The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Of course it sounds terrible—spayed—a sharp hoe, shredded earth—and neutered—not as violent sounding but shameful nonetheless. Still, the reason for the procedures far outweighs the recoiling they naturally give rise to. I told Ben. He was eating oatmeal at our table, spoon at the ledge of his lips; he set down his spoon. Clink. “You’re going to remove Musashi’s testicles?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I could tell by his tone we were in for trouble, entirely unanticipated, because I knew he didn’t give a damn about the dogs, so I never imagined he might care in any way about one of their body parts.

  “You can’t remove a man’s testicles,” he said.

  “He’s not a man,” I said. “He’s a dog.”

  “You can’t do that,” Ben said. He seemed truly stumped, his eyes alarmed; this was a highly articulate person, a person with a love of debate who was suddenly silenced, stumbling over a panic as primitive as what a fish might feel flailing on a hook. I could not believe it. I could not believe my husband, for all his professed distance from dogs, was confusing his testicles with theirs, and I said so.

  “I am not confused,” Ben said.

  “Seems to me like you are,” I said. “You can’t be a responsible pet owner and not neuter your dogs.”

  “That’s just some right-wing mumbo jumbo,” he said. “Remove an animal’s testicles and you fuck up its hormones. You cripple it. The animal doesn’t mature the right way.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about animals,” I said.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I raise this objection on theory. You can’t take testicles from a male. I won’t have a neutered male in this house.”

  “I see,” I said. My voice grew icy then. “You won’t have a neutered male but a neutered female is fine. And you call yourself a feminist?”

  “I object to the procedure in Lila as well,” he said, but it was obvious from his voice: he was backpedaling.

  “Anyway,” I said. “Who are you to call neutering an animal mumbo jumbo? What do you know of the issue?”

  There then followed a still more ridiculous discussion about how he needed to know nothing of the issue because he was a scientist with a knowledge of the importance of hormones in the growth of any mammal, while I countered about the devastating effects of pet overpopulation, an argument that spiraled up and up like cigarette smoke, polluting the air until, at last, he said, “Don’t neuter Musashi. I am asking you not to do it.”

  I knew, then, that I was dealing with an irrational man. And worse, a man who would protect his kind, but was fine as concerned the fate of the female. Lila would be sliced open like a freshly baked cake, her core cut out, the tiny bean-sized sac of the uterus, the ovaries even now stuffed with their millions of eggs, and then sewn up, her healing hard.

  I said okay; I would not fix Musashi. The next day, Lila had her surgery, came home in a cage and didn’t move for days. The vet, it seems, was rough; on her shaved belly we could see an oozing railroad of a wound that ran from her anus to her chest, a huge incision for such a tiny task. “Lila, Lila,” Benjamin said. He sat by her crate, petted her head, brought her water in a small saucer. He was rigorous with her medication, pumping it into her mouth on a precise schedule, and smiling when she took her first timid steps. And it is exactly this—the inconsistencies—that make human loves so snarled. A gentle man? Yes. A blind man? As are we all, sometimes. When Lila was well enough, Benjamin came with me, for the first time, to the Fells, a large wooded area near our house, and we ran with the dogs through the winter woods. Benjamin tied small branches to the dogs’ heads, turned them into reindeer, and then we watched as they cantered along, made magic by his hands; these, my husband’s hands. For better and for worse.

  And the betrayal? I had Musashi neutered behind Ben’s back. The night of our neutering fight, I planned my strategy with barely a twinge of guilt. I would wait four months, enough time so that the conversation—the issue itself—was all but forgotten but not so much time that the puppy would have become a dog with observable scrotum, at which point a secret surgery would have been impossible. Lest our vet ever somehow let it slip in Ben’s possible future presence, I would bring the dog to a different vet, one we were sure to never see again. Problem #1: Explaining why Musashi had stitches between his legs. I would say he got a deep scrape at the park. Problem #2: Explaining, when the dog finally became fully mature, why he had no testicles. When this happened, as it inevitably would, I decided right then and there that I would feign concern, promise to take him to the doctor, then claim I had and announce that night at dinner that the vet had diagnosed Musashi fully male but with undescended testicles. It all seemed so simple. And, in fact, it was.

  Winter turned to summer turned to fall. As planned, Musashi was neutered in a covert operation and when later that evening Ben noticed the small stitches, I gave my rehearsed explanation. It all went by without a hitch. Brilliant. Bad. It seemed a long time went by before the inevitable confrontation, before the day Benjamin finally observed, nearly one year later, that the dog, now fully grown, had no balls. It was summer, and I had just returned from picking flowers on “Poop Hill,” the name the neighborhood children had given to the tract of land used by city dogs as an outhouse. Most people, as they approached Poop Hill, gave their animals a long leash, so the canines could find their deposit spot on the grass while their humans stayed safe on the pavement. But I liked Poop Hill because the flowers, so well fertilized, were abundant, bright, and ironically sweet smelling. And there I was, holding a fistful of my bright finds, standing in our hallway, the dogs lapping up water from their dish, a Sunday, and Ben knelt down to give the rare but occasional scritch to Musashi’s backside. This time, in response, Musashi lay down, rolled over, and pedaled his paws in the air, a pose Benjamin found especially undignified and from which he would inevitably recoil. But for some reason, he didn’t this time. A petal from a flower I was holding floated dramatically down and landed impishly, or accusingly, right at the base of the pup’s denuded penis. Benjamin leaned close, picked it off. “Hey,” he said, still kneeling, looking down.

  “Hey what,” I said, although I knew exactly what was coming.

  “This dog has no balls,” he said.

  “No balls?” I said. “C’mon.”

  “Seriously,” he said. “Look here.”

  I did, of course, look there. “I see some balls,” I said. “Right there.” I pointed to a place too near the tip where there was a tiny bilateral bulge, a quirk the dog had had since infancy.

  “You think those are balls?” Ben said to me. “Are you serious?”

  “Well,” I said. “Isn’t it possible to have, you know, high balls?” I started laughing then, slapping my knee and snorting. “I’m so hilarious,” I said. “Aren’t I?”

  Ben didn’t say anything. “Aren’t I?” I said again, and now there was a ball in my throat, so swallowing was suddenly difficult.

  “What’s wrong with Musashi?” Ben said. “Could they have neutered him before you bought him?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I mean, he was practically new born. I’ll take him to the vet, check it out.”

  Which I didn’t. But three nights later I said, “So I took him to the vet—” Etc., etc.

  “Undescended?” Benjamin said to me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Musashi,” Ben said. He gave one of his magnificent whistles then, and the dogs came bounding through their door and into the kitchen.

  “Hey, friend,” Benjamin said to Musashi. He pulled out his paws then, so the dog slipped gently down, and then he turned the animal over, studied him hard.

  “Undescended,” Ben then said again, not a question but a statement. He looked from the dog to me back to the dog again. A long time seemed to pass. At last he went, stood by the window. What was it he saw out there?

  “Hey,” I said, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t want to listen. Then he left the room.

  3: A
Baby at One Breast, a Monkey at the Other

  If it sounds like our marriage was bad, it wasn’t. We shared so many things, I am only telling of the troubles. Benjamin called me “Pie,” short for Sweetie Pie. I loved to hear him sleep talk, long monologues about dolphins and computer code. In 1999 I decided I was ready, and we set about the task of conceiving as though it were exactly that—a task, a military mission. We “succeeded” after battle number three, the bloodless battle, my periods gone. At gestational month four we discovered we were having a girl, a fact that made the prospect only marginally more appealing. In truth the baby was largely Benjamin’s idea. My zealous approach to conception arose more in response to challenge than desire. “Look how much you care for the dogs,” my friend Audrey kept reassuring me. “If you love the dogs so much, obviously you’re a person capable of attachment. You won’t have a problem.”

  But I would. I did. Have a problem. It was easy enough to give voice to my ambivalence about having a child; maternal ambivalence is très chic these days; there are lots of books about it, and Oprah did a whole show on the topic, each female guest confessing that, yes, she had a shadow side; that, yes, when it came to babies and feelings about them, it wasn’t all cream and talc. None of this comforted me. It seemed to me my ambivalence was of altogether a different sort, or species. A single question circled round and round inside my skull, its serrated edges making a scraping sound that no one else could hear. What I didn’t say … Okay. What if I couldn’t love the baby as much as I loved my dogs? Or, what if I found I loved both the baby and the animals equally? Can you imagine admitting to that, should it occur? In the hypereducated community that comprises my culture, a culture that boasts more PhD holders per square mile than most other parts of the country, or even the world, such a feeling for one’s pets is more blasphemous than having a house decorated with stenciled hearts or printing a tattoo of a serpent on your bicep. In my culture, it’s tentatively okay to have a companion animal, but one must avoid the sentimentality associated with it at all costs. One must rigidly remember not to anthropomorphize and above all not to ooze emotion over domesticated beasts, the toys for which consumers stupidly spend over billions of dollars while so many in this world are starving.

  So how could I comfortably say, or feel, that I might love daughter and dogs equally? Did I not know the difference between my meats, MacDonald’s on the one hand, expensive organic rib eye on the other? A whole new middle-class, navel-gazing female writer problem, the critics might write, if they wrote anything at all. Domesticity diminished to its most insignificant level. And, yet, were I to claim I valued my dogs and my daughter equally, I would not in fact be making an insignificant statement. I would be in violation of a sacred human stance in place since pets, thousands of years ago, first took up residence in human households.

  But that is not the whole story, not by a long shot. If I had known then what I know now, perhaps I could have been comforted. Because there are places and times far, far away from here—there are and were places—where people loved animals as much, if not more, than their own children. And these people represent a vast variety of cultures from all around the world. Explorer Francis Galton, for instance, wrote in his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, about coming upon aboriginal Australian women who “habitually feed the puppies they intend to rear from their own breasts, and show an affection for them equal to, if not exceeding, that to their own infants.”

  Another anthropologist of the nineteenth century told how, in Fiji, women and shamans made pets of parrots, fruit bats, and lizards, and, noted James Serpell in his In the Company of Animals, they apparently felt such love for their animals that they would masticate for them plants and bananas while their own human babies stayed hungry at their sides. My favorite image is that reported by I. H. Evans in the 1930s. He lived amongst the Semang Negritos of Malaysia and wrote of seeing a woman running down the street in a great hurry, a baby at one breast, a monkey at the other.

  My breasts: They grew in pregnancy, the veins bulging blue and a particular deep purple hue. The nipples swelled and sensitized, at the end the size of strawberries, huge and indecent. Around month six I had my amnio—all was well—except the baby on the screen did not look human, nor animal, nor plant. She came, it appeared, from a category not yet created by Linnaeus; all static and blips, she lived inside the Hewlett Packard screen that showed her shape. And the bulge in my belly? What accounted for that? My dreams grew strange. In them I gave birth to a snowman, a two-legged tree, my sister. She tried to wash my hair and the soap stung my eyes. There was grit, burn, push, pull, the moon as tiny as a Cheerio in some strange sky. I woke up, scared and big.

  I had the baby. Human birth is an unreasonable proposition; her head was too big for my pelvis; it got stuck in the brackets of bone. Hyenas, however, give birth through the clitoris, so I still count myself amongst the luckier of the beasts on our blue ball. There she was, seven pounds, waxy and wet.

  Five days later, C-section healing, Benjamin and I brought our daughter home. We arrived to two dogs howling with joy – hello, hello, hello, kisses and slurps all around, such a long time, so good to see you, you too, leaping on hind legs, their short forelegs dangling the way they do, their ears pressed back in pleasure. All the books I’d read emphasized the importance of letting the dogs thoroughly sniff the new family member. I lowered the bundle of baby down. The summer breeze blew in, and halfway to their level, the dogs caught a whiff of the strange smell. They froze. Their eyes turned canine, carnivore, the little dots of yellow in the iris with a wolfish gleam.

  “Stop,” said Ben. He claims he heard a low growl emanating from Lila’s throat. Had I heard it, I would have stopped, of course. I, however, heard nothing.

  “Musashi, Lila,” I sang. Something was amiss, but what? “This is Clara,” I said, and then she was down, this baby so bundled only the disc of her face was visible, the tiny lips, the perfect mini nose, and eyelids scrawled with arteries.

  Lila, always the more aggressive, stepped forward. Her snout was wet, her black lips seamed shut; but it was the eyes that gave me pause. Slowly, slowly, she lifted one leg and pawed at the bunting, almost batted it. Playful? Aggressive? Curious? Musashi followed, his blocky head low down and then, before I could stop them, their noses were in the wrappings, the huff huff of their hungry breath, the child screamed, the dogs shot back. Ben grabbed the baby from me, his own face full of canine rage. “How could you?” he spit. “They’ve bitten her.”

  Understand, I was doped up on drugs, painkillers coursing through my system, the whole world wavy, and I had done what all the books instructed. “No,” I said. “No.”

  We peeled back the wrappings. Our baby was unbroken, everywhere. In an instant she plunged into slumber again. Later on, when we removed her diaper, we saw blood inside it, but that, we knew, was not from the dogs. Female infants shortly after birth often menstruate, if you can call it that, in response to the maternal hormones. Yes, that blood came from me.

  I have never brought up, certainly not then, or now, until now, the idea that I might love my animals as much as my child, or children. No one has ever thought to ask, despite the fact that everyone I know, as hypereducated as they all are, understands that meaning is often found in the questions we fail to form. The oversight has freed me to fret privately, and sometimes not at all. While some pluck petals off the daisy—he loves me, he loves me not—my chant is less melodic, as clunky as the conundrum it echoes: I love her more; I love her less; I love them all the same. At the end of this exercise, what am I left with? A shredded flower, hands painted with pollen, cupped up and empty. I said nothing, to anyone, ever.

  But, as a strategy, silence does not work to tamp the tugs one would rather not feel. As a mother, I wanted to feel clearly and cleanly driven only to my offspring, that packet of genes and nerves, that person in my pocket for the first nine months of her life, but it didn’t happen that way. In the early years of my daughter�
�s life, and then my son’s life too, when he was later born, I would sometimes feel a longing for my dogs that overrode every other affection and made no sense to me, given that I had as much physicality from my mate and babies as any person could possibly need. But I wanted to touch another kind of being. I wanted snout and paw. Why? The very fact of the connection calms. I love the canine paw, its ridges of interstitial fur, its surface cracked and cratered. I love the shape of the snout, the nostrils, the oblong ears, the teeth, tartared and sharp.

  And it was this, this felt biological need to connect beyond my human confines, that drew me downstairs, again and again, after my babies were asleep. I’d sit in the kitchen and groom my dogs. Their undercoats were always dense with down; the fur flew, piling up in drifts I swept into big green bags, huge bloated bags that looked heavy but that drifted in the wind on garbage night. I’d stack them on the curb for the next day’s trash truck, but the fur-stuffed bags always flew away, flew high above the roofs of our city while over and over again I brushed the pups, until it was very late, and Benjamin came down, tired-eyed, 2 a.m., the first feeding over now. He’d see me on the floor, then and now, as well. “Making love with the pups?” he’d ask, and I say the only thing I could.

  Yes.

  With one child, and then a second, our lives got busier and then busier still. The children entered a marriage already divided by dogs; our babies sharpened the wedge, and drove it deeper down. We were two parents with full-time jobs and a moderate income, two parents determined to give their kids the best they could—skating lessons, pottery lessons, day camps, Spanish tutoring. As the children grew so too did the needs, and expectations, along with the bills, while time tucked its tail between its legs and went away. We lost time, traded it in for love, but here’s the quandary; love and time are hopelessly intertwined.