“Mort, go away!” I’d whisper, and give his bottom a gentle push, urging him toward the couch. Mort would not be moved. He would, instead, give me a look of heartrending sorrow, his eyes liquid, his entire face sagging. You have betrayed me, his expression said. You have broken the covenant that requires you to love me more than anything else in the world. Eventually he would stake out a spot at the top of our heads. He would scratch at the carpet and then, with a grunt, he’d start turning in circles near the pillows by my head until finally, with a weary sigh, he’d settle himself on the floor. Marcus and I would start kissing. Mort would start farting. For years, I associated arousal with the smell of bulldog flatulence. (I’m over it now. Thanks for asking.)
As the year went on, my mother was preoccupied and frequently absent, visiting friends for the weekend, once taking a prophetic vacation, a weeklong sailing stint with an outfit called—wait for it—Womanship. Womanship was, as its name implies, a female-only sailing school that ran trips all over the world and sent its participants home with pink T-shirts that read WOMANSHIP: WHERE NO ONE YELLS . . .
Oh, the jokes we made about “Womanship” after my mother came out of the closet! “Where’s Fran?” “You know. Sailing the ‘Womanship.’ ” Years later, we described that sojourn on the Womanship stretching from ten days to two weeks to a month, until we’d convinced ourselves that Fran had ditched us for an entire summer aboard the Womanship. It wasn’t true . . . but that year it felt like she was sailing away from us for real, like she was indifferent or overwhelmed or just too sad to cope.
During my last year of high school, I was a mostly responsible big sister. I threw only one party. It ended with only one of my siblings in the hospital, after someone slipped something into the beer said sibling should not have been drinking. The most distressing part of that awful night wasn’t the ambulance ride, or Marcus squabbling with the EMTs, or one of my brothers guarding my mother’s bedroom, hockey stick in hand, to make sure that no amorous Simsbury seniors made use of her bed . . . it was that when the nurses and the doctors asked if there was an adult responsible for us, no one could find my father, whose job it was to be, if not physically present, at least reachable by phone while my mom was out of town.
Most of the time, I did better. I drove carpools; I looked up recipes and cooked, or tried to cook, dinners; I piled my brothers and sister into the Vanagon and took us all skiing for the day at the little mountain where we had a membership, after Fran would hand me a credit card and the keys. A lot of the time, I had Marcus by my side.
Marcus and I were a couple all through my last year of high school, through four years of college, through infidelity (his) and a few college crushes that never went beyond a few stolen kisses (mine). I hung on to Marcus like a drowning woman clutching a waterlogged piece of driftwood, hoping it would be sturdy enough to sustain her.
I wanted love. I wanted to believe that I was worthy of love, that I was pretty and desirable. I especially wanted that affirmation on a college campus where everyone else seemed so beautiful, where the crew coach had told me I was fat, where everyone seemed so sleek and smart and assured all the time. And so I stayed with him, squeezing every last drop of possibility out of the relationship, wringing it like a tea bag that has long since stopped yielding anything tasty, denying myself all kinds of fun—and, probably, heartbreak—that I look back now and wish I’d experienced. It was like eating low-calorie chocolate fro-yo when you really want gelato, like trying to content yourself with plain grilled fish when you suspect there’s steak to be had.
Marcus and I dated until a year into my first job. Then I met Bill. I was, by then, a veteran reporter, with almost an entire year’s worth of experience. Marcus was in Connecticut, working as a forest ranger, and it had become abundantly clear that our goals didn’t match. He was happy with a day job, one that gave him enough money for food and rent and books and movies, happy to stay in Connecticut. He liked to cook and tend to his garden and chop wood for the woodstove, and he didn’t want a life any larger than that.
I did. After my father left, I set goals for myself: a job at a big, national newspaper by twenty-five. A column by twenty-eight. And, by thirty, I wanted to have sold a piece of writing, either a novel or a screenplay, something that would let me bank enough money that I felt secure enough to get married and have children, knowing that whatever their father did, whatever happened, they’d be provided for.
Bill had gotten his English degree at Columbia, and had gone to graduate school for journalism at the University of Missouri afterward. He’d arrived at the CDT right after getting his master’s. At the Centre Daily Times, job candidates spent a day meeting with the editors, taking tests, reporting and writing a story. Then, as a reward, they’d be treated to dinner with one of the reporters, who would presumably fill them in on the details about what the job, and life in central Pennsylvania, would be like.
I had been dieting at the time, seeing the nutritionist I paid to weigh me once a week and hand me Xeroxed pages from a Yale doctor’s weight-loss workbook. I was subsisting on cans of tuna fish with lemon juice squeezed on top, lunches of takeout salad and dinners of turkey meatloaf and fifty-calorie packets of artificially sweetened cocoa with sugar-free Cool Whip for dessert. Most days, by four o’clock, when I’d stand up from my desk and feel the world waver, and have to hold on to the back of my chair until it righted itself, I would end up at the vending machine in the break room, gobbling down a bag of pretzels, but I’d lost . . . ten pounds? Twelve? Enough to make me believe that if I just kept at it I could lose the weight, the percentage of myself, that would finally make my body acceptable. Enough to make me believe that a man could like me, could look past my current incarnation and see the beauty that would be revealed when I dropped another thirty pounds.
At six o’clock, after Bill had finished his tests and filed his story, he approached my desk.
“Are you ready?” he asked, in his deep, Barry White–level rumble.
“No, I’m not!” I snapped. I was still waiting for a call back from a source, and who was this newbie who dared to disrupt my concentration?
Finally, my story was finished and filed, and we drove, in separate cars, to Mario and Luigi’s, State College’s finest Italian restaurant. Bill had worn a blue suit to his interview. He was so skinny that the pants flapped around his legs, and the jacket hung loosely from his shoulders. His eyes were big and brown and regarding me with thoughtful intent. There’s no nice way to tell a man you’ve just met that he reminds you of your pet, especially when the animal in question is a not-very-bright, flatulent bulldog, so I didn’t bring it up. We sat down at the table, and I think I asked him, “Where are you from?” And then we were off, talking about school, about friends, about our families, and the books we’d loved, and what we wanted to do with our lives, and, for three hours, I ignored angel-hair pasta with vodka sauce, which I’d been looking forward to for days. At the end of the night we walked out of the restaurant together. “Well. This was nice,” he said. Then he looked thoughtful. “If I got one of those X-rated movies at the hotel, do you think the paper would give me a hard time?”
This, I knew, was the guy for me.
The next day, I confronted-slash-accosted the city editor at his desk. “You have to hire him!” I said.
“Why?” the editor asked. “Do you think he’s a really good reporter?”
“I have no idea!” I said. “But I’m lonely!”
Bill got the job. He had a girlfriend back in Missouri, and I, of course, had Marcus. I wrote Marcus a letter, then I called him and listened to him cry, and told him that I was sorry but I’d met someone else, and it was time to say goodbye. All those years together, all that history, and all I felt was exhilaration, like I’d slipped out of a too-tight jacket. I was excited about the new guy at the paper, and the short story I’d sold to Seventeen, and the other one the Redbook editor had asked me to rewrite. I saw open roads, flowers blooming, life as an ocean, de
ep and scary and thrilling, just waiting for me to dive in.
When Bill had been at the paper for two weeks and both of us were free of our entanglements, I sent him a message, via the brand-new system at the CDT that allowed reporters to send texts to one another’s computers. “What are you doing this weekend?” I inquired.
“Why do you ask?” he wrote back.
I rolled my eyes. “BECAUSE I’M TAKING A SURVEY,” I typed.
On our first date we went to a greenhouse in Centre Hall and he bought a tiny spider plant, small enough to slip into his pocket. The first time we kissed was in my car, in the parking lot of a local bar. We started in the front seat, then moved to the back. The next time I drove, I noticed something strange. Close examination revealed a footprint—mine—on the rear passenger-side window.
When my mother called me at work to tell me that Mort had died at age ten—“he went into his doghouse for a nap, and he didn’t come out”—I cried in the newsroom. For the next few days and weeks I’d cry at odd intervals, at movies that made me think about him, or when I’d see other people walking their dogs. I felt abandoned and then childish, like a little kid kicking her heels into the sand, a kid who couldn’t be coaxed off the beach when the day was over, and who refused to understand the eternal bargain between pets and people: the pets almost always go first.
Losing Mort had been like losing the last piece of my childhood; the last hope that we could go back to being the family in the pictures when I was twelve—Mom and Dad in the back row; the kids, combed and groomed, in the front; and Mort lolling on the lawn at our feet. He had been my protector and my last link to that particular past, and I missed him so much. I mourned him fiercely.
And then there was Bill, who held me and listened to me talk—about Mort, about Marcus, about my father; about the relationships I’d hung on to for too long, relationships I’d never wanted to let go of.
When my roommate, a colleague at the paper, said she wanted a dog, I was dubious. I wasn’t sure either one of us had the time to devote to an animal’s care. But we were grown-ups, with jobs and responsibilities, bills that we paid, ambitions that we nurtured, and caring for a pet sounded like another step forward.
My roommate was the one who found Wendell in the CDT classified ads: “Dog, small, spotted, free to a good home.” When we went to visit, Wendell, who was then going by the name Gambit, spent the entire visit jumping, bounding higher and higher with each leap, advancing from knee to waist to shoulder height. He was ten pounds of nervy energy, with a black-and-brown head, delicate markings, like kohl, around his eyes, and oversize, pointed ears. His body was speckled gray and black, a completely different color from his head, and looked like it belonged to another dog, like a distracted God had simply slapped the wrong top and bottom together. His paws were also black and brown, his nails were black, his tail was a clipped, spotted stump, and his upper lip was curled in a permanent, Elvis-like sneer, scarred by a bite his mother had given him when he was a pup.
Rat terriers, I learned, were a mixture of just about every kind of terrier and whippet there was—a little fox terrier, a little Italian greyhound, some Jack Russell, too. They were prized for their feisty temperament, bred to catch rats on long ship voyages and, once they got to America, on farms. I never saw Wendell anywhere near a rat, nor did he evince the slightest interest in keeping my apartment mouse-free. “Sorry,” I imagined him saying with a shrug, “my union only lets me do rats.”
We brought him back to Boalsburg, tried to get him used to his new name, then left him alone for ten minutes, during which he snuck off to pee in the corner of our living room and eat the corner of a couch cushion. On his second night with us, Bill, whom I’d just started dating, sat on the couch for an episode of NYPD Blue (one of the ones where they either showed a naked butt or said a swear word). Wendell settled himself on Bill’s lap. Bill hadn’t spent much time around dogs, but didn’t want to complain, and so he sat in stoic silence as Wendell ate his way through the loose end of Bill’s leather belt.
That was Wendell as a puppy. He was a chewer. A destroyer of purses. A furtive corner-pooper, a devourer of socks and a scritch-scratcher of couches, a lover of forbidden people food. On Chanukah that first year, I prepared a festive holiday meal. My roommate and her boyfriend and Bill and I were in the living room, opening gifts, when Wendell climbed up on the table, inserted the entire upper half of his body into the gravy boat, and slurped his weight in chicken gravy. The next few days were not pleasant for any of us.
My roommate and I were haphazard pet owners, inconsistent with our discipline and our attention. We’d walk Wendell, sometimes, and we’d throw a ball for him, when we thought of it. When he was six months old, we did manage to bring him to the vet to be neutered (“Tell him he’s getting his nails clipped!” Bill called as we drove away).
Wendell came home later that afternoon, with a large plastic cone around his neck, and an expression of wounded dignity on his face (which is to his credit, as it must be hard to look dignified while wearing the Giant Cone o’ Shame). We were instructed to leave the cone in place for three days, to prevent him from biting his stitches. After three days, the stitches dissolved and the cone came off. I put it in a corner, gave Wendell his kibble, and went to work.
When I came home, there was Wendell, waiting at the door, wagging his tail and looking a little sheepish . . . and there was his cone, around his neck again, only instead of facing out, it faced in, trapping his paws against his body, forcing him to move in tiny, mincing hops. I couldn’t figure it out. Either someone had broken into our house and made us the victims of the strangest crime in the world, or . . .
I took off the cone, put it back in the corner where I’d left it, and left Wendell alone. A few minutes later, I stuck my head around the corner . . . and there he was, lying on his side, attempting to slide his head back into the cone that he’d pulled out of the corner.
My roommate speculated that maybe it smelled familiar. I thought that Wendell had decided that it was stylish—a statement piece!—and that he wanted his look back.
After six months, my roommate got another job, at a bigger paper. Wendell and I were alone in State College, where I was miserable, convinced that I would be stuck there forever. A few months later, though, I was hired by the Lexington Herald-Leader. My mother reluctantly agreed to keep Wendell while I got settled in Kentucky. “That dog is the weirdest-looking thing I’ve ever seen” was her less-than-impressed assessment the first time I took him home. By then, she had a sheltie named Boomer, and Wendell, who disdained most other dogs, tolerated Boomer’s company, so much so that, for years, anywhere we went, if we came across any kind of dog with a collie-like ruff, Wendell would trot over to give the other dog a friendly sniff and allow himself to be sniffed in return.
After my first week in Kentucky, Wendell arrived at Blue Grass Airport, on the baggage carousel, in between suitcases, looking deeply aggrieved inside of the green plastic carrying case that I had festooned with hand-crayoned signs that read MY NAME IS WENDELL. THIS IS MY FIRST FLIGHT.
A few days later, he got sick. First he had diarrhea, then he started vomiting. In the middle of the night, it got so bad that I found an all-night veterinary hospital, where he was admitted and diagnosed with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis. They shaved his skinny forepaw to insert an IV, hooked him up to a bag of fluids, and put him in a wire cage, where he lay on his side with his eyes glazed, his sides heaving rapidly up and down as he panted. It was touch and go over the night . . . but the next morning, when I was allowed to go see him, he stood up, wobbled to the front of the cage, and pushed his dry nose through the slots to brush against my fingers. “That’s a very good sign,” said the vet.
That was, I think, the moment that we bonded, the instant that I recognized Wendell not just as a pet or a companion but as a kindred spirit. We were survivors . . . and I would do whatever I could to protect him, to keep him safe, to make him mine.
First, I signed
us up for obedience school. There were eight other people, all of them with bigger dogs—golden retrievers, black labs, German shepherds, and collies, one doleful-looking basset hound. And Wendell. All the other dogs were amiable, or at least reasonable, as we taught them to sit and to come and to heel and walk politely on a leash. Not Wendell. He resisted every step of the way, showing his teeth and snarling at the instructor when she tried to teach him the command for “down,” refusing to listen when I called for him or made the clicking noise that meant that he should walk beside me. Not even bribing him with the little chunks of dehydrated hot dog that the instructor had taught us to make did the trick.
We trained for hours, walking back and forth in the parking lot of the Adolph Rupp Arena, which was near my apartment on West Maxwell Street. After twelve weeks of class, Wendell could heel and sit, even if his “come” was iffy and his “down” was nonexistent. We scored a diploma, and Wendell was practically placid, walking calmly beside me when we went to the front of the class to collect it. “Can we take intermediate obedience?” I asked the instructor, who winced and said, “Maybe you should just take this class again.”
In Kentucky, Wendell and I had a routine. I’d let him out for a quick wee after we woke up. Then I’d get dressed and get into the car. With Wendell settled in my lap—his preferred spot during drives—we’d go to the University of Kentucky’s arboretum. There was a group of half a dozen people, middle-aged and older, people with children and houses and insights into life that I didn’t have and wasn’t hearing from my cynical, transient, mostly young colleagues at the paper. We’d let our dogs off their leashes—tiny, scrappy Wendell, a loose-limbed Dalmatian named Pepper, and a collie called Chief were the three regulars. The dogs would run, and we’d walk and talk for half an hour, and then I’d drive back home to shower and dress for work. Wendell would lie on my bed, his paws crossed and eyes narrowed, watching me as I pulled on my stirrup pants and vests, looking for all the world like he had something to say about my choices, and that something was not complimentary. At some point most afternoons I would make the ten-minute trip from my office to the apartment to let him out. After work, I would go to the gym. Then there’d be another turn around the neighborhood, and we would settle in for the night, with me either in front of my computer, working on a column or a short story or a freelance assignment with Wendell curled on the floor beside me, or lying on the couch, in front of the TV, with Wendell stretched out on the couch cushion above my head. He liked to have his fur brushed, and he liked to have his ears scratched. He wasn’t snuggly, but he’d kiss me, taking neat little licks at my mouth or my nose to express his gratitude.
Hungry Heart Page 37