When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  Finally, the call came. The owner was willing to sell, but the price was four hundred thousand dollars, and he wanted a quick closing. What? The year before he’d been asking less than a hundred thousand. I couldn’t come up with that much money. “How much can you do?” the conservancy lawyer asked. “I could refinance my apartment in New York and pull out”—I went quiet as I tried to figure out what was possible—“maybe two hundred thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money for me, but I think I can get that much.” My stomach was churning. It would be so easy to turn my back. I thought, You’re crazy. Borrow two hundred thousand dollars and give it away?

  But if I didn’t, what then? How could I live with myself? I was sure that somehow my parents would find a way to haunt me, curse me forever, strike me dead. No, I mean it. The Teichner Preserve was named not for me but for them. “I can do it, not in a week or two, though.”

  The director of the conservancy had a plan. “We have some money available from bequests. How about we buy the property, and then you pay us the two hundred thousand dollars when you get it?”

  And that’s what happened, all of it.

  I tell this story of another chance encounter as a way of putting Harry and Minnie’s story in context. I have no idea why such things happen to me, or to anyone. They just do.

  five

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 6

  Visit number two, a week after visit number one, was less hectic and more fun. Stephen took another route. He was only a little bit late. Carol and I decided we could allow the dogs to meet inside my apartment. When I opened my front door, Minnie stood beside me, head up, trying to figure out what was going on. Harry pushed right past her and began exploring. He went straight to a big wicker basket, overflowing with dog toys, most of them Goose’s. Minnie doesn’t play with toys, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away after Goose’s death. Harry inspected the balls and ropes and stuffed animals on top, like a kid in an ice cream parlor checking out the flavors, helped himself, and pulled his choices down to the floor one after another.

  Stephen burst in, an explosion of energy entering my apartment. Carol followed. She sat down at my dining table, opened her purse, and took out a plastic bag bulging with pieces of roast chicken, then, another one filled with cooked ground beef. “I want Minnie to associate Harry with good things,” she told me. “That’ll do it,” I replied.

  Next, she reached in and produced a wide, weathered red leather collar, trimmed with brass cutouts: a shepherd and his dog, three cows, two medallions. “Swiss,” she said. “It belonged to Violet. Harry wanted Minnie to have it.”

  I laughed. “A family heirloom. He’s trying to impress her. Thank you.” Here we were acting out a fantasy courtship on behalf of our dogs, like little girls playing with their dolls. The romantic story we were inventing seemed very Jane Austen. Is Harry Mr. Darcy? I wondered. I’ve always dreamed about being wooed this way. If only. I put the collar on Minnie. It looked very fancy next to her jewels. I remembered the motto of a wonderful, over-the-top line of women’s shoes I used to buy sometimes: Too Much Is Never Enough. That’s Minnie.

  Then I thought, Carol is starting to let go of her treasures. What an act of courage.

  In my bedroom closet, among the folded turtlenecks and T-shirts and sweaters, I have a secret little shrine. On one shelf Piggy’s tough-guy, spiked collar, punk, like Harry’s, sits on top of the flimsy carton filled with his ashes, a tiny fake rose tucked under the plastic shrink-wrap half crushing the box. The crematorium should have done better. I’ve thought about getting Piggy a proper urn, but I never have. I bought the collar in an act of mortified contrition after Piggy dragged me into a pet shop and started devouring all the treats in the baskets lined up by the door and hanging on hooks just within grabbing range, low-hanging fruit put there intentionally, but theft nonetheless.

  One shelf down, Goose’s plain woven collar, faded green and frayed, with all his tags still attached, hangs over the edge of his urn, a better one, made out of wood. My dead dogs’ collars are like my father’s watch or the scarves my mother wore, things I can touch, things that make me remember, not worth anything to anyone else, but priceless to me. By giving Violet’s collar to Minnie, Carol invested it with new meaning. Now it was my treasure, too. And when I said to her, “This must be very difficult for you,” she answered. “It actually gives me pleasure.” But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard.

  I love portraits. My living room is filled with pictures of people I’ve never met: a little girl holding a bunch of flowers painted sometime around 1830 on a wooden board, a woman peering out a window at the sea wondering whether her fisherman husband was coming back, an Englishman dressed for a fox hunt in a red coat and riding hat, and some old oils I bought when I was sent to Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union, among my favorites. I also have a painting of Goose, a serious likeness, not intended to be cute. It hangs above where his crate used to be, next to Minnie’s. I know, dog crates in the living room, an eyesore, but I don’t care. Carol made her way around the room looking at the pictures and then peered out the back door at my balcony and garden, no doubt trying to imagine Harry there. She said nothing.

  I sat in the middle of the couch, Minnie snuggled up against my left leg. As I watched Carol, trying to see my home through her eyes, Harry put his front paws up on my right side, begging for a boost. I scooped him up so I was sandwiched between the two of them. Suddenly, Minnie stiffened, a growl rumbling in her throat. She turned her head toward Harry as if she were about to lunge at him. I grabbed her collars and held her back, facing her with a ferocious stare. Carol and Stephen looked terrified. I petted Minnie and tried to reassure her, and eventually she relaxed. So did the rest of us. We dared to breathe. Harry seemed oblivious. After a few minutes, he jumped down and started exploring again, opening the door to Minnie’s crate with his nose and poking his head inside.

  Minnie’s threatening little outburst had us worried that maybe the dogs might not get along. We went silent, aware of the implications, then tried to chat our way out of the tension we all felt. Stephen brought up politics. We eventually moved on to our dogs’ habits, good and bad. I described how mine have all loved fruit. “We have our daily fruit ritual after our morning walk. We always start with a banana. Then we have an orange. We go through everything available: apples, pears, kiwis, whatever is in season. Goose liked strawberries. Minnie doesn’t. Apricots, plums, pineapple, mangoes, raspberries, cantaloupe, peaches, nectarines. Cherries. I bite them in half and pick the pit out for them. Minnie doesn’t like blackberries. We always end with dates. Again, I take the half with the pit. When Goose or Piggy had their dates, they’d just walk out of the kitchen. Now Minnie gets up on my bed, and I bring her fruit to her. She likes room service.” I heard myself and thought, Carol must think I’m nuts.

  She laughed. “I’ve never really given Harry fruit. What does Minnie like best, or is there any way of telling?”

  “Oh, she loves mangoes. Without a doubt, mangoes are her favorite.”

  Carol told me about having to pay for a twenty-five-dollar stuffed toy Harry snatched from a shelf at the drugstore, and the time he shredded the cushion of a chair, “custom, filled with down. My living room looked as if it had snowed.” As she said, “I’ll send you a picture,” Harry decided he wanted to get back up on the couch. We all looked at each other, anxious. I gave him his boost. This time, Minnie didn’t react at all.

  We took turns feeding the dogs chicken and hamburger. No sign of jealousy. Good.

  I asked Carol about the picture of a fancy, flag-festooned sphere she had at the bottom of all her emails, a kind of logo or family crest. It had a crown at the top, a ribbon with her name, Fertig, on it rippling across the bottom. Each flagpole had a little animal at its tip, a rabbit or a cat or a bird. The standard from some made-up monarchy, I thought, the sort of thing that might be carried at the head of a parade of gargoyles.

  Carol explained she liked armorials, insignias tha
t suggest medieval heraldry or coats of arms, so she designed her own whimsical one. “Harry has one, too,” she said. His was similar to hers but had a black-and-white bull terrier on top, a cross made out of dog bones dangling from a chain at the bottom. His name appeared as Sir Harry Fertig, so I was to understand he was noble and chivalrous. “Ooh, very nice,” I told Carol. She promised to make one for Minnie, “Lady Minnie Teichner, that is.” “For a girl who thinks she’s a glamorous movie star or maybe a princess,” I said, “it’s most fitting.”

  After a couple of hours, Stephen announced that the visit was over. He had to feed and walk his dog, Teddy. Carol and Harry lived way downtown, Stephen way uptown, which meant that from my apartment, he had to drive the length of Manhattan and then some to drop them off and then get home, an hour and a half for the entire trip, if he happened to be lucky, and the traffic wasn’t too bad.

  Minnie and I trailed along behind them as Carol urged Harry in the direction of Stephen’s car. Like kremlinology, figuring out what Minnie’s actions do or don’t mean is a perplexing guessing game. I read it as positive that she wasn’t refusing to walk. Harry stopped to do his business. It came out half-formed and bloody. Carol saw me staring at it. Stooping with her pickup bag, she turned to me: “That’s his chronic colitis.” Not good.

  Stephen’s old Land Rover was battered and boxlike, in need of a new bumper and a wash. He opened the back to reveal a dog bed. Harry stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the tailgate, and looked around to see who would lift him up. Late that night Carol emailed me:

  August 6, 2016

  11:34pm. By the by, Harry slept from when we returned until thirty minutes ago!!!

  Xc&H

  Sent from heaven

  Typos courtesy Apple

  I replied:

  Sunday, August 7, 2016

  6:40 am … Dating is exhausting.

  Carol:

  LOL!!!!!! and so true.

  The exchange continued:

  To: Martha Teichner

  Tuesday, August 9, 2016 5:53 pm

  Subject: re: SIR HARRY FERTIG

  I confess I have told some dear friends about your email.…”Dating is Exhausting.” High marks.

  Xc

  And then, on August 9, 2016, at 5:57 p.m., Martha Teichner wrote:

  True for people and dogs.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10 … Carol came to dinner with Harry but without Stephen. “He offers to drive all the time, but I feel embarrassed because he lives so far away, so we took an Uber.” She brought lovely pastries from a French bakery, cooked hamburger, a dented metal bowl, and a tennis ball.

  Harry’s famous ball and bowl, the very bowl he’d found in a dog park when he was a puppy, looked like what the English call a pudding basin. It was maybe four and a half, five inches high, roughly the same measurement across the top, but rounded, smaller at the bottom. Carol put it on the floor and handed Harry the ball. He immediately plopped it into the bowl, picked the bowl up with his teeth, and started waving it around. When the ball fell out, as it bounced, he used the bowl to catch it, then waved his head around some more till the ball fell out again. Catch and repeat. Catch and repeat. When it seemed we weren’t watching him play his game anymore, he came over to me and began jiggling the bowl between his teeth so it made a chattering noise and then nudged me with it. I noticed that his upper and lower fangs were worn down to the level of his other teeth. No wonder. Minnie was standing a few feet away looking puzzled.

  Both dogs followed me down the back stairs into the garden when I carried out pork chops to grill on the barbecue. Minnie sniffed Harry from back to front, snuffling loudly as she conducted her inspection. It was the first time she’d shown any curiosity about him. Back inside, Harry asked for a boost onto the couch. Minnie jumped up beside him. There they stayed, together, for an hour or so. Later, Harry became interested in the objects on a table next to the couch: my first two Emmys, a couple of sculptures and some tribal handicrafts I’d bought when I lived in South Africa, a vase, photographs in frames, almost everything breakable. He tried to stand up on his hind legs and knock it all down with his paws. Carol decided he was being annoying and shut him in Minnie’s crate for a little time-out. I said, “You know Manhattan Mini Storage?” It’s a network of storage-unit rental facilities in old industrial buildings around the city known for corny billboard advertisements such as this one:

  “In my father’s house there are many rooms.” —John 14:2

  Clearly, Jesus was not a New Yorker.

  “I call this Manhattan Minnie Storage, M-I-N-N-I-E. I should paint a sign.”

  Carol chuckled but should probably have groaned. During dinner, the dogs lay quietly side by side under the dining table.

  We covered a lot of subjects before we got to her cancer. Books we’d both read. TV shows she watched. We seemed to have the same tastes. I have a row of cookbooks on a bench against the wall opposite my table. Carol pulled out one she had, too, and showed me the recipe for a meringue filled with raspberries and cream she made sometimes for dinner parties. I love to cook and cook every day when I’m not traveling, but because I never seem to have much time to experiment, I tend to look at my cookbooks as if they were decorating magazines, for the pictures, feasting my eyes and imagination. The photo of the raspberry meringue looked decadent.

  Carol told me she grew up in the New York area, went to art school in Philadelphia, married one of her classmates, and took his name, Fertig. “I was a child bride.” They moved to Chicago together and eventually back to Philadelphia before they divorced. She returned to New York. She said she was married a second time, briefly, but didn’t elaborate. I told her I’d never been married, although not by choice.

  It was easy for me to forget that she was dying. Did she ever forget? She didn’t act sick. We were having fun. I liked her. It had been clear to me from her first visit that she was the sort of person I wished I’d known for twenty years, the kind of person I would have wanted as a friend for life. She was interesting. She had an edgy sense of humor. I was curious about her.

  Making friends is easier when you’re young. People seem to have room in their lives then and the time to make an effort, before their routines, their careers, their families, their obligations, crowd out discovery and make candor unlikely, listening a luxury. But here we were, getting to know each other as if we had all the time in the world, when just the opposite was true. Or maybe it was because time was short that we were allowing ourselves to become friends, to laugh, to confide in each other, to experience each moment in extra-sharp focus. If I were waiting to die, would I have the guts to enjoy myself, to accept new friends?

  Maybe this is how life is meant to be lived all the time, I found myself thinking, before being jolted back to reality. No, if Carol ever forgot she was dying, it was only fleetingly. When she talked about her illness, she couldn’t look me in the eye. She looked down and then off to one side as she told me that her liver cancer had metastasized to a tumor on her spine. She was undergoing radiation to shrink the tumor. It had gotten smaller, and she was in less pain. “But really, there is nothing to be done. I’m resigned. It is what it is.”

  And it could, so easily, have been me. Substitute Martha for Carol. I could have been the one dying of cancer. A single woman, alone, with a beloved dog nobody wanted. Then Minnie would have been facing death, just because. It could still be me someday. I had to consider Carol’s “situation” and what to do about Harry with that realization always echoing in my mind. What if it were me?

  “Maybe I’ll start going to Pilates classes again,” she said, looking up. “When I was diagnosed, I stopped everything, but maybe I’ll go back. I think exercise is supposed to be good for pain. I’m doing Object-Lesson again. I’ll keep going as long as I can.”

  Object-Lesson was her blog. For years, five mornings a week, subscribers woke up to an email from Carol containing a picture of something beautiful with a short reflection on its
history and significance, one day a jade necklace, another a dozen embroidered gloves, or maybe a life-size hand made out of porcelain, painted gold. “I’ll send you my latest. It’s a pair of nineteenth-century, jeweled Chinese finger guards.”

  “Are you still working?”

  She described the tiles she was designing for the ceilings and walls of the lobby bathrooms in a London hotel and charms for a prestigious Madison Avenue jeweler. “Working gives me some purpose. It keeps me sane. Anyway, I need the money. When I don’t feel well, I work in bed, or I watch television.”

  By ten o’clock, Carol looked gray and wilted. She said she was tired and needed to take Harry home. She found his bowl but not his tennis ball. As I walked with her to the street, I said I’d return it. “Don’t worry about it. He’s got at least thirty,” she said as she nudged him into an Uber. “Next time, come to my apartment. I want you to see Harry in his natural habitat.”

  * * *

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 14 … I came out of the subway at Wall Street. I had Harry’s tennis ball and a cold bottle of Montmorency cherry juice in a plastic bag. Some stories have theme songs. This one had a drink. Tart cherry juice from a farm in Leelanau County, maybe ten miles from where I grew up, mixed with sparkling water. To my amazement, I happened on the concentrate at my neighborhood Whole Foods. Naturally, I bought a bottle. I’ve been buying it ever since. It’s good. The first time Carol and Stephen brought Harry inside my apartment, I gave them some. Carol watched me pour the thick liquid into her glass and smiled as dark red swirls bled over the ice into the bubbles. The artist in her approved. “It’s beautiful.” She loved it, and suddenly it was the next big thing for a woman who had spent her career identifying the next big thing and still, even getting ready to die, couldn’t resist something new. We had started our own two-person fad. I sent her home with an extra bottle I had in the fridge. For my first visit to her apartment, I decided to bring her the big twenty-five-dollar bottle. I knew she was having trouble doing her shopping and had run out.