You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (18 page)

“Brian!” She laughed. “We can’t name him Brian!” That was my brother’s name.

“Bri-ER,” I said. She wasn’t interested.

“Or,” I said, “we could name him Fiorello. Fiorello means ‘little flower’ in Italian. There was a mayor named Fiorello LaGuardia who everyone loved.” We thought Daddy, with his Italian heritage, would like that one, too.

“Fiorello,” she repeated. “Okay, Fiorello and Wisteria.”

Things were starting to feel less crazy and more fun.

When we told people the story of Dahlia and the puppies, we’d get the same stunned response followed by,
“How did you not know she was pregnant?”

It made sense to me that we hadn’t known. Her symptoms were the same as Cushing’s disease. Paul said that one night he was walking her and an old woman said to him, “Her tits are bigger than mine!” Again, we figured they were just exceedingly hangy because she’d had a lot of litters and she was old. She probably hadn’t had postbaby exercise classes to get her figure back. Everything in hindsight sounded stupid. I ended up feeling like one of those girls who live in the back-woods of nowhere who has a baby in the bathroom during a school dance and then goes on
Maury Povich
to talk about it. “I looked in the toilet and there it was!”

The other question people asked after hearing the story was, “Do you know who the father is?”

Do we know who the father is? She was dumped, pregnant, in a shelter in East New York, Brooklyn. Unfortunately, he never called or wrote or sent flowers. Paul said whoever he was, he must have had his beer goggles on that night. Poor Black Dahlia.

“Yeah, but who do you
think
the father was?” they’d press.

“Um, Brad Pitt?”

They wanted answers. They wanted to know what kind of dog the father was. Well, what kind did we
think
he was?
What kind of dogs are they?

“Holsteins.”

 

 

 

 

MORE AND MORE BEATRICE
was trying to reassert her role. One morning she was bustling with curiosity and went too close to the whelping box. Dahlia growled and Bea growled back and they got into a nasty scuffle. Beatrice was bleeding around the neck, but after it was cleaned up she was fine. Dahlia was squinting. Her left eye had been hurt. I was about to go to Miami for work for two days (everything always happened this way) and I raced her to the vet. After checking her eye, he said she had a deep scratch and uveitis, a condition where part of the uvea, the part of the eye that supplies blood to the retina, becomes inflamed. The inflammation causes proteins to leak out, resulting in cloudiness in the eye. If left untreated, Dahlia could lose her eye. She needed topical drops and antibiotics, which meant we would need to stop her from nursing the puppies and we’d have to go back to feeding them again. So, sorry, the vet said, she just can’t nurse. My first thought was, How the hell are we going to keep them from nursing? Separate her from her puppies? AY! And then my mind flashed to Paul, who would be taking care of Violet and Dahlia and Beatrice and the two puppies for two days. Various unpleasant visuals passed through my brain, all of them ending in a very large, angry Paul head. “No,” I said. Just flat-out no.
There had to be another option.
The vet said he could call a specialist to see if she could come up with an alternative. He called a doctor friend and explained the situation. He said I had two small children, and I decided not to contradict that. What if it was that extra kid that made my situation sound that much more dire? Violet was easy, but our little lame Tiny Tim, with the tubercular cough, well, that was just too much for any dad.

I took Dahlia to the emergency specialist and forked over a lot of dough, but it was worth anything—
anything
—because she said (1) she just needed eyedrops, and (2) she would still be able to nurse. I told the emergency vet that I loved her and she was the new beneficiary in my will.

The eye healed, and the puppies grew. And watching them develop was breathtaking. Human children’s changes are remarkable, but animals grow up so much faster. From bumbling blindly around the box with their little fat bodies bumping into things and then, slowly, opening their eyes. We picked them up more and more, socializing them with kisses and receiving immeasurable joy from them. Countless times I found myself walking around the house thinking, Happiness really
is
a warm puppy!

PAUL, WHO WASN’T QUITE
as earnest, kept reenacting the scene from
Apocalypse Now
where they find the puppy in the barrel on the boat.
“Look what she was hiding. See what she was running for. A fucking puppy.”

 

 

 

OUR NEXT - DOOR NEIGHBORS,
John and Elisabeth, were pretty serious dog people. They became like the godparents, frequently stopping by for a little “puppy time.” Our apartments had back doors from the kitchens into a common hallway, and often when I’d open the door to take out the trash, their door would whip open. “Oh, hey, can we see the puppies?” or “We’re having a dinner party. Is it okay if we show everyone the puppies?” It was so charming and fun even if their guests, who were not necessarily dog people, were not quite as engaged as John and Elisabeth.

The puppies weren’t going outside yet. In New York City, puppies have to have all of their inoculations before they can go out on the street with other dogs. So they just stayed in the box, and they occasionally came out into the room. It was easy. It wasn’t like having extra dogs; it was more like having guinea pigs.

As they grew, their distinct personalities emerged, and wouldn’t you know it? Although I wasn’t supposed to, I had fallen for the female, the one we weren’t keeping. She was so incredibly sweet that she had charmed me, but I kept it to myself. It was absolutely impossible to consider having four dogs in a New York City apartment. I started to talk to Matthew about adopting Wisteria. I felt like I could manage losing her if she stayed in the family.

Matt’s wife, Lara, definitely wanted her, but Matt remained harder to convince. Then Lara and Pixie, Matt’s three-year-old daughter, came to New York City for a visit. I gave Wisteria to Pixie to hold and she loved her; I captured the moment on digital film and e-mailed it to Matt. “Say no to this!” I wrote. I felt him beginning to come around, though I was careful not to mention anything to Pixie about it. Violet brought it up, though, since she thought it was a good idea.

Meanwhile, Paul was discussing Wisteria’s potential adoption with his brother, uncle, and best friend, Mike. There were a lot of people who wanted her, and that was before they even saw her picture.

I e-mailed Paul after getting off the phone with Matt.

Five minutes passed and I wrote back to him again.

So we took Wisteria off the market and we let everyone know. It just seemed impossible to break up the puppies, no matter what anyone said. They were two peas in a pod! They slept huddled together, and when Wisteria got a little adventurous and went out of the box, Fiorello wept for her to return and vice versa. All of the breeder and veterinary people told us that this didn’t mean anything. They would do perfectly fine apart; it happened all the time. Dahlia was a doting mother, they said, but as soon as she finished nursing she’d be kickin’ them to the curb. I didn’t disbelieve this, but I felt like our situation was different. Our mother dog was different, and our puppies were different. She may have had to say good-bye to her children before, but she wouldn’t have to now. She had a home, and she should be able to keep her children there with her.

Just like when you have a baby, when you get used to one phase of puppy development, suddenly everything changes. I thought they’d live in that UPS box forever, but one day they were just done with it. They didn’t want to go in it again for any reason. Dahlia was ready to roam the house as well, and the puppies had some serious exploring to do, since among Paul, Violet, and me, there were plenty of shoes that were just begging to be chewed up.

We kept them in the pen at night and when we went out, but the rest of the time they had free rein. Dahlia would try to get away from them more and more, but not totally. They had started to eat little puppy meals, but they still nursed when they wanted to, sharp teeth and all. And Dahlia withstood it. Everyone said she would let them know when she was finished having them suckle, but she never did. Eventually they weaned themselves, but she still assiduously minded them, even when they were pretty much done nursing. Sometimes I thought she was through with them and then I’d see her giving them a full inner-ear bath and nuzzling their tummies. When they were big enough, they slept with her on the couch, one tucked into her front paws and the other nestled into her stomach. If she got up, they glommed together, but when she came back they returned to position.

Four dogs.
Four dogs. Cuatro perros. Quatre chiens. Fir hun-ten. Vier honden. Vier Hunde, fire hunde, quattro cani, quatro cães, yonhiki inu ken, mbwa nne, Arbaa klavim, keturi suniai, tesseres skeeli, char kutte, négy kutyá, chetiri sobaki.
It sounds crazy in any language, doesn’t it? It’s quite something to wrap your head around—you have one dog and then it’s four. Like you’re a size small one day and the next you’re XXXL. You have one head—then four. One apple, then an orchard. One goldfish, then a herd of elephants.

We were starting to get it. We were not getting comfortable with it, but getting used to it. I was talking to a new friend of mine, Deb, whom I had met recently at a book festival in San Jose. It was one of those cosmic meetings where you find a person and the way they look and sound is so familiar that you keep trying to figure out how you must know them. Within five minutes, we discovered we had one very close friend in common and lived five blocks from each other on the Upper West Side, where we both had kids and husbands named Paul. We had that immediate openness that you sometimes feel when you meet a friend in a strange land. I found out she was going through a very hard time; her beloved father had been recently diagnosed with cancer and it was just a harsh, swift blow. He had only a matter of months to live.

Right before Thanksgiving, I ran into Deb when she was walking Lucas, her cute little Havanese puppy. She was filling me in on the stuff with her dad and I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could do. As it turned out, they were going to Delaware and someone in the house where they were staying was allergic to dogs. They would be away for only a few days, and I happily offered to keep Lucas. It was one thing I was completely capable of handling.

So for a few days we had five dogs, and only one of them, Bea, was housebroken. Dahlia’s birth had left her incontinent, and everyone else was still learning. It was like living in a giant litter box. I walked Dahlia and Bea with Lucas and thought, This is only three dogs; I will be walking four.

A few weeks later Deb’s father passed away, and we took Lucas in for a week. I was heartbroken for Deb and her family, and it was a blessing to actually be able to help them.

When Lucas left, we went back to having “just” four dogs. It was like that old story about the guy complaining that his house is too small and the town elder keeps telling him to move his cows, then his sheep, then his chickens, then his horses into the house and finally when he can’t stand it anymore the town elder tells him to move them back out and suddenly his house seems huge. Well, it was almost like that.

It was overwhelming, but we were still not even taking the puppies outside—and that future prospect just hung over me like a roof of dread. When the day finally came that their inoculations were complete and they were ready to go out for walks, I delayed it some more. It was still winter, and cold and windy when I’d taken them to the vet. They had been so terrified to be out of the apartment that we decided it would be better to wait until the weather improved. Sun and warmth would be so much more welcoming. In the meantime, they were paper trained and really pretty good! I thought about the crazy, unsocialized puppies of John, the man in Washington Heights. Our puppies were lovely! They had also grown into their own personalities. Wisteria was what you’d call “mouthy.” She was a biter, but Fiorello was as gentle as a lamb. He never bit, though he started to pee on everything, which Wisteria never did.