The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (19 page)

I
decided to invest
in a behavioral puppy kit and began studying how to raise the best-socialized and well-adjusted dog I possibly could and at the same time, according to the workbook, “not change the dog’s personality or natural spunk.”

This required a great deal of participation on my part, and I had to be willing to activate my suspension of disbelief, which is sometimes a challenge to turn off, particularly if I’m watching something with Samuel Jackson in it (seriously, the man might really want take a good look at the coiffure requirements of a role before he signs on for his next project, because with every successive movie his wigs get nastier and nastier. I don’t see how it can get any worse unless Jackson pops up in his next movie wearing a fright wig or gels all of his hair into one big horn).

For example, as instructed by one of our assignments in the
How to Not Ruin Your Dog and Avoid Lawsuits, Too, Handbook,
I assumed the role of a toddler and rolled around on the ground babbling nonsense and poking at Maeby, gently tugging at her ears, tail, and coat, simultaneously giving her treats so she wouldn’t one day bite the face off a baby who most likely wasn’t invited to my house in the first place.

But as I got further into the handbook, things became a little more complicated. If I really wanted to socialize my puppy and prepare her for today’s urban world, the kit told me, I needed to be fully committed to broadening her horizons as big and wide as possible. And to ensure that I would accomplish all of my objectives, the puppy kit included a checklist of potential Objects of Terror that Maeby needed to encounter and get a treat from before she reached her sixteenth week, which would mark the end of the most crucial socialization and imprinting stage of her life. Looking at the list, I was instantly overwhelmed at the sheer number of targets, which included

•
People of different ethnicities (black, white, Asian, Indian, Native American, Latino, and if you could score a primitive jungle person from a tribe in New Guinea, your dog got membership in the UN)

•
People in uniform (postal worker, firefighter, police officer, meter reader, telephone worker, ambulance attendant—apparently, the puppy kit had obtained my last blood-pressure reading and foresaw some tragedy in our future)

•
Animals (other healthy dogs, hamsters, geese, and goats)

•
People holding umbrellas or wearing sunglasses, hats, beards, helmets, punk hairdos, or raincoats, and the bald

•
People with canes, legs in casts, metal-frame walkers, wheelchairs, baby carriages, luggage, erratic body moves, limps, or odd gaits (this is when living in Phoenix could have come in real handy, as most of our neighbors began to bring metal canes, walkers, or bats with them to venture outside after Mrs. Crowley’s poodle was turned into a chew toy by a cannibalistic pit bull.

•
Environmental hazards and noise pollution: sirens, thunder and lightning, fireworks, the airport, building demolition, loudspeakers, and so on

The list continued for four more pages.

I broke out into a cold sweat. I didn’t know how I could possibly pull this off. I looked at Maeby, her adorable speckled nose resting between her two white-sock paws as she slept on a pile of my dirty underwear in the laundry room, and I thought, “How I have failed you already. You never had a chance when you came to this house. I might as well have locked you in a cage and thrown a black sheet over it. You poor, feral, frightened creature. I should have named you Sybil with all the damage I’m about to do to you!”

But then I had an idea. If I could combine these Objects of Terror, there was a real possibility that I could expose Maeby to all of them before her imprint-expiration date. After all, this was Eugene, bastion of everything odd, unlikely, and—as much as those in the Pacific Northwest want to argue the point,
unnatural
. During our first week here, for example, my husband saw a family bicycling down the street, each member dressed consistently in homemade, brightly colored knitwear made of yarn most likely spun from the fur of the animals living with them. The mom had an accordion balanced on her handlebars, the dad, typically identified as such by unruly facial hair and a “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” stocking cap, had a fiddle, and the little girl had a birdcage with a chicken it. Had I encountered them at the right time, I could have crossed about fifteen Objects of Terror Targets off our list. It would have saved me the equivalent of an entire day had I otherwise searched for all of those individual attributes one at a time.

I imagined her socialization period ending like the closing of a garage door, rolling down slowly, slowly, slowly, and in the final seconds hearing a disembodied voice proclaim, “…and your time…is…UP!” as the door hits the ground with a hollow, metal crash, and all of our future opportunities of getting a treat from a Filipino skateboarder wearing a witch hat and a raincoat while shooting off fireworks being gone forever.

“All right,” I said to my husband during Maeby’s fifteenth week as I rolled out the spreadsheet on the dining room table. “We still have a lot of incompletes here. She still needs to go to a rally or protest, and there’s a sit-in tomorrow at city hall, at which, if we play our cards right, we can knock out Hacky Sackers, a drum circle, a juggler, and if we’re lucky and things get out of hand, some cops. It’s a fiver, got it? This one’s important. Keep an eye out for a Rastafarian and someone from Vietnam, because we’ve got some ground to cover there, too.”

“Got it,” my husband said. “What’s the protest for?”

“The right to breast-feed in the food court at the mall without the use of a covering blanket,” I replied.

“Ooooh, that’s a good one,” he said with a smile.

“I thought you’d like it,” I said.

“No, I mean, we can also knock out infants, toddlers, strollers, and flapjack hippie boobs,” he said, pointing to each correlating category on the chart.

“Flapjack hippie boobs aren’t on here,” I said, laughing.

“They should be,” he opined. “They are far more frightening than most of the things on this list. It’s a good thing hippies don’t wear shoes, otherwise some of those women would get their boobs tangled in their laces.”

“Now, I need you to bring her back here by five because she has to see rush hour,” I reminded him. “And you still haven’t brought home a kite.”

“I haven’t had time!” he whined. “On Saturday she went to the rodeo, on Sunday I spent four hours looking for a tobogganist, although I did find some kayakers, and last night we went to that Republican fund-raiser to expose her to drunk people and strong scents.”

“You know, I don’t want to hear it,” I snipped. “If you want a dog that is tormented every time she sees a kite because someone was too busy to stop into Target for five seconds, then you’re the one who has to live with that, not me. How would you like to spend your whole life thinking a kite is going to swoop down and eat you with a big dowel-and-nylon mouth?”

“Come on,” he replied, obviously defensive. “Who was the one who got ‘spectators at a 10K’? I did! I did! That was me! I also got ‘people swimming’ and took her to the tarmac!”

“That wasn’t ‘people swimming,’ it was
a Jacuzzi,
” I reminded him. “Which
isn’t even on the list.
And on the tarmac, you couldn’t even get out of the car. The kit said ‘not on a hot day,’ but you decided to take her on a ‘hot day.’ Now I have to wait for some clouds to roll in so I can bring her back! And I already did ‘drunk people’ the night you finished off that wine by yourself.”

“That’s it,” he said, throwing his hands up. “I don’t have to take this! I’m leaving!”

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“Where do you think? I’m taking Maeby to ‘an active railway,’” he shot back.

“Now?” I questioned. “I was going to shoot her with the hair dryer!”

“I’ll knock out a homeless person, too, okay?” he said, then turned around and pointed his finger toward me. “But I am
not
doing ‘
hot-air balloon.
’”

I pursed my lips and shook my head, glaring at him. “You know I’m afraid of heights,” I hissed. “You always knew I couldn’t do ‘hot-air balloon’!”

“Then that’s something
you
have to live with,” my husband concluded.

“Try to walk her over a manhole cover and a grate!” I shouted after him after he picked up the puppy and headed for the door. “And we’re still missing ‘speed walkers’!”

“Oh, God,” I said to myself as I turned and rubbed my hand over my chin, looking over all of the empty spots still covering the chart. “Where am I going to find a kung fu person, a tollbooth, and a swinging bridge in less than twenty-four hours?”

When time was up, it was up. Our window had closed and was now bolted shut. We did the best that we could, and although, with a helping hand from Lady Luck, we were able cover “cars backfiring,” “beach party/bonfires,” and “hammocks,” I can admit with a regrettable sense of failure that if Maeby ever encounters a Native American mime involved in any sort of building demolition, I simply cannot predict what she will do.

A
fter Maeby’s
socialization was complete, we both thought that puppy obedience training should be next on the list, so I opened the phone book. The next thing I knew, I was driving along a country road deep in the forest somewhere with my puppy sitting between my husband and me, all of us wondering where the road was taking us.

And in about twenty minutes, we rolled up to a house in the middle of nowhere. A large woman in sweatpants and sweatshirt opened the door, her hair in a ponytail, her face entirely una-mused.

After I introduced the three of us, she stepped aside to let us in, and an unidentified and concentrated smell hit us from all angles. “I know that smell,” I said to myself as I took another whiff of the offensive odor. “I know it. Where is it from? Oh yes. Yes, I know. It smells like zebras. Zebras and elephants and lions, the odors and aromas of Africa. Yet, I have never been to Africa, though I
have
been to the zoo, and in close proximity to the places where all of those animals go potty. And that is the part of Africa that I am smelling right now. The potty part.” Then I spotted the hall and saw that, oddly enough, the top half of the wall was white but the remaining bottom third was a blackish brown. Exactly at dog height.

Holy God, I thought to myself as I tried to resist the compelling urge to swoop Maeby off the ground and away from whatever disease and pestilence was living in that carpet. I’ve only seen houses like this on
COPS
or
Animal Planet
when people from the ASPCA come out to rescue millions of cats from the clutches of a seventy-three-year-old lady and her mentally stunted son. Even I don’t live like this, and before I got married, I almost needed an archeologist to come out and identify some things I hadn’t seen for a while that had been hidden under layers and layers of mess.

My husband and I looked at each other intently, as I’m sure we both realized how foolish it was for us, as a couple, to not have invested the time and effort into learning Morse code so that one day we could send secret messages back and forth to each other through eyeblinks and nostril inflation while trapped in the filthiest house on the planet, trying desperately to formulate a plan of escape with our baby dog.

When the sweatpants dog trainer went into the kitchen to fetch her paperwork, we had very little time to coordinate something acute and tricky to secure our release. But there were more important things to be discussed first.

“Look at that wall,” I whispered, nodding in that direction. “It’s all gross from dogs rubbing against it!”

“That’s not dirt,” my husband whispered back. “That’s from a dog in heat.”

Without hesitation, I picked Maeby up off the floor even though I was sure the carpet was doing wonders to boost her immune system, including exposing her to diseases that had been thought long eradicated.

“If she can’t teach her dog not to rub its coochie on the wall, how is she going to train Maeby to sit?” I whispered just as the trainer walked back into the room.

I looked her square in the eye.

“I forgot the money,” I said simply before we headed out the door.