I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship (14 page)

That's when I made my first call to the PetConnect coordinator, Mary.

“I think there's been a mistake,” I explained. “I thought Rascal was supposed to be neutered yesterday, but it seems like he wasn't.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he's very . . . energetic.” And I'll confess that, for a moment, I was really hoping there
had
been a mistake and that there was still hope for that quiet Florence Nightingale scene I had envisioned.

There was a pause, during which I'm pretty sure she was thinking maybe she should have checked me out more thoroughly.

“When male dogs get fixed they don't have the downtime female dogs have,” she explained.

This was news to me.

Bad news.

“Ah, well!” I responded, my voice an octave higher than when I'd begun the conversation. “Just wanted to make sure that . . . he . . . was handling the surgery properly.” I ended the conversation in a flurry of words as I watched a black figure dive in and then out of my view out the back window.

For the rest of the day, Rascal bounded around outside, charming the blondes into all kinds of destruction. A plush dog pillow from Costco was reduced to cotton candy within the first hour; stuffed animals were stolen from my son's room and systematically dismantled all over the house, a button eye here, a shredded red shirt reading “Pooh” there; our once quiet yard was suddenly the “twilight bark” soundtrack from
101 Dalmatians
; charcoal briquettes were somehow removed from the Rubbermaid bin we kept them in and scattered all around, many half consumed; all of the dogs hurled themselves repeatedly against the glass door panes, in an effort to get in and inflict their play on the hardwood floors, the noise issuing from their twelve long-nailed paws sounding akin to pouring a one-pound bag of Skittles from the ceiling.

Within a few hours, Rascal had gone from being a pitiable, gentle creature to being a pair of wild eyes behind a snarf-smeared door window as we huddled inside, wondering, in silent camaraderie, what on earth we were going to do and how we were going to do it before our house was destroyed.

We
had
to get him adopted.

First thing I needed to do was get a decent picture of him. The one I'd seen on the Web site was a little too mug-shot-ish. Too much whites of the eyes, not enough warmth.

It was the kind of picture that, if taken of a human and posted on
Match.com
, would have pegged him immediately as a psychopathic killer. And, no, people would not be looking at him with an eye toward dating (please, God), but in a society where we are so conditioned to look at people, products, houses, and so on with an eye toward acquiring or not acquiring, I thought he needed to look more
accessible.

And, honestly, more like
himself
. Because he was a very cute dog, apart from the moments of sheer insanity.

So I tried to make him sit on the porch so I could take a picture. The moment I took a step backward, just far enough so I could get more than his left nostril in the frame, he went wild, leaping at me as if I'd just tagged him in a game of
ghost in the graveyard
.

In my best alpha dog voice, I yelled, “No!
”

It was a command he found hilarious.

I tried to channel Barbara Woodhouse, the British dog expert and disciplinary hard-ass, and the original—and best—dog whisperer, as far as I'm concerned.

“No!”
I grabbed his collar and held him steady, as originally instructed on
Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way
. Her contention was that any dog could be trained in six minutes with loving firmness.

Sixty
firm minutes—and about six hundred blurry pictures of some vague in-motion part of his body—later, I was ready to give up.

Then Rascal lay down, his back legs flat and froggy, in what I took to be a sign of trusting relaxation, and his chin between his front paws, and he looked at me. Adoring. Agreeable. Grateful.

Imploring
. Or so I imagined.

He just wanted a home, a family to love him. A place where he could learn the ropes one time and stay there. It was as if he knew he was a boarder here, living in a way station on his way to . . . somewhere. Neither of us knew where that would be.

Why learn
my
rules when learning the last person's rules had led him to a rural animal shelter without the patience or resources to let him live, and when the next person's rules might be different from mine and end up counterproductive in the same way?

“You're right, buddy.” I sat down on the steps in front of him and put my hand on his head.

He rolled onto his side, cupped his paws around my wrist, and lapped sloppily at my hand.

He
wanted
to love and be loved.

But I guess that meant being loved for who he was and not who I tried, during my very brief time with him, to make him.

I scratched his ears for a few minutes in silence, his fur attached mohair-mitten-like to my saliva-covered hand, then got up to go inside. He sat up, but not all the way.

He was still. And quiet.

And that's when I got the picture.

I uploaded it to my contact at PetConnect, and they put it on his little Love Me profile page.

The next day he had a potential taker.

She was a frail woman, bones like a bird, and
cat person
was written all over her face.

“There have been break-ins in my neighborhood,” she told me. “I want to get a dog that will look intimidating.”

I was torn. I didn't think that was a good reason to adopt a dog—it sounded like exactly the reason that would be cited later when she wanted to get rid of him. On the other hand, he needed a home.

He
really needed a home
.

So I introduced them. I needn't have worried about the moral quandary of whether or not I should encourage the adoption—she hated him on sight.

I'd like to say the feeling was clearly mutual, but he was as friendly to her as he was to everyone. It was heartbreaking.

The young, newly married couple that came the next day wasn't much better. Though she talked about having grown up with dogs, having had them all her life, the fact that she was wearing D&G gladiators that I could already imagine shredded into a mess of high-end leather spaghetti and a Cynthia Ashby slip dress I could picture being pulled on from behind told me that she was much more of a cockapoo person. Sure enough, when Rascal jumped up at her, she pushed feebly at him with manicured hands, and her husband looked on helplessly, clearly trying to keep his own Polo-wear clean.

I loved that they wanted to adopt a rescue. I was just sorry that they were so ill prepared to do so.

Three long days later, someone new had seen something in Rascal's picture and called to make an appointment to come meet him.

She was a vet tech, a woman with two young sons and a lot of land, and she was very interested in meeting Rascal.

I thought—briefly—that I had a great idea.

“Can I reasonably give him Benadryl?” I asked Mary.

“I'm sorry?”

“To make him tired.”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how you can give your kids Benadryl to help them . . .”

Even as I spoke, I realized this wasn't sounding right.

“. . . Umm,
sleep
when they're up every night until after midnight, swinging like Tarzan on the drapes, and shrieking like crazed Philadelphia Eagles fans?”

“You
drug
your
kids
?”

At this point, she is no longer just thinking
she
should have checked me out more thoroughly, but possibly that child protective services should as well.

“No, of course not! I just meant . . . remember the old
SNL
thing with Puppy Uppers and Doggy Downers? It was just a joke.”

And I rambled until I hoped I had obscured things enough to make her think
she
was wrong in what she thought I said, and not that
I
was wrong to say it.

Now, in my defense, we
did
have a dog once that would get so freaked out on the Fourth of July that the vet told us to slip her a Benadryl before the fireworks began so that she would be a little drowsy and thus not get so scared. But after the reaction from the woman with the rescue mission, I wasn't a hundred percent sure my vet was on the up and up.

So we flew solo, didn't drug Rascal, and basically prayed he'd behave like the nice young man we knew he could be when his latest prospective parent came to look at him.

She came; he was wild and enthusiastic and over-the-top and we sighed, certain in the knowledge that this, too, had failed. And it was a real shame because
this one
seemed so nice!

But she fell in love with him! She got down on the floor with him and played with him like she'd known him since puppyhood! She
got
that he was a Lab that had a certain, fairly predictable, level of energy.

She was
okay
with that!

Step one was completed. She was interested. She was filling out the application to adopt him, pending approval of her family. Two days later she came back with her children and he was even
more
wild,
more
enthusiastic, and
more
over-the-top, and
they
fell in love.

It was a match made in heaven!

Of course the adoption went through without a hitch: She was a perfect candidate, she had room, she had children, she had realistic expectations, and she had
desire
to adopt Rascal.

I've seldom seen anything as beautiful as the excitement on the children's faces as they pulled up to our house in a van already equipped with a crate, bags of food, and “twelve toys!” they'd just picked out at PetSmart. They packed him up and took him to his new home. I watched from the front porch as he eagerly jumped into their car, as comfortable with them as if he'd been with them always. Not a trace of fear or the mistrust his past might have suggested he should have.

Just love.

I went back in the house and sat down. It was quiet. The blondes, without their goading companion, had returned to their more docile state of lying in the sun and thumping their tails on the deck when they sensed eye contact.

Life was normal again.

And a little . . . emptier.

And it was funny because I really thought I'd be a lot more relieved when he had left because the difference between two dogs and three was like the difference between a firefly and fire. I went outside with the blondes, and they lay down on the porch for a nap, elbows hitting the wood in that familiar sound I'd been longing to hear for weeks, instead of the sounds of moist panting and nails screaming across the hardwood floors followed by the crash of something heavy and the frantic scurrying of the guilty parties.

All in all, though, it was good to have life back to normal. And it was good to feel like we'd helped this soul, though there was always a question in the back of our minds as to how things had worked out. Yes, his new family seemed perfect, every instinct I had told me they were perfect, but how many times as a teenager had I tried to make deals with God to let me have the guy who seemed perfect, only to find later he was creepy/annoying/disappointing in ways I never could have predicted? What if this was one of those situations, where I had been so eager for the outcome I wanted that I'd missed important clues or even warnings that this was an ill-fated match?

Was Rascal okay, or had I taken him from one unfortunate situation and put him, trusting, right into another one?

The answer came six months later.

It was the holiday season, a time when we hug our own a little closer to us, even while our hearts go out to those with no one and nothing. I'm always a little melancholy during the holidays, thinking about the year that's passed and wondering if I did anything that was truly worth my salt. But this time the question was answered by a trip to the mailbox: Rascal's new family had sent one of those photo Christmas cards with a message of goodwill embossed over a picture of the whole family . . . including Rascal.

He was the one in the Santa hat!

Are You a Rascal or a Ringo?

Jeff Marx

If you're ever tending a shop, or waiting tables in a restaurant, or working the customer service counter at an airline, or even just standing in line to get into a Wade Rouse book reading, and you happen to overhear two gay guys snickering as they pass you, nudging each other and pointing, laughing and whispering,
“That was a Rascal!”
or
“That was a Ringo!”
let me explain what we mean by it.

My boyfriend and I have started dividing the world into
Rascals
and
Ringos
, based on the two very distinct personalities of our dogs. It's not nice, but it helps us better describe (and perhaps understand, by making sweeping generalizations) some of the people we meet. And probably more important, it helps us to accept and normalize the behavior of our animal companions, which is an ongoing challenge.

We have two rescue dogs, Rascal and Ringo. They're brothers, although we're fairly sure they have different fathers.

By the way, did you know that dogs from the same litter can have different fathers? We once shared this strange fact of nature with a close friend's sister, who was at our house for dinner. She had a grand old time laughing at us and in a condescending tone explaining that she was
an animal husbandry major
in college, and that puppies from the same litter having two different fathers was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard. “That's
not
how it works,” she told us. Didn't we understand basic biology? We weren't all that invested in the concept; it was just something we heard somewhere, so we figured we must have heard it wrong. Certainly, Ms. Animal Husbandry would know. . . . But when she left, we Googled it, and sure enough, dogs in the same litter
can
have different fathers! She must have skipped class that day. I never got to say, “I told you so!” So I hope she's reading this essay. I'll be watching my Facebook wall for an apology.