In New York City, on a daily basis, millions of women are faced
with an existential conflict: what to wear. And on this particular
day, on the last day of life as I knew it, meaning my last day of life
without a dog, I too faced this conflict. It was the first Saturday of
June 1997, and Ted and I had planned to take a day trip out to “the
country” (which is what New York City people call the far reaches of
Long Island). All week I had been planning to wear a pink linen dress
from Paris, with a matching pink hat. To me, it was an outfit that suggested
innocence and femininity, a certain je ne sais quoi. But when I
pulled said dress out of the closet, I discovered that there was a big
dark sticky stain on its backside. Gum or something. From the subway
system, no doubt. One of the great risks you take, in New York
City, is sitting down."Oh, no,” I said to Ted. “Look!” I held up the dress to show him.
“Well, find something else to wear,” Ted said. Ted was the live-in
boyfriend: handsome, talented, responsible, and too smart for his own
(or anyone else’s) good.
“How many weeks have I been walking around with gum on my
ass? The last time I wore this dress was to my interview at that literary
magazine.”
“I’m sure nobody noticed,” Ted said. “Just find something else to
wear. And hurry. We’re supposed to be at Chip’s by noon.”
Chip was one of Ted’s best friends from college, which was a place
they called “New Haven.” Chip had been promising for months to take
us to the Lloyd Neck Country Club—one of the most exclusive country
clubs in the entire Tri-State area, and perhaps the world. And
today, finally, we were going! All week long I had looked forward to a
day of grand food and fine wine, served to us on silver dishes by waiters
with white gloves, followed by some late-afternoon sunbathing by
the Italian-tiled pool, where more white-gloved waiters would bring
us chilled mango daiquiris, and then perhaps a shirtless George
Clooney (who was rumored to belong to Lloyd Neck) would stroll past
our cabana and I could say to people that I had seen his naked chest.
But what to wear? I had no Plan B in the wardrobe department.
And to top it all I was feeling fat. I had gained seven pounds since Ted
moved in seven months ago, and there seemed no end in sight. To
either predicament. I liked to blame the weight gain on love, however
(rather than on the fact that Ted and I drank sangria practically every
night). There is something about being in love—the cushion of it, the
safety—that simply adds weight to my body, as if the very gravity of
the emotion has a substance that grounds you to this earth.
Despite all that, I still wasn’t willing to accept that the weight gain
was permanent. Therefore I refused to buy anything in a size ten.
But all the dresses that hung in my closet were size eight or
smaller. And Ted was breathing down my neck. So I went with the old
standby: the little black dress. (An LBD never fails to de-emphasize
the bulge and emphasize the legs, and what woman in New York
doesn’t have great legs?) My LBD had a square-cut neck and scooped
sleeves and fell just above the knee. I paired it with a Wonderbra and
a pair of hip Italian platform sandals and voilà! I was ready.
“Okay,” I said to Ted. “I just have to brush my teeth and then we
can go.”
Ted came out of the bedroom and shook his head when he saw
me. “You can’t wear that.”
We lived together for the same reason most young uncertainabout-
each-other couples cohabited in New York: because separately
we couldn’t afford to rent a decent apartment. Marriage, I suppose,
was a p-p-possibility, if only another M-word could enter the equation
on my behalf: maturity.
“Why not?” I said.
“You can’t wear black to Lloyd Neck.” Ted was wearing a pair of
khakis, loafers, and a crisp yellow Oxford shirt, buttoned one button
too many at his neck.
I lifted my chin. “I can.”
“No, I’m telling you, you can’t. Why don’t you just put on a polo
shirt and those white Bermuda shorts we got for you at Brooks Brothers
last week?”
“I don’t want to look dowdy,” I said. I was twenty-nine years old
and already terrified of such things.
“Who’s going to care?”
“I’ll care,” I said. “Besides, this dress is fine. It’s cute.” And then I
set about the task of finding the right handbag to go with my black
dress. Deep down, of course, I knew that Ted, having been groomed
at some of the nation’s finest country clubs himself, was probably
right about my outfit. But something in me that day didn’t want him
to know I knew he was right. It was more important to look thin.
Ted stood right behind me as I opened my wardrobe. “What do
you mean you have nothing to wear? You have a whole closet full of
clothes.”
“This dress is the only thing that fits!” I said. “This is what I’m
wearing. This is what I want to wear!” My voice rose as I spoke, and
cracked, and Ted must have sensed that I was on the edge of something,
something they used to call female hysteria, and because of
that—and because, perhaps, my dress displayed ample cleavage—he
let me have my way.
“Well, let’s hurry then,” Ted said. “If we get to Chip’s by noon, he
and I might be able to get some golf in before lunch.”
I smiled in triumph. Those Bermuda shorts, for the record, were a
size ten.
cc
My triumph was short lived. When we arrived at Chip’s weekend
house in Nassau County ninety minutes later, Chip took one look at
my getup and announced that we wouldn’t be going to the country
club after all. “I know of a great place in Bayville,” he said as he led us
into the kitchen. “It’s right on the water and they serve lobsters and
crab. We can sit outside, drink a few beers. How’s that sound?”
I was too stunned to answer.
Chip (or Charles Ingersoll Pingrey, as he was known in the Yale
alumni magazine) was a benignly handsome, immensely likable man
with a large frame and a kind smile.
“Aren’t we going to golf ?” Ted said.
“Nah,” Chip answered. “I couldn’t get a tee time.”
“Did you even try?” Ted said. I could tell he was half-amused, halfirritated.
Chip answered with: “You guys want something to drink before
we go?”
“No,” Ted said. “Let’s hurry. I’m starved. We didn’t have time to
eat before we left, because I thought we were going to golf.”
“Okay then,” Chip said. “I just need to find my keys.”
After he’d left the room I gave Ted a look, which he knew meant:
Why aren’t we going to Lloyd Neck? “It’s this dress, isn’t it?” I whispered.
“Don’t be paranoid,” Ted said. “Chip is simply like that. He changes
his mind at the drop of a hat.”
And while it’s probably true that Chip—who is uncomplicated
and a pleasure seeker and above all good of heart—had had a sudden
craving for beer and lobster, I thought I knew better. Some people
have gay-dar; I have snob-dar. And when it comes to snobbery, LNCC
takes first prize.
To cheer myself up, I began to snoop through the cabinets in
Chip’s kitchen. Whenever we went to Chip’s house, which was technically
his mother’s, I liked to check out all the expensive All-Clad
cookware, the two-thousand-dollar German knives, and the cabinets
full of French mustards, champagne vinegars, and first-press olive
oils from Spain. “Look!” I said to Ted. “An entire cabinet devoted solely
to jam! Such beautiful jams! Can you imagine living in a house so big
you had room for three different types of lemon curd?”
Ted hugged me and laughed. “That’s one of Lee’s goals in life,” he
explained as Chip returned to the kitchen. “To have a cabinet full of
fancy jams.”
Chip laughed, too, but in an uncertain way. The haves of this
world don’t always get the have-nots.
“So what’s this restaurant we’re going to in lieu of the club?” Ted
asked. He had been an English major at New Haven, and he still loved
to use all the uncommon funny-sounding words. “Is it any good?”
“Yeah, it’s great,” he said. “It’s where the locals go.”
“Are we going to at least drive past the club?” I said as we climbed
into Chip’s car.
“No,” Chip said. “We’re going in the opposite direction.”
The opposite direction. My day, my life, clearly were not going as
planned.
The Lloyd Neck Country Club is located on a tiny fist-shaped
peninsula that juts into Lloyd Harbor. From the center of this fist extends
another finger-shaped peninsula, and the club is situated at the
very tip. And so, from an aerial point of view, one could say that this
peninsula looks something like a hand giving the world the finger,
and therefore one could call the Lloyd Neck Country Club the Fuck
All of You Club. But nobody did. Because manners at LNCC were very
important. And it costs like $350,000 just to join.
So we drove in the opposite direction. I stared out the window and
sulked. Saturdays are precious to those of us who live in New York
City, you see. Sometimes it’s your only chance to get from life what
the city, in all its bountiful cruelty, will never deliver: air, sky, space,
parking spaces, and a sense of belonging and peace. You can pretend,
for a few precious hours, that the clock isn’t ticking, that your relationship
is solid, that your apartment isn’t really only three hundred
square feet.
So imagine a Saturday in Lloyd Neck. We passed mansion after
fabulous mansion. We passed stately oak trees and fine green lawns.
The sky somehow seemed bluer out here than it did in the city, and
the color of the grass was almost unearthly, surreal. Even the sunshine
had an eternal quality to it; it was as if the inhabitants of what
was known as Long Island’s Gold Coast were simply entitled to more
of it, all the time. They say F. Scott Fitzgerald set his novel The Great
Gatsby out here, and Fitzgerald is by far my favorite author—one I try
to emulate, less the alcoholism and the crack-up at the end of his life.
So I put my window down and took a gulp of his epic, golden air, and
it tasted of hope and promise. Some of the greatest wealth in the
world could be found here on this slender, riotous island (one can’t
help but make Gatsby references on the Gold Coast), and the fact that
I was so close to and yet so far from all that wealth suddenly bothered
me for reasons I can’t even explain. I mean, I wasn’t an entirely shallow
person back then, before we got the dog. But I certainly did have
shallow days. Especially on sunny Saturdays in Lloyd Neck. When
you were supposed to go to the country club.
And couldn’t one argue that every New York City woman has her
shallow days? In New York, thousands of people spend hours each
day trying to fill their voids with material possessions. The Fendi
baguette makes up for your miserable childhood. The Ferrari replaces
your low self-esteem. So maybe, on that fateful day, I had been hoping
that three hours at the Lloyd Neck Country Club would lift me
far above my own reality and carry me beyond my three-hundredsquare-
foot apartment, my noncommittal relationship, and my hohum
job.
Lunch, needless to say, was a disappointment. The soft-shell crabs
looked and tasted as if they had been soaking in formaldehyde for a
few months before they reached our table, and a ratty-looking seagull
kept flapping onto our table to beg for food. Above our heads was
a giant banner that said: wet t-shirt contests every thursday night
sponsored by bud light.
“I’ll have champagne, please,” I said wearily to the waitress. There
was nary a George Clooney in sight.
“We don’t have champagne,” she said. “We got white, we got red.”
I looked over at Ted, and he did a shrug/smile.
“Red, please,” I said.
“Oh, let’s have a pitcher of margarita instead,” Ted said. Chip, subliminally
seduced by the banner, perhaps, ordered a Bud Light.
When the waitress left, Ted said to Chip, “I thought you said this
place was good,” but he was laughing, because our table overlooked a
boardwalk, and teenage girls kept Rollerblading by in bikini tops; plus
we were the only customers in the restaurant, which meant we
would get served right away.
Soon our food arrived, and our drinks, and we filled one another
in on the past few months. I was still temping and trying to finish my
first novel, which I wrote on the job (I only took jobs that required no
actual work of me). Later that month, as I did every summer, I would
teach a creative writing course at New York University. “I’m looking
forward to it,” I said. “It’s my favorite part of the year.” As for Ted, he
was still enjoying that blissful state of existence called “between
jobs.” He had moved to New York last November and was looking for
work in documentary film. But no one could ever have referred to Ted
as a slacker, or even called him unemployed. He had worked hard at
his previous production job, and had been diligent enough about saving
money to live on those savings for a year. Plus he was talented
and experienced enough in his field to be picky about where he would
work next. “So I’ve signed up for a couple of classes at Film and Video
Arts,” he said. “Photography. Intro to Avid. I’m looking forward to
that.”
Chip worked in something called a holdings firm—whatever that
was—and he told us everything was the same with him. Everything
was always the same for Chip. He was the only person in our circle of
friends who had an actual job. “I get a lot of golf in on weekends,” he
said. “Can’t complain.”
This conversation somehow, for Chip, segued into the Neil Young
concert he had seen the previous weekend, and then he and Ted were
on to their favorite subject: all the drugs they had taken at all those
Grateful Dead concerts during their New Haven days. This could go
on for hours, I realized. And, no matter how much I enjoyed these
two males’ company, there was only so much “And do you remember
the way Jerry segued into ‘Not Fade Away’ from ‘Space’?” I could
take.
So I gazed across the street toward the harbor. A few small sailboats
bucked in the water, trying to move forward in that anchored
sort of way. It was almost officially summer, I realized, and a crisp anticipation
began to move through my veins—or perhaps it was the
grain alcohol with which they had spiked the margaritas. I became
aware of the rare, wondrous feeling of direct sunlight upon my skin
and the lap-lap-lapping sound of the water. I straightened in my seat.
Maybe this summer would be the summer I had always dreamed of:
with perfect weather, invitations every weekend to friends’ beach
houses in the Hamptons, and weekly gatherings with my girlfriends
at the Bryant Park Café, where we would drink rummy, fruity concoctions,
and wear elegant, jeweled shoes paired with fetching handbags,
and talk about art and books. Maybe I would finish writing my
novel, and Ted would get going on that travel documentary he
wanted to produce. In June we could attend the polo matches in
Southampton and in July we could see the horse races at Saratoga,
and in August we could go sailing at Ted’s friend’s plantation in Beaufort,
and by September, I could relax with a sense of accomplishment,
as opposed to the usual Labor Day freak-out in which I agonized over
all the things I did not do that I’d said I’d wanted to do.
I sighed. Who’s to say any of that would make me happy?
“Remember that time they played that cover of ‘Couldn’t Get It
Right’?” Ted said. “Saratoga ’86.”
“No, it was Hampton ’88,” Chip said. “I remember because Charlie
took so much acid he took all his clothes off and ran into the
street.” He raised his sandwich to his mouth. There was a bluish-gray
claw dangling out the side, like something from Dawn of the Dead.
Some customers arrived: a couple with a dog. They looked to be
our age—late twenties—and she had her hair pulled back in a ponytail,
in that casual, unattended, weekend way that I could never quite
pull off. She also wore a platinum engagement ring and jeweled
shoes. But I barely noticed the ring, or stopped to think how it might
fill some void. I was more interested in the dog. He was a golden retriever,
a great teddy bear of a dog, and I watched the way he curled
himself under the table, sighing with ease as he positioned himself in
a perfect patch of sun. Every moment is a summer moment for a dog.
The man whispered something into the woman’s ear, and she
gazed at him adoringly while the dog gazed adoringly at them. The
way this couple kept their hands knitted together suggested that their
lives were knitted too.
I looked over at Ted: smart, handsome, reliable Ted. He was now
laughing about the time he and Chip were shrooming during history
class. I thought of our own relationship. Sometimes it was rocky,
other times solid as a rock. Sometimes I wanted to cling to that
rock—your one chance at survival in a whitewater river. Sometimes
I wanted to give up and let go, and float with the current, not caring
where I might land. In this sense I didn’t think our relationship was
different from any other. And yet, all my life I had wanted to be knitted
to someone. And I’d always wanted a dog who would sit under the
table and gaze at my lover and me as we held hands.
“Ted, look at that cute dog!”
“He’s handsome,” Ted said.
We smiled at the couple, and they smiled back.
Getting a dog, it is important to note, was something Ted and I
had talked about seriously but sporadically over the past few months,
during those moments when we were getting along so well we could
giddily envision a future together. I had been yearning for a dog since
I was ten, when I lost my husky, Tasha. Ted, too, loved dogs, with the
wounded, stubborn insistence of a boy who had never been allowed
to have one. So here was something we actually agreed upon—that
we both loved dogs, that we wanted a dog.
But in our two years as a unit, we’d also talked about traveling,
and moving to a bigger apartment, and getting a new computer, a
new mattress, new careers, new lives, and so far none of those things
had materialized. We were always talking about the time not being
“right.” Plus, I think we both secretly enjoyed the slow, nonthreatening
pace at which things were progressing in our relationship.
“Our relationship is like a French movie,” I often said to my friend
Tara. “There’s a lot of interesting character development, but no
plot.”
I straightened up in my seat again. Suddenly I was tired of being
an all-talk-no-action kind of person. I was tired of things not going as
planned. I was tired of saying I wanted something and then, when I
was faced with the real possibility of getting it, deciding that I didn’t
want it after all and retreating back into the comforting, safe zone of
indecision. I was tired of having all my summer goals thwarted for
stupid reasons, like a dress. I wanted to call myself on something and
make it happen. And I wanted to call Ted on something, too.
And thus it was that I suggested we stop at the animal shelter on
the way home. “Let’s do it,” I said to Ted after we’d left the restaurant
and picked up our car at Chip’s. “Let’s stop and look at dogs.” We were
idling on the Long Island Expressway, which was backed up for miles.
“We drove all the way out here,” I reasoned. “We might as well do
something productive with this day.”
Ted was silent for a moment. The car behind us honked and
honked every time a light turned green, even though it was clear
that, with a hundred other cars also trying to beat the same light, we
weren’t going to get very far. Then Ted’s face broke into a warm but
cautious smile. “Okay,” he said. “But we’re just looking.”
On the way down to Chip’s, we had passed a giant billboard for
the Nassau County Pet Rescue that showed a floppy-eared beagle
puppy sitting alongside a cardboard pet carrier, with a caption that
read: think outside the box. We now followed those signs and soon
found ourselves pulling into the shelter’s parking lot.
“JFK Junior got his dog here,” I said to Ted as we walked toward
the building. “They mention that in all their ads.” I suddenly had an
image of myself as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (albeit several inches
shorter and with red hair), sauntering down the cobblestoned streets
of Tribeca with the leash of an Irish setter in one hand and a Birkin
bag in the other, looking very chic in a trim wool coat and leather
boots. I looked at Ted and smiled. “We’re looking at doggie-dogs!” Ted
had a John-John sort of look: tall, lean, with dark hair and intense
eyes, and a cute-in-sweatpants butt. I could have a dog with a man
like that, I thought.
“We’re just looking,” he reminded me, but in a playful way. He,
too, seemed suddenly possessed by a kind of wanton excitement, and
he took my hand as we entered the building.
“We can take the dog to the beach!” I said. “To Montauk! Southampton!”
Another young couple was coming out just as we were going in.
Their ironic T-shirts and oil-paint-splattered jeans gave them away as
East Village inhabitants. They carried a sleeping Dalmatian puppy,
and the boyfriend had his arm wrapped around the woman’s shoulders
proudly and protectively, as if she had just given birth. There was
an air of tenderness about them, and of togetherness, and of hope.
“You two wait here,” the boyfriend said, using his most adult voice.
“I’ll go get the car.”
I couldn’t contain myself. “Did you see that puppy?” I said to Ted
as he held the door for me. “Did you see how cute she was?” For as
long as I can remember, I have always preferred dogs over children.
Place a friend’s baby on my lap, and I’ll give her a few perfunctory
bounces and a pat on the bottom before I pass her on to the next person.
But show me a puppy, anytime, anywhere, and I will be on my
knees, blubbering in baby talk, asking the owners in a high-pitched
squeaky voice how old the puppy is, and what kind of toys he likes to
chew on, and what he eats. I will kiss puppy noses and tickle puppy
bellies and writhe ecstatically on the floor well past the point of appropriateness
(and therefore have repeatedly been ostracized at dinner
parties and family gatherings). But what can I say? Puppies make
me happy. And don’t we all just want to be happy in a stupid, blubbering
way?
“Yes, I saw the puppy,” Ted said, again with that smile. “But remember
we agreed we’d get an adult dog.” The official agreement was
that we would adopt rather than purchase a dog, and that said dog
would be a needy adult. “This will help purify some of your negative
karma,” my Buddhist friend Anna had advised us several months
ago, long before I had an understanding of what Buddhism was. Or
karma for that matter. But I liked the idea of adopting a needy dog.
We entered an efficient, immaculate-looking hallway, with signs
directing us toward either dogs or cats. The dog wing was designed in
such a way that you had to walk through the adult section before you
could get to the puppies, and obediently we funneled through. “The
adult section,” Ted said with amusement. “That makes it sound like
the porn section of a video store.”
“Well, as long as I get to kiss one—no, two or three puppies today
I’ll be satisfied.”
I could tell right away that this was a well-run shelter. It felt clean
and organized, and there was an air of militant optimism that suggested
the dogs were well taken care of and they would all find
homes. Ted and I walked slowly past the rows and rows of open-air
pens and fell in and out of love a dozen times. We met Dudley, a
droopy pit bull with an eye infection. And Scooter, a Harlequin Great
Dane. Then there was poor, miserable Clarence, an arthritic old
bloodhound who kept his head on his paw and his eyes raised skyward,
like a martyred saint. “Can we get Clarence?” I said to Ted, but
he said no, a bloodhound would be too big for our apartment. “That’s
true,” I said. I was willing to be open minded, to go with the dog who
pulled most at my heartstrings, and so was Ted.
Slowly, he and I separated, each of us in our own dog trance. I
stood in front of beagles and bassets and every variety of shepherd
mix and Lab. Some of them wagged their tails at me and barked and
spun in circles. Some of them rested their heads on their paws and
barely lifted their eyes, as if they were tired of being passed by. Each
dog was appealing in his own special way, and I stopped thoughtfully
in front of every one of them, waiting for my One True Dog to reveal
himself. I looked, paused, listened. Nothing happened, though. Nothing
within me stirred. I even walked past the dog who would become
our dog, but all I noticed at first was that he had an interesting face:
it was half white and half brown, with one ear in each color, and a
sort of yin/yang marking on top of his head. I wish I could say there
was a moment of Knowing, an instant bond between us, but for me at
least this was not the case. When I tried to make eye contact with this
dog, who was then named Chance, he turned his head away with a
studied, practiced look of disinterest on his face, as if we had quarreled
long ago and he was determined to never, ever forgive me. I
knew that look. And so I moved on.
Ted, however, had a moment of Knowing with Chance. He knelt
down in front of Chance’s cage and said “Who’s this?” in an inviting
voice. I love Ted’s voice, because it cracks with emotion on certain high
notes, and whenever he talks to dogs. “Who’s this handsome boy?”
I watched the way Ted interacted with the dog. There had been an
unmistakable moment of Knowing when I met Ted two years earlier.
I realize this might sound clichéd, but on our first date I sensed that I
was in the presence of a person—the person, even—I might marry,
even though I was not, by any means, the marrying kind. I had endured
too many disappointments and failed relationships, too many
liars and louses and cheats, and I was no longer so eager to commit to
anyone. Or anything. And yet there was this feelingwhen I met Ted. A
stirring. That I already knew him. That I was supposed to know him.
That a part of him already existed in my blood. And he’d felt the same
about me.
Now Ted was trying to get a response out of the dog. “Who are
you?” he said to Chance. “What’s a good-looking dog like you doing
in a place like this?”
Chance eyed Ted suspiciously, then inched himself to the back of
his pen and bared his teeth.
“He is handsome,” I said. In fact, the more I looked at Chance, the
more taken I was by his beauty. There was his face, of course. And his
body was mostly white, with brown patches on his back and tail, and
little spots on his legs like chips of chocolate. His fur looked soft and
fine, with fringing on his legs, and he had a long, feathered tail. “In
fact, he’s absolutely regal,” I said. “He looks like one of those highbred
sporting dogs you see in English paintings, or on the lawns of
great hunt-country estates. What is he doing here?”
There was a clipboard attached to the front of the cage with the
dog’s statistics: name, approximate age, approximate breed. It said
Chance was an approximately eleven-month-old “English Setter X.”
“What’s the X for?” I said to the dog, addressing him in a singsongy
voice. “Is that like Malcolm X? Is that your rapper name?” As I
knelt down, the fur between his shoulder blades rose and bristled and
he curled his lip.
“It means he’s a mix,” Ted said. “Chance is a setter mix.”
“What a sad name to give a dog in a shelter,” I said. “It’s like Last
Chance.” I told Ted about a certain category of short story that I
taught my students, called the “Last Chance to Change” story, in
which a character is given one final opportunity to change the course
of his life. In a classic short story, I explained, a character has to
change by the end of the story. “But in a Last Chance to Change
story,” I said, “the main character doesn’t change and the readers
realize that he never, ever will.”
“He doesn’t look like a Chance,” Ted said. “What do you think he’s
mixed with? Some kind of spaniel?”
“Who knows?” I said. “Can we go look at the puppies now?”
At that point we were intercepted by a volunteer. She carried a
clipboard, and wanted to know if we were interested in adopting a
dog. “Oh, we’re kind of just looking around,” I said. This woman wore
a name tag that said hi, i’m mindy with a smiley face on it. She
seemed to be in her late teens or early twenties and struck me as a
perky do-gooder who hoped someday to be a perky do-gooding vet.
I began to pull Ted toward the puppy cages, but he stopped and asked
the volunteer about Chance: How old was he? Where was he from?
She told us Chance had been rescued from a pound in Connecticut.
He’d been at the pound two weeks and was about to be put down
when the Pet Rescue saved him and brought him here. “He’s only
been here three days. Do you like him? Do you want to try him out?”
“Try him out?” I said.
“Walk him,” Mindy said. “We have a walking room. We call it the
bonding room.”
“Not yet,” I said. “We’re going to look around a little bit more. But
maybe later.”
We continued to make our way through the adult section but
now with Mindy in tow. She followed us and told us how we should
feel about each dog before we’d even had a chance to shake paws with
them. “Oh, you won’t like her,” she said of a sweet-looking border collie.
“Too much work.” “And that one,” she said of the Great Pyrenees,
“sheds much too much.” I didn’t care about shedding, and I’d heard
Pyrenees were nice, but I held my tongue. I was starting to realize this
girl had all the makings of a used car salesman and I wanted to ditch
her fast. “You should meet Lucy,” she said. She pulled me by the arm,
away from Ted. “She’s epileptic and she’s everyone’s favorite dog.”
I didn’t want to see Lucy but I went along anyway, not wanting to
hurt Mindy’s feelings.
“Lucy’s owner absolutely loved her,” she said, “but unfortunately
she couldn’t keep her because she was allergic. Here she is.”
We stood outside the pen. Lucy wagged her tail and pressed her
body against the gate. Then she whined softly and closed her eyes, as
if she were trying to remember what it felt like to lean against a
human leg.
“Isn’t she adorable?” Mindy said.
I just stood there. She was a sweet dog, yes, a mixture of shepherd
and Lab, but she had pointy ears. I didn’t like dogs with pointy ears.
Except huskies. And I didn’t see why I had been singled out as her potential
owner. The volunteer hadn’t asked us any questions about our
wants or needs, about our lifestyle. I was starting to think she had attended
the “how to talk to customers” session but not the “how to listen”
one.
“Isn’t she sweet?” Mindy pressed. “Do you want to walk her?”
I looked around for Ted, who was kneeling in front of Chance’s
pen again. Chance was still cowering at the back of his cage and
growling in a deep-throated sort of way. I muttered something about
puppies and tried to move away from Mindy.
“Puppies are different,” she said. “They’re so much work. You
can’t bring them outside for eight weeks; they have weak immune
systems, you have to be prepared.”
“I know,” I said.
“Lucy’s only three years old, but she acts like a puppy. Don’t you
want to walk her?”
“No!” I finally said. I excused myself, and returned to Ted. “That
woman is sales-pitching me! It’s obnoxious. I don’t have a good feeling
about this place anymore. Maybe we should just leave.”
“I have a good feeling about this dog,” Ted said. “I don’t know
what it is, but I like him.”
“He sure is cute,” I said, suddenly willing to give Chance a chance.
“Look at that face! Those mismatched ears make him look sort of
goofy, but also dignified. Are you dignified?” I asked Chance, but he
just paced back and forth, wolflike, a mixed expression of worry and
violence on his face. “Poor boy,” I said. “I wonder what happened to
him. Why doesn’t he even bark?”
“Maybe we can find out,” Ted said. He went and got Mindy, who
came back with a leash and opened up Chance’s cage. She leashed
him up, apparently against his will, and then led us into the walking
area, a glassed-in room with a concrete floor. “You can spend as
much time in here as you’d like,” Mindy said as she closed the door on
us. Chance became frantic, and suddenly I felt like a Christian left in
a Roman arena with the lions. He panted and whined and scrambled
across the slippery floor, clawing and scratching at the windows, as if
he were looking for a means of escape. Ted, who held the leash, struggled
to control him, and tried to calm him down by saying “Sit” and
“Heel,” but Chance didn’t speak this language. He seemed to know
only Fear. I tried to sweet-talk him and stroke his fur, but every time I
went near him he scrambled away from me. Through the window,
I saw Mindy write something on her pad. I motioned for her to come
back in.
“He’s so nervous and skittish,” I said when she rushed in. “Is he
okay?”
“All dogs are like that,” she said. “This is unfamiliar to him.”
“Let me try to walk him,” I said to Ted. I’ve always had a rapport
with animals and considered myself the kind of person all dogs instinctively
know to trust.
Mindy raised her eyebrows at my dress and platform sandals. “Are
you sure you know how to walk a dog?”
“Yes, I know how to walk a dog. During graduate school I was a
dog walker. And I grew up with dogs. Huskies. Two litters were born
at my house.”
“Where are they now?” Mindy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The dogs. What happened to the dogs?”
“My dog Tasha? My father’s huskies from when I was a child?”
“Yes, yes. Where are the huskies? Is your father a breeder? A backyard
breeder?”
“No, he wasn’t a breeder,” I said. “Tasha had puppies. She was a
champion sled dog. So many people wanted her offspring that my
father had her bred.” Ted started to pinch me. “And when I was ten we
had to give Tasha away.”
“Exactly what do you mean, you ‘gave her away’?” Mindy said.
“My mother died,” I said. “We had a newborn baby in the house.
My poor father was overwhelmed. So we had to find our dog another
home.”
Mindy made yet another notation on her clipboard. “You need
to state that on your application,” she said. “You’re required to let us
know if you’ve had any history of getting rid of animals.”
“A history?” I said. “Of getting rid? Look you have no idea what it
was like—” Before I could finish, Ted pulled me away. “We need to
talk privately,” he explained to Mindy. And we left the volunteer with
Chance.
“Don’t piss her off !” Ted said outside the bonding room. “She
could deny our application.”
“Who trains these people?” I said. “That ninny! Here we are in a
situation where lives and connections and feelings and major decisions
are involved and she’s treating me like a criminal. Has she asked
us our names? Has she asked us where we live or what kind of dog we
want? I would make a good dog parent! And I am tired of having my
efforts thwarted!”
I shouted that last sentence and a woman who was coming down
the hallway pressed herself against the wall when she passed us, as if
my wrath were a disease she might catch.
“Look,” Ted said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t we
go see the puppies now? You’ll feel better when you’ve had some
puppy kisses.”
And who can stay mad in the puppy room? Soon I was surrounded
by dozens of warm, sweet, fuzzy, cuddly puppies. The air had
a fecund, yeasty smell—the smell of new life, and helplessness, and
promise—and the room was filled with the sounds of canine yipping
and whimpering, and human oohing and aahing. I felt something
ancient and maternal shift within me. I asked one of the attendants if
I could hold a puppy. “That one, there,” I said, pointing to a plump,
squirmy female who looked like a black Lab. Her name was Niblet, I
was told, and she was one of a twelve-pup litter that had just come
into the Pet Rescue. “Someone just dumped them off,” the attendant
explained. “We have no idea who the parents are. But they look like
Labs.” I lifted the warm, squirming Niblet to my face and breathed in
that puppy smell. My heart expanded, and I felt certain Ted’s would
too. Niblet had a white blaze on her chest and a tiny bit of white on
the tip of her tail. She whimpered rhythmically and quieted a little
when I brought her to my chest. “I can’t believe someone would just
dump them off,” I said. “Believe it,” the attendant said. “It’s a cruel
world, and dogs got it worst.” I began to kiss Niblet and whisper all
sorts of promises into her ears, how we would love and protect her,
and honor and serve, and how she would never have to be scared
again. She stopped and fell asleep against my chest. “Don’t you want
to hold her?” I said to Ted, but he shook his head. He kept glancing
back in the direction of the adult section. “I really like Chance,” he
said thoughtfully. “I don’t know what it is about him, but I’m drawn
to him.”
“But look at this little wittle cutie,” I said.
And then, as if on cue, Mindy reappeared, her straight hair
swinging pendulously as she hurried toward us. “Someone else is interested
in Chance,” she told us. “You need to make up your minds.”
“We’re still thinking,” Ted said. “Can’t you let us think?”
“You have three minutes,” she said, and literally spun on her
heels.
Ted and I looked at each other, and he opened his mouth as if to
speak, and then he turned around and followed Mindy. I surrendered
Niblet and followed Ted.
Another couple stood in front of Chance’s cage, with their backs
to the dog, discussing. When we approached they tactfully moved
away. They were older than Ted and I, and looked much more responsible.
She had a J. P. Tod’s handbag and matching shoes, and the
way he studied the adoption application—with fearless disdain—
made me suspect he was a contracts lawyer. No doubt they had a cabinet
devoted solely to jam.
Ted stopped Mindy before she could reach this couple. “Would it
be okay,” he asked Mindy, “if we decided we wanted Chance, to come
back and pick him up on Wednesday? We’d like to get our apartment
prepared and things like that.”
“This is not a boardinghouse,” Mindy snapped.
“We know it’s not a boardinghouse,” I said. “We’re simply not
familiar with the procedures. We’re asking questions.”
“Look.” Mindy folded her arms. “Do you want him or not? A dog
like him will be gone by Wednesday, so you need to decide now.”
This time I was really going to tell Mindy to piss off when something
happened. Chance started barking. It was a loud, insistent
bark, as if he were trying to tell us something very important. He ran
to the front of his cage, leapt up, paws on the rail. He took Ted’s wrist
in his mouth and gummed it.
Ted said kindly, “Don’t chew.” Then he turned to me. “Should we
do it?” he said.
“I guess,” and then I started to cry. Because it was so much like
saying “I do.”
Stunned and compliant, we were led into a processing center and
told to wait in line to get our application. After we stood in that line
for half an hour, we were told we had to wait in another line to verify
our references. Then we had to fill out more forms, and swear on the
Holy Bible that we were who we said we were and that we had no intentions
of selling the dog, or using him for medical research, and
then we had to stand at the counter while they confirmed our address
and called our three references, all of whom attested to our honesty,
stability, and integrity and then probably doubled over laughing once
they got off the phone.
Having passed these tests, we were asked to sit in the waiting
room for twenty minutes, ostensibly for them to fill out more paperwork,
but really, we thought, to give everyone one last chance to
20 Lee Harrington
change their mind. The waiting room was set up like an auditorium:
rows of chairs facing a small television set that had a bouquet of flowers
on top of it, as if it were a shrine. We could smell the worry in the
room, and the second thoughts, and the fear.
“It’s so clinical,” I whispered to Ted.
“Shhh,” he said.
A few rows beyond us sat a woman with Lloyd Neck written all
over her—she had the silk blouse, the Lilly Pulitzer skirt, the Pappagallo
espadrilles. I watched with interest as this woman was called
back to the interview area. As she stood, her bracelets clinked and a
cloud of expensive perfume rose along with her. You could tell she got
whatever she wanted and that she always demanded the best. But
minutes later she came out screaming in rage. “I’m a donor!” she
shouted to the volunteer who escorted her. “How dare you refuse me
that cat? I’ve given hundreds, no, thousands of dollars to this place.
How dare you!” She told her husband to get his coat. “We’re leaving.
They’re not letting us take the cat. They think it’s my fault Tuna got
hit by a car! You’ll hear about this!” she shouted to the room in parting.
And she left us all with the sickening feeling that we, too, would
be denied.
“I wish I hadn’t told Mindy about those huskies,” I said.
Ted said: “Should we go back and tell them we want that little
black puppy you liked?”
On the television was a nature program in which two hideous
giant lizards gnashed at each other’s throats. Their hides were tough
and textured, but they still bled red when their flesh was torn off. I
shifted in my seat. “Should we go find that contracts lawyer and tell
him he can have Chance?”
“We could at least get their names, I guess,” Ted said. “In case
they take him home and change their minds.” But neither of us
moved.
Another person’s name was called and a lone young woman rose
and disappeared. My heart pounded. We could still back out, I thought,
as we had backed out before.
But then they were calling our names and delivering the good
news—we had been accepted! We passed! And then they were giving
us Chance, along with a pamphlet and some exit papers and a new
blue leash, and then they wished us luck and pointed us toward the
exit, and Chance, sensing a way out, yanked us through the doors and
into the parking lot, and when he saw the woods beyond he headed in
that direction. He was a medium-sized dog—fifty-five pounds according
to his exit papers—yet he pulled with the force of a steam engine.
We struggled and struggled to pull him toward our car, and he resisted,
oh, how he resisted. God knew where he’d be taken this time,
his resistance implied, but he would not have it. No, he would not. No,
no, no! As we wrestled him into the car, he literally howled the word—
Noooooo!!—and threw himself against the windows. I got in the backseat
with him, thinking that would help calm him down, but still he
howled and scratched and hurled himself against the doors and windows,
desperate to escape.
Ted put the car into reverse and we screeched out of the parking
lot as if we were racing against time. He drove with control and precision,
his jaw set. As we pulled onto the Long Island Expressway and
headed for New York, Chance’s brays got louder, more intense, as if he
were saying: Don’t take me to the city! Don’t take me to where I’ll find glass
on the sidewalks and needles in the park! Don’t take me to your studio apartment—
you don’t have enough space! Your windows look out onto air shafts!
You’re not a real couple! You never follow through! NO! NO! NOOOOOO!!
I put my arms around the dog and tried to hold him still, but he
continued to squirm and scratch. I could feel his little heart pounding
and the heat of his breath as he panted and yowled. He smelled like
shampoo. He finally got loose and hurled himself against the door.
Ted looked at us in the rearview mirror. His eyes were disbelieving
and glazed. “Are you okay back there?”
Chance cried, No, no, no, noooooo!
Eventually we reached that point on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway
where you can see all of Manhattan displayed before you
like a postcard. A million office windows twinkled and winked, their
height reflected in the river. Usually, whenever I beheld this sight my
heart would surge and the first few bars of Frank Sinatra’s rendition
of “New York, New York” would start playing in my head. This time,
however, my little black dress was being clawed to shreds by a psychosetter.
I felt like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.
“What have we done?” I said to Ted.
“We adopted a dog,” Ted said. It helped, for a second, to hear him
narrow it down to the essentials like that. The moment felt existential.
“We took a Chance!” I said.
The Chance tried to ram his way bodily into the front seat, like a
Great White Shark attacking a diver’s cage.
“Get him off me!” Ted said. “We’re going to crash!”
“I’m trying. I’m afraid he’s going to scratch my eyeballs out.”
“Tell him we’ll be home in about half an hour,” Ted said. “Can you
make it till then?”
“I think so,” I said. Our eyes met again in the rearview mirror, and
for a moment, I saw the real Ted. The eternal Ted. I felt that Knowing
again, and trusted that we’re in this together, for better or for worse.
So I put my arms around Chance and held him. I had to use all my
strength to keep him still. “You’re going to be all right,” I told him.
“We’re going to take care of you.”
“Yes, we’re going to take care of you,” Ted said. “You have nothing
to be scared of.”
But even as I said this, I didn’t quite believe it. There is plenty to be
scared of in New York. And in life. Especially when you make a major
change.
“Let’s rename him,” I said. “It will symbolize his new life with us.”
“Good idea,” Ted said. “He’s English, so it should be an Anglican
name. Something dignified but also cute, like his face.”
Back and forth, Ted and I called out goofy yet dignified names for
the dog: Clarence? Watkins? Percival?
Chance cried, Noooooo!
Darcy? Bingley? Wickham?
Noooooo!
“How about Wallace?” Ted said.
I noticed that the dog’s white ear had little specks of brown on it.
“That’s cute.”
“We could name him after Wallace Stevens,” Ted said. “Did I ever
tell you I did my senior thesis on the poems of Wallace Stevens as
compared to the lyrics of Robert Hunter?”
“Who is Robert Hunter?” I asked. The dog struggled to squirm out
of my lap.
“He wrote most of the lyrics for the Grateful Dead. He and”—
Ted’s eyes widened—“Jerry.”
“We’re not naming him Jerry,” I said. The dog was still howling
and scratching at my arms, so I let him go. He leapt away and pressed
himself against the opposite door, staring at me with terror. His little
ribs heaved up and down.
“I like the name Wallace,” Ted said.
“So do I. It’s a good name to grow into.”
The dog did not howl noooooo, so we took this as a yes.
And thus our dog had a new name, a new beginning, and a new
life. And although he was really named after a great and complex
poet, in these pages he shall henceforth be known as Rex. Rex of the
City.

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