Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  “So,” I said to Rowdy, “the hypothetical situation is this: You get loose and fall hopelessly in love with a golden retriever. You won’t look at another mal, refuse to come home, and you father a litter of mixed breed pups. How do I feel? Okay, angry. It may be silly, but I can’t help it. And since we’re talking about people, let’s magnify it a lot, because the fact is, I could always get some more dogs, but children are hard to replace. And do I want your mate dead? Am I angry enough to kill her? If it’s the only way I get you back? Of course not. I don’t want anything enough to kill a dog.” But not everyone feels that way about dogs. Or about other people.

  Half an hour later, when Rita stopped in for coffee, I told her what I’d been thinking about, and she told me not to do what I’ve just done, namely, tell anyone.

  “Holly, look,” she said emphatically. “I never give advice. Hardly ever. But I’m telling you, don’t say any of this to anyone else, okay? I know you, and I understand that you’re not kidding. Dogs are how you understand Arabs, the Mideast situation, feminism, the Holy Trinity, psychotherapy, higher education, and everyone and everything else, but I’m telling you, you need to be aware that most people are going to find this frivolous and offensive, and you need to keep it to yourself. If it ever comes up, just say that you think you can empathize a little, or whatever. Don’t mention dogs.”

  “Well, I won’t mention them to Charlotte Zager,” I promised.

  “Who?”

  “Jack Engleman’s sister. Charlotte Zager. She’s cleaning my teeth this afternoon.”

  “What?”

  “Well, she is a dentist,” I said.

  In the midafternoon, I was sitting in a blue plastic stackable chair in a yellow plastic office in Newton Centre. I was trying to fill out the patient information form handed me on a clipboard by the receptionist. The form asked how I was referred to Dr. Zager, and it seemed inappropriate to write that I’d met her while visiting her brother when his gentile wife had just died under suspicious circumstances, that it was the first time Dr. Zager had been in the house, because the family sat shiva for Jack when he married Rose, that Dr. Zager seemed to me to be making herself all too at home there all of a sudden, and that wondered what kind of person she was and couldn’t think of any easier way to pursue an acquaintance with a dentist than to get my teeth cleaned. Besides, there wasn’t room on the form.

  The memory of Charlotte Zager’s molar-wrenching handshake made me a little nervous, but after an assistant showed me into an examining room, put a bib around my neck, and cranked me in a reclining dental chair, Dr. Zager came in, remembered me, didn’t ask any weird questions about how I happened to be there, and said she’d check my teeth when the hygienist finished cleaning them. Although I’d seen my own hygienist only a month earlier, this one, a pickle-mouthed blonde who delivered a moralistic scolding about regular flossing, spent half an hour lacerating my gums. When she finally tore her gloves off, Charlotte Zager came back and took a remarkably gentle look.

  “Holly,” she pronounced, “I think your teeth can be saved.” In case you think sh was kidding, you should know that my father considers fluoride to be one of the principal instruments of the communist conspiracy. My teeth are a cold-war battlefield. Charlotte Zager was the Gorbachev of dentistry. She made me chomp into a mass of nauseating wax and told me I’d get a call when my fluoride trays came back from the lab and that when they did, the hygienist would show me how to use them. Then she asked whether I had a dog.

  “Two,” I said.

  “You do know about caring for their teeth?” she said. “They have teeth, too, you know.”

  The most recent proof I bore of the truth of her claim was a scar left by Kimi, but I didn’t hold up my hand and point to it. It was mostly my own fault, and people don’t always understand that Kimi didn’t mean it. (I never tell people that if she’d been serious, I wouldn’t have the hand at all.)

  “I do try to brush their teeth,” I said.

  If this sounds bizarre, you’re behind the canine times. These days, the well-groomed Rover has his own toothbrush and special toothpaste that’s safe to swallow. If he suffers from halitosis, he also gets his gums squirted with mouthwash glop, and if he’s lucky, he gnaws on a bone-shaped hunk of dental floss.

  “And regular professional cleaning?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “They’re both fairly young, and their teeth are good, and I don’t think it’s worth the risk of the general anesthetic.” Ready for a historic first? I swear, it was the first time I’d even considered this question, never mind actually uttered it, and the words felt stranger in my mouth than the lingering taste of wax: “Um, why are we talking about dogs?”

  It might have been a first for me, but not for her. “My son is a veterinarian.”

  And does he always ask his patients about their owners teeth? But I didn’t say it. “Oh, what’s his name? I have a good friend who’s a vet.”

  “Don,” she said.

  “Zager?”

  She nodded.

  “Is he around here?”

  “Newtonville,” she said. “On Washington Street.”

  On my way home, I took a slight detour to satisfy my curiosity. Not far from the corner of Walnut Street was a shabby two-story house with a curtained storefront and a fresh white shingle that showed a stylized outline of a Scottie and the name Donald M. Zager, D.V.M. The dumpy faded building had a view of the section of the Mass. Pike that has a Star Market built over it. It reminded me of something Rose Engleman had said, that Newton isn’t the way people think it is. As I know from Steve, who hates the business part of being a vet, even someone with great credentials and an endearing whelping-box manner has to remember that owners care about appearances even if the patients don’t. Donald Zager’s clinic looked like a place you’d go to have your palm read or your cards done, not somewhere you’d want your dog neutered or your cat defleaed.

  Chapter 11

  “JUST give it back,” Jeff was telling Leah when I walked in. His tone was reasonable, but his expression was hurt and sullen. The humidity had made deep-golden ringlets of his hair. He looked like a gawky, pissed-off Renaissance angel.

  Leah’s hair was meticulously French-braided in cornrows and plaits, but an aura of tendrils had escaped. Her eyes were pleased, her mouth stubborn.

  “No,” she said forcefully. “Why should I?”

  One of them might at least have said hello to me. I flashed them a post dental-hygienic smile, anyway.

  Jeff nodded to me and mumbled. He looked abashed. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “See ya.”

  “So what’s this about?” I asked Leah when the door closed behind him. She was standing mule-like in the middle of the kitchen. “Or maybe it’s none of my business.”

  “Nothing,” she said. He’s just making... Forget it.”

  “Oh, damn. He noticed the roses.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not the roses. It was something else.”

  “Willie, uh, sent something else?”

  “Brought it.”

  I looked around the kitchen, but there weren’t any flowers.

  "Well, what was it? And what is he giving you stuff for? He practically doesn’t even know you.”

  “So?”

  “So what is it?”

  She produced what used to be called a boom box—I’m not sure what the right word is now—a supersize combination radio, tape, and CD player with a few dozen dials and lights and big detachable speakers, the kind of contraption that runs through ten D batteries every few hours. It was even bigger than the one she had and much flashier.

  “It looks like the one in that Spike Lee movie,” I said. “You know, the one that kid carries around. And then it gets kicked in.”

  “Wait’ll you hear it!”

  “When I walked in, Jeff was telling you to give it back.”

  She smiled and made a face.

  “I hate to tell
you,” I said, “but the fact is, you do have to give it back. Tough, but there you have it.”

  When malamutes decide they don’t want to do something, they plant their feet, brace their legs, and imitate the Central Park statue of Balto, the canine hero of the 1925 Great Serum Run that saved Nome from diphtheria. I wasn’t sure whether Leah was imitating the statue of Balto or imitating Kimi and Rowdy’s imitation, but she locked her knees and elbows, clenched her jaw, and froze that way.

  “The best thing would be,” I went on, “if you call him and explain. You don’t have to be rude or anything. All you do is say you can’t take such a big present. I know you think it’s wonderful and you want to keep it. But you can’t.”

  “That is not fair! And what’s he supposed to...?”

  “Leah, he didn’t know any better, that’s all. Among other things, it’s no favor to him to let him think this is just sort of the way it’s done, because it isn’t. You can ask Rita if you want. Or we can try to call your parents. Or look it up in Miss Manners.”

  “I think you’re being a snob,” she said, but at least she said something.

  “You know Kevin Dennehy, right? Is he a snob?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, if we need an arbiter, or you’d feel better if we got a sort of second opinion, we can tell Kevin about it, but I’m warning you, he’d probably ram it down the kid’s throat or bash him over the head with it. And he won’t demand to know the gentleman’s intentions, either. He’ll assume he knows what they are.”

  She looked stunned. “That is the stupidest... Nobody would...”

  “Kevin would,” I said. “And I agree that that’s sort of archaic. Look, Leah, it’d be just as out of line if you gave him something like this. Can you imagine doing that?” In a way, people are easier than dogs. Try getting a malamute to reverse roles and see the other dog’s point of view. “Really. Imagine going out and spending hundreds and hundreds on something like this and giving it to somebody you’ve met a couple of times. You just wouldn’t do it, right? No matter how much you wanted the person to like you, you’d know that that wasn’t the way to do it. It wouldn’t even occur to you, but if it did, it would feel strange, and you’d find some other way to meet whoever it was.”

  She burst into tears. “What am I supposed to do? Write him a letter and say, ‘Sir, ladies do not accept blah blah blah, and my aunt doubts the purity of your...’?”

  “Do you want me to take it back?”

  Her look was relieved and suspicious.

  “I’ll be nice about it,” I promised. “I’ll say how generous it was, which it was. I know it would be hard for you, and it’s no big thing for me. You want me to?”

  She nodded. “Would you?”

  I returned the nod. “Look, did you remember to take the dogs out? And run a brush through them, would you? And when you do, put the fur in a plastic bag. I’m going to... Never mind. I’ll tell you about it later. And then vacuum in here, or there’ll be fur in everything we eat. I’ll be back soon.”

  The Bronco made it back over the great suburban divide and to the Johnsons’ house in only twenty minutes. If I had three muscular kids and a big house in Newton, or even if I just had the house, I wouldn’t hire a lawn service, but the grass would be cut the way the Johnsons’ wasn’t, and someone would dig out the dandelions the way no one had uprooted theirs.

  At first I thought no one was home. Old-fashioned non-mini, wide-slatted aquamarine Venetian blinds were lowered on all the windows. The front door had a peephole, and mounted to the right of the door, next to a lump of crisscrossed silver duct tape that probably covered a doorbell, was a shabby intercom with a collection of unlabeled buttons and switches. Above it, encased in a plastic food-storage bag, hung a piece of ragged cardboard on which someone had printed in black block letters: Beware of the dog.” I rested the oversize brown shopping bag containing the boom box on a dirty sisal mat that read: “Welcome.”

  I pushed some buttons on the intercom and, after a minute or two, rapped my knuckles on the door. Then I kept pressing what I thought was the most likely button and spoke into the little box: “Hello? Anyone home?”

  One slat on the window to my right rose an inch or two and then sank. I rapped on the door and tried to sound as if the sisal mat meant what it said: “Hello? Anyone home?”

  When I’m in the middle of writing something, I sometimes just let my doorbell ring, too, because often enough, the stranger standing there turns out to be a solicitor for Greenpeace or a Jehovah’s Witness. I knocked hard and called out, “Hello? Is Willie there? My name is Holly Winter.” Just in case the neighborhood was as heavily canvassed as mine, I yelled that I wasn’t collecting for anything. When the front door suddenly opened inward, I found myself looking into the face of Willie’s brother, the one from the fun match, and hollering: “And I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness!”

  I felt like a jerk.

  He must have caught only the last two words. “Mom isn’t interested,” he said. “She’s Presbyterian.”

  I hadn’t seen the brother up close before. Like Willie, he had white-blond hair, but the sides of Willie’s head were shaved bald. His brother’s hair stood luxuriantly and stiffly on end all over his head. His features were chunkier than Willie’s, and his expression was stupefied but vaguely bellicose.

  “Um, I was saying I’m not,” I told him. “I thought maybe... Never mind. Could we start over? My name is Holly Winter. Willie and I train dogs together. I need to see him. Is he here?” He shook his head. Willie’s brother didn’t have shoulders like Kevin Dennehy’s, but he was working on them, and he was taller and beefier than Willie, who was squat and stocky. In fact, the brother had probably been building his lats or traps when I rang the bell: His white T-shirt and yellow shorts were soaked, his face flushed.

  A small gray-haired woman with the expression of a frightened squirrel stood behind him and peered at me.

  “Mrs. Johnson?” I said.

  Her eyes opened in alarm, as if I were trying to scare her off a bird feeder.

  “Mrs. Johnson, my name is Holly Winter. Willie and I train our dogs together. May I come in?”

  She tilted her head and looked up at her son. “Dale?”

  “You want me let her in?”

  She jerked her bony little chin up and down, he moved back, and I carried the heavy bag in. Everything I could see—the big front entrance hall, the dining room on the right, the living room on the left, and the wide flight of stairs directly ahead— was papered, painted, carpeted, or upholstered a muddy aquamarine. The lowered blinds let in murky light. I felt as if I had just stepped into a giant aquarium.

  Dale abruptly lumbered off- through the dining room, and I heard the swish of a swinging door. Mrs. Johnson stood bewildered, wrapping the fingers of her left hand around the first finger of the right and squeezing hard. I had the sense that she’d once known what to do next—invite me to sit down, ask me what I wanted—and was hoping that, somehow, if she wrung that finger painfully enough, the memory would squirt out.

  “Willie’s gone to Star Market for me,” she said with some alarm.

  “Do you expect him back soon?”

  Her mindless eyes opened into frightened circles.

  I tried to sound matter-of-fact. “I just need to see him for a second. Do you expect him back soon?”

  She shrugged her shoulders as if I’d asked her the meaning of life.

  “How long ago did he leave?” I asked.

  “An hour? An hour ago?”

  Why ask me?

  “Then he’ll probably be back soon,” I said. “Do you think I could wait for him?”

  She nodded and finally moved toward the living room. I followed her. She perched on the edge of a wing-back chair, and I sat on the couch. I wasn’t looking forward to making conversation with her, but I couldn’t face explaining the complex matter of returning Willie’s present, and, in any case, I didn’t want to embarrass him by talking to his mother abo
ut it, and I didn’t want to leave it with no explanation at all. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about insisting that Leah give the thing back. How was he supposed to have known better? His mother couldn’t manage to answer the doorbell by herself, and when someone had done it for her, she hadn’t been able to remember how to say something as complicated as “Hello,”

  “Come back later,” or “Won’t you sit down.”

  I looked around for something to talk to her about. A stack of magazines sat on the coffee table, but the one on top of the pile was an issue of Outdoor Life, and it felt like a tactless choice. Her flowered housedress was the kind I associate with the women in those McCarthy-era films about what to do when the Russians drop the bomb. I guess we could’ve debated the pros and cons of duck and cover, but we didn’t because I noticed the one sizable nonaquamarine object in the room, a large, framed family tree that hung over the fireplace.

  “Your family.” I smiled and gestured toward it. It was the most familiar-looking thing in the room. Anyone interested in purebred dogs is, of course, expert at reading pedigrees, and genealogical diagrams of human lineage are simple and straightforward compared with the ones that trace canine ancestry. For a start, in human family trees, the same individual tends to appear only once, but in a linebred dog’s pedigree, the same names show up more than once, and if there’s been close inbreeding, the trunks and branches of the family tree twist in and around each other in a scandalous tangle.

  “Johnsons and Smiths.” Her voice was a little hollow, but less than it had been. “Smith was my maiden name.”

  “Oh,” I said brightly.

  “And Johnson is a very old name, too,” she added proudly. I gave her a vacuous smile, and she went on. “And one of my ancestors was a cousin to President Zachary Taylor.”