Bill and I made up an elaborate backstory for Wendell—how he’d grown up wealthy on an English estate until he was caught disgracing himself with a stableboy. How he’d been exiled to America, and how his father had disowned him, but his mother sent him money, ten- and twenty-dollar bills tucked into the cookie tin she’d mail him every month. How he’d gone to New York City and designed window displays for Barneys before deciding to lower himself and become a companion for a good-hearted but fashion-challenged young lady. On sunny days, Wendell would perch on top of the concrete retaining wall near my door, head erect, ears up, paws stretched out in front of him like Anubis, or a very small sphinx.
When I got my job at the Inquirer, Wendell was not pleased. He was used to quiet and being close to forests and meadows. In Philadelphia, the streets were paved with pizza crust and chicken wing bones, and they were also loud and crowded with pedestrians and cyclists and skateboarders, whom Wendell regarded as his mortal enemies. Instead of a stroll through a grassy arboretum, our morning walks took us to the narrow strip of grass that ran down Front Street, which paralleled I-95. While the rush-hour traffic hummed and honked and screeched along, we would walk north on Front Street, loop around the Society Hill Towers on Spruce Street, then head back on Second Street, along the cobblestone streets, past the coffee shop and the bank and the Wawa and the homeless guys who came to greet Wendell by name.
Sometimes we’d venture to the dog park a few blocks south on Catharine Street. Released from his leash, Wendell would huddle by my ankles, alternately trembling and snarling at any dog that dared to approach. He could never resist a tennis ball, but when I threw it in the dog park he would race off after it, snatch it in his jaws, zip back to me, drop it at my feet, then hide behind me again, letting me know he wasn’t happy. Eventually, though, he met other dogs and I made friends with their owners, including my BFF for life, Susan.
Wendell did not much enjoy the companionship of his canine fellows. Nor, really, was he a fan of other people, including the guy I dated after Bill, the inspiration for Bruce Guberman in Good in Bed. That guy lived in a high-rise that did not permit pets. When I went to visit I would put Wendell in a black nylon duffel bag. I’d zip it up so that just his head stuck out as I approached the building and then, as soon as I got to the door, I would zip it completely shut, and hope he wouldn’t move around too much or, God forbid, bark. We’d spend the weekend in the reporter’s efficiency on the eighth floor, me reading books, my gentleman friend smoking pot from an oversize blue glass bong and Wendell curled up on the bed with a look of disapproval on his face.
Sometimes, Wendell’s antipathy was useful. When Susan broke up with an OCD doctor, a miserable fellow who hated his job and yelled at her for putting onion skins down his garbage disposal, we joked that we could make her ex lose his mind by putting a trail of rose petals in his house, leading from the front door to the bedroom . . . only, instead of Susan, he’d open the door and see a small, trembling, sneering rat terrier in his bed.
Susan and Wendell had an interesting relationship. Wendell ignored Daisy, Susan’s sweet mutt, who had white fur and black eyes and a black nose, who was about four times his size, but he liked Susan. When we visited, Wendell would growl at Daisy, then claim his spot on top of Susan’s couch. When I traveled for work, Susan would let him stay over, and once I came to pick him up and noticed that he looked different. “I clipped his whiskers,” Susan confessed (Wendell had long, quivering whiskers, black on one side of his muzzle, white on the other). “Jen, I had to do it. He’s not a looker. He needs all the help he can get.”
Our second year in Philadelphia, Wendell was attacked by a stranger’s dog when we were out for our evening walk. Wendell was, as always, on his leash. The other dog was not. One minute Wendell was sniffing the mulch, ignoring the other pets and people, and the next minute, a giant dun-colored dog streaked across the open space, snatching up Wendell in his mouth, clamping him in his jaws and shaking him back and forth while Wendell made a horrible screaming noise. The dog’s owner grabbed the dog’s collar and pulled; I tried to pry the dog’s jaws open, my fingers slick with saliva, shouting “DROP!” at the top of my lungs, not even thinking that the dog might decide to clamp those teeth down on me.
Finally, Wendell was free. The other dog’s owner called apologies—“he’s never done anything like that before!”—as I scooped Wendell up. He was bleeding and whimpering and making that terrible shrieking sound when I jostled him. I cradled him against my chest and ran two blocks to the Queen Village Animal Hospital. The dog had torn a long strip of skin and fur from Wendell’s back. He had gouges in his neck that had to be cleaned out and disinfected, wounds on his belly that required stitches and surgical drains. The vet shaved his side, which was how I found out that Wendell’s skin was as speckled as his fur. Hairless, he looked even skinnier than normal, a tiny, wounded, spotty scrap of a thing.
I took three days off work and sat with him in my apartment, holding him in my lap, petting him wherever I could between the bandages and the bits of plastic tubing the vet had left protruding from his sides so that his wounds could drain. He would curl in his basket with a pained sigh and look at me with what I thought was betrayal. How could you let this happen? Then he’d clamber slowly onto the couch and he’d sigh again and shut his eyes, and I’d feel his body go limp on my lap as I petted him and promised to do better.
Wendell was there when I broke up with the high-rise guy. He was there when Bill and I reconnected, briefly, when I was twenty-eight. Bill had moved from Augusta, Georgia, to New York City, had gotten a job at a magazine covering arts and antiques. He was living on Sackett Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, paying what I found to be a shockingly high amount for a dismayingly tiny apartment, a place where the kitchen was so small that the refrigerator was in the living room.
I had never stopped caring for Bill. At twenty-eight, I wanted so badly to get married, to have children, to buy a house, to get on with it, to move into the next stage of grown-up life. Bill wasn’t ready. We broke up again, and I met Adam, who was funny and smart and plugged into pop culture with the same fervor as me. Unlike the rest of my post-Marcus beaus, who’d been tall, with dark hair and dark eyes, Adam was exactly my height. He had curly blond hair that would spring into a full-on ’fro if he didn’t keep it cropped short, and long, curly blond lashes that I thought were wasted on a guy. We made each other laugh, and we had the same level of ambition, the same dreams of a house and a family and enough money for great food and nice vacations. Best of all, Adam was ready. He wanted to get married. He wanted to get married to me.
Wendell tolerated Adam when we were dating, but he didn’t like it when Adam moved in, and he found ways to make his displeasure known. At night, he would growl at Adam, then grumpily fall asleep in his usual spot, on a pillow above my head. When Adam would put on his suit and go to work in the morning, Wendell would chase him down the length of the second-floor hall, growling and barking. Then he’d stand at the top of the stairs, watching, as Adam let himself out the front door, his posture and the bristle of fur on his back all communicating, “And STAY OUT!”
Wendell, of course, was the inspiration for Nifkin, Cannie’s little rat terrier. That’s his picture on the back of Good in Bed. When I sold the book and my advance check arrived, I took myself to Target with the intention of finally being able to buy absolutely anything there that I wanted. I loaded up a shopping cart with name-brand dish towels and scented candles, then headed to the pet aisle, thinking that I’d upgrade Wendell from his generic kibble to the fancy Iams that came in the bright yellow bag and cost twice as much as his usual fare. When I got there, I found Adam, holding his own bag. “I was going to surprise you,” he said.
Wendell saw me grow up, from a single girl to a more responsible, older single girl, to a married lady to a mother, moving from an apartment to a starter house to a bigger house, and eventually acquiring a summer place on the Cape, where we spend most of July and Au
gust, and which Fran enjoys from May to October. (Wendell’s collar had our Philadelphia address on the front, and the back said “Summer residence,” with our Truro address and phone number—the canine equivalent of those snooty author biographies that announce the writer “divides his time between Berkeley and the Hamptons”).
Wendell would grudgingly accommodate himself to every shift in my life, but I think that he was meant to be a single girl’s dog. By the time that love and marriage led to the baby carriage—the eight-hundred-dollar Bugaboo I’d pilot around Queen Village—he was a senior citizen, grumpy and prickly and set in his ways, miserable every time he had to go to the vet and endure the indignity of being weighed on the cat scale, or when he had to cede my lap or my time or my attention to a newborn. He tolerated the girls but never warmed to them, although they both adored him, and knew his place in my heart. Lucy’s first word was “mama,” but her first sentence was “Wen-gell! Come, come!” complete with a tap on the bed.
As Wendell got older, his vet noticed the heart murmur he’d always had became an enlarged heart. His cardiologist—yes, my dog had a cardiologist—prescribed diuretics, which made him pee all the time and taxed his kidneys, so then he had to take medication to keep them working. I told myself, every time we made a thousand-dollar visit to the Penn Veterinary Hospital, that by paying for treatments that other, possibly more sane pet owners would have balked at, I was allowing students to get the hands-on experience they needed, so that when the procedures became more commonplace, they’d be ready . . . but the truth is, I couldn’t bear to let him go. “As long as he’s not in pain,” I told the doctors as they reconfigured his medications and performed ultrasounds, trying to find the delicate balance between keeping his compromised heart beating and not sending him into renal failure. When he lost his appetite and I began finding his medication on the floor, I started crushing his pills and mixing them with pâté, which he’d then lick off my fingers. Fran would watch in bemusement and disgust, then announce, “In my next life, I want to come back as your dog.”
Wendell died in the early springtime, in 2009. I was devastated, cracked open and exposed in my grief. My dad had died a year before, and I’d gotten through that just fine, handling my business, doing what needed to be done, trying to assimilate my new three-year-old half brother into my life, brightly insisting that it was no big deal, that I was okay, that, honestly, I’d already lost my father a long time ago.
I was not fine. I was not okay. My father had not been in my life, but until he died, I never stopped hoping that he’d straighten himself out, that he’d see the wreckage that he’d left and feel sorry, that he would be, once more, the father I’d loved so much when I was little, or that at least I’d get some answers, that I’d understand what had happened and why he’d left. But it wasn’t until I lost Wendell, too, at the very advanced age of eighteen, that I let myself feel anything. I barely shed a tear at my dad’s funeral, but when I had to go to the Penn Veterinary Center and say goodbye to Wendell—when I touched his stiffened body, stroked his gray head, and whispered, “Good boy,” for the last time, I cried like my heart was breaking. Wendell had been with me for everything, through everything, and now my marriage was ending—a fact I had barely been able to admit to myself—and Wendell wouldn’t be there to see me through it. Adam was, and is, a wonderful man—funny and smart and accomplished—but we’d gone into our marriage expecting one version of things, and we hadn’t done well at navigating our personal or professional changes.
I should have told Adam what I’d come to realize—that something important had been irreparably broken after Lucy’s birth, that I wouldn’t be able to trust him with my heart. Instead I went looking for the guy who’d never let me down. Bill and I hadn’t spoken since 9/11. Now, here it was, almost nine years later. I didn’t have his phone number, hadn’t friended him on Facebook or tried to find him on Twitter. I didn’t want to be that girl, the one who, late at night, would look up old loves on social media, scroll through the pictures of their vacations and cookouts and adorable children and wonder how it could have turned out differently . . . but I did have his old AOL e-mail address. I wrote him a short note, with a memo line reading “Is this still you?” thinking that if he read it, if he answered, it was meant to be. Thinking, too, that he’d probably never see it, because who still had an AOL address?
Thirty seconds later, my in-box pinged. “Still me,” he’d written, “what’s up?”
I told him Wendell had died. I told him my father had died. I said that I was married, but unhappy and not optimistic. Bill invited me to have dinner with him in New York in a few weeks, when I’d be there for business. I was sitting in the restaurant bar when he came up behind me and touched my shoulder. He was wearing a suit again, the same way he was the first time we’d met—and, except for some gray in his hair and more fashionable glasses, he looked almost the same as he had when he was twenty-four and I was twenty-three. He’d never been married. I joked that he’d been waiting for me . . . and he didn’t tell me I was wrong. “It feels like you just went away for a long weekend,” he said at the end of another three-hour dinner, where we talked until everyone else in the restaurant went home and the waiter blew out the candle at our table and finally told us they were closing when we didn’t take the hint. We were, we discovered, still each other’s favorite people to talk to . . . and finally, all those years after our first conversation, he was ready to commit, to sign up for “forever,” and take on a life that included a novelist in the house and two little girls.
The next few years brought a slow untangling—the end of the marriage, Adam moving out, the two of us working through the best way to parent our daughters. I didn’t want to add a pet to the drama of Adam’s departure and Bill’s gradual introduction. I was—we all were—focused on the girls and getting them through it.
After Wendell, I knew it would be a while before I was ready to have another dog. But when Phoebe was three and Lucy was seven, they were both lobbying for a pet. “What kind?” I said, expecting them to ask for a poodle or a pug, or one of the cunning, bat-eared French bulldogs that had started popping up in our neighborhood.
“A dog like Wendell,” Phoebe decreed.
“Seriously?” I asked. “Wendell was kind of grouchy.”
But Lucy googled rat terriers, and showed me Internet evidence that they are, in fact, known as a breed that’s good with families and young children. Then she found RatRescue.com. We told the administrator that we’d be interested in puppies but would prefer an adult, then scrolled through the pictures of available dogs until we came to a shot of a very stout, extremely pregnant female, standing on a deck and staring off into the distance with an expression of resignation on her face. Her name was Moochie. She’d been left at a kill shelter, pregnant. “Seduced and abandoned,” I said. The rat rescue people had placed her in a foster home. She’d given birth, and all five of her puppies had swiftly found homes . . . but no one was in a hurry to take on what the site’s administrators described as a “teen mom.”
I filled out the application, which was more comprehensive than the one I’d completed to get into college. I described the homes where Moochie would live. I wrote an essay about my day-to-day life, explaining that the house was rarely empty, that any dog I adopted would hardly ever be alone. I cited my time with Wendell as proof that I was capable of providing a rat terrier with companionship as well as excellent health care.
Finally, we were approved. On a brilliantly sunny January Sunday, Bill and Phoebe and I drove down to Baltimore. We parked in front of the designated house and out came a young woman with a blue-and-yellow leash attached to a dog that could have been Wendell’s significantly more substantial sister. Instead of Wendell’s speckles, Moochie’s fur is mostly white, with large black spots and brown highlights and a sweet pink triangle on her nose. One of her pointy ears stands straight up, like Wendell’s did, while the other one flops down, drooping toward her forehead. Unlike Wendell,
she had a long, curved tail. Her belly was soft and pink, with loose folds of skin, evidence of her recent pregnancy, and she was solidly built, a contrast to Wendell’s narrow frame and spindly legs. She sniffed my hand, then Phoebe’s, and gave Bill a suspicious look, and squatted down for a quick wee. Then I scooped her up and put her in the carrier we’d purchased, and drove her to Philadelphia.
At home, Moochie inspected every inch of the house, sniffing at the carpets and in the corners. In my imagination, she was communing with Wendell’s spirit, getting the lowdown on me and the girls and Bill. Upstairs, she wriggled underneath my bed, and would not come out, no matter how we pleaded and wheedled. For the first week of her new life, she stayed under the bed, coming out only for walks and to gobble her bowl of kibble, never making a sound—not a bark, not a whimper. She was, we quickly realized, afraid of almost everything. On our jaunts through the neighborhood, a slammed car door, a gust of wind in the trees, a motorcycle, another dog, or the sight of a man, of any age or size, would make Moochie stiffen, or do a startled jump, or run behind my legs, cringing. Construction crews, which abound in our neighborhood, were terrifying menaces. She’d plant her four feet on the sidewalk, refusing to walk by a cement mixer or the jackhammer, even if they were all the way across the street, forcing me to pick her up and carry her.
Hungry Heart Page 38