by Galia Oz
What would happen if I was friends with Donna Silver? At recess she would put her hand on my shoulder or lean against me, and she would say funny things, and I would feel like I belonged, without doing anything at all.
I didn’t have a chance to say thanks. Donna Silver floated away.
Outside, by the gate, I remembered Adam’s story. I stopped and kneeled to fix one of my socks that had slipped down into my shoe, and I peeked into the booth right under the nose of the security guard, who was sitting and reading the paper and playing with her keys, and I managed to see that there really was a big red sack inside, and I knew that I’d seen that sack someplace before but I couldn’t remember where. If only I could see through walls, or at least through sacks, I thought, and I straightened up quickly because I was afraid that the security guard would look at me and see my thoughts, just like she saw diamonds. What should I do now? Hide and wait, I guess. But my head felt as if it was spinning round and my legs took me home.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” said Mom the minute I walked through the door. And even before she touched my forehead, she announced that I had a temperature, she could tell by my bright eyes. “Please crawl right into bed, and in a minute I’ll bring you some tea with honey.” I lay in bed, and Shakshuka came to make me feel better, and when Mom wasn’t looking I let her climb up on the blanket and lie down next to my legs, and I slept like that for hours and hours, Mom said for almost two days straight, with a few breaks, and I didn’t dream about anything, and I didn’t care what horrible things the security guard might be getting up to in the meantime, and once I woke up and played pick-up sticks with Dad until the cat came and scattered all the sticks and won the game, and another time I opened my eyes and sat up in bed and I didn’t know if it was day or night or what day it was. Shakshuka sat on the floor and looked at me. “What happened, Shakshuka?”
Shakshuka wagged her tail and squeaked a little, as if she wanted to say something.
“I’m telling you,” I said, and I patted her, “that you would also be friends with Donna Silver, I promise you. She would whisper something funny to you and you’d go running after her right away. No one can resist her.”
But Shakshuka got angry and she gave a loud bark. She wanted to say no, that she would always stay loyal, because that was the way it was with dogs. And she also told me to get up. I got up and followed her, but on the way the cat came and blocked my path and looked at me with his yellow-green eyes and moved his tail that looked like a nervous snake from side to side.
I wanted to go around him, but the minute I moved, he said, “Meow.”
I said, “What, again with your personal space?”
“Meow.”
“Meow yourself.”
And it was only then that I heard someone ringing the bell, and Mom shouted from the kitchen, “Will you get the door, Julie?” and I took two steps back and then I ran forward and sailed over the cat in one giant leap and rushed to open the door for Danny because Mrs. Brown had sent him to bring me the homework.
“She told you to come?” I asked in surprise.
“First she asked Effie, but Effie said she didn’t want to, or she couldn’t, or something like that,” Danny said.
“Yes,” I said. “Effie doesn’t have time for me.”
“I don’t know what your problem is with this cat,” Danny said, petting him. “He’s just fine.” And he was right. That evil cat suddenly didn’t care about his personal space, and he wound himself around Danny’s legs, asking to be stroked, and Danny patted him without any oven mitt, and the cat purred so loudly he sounded almost like the security guard’s drill.
“Ha!” I laughed. “I knew the two of you would get along!”
“Yeah, but he’s smarter.”
“Tell me, what does it feel like when you hit somebody?”
“Why, you feel like fighting?”
“What’s better?” I continued. “To hit someone or to throw something at them?”
“I don’t know,” said Danny. “Pushing is also good sometimes.”
“Oh, well, maybe I won’t hit anyone,” I said, “but sometimes I get so sick and tired of them. They’re not my friends anymore, and anyway they’re all so boring these days.”
Danny didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask who I was talking about. Even Danny understood things sometimes.
Danny said, “So who will you hang around with?”
“Not with the baboons who play soccer, that’s for sure,” I told him.
“We wouldn’t let you either,” Danny said.
“Of course not. I’m not dumb enough.”
“But your cat is dumb,” said Danny because he had to get back at me.
“Well, yeah, that’s true,” I said to let him win, and I leaned down and stroked that evil cat, but I pulled my hand back double quick because you never could tell with him.
“Let’s say we hold a competition,” I said to Mom before bedtime, while Dad was giving Monty and Max their bath. “For the worst creature in the house. The worst behavior-wise, the worst in helping around the house…the one who makes the most trouble, basically.”
“You’re raising a very serious topic here,” said Mom. “That’s not an easy thing to decide.”
“It is an easy thing to decide.”
“Let’s see, Monty wrecks the house, so he must be the winner of the competition. On the other hand, maybe Max is the winner because he never eats anything and it takes him hours to fall asleep. He makes terrible trouble. And the minute he drops off, Shakshuka starts to bark and she wakes him up. Shakshuka’s the worst. No! You’re the worst because you have the most holes in your socks,” said Mom, and she grabbed my feet and tickled me through the holes in my socks. That was my mom. She made a joke out of everything.
The worst creature in the house walked by in the hall, with his tail standing straight up, looking like the scary tip of a shark’s fin that you could see sticking out of the water.
“You’re better,” said Mom. “School tomorrow.”
In the morning I decided: Today I’m not going to talk to anyone. Nothing, not a word.
In gym they sang:
“Silver, Silver
Flowing like a river.”
And again:
“Silver, Silver
Silver is the thriller.
Yeah, it’s Donna, Donna,
Donna who we wanna.”
And it went on and on, and it just so happened that I was standing next to Effie when Donna Silver broke her own record for the long jump.
“Your friend’s really good,” I said.
I was surprised to hear myself talking after all.
“She’s not my friend anymore,” said Effie, and she jumped in the air and clapped her hands like all the other kids were doing.
I didn’t say anything. I remembered how on the last day before I got sick I met Effie sitting on the highest step, all alone, and how she wanted to come over to eat spaghetti and I said no.
I said, “She’s the one who’s losing out, that Donna Silver.”
Effie said, “She never loses.”
“She lost you,” I said.
Donna Silver was hugging a red-haired girl from the other class. Everything about her is being on top, I thought. No wonder she’s such a good long jumper. “So what?” said Effie as if she could hear my thoughts. “I’m losing out too.”
When we walked home from school that day, we forgot all about the security guard because Adam was in the middle of a story about some factory near his house that recycled chewing gum, and whoever brought old gum there got a new piece of gum in its place, and once Adam peeked into the back side of the factory and saw a huge pot that took up half the room and a small flame was burning underneath it, and there was a man standing there stirring all the gum together to recycle it and make new gum out of it, and from the bits of the bits that were left over, according to Adam, they made car tires. So the next time we had a piece of gum, we should know that someone e
lse had already chewed it.
Brody said that recycling was definitely very important, but still maybe Adam should stop recycling his stories, and I said that the story actually made me feel like chewing some gum, and only Effie, who was walking along daydreaming and not listening to us, stopped suddenly and said, “Look.”
We turned around and we saw. The yard was empty. Everyone had gone home. Almost.
“Be quiet,” I said, and I started to walk back, and I didn’t even stop to make sure that they were following me. In a minute we were standing outside the locked gate and we saw that there were cats all over the place. Here they are, I thought—the dangerous robbers the principal was talking about, the climbers, the ones who might sneak into classrooms—and I counted seven, each one in a different spot. The security guard had made little piles of food for them all over the yard so they wouldn’t fight. There were black-and-white ones, striped ones, one that was completely white, and a beautiful orange one that looked exactly like Donna Silver’s new friend. On the side I saw a red sack full of food that looked just like the one we had at home, which Mom bought for the cat. I knew I’d seen that bag somewhere before.
“Good for you, Adam. The security guard’s our ‘criminal,’ ” said Brody. “And here are the wicked robbers, eating their lunch.” Adam didn’t say anything, but his face looked so full of happiness, it was as if someone had switched on a light inside him. If I’d known how to look into kids’ heads to see their thoughts, like the security guard could see through walls, maybe I could have seen how he was making up his next story.
“What do you want from Adam?” I said to Brody. “He was right. She may not be a diamond thief, but she’s still the smartest woman in the world.” And we all watched as the security guard stroked the beautiful ginger cat.
Brody said, “I thought you didn’t like cats, ever since you found your awful one.”
“What, you have a cat?” Effie woke up.
“I have a tiger,” I said, and I gave Effie’s shoulder a head-butt, but not a real one, just a joking one. “Anyone want to come over for spaghetti?” And I saw that Effie would come, and I didn’t care about anything else.
We went to my house, Effie, Brody, Adam, and me, and I showed them all how I used the oven mitt that Danny brought me to pat our creature who we still hadn’t found a name for, who really was evil and had an ice-cold heart, there was nothing you could do about it, but sometimes he looked at the world with this dreamy, enchanted expression, as if he had never seen such beauty before in all his life, and once I sat down next to him and explained to him that he should learn from Shakshuka, who couldn’t care less about personal space, and you could get as close to her as you liked, and Mom saw me talking to the cat and asked if I’d finally made up with him, and I told her that was a serious matter for debate and I really had to think about it.
I was born in a small communal village called a kibbutz, in Israel. As a child I spent many hours every day playing with the other kids in a lush, almost vehicle-free environment, where doors were never locked and secrets were hard to keep. Pets were unleashed, and they often wandered about freely. It was not a perfect childhood, and my own kids were raised in a far more conventional way, much like the characters in my books. Yet some of the kibbutz’s free spirit can be found in the world of Julie, Adam, Effie, and Brody in Dog Trouble!
I wish to thank my Israeli editors, Rachela Zandbank and Einat Niv, and all the good people at Keter Books for their dedication and friendship. I cherish the advice and support of my wonderful agent, Deborah Harris. I will always be thankful to Erica Rand Silverman, who was the first to read the English manuscript and thought it was funny. I’m grateful to Phoebe Yeh, the editor of this book, for being the profound reader and generous person she is. And I thank everyone else at Crown/Random House for their tireless efforts.
To my sweetheart husband, Amit; my beloved, gorgeous, witty son and daughter, Alon and Yael; my humble dog, Mishmish; and my awful but charming cat—you’ve all taught me what happiness is. Even the cat…Thank you.
Galia Oz is a prizewinning children’s writer and a documentary filmmaker. She is the recipient of the Levi Eshkol Prize for Literary Works, and her Shakshuka books are some of the most beloved stories in Israel children’s literature. Julie’s dog troubles have also been published in France, Spain, and Brazil. Oz lives near Tel Aviv with her family, (not so) evil cat, and only sometimes troublesome dog.
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