Good Dog. Stay. Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  BEGIN READING

  PHOTO CREDITS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ANNA QUINDLEN

  COPYRIGHT

  For several years I was that most pathetic of creatures, a human who walks into the veterinarian’s office without an animal. “Beau?” the woman behind the desk would call, and I would rise. Dr. Brown would usher me back into an examining room kitted out with a bottle of preserved heartworms and a model of the canine knee and send me off with a prescription refill and the promise of a house call when necessary. The house call would be for the purpose of euthanasia, but neither of us ever said the word.

  The object of our discussion, a black Labrador retriever with the ridiculous AKC name Bristol’s Beauregard Buchanan, was at home sleeping on an oriental rug in the foyer. The rug smelled. So did Beau. At this late date there was not much reason for him to appear at the vet in person. His sight and his hearing were mostly gone. But he had retained the uncanny ability to know when a certain phony lilt to my voice as I snapped on the leash meant we were headed to that place where his prostate was once examined. After that memorable visit, when he emerged from the back of the veterinary office with the fur on his spine raised as though he was a Rhodesian ridgeback, he had made me a figure of fun on crowded New York City streets. “You’re really pulling that dog,” a man once said, stating the obvious near a bus stop on Broadway. It was true; Beau’s white-coat syndrome took the form of systemic paralysis, so that he turned himself into a solid seventy-five-pound block at the end of the leash, like one of those wooden pull toys for children, but bigger and more obdurate. When we finally made it to the waiting room, he would begin to shake and shiver and shed his coat, so that the other patients and their people were enveloped in a haze of fine black fur not unlike a cloud of gnats.

  I did not miss those forays, although I mourned the increasing infirmity that made them impossible. As Beau grew old there was no way, other than the dog taxi that advertised on the vet’s bulletin board alongside the cards for homeless kittens and lost mongrels, to travel those few blocks. He moved as though his back legs were prosthetics to which he had yet to become accustomed. The very last time he sensed we might be heading to the dog doctor, he lay down on the front stoop and refused to budge. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Neither was I. I’ve put in my time around people whose bodies were failing, who were clearly marooned in some limbo between illness and death. I hated the way the medical profession felt obliged to continue to poke, to test, to treat, even when cure or comfort was not in the cards. With people, it’s assumed you’ll do everything; with animals you have the luxury of doing the right thing. A Supreme Court justice once said that one of the most important rights is the right to be left alone. After nearly fifteen years of loyal companionship, Beau had earned that right.

  It’s a shame that obituaries and eulogies come only after people are gone and unable to appreciate them. How many times after a memorial service have you said of the deceased, “She would have loved it”? Rumor has it that certain celebs, knowing The New York Times writes important obits well in advance, have tried to get a peek at their own. Their expressed rationale is fact-checking, but I suspect it has more to do with self-esteem. How many inches of type? What sort of coverage? And, in the world of the preeminent and the prominent, the big question: Will the story run on the front page with a picture?

  Beau, of course, will have no idea what I say about him, although he always seemed to understand that a laptop in its case near the front door meant a trip to the country, which, even in his old age, gimpy as he was, sent him into a fandango. Besides, when I talk about him I’m really talking about me, about us, about our family, about our life together. Dogs provide many services in the lives of human beings, even human beings who don’t need a dog to lead them through their daily routines or to keep predators away from their sheep. In dog shows, the class of dogs who do those kinds of jobs are still called working dogs, but most of them don’t work anymore in those particular ways, nor do many hunting dogs hunt. (The classification of certain animals as toy dogs, however, remains accurate.) The job so many dogs really perform is to allow us to project our feelings upon them, to assume they are excited or downhearted or lonely when we are. “He’s so much happier when he’s out in the country,” my husband always liked to say about Beau. And maybe he was right. But I suspect it is he who is happier in the country, and he liked the idea that he and Beau were of one mind.

  People do this with their children, too, trying to use them as a mirror or a foil, which is how you come to have otherwise sane men screaming instructions on Little League fields or women allowing preadolescent girls to wear just a little lip gloss, just a little blush. Most parents come to their senses sooner rather than later, so that their sons and daughters are not forced into a declaration of independence and individuality by leaving home or marrying young. But any woman who has ever lain in a birthing room and watched as, in violation of all laws of physics, an entire human being emerged from her body, can be forgiven if she has a difficult time seeing the resulting person as utterly and irreversibly separate.

  For a long time I thought of myself, rather smugly, as quite good at this separation stuff. Then one evening I was providing what, it developed, was some heavy-handed help on a high school essay. In an even tone of voice, our daughter said, “Mom, I am not you.” Along with “Will you marry me?” and “You’re pregnant,” those words are a flag flying in my subconscious from here to eternity.

  Dogs, however, do not talk, or talk back, which is part of their charm in a hyperverbal age, and so they lend themselves effortlessly and endlessly to this sort of projection. So does their essential open-faced affect. It would never occur to me to assume that the cat and I have two hearts that beat as one; with his narrowed amber eyes and scarred upper lip, his prevailing mode is either contempt or indifference. When he curls around my ankles, it suggests hunger, not affection. I like this about cats; they’re the Clint Eastwoods of companion animals. A dog who sits by your side craves company; a cat is doing you a favor. This is why when you say “Sit!” a cat rises and stalks out of the room. Most dogs will fall back onto their haunches, vibrating slightly, their liquid eyes locked on yours.

  Human beings wind up having the relationship with dogs that they fool themselves they will have with other people. When we are very young, it is the perfect communion we honestly believe we will have with a lover; when we are older, it is the symbiosis we manage to fool ourselves we will always have with our children. Love unconditional, attention unwavering, companionship without question or criticism. I once saw a pillow that said I WOULD LIKE TO BE THE MAN MY DOG THINKS I AM. That about covers it.

  So the traits we ascribe to our dogs, the stories we tell ourselves about them are, at some level, our own stories. When Beau tottered down our block, passersby saw a very old Lab with a white muzzle and a tail that seemed vaguely broken, as though all those years of wagging had worn it out. But I saw a dog whose entire life, puppyhood to adolescence to middle and old age, was inextricably entwined with those of two little boys with high, piping voices and their younger sister, who spent her formative years trailing her brothers around. I remember the three of them squatting next to a roly-poly puppy and allowing him to gnaw on their fingers. “He has really sharp teeth,” the eldest said. “You’re right, Quin,” said the second. “His teeth are really sharp!” “Really sharp,” their sister repeated.

  Those boys are men, the girl a woman, their parents middle-aged. That is the story of my life, and of Beau’s. His children grew tall, their familiar voices dropped in tone and timbre, their soft faces sharpened to reveal the architecture of cheekbones and chin. But he alway
s knew them. They went away to college, were gone for months at a time, spilled back through the door with a clutch of friends so enamored of their own lives that sometimes they merely stepped over him on their way to somewhere else. And still his tail thrummed on the hardwood floor, like the fan belt on some machine.

  Sometimes people tell me that their children are begging for a puppy, and that they won’t be fooled into going along because they know, they know that the kids say they will train the dog, walk the dog, feed and brush and tend the dog, but they won’t. Well, of course they won’t. Any parents who believe that they themselves will not wind up walking the dog most, if not all, of the time—especially in a downpour or a sleet storm—are parents who will also believe that there is no homework over the winter break and that the cigarettes belonged to someone else. For children, the point of having a dog is something like the point of having a mother and father. Our job is not to do but to be, not to act but to exist. We are bedrock, scenery, landscape, to be often ignored and then clung to during difficult or frightening or, occasionally, happy times. My mom, my dad, my dog, my home, immutable, to leave and then to return to at will and leave again.

  Once he’d grown to adulthood, Beau was the sort of dog whom central casting might have chosen for that solid and stable role, with his big blocky head, foursquare stance, gruff bark. A Disney cartoonist could have anthropomorphized him, in robes or a white coat, as a judge or a general practitioner. But his long Labrador life started off wild and crazy. We mothers do not use the word “bad” much anymore, believing that it is too judgmental in a nonjudgmental age. Instead we use the locution “not good,” as in “Christopher, it is so not good for you to put yogurt in Maria’s hair. Quin, it is so not good that you told him to do that.” In his formative years, Beau was so not good that nothing and no one was safe. Friends who came to visit in the country had to be repeatedly cautioned not to leave shoes or socks at ground level when they wanted to go swimming; he ate them both. My most enduring memory of his youth is of him galloping around the yard, purloined needlepoint yarn streaming from his mouth. As an adolescent dog he once happily grabbed our daughter by her ponytail and tried to run off with her. He looked completely flummoxed when we screamed at him and, I am sad to say now, thrashed him with a rolled newspaper.

  My husband likes to say that there are no bad dogs, only bad masters, although usually when he says this he is not talking about dogs at all. Occasionally we had to wonder if we were bad masters. Beau ran away and we had to leave the country for the city without him one Sunday evening while the children sobbed in the backseat. “Is Beau dead?” asked the eldest as the wailing music of the other two, like one of those discordant modern compositions, grew louder. We put an ad in the local paper and it turned out that Beau was not dead but living happily with a golden retriever about two miles away. My father drove his pickup there with Beau’s crate in the back and dragged him home. Even in the less hospitable city, if the door to the house was left open for even a moment he would slip out and gallop, unfettered, down the street. I would run for blocks, with passersby to guide me: Oh, the black dog? He went that way. One wag suggested I write a children’s book entitled “Follow That Dog!” I did not find it funny.

  Labradors are notorious late bloomers, dogs who continue to think they are puppies long past the statutory age and weight at which this seems reasonable. The most frequent advice we received was that Beau would stay much closer to home after he was fixed, a strange term of art, since it suggests that a male with all his parts working is a problem in need of a remedy. Fixed he was, a simple operation accompanied by a difficult conversation. What Beau had lost had great meaning to the boys, then ten and eight; they visibly tensed as they sat side by side on the sofa. Beau himself banged around the house in one of those plastic postsurgical collars, getting stuck in doorways, knocking mugs off the coffee table. “Old Bucket Head,” we called him.

  It is true that once he had grown into his tremendous feet and his tremendous tail, he settled down considerably. His circuit narrowed, from the whole wide world to the house down the road where the owners forgot to put the lids on the garbage can, and the back swamp, where there was always some chance of running into a deer carcass. Some days he would emerge, wagging wildly, with an entire rib cage in his mouth. And he still had a predilection for certain sorts of trouble. One summer he was skunked three times, and he spent weeks studded with spines after indulging his taste for advanced decomposition by rolling on a dead porcupine.

  He hated horses and could hear them long before we could; he would begin to bay ceaselessly a good three or four minutes before the clip-clop of hooves would echo through the valley. Beau was also terrified by the percussive: Gunfire and thunder undid him completely, and when displays of fireworks could be heard on the Fourth of July, it was a cinch that he would disappear upstairs. There are few things more pitiable than the sight of a full-grown Labrador with only his tail and his back end visible from beneath the dust ruffle on the bed. And he simply would not swim, no matter how often he was lectured by his master about the responsibilities of a water dog. We concluded he was defective, missing a key Labrador gene. Then one July day when he was six years old, he suddenly entered the water and began to paddle purposefully across the pond to chase away a dozen geese whose honking had enraged him.

  By then he was a good dog, and we told him so often. It was one of the terms he recognized, along with “chow,” “leash,” and “walk.” He ran with his master every morning, posed in front of the fireplace in winter in a recumbent position like an insurance ad, stayed off the furniture, and did not jump on guests. People admired his self-control, on the street and at dinner parties, although one New Year’s Eve he was discovered with his muzzle buried to the ears in a bowl of chocolate truffles.

  His greatest challenge, at least until he found himself unable to negotiate the stairs, came when he was nine years old. Mesmerized by a litter of tawny puppies, we decided to acquire a yellow Labrador whose full name, Endless Mountains Biggie Shortie, was shortened to Bea. This was a mistake, since when strangers on the street asked for their names, our two dogs wound up sounding like a vaudeville act. But the biggest error, as far as Beau was concerned, was the initial impulse. Our sense was that we were doing him a tremendous favor: In his often dull and uneventful middle age, we were giving him his own dog. His sense was that we had lost our minds.

  We are not the sort of people who confuse dogs with children. We never referred to ourselves as Beau’s mommy and daddy, nor did we ever call him our son. We had sons, and they never tried to lick our faces nor steal hamburger meat defrosting on the kitchen counter. The chances of either my husband or I ever putting clothes on a dog is between zero and nil. We would not be the people for a dog who would stand for such a thing.

  But Beau’s reaction to the acquisition of Bea was familiar to us, not from our years as dog owners but from our years as parents. He didn’t like the competition. He would insinuate himself between Bea and his master every chance he got. Put a hand on her head and he was right there, using his big skull and shoulders to shift her aside. As this puppy circled his legs, nipping at his flanks and then playfully running away, he became increasingly annoyed, until finally he held her down with one paw and growled.

  She learned her lesson in subservience well; she followed him everywhere slavishly and developed a habit of occasionally stopping to lick his face while he was sleeping. The dynamic was familiar to any parent. I remember once explaining to our eldest that he would have to be patient with my divided responsibilities. “Don’t forget, I’m Christopher’s mommy, too, Quin,” I said. “And Daddy is Christopher’s daddy?” he replied, horrified. It turned out that there is an enormous difference between telling a toddler a new baby is coming and having him understand that the baby is going to have dibs on the parents he believed were his alone. Or, as Christopher once went on to say about Maria, “Why did we need another baby in this house?”

  Our rationa
le was that Bea would keep Beau young, and I suspect that is what did happen. He ran because she did, foraged at her side, kept up when he might have lain down. When both of them were younger, she used to dance in circles and butt-check her older companion violently for her own amusement, but as he became increasingly infirm she knew not to do that anymore. And while birth order meant that we called him the Big Guy, and her the Little Girl, over time she became stronger and more formidable than he. In the fashion of the frail elderly, he seemed to shrink, and his skeleton became more prominent until eventually he was all vertebrae and pelvis beneath the flat black fur. For long periods he lay, alert, his milky eyes gazing mysteriously inward, as though he was reliving the past. Unless we entered the room with heavy footfalls he often did not know we were there, and it became important to approach him slowly so that he would not be startled by a pat on the head. Sometimes he splayed frog-legged on the linoleum and could not rise again without a boost in the rear; some days he had to be wheelbarrowed up the stairs in a kind of three-legged-race arrangement, in which we would hold his two back legs and he would use his front ones. Beau once had a catcher’s mitt of a mouth, but there came a time when a scrap thrown in his direction usually bounced unseen off his head. Yet put a pork roast in the oven, and the guy still breathed as audibly as an obscene caller. The eyes and ears may have gone, but the nose was eternal. And the tail. The tail still wagged, albeit at half-staff. When it stops, I thought more than once, then we’ll know.

  Beau was a gift on my fortieth birthday from my closest friend and her husband. Every ten years my own husband gives me a surprise party, although, if life were a yearbook, I would overwhelmingly be voted Least Likely to Want to Be Caught Unawares. The idea that I have not seen the guest list, the menu, or the flowers throws me into a swivet, which may be why he does it in the first place. The year I turned forty was particularly bad in this regard, or good, depending on whether you were the gleeful architect of the surprise or the befuddled victim. Although the zero at the end of my age had put me on full alert, my mind abuzz with memories of a thirtieth birthday party held during a power outage on one of the hottest days of the year, I was thrown off by a request from my boss that I give a speech to a group of advertisers at a downtown restaurant. Even when all our friends appeared, grinning, from behind the double doors of the restaurant’s private room, I continued to repeat, “I have prepared remarks!” until someone told me to shut up.