by John Grogan
“No way!” she would whisper.
“Why not?” I would whisper back.
“Are you nuts? Mrs. O’Flaherty is right on the other side of that wall.”
“So what?”
“We can’t!”
“Sure we can.”
“She’ll hear everything.”
“We’ll be quiet.”
“Oh, right!”
“Promise. We’ll barely move.”
“Well, go put a T-shirt or something over the pope first,” she would finally say, relenting. “I’m not doing anything with him staring at us.”
Suddenly, sex seemed so…so…illicit. It was like I was in high school again, sneaking around under my mother’s suspicious gaze. To risk sex in these surroundings was to risk shameful humiliation at the communal breakfast table the next morning. It was to risk Mrs. O’Flaherty’s raised eyebrow as she served up eggs and fried tomatoes, asking with a leering grin, “So, was the bed comfortable for you?”
Ireland was a coast-to-coast No Sex Zone. And that was all the invitation I needed. We spent the trip bopping like bunnies.
Still, Jenny couldn’t stop fretting about her big baby back home. Every few days she would feed a fistful of coins into a pay phone and call home for a progress report from Kathy. I would stand outside the booth and listen to Jenny’s end of the conversation.
“He did?…Seriously?…Right into traffic?…You weren’t hurt, were you?…Thank God…. I would have screamed, too…. What? Your shoes?…Oh no! And your purse?…We’ll certainly pay for repairs…. Nothing left at all?…Of course, we insist on replacing them…. And he what?…Wet cement, you say? What’s the chance of that happening?”
And so it would go. Each call was a litany of transgressions, one worse than the next, many of which surprised even us, hardened survivors of the puppy wars. Marley was the incorrigible student and Kathy the hapless substitute teacher. He was having a field day.
When we arrived home, Marley raced outside to greet us. Kathy stood in the doorway, looking tired and strained. She had the faraway gaze of a shell-shocked soldier after a particularly unrelenting battle. Her bag was packed and sitting on the front porch, ready to go. She held her car key in her hand as if she could not wait to escape. We gave her gifts, thanked her profusely, and told her not to worry about the ripped-out screens and other damage. She excused herself politely and was gone.
As best as we could figure, Kathy had been unable to exert any authority at all over Marley, and even less control. With each victory, he grew bolder. He forgot all about heeling, dragging her behind him wherever he wished to go. He refused to come to her. He grabbed whatever suited him—shoes, purses, pillows—and would not let go. He stole food off her plate. He rifled through the garbage. He even tried taking over her bed. He had decided he was in charge while the parents were away, and he was not going to let some mild-mannered roommate pull rank and put the kibosh on his fun.
“Poor Kathy,” Jenny said. “She looked kind of broken, don’t you think?”
“Shattered is more like it.”
“We probably shouldn’t ask her to dog-sit for us again.”
“No,” I answered. “That probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Turning to Marley, I said, “The honeymoon’s over, Chief. Starting tomorrow, you’re back in training.”
The next morning Jenny and I both started back to work. But first I slipped the choker chain around Marley’s neck and took him for a walk. He immediately lunged forward, not even pretending to try to heel. “A little rusty, are we?” I asked, and heaved with all my might on his leash, knocking him off his paws. He righted himself, coughed, and looked up at me with a wounded expression as if to say, You don’t have to get rough about it. Kathy didn’t mind me pulling.
“Get used to it,” I said, and placed him in a sit position. I adjusted the choke chain so it rode high on his neck, where experience had taught me it had the most effect. “Okay, let’s try this again,” I said. He looked at me with cool skepticism.
“Marley, heel!” I ordered, and stepped briskly off on my left foot with his leash so short my left hand was actually gripping the end of his choke chain. He lurched and I tugged sharply, tightening the stranglehold without mercy. “Taking advantage of a poor woman like that,” I mumbled. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” By the end of the walk, my grip on the leash so tight that my knuckles had turned white, I finally managed to convince him I wasn’t fooling around. This was no game but rather a real-life lesson in actions and consequences. If he wanted to lurch, I would choke him. Every time, without exception. If he wanted to cooperate and walk by my side, I would loosen my grip and he would barely feel the chain around his neck. Lurch, choke; heel, breathe. It was simple enough for even Marley to grasp. Over and over and over again we repeated the sequence as we marched up and down the bike path. Lurch, choke; heel, breathe. Slowly it was dawning on him that I was the master and he was the pet, and that was the way it was going to stay. As we turned in to the driveway, my recalcitrant dog trotted along beside me, not perfectly but respectably. For the first time in his life he was actually heeling, or at least attempting a close proximity of it. I would take it as a victory. “Oh, yes,” I sang joyously. “The boss is back.”
Several days later Jenny called me at the office. She had just been to see Dr. Sherman. “Luck of the Irish,” she said. “Here we go again.”
CHAPTER 11
The Things He Ate
T his pregnancy was different. Our miscarriage had taught us some important lessons, and this time we had no intention of repeating our mistakes. Most important, we kept our news the most closely guarded secret since D-day. Except for Jenny’s doctors and nurses, no one, not even our parents, was brought into our confidence. When we had friends over, Jenny sipped grape juice from a wineglass so as not to raise suspicions. In addition to the secrecy, we were simply more measured in our excitement, even when we were alone. We began sentences with conditional clauses, such as “If everything works out…” and “Assuming all goes well.” It was as though we could jinx the pregnancy simply by gushing about it. We didn’t dare let our joy out of check lest it turn and bite us.
We locked away all the chemical cleaners and pesticides. We weren’t going down that road again. Jenny became a convert to the natural cleaning powers of vinegar, which was up to even the ultimate challenge of dissolving Marley’s dried saliva off the walls. We found that boric acid, a white powder lethal to bugs and harmless to humans, worked pretty well at keeping Marley and his bedding flea-free. And if he needed an occasional flea dip, we would leave it to professionals.
Jenny rose at dawn each morning and took Marley for a brisk walk along the water. I would just be waking up when they returned, smelling of briny ocean air. My wife was the picture of robust health in all ways but one. She spent most days, all day long, on the verge of throwing up. But she wasn’t complaining; she greeted each wave of nausea with what can only be described as gleeful acceptance, for it was a sign that the tiny experiment inside her was chugging along just fine.
Indeed it was. This time around, Essie took my videotape and recorded the first faint, grainy images of our baby. We could hear the heart beating, see its four tiny chambers pulsing. We could trace the outline of the head and count all four limbs. Dr. Sherman popped his head into the sonogram room to pronounce everything perfect, and then looked at Jenny and said in that booming voice of his, “What are you crying for, kid? You’re supposed to be happy.” Essie whacked him with her clipboard and scolded, “You go away and leave her alone,” then rolled her eyes at Jenny as if to say, “Men! They are so clueless.”
When it came to dealing with pregnant wives, clueless would describe me. I gave Jenny her space, sympathized with her in her nausea and pain, and tried not to grimace noticeably when she insisted on reading her What to Expect When You’re Expecting book aloud to me. I complimented her figure as her belly swelled, saying things like “You look great. Really. Yo
u look like a svelte little shoplifter who just slipped a basketball under her shirt.” I even tried my best to indulge her increasingly bizarre and irrational behavior. I was soon on a first-name basis with the overnight clerk at the twenty-four-hour market as I stopped in at all hours for ice cream or apples or celery or chewing gum in flavors I never knew existed. “Are you sure this is clove?” I would ask him. “She says it has to be clove.”
One night when Jenny was about five months pregnant she got it in her head that we needed baby socks. Well, sure we did, I agreed, and of course we would lay in a full complement before the baby arrived. But she didn’t mean we would need them eventually; she meant we needed them right now. “We won’t have anything to put on the baby’s feet when we come home from the hospital,” she said in a quavering voice.
Never mind that the due date was still four months away. Never mind that by then the outside temperature would be a frosty ninety-six degrees. Never mind that even a clueless guy like me knew a baby would be bundled head to toe in a receiving blanket when released from the maternity ward.
“Honey, c’mon,” I said. “Be reasonable. It’s eight o’clock on Sunday night. Where am I supposed to find baby socks?”
“We need socks,” she repeated.
“We have weeks to get socks,” I countered. “Months to get socks.”
“I just see those little tiny toes,” she whimpered.
It was no use. I drove around grumbling until I found a Kmart that was open and picked out a festive selection of socks that were so ridiculously minuscule they looked like matching thumb warmers. When I got home and poured them out of the bag, Jenny was finally satisfied. At last we had socks. And thank God we had managed to grab up the last few available pair before the national supply ran dry, which could have happened at any moment without warning. Our baby’s fragile little digits were now safe. We could go to bed and sleep in peace.
As the pregnancy progressed, so did Marley’s training. I worked with him every day, and now I was able to entertain our friends by yelling, “Incoming!” and watching him crash to the floor, all four limbs splayed. He came consistently on command (unless there was something riveting his attention, such as another dog, cat, squirrel, butterfly, mailman, or floating weed seed); he sat consistently (unless he felt strongly like standing); and heeled reliably (unless there was something so tempting it was worth strangling himself over—see dogs, cats, squirrels, etc., above). He was coming along, but that’s not to say he was mellowing into a calm, well-behaved dog. If I towered over him and barked stern orders, he would obey, sometimes even eagerly. But his default setting was stuck on eternal incorrigibility.
He also had an insatiable appetite for mangoes, which fell by the dozens in the backyard. Each weighed a pound or more and was so sweet it could make your teeth ache. Marley would stretch out in the grass, anchor a ripe mango between his front paws, and go about surgically removing every speck of flesh from the skin. He would hold the large pits in his mouth like lozenges, and when he finally spit them out they looked like they had been cleaned in an acid bath. Some days he would be out there for hours, noshing away in a fruit-and-fiber frenzy.
As with anyone who eats too much fruit, his constitution began to change. Soon our backyard was littered with large piles of loose, festively colored dog droppings. The one advantage to this was that you would have to be legally blind to accidentally step in a heap of his poop, which in mango season took on the radiant fluorescence of orange traffic cones.
He ate other things as well. And these, too, did pass. I saw the evidence each morning as I shoveled up his piles. Here a toy plastic soldier, there a rubber band. In one load a mangled soda-bottle top. In another the gnawed cap to a ballpoint pen. “So that’s where my comb went!” I exclaimed one morning.
He ate bath towels, sponges, socks, used Kleenex. Handi Wipes were a particular favorite, and when they eventually came out the other end, they looked like little blue flags marking each fluorescent orange mountain.
Not everything went down easily, and Marley vomited with the ease and regularity of a hard-core bulimic. We would hear him let out a loud gaaaaack! in the next room, and by the time we rushed in, there would be another household item, sitting in a puddle of half-digested mangoes and dog chow. Being considerate, Marley never puked on the hardwood floors or even the kitchen linoleum if he could help it. He always aimed for the Persian rug.
Jenny and I had the foolish notion that it would be nice to have a dog we could trust to be alone in the house for short periods. Locking him in the bunker every time we stepped out was becoming tedious, and as Jenny said, “What’s the point of having a dog if he can’t greet you at the door when you get home?” We knew full well we didn’t dare leave him in the house unaccompanied if there was any possibility of a rainstorm. Even with his doggie downers, he still proved himself capable of digging quite energetically for China. When the weather was clear, though, we didn’t want to have to lock him in the garage every time we stepped out for a few minutes.
We began leaving him briefly while we ran to the store or dropped by a neighbor’s house. Sometimes he did just fine and we would return to find the house unscathed. On these days, we would spot his black nose pushed through the miniblinds as he stared out the living room window waiting for us. Other days he didn’t do quite so well, and we usually knew trouble awaited us before we even opened the door because he was not at the window but off hiding somewhere.
In Jenny’s sixth month of pregnancy, we returned after being away for less than an hour to find Marley under the bed—at his size, he really had to work to get under there—looking like he’d just murdered the mailman. Guilt radiated off him. The house seemed fine, but we knew he was hiding some dark secret, and we walked from room to room, trying to ascertain just what he had done wrong. Then I noticed that the foam cover to one of the stereo speakers was missing. We looked everywhere for it. Gone without a trace. Marley just might have gotten away with it had I not found incontrovertible evidence of his guilt when I went on poop patrol the next morning. Remnants of the speaker cover surfaced for days.
During our next outing, Marley surgically removed the woofer cone from the same speaker. The speaker wasn’t knocked over or in any way amiss; the paper cone was simply gone, as if someone had sliced it out with a razor blade. Eventually he got around to doing the same to the other speaker. Another time, we came home to find that our four-legged footstool was now three-legged, and there was no sign whatsoever—not a single splinter—of the missing limb.
We swore it could never snow in South Florida, but one day we opened the front door to find a full blizzard in the living room. The air was filled with soft white fluff floating down. Through the near whiteout conditions we spotted Marley in front of the fireplace, half buried in a snowdrift, violently shaking a large feather pillow from side to side as though he had just bagged an ostrich.
For the most part we were philosophical about the damage. In every dog owner’s life a few cherished family heirlooms must fall. Only once was I ready to slice him open to retrieve what was rightfully mine.
For her birthday I bought Jenny an eighteen-karat gold necklace, a delicate chain with a tiny clasp, and she immediately put it on. But a few hours later she pressed her hand to her throat and screamed, “My necklace! It’s gone.” The clasp must have given out or never been fully secured.
“Don’t panic,” I told her. “We haven’t left the house. It’s got to be right here somewhere.” We began scouring the house, room by room. As we searched, I gradually became aware that Marley was more rambunctious than usual. I straightened up and looked at him. He was squirming like a centipede. When he noticed I had him in my sights, he began evasive action. Oh, no, I thought—the Marley Mambo. It could mean only one thing.
“What’s that,” Jenny asked, panic rising in her voice, “hanging out of his mouth?”
It was thin and delicate. And gold. “Oh, shit!” I said.
“No sudden moves,�
� she ordered, her voice dropping to a whisper. We both froze.
“Okay, boy, it’s all right,” I coaxed like a hostage negotiator on a SWAT team. “We’re not mad at you. Come on now. We just want the necklace back.” Instinctively, Jenny and I began to circle him from opposite directions, moving with glacial slowness. It was as if he were wired with high explosives and one false move could set him off.
“Easy, Marley,” Jenny said in her calmest voice. “Easy now. Drop the necklace and no one gets hurt.”
Marley eyed us suspiciously, his head darting back and forth between us. We had him cornered, but he knew he had something we wanted. I could see him weighing his options, a ransom demand, perhaps. Leave two hundred unmarked Milk-Bones in a plain paper bag or you’ll never see your precious little necklace again.
“Drop it, Marley,” I whispered, taking another small step forward. His whole body began to wag. I crept forward by degrees. Almost imperceptibly, Jenny closed in on his flank. We were within striking distance. We glanced at each other and knew, without speaking, what to do. We had been through the Property Recovery Drill countless times before. She would lunge for the hindquarters, pinning his back legs to prevent escape. I would lunge for the head, prying open his jaws and nabbing the contraband. With any luck, we’d be in and out in a matter of seconds. That was the plan, and Marley saw it coming.
We were less than two feet away from him. I nodded to Jenny and silently mouthed, “On three.” But before we could make our move, he threw his head back and made a loud smacking sound. The tail end of the chain, which had been dangling out of his mouth, disappeared. “He’s eating it!” Jenny screamed. Together we dove at him, Jenny tackling him by the hind legs as I gripped him in a headlock. I forced his jaws open and pushed my whole hand into his mouth and down his throat. I probed every flap and crevice and came up empty. “It’s too late,” I said. “He swallowed it.” Jenny began slapping him on the back, yelling, “Cough it up, damn it!” But it was no use. The best she got out of him was a loud, satisfied burp.