by Danzy Senna
The living room was covered in white, like a cartoon vision of heaven. Beulah sat in the middle of the vision, grinning and slapping her tail happily against the floor. Jackie paused at the door, awestruck, imagining for a moment that she had died. Then she realized that Beulah had destroyed the down comforter, the one she’d already stained with pee.
Jackie dropped her purse filled with treats. Beulah wiggled her way across the room to greet her, but when Jackie knelt down and held out her arms, the puppy shrank back, sensing something wrong. She was close enough that Jackie caught her by the scruff of the neck anyway. The puppy’s tail wagged slightly between her legs—she didn’t know if she was being greeted or punished, and Jackie wasn’t sure either. Some small voice told her to control herself. She pulled Beulah close and stared into her face, trying to decide on the best punishment. It was then that she noticed the hole.
It sat directly between the dog’s two nostrils—small but perfectly round, as if a thin nail had been driven through it, or a large needle. It looked almost as if somebody had tried to create a third nostril. Jackie felt first repulsion, then horror, then pity. How had she not noticed it before? She began to cry. She stood up, sniffling, backing away from the mutilated animal, who wagged its tail, panting.
“Who did this to you?” she hissed. “Who did it?”
She had the urge to call Kip, but she knew that was impossible.
The hole reminded her of shackles and chains, of mutilations too deep ever to heal. Jackie threw herself down on the bed and sobbed silently into her pillow. She felt a pain in her chest like a burn, and she was aware that it wasn’t just the hole she was crying over. She whispered to herself, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.” After a moment she heard Beulah’s toenails clicking down the hall. Beulah leaped onto the bed, where she wasn’t supposed to be, and began to lick the salt off Jackie’s cheek. Jackie held her close, gently this time.
The bitch was crazy. She never slept. She never even got tired. At night, Jackie tossed and turned, listening to the incessant click of Beulah’s toenails as she paced up and down the hallway. In Jackie’s half-conscious state, she imagined the dog was supernatural, a laboratory escapee, and that the hole in her nose was where the scientists had inserted crack cocaine.
Later in the week, she asked the veterinarian, a tall WASP, whether the puppy was perhaps abnormal. The vet agreed with Jackie that the hole was mysterious—and disturbing—but she insisted that the puppy was just behaving like a puppy. She simply needed more exercise. She told Jackie about the dog gatherings in the center of the big park up the hill. Rain or shine, winter or summer, the dogs and their owners convened before nine o’clock, when leash laws went into effect, so that the dogs could tire themselves out running.
She took Beulah the next morning, before work at the Swiss bank. The dog owners stood in small clusters, chatting with one another under the cold white sunlight of late fall. Steam rose from their Styrofoam cups and disappeared into the crisp air. The dogs—there must have been at least twenty—swarmed on the grass around them, wrestling, fighting, humping, shitting, sniffing. Beulah pulled Jackie forward, trying to join the fray, wheezing from the pressure of the collar against her esophagus. Up close, the group looked like a cult. They wore expectant believers’ faces, as if they were waiting for a UFO to land, or the Virgin Mary to descend from the clouds, and the manic dogs added an air of helter-skelter.
Jackie unhooked Beulah’s leash and watched her romp over to a black Labrador with a red bandanna around its neck. They did their crotch-sniffing dance, then began to wrestle. Snippets of conversation—stray phrases from a whole new language—floated across the grass toward Jackie:. . . you’ve gotta wait six months to spay . . .
. . . lost his Booda Velvet . . .
Can I have my Kong back, please?
Jackie heard a voice behind her.
“You must be new here.”
She turned around.
The woman before her, swinging a leash in her hand like a lasso, was heavyset, with rosy cheeks and big horsey teeth. She could be a haggard thirtysomething or a young fortysomething. She reminded Jackie of a high school guidance counselor, somebody settled and sexless. She might have been pretty once; now she was practical and solid. She looked as if she had dressed in a hurry: filthy Harvard sweatpants, New Balance sneakers caked in mud or shit, a misbuttoned beige cardigan.
By the woman’s side was the ugliest mutt Jackie had ever laid eyes on. Everything was off. It was barrel-chested, and its legs were meant for a much smaller dog. Its fur was no color at all. One of its eyes was completely opaque—a cataract?—and along its nose ran a raised scar. Its face wore a crazed joker’s grin. It appeared to be more wild boar than dog.
The woman saw the look on Jackie’s face. “I found him this way. About six months ago. Abused, bleeding, stabbed in the eye. Somebody did a real number on him. He had a tag that said ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ with a phone number, but I threw it out. Whoever did this to him didn’t deserve him back.”
“Oh.” Jackie tried to think what else to say. “How good of you.”
The woman stuck out a hand and said, “I’m Nan, by the way. Welcome.”
Jackie introduced herself; then, for lack of anything better, she nodded in Beulah’s direction, where she was being mounted, unsuccessfully, by a poodle. “I found my puppy a few days ago. She was a stray too.”
Nan squinted at Beulah. “You found her? That’s a good-looking stray. She couldn’t have been on the streets for long.” Jackie sensed a kind of one-upsmanship in the woman’s tone.
“She has a hole in her nose,” Jackie said.
Nan blinked at her. “So? I have two.”
“No, an extra hole, somebody pierced her nose.”
Nan shrugged, unimpressed, and then went on to offer unsolicited advice. She told Jackie where and when (eight months) to get Beulah spayed, and how to get the stray dog saver’s discount on vet expenses. She told her what kind of food to feed her (Eukenuba) and how many times she needed to be walked each day (fewer than three long walks was inhumane). Jackie was hungry for advice, and she felt comforted by Nan’s sensible enthusiasm. She seemed to know everything—about history, literature, dogs. She informed Jackie she’d been working on her PhD for ten years. She was writing her dissertation on Victorian methods of birth control. Jackie listened to Nan chatter while the dogs ran in circles around them. She felt happy for the first time in months.
The park was staggeringly beautiful in the morning light. The people continued to look expectant, as if they were waiting for something better to come, but the dogs were content, having already found perfection. The field was wide and lush, the sky unbroken by buildings. It was hard to imagine that beyond the green lay the filthy, groaning city. The park reminded Jackie of Narnia, the land that had so obsessed her as a young girl. She’d spent hours in her mother’s closet, eyes closed, trying to walk through the closet’s back wall and into another world. She’d been surrounded by the smells of her mother—nicotine and whiskey and jasmine oil—but for a second it had seemed that the wall really was melting away, giving access to another country.
Jackie learned a lot from Nan those first few weeks, the basic and not-so-basic facts of dog psychology.
Dogs travel in packs, unlike humans, who tend to couple.
Fifty percent of all so-called purebreds are actually mixed. The other fifty percent—the truly pure ones—are stupid and sickly, and susceptible to glandular problems.
Dogs have a denning instinct and therefore respond well to confined spaces. Paradoxically, they feel safe, rather than trapped, in cages.
Among dogs, hierarchy rules. There must be an alpha dog, somebody to follow; otherwise, the pack is lost.
In public, at the dog park, Jackie spoke with disdain about the unknown person who had tied Beulah up on the street. She nodded her head sadly when the other dog owners talked about euthanasia, puppy mills, dog abuse.
In private, Jackie
continued to beat Beulah. Not every day, but nearly. It became a ritual, like a glass of red wine with dinner. Beulah barely seemed to feel it. She wore a bemused, mocking expression while Jackie went at it. She didn’t seem in the least bit scared. But Jackie was—scared of herself, the way she hungered to hit the puppy. She would examine the house when she got home from work, searching for damage. She always found it, and then she would set upon Beulah with a newspaper or her hand, depending on the severity of the damage. It was like an itch, a tickle in her fist, the way she yearned for violence, and in the act of it felt exhilarated. Sometimes she was able to restrain herself, and then she would settle for cursing. I hate you, you fucking dirty mongrel. You’re ruining my life. Get lost. Get lost. Get lost. But usually those curses were not enough. They didn’t satisfy her.
The beatings didn’t work either. Beulah continued on her path of destruction, undeterred by Jackie’s raised hand. She ate Jackie’s panty hose, broke the bathroom scale, peed on the wooden floors, and toilet-papered the living room. Jackie spent her small salary on bull’s penises and pig’s ears, but Beulah wanted more. She wanted to loot the bedroom closet, seize the objects most valuable to her master and destroy them.
Outside, Beulah was just as bad. Jackie had never noticed before that the streets of Brooklyn were paved with discarded chicken wings. They were everywhere, and Beulah loved them. She pulled so much on the leash that strangers often called out, “Who’s walking who?” Off the leash, she never came when Jackie called her. Sometimes, Jackie was forced to chase her for the better part of an hour. Beulah would stand still, grinning, until Jackie was within inches, then at the last minute she would leap out of Jackie’s reach and run in circles around her. It was as if she was trying to humiliate Jackie in front of her new friends.
None of this behavior was lost on Nan, who tried to give Jackie advice on training Beulah. Spray her with water when she barks. Shake a can filled with coins when she jumps up on you. Spend fifteen minutes a day practicing commands. She must love and respect you as her alpha dog. All dogs long for a benign dictator. Underlying all her suggestions was the smug refrain: There are no bad dogs, just bad owners.
Jackie pretended to listen to what Nan said. But really she was thinking about how she was going to kick Beulah’s black ass when they got home.
Even as Jackie kicked and beat and cursed Beulah, she loved her. Beulah was all that mattered to her. Their relationship was one of extremes. Extreme hatred, extreme love. Jackie wondered if you could truly love something without sometimes despising it. Violence seemed just another form of intimacy.
She stopped going to Manhattan so much for dinner or movies. When she did, she spent the entire time imagining Beulah at home with her bone and the television blaring out a language she’d never understand. Jackie stopped jogging—Beulah enjoyed group exercise more, so Jackie took her place on the sidelines like a proud mama and watched her play with the other dogs. Jackie learned to almost enjoy evenings spent curled in a filthy heap with Beulah on the living-room futon, which was permanently pulled out now to serve as Beulah’s bed.
Jackie began to lose touch with her old circle of friends—the pretty, manicured set of girls who lived in the city. She didn’t miss them much. They had begun to annoy her, their constant prattle about men, dates gone wrong. There was something so desperate about their endless parties and fancy dinners, as if they were in a perpetual state of meaningless celebration. The last time she’d been out with them, still smarting from the breakup with Kip, she’d noticed how none of them looked at the others when they spoke. Instead, they looked over one another’s shoulders, scanning the bar for eligible men. They were a sisterhood of fools, she’d thought, and she’d taken to avoiding them. If they assumed it was because she was depressed, in mourning—because her man had turned out to be a dawg, just like all the rest—they were wrong. The truth was, she was too preoccupied with Beulah to notice either his or their absence.
Jackie grew close to Nan. They spent most mornings and evenings together at the park, where they huddled close for warmth, watching their mongrels romp on the grass. It was an odd thing, the dog park. They were strangers, but there was an intimacy to their encounters, particularly in the mornings, before they had put on their business suits and makeup. They saw one another in their natural state, sleep still stuck to their eyes, the way lovers see each other before the day begins.
Nan, she learned, hadn’t had sex in ten years. Her last “encounter,” as she put it, was with her ancient thesis adviser. He’d been in his early seventies at the time but was now dead. “It’s weird,” Nan said, wearing an oddly elated smile, “you stop missing it after a while. You learn to live without it.”
Nan liked to gossip nastily about the other dogs and their owners, although it was hard sometimes to tell which she blamed, the person or the dog. This one stole Humpty’s Kong, that one didn’t pick up her dog’s poop, “making the rest of us look bad.” She seemed to have had a bad experience with almost all of them at some point or another. She particularly hated a group of single, childless white women who, unlike Nan, hadn’t quite given up hope of partnering yet. Nan called them “the Weather Girls,” after the early eighties disco duo famous for their hit single, “It’s Raining Men.” She said they were all waiting for the sky to rain hunks on them. “Fools,” she’d spit out. “Fools.”
The Weather Girls all owned purebreds, and for this Nan hated them the most. Their dogs, being purchased, had the pretense of being status symbols, whereas Humpty and Beulah had the air of the tragic, the accidental, thus conferring on their owners a level of moral superiority. Nan liked to whisper mean things about the purebreds—how Dodo, the obese chocolate Lab, resembled a piece of walking shit, or how Edwina, the aged golden retriever, was essentially retarded, or Mindy, the cocker spaniel, was allergic to her own tear ducts. Nan particularly hated a Shar-Pei named Kabuki, who was owned by Doreen, the de facto leader of the Weather Girls. Jackie had to agree that Kabuki was funny-looking. His brown mass of wrinkles, like a crumpled fur coat, reminded Jackie disconcertingly of the disease that aged small children prematurely. But Kabuki didn’t have a disease. He had been bred to look that way, a cruel hoax by a mad scientist.
Nan liked to point out that Kabuki would never survive if left to evolution. “He’ll get a fungus infection between those folds in his fur that everyone thinks are so cute—and then he’ll die of gangrene.” Nan said Humpty and Beulah stood a much better chance of surviving in the wilderness. They resembled what she termed the “standard mongrel.” Nan said that in the laws of Darwinian selection, the standard mongrel was the one that always survived: thirty to forty pounds, short floppy ears, long nose. Beulah’s ears and fur were a bit on the long side for natural selection, but she’d at least stand a chance, unlike Kabuki.
Sometimes, when Nan wasn’t around, Jackie would join the Weather Girls in conversation. They reminded Jackie of her friends in the city, the ones she’d stopped seeing. Those city friends were black, while the Weather Girls at the park were white, but they were basically the same model of woman. It struck Jackie that while she could be black or white, depending on how she decided to wear her hair, she was always a woman. There was no escaping that.
Winter came. The grass at the park turned gray and crunchy and the sky above appeared streaked and dirty, like the film that coated Jackie’s apartment windows. For a while that autumn, even into December, the park had felt like a pleasant ritual for Jackie, but increasingly it felt like a drag. Often there was a tension in the air, and fights broke out regularly between the dogs and between the owners. The people seemed to forget, at times, that the dogs were animals. They would argue, viciously, their teeth bared, over whose dog had started the fight. Nan, meanwhile, had grown possessive. Several times, she’d invited Jackie to join her for a movie and dinner, and each time Jackie had declined, not wanting to expand their friendship beyond the realm of the park. If Nan caught Jackie talking to the Weather Girls, she would sulk
angrily on the edges of their circle and leave without saying good-bye.
Jackie dreaded these petty dramas, but she continued to go to the park. It was still the only way to tire Beulah out. And besides, Jackie no longer had any other friends. Her sisterhood of fools had stopped inviting her to dinner parties and barhoppings, and she’d stopped wanting to go.
Jackie began to eat only when she was hungry, and she gave no thought to taste or calories or nutrients. She would scavenge the dark streets around her house for takeout, settling for whatever was near and cheap—kung pao chicken and fried shrimp, pizza, beef patties, jerk chicken, or roti—and carry it back to her apartment, hunched against the cold. There, she didn’t bother to put it on a plate, she’d just eat over the container it had come in, wolfing down what she could while Beulah stood waiting for leftovers.
Jackie no longer put much effort into her appearance. Her weekends went by without a shower or even a change of clothes. Her fingernails were filthy, her hands callused from the pull of the leash. Her feet, ordinarily scrubbed and toenails brightly polished, were as tough as hooves. The hair on her legs grew freely. She had never known how long and dark it could grow. She could see the women at the temp agency eyeing her with disapproval when she showed up for a new assignment. She was no longer Vanessa’s favorite, no matter how pale her skin.
She’d hidden away her long mirror months ago, to keep it from Beulah. The pea brain was always jumping against it, trying to play with her own reflection, and Jackie had been afraid she would break it. One day, while rummaging through her closet for a tennis ball, Jackie came upon it. She pulled it out and propped it against the wall. She glimpsed herself full length. Just a few weeks earlier, she had taken to wearing her hair in twin braids, Pippi Longstocking style, so its texture was unclear. She wore her usual dog walker’s uniform: Adidas sweatpants and a sweater with the logo of a trucker’s union across the front. She had not gained or lost any weight, but she looked different: raceless and ageless, almost virginal. There was a rough clarity to her features she hadn’t noticed before—a wide blankness to her gaze. Her skin was clear, her features bold. She put the mirror away, vaguely troubled, but not certain exactly why.