Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  “She might have been abused,” said the trainer I brought in to help me figure out this strange, un-Wendell-like dog.

  In the days and weeks that followed, we started to learn Moochie’s ways. We discovered that she hated confinement after we put her in a metal crate during a weekend in Connecticut, and came home to discover that she’d Hulked her way out, pushing two of the bars apart and wriggling through the opening.

  We bought a plastic crate. Moochie chewed her way through it. What she wanted, it emerged, was to be with me. On my lap, or against my chest, or, when I was sleeping on my side, wedged under my leg, between my thighs and my knees. She was bigger than Wendell, and heavier, and bossier. She’d hop onto the bed, drop her bottom down against me, shove and wedge and wriggle until we were both where she wanted us, and only then fall into a doze, during which she’d snore and twitch and whimper, paws paddling the air as she ran in her sleep. She found her voice and started barking—at visitors, at the doorbell, at other dogs walking on the sidewalk by our—her—house. The UPS truck was her nemesis, prompting a frenzy of barking with every approach.

  It soon became clear that whatever had happened to Moochie had involved men, judging by the way she’d either cringe and hide, or lunge and bark, whenever a strange man came to the house . . . but she learned to like Bill. When he’d read on the couch, she’d sidle up to him, then hop up onto his chest, or settle herself between his legs, napping with her chin resting on his thigh.

  On Valentine’s Day, when she’d been in residence for six weeks, Moochie managed to clamber onto a barstool, then onto the breakfast bar, where she devoured a two-pound box of chocolates and a dozen chocolate-chip cookies I’d baked. My assistant, Meghan, and I rushed her to the vet, where she was weighed—“You might want to watch the treats,” said the vet, noting that Moochie had put on a pound and a half since her arrival six weeks previously—and then given a shot of what was described as doggy Pepto-Bismol in her bottom.

  “I think she’s eating her feelings,” Meghan said as we walked the disgraced and belching Moochie back home. “Valentine’s Day is probably hard for her. She was pregnant, she was abandoned, and now it’s a holiday that celebrates love . . .”

  “Also, RatRescue.com was like online dating, and she knows she’s not on the market anymore,” I said. “So it’s not like she has to maintain her girlish figure to find a home.”

  The pattern was set. Moochie would eat anything she could reach and steal, including but not limited to things that were not, technically, food. She’ll gnaw on FedEx envelopes and book spines and magazine pages. One memorable night she swiped an entire roast turkey breast that had been placed on the cutting board to rest before we carved it. Again, Moochie hoisted herself onto the breakfast bar. She snagged the turkey, dragged it across the counter, then towed it into the dining room (where all the finest dogs eat). We found her underneath the table, having her way with the turkey breast, an act that inspired Phoebe, in first grade at the time, to write a story entitled “My Noddy Dog.” (“My dog shur is noddy,” the first sentence read.)

  If Wendell was a stylish and cynical gay man trapped in the body of a rat terrier, Moochie is more like a sweet, plump, slightly bewildered 1950s housewife. I imagined Wendell in three-piece suits and ties and matching pocket squares, looking haughtily down his snout at a world whose vagaries and messiness displeased him. Moochie, I picture in shirtdresses and aprons, wringing her hands and cringing at a car door’s slam and eventually ending up with a Valium prescription. “A loyal companion animal,” my mother will say as Moochie trails me up the stairs in the house on Cape Cod, rarely straying from my heel. Bill and I learned that she could swim that first summer after I went out in a kayak. I was paddling away from the shore when I heard Bill call my name. I turned around and saw a small black-and-white head, eyes wide, flailing valiantly after me. I rowed back to meet her and lifted her into the kayak, where Moochie gave herself a brisk shake, looked around, and then positioned herself on the bow like a ship’s figurehead, bravely scanning the waters for danger.

  Moochie might love me the best . . . but if Wendell was my dog, then Moochie is our dog, Bill’s dog as much as she is mine. He makes up stories for her, giving her the lines of an insult comic. Sometimes she’ll snap at him when he tries to kiss me. I think it’s because she’s momentarily forgotten herself, and him, and he’s just one of those men in her past. He thinks she just wants to remind him who’s the boss.

  Four years after Moochie’s arrival, Bill and I were, at long last, planning our wedding.

  Getting married at forty-five is, I discovered, different from getting hitched in your early thirties. I was less worried about inviting everyone or proving anything. I knew who I was, my strengths and insecurities, how I can be thin-skinned and argumentative, how I hold grudges and look brave online while IRL I’m in my closet crying over my hurt feelings. I know who he is, how his stoicism can look like indifference, how his love is more in his actions than his words, how he’ll always be my voice of reason, whether it’s about art I want to buy or a tweet I want to send.

  We knew what we wanted—a ceremony at home, close friends and family, gorgeous flowers, delicious food.

  Our first impulse was to have Moochie attend, in an attractive floral garland, possibly carrying the rings. Then we learned that our rabbi is afraid of dogs . . . and we remembered Moochie’s tendency to get snarly and defensive whenever there are strange men in the house.

  “I’m not going to allow Moochie to be treated like Rosemary Kennedy,” Susan said when we explained that, regrettably, Moochie wouldn’t be part of the big day. The afternoon of our nuptials, we dropped her off at Fran and Clair’s hotel room . . . and, when it was over, I took off my wedding dress, put on jeans and a sweater, and went to retrieve her. When I opened the door, she flew over, wagging and whining ecstatically. She planted herself in my lap and looked up at me, her big brown eyes as trusting as Mort’s ever were . . . and then, with Wendell’s hauteur, she permitted me to leash her, and strolled down the hotel hallway, nails clicking, snout held high. Past the room where Lucy and Phoebe and David were sleeping with Aunt Molly, who was already planning on marching them back to me in their wedding finery (“Now, children, this is called the walk of shame”). Past my brothers’ rooms and out the door, down South Second Street, past Adam’s apartment, then around the corner, and home, where the caterers were packing up and Bill was waiting. We sat on the couch, just the three of us. Moochie sighed contentedly, then wriggled herself into position, sprawling across us, her head in Bill’s lap and her bottom in mine. “Who’s my good girl?” I heard Bill ask in his deep voice, and I shut my eyes, took his hand, and thought, I have come home.

  * * *

  I. And a certain class of literary male writers.

  II. FRAN, STOP READING HERE.

  Coda

  Letter to Lucy and Phoebe

  Time, May 2015

  I get it. I know that, to you, I am just “Lady Who Can’t Work the TiVo.” Or “Woman Who Needs Emojis Explained to Her.” I know how annoyed you get when I chase you around with the hairbrush/toothbrush/sunscreen/good shoes and insist that you make your bed, clear your dishes, and wear underpants when leaving the house. I see how you cringe when I car-dance every time “Baby Got Back” comes on the radio, especially when the people on the street watch me lip-synch. To you, I am pretty much a large lump of ignorance who exists only to make you eat your vegetables, finish your homework, and write your thank-you notes.

  But I do know a few things. Having passed through the vale of tears that is adolescence, I can peek around the corner into your future, and tell you what’s coming next.

  Within the next few years, some people—not all, but some—will stop seeing you as you and start seeing just your surface: your face, your hair, your body. These people won’t care that you’re both stars at math or that you both love to swim. They won’t want to hear about the time that you, Phoebe, got lost in the supermarket when yo
u were three and how you marched yourself up to the service desk with perfect aplomb and told them that your mom’s name was Jennifer Pearl because your name is Phoebe Pearl, so why wouldn’t it be? . . . and how, when I found you, you were sitting on the counter, chatting with the manager, with a balloon in one hand, a giant cookie in the other, and a stuffed bunny in your lap. They won’t care that you, Lucy, built a spaceship out of a bunch of cardboard boxes, with a ball chute on the outside and holders for an iPad and some lip balm in the shadowy interior, and that you love show tunes and sailing and MythBusters and can sing all the words to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”

  These people will care mostly—sometimes only—about how you look. They’ll reduce you to a body, instead of seeing you as a person. This will persist for the next forty or fifty years or so, at which point you will become essentially invisible, and they will stop seeing you at all.

  They’ll think that your body is public property. They’ll think they can catcall you on the street or grope you on the subway or tell you you’d be prettier if you smiled. If you insist on expressing your opinions—and I hope you will—they’ll hide behind their screens and call you ugly, or a slut, or a fat, ugly slut, which always confused me. How can you be fat and ugly and sell sex for a living? How is that a workable business model? If you succeed, they will whisper, or write, that you must have slept with someone important to have gotten whatever you got. If you speak up, they will try to shame you into silence, because—and it breaks my heart to write these words—that’s the way some people still think women ought to be.

  My prayer is that you’ll never lose sight of yourselves—all of yourselves. You are so much more than just your looks. Your bodies are perfect, perfectly made and perfectly sized. You don’t have to waste years of your life fighting against them or trying to fit someone else’s idea of beautiful (especially if that person is taking your money and whispering snake-oil promises about how if you only stick to this diet/cleanse/fitness plan, if you only get this injection/operation/painful piece of shapewear, you’ll look the way you should).

  Love your bodies for what they can do. Remember that you’ve climbed mountains, swum across ponds, collected bucketsful of clams, balanced on bicycles and paddleboards, and danced around in your bedrooms with complete abandon. Remember how great it feels to solve a tough math problem, or cook something delicious, or fall into a really great book, and how none of that has anything to do with your appearance.

  Keep swimming. Keep talking. If something’s wrong, speak up. I will always love you, and I will always see you, all of you, inside and out. And every single part of you is perfect.

  Acknowledgments

  Iam grateful beyond telling to my family and loved ones for letting me tell my version of this story: my Nanna, Faye Frumin; my mom, Frances Frumin Weiner; her partner, Clair Kaplan; my sister, Molly Beth; my brothers, Jake and Joe and David; and Adam Bonin, the father of my girls.

  Thanks to my agent, Joanna Pulcini, who read that very first hot mess of a five-hundred-page manuscript for Good in Bed and said, “This is a book.” Thanks to everyone at Atria for letting me tell that story, and every story since then, and for handling my work with such care: Carolyn Reidy, Judith Curr, and Lisa Sciambra. Special thanks to Sarah Cantin—may this be the first of many books together! Thank you, Marcy Engelman, for your loyalty and your skills.

  My assistant, Meghan Burnett, was a rock star, as always.

  To Lucy and Phoebe and Bill—you are my happy ending.

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  Jennifer Weiner is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of fourteen books, including Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, which was made into a major motion picture, Who Do You Love, and The Littlest Bigfoot, her first book for middle-grade readers. A graduate of Princeton University and contributor to the New York Times Opinion section, Jennifer lives with her family in Philadelphia. Visit her online at JenniferWeiner.com.

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