I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship (18 page)

“But just one,” they repeated, with all the confidence of people who were used to having their pronouncements ignored.

Since Delilah liked my older brother, Robert, the best, and Sampson and I had bonded, it was decided that Ben, the baby of the family, would get to pick which puppy we kept.

From early on, his choice was clear: While all three puppies were insanely adorable (I defy you to find anything cuter than a pug puppy), one was downright spectacular. Alfonzo, as Ben named him in a rebellion against our biblical theme, was pure white, not the dirty-snow color of the other pugs. His eyes were large and as luminous as an Italian lover's, and his chest was broad and curved.

Alfonzo's tail also curled over on itself twice. “The prized double-kink!” my father often proclaimed, displaying an inexplicable knowledge of show-dog terminology.

My father seemed to take a particular pride in Alfonzo. He had children who humiliated him at every turn—once we pulled down his pants in the middle of the grocery store; another time, he was summoned to my elementary school because my teacher wanted to show him exactly how messy my desk was—but he would have this one shining triumph in life: He would have the most beautiful pug on the block.

And beautiful he was. Had it been possible for him to compete, Alfonzo would be awarded the Junior Miss tiara. More than that, he'd taken an immediate liking to Ben. He followed Ben around faithfully, sat by his feet while Ben ate dinner, and would only sleep on Ben's bed. My parents watched the two of them frolicking in the yard together in the manner of a laundry detergent commercial, and knew the choice was a given.

Then Ben spoke up. “I'm keeping McDuff,” he declared.

My parents wheeled around to face one another, then with the simultaneous precision of soldiers, spun out to stare at Ben. “McDuff?” they repeated.

McDuff was the runt of the litter. He had no double kink in his tail; it just sort of flopped there, like a giant piece of overcooked rigatoni. He was small and scrawny, and his eyes bulged out disconcertingly. His head was oddly shaped, too, with a few knobby bumps and one flat spot just above the eyes. He resembled E.T. without the lit-up finger.

“Don't you want to keep Alfonzo?” my parents wheedled.

Ben shook his head, and stood his ground in his Toughskins jeans. “McDuff.”

“But Alfonzo loves you,” my mother said.

“The double-kink tail!” my father moaned.

Ben smiled. “Nope.”

By now Robert and I understood what was unfolding.

“McDuff 's a great dog,” Robert said.

“Good choice,” I added.

“Christ!” my father bellowed, his universal signal for conceding an argument. He stormed off to watch television, and Robert and I high-fived Ben. We all knew we were keeping McDuff
and
Alfonzo.

As it turned out, McDuff had the best personality of all of our dogs. Delilah, never a peach, grew more curmudgeonly and delusional as she aged, often picking vicious fights with bedding or large rocks. Alfonzo had beauty-queen looks but, true to stereotype, no brains (once, he tore across the lawn and smashed face-first into the hubcap of our car, which was parked in the driveway). And Sampson, while noble, could be hot-tempered and obstinate, as well as an unabashed adulterer.

But McDuff was a prince. He was the last one to bed at night, faithfully yawning alongside whoever stayed up late, and the first one to rise in the morning, joining my mother on the couch at dawn while she knocked back the copious amounts of caffeine she needed to steel herself for the day ahead. While the other pugs slept curled up in the curves behind our bent knees, like snorting, farting Hot Pockets, McDuff stayed alert in case someone in the house had insomnia and needed company. If anyone wandered into the kitchen for a midnight snack, they'd hear the scrabble of nails on the linoleum floor and look down to see McDuff 's gentle bug eyes blinking up at them.

McDuff was a lover, not a fighter (unlike Delilah, who was both, and continued molesting shins even after my parents deemed us sufficiently educated and had her spayed). Whenever the other pugs got into a scrap, which happened like clockwork at every mealtime when bowls of kibble were set down, McDuff would hurl his bony body into the middle of the fracas. His good intentions never lasted, however, for as soon as he was nipped, he'd morph from Gandhi into Cujo, joining in the snapping and yowling while my parents shouted ineffective threats and pulled the pugs apart.

Invariably, moments after their squabble was halted, all four pugs would converge again on the same bowl, while my mother gestured to three untouched, identical bowls like a manic Home Shopping Network showgirl. My parents were the only ones who ever got hurt during the pug fights, since the dogs had thick fur and tiny mouths and never inflicted damage on each other.

“Jesus!” my father would shout at the pugs, nursing a freshly bitten thumb. “There are four bowls of food.
Four!
That's one each!”

The pugs would endure these mathematical lectures by staring dourly at my father, and occasionally passing gas.

Since my dad is a writer who works at home, the soundtrack to many of his business calls were snarls and yips. Once, while breaking apart a squabble with one hand and clutching the phone to his ear with the other, he could hear the editor on the other end of the line muffling hysterical laughter. Dad's patience was wearing thin, so my parents came up with the brilliant idea of halting the spats by leaving food out
all the time
, so the dogs could just snack whenever they pleased (somewhere, Cesar Millan is reading this and weeping). The idea worked for about ten minutes. Then, a pug wandered over to sniff at a bowl, another pug got up to see what was so interesting, and a fresh battle commenced.

Taking our pugs for a walk was no less dramatic than feeding them. For some reason, my parents refused to use leashes, presumably because their borderline hippie personalities meant they couldn't stand to see anything restrained. Since none of the pugs was particularly smart—more than once, when my father stopped to talk to a neighbor, a pug would amble over, mistake the neighbor's leg for a tree, and pee on it—our walks were a spectacle. First our front door would fly open, then the pugs would waddle out, followed by one or both of my parents, who would wave their arms and screech in an attempt to herd the pugs into the same general direction.

But the real excitement came when a car rounded the corner near our house.

“Grab a pug!” my parents would scream at bewildered passersby.

My father would then heroically attempt to block the car's progress with his body, dancing across the width of the street with his arms outstretched, while my mother frantically raced around, tucking pugs under her armpits in the same way that I've seen classy French women carry around baguettes.

Despite the close calls with cars, our pugs all lived long, happy lives. One by one, though, they succumbed to old age, until only McDuff was left. He remained faithful and steadfast to the very end, hobbling around on legs bowed from arthritis and waiting patiently to be lifted up on the couch alongside my mother as she sipped her morning coffee.

We buried him in our backyard, his little body nestled inside a pillowcase, next to the graves of his parents and brother.

Pictures of the pugs are still scattered around my parents' house, and even though it has been twenty years since McDuff died in my mother's arms while I was away at college, every time I open their door, I still reflexively look down, expecting to see their fat, wiggling bodies converging around my legs. But the house is quiet now; my parents dog-sit for their children's pets, but they've never gotten another pug.

Experts tell us the strongest portal to memory is our sense of smell, but for me, it's a certain sight that brings my childhood rushing back. Whenever I see someone walking a pug, I instinctively run toward them. I can't stop running my fingers over the soft wide forehead and staring into the gentle brown eyes. Instantly, I'm eleven years old again, feeling the steady warmth against me while I lie in bed, and listening to the gentle snorting lullaby that never failed to put me to sleep.

Pugs weren't just my childhood.

They were the best parts of it.

Wuzsha, Wuzsha, Wuzsha!

Eddie Sarfaty

As my father helped Donna coax Ginger into the Pooch Parlor with a Liv-A-Snap, I ran out of the garage dragging Cindy by the collar.

“Dad, Cindy needs her hair done, too.”

“We'll give her a bath later.”

“She needs a cut—she has split ends.”

“I don't think Donna has time today.”

“She might.”

My father looked at me, and deciding it was worth the extra money to avoid listening to a twelve-year-old boy whine all day, turned to the bony blonde.

“Do you have time?”

Donna gave me a wink as she tightened her teddy bear barrette, exposing the gray roots of her sun-ravaged hair.

“Sure, not a problem.”

“She needs her nails cut, too,” I urged.

“We'll give her the works.”

Cindy wasn't easily lured into the calamine pink van, and Donna's assistant, a pudgy girl in a tube top, had to hoist the scruffy black mutt into the back. As she was closing the parlor's rear doors, adorned with a snooty poodle, I heard Donna whisper to the girl, “This one'll be a breeze—she hardly needs anything.” She had the air of a kiddie-pageant official who's smilingly accepted an entrance fee from the deluded parents of a homely third-grader.

Despite Donna's remark, I was thrilled Cindy was getting the royal treatment instead of her usual cold-water shower with the garden hose and Prell shampoo. I wanted her to feel pretty, too—and not like the Baby Louise to Ginger's Baby June.

Every other month, Donna parked the pink monstrosity in the driveway of our assembly-line Long Island house as she bathed, cut, and blew Ginger dry. Between groomings, I was supposed to brush the golden retriever regularly to avoid knots and to minimize the tumbleweeds of shed fur that swirled around the house. Ginger was beautiful. Athletic, with a glossy, amber coat, she reminded me of the thoroughbred-legged boys who shone in gym class and the popular girls who were forever combing their Farrah Fawcett hair.

Although Ginger was as cuddly as a Muppet, I didn't feel a particularly strong attachment to her. My failure to force my Jewfro into a satisfactory approximation of the '70s feathered style and my self-consciousness about my fat-boy boobs made it easier for me to identify with Cindy's kinky hair and goofy proportions. Knowing firsthand the sting of being shunned by the cool kids in junior high, I was determined Cindy should never feel slighted. After I finished attending to Ginger, I always brushed Cindy's raggedy pelt the same number of strokes—eventually irritating her skin and causing a bald patch on her rump.

Ginger had originally belonged to my aunt Syl and uncle Lenny, who'd paid more for the pedigreed dog than my parents paid for the used Dodge my father drove. Ginger had papers proving she was descended from champions—and so was supposedly better than Cindy, whom we'd rescued from a cinder-block shelter. I never questioned that Ginger was more important; it made sense to me. Syl and Lenny's brick house was bigger than our wooden one, their yard was landscaped, their furniture matched. My cousins Elliot and Tracy took swimming lessons at a ritzy country club, while I had to repeatedly fling my Frisbee into the neighbors' yard, hoping to get invited into their tin-can pool. Syl and Lenny had been to Sweden and Italy; my parents had been to Hershey, Pennsylvania. Plus, my grandmother—whom I adored—had chosen to live with their family. Why wouldn't she?

But as I learned, nobody gets through life unscathed, and good fortune can vanish at any moment. In five years, the better family in the brick house was no more. A sudden heart attack, a suicide, and an aggressive cancer robbed Elliot of his father, sister, and mother. Even now, over thirty years later, I can still hear Aunt Syl's wails, muffled against my father's shoulder, as she stood beside Lenny's newly planted plot and watched her eldest child being lowered into the autumn ground. And I'll never forget the misery in my grandmother's face on the September morning four years later when, in the same tiny cemetery, she buried Syl. I also clearly recall the day Granny and Elliot came to live with us, pulling up to the curb with the last load of their belongings—and with Ginger, who gleefully bounded across our lawn, seemingly oblivious to the enormous changes in all our lives.

It never occurred to me that the tragedies of those five years had any effect on bouncy, purebred, inbred Ginger. Dismissing her as insensitive was easy since I'd already cast her in the role of the pretty girl who only cared about being admired. When she started eating anything she could sniff on the shallow kitchen counter (even once, an entire seven-pound Hebrew National salami, plastic and string included)—and then quietly vomiting in a corner—it was easy to write her off as a narcissistic blonde with an eating disorder.

Cindy employed her sense of smell more intelligently, carefully assessing every scrap of food first instead of just gobbling up anything that wasn't nailed down. She was talented enough to find survivors in the rubble after an earthquake, if necessary. Ginger, I'm certain, would only be able to locate victims fortunate enough to be buried with a box of Snausages. Though there was no fence between our yard and Artie the cop's next door, Cindy knew exactly where our property ended and would automatically halt even if you kept walking. Ginger would stop only when her nose was bored or the continental shelf ended. Cindy would routinely receive a biscuit after performing a variety of neat tricks in quick succession. All Ginger had to do for a reward was sit—after being told five times to stop jumping on the company. The inequity reinforced what I was learning in school: Looks matter—a lot.