Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  “Holly Winter?” It sounded like a genuine question, probably because he expected to find the yard filled with dog runs, the air rich with yelps, and a clone of one of my parents exuding dander in his direction. I’m not much like either one. Maybe that’s too bad, maybe not. Marissa was spectacular, but Buck is a human moose.

  “Arthur,” I said.

  I hadn’t remembered how tall he was, and I’d forgotten his face because there was nothing memorable about it. He was wearing one of those complicated British intellectual trench coats with dozens of flaps, pockets, buttons, fasteners, and miniature epaulets, and his face, eyes, and hair were the same bland English beige. His head was disproportionately large and remarkably oval, his body long, thin, and straight. He looked quite a lot like a wooden spoon.

  Leah did not, which is why her arrival is somewhat blurred in my memory. I remember inviting Arthur in, and I’m positive that he declined the invitation. If Kimi and Rowdy had escaped from my bedroom, where they were temporarily jailed to protect them from Arthur’s hostility to their species, I’m sure I would recall the event. Arthur, I believe, stood in the rain yanking out Leah’s gear and handing it to us, and we ferried it through the downpour and into my kitchen. We must both have said good-bye to him.

  I clearly recall planting my wet feet on the muddy kitchen floor next to the pile of Leah’s sodden belongings and staring at her. As a child, it seemed to me, she had had light hair, but as sometimes happens in golden retrievers, the color had deepened to a rich red, much deeper than mine. My eyes are brown like Buck’s. Hers were blue. Her face was not oval like Arthur’s, but triangular, and in envisioning her as ugly, I had been entirely wrong. And robust? She had what my grandmother used to call an hourglass figure. I haven’t heard her use the phrase since Marissa died. The only glass object my own figure resembles is a test tube. Except for the shades of red in our hair that echo the blaze of Marissa’s, Leah and I were nothing alike. I don’t look like my mother. Leah did. The similarity was particularly amazing because it transcended the style of Leah’s times. Her long, wavy hair was pulled into a lopsided topknot, and she wore a black tank top over a blue T-shirt over a white long-sleeved shirt above a pair of knee-length metallic blue and black shorts intended for the Tour de France.

  “Is something wrong?” She sounded like Cassie, who, of course, sounds like Marissa, but her voice was higher pitched and less throaty than theirs.

  “No, nothing. I’m glad to see you. I’m just... I want you to meet my dogs.”

  “Golden retrievers, right?”

  “I used to have goldens,” I said. “But I’ve had a conversion experience.”

  When I opened the bedroom door, somewhat over a hundred and sixty pounds of Alaskan malamute barged into the kitchen and ignored me. I have owned a lot of dogs, and not one has ever been allowed to jump on people, but I hadn’t had Kimi very long, and before that, she’d had a laissez-faire puppyhood. Besides, anyone who knows anything will tell you that northern breeds are a challenge to train. Kimi wasn’t trying to knock Leah over. Her aim was simply to get close to Leah’s face, and since Leah didn’t kneel down, Kimi rose up. Rowdy knew not to jump. He dropped to the floor at Leah’s feet, rolled onto his back, and foolishly waved his great, powerful legs in the air.

  “Wow! Huskies!” At least she sounded happy about it, and although I observed her carefully for signs of what my father believes to be satanic stigmata—watery red eyes, a dripping nose, blotches, and sneezing—I saw none. She rubbed Kimi’s neck vigorously and looked down at Rowdy. “Is that one having some kind of fit?”

  “No. And they’re malamutes.” If you own a malamute, so many people tell you what a beautiful husky you have that the response becomes automatic. I didn’t mean to begin our relationship on a note of correction, especially because I was relieved to hear her say something that would never have passed through the speech center of my mother’s brain, Marissa would even have known which strain of malamute they were: Kotzebue. “Alaskan malamutes. This is Rowdy,” I said as I rubbed his belly, “and the bitch is Kimi. The female. The one with the black markings on her face. Rowdy, sit.” He did. “Give your paw.” Leah lowered Kimi, gravely waved her hand in front of Rowdy, and grasped his massive foot. He already knew the trick when I got him. I’d avoided teaching it to Kimi because pawing is dominance behavior, and no malamute needs instruction in bossing people around.

  “Kimi, sit,” Leah said. She made the same handshaking gesture that had prompted Rowdy. “Give your paw.”

  Kimi, who didn’t know the routine, sat squarely in front of Leah, flattened her ears against her head in a display of dutiful submission, and gently raised a forepaw. She didn’t squirm and didn’t rake her claws on Leah’s legs.

  “Good for you,” Leah told her. “What a good dog!”

  The Julia Child of dog training was the late Barbara Woodhouse, a British woman whose TV series promoted the belief that dogs adore the sounds of d and t and that the correct way to praise a dog is to sing out: “What a good dog! ” I was pretty sure that Leah had never heard of Barbara Woodhouse. Kimi kept staring up at her as if begging to be told what to do next.

  “Kimi, okay,” I said. That’s the release word I always use, the word that tells my dogs that they’re free to do what they want. Kimi didn’t move. “Okay!” I repeated happily. Kimi didn’t even look at me.

  “Okay!” Leah said, and Kimi bounced into the air.

  “Leah, have you ever trained a dog before?” I asked.

  “You mean dog school?” The voice was my mother’s, but not the tone of incredulity. Heftily degreed parents like Leah’s should have instilled a proper respect for institutions of higher learning, but she sounded as if I’d asked whether she had an M.A. in découpage or a diploma from an accredited academy of miniature golf.

  I let the subject drop and helped her to transfer the pile of possessions to the guest room. The house belongs to me, or will eventually, but I inhabit only the first floor and rent the second-and third-floor apartments. (In spite of the fresh Sheetrock, good floors, and new kitchens and baths in the apartments—and absent from my own place—I rent only to pet owners.) As I watched Leah haphazardly unpack, I realized that her lukewarm response to the prospect of obedience training stemmed from the sport’s failure to require human participants to wear a uniform or costume. Collars are strictly regulated, of course— no tags, no pinch collars, and, obviously, nothing electronic— but handlers wear whatever they want.

  As I lounged on the bed and the dogs nosed around, she pulled out footless dancers’ tights, leotards, sweatshirts, football jerseys, running shorts, more bicycling gear, and shoes designed exclusively for marathons, walks, tennis, and aerobic workouts. I asked whether she danced, ran, walked, played tennis, or did aerobics, but she thought my questions were funny and admitted that she was not very athletic. She’d also brought a combination radio and tape player that was three times the size of my television (and, as it turned out, ten times as loud), three or four hundred cassette tapes, the complete works of Jane Austen in hard cover, a stack of raise-your-SATs workbooks, and more cosmetics than I have cumulatively bought in my life.

  “You’re not really my niece, you know,” I told her. “We’re actually cousins.”

  She smiled, dashed over to me, and gave me a hug. “I’d rather have you for my aunt,” she said.

  Soon afterward, she asked a disconcerting question about a framed color photograph that hangs in my kitchen: “Is that your boyfriend?”

  I thought she was kidding. “Of course not.”

  She looked blank.

  “Come on,” I said. “Do you really not know who that is?”

  “No. Really, I don’t. Is it some kind of secret?”

  “Leah, that is Larry Bird.”

  Her forehead wrinkled a little, and she started to open her mouth.

  “Larry Bird,” I repeated. “The greatest basketball player in the history of the world.” You usually have to discuss Bill
Russell when you say something like that, but I didn’t want to talk over her head.

  That evening, as Leah was in the guest room simultaneously painting her nails and reading Pride and Prejudice, I called Rose Engleman, who was on the board of the Nonantum Dog Training Club, to double-check the schedule of summer classes. While I was getting the information, Leah made the mistake of patting the dogs. When she saw the fur embedded in the tacky lacquer, she yelled at them, booted them out of her room, and slammed the door. Twenty minutes later, she apologized to me and taught Rowdy and Kimi to lap her face when she smacked her lips and said, “Kiss!” It was the stupidest dog trick I’d ever seen, worse than “Say Your Prayers.” Kimi and Rowdy thought it was grand.

  Chapter 3

  FAME was what sold Leah on Cambridge. The morning after she arrived, we did a tour of the Square and ended up at the sidewalk café that sprawls out from under celebrated Harvard’s Holyoke Center toward the famous Out of Town News-Stand, across from the Yard and in walking distance of the Fogg Museum, the Longfellow House, and the Blacksmith House, but Leah was impervious to historical renown. She caught on to the propinquity of contemporary celebrity thanks to the dogs, whose presence in an eating establishment was illegal, but who’d been easy to smuggle into the outskirts and stash under one of the tables that are more on the sidewalk than actually in the café. Practically all my father remembers of his one trip to France is that dogs were allowed in restaurants, and according to an article in a recent issue of Dog Fancy, they’re still welcome. To sneak a dog into an American café called Au Bon Pain is simply to add authenticity, as the proprietors must realize, even though the Cambridge (so-called) Health Department doesn’t. Most dog diseases are species-specific, and there isn’t a single one that a person can catch just by sitting in a café with a dog, whose mere proximity, of course, builds the human immune system so it can fight off the colds, flus, and strep throats spread by the legal customers. Have I digressed?

  Because of our need to protect the francophile café management from knowingly violating the Cambridge restaurant code, We were perfectly positioned to person-watch and were doing Just that when Leah spotted among the passersby a cigar-smoking man whom she recognized as the greatest playwright since Shakespeare, then five minutes later, a tall woman best known as the Barbara Woodhouse of French cooking.

  “She’s really famous!” Leah said in awe. “Everyone knows who she is! Do you think we could ask her to say something?”

  “We’d have to follow her,” 1 pointed out. “And what would we ask her to say?”

  “Preferably,” Leah said, “we could have her wish us Bon appétit. But anything would do. I could bump into her by accident. You know, just jostle her a little, not knock her over or anything.”

  “Good.”

  “And I’d say I was sorry, and then she’d have to say that it was perfectly all right or something. Or maybe Kimi would do something to her, and we’d have to apologize.”

  “Sure,” I said. “All I do is sic my dog on Julia Child. Then we get to hear how she sounds in person. Leah, for one thing, for all I know, she is afraid of dogs.”

  “I’ll bet she isn’t, and if she is, we could at least hear her shriek,” Leah said happily. “It would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it?”

  The same reverence for public renown that sold Leah on Cambridge soon blended with her sense of fairness to sell her on my dog-training plans as well. As soon as she heard that Rowdy had an obedience title, she started making a game of kowtowing to him and calling him Sir Wowee.

  “His name is Rowdy,” I said in defense of his dignity, “not Wowee. And his obedience title is C.D., Companion Dog. It’s the first title. It’s nothing special.” Except for a malamute. In the preceding year, for instance, golden retrievers had earned 814 American Kennel Club C.D.’s, 370 C.D.X.’s, and 127 U.D.’s, and 20 goldens had become O.T.Ch.’s, Obedience Trial Champions. There were 26 Companion Dog malamutes, one Companion Dog Excellent, and not a single Utility Dog that year. Of course, there are more goldens than malamutes, but just ask yourself: Why are there more goldens?

  “And what’s Kimi’s title? She’s probably some kind of world champion.”

  “Rowdy is a champion in breed, too, but Kimi doesn’t have a title in anything.” Then I hammered in the point. “He does, but she doesn’t.”

  What Leah persisted in calling dog school began a couple of days after my preventive rescue of Julia Child. “We’ll eat a little early so we’ll have time to exercise the dogs before we leave,” I said.

  Leah objected: “They had a long walk this morning, and it’s hot out. They don’t need any more exercise.”

  I had to explain that although I usually avoid jargon, I do use “exercise,” a highly technical canine obedience term, because I refuse to say that a dog has to go to the bathroom. Rowdy finished his technical exercise before Kimi, who was somewhere down the block with Leah, and as I was crating him in the back of the Bronco, my next-door neighbor, Kevin Den-nehy, ended his daily run by trotting up and dripping sweat that hit the blacktop in loud splats. Even though Kevin holds a relatively elevated rank—he’s a homicide detective—he still looks like a Cambridge cop. Six months earlier, when enough Nautilus establishments had folded to convince Kevin that lifting was unfashionable again, he took up free weights at the Y. The program he was following must have been designed to reshape his body so it was too broad to fit through ordinary doorways unless he turned sideways.

  He asked how I was doing. When I said that I was doing fine and heard that he was, too, he asked how my niece was doing with the dogs.

  “She isn’t my niece,” I said. “She’s my cousin.”

  “So why’s she call you aunt?”

  “Because she feels like it,” I said. “And she’s doing fine with the dogs. She isn’t allergic, and they’re crazy about her. They’re totally infatuated. I mean, the standard says that they’re not supposed to be one-man dogs, but this is ridiculous.”

  I expected some kind of response from Kevin, partly because he’s a friendly guy, but mostly because I knew he’d always had a slight crush on me. He didn’t reply at all. At opposite ends of the lead, Kimi and Leah were bouncing up Appleton Street. I’m not sure that Kevin even heard me. His glazed eyes were fixed on Leah, who was wearing what looked like a heavily elasticized black two-piece bathing suit over a yellow tank top and a pair of shiny knee-length electric-blue shorts. Freed from the topknot, her hair stood out from her head and curled down her back like the coat of an undipped apricot poodle.

  “Hi, Kevin!” she said. “How’s your mom?” She also asked about three of his relatives who’d been visiting. In the couple of days she’d been with me, I might add, she’d learned the names of a few dozen neighbors who were only faces to me, and she’d ingratiated herself with Mrs. Dennehy, a strict vegetarian and teetotaler, who does smell hamburger and beer on Kevin’s breath when he returns from my house, but only imagines that she smells perfume on his clothes.

  “Hey, Leah, come on,” I said. “We’re late.”

  To make it to Newton by seven, I’d planned to leave at six-fifteen, and it was now close to six-thirty. Newton is Shaker Heights. Scarsdale. Maybe Shawnee Mission? The suburb of suburbs, it has big trees, bigger houses, good schools, and practically no crime. Stroll down a Newton street on any weekday, and you’ll assume that it has no people except babies, their nannies, and the hundreds of work crews mowing the lawns and painting the houses of the invisible population. A national survey of places in which nothing ever happens once rated Newton the most boring community in America. Although it’s only fifteen or twenty minutes by car from Cambridge, I always allow extra time: The boundary between the city and the suburbs is so steep that even my four-wheel-drive Bronco might not make the grade. Even so, Newton has lots of people who used to live here, because it’s where politically minded pro-public-school Cambridge intellectual parents move when their kids are ready for first grade. The prospect of moving to Newton
is the most powerful birth-control device in Cambridge.

  But Newton does have parks, dogs, and the Nonantum Dog Training Club.

  “I want you to know that this is not my regular club,” I told Leah as we drove west along the river. “This one is much more competitive. Some of these people are obsessed with high scores—they really compete, even at fun matches, even in class—and I don’t want it to get to you. First of all, they’ve got poodles and shelties and goldens, real obedience dogs, and you can’t expect to compete with that. But more important, that’s a sort of sick attitude. All you want to work for is getting Kimi in shape so she’ll qualify sometime, right? Not necessarily this summer. Sometime. And the class you’re in isn’t for beginners. It’s Novice for Show.”

  “Do you get grades every time?”

  “At class? No. Never. Just at matches and trials. Hey, don’t worry about it. Just have fun with her. That’s what it’s about.” Remember, Holly? Scores don’t matter. What matters is your dog, not your score. Say it often enough, and you’ll shake that high-score sickness. Scores don’t matter. “Scores don’t matter, anyway,” I said.

  As I’ve mentioned, dog training is one sport that requires no special costume, but as Leah and I walked the dogs through the wide opening in the stone and concrete wall, past a tennis court, and into Eliot Park, she drew a few stares. I guess Pre-Raphaelite aerobic bicycling hadn’t yet reached the suburbs.

  Leah and Kimi and Rowdy and I were not, of course, in the same class. Leah and Kimi’s Novice instructor was Bess Stein, who sometimes admitted to seventy-five, was rumored to be well over eighty, looked about twenty years younger than she was, and moved with the agility of a preteen. She was tall and angular, with salt-and-pepper hair swept into a loose bun plunk on the top of her head, and she had the one absolute requirement of an obedience instructor: a clear voice that carried well, even outdoors. Tony Doucette, who was teaching my advanced class, was a tidy little man with a pencil-thin moustache and hair-oiled waves who looked like what you’d expect if one of Al Capone’s accountants had been deep-frozen in the thirties and then periodically defrosted to teach people to train dogs. I was always surprised that he didn’t wear spats.