What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned

by Merrill Markoe

  It starts out slowly at first. The large pear-shaped woman in the pink sweater asks him to kiss her hands. He does. Then it starts to heat up. A pretty blonde in tight jeans commands him to straddle a chair butt outward so she can practice her whipping technique. She smacks him tentatively. “Those pants are pretty thick. You can hit him harder,” Ava advises. “You want to aim at the broad part of the back, or the back of the legs. You want to avoid this area here because you can hurt the kidneys.” I raise my hand. I want to know if this will be on the final exam. The blonde smacks him much harder on her next try. Then she leans over to see his reaction. “He’s smiling,” she reports back to the class. “Make him say thank you!” a class member yells out. “Do you want some more?” the blonde asks him. “Yes,” he mumbles. “I can’t hear you,” she taunts him. The class applauds spontaneously.

  The next woman up to bat is a plain, boxy Latino woman in her early forties, dressed in a black-and-white-striped suit with a knee-length skirt. She commands the Navy Seal to get on his knees. “Kiss my feet,” she orders. “That’s it. I’ve been home all day and they do hurt. Take off my shoes and smell them. Oh? You think that’s funny? Then put my leg between your thighs and hump it like the dog that you are.” And he does it. Well, it is school. Maybe he’s worried about his GPA. The class breaks out in applause again. I am thinking, Who are these people?

  Whereupon a gorgeous white woman with long black hair and enormous breasts, dressed in a skin-tight red sweater and short black skirt, takes confident control of the Seal. She puts him into a dog collar, attaches it to a leash, and begins to lead him up and down the aisles. Now I’m angry. His leash technique is sooo much better than what I can get from any of my four dogs, even after all that expensive training. I can’t take it anymore. This is the final insult!

  “The lady who is leading him around the room is his wife,” announces Ava. Happily reunited, the Seal and the babe take the stage and answer questions like they are a celebrity couple: The Liz and Larry Fortensky of Domination. “You never told me you like to be whipped,” she teases. “He never liked to be whipped before.”

  “Really???” says the blonde who did the whipping, suddenly embarrassed and full of remorse. “I didn’t know you didn’t like to be whipped. Because I don’t like to whip either. I guess I should have asked you first.”

  “Communication is very important,” says Ava. “I guess we were both a little nervous,” says the Seal. Everyone nods.

  “Well, that’s it for tonight,” says Ava, “except for those of you who would like to work on knots.” It’s almost eleven P.M. I think I’ll work on my knots in the morning.

  On the way down in the elevator, a bunch of us compare notes. “It was either this or an antiques lecture. And the antiques lecture was sold out,” says a very professorial-looking black woman, waving good-bye as we head across the parking lot to our individual cars.

  Diary of a New Relationship

  I guess every man has an idealized image of the woman he loves. And my man apparently wants me to look like Nikki Sixx.

  One of the unique and enduring qualities of this not-so-new-anymore relationship is the emphasis on hair fluffing. In past relationships, very little comment was made about my looks in general. No comment was ever made about the fluffiness level of my hair.

  In my past romantic entanglements, most of what I did in the name of vanity was discouraged, or simply not acknowledged at all. When I wore eye shadow, one long-term boyfriend used to fix me with a withering glance and say, “Why do you have green stuff on your eyelids?” As if there might be a good answer to that, like “What? Are you serious? Let me get this straight. You’re saying there’s green stuff on my eyelids?” Or perhaps the more technical “Well, I’m suffering from eyelid fungus.”

  Of course, that particular former member of my roster of so-called serious boyfriends once took off his Hawaiian shirt and cleaned his windshield with it, then put it back on and went out to dinner. When that is taken into account, it is not so surprising that the fluffiness of my hair was not one of his concerns.

  But now I have a boyfriend who is a musician. And he, like others of his kind, puts a lot of emphasis on image. He looks at those scary pictures of Mötley Crüe in their platform boots and spandex pants from the eighties and thinks, “Wow. Great hair.”

  His effect on my overall appearance has been such that right now, as I write this, my hair is a full 75 percent fluffier than at any previous point in my history. But then again, I come from the Joni Mitchell sleek-and-wounded-too-artistic for-hair-product tradition. Perhaps that is why I am still not certain that fluffiness is a look I can pull off. Not everyone can do everything. Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, will never be thought of as a punk. Pamela Anderson will not be confused with an academician. And so, too, I have found that there are certain adjectives and looks that no one has ever used when describing me. “Delicate,” “dainty,” “tidy,” and “petite” are some of them, along with “Gladiator,” “Bank President,” “Race Car Driver,” and “Supermodel.” “Fluffy” has always been on all such lists.

  Because I am in love with my current boyfriend, I try to do what I can to please him. But when I catch a glimpse of myself in a store window, I never fail to worry that the fluffier my hair gets, the less I look like Pink and the more I look like Madeleine Albright in a party dress. I fear that I look like I am trying too hard and failing miserably. Like a bulldog fresh from the groomer who is still wearing a bow.

  Some of this stems from the difference between being a writer and being a musician.

  Musicians strut. They are peacocks. When they look around the world for role models, they think flash. They think Keith Richards and David Bowie. They pose for album covers bare-chested, wearing only a truss, lime green bell-bottoms, and a fedora.

  Writers skulk. They stare, unsmiling, deadpan and miserable, from their book jacket photos. Writers attract attention at parties by looking away when you look at them so they will never look like they care if you look or not. Even though they know that you are and like that you are and hope you will keep looking so they can keep looking away when you do. When I survey this parched landscape for role models, I feel lucky if I can pull off Joyce Carol Oates.

  The boyfriend does not understand, no matter how hard I try to explain, what it means to have tried and failed with big ratted hair for decades. When I was in junior high, everyone I hung out with could knock low branches off trees with their pyramids of cantilevered hair. They carried cans of hair spray the size of scuba tanks in their purses for on-the-spot maintenance between classes. Hoping to blend in, I, too, would spend all five of the allotted minutes between classes ratting and spraying my hair into a big bubble. But once I left the spraying chamber and returned to the classroom, amid the people I hoped to impress, my hair would deflate like an inadequately prepared pan of Jiffy Pop. Flat and sad, it lay on my head rigid and mangled like a drugged animal; I could almost hear the air escaping the way it does from a punctured balloon. “Fuck you. You can’t tell me what to do, asshole,” my teenage hair would yell at me.

  But the new boyfriend cannot really comprehend my dilemma. The new boyfriend comes to me complete with a history of previous girlfriends who were all winners in the Vanity Derby. I refer here to the kind of rock-and-roll bohemian girls with hair the color of nail polish who can assemble a fetching outfit by throwing together a hula skirt, a mohair sweater, a mattress cover, a prayer shawl, and oven mitts. Some were women who worked as exotic dancers and therefore spent as much time fixing their lip liner and pasting on eyelashes as I spend cleaning up dog shit.

  In other words, a lot of time.

  Insecurities aside, I still feel that the new boyfriend is a step in the right direction, because I am at long last following the advice of my mother, who harped at me, from early childhood on, “Stop running around with all those worthless lawyers and accountants and settle down with a nice rock musician.”

  My parents were very critic
al people, who felt that their mission in life was to protect me from the stress that having a shred of self-esteem might cause me. In their eyes I was always too fat or too thin, I was wearing too much makeup or not enough. For me to have been the kind of daughter my parents had in mind, I should have been born with an Etch A Sketch for a face.

  Therefore, my current hair dilemma with the new beau fits neatly into what my shrink calls repetition compulsion. My mother also complained ad nauseam about my hair. However, she had a different solution. Her mantra was always “Get your hair out of your face”—the better to see the sunshine reflecting off my big beaming forehead like a spotlight on a newly arriving space alien.

  Whereas “Get your hair into your face” is the mantra of the new boyfriend. “Did you cut your bangs?” is often the first thing he says to me when I greet him at the door.

  “Well, yes. Because I can’t see.”

  “So you can’t see,” he will say. “You’ll get used to it.” And the next thing I know, he is headed toward me, his hands reaching forward, fingers extended in the fluffing position.

  In the name of helping this all along, I have purchased at least one bottle of every volumizer product currently for sale. Sadly, these preparations do not create volume, but rather are more like Viagra in that they produce a kind of stiffness that only lasts for about an hour.

  So I don’t know what the answer is.

  Wigs are too hot. And hats blow off. The only thing I can think of that gives me hope is that if this relationship really lasts, the way I am hoping it will, in the fullness of time his eyesight is sure to deteriorate. Then perhaps I can convince him that my hair is in fact really fluffy. It’s the prescription in his glasses that is the problem.

  Home Alone

  The other night I ate a pack of frozen hors d’oeuvres for dinner: three weenie rolls, two egg rolls, three potato puffs, and three air-filled triangular things. When I confided this information to a friend, she remarked, “Well, that’s the kind of thing you can do only when your life is completely unobserved.”

  This is the first extended period of time that I have lived alone. By “alone” I mean without humans, because, except for a few weeks, I have always had dogs (and dogs are no help at all when it comes to goofy behavior; in most instances they only encourage it). Which brings me to my point: When you live alone you are apt to turn into the silliest version of yourself, simply because there is no one around to stop you.

  When you live with your parents, you are expected to play by their rules, no matter how hip or evolved your folks might pretend to be. And when you live with a man—I don’t need to tell you how it works when you live with a man, do I? After a lifetime of living both with parents and with men, I am only too well acquainted with what have erroneously been referred to as my “annoying habits.” The question is, Are your habits still annoying if there is no one around to say he or she is pissed off? And of course the answer comes back a resounding “No! No! A thousand times no!” It’s just like magic. When you live by yourself, all your annoying habits are gone!!

  Which is not to say that living alone is something to strive for. Quite frankly, several things about it are not too appealing. It can be lonely and boring. There’s no one around to whine to. Plus, you have to lift those enormous containers of bottled water all by yourself. I once stayed in a relationship almost a year past its due date just to avoid confronting the issue of the giant bottles of water.

  The good part is that these circumstances force you to learn to do stuff you might otherwise have avoided entirely, like finding out where the circuit breakers are and how to turn off the water at its source. Or how to eat alone in a restaurant without making a face that continuously says, “The person who is meeting me here should have been here by now. I wonder what in the world is causing the delay!”

  When you live alone you find yourself getting both very brave and very stupid. There’s no one to comment when you play one cut from an album 300 times in a row. Or rent a movie and replay it during the cute guys. You can go whole days without turning the television on at all (cheerfully ignoring those important hours of stock-car racing from Daytona!). Finally, there’s the real plus: When you live by yourself you don’t have to worry that you’re not getting enough fats and sugars in your diet.

  The bad part is that it’s possible, by indulging your whims, to turn into a caricature of yourself. There is a point at which the good side of living alone and the bad side of living alone converge. For instance, one of the good things is that you can relax and spend the whole day looking like a pig if you want to. And one of the bad things is that you can catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and realize that you have just spent the whole day looking like a pig. This is a phenomenon I call the Fish Table Principle, so named because when you live by yourself, you can go ahead and buy a table that looks like a fish without fear of reprisal. But then you have to go through life pretending to enjoy living with a table that looks like a fish.

  So we see that this whole living-alone business is a mixed bag. But having done it for the past couple of years, I feel I must caution the neophyte to avoid one danger area right from the start. I refer to the reading of articles in women’s magazines, like Cosmopolitan, that purport to give advice on living by yourself with flair. They almost always involve “pampering yourself,” which generally boils down to “Treat yourself to a bubble bath!” Then there’s the old “cooking a fabulous dinner for one, using the good china and the good silver” technique. (Right away making the dangerous assumption that you may have some of each.)

  When I first started living alone, I used to scour these articles. Quickly they became a source of real irritation. The truth is that a lot of women end up living alone as a result of troublesome circumstances. These women, like me, have quite enough to worry about without the added stress of feeling they’re not executing their daily rituals with sufficient style to please Helen Gurley Brown. So, let the Cosmo women lightly braise their short ribs and toss up a celeriac vinaigrette for one. Here are my alternative suggestions for the flakier, lazier woman who doesn’t want to go to the store because it’s too cold (or too hot) and anyway there’s still half a box of Wheat Thins and a couple of beers in the fridge.

  Merrill Presents Eight Things to Do When You Are Living Alone, Because Now There Is No One to Stop You

  Dye your hair a lot of exotic colors that always fascinated you but you were too chicken to try. Then cut it all off, buy a really big hat, walk up to randomly selected people on the street, glare at them, and say ferociously, “What exactly are you staring at?”

  See if you can eat a full three-course dinner in your car before even leaving the supermarket parking lot. Be sure to use the good silver.

  Test really unusual clothes for falling asleep in. While you’re at it, why not try sleeping on a different edge of the bed every night?

  Shave the dog, oil him, then sit next to him out in the yard and see who gets a good all-over tan first.

  Take yourself out on a date! Make reservations at your favorite restaurant. At the table, try moving back and forth between two chairs as you find out where you’re from and what your major was in college. Afterward, if you feel there’s too much pressure on you to go right to bed, take out a can of Mace and spray yourself thoroughly.

  One night cook yourself a dinner that includes lean meat/fish/poultry, leafy green or yellow vegetables, and a starch!

  Call up a radio psychologist under the pretense of needing some help, and when he or she says, “Turn your radio down,” turn it up!

  Call to get an appointment with the phone repair guy or someone from the gas or electric company. When they ask, “Will someone be home between eight A.M. and ten P.M.?” reply, “No, I live by myself and I work for a living. I can’t be there for fourteen hours in a row.” When they begin to tell you that they’re sorry, they’re very sorry, but unless someone is there from 8:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. there’s nothing they can do to help you, tell them
to please hold. Drive quickly to their place of employment, find them, and threaten them with bodily harm from a blunt instrument. At your trial insist that “a jury of my peers” means “other single people who live alone.” You’ll be cleared of all charges and home playing the same cut on the album 300 times in a row in no time flat.

  My Romantic Dinner with Fabio

  Monday morning the sun staggered sleepily through the grimy blinds of my vine-covered Malibu bungalow as I awakened to the sounds of a ringing telephone. Lazily I stretched out my long tanned limbs like a tawny lynx as I struggled to answer it, reaching over the four sleeping dogs between me and the nightstand. It was a woman from TV Guide. “We would like you to write an article entitled ‘My Romantic Dinner with Fabio,’ ” she said. My tender lips trembled as I silently mouthed the words. “My Romantic Dinner with Fabio??” I shook my tousled mane of raven hair as I tried to comprehend the idea of me and Fabio ever, even momentarily, sharing the same breathing space on the planet. Until now, it had seemed just a shade less likely than a surprise announcement that I had been appointed the new replacement for Donald Rumsfield. “Yes, okay. I’ll do it,” I heard myself whisper. “His people will call you,” she replied. “They would like to do it on Wednesday.”

  Within hours I was on the phone with Peter Paul, Fabio’s manager. He was anxious to tell me about “Fabio’s message of support for the rights and needs of women.” Plus his new video, his newly renovated international 900 number, his perfume endorsement, and his future plans to make action-adventure movies with video game merchandising and Marvel comics tie-ins. My pale hands began to tremble as I realized that for the first time in my life my bosom was starting to heave.