fourteen
DOMESTIC BLISS
Carol was right. Harry, left to his own devices, would indeed have slept till noon every day. Unfortunately for him, chez Teichner, lying in bed all morning wasn’t an option. At five-thirty, a quarter to six at the latest, when I usually get up, I’d find Harry against a pillow, perpendicular to my head, snoring. I’d slip out from under the covers, brush my teeth, wash, dress. Then I would collect the bag containing scissors, first-aid supplies, and the bootie I put over his cracked pad. Most days, he never woke up. He’d just keep right on snoring as I picked up his paw. It was like holding a baby’s hand and waving goodbye. I could move it any way I wanted as I started applying antibiotic ointment and wrapping it in tape, eventually pulling on the red bootie and securing its Velcro strap. At night, after boosting Harry up onto my bed, I’d remove the bootie and cut the bandage off.
It took a while, but after considerable trial and error, I worked out a system and figured out which products worked best and how much of everything I needed to keep on hand.
I thought about what the people at my local CVS pharmacy must have thought. I would go in and buy them out of nonstick pads and the various kinds of tape I used, eight, ten, twelve rolls at a time, if they had that much, plus enough antibiotic ointment to oil an elephant. The girls at the registers always looked puzzled as I unloaded my basket. They had to recognize me, I was in there so often. Were they curious? Why those particular first-aid items over and over? What kind of injury were they for that never got better? How big was the person or thing this woman was patching up? Did she have a mummy at home?
They’d get in new stock, and suddenly, a day later, it would all be gone. Surely no other CVS store in Manhattan went through that stuff so fast. I could imagine the store manager looking at the sales figures and wondering what in the world was going on, the warehouse perplexed and possibly suspicious at the constant reordering. Every time, I’d shell out forty or fifty dollars. Harry’s foot care, I discovered, was expensive.
Getting Harry up took some doing. A kiss or a pet might or might not wake him. Once he opened his eyes, his expression changed from trusting to suspicious to defiant. He never, ever, had any intention of starting his day when I started mine. He clearly preferred Carol’s hours. Most mornings, he’d take one look at me and wriggle to whatever part of the bed was hardest for me to reach. I usually had to put my arms around him and haul/drag/push all sixty-something pounds of him along the duvet to the foot of the bed, then help him down to the floor.
Getting Minnie up in the morning was even harder than getting Harry up. She informed me daily that she was not a morning person. I’m quite sure she thought she was a person. I’d pull back her blankets and nudge her. No response. I’d nudge her again. No response. I’d pet her, scratch her ears. After three or four tries, maybe she’d raise her head and give me one of her indignant, put-out looks before pretending to go back to sleep. I’d try to lift her to a standing position. As often as not, she’d collapse back down again. When she finally deigned to leave her bed, on her terms, she’d arrange herself frog-dog style on a nearby rug and do several elaborate stretching exercises.
Breakfast. Not mine, Harry’s and Minnie’s. I ordered Harry’s three kinds of prescription diet dog food online and had the shipments sent to my office, since delivery services can’t get into the building where I live unless someone’s home to buzz them in. A case of twelve cans and two eight-and-a-half-pound bags of dry food. Heavy. I took them home six cans or a bag at a time on the bus, so it took four days per shipment. I became a dog-food packhorse. In the morning, I mixed together some of each, plus big spoonfuls of Greek yogurt and canned pumpkin. I hid Harry’s six different types of pills in wads of raw ground sirloin. Harry happily gobbled up his meals.
Minnie refused to eat unless she was hand-fed. She often refused to eat at all when I was away on assignment. She got bored with the same menu every day, so every couple of weeks, I pushed my grocery cart to the Barking Zoo and hauled home a fifteen-pound bag of something called Hund-n-flocken and an assortment of cans with such names as Grammy’s Pot Pie and Santa Fe Skillet, in addition to plain old beef or venison or lamb. There was barely room in my pantry for what I planned to eat. Minnie, too, had yogurt and pumpkin with her breakfast, the pumpkin something new when Harry arrived. She seemed to like it, to the extent that she admitted to liking anything other than mangoes. Like Harry, she got her various medicines wrapped in meat. I found myself going through about six pounds of ground sirloin a week.
Hearing the litany of services rendered daily, a friend told me I must have a sign on my back, invisible to humans, that says FOOL FOR DOGS.
A walk. It was late fall and cold by the time Harry settled in, so after their breakfasts, I had to get both dogs into their sweaters or jackets. Harry cooperated. Minnie saw me coming and always ran around and around the apartment until I cornered her. If dogs can scowl, she was scowling.
Coffee in one hand, leash in the other, I urged the two of them down the front stairs to the street.
It was still dark when we went out. Sometimes, on clear mornings, as we made our way to Chelsea Piers and the park along the Hudson, I could see the moon just above the rooftops about to set, or a colossal cruise ship as tall as a building looming in front of us as we reached the water. I loved watching the ships glide by in the gloom on their way upriver to dock. Every day, I’d stop and sit on a particular bench so that I could say good morning to the Statue of Liberty in the distance, a bit hard to make out, but her raised arm and the white light of her torch unmistakable. Harry caught on quickly that this was our treat stop. Three treats, no more, except when I fell for the starving-dog act. Harry and Minnie had refined looking pitiful and hungry to an art, Minnie ever the actress. Harry was happy to be her leading man, especially if it meant a few extra treats.
I got into the habit of having my phone with me wherever I happened to be with the dogs. After Carol told me it would break her heart if I brought Harry to see her, I couldn’t miss chances to take pictures to send her. Examples: standing at my feet in the kitchen looking up with expectation in their eyes; sitting together at the top of the stairs to the garden; lying on the floor, their bodies touching, her paws on his; Harry in bed; Minnie in bed; Harry and Minnie together in bed; Harry in his biker jacket; Harry in his varsity jacket covered with pins; the two of them tied to the wrought-iron fence across the street surrounded by a sea of fallen yellow ginkgo leaves; side by side squatting to pee directly in front of a sign with a picture of a dog in a circle with a line through it; three little birds perched inches away on the bench where I sat to hand out treats; Harry, his chin on the bench, eyeing the bag of treats just beyond his nose. That sort of thing.
Knowing I had to find pictures to take made me look around on our morning walks. I watched seagulls and cormorants bobbing on the river, riding a fast tide toward the ocean. Looking east, I saw a pink sky above a cubist cityscape, the Empire State Building a familiar face in the crowd, not the tallest but still tall in the geometry of dark buildings. As the sun came up, for a few minutes it turned the far side of the river, the New Jersey side, bright gold, the construction cranes and half-built high-rises transforming the New York side silver. Dawn felt spiritual. I needed those mornings.
For a few weeks, I saw a young red-tailed hawk every day. It would soar above the trees, then plunge suddenly, disappearing into the bushes before rising again, moments later, sometimes with a rat writhing in its beak. Often, it landed on a streetlamp overlooking the path the dogs and I took through the park. I never managed to get a good picture, but even in my sorry little snapshot, you recognize that this was a creature uninterested in the likes of us, its haughty profile silhouetted against the sky, its beak and head turned away.
On the walk home I strained to look in the windows of the art galleries. I checked out the posters advertising rock concerts and weird, trendy clothes plastered all over the plywood used to board up what was a restaurant before Superstorm Sandy destroyed it in 2012. New posters were slapped over old posters, their edges framed by an ooze of hardened glue. I couldn’t pass the building without remembering what it looked like when the flooding drained away, the high-water mark left behind a foot above my head. Now homeless people slept in the shelter of the scaffolding that supported it.
The dogs had their own landmarks. Strange stones maybe three feet high, each one paired with a tree, line the 500 block of West Twenty-second Street, as if short druids had left behind proof they inhabited Manhattan once. In fact, part of a 1980s art installation, the stones have been repurposed. Peed on by practically every dog passing by, they are now the daily record of canine activity in the area. Harry and Minnie sniffed them, one after another, long and hard, reading them like a newspaper.
The more I looked, the more I was amazed by the extraordinary things there were to see on an ordinary walk.
Snacks. We came home and ate fruit together, something I’ve done with all my bull terriers. After I’d exercised, showered, and dressed, it was time for bite-size shredded wheat squares dipped in honey-roasted peanut butter.
Red kisses. Before I left for work or a trip, I’d give Harry and Minnie big, red lipstick kisses and tell them I loved them, some superstitious part of me hoping I was inoculating them from harm.
Dinner. Most nights, when I wasn’t traveling, I’d get home from work around eight o’clock, say hello to the dogs, check the mail, change clothes, and then make dinner. If I lingered a little too long before heading into the kitchen, standing at my dining table opening bills or leafing through a magazine that had just arrived, Minnie—with her sidekick, Harry, in silent support—would bark at me, a loud, indignant, get-in-there-now bark. No ambiguity about her message whatsoever.
It’s not as if the dogs were wasting away. My au pair made them dinner long before I got home. They wanted more dinner, some of my dinner. I would deposit bits of leftover meat or fish into their upturned mouths. With Minnie and Harry, I couldn’t decide whether it was more like feeding baby birds or snapping turtles.
THE FARMERS MARKET. I was giddy on the Saturday Minnie and Harry and I set off for the farmers market together the first time, Harry wearing his red bootie. It was at the end of October, a few days after Stephen’s emergency call asking me to take Harry for a few days; in fact, just a few hours before I found out he would be staying with me for good. There were again three of us heading to Union Square. Harry was lazy and had to be urged along. Minnie pulled a little. I had to be careful so that my grocery cart didn’t run over their feet. It was a glorious morning, the market filled with apples and grapes, beautiful squashes and flowers, everywhere the colors of fall.
Arriving with Harry reminded me of going to school or work after getting a radically different haircut and feeling self-conscious, wondering what people would say or if anybody would even notice? I’d told a few regulars about Carol and Harry. Right about where I’d run into Stephen on that day in July, I now ran into Sunny and his owners, Mike and Julia. Minnie, as usual, ignored Sunny. Sunny lifted his head and wagged his tail slowly when he saw Harry. They eyed each other and stood nose to nose. Carol once told me that Harry knew another bull terrier when he saw one. So, it seemed, did Sunny. Mike and Julia beamed.
At Cato Corner Cheese, the tall, lanky man who always cuts my slab of Dutch Farmstead into a tic-tac-toe of cubes to give to the dogs tipped a pile of free scraps into my palm and announced he was happy to make Harry’s acquaintance. People did notice, and I wondered why it mattered so much to me that they knew the story and cared enough to be sad for Carol and glad for me.