Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  “Not here,” Eva pronounced. “Too cheap to pay for them.”

  I felt irked at Eva, who’d succeeded in transforming Joy’s pride to a sense of having been shortchanged. The too-cheap crack did, however, point to a unifying theme in the contents of the registration packet: Nothing in it had cost Maxine a dime.

  “And,” Eva relentlessly continued, “at Dog Days, there’s something going on every minute. Here, take tonight. After dinner, there’s nothing. We drive all the way here to the middle of nowhere, and then we wait all this time for something to eat, and then afterwards all there is to do is sort of hang around and twiddle our thumbs.”

  Rangeley was, admittedly, a long drive from New York or New Jersey or wherever it was Eva came from, but it actually was what most other tourist areas merely tried to be: a yearround resort where you could hunt, bird watch, swim, water ski, canoe, sail, sit and enjoy the mountains, hike the Appalachian Trail, or even pan for gold. In winter, Rangeley had sled dog racing and skiing, downhill and cross-country. Spring did, of course, bring black flies, but it also brought fish, and the fall foliage was as good as anything in New Hampshire and Vermont. And the town itself was a beautiful place with a wild streak, rugged and a little rough, not cutesied up, but naturally lovely, set between Rangeley Lake and Haley’s Pond. The middle of nowhere, indeed! Furthermore, since dog people are undoubtedly the most gregarious individuals in the world, we do not think of after-dinner socializing as hanging around and twiddling our thumbs because there’s nothing to do.

  As if to illustrate the sociability of our breed, the people who packed the lodge’s reception area and the adjoining bar were all talking and introducing everyone to everyone else. Even without our dogs, by the way, we are often so obviously interconnected as to be recognizable as members of a fraternal and sororal society, but when we’re dressed for dinner and not wearing our usual breed-loyal T-shirts and such, you’d have to examine us closely to discover our precise identity. I, of course, have a practiced eye. The designs knitted into Maxine McGuire’s cardigan sweater depicted a high jump, a dumbbell, trophies, and other dog-societal symbols, and almost every pair of earrings in the room would, I felt certain, turn out to be a miniature brace of dogs. We were well-groomed and dolled-up. By definition, we love a show, and we sure do know how to put on the dog.

  Ahead of me, Eva shoved through the crowd, thus breaking track for Joy and Craig. As they trailed off after her, I squeezed into the only floor space available nearby, a gap between a side table and one of the couches that faced the fireplace. As I was glancing around trying to locate Cam or Ginny, one of the women seated on the couch suddenly shrieked, “What’s this doing here?”

  From my refuge, I looked almost directly down at her brown curls. I leaned forward to peer at the object of her consternation, which I at first mistook for a tourist brochure like the ones in the registration packet.

  The woman next to her said, “It’s just another one of those—”

  “No, it isn’t! What’s wrong with you? Look at it!” The first woman thrust the shiny folder at her neighbor, who made a noise of disgust and said, “This is gross! Where did you get this?”

  “From right there, right on the coffee table. It was sticking out from one of the magazines, and it caught my eye because of the picture of the dog, so I reached for it. And then when I ever saw what it was!”

  Well, I wanted to shout, so what was it?

  As if in answer, the neighbor opened the brochure on her lap and thrust it up to display a brilliantly colored, superglossy photograph of three small satin-lined, lace-trimmed caskets, baby blue on the left, baby pink on the right, and, in the middle, virgin white. Each casket rested on a trestle, and in front of the trestles, three little stands supported ornately embossed grave markers. Before I could focus on the inscriptions, the woman who held the brochure began to read the text at the bottom of the page: “ ‘Lasting Security and an Eternal Tribute to Your Beloved Pet.’ ”

  “Betty, stop!” ordered the woman who’d found the brochure.

  “This really is gross,” Betty commented. “Katy, listen to this. It says, ‘A fitting last resting place for the little one who warmed your heart. The Manson Family understands—’ ”

  “What!”

  “That’s what it says. It’s the name of the company.” Betty flipped over the brochure and pointed. “See? ‘The Manson Family, Inc. Loving Attention to Final Needs Since Nineteen Forty-Six.’ But listen. This is worse.” She turned back to the passage she’d started before. “Where was I? Oh. ‘The Manson Family understands the grief of losing the beloved little one whose passing presence here on earth brightened each precious moment. Here at Manson, we, too, have lost small ones—’ ” Betty broke off. “Don’t you get it? Yuck.”

  “Get what?” Katy demanded.

  “Katy, look at the picture! I mean, really look at it. Look at these, uh, whatever they’re called. Coffins. Caskets. And that business about small ones and little ones? Just what do you think these are really meant for? And down here, it doesn’t even say they’re for pets; it says ‘suitable for pets.’ Right?”

  Katy launched herself backward. The couch lurched. She blew out her breath and whispered, “Oh, my God!”

  “You see?” Betty said. “Like I said. It really is gross. Pets or babies.”

  A man sitting in a nearby armchair spoke up. “There’s lots more where that came from.” He pointed to a magazine rack. “This thing’s full of them.”

  Now that he’d made the conversation general, I joined in. “Are they all, uh …” I fumbled for the right phrase. “Are they all the same? All copies of the same brochure?”

  “Naw. They’re all different,” he replied. “Tombstones. Pet cemeteries. Coffins. Urns. All kinds of stuff. You want to see?”

  “Not particularly,” I answered. “But—”

  Before I could finish, the lodge door swung open so forcefully that I had to squish myself against the couch to get out of the way. Brandishing a large greeting card in her hand, Phyllis Abbott strode in and immediately silenced the crowd, less by speaking than by radiating judicial authority. “May I have your attention!” Mrs. Abbott began. Having already obtained it, she lowered the greeting card and, before I could get a look at the picture on the front, gave the card the kind of merciless shakedown that Rowdy administers to play-prey dog toys when he’s pretending to break their necks. When she’d finished rendering the card lifeless, she held it in front of her and intoned, “With deepest sympathy on the loss of your pet.” Opening the card, she read the following verse:

  “ ‘Your precious pet has gone away.

  I know just how you feel today.

  Dear friend, recall that with the years

  Sweet memories will dry your tears.

  But that is then, and this now,

  When you just heard that last bow-wow,

  When empty dishes on the floor,

  Say your best pal lives here no more.

  You have my thoughts while yours are dour;

  I think of you from hour to hour.’ ”

  Mrs. Abbott whipped the card through the air and deposited it in the hand of her blank-faced husband, who stood a few feet away, as if to disassociate himself from her or perhaps from her performance.

  “I have not lost a pet,” Mrs. Abbott proclaimed, “and furthermore, let me announce to whatever vile excuse for a human being has perpetrated this prank that I have no intention whatsoever of losing a pet for a great many years to come! Nigel and Edwina are both young and in perfect health, and if this filthy, vicious act is someone’s misguided idea of a joke, I want to make it clear that, far from being funny, it is of the utmost seriousness. The person responsible evidently fails to understand that a judge is a judge is a judge, every minute of every day, no matter where she goes or what she does, and no insult directed toward a judge is ever a strictly personal matter, but constitutes a direct affront to the dignity and authority of the AKC. This,” she added, “will be so
treated.”

  She swung dramatically toward her husband, meaning, I think, to aim a finger only at the offending card. As it was, however, she appeared to be directing the avenging wrath of the American Kennel Club straight toward Don Abbott.

  TWENTY MINUTES after Judge Phyllis Abbott pointed an AKC-authorized finger at her husband, I was seated in the dining room at a round table for eight. Somewhat to my surprise, dinner really was quite formal: white linen, wine, a buffet offering roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, stuffed scrod, scalloped potatoes, broccoli, salad, and, as the brochure had promised, wine, red and white, and not in jugs, either. After the cheapskate packet, I’d half expected to find a genuinely traditional New England Sunday-night supper: hot dogs and beans with ketchup, and brown bread straight out of the can, the ridges still visible, followed by mealy Indian pudding, also canned, but mushed up, heated, and topped with vanilla ice cream, accompanied by the traditional Yankee choice between milk and nothing. Real WASP food is nowhere near as bad as people say; it’s much, much worse.

  I was sitting with Cam and Ginny, and also with Sara Altman, the head agility instructor, a dark young woman with long brown hair bound back in a ponytail. As I’ve said, Rowdy and I had once done a miniclinic with Sara, and I’d liked her a lot. Instead of admonishing me to praise my dog while telling me everything I was doing wrong, she’d used positive methods on both of us. Also, when Rowdy had pried the lid off a big metal canister of dog treats and scattered them all over the mats, she’d simply commented how helpful it was in agility to have a dog who was motivated by food. As I’ve mentioned, that’s how agility people are: obsessed. If a falling tree had crushed in the roof of Sara’s house, she’d probably have viewed the trunk and branches as an interesting new agility obstacle, and her only worry would have been whether the bark gave proper traction. The others at the table were strangers to me: three women—Myrna, Marie, and Kathy—and a young man named Michael whose left upper arm displayed a still-healing tattooed portrait of his dog, which he said was a cream-colored long-haired Akita named Jacob.

  “What a big dope I was.” Ginny stabbed her fork into a slice of roast beef. “I’m just glad I didn’t go to Max and tell her how touched I was that she’d remembered.” Phyllis’s dire announcement had somehow cheered Ginny up. The endless braid around her head was still damp from her swim, she’d touched up her tracking tan with a little makeup, and she looked altogether happy to be who she was and where she was. With a smile she added, “Old gullible me.”

  “I wasn’t sure,” I said. “Before, it was sort of remotely possible that my card was a mistake, and yours wasn’t.”

  “Come off it,” Cam said. “With both of the cards unsigned?”

  “Clarity of hindsight,” Sara commented.

  “Sara,” I pointed out, “the other odd thing is all those brochures out there in the lobby, on the coffee table and in the magazine rack. By the fireplace.”

  “Maxine has a lot of friends here,” Sara replied. “She’s been coming to Rangeley since she was a kid. That’s just her way of showing she’s supporting the other local businesses.”

  With her usual concern for distinctions, Cam, the obedience legal-eagle columnist, said, “Not those brochures. The other ones. The ones about gravestones and urns and whatever.”

  Sara tightened her neck muscles, and her head moved back and upward like a cobra’s. “What!”

  Cam said, “They were all around, by the fireplace. Holly took them. So nobody’d get upset.”

  One of the other women at the table spoke up, Myrna or Marie. Neither wore her name tag, and I couldn’t keep them straight. They both had short, fluffy hair and heavy New York accents. “Hey,” said whichever one it was, “maybe it’s a whole new dog activity, right? ‘Come on, big boy, for the casket, you like the white, or you want blue? And while we’re at it, how about your headstone. Plain old Rest in Peace do for you? Fun, huh?’ New dog sport. I mean, why leave him out? It’s his funeral.”

  “Myrna, please,” said her look-alike friend, who must have been Marie. “You can laugh, but it’s not all that—”

  Myrna interrupted. “So what are you going to do? You got some way to keep them alive forever? You lose a dog, and you’re a wreck, and you’re never going to laugh again, and you’re never going to get another dog?” Myrna’s raucous style and brassy voice had initially put me off, but when I listened to what she said and ignored how she said it, I admired her attitude. If fate snatched one of her dogs, she’d immediately get a new puppy and thumb her nose in death’s face. “So,” Myrna went on, “who left that shit out there? Sorry. Marie? Marie, I’m cleaning up my act. No more dirty words until we cross the Long Island border. So who put that stuff out?”

  “And who’s sending these cards?” Cam added. “And who got them? Ginny. Phyllis. Holly, you did. Did anyone else?”

  No one answered.

  “I wonder if Eric Grimaldi did,” I said. “I was just thinking. When Mrs. Abbott was talking about AKC and being a judge, I assumed she was taking it a little too personally, in the sense that she’s a judge.” I lowered my voice. “It did seem to me that she was overreacting. I didn’t exactly enjoy getting that sympathy card, but I mostly assumed that I got it by mistake. And Ginny thought hers was real. But even when she found out, she didn’t decide that she got it because she’s a tracking judge. Did you?”

  Ginny shook her head. “I never thought of it. Why would anyone …?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Holly, what about you?” Cam asked.

  “Me! Why would I …?”

  “In your column. In an article. Somewhere else? Have you written anything that could’ve made someone want to get back at you? I don’t remember anything, but …”

  “The anti-puppy mill stuff,” I said. “The usual stuff about not buying anything from pet shops that sell dogs. But I’ve been writing that for a long time, and so have plenty of other people. And I’m not AKC’s favorite person, but it’s no big thing.”

  In case you don’t subscribe to Dog’s Life, I should mention that I’d written about the miserable conditions of the AKC-registered breeding stock in the puppy mills. In a recent column, I’d discussed a report published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, according to which the puppies in three California pet shops were about twice as likely to have kennel cough, giardiasis, diarrhea, vomiting, severe gastroenteritis, or some other illness than were pups from private sources. The AKC connection? Every time a puppy mill operator registers a dog, a bitch, or litter; and every time a puppy mill operator transfers a puppy to a puppy broker; and every time the broker sells a puppy to a pet shop; and every time a puppy buyer registers the puppy, the American Kennel Club collects a fee. My great offense, I think, was to point out that in revoking the AKC registration privileges of about twenty puppy mill operators every month, the AKC was actually closing down each month only about 4 percent of the estimated 5,000 puppy mills in this country. I may also have commented that it didn’t seem like enough.

  Cam looked embarrassed. Her husband, John R.B. White, was an AKC delegate who sat on some committee or other, but his father, Richard Burton White, had been a real power in the fancy and at the AKC. I had the impression that the son had inherited some of the father’s clout. “That’s not what I was thinking of,” Cam said. “It was more like, oh, show reports, something like that. If someone felt slighted, you know, that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t do show reports.” I tried to keep my voice neutral. A show report in my own national breed club newsletter reads something like this: On June 25 at the East Podunk K.C., BOB was CH Wolfwhistle’s Silver Dagger, Buzzy, owned by John and Jane Bishop. It goes on to say that BW, WD was another dog owned by the same people or by someone else; that BOS, WB was a bitch owned by so-and-so; and so forth and so on, all of which is glorious to read if you happen to be John or Jane Bishop, whose dog went Best of Breed, or if yours went Best of Winners and Winners Dog or Best o
f Opposite and Winners Bitch. Otherwise? Sure, all of us love to see our dogs’ names in print, and we want to see how other people’s dogs are doing, but what everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to do with show reports is read them or skim them or just know that they’re there; there’s not a dog writer on earth who honestly enjoys writing them. I mean, you slave over them trying to inject a little spirit, a little dash, a little humor, and what happens? Either no one notices, or someone whose dog just got a plain old mention snubs you or yells at you at the next show and accuses you of playing politics by promoting someone else’s dog when all you did was give it an extra two adjectives. So, as I told Cam, I don’t do show reports anymore.

  “You ever thought about judging?” Ginny asked me, referring, as I understood, to obedience judging. “You judge any matches?”

  “No,” I said. “I could, I guess, but I don’t really have the right temperament. It’s not something I’ve ever wanted to do. I’ve helped out at a couple of Canine Good Citizen tests, but that’s different. I had to fail some dogs, but no one’s going to hold a grudge against me for that, and I don’t think there’s anyone at camp who was there, anyway.”

  “Actually, I was,” Ginny admitted. “Last fall. At Cambridge. Didn’t you just do that ‘accepts grooming’ part?”

  “Yes. Yeah, now I remember. But you passed, didn’t you?”

  “No, as a matter of fact. I had Magic, and you failed her for being too friendly.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. She jumped on me and grabbed the brush, and then she wouldn’t let go of it. I had to fail her.”

  “Look,” Cam said, “if Holly didn’t remember that Ginny was there, maybe she’s forgotten someone else. And Ginny’s a tracking judge, and Phyllis judges a lot. So maybe it really is someone with something against the three of you.”

  “But what?” I demanded. “Obedience judging is really quite objective, at least compared to breed. If your dog refuses a jump or breaks a stay or whatever, there’s nothing the judge can do except score you zero on the exercise. And if the dog’s perfect, sure, the judge can dock you a few points for supposedly crooked sits and handler errors that no one else saw, and that does happen.”