I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship (17 page)

In the spring, as soon as the ground had thawed enough, we had our yard fenced in, so Stella could run around to her heart's content, but I spent that first winter with her, squatting in the backyard to give her moral support, for all the neighbors to see, in negative temperatures, snowstorms and starlight.

Peekapoo, Where Are You?

Annabelle Gurwitch

The late 1970s saw my family living in Wilmington, Delaware, where the powerful reach of the Dupont family and the company of the same name cast such a lengthy shadow that those who lived in its shade trudged through their existence in a sort of half-light.

At least that's how it seemed to me at age twelve.

But then I learned that we were moving south, and not just south, but to Miami Beach. I had no idea in how many ways this move would change our lives. We packed up our solidly middleclass redbrick walk-up apartment and landed in a brightly painted concrete and glass building (with an elevator!), where we were to stay for several weeks until we could enter the home my dad had found for us. It was as though we'd been trapped in a black-and-white film and suddenly we woke up in Technicolor. From the moment we landed, Miami was an assault on the eyes and senses.

I can't remember every detail of my wedding day, but I can that first day in Miami, from my heart beating excitedly on the ride up to the penthouse apartment to the thrilling moment we crossed the threshold into a living facsimile of Barbie's Malibu Dream House.

The joint was sparsely furnished, everything modern, clean, and mostly white. A white plastic chair in the shape of a hand was in one corner, strands of silver love beads separated the kitchen and dining area, and a metal spiral staircase led to the loft bedrooms upstairs. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors opened onto a gravel rooftop balcony that looked out onto a park below. The park was landscaped with majestic royal palms, the stately wide palm trees that I had only seen in episodes of
The Beverly Hillbillies
.

This could mean only one thing: We were rich!

It couldn't have been further from our apartment in Delaware, which backed up to a large cement drainage pipe in whose runoff—water whose provenance was unknown—I regularly played, which I'm fairly certain is not at all responsible for the fact that I am a good three to four inches shorter than all of my blood relations, but is still, nonetheless, troubling. The uniting design feature of the rental unit was Day-Glo yellow and orange deep-pile shag carpeting that covered every inch of floor space, even in the bathrooms.

The day we arrived I lay down on that neon acrylic expanse next to the sliding glass doors and let the sun warm my sallow skin.

That's when I noticed the carpet was damp.

Now, if it had been only a day earlier, I might have speculated that this was due to an unfortunate instance of impatience on the part of our pooch Petey.

Petey was our Peekapoo, a breed I had never heard of when we acquired him and have heard little of since. The Peekapoo is sort of an also-ran hybrid, like a car I would later own, the Chevy Monza. With the wheelbase of a Vega and the engine of a Corvair, Chevrolet made that clunker for only five years before they concluded, “Well, that didn't work,” and chucked it.

The Pekinese-poodle hybrid has been around for about half a century now, but a Peekapoo has still never sold a burrito or a beer, never starred in a movie, never been memorialized into a Monopoly token, and never been a member of a royal family, like the flirtier and more popular Pomeranian, several of which accompanied Queen Victoria everywhere she went.

One of the most prominent features of the Peekapoo is what has been termed its hilarious attachment to its owners. The way this manifested itself in our Peekapoo was that our dog liked to be with us so much he often urinated on the floor rather than go outside and be separated.

Our Petey was basically a barking ball of stringy hair that collected everything in his path. Leaves, twigs, crumbs, even poop were regularly found clinging to his scrawny little body. His smashed Pekinese nose was often runny. He was basically a mess, but that didn't dampen his enthusiasm for us.

Pee ka poo.

Maybe not such a good name for a breed.

That shag carpet turned out to share the collective quality of our dog, but Petey never got to dig into its mysterious depths because he wasn't with us. He'd be taking a later flight and meeting us in Florida soon. At least, that's what my sister and I were told.

When?

The excuse that Petey would be jetting in on a later flight didn't seem so far-fetched. We had a lot of stuff. Sure, I mean, why not, anything was possible, after all: We'd resided in grayflanneled Delaware and now we were in acid-washed Miami Beach? The world was magical, we'd landed in paradise, and a dog could fly unaccompanied on an airplane. Sounded possible. To a twelve-year-old.

Then, a letter arrived addressed to my sister and myself.

It was signed with a paw print.

I'm not proud of admitting this, but I loved being mad at parents. Like many children, I carried the vague sense that a great injustice had been done by just being born into my family, and this letter gave my anger focus. Which was worse? The idea that my dog had chosen another family over ours because they ate spaghetti on a regular basis, or that my parents would think up this kind of ruse?

I cried and cried, but a parental decision had been made. In a short time, we no longer looked twice at the palm trees that dotted the beach, and my sister and I—in our matching Nik Nik polyester shirts—soon learned to craft tanning reflectors out of tinfoil, learned how to blow-dry our hair like Farrah, and learned that Soylent Green was made of people, so life went on. But over the years, I loved telling the story of how my parents had sucked, and I had proof, the tangible evidence of one of the many wrongs that had been inflicted upon me.

Cut to thirty years later, just a few months after our cat Esme took to living in the shrubbery in front of the home I share with my husband and son. Esme was a foundling who spent most of her time cowering in the deepest recesses of our closets, so that she earned the nickname “Fraidy Cat.” When our psychotic cat had first exiled herself to the bushes, I was so desperate that I consulted a pet psychic. Pet Psychic Lady only charged $125 to inform me that the cat was being bombarded by negative thoughts from an old boyfriend of mine. Oh, and on top of that we needed to start calling the cat by her given name.

“Would you come if you were called Fraidy?” she admonished me.

“No,” I answered, “but I also don't come running when I hear a can being opened.”

Pet Psychic Lady didn't have a sense of humor, but she didn't need one; after all, she had people like me paying good money for her advice.

I actually held out hope that this would work right up until the night my husband and I were watching television together and we heard a small yelp. Jeff went outside and saw a coyote trotting away with Esme/Fraidy Cat limp in his mouth.

The next day our five-year-old son, Ezra, inquired where Fraidy Cat had gone. Before I could think, I heard myself saying that sometimes when an animal is sick, it crawls off to die alone and that's exactly what happened with Esme. That was the answer that I stuck with for the first day.

The next morning more questions came. “Where did she go?”

“She went to the side of a canyon near our home.”

But wait, there's more!

“I want to see where she went to die.”

“Of course, sweetheart, we'll visit the spot at dusk. It has a beautiful view, and is very peaceful.”

As my son and I stood on the hillside, looking out at the national park that borders our neighborhood, where in truth, Esme's remains probably do reside, it hit me: There was not a royal palm in sight, just scrub bush and sage. No elaborate scheme had been hatched, but sure enough, I had “Peteyed” my own child.

At that moment, I realized I'd have to forgive my parents. Sure, maybe it was ill conceived and, in truth, rather poorly executed. I mean, why was the letter signed with a
paw print
; if Petey had actually composed the rest of the note himself, he could have signed his name as well. And sure, maybe that incident explained why, as an adult, I had shunned canine companionship and turned to feline felicity. My parents were trying to soften the blow of the loss of a pet, and now I wanted to shield my offspring from a loss as well. I sighed and breathed in the cool evening air. Who knows, I thought, there might be a dog in this family's future yet.

Pimping Out Delilah

Sarah Pekkanen

It was obvious: Delilah needed a boyfriend.

I was in the fifth grade when our pug began sexually assaulting the shinbones of everyone who dared to enter our house.

So with the determination of an old-school religious couple setting up an arranged marriage, my parents began soliciting a gigolo for our pudgy, cantankerous, two-year-old dog.

The first family to respond to our call offered up Cagney, a genial, doddering fellow who had the befuddled air of someone who was perpetually searching for his eyeglasses. In hindsight, I think Cagney's family might've been using us as a pet-sitting service, because Cagney was not what one might call “goal-oriented.” By the time he arrived at our house—accompanied by his plush bed and teddy bear—Delilah was delirious with excitement. She waited on the couch, her Dibs-shaped body quivering with lust, for Cagney to amble arthritically by. Exhibiting the timing and fearlessness of a movie stunt double, Delilah would then leap onto Cagney's back, her hips churning like Britney Spears's.

But Cagney was unimpressed by Delilah's gymnastic prowess and gyrations, and flopped down for a siesta while she went in search of an unsuspecting leg. He pretty much stayed asleep until his family, tanned and rested and smelling vaguely of piña coladas, came to pick him up a week later.

The next time Delilah went into heat, my parents again cast a wide net for a pug—any pug—to mate with her and provide us kids with the free sex-education lessons that they, being borderline hippies, felt were our right.

An elderly woman volunteered her dog, imaginatively named Puggy, and although we were wary, he was the only stud on the horizon. So my mother piled my two brothers and me into our ancient station wagon and we drove fifty miles to pick up Delilah's suitor, fighting the entire way about who had crossed the imaginary lines separating our seats.

After we entered the woman's house, which boasted a decorating scheme of dozens and dozens of lace doilies, the woman bypassed pleasantries and issued one nonnegotiable order: Puggy was to have a pack of gum each day.

“Gum?”
asked my bewildered mother.

“Juicy Fruit,” Puggy's owner specified, filling our hands with bright yellow packages. “He just loves it.”

She paused in doling out the goods to give us the stink eye, and one of my brothers surreptitiously put back the doily he was trying to steal. “Don't you kids go and chew it yourselves.”

“No, ma'am,” we blurted, our faces as angelic as those on the Precious Moments collectible dolls the old lady had showcased atop the doilies.

We barely made it to the car before we fell upon the bounty like starving jackals, shoving entire packs into our mouths. By the time we pulled into our driveway, we resembled hyperactive chipmunks. Our mouths were so full that none of us could talk without lisping profoundly.

Deprived of his beloved Juicy Fruit, the obese Puggy slumped around, sighing morosely. Delilah would've turned up her nose at him if it hadn't already been permanently flattened into that position against her face, and refused to go near him. Once the gum was gone and we realized that was the only trick in his repertoire, we kids lost interest in Puggy, too, and he spent the rest of the visit perched on our couch like another overstuffed throw pillow, watching sporting events with my father.

Luckily, Rocky was waiting in the wings, like the perfect suitor who swoops in during the final scenes of a rom-com movie. The couple that owned Rocky worked long hours and knew he wasn't getting the attention he deserved. They wanted to sell him for $250. But my family couldn't afford him, and we left their house dejectedly, having already fallen in love with his sweet manner and random, explosive snorts. A few hours later, the couple phoned, saying they'd take $50 because they loved the idea of Rocky going to a bustling, happy home with the side benefit of unlimited sex.

Rocky—swiftly renamed Sampson—snored louder than any man I've ever met and awoke with the same furtive look as my father when caught napping:
I was just resting my eyes!
He also routinely passed gas that would halt conversation as everyone fled the room, shirt collars pulled up over noses and mouths. But he approached Delilah with the grim determination of a man hired to do a job and do it well. Within a day, we suspected Delilah was knocked up.

Sampson, however, wasn't finished. Across the street lived Delilah's twin, Spunky. Apparently Hugh Hefner isn't the only one who appreciates the allure of sisters, because soon Sampson was slinking under her fence, perhaps drawn by the tantalizing promise inherent in Spunky's name.

Within a few months, both sisters produced litters of pugs, and Sampson seemed to have a special strut in his step. Being reasonable people, our neighbors quickly found good homes for all of their pug puppies. My parents, however, were already beaten down by us three kids. We cajoled and wheedled until they promised we could keep one of the three puppies.