I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship (9 page)

She responds flippantly, an affirmative in two syllables: “Yayyes.”

To the uninitiated, we look insane: two grown men speaking as anthropomorphized dogs.

But lately I've discovered that all dog lovers have a dog voice. I know a woman whose dog voice is actually a wordless, nonsensical theme song that can only be described as a musical mash-up of
Bewitched
and
Gilligan's Island
.

That woman is a district attorney.

Sometimes, Sweet Pea has doggie nightmares.

I watch her squirm and twitch convulsively.

I imagine she's reliving her former life.

Not the one as a rescue, the lifetime before that: the one that earned her all the Isaac Mizrahi sweaters and American Apparel hoodies.

The one where she was a selfless missionary running a leper colony.

Surrounded by oncoming death and disease, she tirelessly cares for the doomed.

“How will I survive this? Will there be an end that justifies this ongoing hell? Holy shit, did I just pull off someone's hand?”

I wake her up.

“It's all right, baby. Daddy's here. Ssshhh.”

Momentarily startled, she blinks at me, but then quickly gets her bearings, shakes off the sleep, and takes in her luxurious surroundings. From across the room, Ozzy looks from her to me and says, “Sounds like someone was having a bad dream, Judy.”

He heaves a sigh with his entire body, then immediately drifts off to sleep himself, chanting, “It was only a dream, Judy. Only a dream.”

The Lone Wolf

Laurie Notaro

I had never seen such a sad look on a dog's face before.

She sat alone in the play yard, not a soul around, hunched under a Fisher-Price play structure. Everyone else, apparently, was inside the doggie day-care center as the lone little dog looked on at the closed door that separated her from her compatriots, forlorn, abandoned, friendless.

It was a pitiful, wrenching sight.

Especially because the dog I was looking at was my very own.

As soon as I hurriedly parked my car, I ran inside the lobby and immediately accosted Sarah, one of the dog wranglers, a cute, perky girl in her early twenties.

“Maeby is out there all by herself!” I boldly proclaimed, pointing in the direction of the play yard, as if there was a nefarious-looking man in a trench coat about to lure my dog away from her position under the plastic log cabin with a laced chicken strip.

The girl smiled. “Oh, Maeby hides,” she said comfortingly.

My dog? I thought. She can't be talking about my dog, who howls every time we leave the house to bring her pack back together and who acts like she took a hit off the doggy crack pipe as soon as we pull into the day-care parking lot. I don't know how many Maebys there were at day care, but certainly, she couldn't be talking about
my
dog.

“I mean
my
Maeby,” I tried correcting her. “The tan and white Aussie mix, one brown eye, one blue.”

She laughed. “Oh, I know Maeby,” she said with a wider smile. “There are a lot of times we can't even get her to come inside with the other dogs. She's a little lone wolf.”

I almost burst out laughing. She had to be kidding. My Maeby? My little dog, who couldn't wait to burst through the day-care doors in the morning to play with all of her friends? I felt like Sarah had suddenly told me that my dog was a cat or that I had been taking a bonobo on walks all this time. The thought that my dog was a lone wolf was preposterous; we had done everything possible to socialize her before the Experience Window of Doom shut and apparently locked at sixteen weeks. She loved other dogs; in fact, she had been made a doggie day-care “greeter” a year before, in which she was introduced to new dogs to play with them and make them feel at home.

I simply did not believe that my dog was basically skulking around the playground by herself, not associating with anybody and hanging out alone in the log cabin as a matter of choice and preference like Ted Kaczynski.

I knew it was a lie.

Until Sarah opened the door to the play yard and called for Maeby to come in.

She refused to move, looked at us briefly, and then, carelessly, looked away.

Like a lone wolf. Like she didn't even know me.

I gasped.

Sarah glanced at me with an “I told you so” face and headed out to the playground to try and coerce my antisocial dog into coming inside and going home, armed with a cookie that had sprinkles on it.

I told my husband what happened as soon as I got home, and he had as much trouble believing me as I did Sarah.

“She probably didn't feel very well today,” he said, trying to explain it away. “That dog is a player. Other dogs line up to play with her. She's been invited to ten dog birthday parties this year alone. Lone wolves lick themselves in public and pee on everything, rub their noses on windows. They don't get invited by every little dog on the block to their birthday parties. She's an A-lister. A must-have.”

“That's true, that's true,” I said, nodding, mainly because I very much wanted to believe it, but then suddenly had an idea. I ran to my purse and dug out the Doggie Daily, the report card that the day care provided when I picked Mae up.

“Look,” I said to my husband after I opened it and read it. “It says here that she was ‘a big flirt' today and that she was voted the ‘most uplifting.' ”

“I saw one from last week around here,” my husband said, scouring the coffee table. “Here it is. Oh. Well, look at that. See? Last week she was voted ‘most affectionate' and was Dog of the Day.
Dog of the Day
. No one just hands that out. That's equivalent to being the Lord of Dogland. Our dog reigned for an entire day. She could have made policy and waged wars with a kennel or pet resort in a neighboring town. She's like Queen Elizabeth I if the monarch eagerly ate her own eye boogers and became visibly upset when having dirt clods plucked from her belly.”

“Uplifting
and
affectionate,” I stressed. “I mean, that's pageant-winning qualities, right?
Uplifting?
Have you ever met an
uplifting
dog before?”

“Shall I introduce you to one?” my husband said, motioning to Maeby, who twitched as she lay on the carpet, sleeping.

“Then why is she getting picked last for the kickball team?” I wondered aloud. “I think we have another Doggie Daily on the fridge!”

I ran to the kitchen, plucked it off the front, and was immediately disappointed.

“Voted ‘softest hair,'” I reported with a scowl as I walked back into the living room.
“ ‘In the world.'
Big deal. What does that even mean? I can't work with that. That's just filler. Oh—
oh!
But in the ‘When I grow up I want to be' section, it says ‘write a novel.' Well, how about that? Another writer in the family.”

I beamed until I looked up and saw my husband's face.

“Well,” he said simply, “there you go. There's your red flag. I don't know how much more you need than that. Clearly, there's something wrong with the dog.”

I looked at Maeby, now snoring deeply. How could she have gone from helping transition the new dogs as a “greeter” in day care to the “loner” in what seemed like seconds flat? What could have happened in her little doggie world to spur such a dramatic and sudden change?

I spent the next week wondering if there had been an incident at snack time, or maybe there was a squabble over a chewy or fur was shed regarding a squeaky toy that had Hamlet's territory clearly splattered all over it. Perhaps she peed on a spot that had just been freshly marked by Lola or Baci and it wasn't quite all the way dry yet. Maybe my little mixed dog wasn't welcome on a playground full of purebreds or dogs with papers. The doggie day-care world suddenly seemed like a cruel and dangerous place, full of politics, revenge, and alliances, like a maximum security rec yard or
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
. Things, I realized, could get real crazy real easy. You're Queen Elizabeth one week and then you're on a reunion show in a low-cut dress, and the next, someone has a copy of your felony arrest record and the camera is panning to your mug shot.

My poor dog, I thought as I looked at her sleeping. The heights you have soared; the lows you have seen.

Against my better judgment, my husband took her to day care the next week. I spent the hours worrying that she was hiding out under the slide of the plastic fort, shunned and scorned for the $6.75 I was paying for her to have a fun time. When the clock hit five p.m., I shot out the door to pick her up. When I got there, all of the dog wranglers were in the playroom with their charges, so I pulled Maeby's Doggie Daily from the bulletin board and opened it up. It was there that I found out Maeby, according to the boxes that were checked, spent the day apparently being “howling hot and” “canine cool,” and “flirting with her boyfriend, Sammy Schnoodle.”

Her
what
?

I still had my mouth open when Sarah walked into the lobby with Maeby on her leash.

“This whole thing,” I stuttered, “was over a boy?”

She looked puzzled. I pointed to the Doggy Daily.

“The lone wolf,” I explained. “Was playing hard to get? It wasn't because she was exiled from the dog kingdom, which she once ruled like the Shah of Iran?”

“Maeby, an outcast?” Sarah asked, and then burst out laughing. “Oh, hardly. Her milk shake is in the yard. In fact, it spills over quite a bit when she's shaking it.”

“I don't understand,” I replied, completely confused. “Last week she was all by herself in the yard, and you said she was a lone wolf.”

“Oh, last week she was,” Sarah agreed, “because she's picky. She just turned three, so she's not a frolicky puppy who will play with just anybody anymore. She's definitely developed some opinions of certain dogs, who she likes, and who bugs her. She only hangs out with who she wants to hang out with. Sometimes that means she doesn't feel like hanging out with anybody.”

And just like that, it made sense.
I
was the one who got picked last for the kickball team,
I
was the one who oftentimes sat on the playground by myself when I was in school. Who knows where I would have ended up if I had a hardier ability to grow facial hair and got a passing grade in chemistry? Maybe in a log cabin in Montana, maybe inventing Healthy Choice frozen dinners and wearing a chin net.

But the truth of the matter was that Maeby was not me; she was clearly her own little dog, with her own set of likes and dislikes and choices about how she spent the glory of her dog days. Maeby was a milk shake; at her age, I was a lunchroom pint of lukewarm skim milk, opened and hyperactively torn on the wrong side. In the land of doggie day care, I realized, there is no kickball team, there is no dog kingdom, there is no snubbing at snack time. There are just dogs and buttholes, and if someone wants to hang out in a log cabin all by herself, nobody cares, no one notices, and no one talks about it afterward. There will always be a new butt to sniff, and old butts you've already visited.

And in the world of anything, that was certainly most uplifting.

The Evil Stepmother

Jane Green

I liked his smell. I liked the way he walked, and his large patrician nose. I liked the way that whenever I couldn't figure out how to do something—put up the inflatable slide, unblock the sink—he would run over in a flash, and calmly fix whatever needed to be fixed, with his blue eyes twinkling as I made him coffee. I liked that he loved animals and children, and in particular,
my
children: four of them, all under six.

I had been living on an old, old farm in the middle of nowhere in rural Connecticut, when my marriage, already slipping through our fingers like sand, ran out. We had moved to the farm in a rush of romantic fantasies: I would plant orchards, grow our own fruit and vegetables; our children would frolic barefoot and grow up with the many animals we would have: chickens, goats, miniature sheep.

The morning I listened to my then husband's truck pull out of the driveway, the morning after the fight that couldn't be fixed, I knew my life would no longer be that of a farmer's wife. Frankly, I was ever so slightly relieved. All that bread baking and jam making had added a few unwanted pounds, and truth be told, I was terribly lonely out there in the country. It was time to head back to the beach, to be closer to my friends, my support system, as I attempted to adjust to a new life as a single mom.

I rented a tiny cottage by the water in Westport, Connecticut, and promptly fell head over heels in love with living by the beach. Shortly thereafter, I fell head over heels in love with the landlord, he of the twinkly blue eyes, as he fixed the plumbing and took me on long rides on his Vespa.

He and his two children instantly became part of our large family. We had visions of us living happily ever after, almost immediately talking about building a house together, assuming,
knowing
, that we were both in for the long term: the modern-day Brady Bunch.

I thought I'd met every member of the family until the day he drove out from New York in his old truck, parking it in the driveway to come inside for lunch. I went out to get something from the mailbox, and as I walked past the truck, lost in a daydream, a huge noise started up.

I jumped and backed away, terrified, as a snarling mass of fangs and saliva threw its huge bulk at the back window, barking ferociously, revealing huge teeth that looked all the better to eat me with.

I like dogs. Secretly, though, I prefer cats. There was a very good chance that had Landlord not come along when he did, I might have turned into the Crazy Old Cat Lady, somewhat along the lines of Big Edie in
Grey Gardens
. I would happily have lived in a faded old mansion with a hundred cats and the odd tame raccoon (but my bed would have been bigger).