A Body, Undone

by Christina Crosby

  I chose her death when she was unable to eat. Sitting in the backseat of my car, I held her in my lap as the vet injected her with a fatal dose. She was my first dog, had been my wonderfully physical companion as I lived through the formative and deforming years of professionalization, and I grieved her loss. But I knew even at that terrible moment that I would have another dog.

  “Is this the day?” Babe D. (a.k.a. Babe the Dog) asked every morning, “Is today the day?” Janet and I were sitting up in bed, where we ate cereal and drank tea every morning. Babe was on Janet’s side of the bed, with her hind legs on the floor and her upper body on the duvet cover—that’s all the farther she was allowed. She reached out and put her left paw on Janet’s left leg. “No.” She took it off. She put it back on. “No.” Janet suffered this a few more times and then told her, “Off,” and Babe learned that for yet another day, she didn’t get to dominate Janet—she knew better then to ask me, because I was securely in the alpha position of our pack, while Janet was beta, and Babe invariably gamma. She nonetheless asked every day if, overnight, the order of things had changed. Babe D. was named in honor of Babe Didrikson, the best athlete of the twentieth century, and she lived up to that indomitable competitor’s name.

  I began looking in the classifieds about two years after Shameless Hussy’s death, and after a couple of months, found what I was searching for—a litter of half white lab, half golden retriever puppies, $50 each. When I went to see them, I looked for the smallest one, as if to channel Shameless Hussy, paid my money, and started walking away with “Tiny,” as the owner of the bitch called her, in my arms. But Babe, whom I first saw draped over the shoulders of one of the other puppies, decided I was the best thing going, and came running after me, with her little ears flapping. She was a real looker, mostly white, with a blush of color on the tips of her ears and the top of her head, while Tiny had no such advantages. So Babe went home with me.

  For the first three years of her life, she was a hellion. She would look directly at me, our eyes would meet, and I could see her deciding whether she was going to obey my command. I had no convenient fenced-in field, so I was training her outside on a long lead. I named her so that I could yell in public, “Babe, come here!” Good thing, because we practiced the recall command over and over. When she was older and almost 100% reliable, I would sometimes forgo the leash, especially if I was in a hurry. Now and then, of course, when I called her to come, she’d turn around, and take off, with me in hot pursuit, sprinting through the backyards of my neighborhood and quickly calculating where I might corner her. Great fun for the dog, but when I finally tackled her and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, she knew she was in disgrace. I guess the iconic moment was this: Before leaving for class one bright fall afternoon, I opened the door into the backyard for her, where she knew to relieve herself in amongst some ivy and scrub bushes. By then, I had had her for maybe two and a half years, and she was off lead while I waited for her by the door. She took off, I ran after. Going fast, she disappeared around a corner—and was gone. Damn! I was already late, and could only hope that she would head for campus one block over and not run down to the busy street one block below. Coming home I looked for her everywhere and kept calling her, with no luck. I was getting ready to go out on my bicycle to extend my search when a Wesleyan Public Safety cruiser pulled up. I could see Babe happily sitting on the front seat, panting, with her ears cocked, beside the uniformed officer, who stepped out and called, “Excuse me, ma’am, is this your dog?” He had checked the tag on her collar, which had my phone number and address, and had brought her home. “She was in the Science Center, got up to the second floor somehow. The students were pretty happy about it. Here she is,” and he handed her over. So, escorted by a uniformed officer, she came home.

  If you had told me then that she would become a well-trained dog, who would stay right beside me (off lead!) when we went out for an afternoon run, and always come when called, I would have laughed derisively. Yet she did turn into a well-behaved dog and one I loved unreservedly. I could even look at her puppy pictures without cursing. Home in the evening, I would take her out back for a game of “tennis ball” that sent her tearing down the hill. Back she would come with the ball in her mouth. Dropping it at my feet, she’d tell me to DO IT AGAIN. In bad weather, I’d sit inside at the top of the stairs and bounce her ball down. Down she would rush after it and back up she would come, two steps at a time, down and back, endlessly. Only hot and humid weather could tire her out. I’m sure that to anyone who didn’t particularly like dogs, such routines would seem insufferably repetitious and boring, but I found her wholly engaging in her enthusiasm and simple happiness, and welcomed the familiarity of our play.

  Janet enjoyed Babe’s company, too, and, having trained a dog herself, understood quite clearly the question Babe posed every morning. We both found her amusing, and the three of us formed a unit with clearly articulated, harmonious relationships, insofar as any pack where species meet can so establish itself. In warmer weather, when we left the front door open, Babe would sit for hours looking out the bottom half of the storm door, now and again jumping up in great agitation. We knew what she was doing—she was watching squirrel TV, always the same channel, always the same program, always squirrels. When it got cold, I was sorry to turn off the TV by shutting the door. Babe also harbored a desire to meet skunks, as we discovered one evening when I let her go off lead to relieve herself behind the house. She returned in a minute or two, but as she approached, stopped to rub her muzzle against first one, then the other front leg. Something was bothering her. A nearer approach, and I knew what. As Janet imagines the scene, the dog saw a skunk and excitedly asked, “Can I smell your butt—right now? Can I, can I??” She got sprayed right between the eyes. I had heard that tomato juice countered skunk oil, so I opened every can of tomatoes and tomato juice in the cupboard, including Newman’s Own Marinara Sauce, and dumped the contents over her while Janet went to the closest convenience store for more. She returned with bottles of Bloody Mary mix that I poured over the dog and tried to rub into her coat. She smelled like skunk for a long, long time—I can’t recommend it as a treatment. She did not, thankfully, turn pink.

  Fortunately for the three of us, “Can I smell your butt?” became for Janet and me an oft-repeated phrase announcing our dog’s enthusiastic approach to the world. Babe was always puppy-like in her hopefulness, and had never really grown into the big feet that had promised a larger dog, so she looked puppy-like, too. One year Janet was living in Cambridge, and when I went to visit, we often walked with Babe to a noodle shop just off Harvard Square. I looped her leash to a chair outside, and she sat there waiting for us to carry out our food and join her. We watched her through the big front widows as she repeatedly beguiled passersby, who stopped to talk with her and scratch her behind the ears—the most popular dog in Cambridge, Janet and I observed in justified hyperbole. It’s the making of such accounts that enriched our social unit, giving my relation to Janet and hers to me greater depth and complexity, because we weren’t alone—we had Babe in our lives. Here I want to be vividly clear. We did NOT think of Babe as a child, so please don’t get confused by my effort to narrate the pleasures of living in the social unit of a pack. I was never Babe’s mother, I have no floppy ears. No, our pack had two human beings and one dog being, and was a formation in which Babe the Dog, Janet, and I made a domestic life together. Babe enhanced our social world, made runs more fun and walks more adventuresome, turned raking leaves into a game, did the same by dropping her ball in front of the lawnmower, and by plunging into any available body of water, including a little stream that ran through a wooded ravine not far away. When she’d come splashing out, her undercarriage would be black with mud. I had to hose her off, no big deal.

  One night I woke up to the sound of Babe falling down the stairs. It took me a moment to figure out what was going on, and when I got down to the living room, she was wobbling about dazed. Janet was in NYC. I
got Babe to lie down, and lay down on the floor alongside her, telling her over and over that she was a good dog. After a while, we both went to sleep. I woke up stiff, and she had a lump on her head from her tumble down the stairs, but was otherwise her indefatigable, enthusiastic self. Whatever had happened remained unexplained. One evening a few years later, she was suddenly having a seizure, right there in the kitchen with Janet and me. Our veterinarian’s answering service referred us to an emergency clinic in West Hartford—Janet drove while I held Babe in my lap, stroking her and whispering in her ear as her body trembled and jerked. And then, just like that, the seizure stopped. When we got out of the car fifteen minutes later, she jumped out wagging her tail, ears up, completely her sociable self. I’m glad to see You, Babe informed both the veterinarian and her assistant. Are You glad to see Me? We learned that there was nothing we could do, other than be thankful that the seizure was over with no apparent damage. The next time, though, everything was different.

  I had been home from the hospital for six or seven months, and had gone out with Babe to let her relieve herself behind the garage. I was wheeling myself slowly up the path to the deck, when she ran past on the lawn and jumped to get up where the deck was lowest. There was a pipe that she didn’t see, and she hit her head hard just above her eyes. She immediately went into convulsions, neural circuits in her brain flooded with incapacitating voltage, and began staggering spastically around the yard with her tongue out and her eyes rolling back in her head.

  I looked on aghast, and turned to go back down the path hoping I could somehow reach her. HELP HELP HELP WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME HELP HELP! In turning the wheelchair, I had wedged it between the stone walls along the path (my turning radius was too large, as I now know), and was hopelessly stuck. The more I struggled, the clearer it became that I couldn’t help her—I couldn’t even help myself. Oh God Oh God HELP PLEASE PLEASE HELP I NEED HELP MY DOG AND I NEED HELP . . . finally I saw a woman come running around the side of my neighbor’s house with her maybe ten-year-old son. She dislodged my wheelchair and helped me into the house, then went back outside where the boy had remained with Babe. I fumbled to find the phone number for our veterinarian, utterly frantic, and at last was able to dial. “Somebody is coming, we will send somebody out, she’s on her way, she really is, she’s coming.” She did come. By then Babe was no longer actively seizing, and had been carried into the house by my neighbors. The veterinarian’s assistant injected her with a medication that should—and did—ensure she would stay quiet. Thank you, thank you, I said to everyone, thank you.

  Then I was alone with Babe. I couldn’t lie down next to her, could only lean down to touch her where she lay quietly on her bed, and even that was hard to do because I had to heave myself back up into a sitting position and I wasn’t very strong. Worse—I knew I couldn’t really comfort her, because she could not get used to the wheelchair, which means she was a shade uncomfortable with me. The chair made her uneasy, and no wonder—it’s a big and cumbersome machine that moves around, stops, and moves around again. Our pack had been dispersed and her routine profoundly disrupted for half a year, and even though I was home from the hospital, I was far from the person she had known in the alpha position of our pack. I had so looked forward to seeing her again, and Janet, too, had been anticipating the reunion. Poor Babe. She recognized me, but kept her distance and didn’t excitedly come over to greet me. It broke my heart. My relationship with her had been a fully embodied one. Dogs understand us as much by our posture and gestures as through words, and although she knew who I was, there was no recovering our old closeness. How I cried over the loss of that treasured, physical intimacy! How cruel of the fates to decree the alienation of her affection, by returning me to her so strangely altered.

  The seizure when she hit her head was a prelude to seizures that began in earnest some months later. Every few days she had a seizure, and though none lasted longer than a few minutes, those were hard minutes to bear since there was nothing we could do. She was probably suffering a brain tumor, and there was nothing to be done but help her be calm after each neurological storm. On Christmas Day the three of us got into the van, and Janet drove over to the large cemetery covering much of Indian Hill, adjacent to the campus. The day was sharply cold, but sunny. Babe did fine walking and I was okay rolling the big loop around the graves. In fact, she was very much her enthusiastic self, forging ahead and looking back so that we would come on, already. Just after Christmas, we had to leave town for a few days. We were fortunate that her veterinarian worked in a practice that included a kennel where she always stayed when we left town, and the doctor made sure that the staff understood her vulnerability. They promised to watch over her carefully. The day we got back was too late to go get her, so the next morning Janet went out to pick her up first thing. Donna was helping me with my routine of care when Janet came back alone. “Babe is too sick to come home—the seizures became so frequent that they had to keep her heavily tranquilized. Doctor Brothers thinks her time has come. We need to go back together.” We didn’t talk about it for long, because there was no question about what we had to do. When the attendant brought her into the little examination room where we were waiting, I don’t know that Babe could clearly distinguish who Janet was—although she staggered forward to where Janet was sitting on the floor. I could only reach down to touch Babe’s head. There was a Medi-Port on her rear leg, where Doctor Brothers inserted a needle. Then we were left alone with our dead dog, who looked a lot younger than her twelve years—because she was white, there was no grizzled muzzle to indicate her age.

  Recalling this event still hurts my heart, in part because my love for her was so physically thwarted after I got home from the hospital. At this mournful moment of her death, I couldn’t join Janet in cradling her as Doctor Brothers ushered her out of the world. I could just barely run my hand down her back. I had already been grieving for the closeness with her that I lost when I returned from the hospital so terribly transformed—now my tears flowed into the finality of death.

  Moxie Doxie is the name of the little white bichon frise now sleeping in my lap, the best hand warmer around, since dogs’ temperatures run higher than ours. I consider her name truly inspired. So far, only my colleagues in early modern studies and one particularly sharp eighteenth-century scholar have understood the full significance of the rhyme. “Moxie,” as you doubtless know, signifies “courage, audacity, spirit”—its etymology takes you back to nineteenth-century America, when Moxie was the name of an all-purpose fortifying tonic peddled door to door. The name of the potion came to signify as a metonym for the qualities necessary to hawk it. You had to have moxie to sell Moxie. As for “doxie” (or doxy, doxye), the Oxford English Dictionary tells you that the word was “[o]riginally the term in Vagabonds’ Cant for the unmarried mistress of a beggar or rogue: a beggar’s trull or wench: hence, slang, a mistress, paramour, prostitute; dial., a wench, sweetheart.”1 In short, a hussy—“a disreputable woman of improper behavior.”2 Shameless Hussy and Moxie Doxie are quite the same—as names. As dogs, they’re not.

  Moxie Doxie is not a retriever of any kind, though she does enjoy playing a round of “go get it” with a floppy, squeaky toy. She’s a breed raised for centuries to be petted. Favored by royalty in sixteenth-century France, her “job” is to hang around with you and be charming, and so she is, thirteen and a half pounds of tightly curled white hair, with floppy ears that cock when she’s listening, a short muzzle, black nose, and round, dark eyes—all very appealing. I need a dog that will come to me and climb up, since I can’t lie down on the floor to play. I feared I would have retriever envy, but I don’t—those days are over. Moxie’s a happy dog who sometimes presents me with a toy to tug and throw, and who will amuse herself by violently shaking and tossing a toy to then run after. Her presence is welcome and comforting.

  It’s true that I can’t be with her as with her predecessors—I can’t play chase with her, running from room to room, or
roll around with her on the floor, and I actively miss that play. I also can’t be the kind of trainer that I was when working with Shameless Hussy and Babe. I can’t assume the erect posture of the leader, can’t swoop down on her when she’s getting into trouble, and can’t religiously enforce the recall command until she understands that she must come to me, no matter what. So she doesn’t. Nonetheless, Janet and I together have managed to train her pretty well, though she’ll never be as responsive to voice commands as I wish. I enjoy the other-mindedness of interacting with her, and the pleasures of just hanging around. I like being companionable with dogs, who like being companionable with us. Dogs are all body all the time and our sociability with them is largely an embodied affair. That’s not to say there’s no thinking. There is plenty of thinking on both her part and mine, and I communicate with her, chair and all. She’s never known me otherwise, and I make a happily livable life with Janet and her in the ever repeated present of dog time.

  15

  Anabaptist

  Reformations

  “You’re going to love this wedding,” Jeff said to Janet and me. Kirsten and Matt’s wedding was to be on the following day, and Jeff, in his excitement, wanted Janet and me to feel what he was feeling. This desire, a subtle and generous emotional coercion, was all too familiar to me, since Mother would quietly exert unspoken affective expectations to ensure familial harmony. Jeff, quite unconsciously, I think, very much wanted us to like what he liked, love what he loved, feel what he felt. To be part of his family. Weddings, however, were never going to be for me what they were for him. I am the lesbian of the family and a feminist, too. I have no interest whatsoever in getting married. To the contrary. Janet and I both hold the belief that “marriage enslaves all women,” a radical feminist view from the 1970s that neither of us has seen any reason to abandon.