The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (31 page)

But I would. I did. Have a problem. It was easy enough to give voice to my
ambivalence
about having a child; maternal ambivalence is très chic these days; there are lots of books about it, and Oprah did a whole show on the topic, each female guest confessing that, yes, she had a shadow side; that, yes, when it came to babies and feelings about them, it wasn’t all cream and talc. None of this comforted me. It seemed to me my ambivalence was of altogether a different sort, or species. A single question circled round and round inside my skull, its serrated edges making a scraping sound that no one else could hear. What I didn’t say … Okay. What if I couldn’t love the baby
as much as
I loved my dogs? Or, what if I found I loved both the baby and the animals
equally?
Can you imagine admitting to that, should it occur? In the hypereducated community that comprises my culture, a culture that boasts more PhD holders per square mile than most other parts of the country, or even the world, such a feeling for one’s pets is more blasphemous than having a house decorated with stenciled hearts or printing a tattoo of a serpent on your bicep. In my culture, it’s tentatively okay to have a companion animal, but one must avoid the sentimentality associated with it at all costs. One must rigidly remember not to anthropomorphize and above all not to ooze emotion over domesticated beasts, the toys for which consumers stupidly spend over billions of dollars while so many in this world are starving.

So how could I comfortably say, or feel, that I might love daughter and dogs equally? Did I not know the difference between my meats, MacDonald’s on the one hand, expensive organic rib eye on the other?
A whole new middle-class, navel-gazing female writer problem
, the critics might write, if they wrote anything at all.
Domesticity diminished to its most insignificant level.
And, yet, were I to claim I valued my dogs and my daughter equally, I would not in fact be making an insignificant statement. I would be in violation of a sacred human stance in place since pets, thousands of years ago, first took up residence in human households.

But that is not the whole story, not by a long shot. If I had known then what I know now, perhaps I could have been comforted. Because there are places and times far, far away from here—there are and were places—where people loved animals as much, if not more, than their own children. And these people represent a vast variety of cultures from all around the world. Explorer Francis Galton, for instance, wrote in his 1883
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
, about coming upon aboriginal Australian women who “habitually feed the puppies they intend to rear from their own breasts, and show an affection for them equal to, if not exceeding, that to their own infants.”

Another anthropologist of the nineteenth century told how, in Fiji, women and shamans made pets of parrots, fruit bats, and lizards, and, noted James Serpell in his
In the Company of Animals
, they apparently felt such love for their animals that they would masticate for them plants and bananas while their own human babies stayed hungry at their sides. My favorite image is that reported by I. H. Evans in the 1930s. He lived amongst the Semang Negritos of Malaysia and wrote of seeing a woman running down the street in a great hurry, a baby at one breast, a monkey at the other.

My breasts: They grew in pregnancy, the veins bulging blue and a particular deep purple hue. The nipples swelled and sensitized, at the end the size of strawberries, huge and indecent. Around month six I had my amnio—all was well—except the baby on the screen did not look human, nor animal, nor plant. She came, it appeared, from a category not yet created by Linnaeus; all static and blips, she lived inside the Hewlett Packard screen that showed her shape. And the bulge in my belly? What accounted for that? My dreams grew strange. In them I gave birth to a snowman, a two-legged tree, my sister. She tried to wash my hair and the soap stung my eyes. There was grit, burn, push, pull, the moon as tiny as a Cheerio in some strange sky. I woke up, scared and big.

I had the baby. Human birth is an unreasonable proposition; her head was too big for my pelvis; it got stuck in the brackets of bone. Hyenas, however, give birth through the clitoris, so I still count myself amongst the luckier of the beasts on our blue ball. There she was, seven pounds, waxy and wet.

Five days later, C-section healing, Benjamin and I brought our daughter home. We arrived to two dogs howling with joy – hello, hello, hello, kisses and slurps all around, such a long time, so
good
to see you, you too, leaping on hind legs, their short forelegs dangling the way they do, their ears pressed back in pleasure. All the books I’d read emphasized the importance of letting the dogs thoroughly sniff the new family member. I lowered the bundle of baby down. The summer breeze blew in, and halfway to their level, the dogs caught a whiff of the strange smell. They froze. Their eyes turned canine, carnivore, the little dots of yellow in the iris with a wolfish gleam.

“Stop,” said Ben. He claims he heard a low growl emanating from Lila’s throat. Had I heard it, I would have stopped, of course. I, however, heard nothing.

“Musashi, Lila,” I sang. Something was amiss, but what? “This is Clara,” I said, and then she was down, this baby so bundled only the disc of her face was visible, the tiny lips, the perfect mini nose, and eyelids scrawled with arteries.

Lila, always the more aggressive, stepped forward. Her snout was wet, her black lips seamed shut; but it was the eyes that gave me pause. Slowly, slowly, she lifted one leg and pawed at the bunting, almost batted it. Playful? Aggressive? Curious? Musashi followed, his blocky head low down and then, before I could stop them, their noses were in the wrappings, the huff huff of their hungry breath, the child screamed, the dogs shot back. Ben grabbed the baby from me, his own face full of canine rage. “How
could
you?” he spit. “They’ve bitten her.”

Understand, I was doped up on drugs, painkillers coursing through my system, the whole world wavy, and I had done what all the books instructed. “No,” I said. “No.”

We peeled back the wrappings. Our baby was unbroken, everywhere. In an instant she plunged into slumber again. Later on, when we removed her diaper, we saw blood inside it, but that, we knew, was not from the dogs. Female infants shortly after birth often menstruate, if you can call it that, in response to the maternal hormones. Yes, that blood came from me.

I have never brought up, certainly not then, or now, until now, the idea that I might love my animals as much as my child, or children. No one has ever thought to ask, despite the fact that everyone I know, as hypereducated as they all are, understands that meaning is often found in the questions we fail to form. The oversight has freed me to fret privately, and sometimes not at all. While some pluck petals off the daisy—he loves me, he loves me not—my chant is less melodic, as clunky as the conundrum it echoes:
I
love her more
;
I love her less; I love them all the same
. At the end of this exercise, what am I left with? A shredded flower, hands painted with pollen, cupped up and empty. I said nothing, to anyone, ever.

But, as a strategy, silence does not work to tamp the tugs one would rather not feel. As a mother, I
wanted
to feel clearly and cleanly driven
only
to my offspring, that packet of genes and nerves, that person in my pocket for the first nine months of her life, but it didn’t happen that way. In the early years of my daughter’s life, and then my son’s life too, when he was later born, I would sometimes feel a longing for my dogs that overrode every other affection and made no sense to me, given that I had as much physicality from my mate and babies as any person could possibly need. But I wanted to touch
another kind of being.
I wanted snout and paw. Why? The very fact of the connection calms. I love the canine paw, its ridges of interstitial fur, its surface cracked and cratered. I love the shape of the snout, the nostrils, the oblong ears, the teeth, tartared and sharp.

And it was this, this felt biological
need
to connect beyond my human confines, that drew me downstairs, again and again, after my babies were asleep. I’d sit in the kitchen and groom my dogs. Their undercoats were always dense with down; the fur flew, piling up in drifts I swept into big green bags, huge bloated bags that looked heavy but that drifted in the wind on garbage night. I’d stack them on the curb for the next day’s trash truck, but the fur-stuffed bags always flew away, flew high above the roofs of our city while over and over again I brushed the pups, until it was very late, and Benjamin came down, tired-eyed, 2 a.m., the first feeding over now. He’d see me on the floor, then and now, as well. “Making love with the pups?” he’d ask, and I say the only thing I could.

Yes.

With one child, and then a second, our lives got busier and then busier still. The children entered a marriage already divided by dogs; our babies sharpened the wedge, and drove it deeper down. We were two parents with full-time jobs and a moderate income, two parents determined to give their kids the best they could—skating lessons, pottery lessons, day camps, Spanish tutoring. As the children grew so too did the needs, and expectations, along with the bills, while time tucked its tail between its legs and went away. We lost time, traded it in for love, but here’s the quandary; love and time are hopelessly intertwined.

Benjamin and I worked hard to keep up with the accumulating costs of providing a middle-class education. Because we live in an urban area where the schools are poor, our goal was to save enough for private school, to the tune of $70,000 a year for two, not counting looming college costs. And forget about retirement. We doubted we’d survive the stress.

It was at some point during these difficult years that Ben developed that mysterious arm ailment that defied precise diagnosis. The pain began at first as an intermittent throb, but over time it escalated until, at last, it claimed him almost completely. Thoracic outlet syndrome, carpal tunnel, whatever it was, the ailment resulted from the computer, which he used most moments of his sixty- to seventy-hour work week. Unresponsive to any type of treatment except morphine, the pain, eventually, drained his face, beat in the back of his neck, his burning arms hanging useless by his sides. There were visits to pain clinics, so many I cannot count, each one exactly like the other, hushed and cold, tiled and white. There were visits to pharmacologists, psychologists, neurologists, chiropractors, while for the children there were yearly checkups, dental appointments, ear infections, strep throat, stomach bugs, vomit vomit vomit. If I told you we ever had fun during these years, you would not believe it; neither would I. We did. When Clara was five, we received a reminder card from our veterinarian: time for the canines’ various vaccines, the Heartgard medication, time for the toenail clipping, the teeth cleaning, the fecal tests. “We spend,” said Benjamin, when Clara was five, “thousands of dollars on these animals. One of these days, I’m going to get a calculator and figure the precise cost.”

We were in the kitchen. I was spooning mash into our secondborn’s mouth. “They’re worth it,” I said. This a conversation we’d had, in one form or another, since we first wed, both with and without the calculator, going round and round through the course of our marriage, our childrens’ lives, never growing stale, this, our old perpetual hot spot.

“To me,” I added.

“But to us?” he said.

“These dogs have taught our children a lot,” I said, and they had. From them our daughter had learned gentleness (
suavo, suavo
) and a certain perspicacity.

“Yes,” said Benjamin. “They have taught our children a lot. I agree.” He didn’t say anything after that.

“What?” I said.

“They just seem … I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of things. We have limited resources.”

“If we can afford cable,” I said, “then I think we can afford our pets.”

“We can,” he said. “But,” and then again he stopped. I sensed, suddenly and for the first time, that the conversation was about to change. Benjamin seemed to want to say something hard, something true for him. I could sense him running straight into the hot heart of a feeling, at the last second scuttering to a stop. When he spoke again, he had, to my disappointment, assumed his professorial stance.

“Pets,” he said, “are a product of bourgeois culture. Communist cultures abhorred pet keeping, and for a real reason. It is a sign of indulgence to spend so much money on dog food and diamond-studded collars and high-tech medical care when the world has such serious issues. It is wrong. It is a problem of priority. And we only do it because we can.”

“No,” I said. In fact I said this much later, months later, having by then armed myself with the research I might need in order to defend the dogs and their place in our family. What I found: people rich and poor alike all throughout history have kept pets. Far from being a bourgeois indulgence there have been many plainly impoverished societies where companion animals were prevalent. Writes James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, in his
In the Company of Animals
: