him occupied for a while.
I maintained a good distance between us and the pair behind. But I could feel Gulliver’s tension begin to move up the lead. I kept distracting him as I stacked him. In spite of all this, everything went well. We finished the last go-round, and the judge made his decision. We weren’t the ones he pointed to, but I didn’t even feel let down. I was just grateful and relieved that there hadn’t been another incident. While I was momentarily distracted by negotiating my way out of the ring amid all the other dogs, Gulliver lunged hard against the lead, and it tore through my hands, which were slippery from all the liver I had been handling. With an angry bound, he began to chase the dog who had crowded him the day before, right out of the ring.
Though I was close behind him, I couldn’t keep up. As he ran, there were the usual shouts of “loose dog.” Generally, someone caught the escapee, and that was the end of it, but this day, by the time I found him again, he had bitten the other dog on the haunches. Not a bad bite, but a bite nonetheless. I pulled him from the following show the next day.
After waiting for a while, and then, on the basis of advice from several of my friends in the breed, I reluctantly decided that our career in the show ring was over, even though he needed only that single point to finish his championship. At home, I at last sunk into the mire of an even darker time. Never again would I be in the ring beside him. It was over.
•••
Pat and Dawn were supportive and stood by me faithfully during this time, but they didn’t really understand what I was going through. On the other hand, Myrna Robinson did, a woman I had met nearly as soon as I arrived in California. She was a therapist with a master’s degree in social work, who had divorced in nearly the same year Jim had moved out. She was extremely petite and finely boned, with deeply set dark brown eyes that almost always held a gentle expression. We both served on the boards of two charitable organizations and, as divorced women, had the same amount of free time on our hands. Myrna understood, kept me afloat, came to visit me at the hospital every day. It was Myrna who initially drove me back and forth to my outpatient therapy after my second suicide attempt in the spring of the following year.
She invited me over for dinner, and lunch when she was not working, to go to a movie on a Saturday night, intuiting that it was important for me not to be alone. Though she knew nothing about dogs, Gulliver was always welcome, too, and she stored one of his special sheepskin blankets in her front hall closet, claiming not to care when the space beneath the coats became fragrant with an unmistakable musky odor. Loving Gulliver, it seemed, was another way of loving me.
Even though I had been terrible about returning her phone calls, Pat had been determined to reach me in spite of my depression. She hadn’t tried to talk me into resuming the show circuit with Gulliver once I had pulled him for aggression, even though she and John went on to finish Seren’s and Butler’s championships and to take enormous pleasure in the achievement of doing it themselves rather than with a handler, driving their “bus” from state to state. I didn’t try to explain to her what was going on with me on a personal level. She just intuited and accepted it.
Dawn, too, continued to try to reach out, but I’m not sure she really fathomed the bleak world I had entered. It frustrated her, perhaps, when I turned down her offers for shopping or lunch. Pat didn’t seem to mind so much. She just wanted a chat on the phone, and sometimes a chat was all I could manage. Joy and Dad didn’t call much, so I was reliant on friends instead of family.
•••
I began to date occasionally, and I used Gulliver as the bellwether of the potential success of a new relationship. As the expected guy
came up the front walk to our house, I would let Gulliver loose to greet him, allowing him to bark madly at the intrusion of the stranger. When Tom, Dick, or Harry came quickly to a halt and stood with his hands frozen against his thighs, I knew that they were not dog lovers, let alone dog people, and at the back of my mind was the thought that they had failed Gulliver’s test, no matter how charming they might turn out to be. Their hearts, it would inevitably turn out, were not as warm and open as both Gulliver and I required.
One late afternoon, Brad Clink came to pick me up for our first date. As Gulliver took off and began to bark—his approach steady and fast as a fighter jet—Brad dropped to one knee and opened his arms, welcoming the speedy bullet of a dog straight into his chest. Gulliver flew in on target, all elbows and knees, and began to lick Brad’s face with ecstasy. Brad returned each kiss with a nuzzle of his own, thumping Gulliver happily on the ribs, calling him “a good ole boy.” He’d kissed my dog before he’d even kissed me.
Brad had been divorced for thirteen years, having been thrown into the role of single parent to two daughters when his alcoholic wife left him. His kids were just about the same age as mine, he was crazy about dogs, he loved the movies, and sailing, and the symphony, and all these things we had in common attracted me. After our fourth date, I took the initiative, and, trying not to sound too eager, I asked him out again, even though it had only been two days since we’d last seen each other.
He lived on the other side of the bay, nearly an hour’s drive away, so we had to make a determined effort to get together. Little by little, we both stopped dating anyone else, and now at night I sat on my bed, and with my arm wrapped around Gulliver, talked with Brad on the phone. When we ran out of things to say, we just listened to each other breathe. I met his youngest daughter, and we got along right away, and my kids seemed to accept him, guardedly, as well, telling friends that their mom had a boyfriend. Both Dawn and Pat approved of Brad, and that helped me let him into my heart and into my home. Brad felt their affection and returned it.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 10