My sister and I were fiercely bonded, my love for her always all-consuming, but mixed in with my adoration of her was a fearful respect for her dominance. She picked the movies, got first go at the front seat of the car, chose the restaurant, told the story, got the laughs. And in later years, she got the guys, too.
Even as an adult, I seemed to gravitate toward strong, bossy women, or they to me. For as long as I could remember, I had friends that called the shots—whether that meant I always played the boy in make-believe, or, in older relationships, that I was usually the designated driver or picked up the tab more frequently. It had never really occurred to me that there was a different way. That I might assert my needs or opinions a little louder; that compromise might be a nice solution for everyone involved.
Felicity’s and my usual route crossed a second busy thoroughfare, the final main artery twisting into the more remote hills above. Sometimes we’d wait up to five minutes for a lull in the traffic, darting as quickly as possible to the far side of the street. It was my least favorite part of the walk, and not just because this was the spot in which “it” had happened.
A month before, we were heading back down the hill toward the house and paused as always at the crossroad. Waiting there, I had loosely straddled Felicity, my legs on either side of her wide back. At that time, she’d only worn the pinch collar and a gentle lead around her snout. I was stroking her head, passing the time until the unbroken procession of cars slowed long enough for us to cross, when I heard the patter of paws on pavement and a delighted-sounding yip.
I saw a flash of black under Felicity and realized that, in the space of a moment, she’d taken this little dog’s neck in her jaws. A geyser of piss shot a foot in the air; the puppy was bloody before I could react. I pulled on the leash to the point that I was nearly sitting on the pavement, but Felicity could not be interrupted. She had the little black Lab by its neck, and she was shaking it. Hard. In my panic, I didn’t think of the pepper spray in my fanny pack, carried for occasions like this one. I couldn’t make myself big enough, or my voice loud enough, to make it stop. There was blood everywhere.
A man had come running toward us and reached into the fray, pulling Felicity bodily off his pet as if by magic, through some superhuman surge of adrenaline. The puppy, once released, went slinking back up the hill, trailing blood behind him. The man was panting. Felicity licked her lips and sat down.
“You’d better go check on your dog,” I croaked.
It took the better part of a month to settle the fallout from the attack. Only one thing was sure: the puppy was off-leash and Felicity was not, so his owners and not the Benjamins were at fault. That is not to say that the owners did not want compensation for the vet bills—the cost of the stitches, the ointment, the antibiotic, and the Clomicalm for the pup’s shredded nerves all added up to a hefty sum.
The Benjamins refused to contribute. This was awkward for me, as I had to pass the victim’s house every time we went on a walk. And every time, the puppy barked from where he was tied up on the porch, Felicity tensing in what seemed like excitement or anticipation. The owner told me one day, as I tried to slink by the house unnoticed, that their little dog wasn’t the same after the attack.
The subject of my own shredded nerves never came up; they didn’t ask how I was feeling following the incident, and I felt ashamed to initiate a conversation about my anxieties. I thought that, by them not asking, it was assumed that I was fine—that I should be fine. That I could handle it. Oh, how I wanted to be that strong and imperturbable.
Guilty or not, Felicity’s gentle lead was immediately discarded in favor of the muzzle and shock collar. Mrs. Benjamin demonstrated her new and distinctly not-gentle accessories the next time I arrived to walk her.
The muzzle fit snugly around her snout, preventing her from doing anything more than a pathetically restricted pant, the tip of her tongue protruding as much as the thick canvas sheath would allow. The shock collar came with a remote that I carried in my hand. It had a dial, one to ten, which dictated the intensity of the shock that I delivered via a large black button. Not something to press inadvertently. Not something I ever wanted to press intentionally, for that matter.
My slumber party with Felicity fell over a weekend, and I didn’t have any other dogs to walk or pets to visit. Few weekends were as free as this one; usually I had a couple of drop-in visits for dogs and cats whose owners worked weekends or were out of town.
After our morning walk, blessedly devoid of any other dogs or deer or potential for disaster, I settled down on the back porch with Felicity at my feet and read a novel. I was just as happy to spend the Saturday in solitude; I presumed Ian had plans of his own that didn’t require my presence at the apartment. No doubt he was busy populating the folds of our slipcovered armchair with spit-dampened sunflower seed husks.
In the afternoon, Felicity and I dozed in the den. I was curled into a tight ball on one end of the couch, Felicity in a heap at the other. Despite my best intentions to get her second walk in during daylight hours, we overslept, and the sun was already waning by the time she was strapped up and ready to go.
Walking up the stone steps, I recoiled at a giant garden spider weaving its web between the rosemary and a low-hanging branch of the Japanese maple. The mantra “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. And spiders” ran through my head as it always did in the event of a close encounter.
Still shuddering, I unlatched the gate. When Felicity tore past me, I fell and hit my head. From the ground I could see her shadowy form darting through the evening traffic, the headlights illuminating her race to the far side of the road. Only when I was back on my feet could I see what she was after.
The other dog’s owner had dropped the leash, screaming shrilly as Felicity chased her golden retriever around the cars. Felicity seemed utterly unaware that the muzzle prevented her from truly getting at her victim; the retriever, on the other hand, got a defensive snap and a snarl in when it could.
“Control your fucking dog,” the woman was screaming at me. I was weaving through the cars, which had stopped to observe the strange scene unfolding around them. As traffic started to back up, drivers farther from the scene began to honk impatiently.
I was pressing the shock collar remote repeatedly, the knob cranked to deliver the maximum voltage to the box around Felicity’s neck. But she couldn’t be distracted. She didn’t even seem to register the shocks.
Around and around we went, me chasing Felicity, Felicity chasing the terrified retriever, the woman screaming like her dog was being gutted before her eyes. Finally, I got a foot on Felicity’s trailing leash. My adrenaline gave me power enough to drag the charging shepherd to me, though I was shaking badly. It was clear that the woman’s dog was unharmed, thanks to the stopped cars and Felicity’s secure muzzle. But the retriever—like me—was trembling visibly, traumatized by the sudden and unrelenting pursuit of the bigger, overtly aggressive dog at my side. The owner appeared ready to murder me with her bare hands, as if it were me and not my canine companion that had given chase.
“I am so sorry,” I stammered. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Control your fucking dog!” the woman spat over her shoulder, as she set off up the hill.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I called after her, my voice trailing off at the obvious futility of my broken-record apology.
The cars had started moving again, now that the spectacle had ceased. I waited my turn to cross back over to the house, taking Felicity back through the gate, down the steps, and into the entryway where’d we’d been only moments before, when we were intact and still innocent of all charges.
Biscuit had been anything but aggressive—to humans, squirrels, birds, rats, or other dogs. My parents told the same tired joke over and over, that if someone tried to rob us, she’d probably lick the thief to death. The only things she snapped at were the bees that buzzed in her face as she dozed in the shade of our heavily wooded backyard.
When I removed Felicity’s muzzle, I could see the retriever had gotten a few good bites in on her face. She was bleeding between the eyes and under her right ear. For my part, I had scraped an elbow and a knee, and a tender lump was rising on my temple, right at my hairline.
“All right, you unbelievably bitchy beast,” I said wearily. Using a dampened paper towel and soap, I cleaned the puncture wound. Felicity was like a different dog, completely calm and licking my hands as I cleaned her up, as though I were simply caressing her face and the events of the previous ten minutes had never even happened. I dressed the wounds with Neosporin, wiping the residue on my jeans.
“What are your parents going to say about this?”
I dreaded that conversation, though I knew it was unavoidable. I’d been cleared of any wrongdoing or negligence in the case of Felicity versus the off-leash puppy, but it was still a strike against our collective record—Felicity’s and mine, together as a dog-and-walker unit. I suspected that there were not three strikes in this game, and that the events that had just unfolded at street level would mean the end of these walks with my selectively ferocious companion.
And I was right.
After the second attack, I still spent the night with Felicity. We had naps on the couch, and I continued to share the guest bed with her. The Benjamins still left me food in the fridge, though I perceived a distance in their once-warm notes. This was likely projection on my part, as I anxiously looked for exclamation points, smiley faces, any indication that they still held me in high regard. But I never walked Felicity again, the consensus being that I was not strong enough or skilled enough to control her.
I was not alpha enough. All of these things were true, and I resented it bitterly.
Disgruntled as I was about my demotion, I went along with the new arrangement. It was less that I really wanted to be the one putting myself (and all dogs, large or small) in harm’s way so that she could be well-exercised, and more that I hated to be deemed inadequate in any way. Especially in this way. In my most honest self-recriminations, I acknowledged that I was always the pushover, even in adulthood. Even when it came to dogs. Even when it came to roommates.
My parents—and everyone else I told about the situation—asked why in the world I didn’t just walk away. The money, they said, couldn’t possibly be worth the bullshit.
And they were right. The money wasn’t really the point, ultimately, though I sorely needed the income from this client. The loss of her regular weekly walks had put a significant dent in my monthly balance, which forced me to refactor what at the apartment I could jettison in the aftermath of this pay cut. We didn’t have cable, using old-fashioned rabbit ears on the ancient TV I’d found on Craigslist for $20. I was still relying on pirated Internet from the coffee shop by the apartment. I’d drive up and park curbside, taking care of all Internet-based business from the driver’s seat of the car. There was little fat we could cut out of the current arrangement. I wasn’t willing to compromise on power or hot water.
Money entirely aside, I kept up the overnights when the request arose because I couldn’t abandon Felicity entirely. For better or worse, she was subject to owners who addressed her desire to munch other dogs to death by trussing her up and attempting to shock her into submission. I hoped, perhaps foolishly, that my love for her might in some small way offset the trauma of their approach. Sad as it was, she was the closest thing I had to a friend at that point, and I knew I’d miss her too much if I quit the client altogether.
The Benjamins enrolled her in a highly reputable—and appropriately expensive—training program for aggressive dogs. It was with an unbecoming sense of schadenfreude that I learned Felicity took off after another dog at one of the classes and pulled Mrs. Benjamin down, dragging her for a short distance and cracking two of her ribs in the process. Apparently she wasn’t alpha female enough for Felicity either.
After that accident, she seemed to concede that Felicity’s previous transgressions weren’t my fault. She never said as much, but the rapport between us became markedly less chilly. I liked to think that she understood that no one—neither she nor I nor anyone else—could be expected to easily bring to heel an enraged eighty-pound dog that, despite her bedroom eyes and propensity for spooning, was still an animal. With all the accompanying natural instincts for hunting and establishing dominance. And resisting electrocution.
Perhaps, and this was pushing my luck, she finally understood that Felicity couldn’t be controlled. Not by anyone of normal strength and a reasonable aversion to canine torture. If nothing else, we had something in common; we were both victims of Felicity, and her insatiable penchant for mayhem. And we both loved that dog immeasurably, no matter what harm she did.
In the end, it wasn’t an alpha female who changed Felicity at all. It was Tom, my mentor and the one who had introduced me to Felicity and the Benjamins in the first place. He’d walked her long before I ever came on the scene, before the muzzle and the shock collar and our many misadventures together. He, too, believed in the power of love and a soft touch. But unlike me, he put his faith into action and blew us all away with his impossibly quick rehabilitation of our irascible bully.
After mere months under Tom’s careful tutelage—without the use of a choke or pinch collar, and certainly not the shock collar, or any other form of negative reinforcement—Felicity was riding in his van with other dogs and romping about out on leash-and violence-free group walks. This, the same dog who had nearly killed a puppy, muzzle-jumped an innocent retriever, and mangled her owner’s rib cage.
Thrilled as I was by this transformation, I’d be a big liar not to admit that I wished it had been me who brought our girl back from the dark side. I had the pure, unadulterated desire to make her happy. But actually achieving that required skills I simply didn’t possess. At least not yet. The question was whether I could learn to be as assertive as I needed to be. And whether I could learn fast enough. My success in this line of work depended on it. While I wasn’t yet an old dog, per se, it was a hell of trick for me to pick up after so many years of being carefully and comfortably submissive.
The alpha in me, it seemed, remained ever elusive, both in matters professional and personal.
To: “Sis”
Subject: Pizza-face thanks you
Sister mine,
I got my first shipment of Proactiv today. Thank you for this! My face is just too awful to bear—I can’t even touch it, it’s so bad. Truly a pizza face. Until the medication works its magic, I am thinking about wearing one of those Phantom of the Opera masks—except I think my jaw would still be exposed. Maybe a traditional paper sack would work best? I promise I’ll pay you back. Do you think I am allergic to dog saliva? I’m probably allergic to having no money. Maybe the pharmacist could prescribe me a roll of twenties … I’m going to look into it.
Lindsey
CHAPTER SEVEN
Desperate Measures
My cell phone’s musical ringtone jarred me from sleep. Cheerful as it might have sounded to the untrained ear, it had started inciting in me a physical response. A tensing, or a bracing, in recognition that there could be nothing but bad news on the line. This was likely due to the fact that for every kindly call I got from a
family member or, even more rarely, an old friend, there were dozens coming in concerning this dog or that appointment that required quick thinking, flexibility, and light-on-my-feet troubleshooting. Hence my Pavlovian response to the ringing phone.
Considering that the sun was barely up and I’d been fast asleep, I was hardly primed for any feats of problem-solving prowess. Before answering the incoming call, I cleared my throat hard, giving my voice a few practice runs. I always sound phlegmy and hung-over in the morning, whether that’s actually the case or not. Either way, I didn’t need to give my clients the impression that I was answering the phone in bed, still half-asleep. Even though I was, on both counts. I didn’t want the person on the other end of the line to free associate toward unbrushed teeth and rumpled pajamas.
“Uhhhahhheeeeaaaaooooo.” I cleared my throat again. “Good morning. Good MORNing!” I flipped open my phone.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, hi! It’s Sally, Tucker and Abbie’s mom.”
Their puppy profiles popped into my head automatically. Tucker and Abbie, Border collies. She’s purebred; he’s a mix. She’s high-strung; he’s just hyper.
“Sally, hi!”
“Sorry to call so early. I need to cancel Tucker and Abbie’s walk today. By the time I remembered I should call you last night, it was way too late. I’ll pay for the late cancellation.”
“It’s okay! No worries.” I was way too nice. Cancellations were a pain and could wreak havoc on a carefully scheduled day of visits, but it was pretty cool when they were late enough to warrant payment. I felt bad enforcing the penalty, though, and rarely held my clients to it out of sheer codependency. Especially in this case, when Abbie and Tucker were my first visits of the day and didn’t throw much else off schedule.
“Abbie’s had a terrible accident. She jumped out of the living room window yesterday before I got home from work. I found the screen popped out, and Abbie was down on the patio just covered in blood. Even after the stitches and medication, she’s in pretty bad shape, so I’m going to take her in to work with me for the rest of the week.”
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