by Amy Hempel
“Are guide dogs happy?” my husband asked at the start. I considered this, and cited the expert who believes that an animal’s happiness derives from doing his job. So in that respect, yes, I said, I would think that guide dogs are happy. “Then why do they all look like Eleanor Roosevelt?” he said.
I told him about the way they get to know you. Not the way people do, the way people flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn’t a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction—dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there’s not an end to it.
I could tell my husband now about Goodman in the garden. I raised Goodman myself—solid black Lab—and, after a year, I gave him up, the way you do, for further training and a life with Alice Banks. Alice was a gardener. She and her husband relaxed on weekends tending beds of annuals and several kinds of tomatoes. When Alice and Goodman graduated from the program, Alice said I was welcome to stay in touch. It is always the blind person’s call. We exchanged letters for several months, and in the spring, I sent her a package of things for the yard. Then I got a letter from Alice’s husband, Paul. He said they had been weeding in the garden, Goodman off-duty and retrieving a tossed ball. When Goodman found himself in the tomato patch, Paul wrote, he picked something up in his mouth and began yipping with excitement, tossing the thing into the air and running in circles to retrieve it. Paul told me that Goodman had found one of the sachets I had made to keep away deer; it was a packet of cheesecloth stuffed with my hair.
That is how I like to be known.
It was something I learned from my husband, who trusted natural ways to keep predators away.
Today I am known as the Unusual Person. This is a test wherein I pull my windbreaker up over my head from behind and stagger around the corner and lurch menacingly down the walkway toward the dog-in-training. A volunteer will have the dog on a lead and attempt to walk the dog past me. We will see if the dog startles or balks or demonstrates curiosity; if the dog does startle, we’ll see if he recovers quickly and continues on his way.
Before lunch I test half a dozen dogs. The first one walks by without more than a glance—he is being raised in New York City. The suburban dogs are skittish when they pass, but only one barks, and on the second approach, she, too, is quiet and passes. I am not a threat.
I eat quickly and head over across the quad to the best part of this place, the Whelping Center. The broods are brought here a couple of days before their due dates and are settled in quiet kennels where there will be a quilt on the floor and a handful of biscuits waiting. Chicken soup for dinner. The women who work here are unflappable and funny and intuitive and have substantial personalities, though they are, some of them, elfin—if only I had been raised here, is what I’m saying.
I contrive excuses to bring myself often to the Whelping Center. Sometimes I scoot into a kennel and warm my hands under the heat lamp trained over the newborns sleeping inside a plastic kiddie pool lined with towels, their eyes not yet open, their ears leathery tabs. I feel, here, optimistic, yet hopeful. Jubilant, yet happy. This is the way I thought and spoke for an irritating year as a girl, annoying the teachers at the girls’ school I attended. In school I was diligent, yet hardworking. The headmistress, I felt, was impartial, yet fair.
Jeanette will find me like this—sitting in the pen, eyes closed, puppies “nursing” on my fingertips—and say, “Don’t just sit there, get busy.” Ha ha, Jeanette. It’s the command—“get busy” is—for a guide dog to eliminate.
I often time my visits to when the older puppies are fed. A Labrador eating looks like time-lapse photography. After the pups have been weaned and are on to softened kibble, their food is set down for them in bowls like Bundt cake pans, a kind of circular trough. They crowd in around it and the pan begins to turn. It spins faster as they eat and push, until the pups are like propeller blades. Then they’ll move in the opposite direction, and the bowl spins the other way, as though they are in the southern hemisphere. One of the staff put a cartoon on the wall: “Why dogs never survive shipwrecks.” It’s the captain dog standing up in a lifeboat addressing the other dogs: “Those in favor of eating all the food now, say ‘Aye.’”
A beauty came in yesterday—Stella, out of Barnstormer Billy and one-eyed Tara. Stella will have an A litter (we name the litters alphabetically), so in the time I have left I write down the names in a tiny three-ring binder: Avalon, Ardor, Able, Axel. Jeanette looks over my shoulder and says, “Like Axl Rose? You don’t look like a headbanger.”
Acre. I was looking in the dictionary, and after “acre” it said, From the Latin agere: to lead.
In the afternoon: stairs—closed and open, up and down, on a short lead.
It is astonishing to find out how quickly the wrong things come into your head. I don’t mean the vain thoughts that are unseemly and irrelevant in surroundings such as these. I mean that I can pause outside a kennel to dip my shoes in bleach and be visited by the memory of shattering glass, the way the etched glass of the heirloom globe exploded. I had lit a candle in the old lamp but had not fitted it carefully; as it burned, it tilted until it touched the handblown glass, handily prefiguring the news, over dessert, that my husband was going to get on with it because how long was a person supposed to give the other person to come back?
Last night, Stella delivered early. Nine healthy puppies, and one—the smallest, a female—with a cleft palate. She died within minutes. Fran, the staffer present at the whelp, entered it in her log, her notation including the name she gave this pup: Angel. There are those of us who seek Fran out in the hope that something of her rubs off. Fran helped Stella deliver over a period of seven hours. At midnight, when there had been three quiet hours, Fran helped Stella to her feet and ran the ultrasound scanner over the dog’s belly. Nothing showed on the monitor, so Fran left the kennel to get some sleep. Yet in the morning when she checked in on the mother, there were ten healthy puppies nursing. During the night, Stella had given birth to one more, a female, as though to replace the one who had died. I said why didn’t we name her “After,” or put a little French on it—“Après”—but Fran said no, she wanted to name her for Angel. Sentimental? I am not the one to say; before I gave up Goodman, I made a tape recording of his snores.
Maybe it was fatigue, or the sadness of losing the runt, but Fran snapped at me when I showed up for work. She asked a perfunctory question. I should have said I was fine. But instead I observed that this was the day my husband left for Paris with his new girlfriend.
“Like you have a right to complain,” Fran said, incredulous. “Let’s think back one short year.”
I was stung, and flushed, and fumbled at the sink. Did I expect sympathy? Browbeaten, yet subdued. Subdued, yet humbled. I left the room before she could say I didn’t have a leg to stand on, or the shoe was on the other foot.
Back in the lounge, I wiped at the antibacterial wash I had splashed on my jeans. What gets on my clothes here—if it came from a person I’d be sick. Last week I was in the infirmary when a Lab was brought in with the tip of his tail cut off by a car door. Yet he was so happy to see the veterinarian that he wagged his tail madly and sprayed us all with blood, back and forth, in wide arcs. The walls and cabinets, too.
There is much to learn from these dogs. And we must learn these things over and over!
In the way that we know things before we know them, I dreamed that I swam across Lake Michigan, then pulled myself up on a raft near shore; just then the light changed in such a way that everything underwater was visible in silhouette, and giant hammerheads shadowed by. This was the night before my husband told me about Paris, and even in the dream I remember thinking, If I had known what was in the lake, I never would have gone in.
It’s a warmish day for December, so I take one of the broods for a walk on the grounds. It’s a lovely o
ld neighborhood. Down the road from the school is one of those classic mansions you admire until you notice it’s a funeral home. Every day I drive past it to get here, and an image undoes me, though I can’t say quite why: a pair of white gloves folded over the wheel of an old Ford Fairlane outside a funeral home in Georgia in June.
The sight of geese has this effect on me, too. The dogs scare them up from the pond. When my best friend and I were in the first grade, her father acquired a dozen German Emb-dens. He let them roam freely about the yard. Every evening when he came home from work, he would turn a hose on the droppings they left in the drive; the grass along both sides of blacktop was a stripe of vivid green. He was a little eccentric, and the first of my friends’ parents to die.
Buddha, Baxter, Bailey, Baywatch. I throw in that last for Jeanette. Working a litter ahead. We don’t name the pups until they are four weeks old and get their ears tattooed, but still, it’s good to be ready.
Back in the lounge there are letters from a sister school in Canada that has taken several of our dogs who failed the qualifying exam—except we don’t say “failed,” we say the dog was reassigned, or released for adoption as a pet. Canada will take a “soft” dog, one who maybe startles or is a bit less independent. Maybe it is like William Faulkner not getting into the U.S. Army Air Force and then going to fly for Canada. What’s with Canada?
Trying to smooth things over, I guess, Fran asks for a hand in putting together the invitation for the Christmas party. I make James Thurber look like da Vinci, but I stay late—it’s the night of the six-months-and-under class, the babies—and work up a festive border. The party is a high point for the volunteers who raise the puppies. They bring them to the high school gymnasium we borrow, and dress them up in Santa hats or felt reindeer antlers held on with chin straps, and there are cookies for everyone, and in the center of the gym floor there is a large cardboard box filled with wrapped gifts. On the command, the volunteers walk their dogs, one at a time, up to the box, where the dog is allowed to reach in and select a present, then return in a mannerly way to his spot. They get excited, of course, and invariably there will be a dog, like Ivan last year, who will get to the box and jump in.
Everyone wants to know how you do it, how you raise a puppy and train it for a year and a half and then give it up. Because you don’t just love the dogs, you fall in love with them. A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there. But these love affairs begin with yearning, for a future that won’t be shared. Good training. There is a Zen-like quality to this work, if you can find reward in staying in the moment and in giving up what you love because someone else’s need is greater. Sounds good in theory, but I counseled a volunteer who was coming up on the separation and she was crying and angry, and she said, “Just because I’m not blind!” She said, “What if he never swims again? Swimming’s his favorite thing.” I said, “You know how dogs’ paws paddle in their sleep?” Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
There is another side to this; it makes a pretty picture. The folks who raise the pups and then have to give them up? When the dogs get old and retire, the raisers can get them back. They can take them back in their well-earned rest. Raise enough puppies over the years—a steady stream of dear ones returning home.
Fran doesn’t hold a grudge. She says she liked the invitation, and we walk together to the office to have it copied.
There are people whose goodness brings them to do this work, and there are those of us who come here for it. Both ways work.
Although, metaphorically, I am still in the lake, priding myself on a strong Australian crawl while nearby a hammerhead waits. Never mind the fact that this ravenous shark, in real life, is found in warm seas. It is with me in the lake where I mourn my lost status as someone who doesn’t cause problems, and prove again that life is one long medley of prayers that we are not exposed, and try to convince myself that people who seem to suffer are not, in fact, unhappy, and want to be persuaded by the Japanese poem: “The barn burned down. / Now I can see the moon.”
Did I invite this? It is like sitting in prayers at school when the headmistress says, “Who dropped lunch bags on the hockey field?” and although you went home for lunch, you think, I did, I did.
2.
I picked up coffee in town, but skipped the doughnuts and scones; after fifty-two years, my body owes me nothing. I ran into a former neighbor at the deli. We were still dressed the same in barn jackets and jeans; we both worked at horse farms. Standing in line for coffee, she picked crumbs of rust off an old bulb digger that looked pornographic in her hand. My own rusted one was plunged to the hilt in a circle of tulips where I left it when I heard about Lynney.
Claire, the former neighbor, told me she hadn’t known Lynne Markson was divorced. I said she wasn’t, they weren’t, who told her they were? She said, “I thought she did.” She said they had run into each other in line at the Film Forum, and Lynne told her she only came into the city once a week now. Lynne told her the rest of the time she lived upstate near her husband. Claire said she thought that was an interesting slip: “near” instead of “with.”
I told her it wasn’t a slip, and the reason she was upstate started the week the dog showed up in my yard, the same week my husband moved out. I would find the dog curled under the forsythia in the morning, in a shallow dirt bed he had dug the night before. When I let my own dogs out in the yard, he would stand and stretch, then stay still while they sniffed at him. He was a beagle wearing a faded too-tight collar he would not let me close enough to remove.
He was terrified of people, so I was certain he had been abused. But he liked the company of the dogs; he made himself part of the pack. Each morning he followed my dogs from the front yard with its hill, where their tennis balls rolled away, down into the backyard, where the three of them pawed at holes in the garden rows, probably after the moles that ate the centers out of the melons.
My dogs are female, so of course I indulged the notion that he had selected my house to fill the male post just vacated by my husband, who had moved back to the city. I stayed at the beach with the dogs and filled out my share of paperwork to make the separation final.
The beagle was small enough to shimmy in under the cedar fence gate where rain had eroded a patch of dirt into a small trough. He had rolled in, shook himself off, and stayed. I put out a bowl of food for him twice a day, and kept a bucket filled with water in the shade from the wisteria. The only time I knew he left the yard was when I took my own dogs across the street to walk through the fields that end at Round Pond. He would trail us, letting their bodies brush his when they all chased rabbits and squirrels. He had the look of a harried executive; he carried himself, chest first, like a little mogul. So I called him Beagleman. “Get me Beagleman!” I would order my dogs. “I’ll take a meeting in five minutes—front yard.” And they would race off to get him and herd him into the front and we would file across the street, every day a parade.
I didn’t bother to fill in the dirt beds that Beagleman dug, and that my own dogs copied. The yard was a yard—it had never been an even “carpet” of green. Mowing had always been my job, one I liked, but I did not go beyond that to what more was required: grading, fertilizing, sprinklers.
Starting early in the summer, I put Beagleman’s bowl closer to the house. Then I sat on the outdoor steps without moving or looking at him while he ate. When he finished, I tossed a handful of crumbled cheese in his direction. He would follow the spray of cheese, eating a trail that led to my open hand where more cheese was offered. He would start toward me, then stop and pulsate and whimper. At that point I would toss him the cheese and try again later in the day.
In the evenings around six—this was in July when the sand at the beach is so hot—I would load my two dogs into the back of the station wagon and drive to the ocean for a swim. Beagleman would wiggle under the closed gate and stand at the top of the driveway as I backed the car into the street. He would b
e there when we returned at dusk, and fit himself under the gate when the three of us had passed inside.
After an early spring of taking the marriage apart, I was glad to have every day the same. I did not ask much of myself; it was enough to keep a cutting garden watered and shop at a farm stand for tomatoes and basil, and baby eggplant to grill, and that white corn that needs just three minutes in hot water with milk. It was enough to conduct classes for young beginning and intermediate riders at the farm, to keep my dogs and sometimes myself reasonably groomed, and try to win over the beagle. I was mindful of the symmetry—trying to establish this creature’s trust, having dispatched that of my husband.
This took us up through August.
Then, just before Labor Day, I kept the cheese in my hand. And Beagleman ate it, his eyes on mine. I told him he was a very good boy. He ate from my hand several times that day. I got him to follow me inside and into the kitchen, source of the cheese. I introduced him to a wall of cheese in the refrigerator. He ate from my hand while I gently touched his chin with a finger. I rubbed under his chin while he ate, and it was only another day before he let me rub his muzzle. From there it was his ears, scratching them while he sat beside me. I cut off the collar that left a dent in the skin of his neck.
At the end of the summer, he let me brush him while he rested his head on my leg. Within the week I had him upstairs, and we celebrated by having a slumber party—the three dogs up on my bed in the dark, eating popcorn and watching a movie.
Beagleman seemed to be proud of himself. He walked with confidence, he no longer hung back. He was in the front seat of the car on every errand. At night he raced ahead of me up the stairs; I would find him on my pillow on his back, waiting for me to rub his stomach.
This lasted until the lawyers said we would have to sell the house. I would be moving, I would be renting, and no one would rent to a person with three dogs. That was when I heard that Lynne Markson wanted a dog.