by Meg Donohue
John, my boyfriend back then, didn’t support the career shift either. He’d been cagey regarding his feelings about animals during the early months of our relationship, but I sometimes believed I saw his well-tended hair rise a quarter of an inch when I spoke of my dog, Toby. It was like he was literally bristling—like a dog raising his hackles when he senses danger. John was needy in the way of a lot of well-coiffed, handsome men; I don’t think he could handle sharing the limelight, or even just my affection, with a dog. So, in a way, I’d known John and I were ill matched almost from the start, but once I embrace someone, it’s hard for me to let go. I began to think of John’s forthright self-centeredness as a lovable quirk, not unlike when my paternal grandfather died and at his funeral I found myself speaking fondly of his unapologetically thunderous burps.
Still, everything was relatively fine until what I’ve come to think of as the Great and Terrible Stir-Fry Incident of 2013.
Five months ago, John started letting himself into my apartment to make dinner for me on the nights I worked late. John, to his credit, was an excellent cook, and the whole dinner thing was a nice idea—in theory. In reality, I came home to a mess in the kitchen and the sound of Toby barking frantically from my bedroom.
“Your dog was giving me the hairy eyeball while I cooked,” John told me by way of explaining why he’d shut Toby away in the bedroom. He’d just dumped a pot of spaghetti into a colander and steam rose up behind him from the sink.
I’d never liked how John referred to Toby as “your dog,” but I was also aware that not everyone loved dogs the way I did and that dating someone who was not exactly like me was probably a healthy route to take. Also, I assumed John’s hairy-eyeball comment was a joke. I mean, Toby had the standard canine, hair-around-the-eyeballs thing going on, but his expression rarely strayed from one of trusting good cheer.
The second time I came home to Toby barking from the bedroom, I understood that John had not been joking. Or at least that I no longer found him funny. John pretended to be baffled by my anger, but I could see something callous and hard lurking behind his innocent expression. His actions were a power play, I realized—an ultimatum. John wanted me to choose his side, to pick him over Toby, to prove that I loved him more than I loved my dog. His lack of self-esteem was sad, and as a mental health professional my heart went out to him, but as his girlfriend it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I was dating an asshole.
Still, I kept my cool. I tried to explain Toby’s state of mind to John. “Toby is lonely and confused,” I said. Except for the high school girl who stopped by to walk him in the afternoon, he was on his own all day. “He’s probably underfoot when you get here because he’s hoping for a quick walk . . . or at the very least, a little attention.”
It broke my heart to think of the disappointment and maybe even dread that my dog might have felt when the front door opened to reveal John instead of me walking in at the end of the day. Toby was fourteen years old—he didn’t deserve that sort of treatment.
I’d had two dogs before Toby—a beautiful, high-energy spaniel named Bella followed by a dignified white shepherd named Star. I’d loved those dogs, really loved them, but Toby was different. I picked him out from the shelter when I was nineteen years old. According to the information sheet attached to his kennel, he was a flat-coated retriever mix, weighed sixty-four pounds, and was about one year old. I liked the idea of adopting a dog that was beyond the puppy stage, a dog with an unknown span of life under his belt. It seemed only fair; he didn’t know what he was getting into with me either. Toby looked solid and strong, his black wavy hair spilling over his paws like bell-bottoms, and the clever, playful spark in his chocolate-brown eyes caught mine immediately. When I opened his kennel gate, he ran to me, and a wonderful lightness expanded in my chest. I remember that I laughed out loud, the sound mixing in with the din of barking dogs. The only thing missing from the scene was orchestral music soaring to a grand, heart-swelling crescendo. That’s how big that moment felt to me, and still feels years later, looking back on the memory: the moment I chose Toby and he chose me.
And so Toby became my constant companion throughout that strange terrain of my twenties when I was trying to get my bearings in the new world of adulthood, no longer living at home, wading through boyfriends and college and graduate school and then my rewarding but draining work as a grief therapist. Toby was there through all of it, a goofy, loving friend who kept my spirits up. Boyfriends had come and gone, but Toby had remained.
I have a theory that you get the right dog, the dog you need, for a particular stage of your life. Bella and Star were the dogs I needed in my childhood—comforting, undemanding, and sweet. Toby was the dog I needed to help me break out of my shell as I became an adult. He provided humor and heart and unwavering friendship, never letting me retreat too far into myself. We understood each other, Toby and I. In many ways, I thought of him as my dog soul mate.
I’d never explained to John exactly what Toby meant to me, but really, did I have to? It was my apartment, my rules, my dog. I told John in no uncertain terms not to lock up Toby again.
So when I returned home a third time to the smell of stir-fry in the kitchen and the sound of Toby barking in the bedroom, my frustration boiled over into rage. I raced down the hall, glaring at John as I passed the kitchen.
Toby stopped barking the moment I opened the bedroom door. It may seem strange to describe a dog as charismatic, but that was Toby—high-spirited, gregarious, brimming with good-humored mischief. How could anyone not love him? He had a wide, handsome head, bright, intelligent eyes unclouded by age, and soft black fur that was lately streaked with gray. Now his lip was caught on his gum, exposing a couple of teeth, giving him a funny, disheveled look that made me laugh despite the fact that a moment earlier I’d been fuming. Toby seemed a bit offended by my laughter, or more likely at having been shut in the bedroom, and shook out his fur with a proud little swagger. I grabbed his leash and headed for the door without a single word to John. No amount of perfectly stir-fried, teriyaki-coated baby corn was worth this bullshit.
We were a block away from my apartment when my cell phone rang.
“We’re done!” Lourdes said by way of greeting. She and her husband, Leo, had finally finished construction on the rental unit below their house and were about to post the listing on craigslist. She’d been trying for months to convince me to embrace the idea of starting my own practice, but to do it in San Francisco, where, in her words, “the hippie-dippy Bay Area animal lovers would flock to pet bereavement counseling like hipsters to hand-brewed coffee shops.” She’d never been much of a fan of John’s, and ever since she and Leo had entered the home stretch of renovating their rental unit, her effort to get me to move had reached a fever pitch.
As I listened to my friend launch into one final push to convince me to take the apartment, I glanced down at Toby. His hips seemed a bit stiff, but his gait, if slower, was as happy as ever. When we reached the corner, he looked up over his shoulder at me. Where to next? his eyes, alight with enthusiasm, seemed to ask. Let’s go! Already, he’d forgotten his confinement in the bedroom and was eager to move on. That’s the wonderful thing about dogs—they’re always looking forward.
What am I doing with John? I asked myself. Why am I still working at the hospital? At thirty-two years old, I’d never lived anywhere but Philadelphia. I’d been in the same apartment, blocks from my parents’ house, for ten years. I’d been treading water, embedded in routine, for so long—waiting, but for what, exactly?
On the phone, Lourdes had reached her final and most desperate apartment-selling point—the energy-efficient toilet. “There are two levels of flush,” she was saying. “One is for pee, and the other—”
“Lourdes,” I interrupted, laughing, “I’ll take it.”
“What? You’re not dying to know about the second level of flush? This kind of information isn’t going to make or break your decision?” She paused. “Shut the fuc
king front door. Did you just say that you’ll take it?”
Lourdes’s excited squeal was so loud that Toby froze, cocked one silky salt-and-pepper ear toward the sky, and barked.
FOUR MONTHS LATER, here I am, knocking on Lourdes’s door. If you must come down with a touch of agoraphobia, I highly recommend doing it in an apartment where your best friend from college lives upstairs, safely within the confines of a fence that separates the property from the city sidewalk.
The moment Lourdes opens the door, her poodle, Giselle, races forward and wedges herself between my legs. I steady myself on the doorframe and laugh.
“Well, it’s happened,” Lourdes says, staring at her dog. “The girls have finally convinced her that she’s a pony.”
I kneel down to Giselle’s level and smooth back the funny bouffant of ginger hair between her ears. It springs right back into place. Giselle is gangly and cheerful and smart and I imagine that if she spoke she would sound just like Julia Child, whose television show my mother watched in reruns throughout my childhood. Her tongue shoots out and I turn my head, laughing, so it lands on my cheek.
Lourdes takes in our little exchange, amused. “Wine?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
At the kitchen table, Lourdes’s daughters, Portia and Gabby, are drawing on a long sheet of white butcher paper that is anchored by two plastic bins of crayons and two glass-sphere terrariums filled with dirt and succulent plants. The succulents are cuttings from the rows of raised beds that Lourdes herself built in the backyard.
If I love my downstairs apartment for its tidy quiet, I love Lourdes and Leo’s house for its energy, the jazz rhythms of family life. It’s a pale slip of a home that all winter long seemed in danger of having its edges erased by fog and rain. There one moment, gone the next. It looks like a modest Victorian from the front, but they gutted the inside a couple of years ago and now there is an open floor plan with concrete floors and an entire wall of glass that can be folded like an accordion when the weather allows. The glass wall is closed today. In the distance, fog clings to the steep, dark tilt of Sutro Forest, a hint of sunset searing its edges. I feel a twinge of vertigo and look away.
“Hi, girls,” I say, heading toward the table.
“Mags!” Gabby squeals. She’s three and recently had her first haircut; her round, angelic face is newly framed by the jet-black bowl cut favored by serial killers.
“Hi, Maggie!” says Portia, who is seven.
Lourdes opens a bottle of wine and fills two glasses. In the decade since college—despite marriage and children and years of running her own landscape design business—it seems to me that Lourdes hasn’t changed a bit. Her wardrobe is still a study of efficiency—a rotation of button-down shirts, usually in a bright check print, and dark jeans that now have knees rubbed threadbare from gardening. She still wears her shiny black hair tucked behind her ears and puts on thick black glasses every day because she can’t be bothered with contacts. On someone else, those glasses might seem severe, but Lourdes has one of those faces that can never appear anything but affable. Even when she’s unleashing a torrent of sarcasm, cursing up a blue streak, my friend’s dark eyes never lose their velvety warmth.
She finishes pouring the wine and holds out one of the glasses. “Good day at work?”
I nod, taking a long sip of wine. “I just had the final session with one of the first patients I saw when I moved here.”
“Therapy,” Lourdes responds, shaking her head. She’s flicking through the pages of one of the supermarket coupon books she loves, stopping occasionally to rip something out or circle a deal with a green crayon. “It’s a horrible business model. If you’re good at what you do, you lose clients.”
“Patients,” I correct.
“Is a virtue I don’t have.” She looks up and releases a catlike grin.
“Add it to the list,” I say. “How’s the garden project?”
Lourdes had put her landscape design business on hold after Gabby was born, but she recently became involved with Portia’s elementary school’s efforts to plant a vegetable garden in a corner of the school yard. Accustomed to designing elaborate gardens with only a homeowner as a guide, she’s grown increasingly frustrated by the slow decision-making pace of the large committee of parents assigned to the project.
By way of answer, she lofts her eyebrows and takes a gulp of wine. We sometimes communicate in sips of alcohol, a little trick we established in college.
Gabby runs belly-first over to me and clambers onto my lap. She’s not, generally speaking, a calm child—I once caught her crouching beside Giselle’s bowl, squirreling dog food in her cheeks with a sheen of manic glee in her eyes—but she seems to enjoy sitting on my lap and staring at my face. Her whole body stills as she studies me. The experience is both comforting and unnerving. She is so full of trust, so fearless. It makes my throat tighten.
“Hello, Gabby,” I say.
“Hi, Mags,” she lisps. And then, with a casual motion that reminds me of the time a guy on a bus in Philadelphia opened his blazer to show me rows of stolen iPhones, Gabby lifts her shirt to reveal that her entire belly is covered with Trader Joe’s stickers. She pulls one off and hands it to me. She doesn’t even wince when she rips that sticker off her skin, that’s what a wonderful little bruiser she is.
“Oh, thank you. I’ve always felt I was missing something riiiight”—I press the sticker to the tip of my nose—“here.”
Gabby laughs. Lourdes watches as her daughter lowers herself off my lap and begins dancing around the table. There’s classical music playing, something so mild and soothing I’d hardly noticed it before, but Gabby is jerking her shoulders and shaking her hips.
“She dances like her father,” Lourdes says ruefully, causing me to snort into my wineglass. “All right, chiquitas. Time for pajamas.” Portia and Gabby groan, but scamper out of sight. We hear their feet stomping up the staircase and then the sound of drawers opening and shutting.
Giselle trots over and sets her head on my lap. She’s an affectionate dog, easy to love. When Toby and I first arrived at Lourdes’s house after three days of cross-country driving in a cramped rental car, Toby and Giselle had immediately begun racing around the small yard together. Well, “racing” is a bit of a stretch—Toby wasn’t doing much racing by then. But the dogs had bowed to each other and wagged their tails and batted each other with their paws, teeth merrily exposed. I’ve always believed there is something infectious about dogs at play, and, sure enough, Toby and Giselle’s happy energy cast a spell over our arrival. By the time Lourdes led me down the stepping-stone path to the bright blue apartment door tucked away at the back of their lovely home, the seeds of doubt that had sprouted in my mind as I’d driven across the country were gone.
I’m still petting Giselle, but I must lose track of where I am for a moment because next thing I know I’m reaching into my pocket and scooping out a handful of my evening vitamins. I toss them into my mouth and wash them down with a gulp of wine.
“What was that?” Lourdes asks.
“What?”
“Nobody told me we’d reached the pill-popping portion of the evening.”
“Sometimes a girl needs a little pick-me-up.”
“Maggie.”
My laugh has a tinny ring. “It’s just vitamin C.”
“That’s a lot of vitamin C.”
Upstairs, someone shrieks. I watch Lourdes as she holds her breath, head tilted, debating if she has to go up and intervene. When the sound doesn’t escalate, she sighs audibly and sinks deeper into her seat. We clink our glasses together and I think maybe she’s forgotten about the vitamins but then she says:
“When Leo gets home we should take this party on the road. Head down to Kezar’s for a dirty martini.”
I sip my wine, hoping it will do for an answer. She raises an eyebrow.
“Moment of truth,” she says. “What’s the tally?”
I take a deep breath. “In today’s p
erformance of The Agoraphobic Therapist,” I say, “the title role will be played by Maggie Brennan.” Then, to the tune of “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent, I begin to sing. “How do you measure / three months at home? In Netflix—In Amazon / In Google—In cups of coffee . . .”
Lourdes laughs. “Really, Maggie. How many days?”
“Ninety-eight.”
She’s my best friend, and I’ve told her everything. Well, not everything. I haven’t told her that I’m worried about my practice, that if there isn’t a serious uptick in the number of patients I see, I’ll need to dip into my savings to pay rent. Worse, that I’m afraid I might be a fraud—after all, a therapist who doesn’t have her shit together is like a hairstylist with a bad perm. Or that I seem to be having trouble saying good-bye to my patients, even the ones that I know I’ve helped, and it’s not just that I’m concerned about the loss of income. Some things are too hard to say out loud, even to Lourdes. It would be all too easy for the stickiness of our dual relationship—landlady/renter and best friends—to become like tacky floor between us; I fear that we would eventually keep our distance from each other, not wanting to get stuck.
But she does know that I haven’t left the property in months, and she knows about my family history. She knows that I’ve recently graduated from neat freak to germaphobe, that I worry about the illnesses my patients might introduce into my little haven, that I’ve been steadily working my way through a stockpile of vitamins and medicinal teas and antibacterial soap. Really, what choice do I have but to be vigilant? What would I do if I caught something? Even my good friend Google would have trouble locating a doctor willing to make a house call for less than a small fortune. Still, I normally remember to keep my vitamin intake to a minimum around Lourdes; I try to exercise restraint.