by Susan Conant
My only excuse is that my perception must’ve been slowed and distorted by the residual images of a parts match. Best size in a toy breed? Very short. Itchiest headgear? She wore one of those pointy-topped Peruvian hats with rows of cream white stick figures knitted into the brown wool. The ear flaps were knotted under her chin. Long, dark, sopping hair dripped onto her forehead and streamed over the shoulders of her navy pea jacket. In the dusk, the day pack was a dark lump. I wondered whether it had been safe for women to hitch rides in the sixties and how someone could imagine that it was still safe for anyone, male or female.
The light changed to green, and my mental processes finally shifted into first. Green. Sixties. Pea jacket. Very short.
I leaned over, unlocked the passenger door, opened it, and yelled, “Get in!”
She did. I wondered why. Rowdy, safe in a Vari-Kennel behind the wagon barrier, wasn’t visible, but the crate and barrier certainly were. Also, despite my persistent and repeated application of every commercial deodorizing product marketed to dog owners, as well as a few dozen folk remedies, the predominant odor in the Bronco wasn’t Outright or cider vinegar but distilled essence of dog. Especially on that cold, wet day when the windows were closed and the heater was blasting, she must’ve smelled it the second she approached the open door. Yet she got in. Why? If she’d bolted from the show the second she’d released Rowdy, she must’ve been out in that chilling weather for thirty or forty minutes. I guess she got in because she was cold, wet, and very young.
Massachusetts drivers being the charitable souls they are, every car behind me had begun to sound its horn the second the light turned green. As soon as I heard her pull the door shut, I stepped on the gas.
“You owe me thirty-five dollars,” I said flatly.
“Do I know you?” The voice was young, clear, and educated, with a hint of a British accent, and not Harvard educated, pseudo-British, either, but real British, in other words, genuinely foreign. But just a trace.
“You owe me thirty-five dollars,” I repeated. “For trail mix. After you let go of his leash, he went to a concession stand that sells trail mix and candy and stuff. It has open bins.” I assume that I sounded cheerful. I was. In fact, I was having fun. I’d wanted to get one these people alone for a long time. “He didn’t actually eat thirty-five dollars’ worth, thank God, but he grabbed a lot of mouthfuls and threw them on the floor, which is what he does when he steals food. You wouldn’t know that, of course, because you don’t know anything about dogs, never mind malamutes, but he does. His name is Rowdy, by the way. He’s an Alaskan malamute. Anyway, what Rowdy didn’t eat or toss on the floor he probably drooled on or whatever, and the guy was nice about it, and we settled for thirty-five dollars.”
The Bronco was very warm by now. The wipers made a cozy swish back and forth across the windshield. And the car smelled homey, too, of course.
The indignant young voice broke the near silence. “You’re kidnapping me! Stop this car and let me out this instant!”
“Actually, I’m rescuing you. You’d’ve got into any car that stopped, so I’ve probably rescued you from rape and murder, and those dog people back there would hang you from the nearest grooming loop. I’ve practically plucked you off the scaffold. Actually, one of them was going to strangle you. I think I’ve got that right. And someone else definitely wanted to shoot you. Actually, what she said was that you ought to be shot on sight. But I didn’t shoot you, did I? I’m not even taking you back there.”
“You’re holding me in this car against my will! And that’s kidnapping. You could get in a lot of trouble for this.” Childish? That’s how she sounded.
“You were hitching. I picked you up. You’re lucky. I happen to be a nice, peaceful person. Let me introduce myself. My name is Holly Winter. I live at two fifty-six Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is where we’re going, in case you wondered. I’d offer you my hand, but I need it on the steering wheel right now, so why don’t you just tell me your name, and we’ll save—”
She interrupted with a self-righteous announcement: “I am not going anywhere with the kind of person who keeps an animal locked in a cage.”
“Actually, you are,” I said. “Right now, that’s what you’re doing, but the word is crate. Question: Why is Rowdy in a crate? Why isn’t he free?” I answered for her. “So if I slam on the brakes, he won’t be thrown against the windshield. That’s why the wagon barrier’s there, too. Double protection.”
“You couldn’t let anything happen to your valuable property, could you?” she snapped.
“He is valuable,” I said. “He is one of the most important people in my life, and, in case you wondered, I am not joking. So is Kimi, my other dog. Hey, while you’re at this, have you ever considered releasing children?”
She didn’t answer.
“Really,” I said. “I mean it. I’m serious. A lot of people would be less pained and, uh, jeopardized, in a way, if you went around liberating their children instead of doing stupid things like this. I mean, for a start, children can at least talk. Not babies, of course. You’d go for preschoolers, I guess. On the other hand, there are these old statistics.…” I paused and explained. “I write about dogs. That’s what I do. I’m a dog writer. That’s why I know this stuff. Anyway, in 1982, Americans spent one point thirty-two billion dollars on pet accessories, and in the same year they spent only two hundred and twenty-two million dollars on toys for children under the age of eighteen months. Okay? So which would people rather lose?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said.
Finally. I felt delighted. “The point is,” I said, my voice suddenly cold, “that the quality of the bond, if you want to call it that, is not very different. Love is love. It sounds corny, but that’s what this entire dog thing is about: absolute, unconditional love. And if Rowdy had been killed because you ‘liberated’ him, I would have been absolutely and unconditionally glad to see you dead. I might not actually have murdered you, but I’d sure have wanted to. I might even have done it. But since no harm came to him, thank God, I am taking a constructive, civilized approach to the situation.”
“Stop this car!”
“No,” I said, peering out to check a sign that pointed the way to Arlington. “Of course not. You haven’t even met Kimi yet. Do you have any other questions?”
She said nothing.
“Well, I do,” I said. “First of all, are you from A.L.F.?”
A.L.F.? Animal Liberation Front. The militant wing of animal rights extremism, the Irish Republican Army of animal liberation, but, oddly enough, British. Really, that’s true. Her accent was what made me ask, of course.
“No,” she said. “It was my own symbolic act.”
“Rowdy is not a symbol. He’s my dog. And if you think it was okay to let him loose indoors,” I went on, “you’re wrong. A dog fight would have been almost as bad. And he could have wandered out. It wasn’t likely, okay, but it could have happened. What you did was not just symbolic, you know. It was directed against my dog.”
“Ownership is not something I choose to recognize,” she said smugly.
“Well, you may not, but Rowdy and Kimi do,” I said.
“Ownership is exploitation,” she mouthed. It’s a stupid cliché, I know, but she was very young.
“Fine,” I agreed. “But it goes both ways. What you probably don’t know is that dog people joke about it all the time. ‘Congratulations! You are now owned by an Alaskan malamute.’ But it’s no joke! We honestly are owned. I am. And, believe me, the interspecies relationship is voluntary. It has been from the beginning. People didn’t force wolves to come into the cave, you know.”
“Is that dog part wolf?” she demanded.
Well, asking that question seemed to me to be the only intelligent thing Gloria had done so far, and I gave her a thoughtful answer. Gloria. Yeah, before long, she told me her name. Gloria Loss. We talked about her even more than we talked about dogs. She was eighteen years
old, and she lived in Cambridge. Until a year ago, she’d been a day student at a private prep school just outside Boston, a place that specializes in troubled kids without embarrassing their parents by advertising itself that way. The British accent came from four years in England. Her father was a professor of linguistics, and Gloria and her mother had gone to England with him when Gloria was eight. When they’d returned to America, the father had immediately turned around, gone back, and moved in with one of his students, and Gloria had seen him only twice since then.
“What does your mother do?” I asked.
“Personal growth,” Gloria answered, as if it were a form of full-time employment. “Energy healing,” she added. “Healing modalities. Right now, she’s trying to clarify her desires. She used to do Feldenkrais. You wouldn’t know what that is. Awareness through movement, they call it.”
I didn’t have the heart to explain why I knew exactly what the Feldenkrais Method is, even though I knew it mostly by another name, TTouch. What is it? New Age massage and movement, a healing touch for dogs. Dog owners use Feldenkrais to heal those they love. Gloria’s mother evidently did, too. Gloria herself had never owned a dog or cat. She’d once had gerbils that had reproduced and promptly eaten their newborn offspring.
At a stoplight, I glanced over at Gloria, who’d removed the ugly Peruvian cap and sat hunched in the seat, her knees drawn up in a fetal curl. Even in the dim light from the dashboard and a nearby streetlight, her face was painful to look at. She had the kind of acne you practically never see anymore, certainly never on children of privilege, children whose fathers are professors, who’ve traveled abroad, whose mothers can afford to pursue personal growth instead of working for a living. I felt furious at the parents who’d neglected this poor kid, who’d turned her loose to develop into a mangy stray. By the time we reached the intersection of Alewife Brook Parkway and Mass. Ave., which is to say, Cambridge, I was feeling disappointed and chagrined. I’d thought I was capturing Satan himself. What I’d caught was, at worst, a minor imp.
I didn’t even bother to press her about why she’d released Rowdy. She’d already told me herself. “It was my own symbolic act,” she’d said. The sight, sound, and scent of two thousand show dogs, each one groomed, pampered, and adored? Two thousand beautiful dogs, each one loved and cared for? And there she’d been, ugly Gloria. Of course it had been a symbolic act. When I’d stopped to pick her up in Medford, I’d intended to beard one of those satanic animal liberationists in my own woofy den. Just force one of those bastards to meet my dogs and spend some time with us! Training is cruelty? Let the son of a bitch watch Kimi stubbornly refuse to go indoors until we’ve done our obedience work. And the joyful grin on Rowdy’s face when he finds his dumbbell and soars back over the high jump? Or let anyone, absolutely anyone, just hang around with us, listen to us, watch us, learn who we really are, homo sapiens, canis familiaris, two species delicately evolved in unison, biologically distinct, behaviorally meshed, the only two species to keep one another as companion animals. People keep cats and birds, too, of course, but dogs are more loyal to us than we are to them. We are uniquely theirs. Without us, there would be no dogs. Without them, we would be less human than we are now. No one should miss this transcendent miracle. No one but Gloria Loss, who didn’t need to learn that my dogs and I loved one another more than anyone had ever loved her.
Fifteen minutes after we’d crossed Mass. Ave., Gloria stood awkwardly in the bright light of my kitchen. Faith’s description had been accurate, and so had Lois Metzler’s: Gloria was short, dark, and damp. Her hair had been treated with some oily gel or mousse that forced her thick locks to fall depressingly forward and downward. The paisley skirt Faith had mentioned was, in fact, the bottom half of a long, unflattering dress in shades of mustard, black, and navy. It dripped onto heavy hiking boots that had absorbed the rain. The raw, inflamed lesions that covered her face made it hard to see past her skin to the person inside.
The beauty of dogs, though, is that if Gloria had had two or three heads, each as repulsive as the first, Rowdy and Kimi would have welcomed her with the same enthusiasm they now displayed. They’d both had a brief trip to the fenced-in yard, and now Rowdy, who had, of course, already met Gloria, was sprawled on his back on the floor, his mouth open in a toothy smile, his legs wiggling foolishly in the air in anticipation of chest-scratching and tummy-rubbing that Gloria failed to offer. Kimi sat neatly in front of Gloria and kept lifting her right forepaw, but Gloria missed or refused that invitation, too.
“He wants you to rub his belly,” I translated. “And she wants to shake hands.”
“This is an undignified way to make animals act,” she told me.
“I didn’t teach Rowdy that. It’s just something malamutes do. Lots of dogs do it, but it’s a malamute specialty. And there’s nothing undignified about shaking hands. Pawing at people is a spontaneous behavior. They do it for attention. They do it for lots of reasons. And they happen to like learning to do it the way she’s doing it now, at least when they get a civilized response in return.” Kimi’s pretty eyes were puzzled. I was annoyed. “Damn it, give her your hand! She doesn’t understand why you’re ignoring her.” Then I paused and said, “Never mind. I’m going to feed them. You’d better get out of the way.”
I fastened Rowdy to a leash at one end of the kitchen, Kimi to a leash at the other end. Then I dished out two helpings of premium chow and fed the dogs. Gloria almost certainly disapproved, but if I don’t tie up the dogs, the one who finishes first tries to steal the other one’s food, and we end up with a mess of kibble scattered all over the linoleum and a snarling tangle of dogs.
When the dogs had finished eating, Gloria, who’d taken a seat at the table, said, “They’re still hungry. You didn’t give them very much.”
As I unhitched the dogs, I said, “It’s concentrated food. I use a measuring cup. They both have a tendency to put on weight, so the main thing is not to feed them too much. In terms of health, overfeeding is almost as bad as underfeeding. Um, would you like something to eat?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m hungry. I’ll make us both sandwiches. And then we need to have a talk.”
My cheese sandwiches are a lot better than the ones you buy at dog shows. In other words, mine aren’t soggy, they don’t taste as if they’d been made a month in advance, and the cheese is identifiable as such. As you probably know, in addition to producing dog and cat food, the big pet food companies manufacture monkey chow, ferret food, and stuff like that, with only one obvious omission. Hills Brothers, Iams, where are you? The market is here. I’d buy it. I’d be delighted. No more wondering what to fix, no more pans to scrub, no more checking to make sure you’ve included the four food groups? I mean, I’d want to go out to a restaurant once in a while for a little variety, of course. But most of the time? Just dish up the Purina People Chow, and I’d be perfectly happy.
In the meantime, Gloria and I ate cheese sandwiches and continued the discussion we’d had in the car.
“Could I get something straight?” I asked. “How did you get to Woburn?”
“Hitched,” she said, with an air of empty, precocious sophistication.
“But how did you know to go there? Where did you get the idea?”
She chewed, swallowed, and said, “At a meeting. It’s a … I don’t belong. I haven’t joined. I just go sometimes and listen.” Then her high voice took on the self-righteous tone I’d heard earlier. “It’s a group of people who care about the planet.”
She made it sound like some place other than where I lived. There’s no mirror in my kitchen, but I’m sure that my mouth took on the pseudosmile dogs make when they’re about to vomit.
I said, “And these people want us to share it without exploiting it. And with all living creatures without exploiting them. Right?”
If Gloria had been even a few years older than she was, her expression of astonished recognition would have been funny.
“Look, Gloria,” I went on. “
You picked the wrong person’s dog. I happen to be interested in Antarctica. I probably know more about it than you do and probably more than these people do, either. I am very concerned about it, and the way I got interested in it was exploitation, and, not only that, exploitation of dogs. So I understand about abuse of the environment and abuse of dogs, and I’m just going to tell you that my relationship with my dogs is not abusive and certainly not exploitative.”
“You bought them, didn’t you?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t, but I would have. I’ve bought dogs. I’ve paid for them.”
“At pet shops.” Gloria bit defiantly into her sandwich.
I dropped mine on my plate and slammed my fist on the table. “Absolutely not! I won’t spend a dime in one of those goddamned places. As a matter of fact, one of the main things on my mind right now is what to do about a pet shop. You know this place, Puppy Luv?”
Her jaw was locked. She nodded.
“There’s a malamute puppy there. I won’t buy the puppy because I will not give these bastards any profit, I will not create a market, and I will not contribute to their damned industry. But I’m still worried about the dog. Do you know where those puppies come from?”
“Puppy mills,” she said.
“Yes! Now if you really want to do something about animal exploitation, and if you ever want to get seriously active, those are the places to go after. I mean, that’s real exploitation. If you want to get somebody, get those people, not me. And not people like me, either.”