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Becky Has Two Daddies

[Robert Masello]

I
T’S BECOME
an early-Sunday-morning ritual. I stumble out of bed, throw on a ratty robe, and wait for my apartment buzzer to go off.

It’s Bill, Becky’s other dad, come to take her for a seven-mile hike up into the wilderness trails of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Becky is my two-year-old black Lab. Bill, a steel-gray captain-of-industry type, is the capable, commanding, and alpha dad who gives Becky the exercise and discipline she desperately craves, while I am the lazy, good-for-nothing beta dad she’s forced to live with all the rest of the time.

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes two daddies to raise this dog.

My old dog, Sam, died earlier this year; Sam was a once-ferocious mutt who had calmed down over the years, so much so that I could read the paper while taking him for a slow mosey around the block. Becky, recently acquired from a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, is a fancy-shmancy dog, an AKC-registered hound with more papers than a
Mayflower
descendant. She’s sleek and black and beautiful, like a well-oiled seal, and at 61 pounds, too strong and energetic for me to handle without a Haltie, a choke collar, a bridle, and a stun gun. (Just kidding about the stun gun.) Laurie, my wife, who’s also in better shape than I am (let’s face it, Dom DeLuise is in better shape than I am), is a mere slip of a thing, and prefers a genteel game of tennis to being dragged by a dog who’s pulling with the power of a tow truck in pursuit of every squirrel, bird, butterfly, and blowing candy wrapper that crosses her path.

Which may be why Bill has volunteered to perform this unusual form of community service. Becky leaps up, yipping, at the first sight of his Ford Explorer, her paws scrabbling at the side door, her tongue hanging out, her neck straining at the Louis Vuitton collar and leash. (My wife’s idea, may I add.) Bill gets out to let her in, and I cannot help but admire his taut abdomen, his well-muscled calves, his take-charge attitude; even though he’s a few years older than I am, Bill hasn’t let himself go. I, on the other hand, never really had a hold on myself in the first place.

While Becky and Bill are off hiking and running and romping in the hills, and Laurie’s tearing up a tennis court somewhere, I go back to bed (on a well-timed pickup day, the blankets are still warm), then set another alarm to get up and throw together a sad excuse for a brunch. Some coffee, some grapefruit juice, some pricey (but good) muffins from the new City Bakery in the Brentwood Country Mart. It’s the least I can do. Laurie tries to get home from her tennis match around the same time as Bill—often accompanied by his equally fit counterpart, Mimi—returns with Becky.

But sometimes they’re all a bit late, and that’s when I have too much time on my hands—time to think about how this all looks. My dog needs another man to give her what she requires, and everybody knows it. She needs the strong, sure hand I do not know how to provide.

When we first got Becky, we briefly hired an expensive trainer, a big woman with short-cropped red hair and baseball cap, who observed my dog-walking technique. For a block or two, I did my best to control Becky’s wild and powerful lungings while at the same time trying to reason with her, to explain to her why she needed to stop pulling, or spit out the snail she’d just crunched between her perfect white incisors. “You’re a man of words,” the trainer finally said, fixing me with her gimlet eye. “Yes, I guess I am,” I said, modestly, “I’m a writer.” “Dogs don’t understand many words,” she said, taking the taut leash from my hands and effortlessly removing the squashed snail from Becky’s slavering jaws, all with a magical gesture of some kind and a simple “Leave it.” The dog looked up at me as though thinking,
Is that all you wanted? Why didn’t you say so?

Why indeed? Because, as this dog has brought home to me, I lack the dominant gene. I cannot impose my will on anything: I can barely retrieve a soda from a vending machine. Do Becky and Bill, I wonder, laugh about that, as they march over hill and dale? What do they say about me and my slothful habits? Does Becky implore Bill, her other dad, to—I can hardly contemplate this—adopt her, to give her the active, fun-filled life that I, with my sedentary habits and submissive nature, can never do?

Do they talk about my bald spot?

When the buzzer goes off again, and Becky bounds into the house, racing for her water bowl, everyone is all smiles. Bill says something nice like “Oh, Becky’s home again, and wants to see her daddy.” And Mimi exclaims over the muffins. My wife, in her tennis duds, crows about her latest victory, and I try to turn the topic to a book review or an inflammatory editorial—whatever I’ve managed to read in the fifteen minutes I’ve been up since the last alarm went off. But nobody’s fooled, not even Becky. We’re all wondering how long we have to keep up this charade, how long we have to go on pretending that Becky needs two daddies at all. I offer everyone more juice, and try to hold the pitcher—still pretty full and heavy—steady as I pour. But everyone, I fear, can see the tremor in my hand. Becky in particular doesn’t miss a thing.

Can We Interest You in a Piece of Cheese?

[Alison Pace]

M
ORGAN,
A
DELAIDE,
Mischief, Boswell, Maxwell, Winston, Brentwood, Sasha, Spanky, Maggie, Bailey, Jake. Those are, respectively, the names of the Saint Bernard, English Bulldog, French Poodle, English Mastiff, Irish Wolfhound–English Sheepdog mix, Scottish Terrier, Wheaten Terrier, Shar-Pei, Shar-Pei, Shar-Pei, Jack Russell Terrier, and Corgi with whom I shared my formative years.

The years I remember as the Shar-Pei years began when I was eleven with the acquisition of Sasha, a black version of the breed who had eyes only for my mother. Sasha was followed shortly after by Spanky, the fawn-colored great love of my life, and then later by Maggie, an apricot beauty who never quite grasped the concept of her name, or of coming to the person who called it, and who in later years we began to call Margaret.

At the height of the Shar-Pei years (years that also included Max, the Irish Wolfhound–English Sheepdog mix of exceptional intelligence, and Brentwood, a renegade Wheaten Terrier), visitors caused such great excitement in our house—some might even say hysteria. “Someone’s here!” someone inside the house would say (the exclamation point always heavily implied) even though such a statement wasn’t exactly necessary. The dogs, clearly brilliant sages, always knew someone was approaching our house long before a car ever turned into the driveway, and would announce it vigilantly. (Except for Brentwood, the renegade Wheaten Terrier, who often saw the mayhem caused by a knock on the door or a press of the doorbell as an opportunity to head straight upstairs into my parents’ bedroom and pee on their pillows. And once, in an especially unfortunate episode, he used this time to have his way with my stuffed bear, Esme.)

The first step to answering the door, and an extremely important one (though really each of the steps could be categorized as crucial), was to herd the dogs away from the front door, down the hall, through the kitchen, out the kitchen door, and into the yard.

“Outside! Outside!” we would yell, and this worked well. “Well” in this case is defined as Sasha (the black Shar-Pei), Spanky (the fawn Shar-Pei), and Max (the Irish Wolfhound–English Sheepdog mix) heading outside in a mass of fur and energy and excitement. Maggie, the apricot Shar-Pei, would often become confused and disoriented and, in most scenarios, run into the den.

“That’s okay,” we’d say, the reasoning being that surely whoever had come a-calling on that particular day would be fine with
just the one
dog. Only the one dog was a crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth, somewhat-close-to-marauding Shar-Pei. And while a Shar-Pei puppy is all wrinkles and cuteness and all sorts of cuddly, that same grown Shar-Pei can indeed look aggressive. “Threatening,” “fierce,” “frightening,” “downright horrifying” are among the words I often heard being bandied about in the vicinity of our claw-marked front door.

There were narrow, vertical leaded-glass windows on either side of the door. Whoever was not already in the kitchen would knock on the glass and hold up a finger,
One minute,
we’d suggest to our guests, before heading to the kitchen to get the cheese.

“Has anyone seen Brentwood?” someone might ask along the way.

As Maggie stood on the back of the sofa in the den, barking ferociously, flinging herself against the window and smearing copious amounts of drool in a variety of places, Brentwood remained stealth on his covert mission upstairs, and the three dogs outside took advantage of the space provided by the backyard to get a good running start. All the better to build up some speed and make a much more impressive thudding sound when flailing against the kitchen door.

Now, the second step, equally important, was to get the cheese. Often, this was my job, and with a great sense of importance I would head into the laundry room (our laundry room was also the room of the refrigerator) to take a cellophane-wrapped slice of Kraft American cheese from its place on the inside of the refrigerator door. Mission accomplished, I’d usually hand the cheese off to a parent or someone else in a position of authority, which as the youngest, was anyone but me. At this point in the process—fueled by the barking and the lunging, egged on by the drooling and the knowledge of what Brentwood was up to upstairs and how helpless we were to stop it—inevitably, two or more family members would turn on each other. Then, about a full five minutes after the arrival of our guest, we’d open the front door.

“Hi,” we’d say, and maybe, “Welcome,” although clearly that had been implied. Maggie would now have left the den and joined us at the front door. She’d begin to lunge with a great deal of zeal in the direction of the guest. On good days we could corral her into the kitchen, and on days not so good she could conservatively be called a preview of things to come.

“Here,” we’d say to our guests as we led them into the kitchen, the thump, thump, thud, of Shar-Pei, Shar-Pei, and Irish Wolfhound–English Sheepdog mix making impact with the door providing both acoustic accompaniment and rhythmic greeting.

“Just take this piece of cheese,” we’d explain encouragingly, soothingly. Perhaps in our voices there was just the slightest bit of underlying tension, a tension we hoped clearly relayed the sentiment of
What you should really do is absolutely take this cheese. Really, take it, please.

“And take a seat in this chair here,” we’d helpfully suggest as one of the white wood and not-all-that-sturdy chairs was pulled from the kitchen table, and placed, vulnerable and exposed, in the center of the kitchen. And finally, we’d unwrap the cheese and hand it over.

When I think about it now, I’m not really sure why it seemed preferable to our guests to sit in that chair with a slice of American cheese in hand and face what was on the other side of the kitchen door as opposed to simply saying, “I think you people, every last one of you, along with your dogs, are insane.” Yet we all make our choices and somehow, most of our guests chose to stay. They would sit down in the chair—two chairs if there were two people, and then they’d each get their own pieces of cheese. We’d open the door, the dogs would come in and bark and lunge and bark a lot more. Max, in what he surely must have seen as a gesture of great affection and welcome, was very partial to pressing his nose into our guest’s lap, causing both the chair and the guest to slide across the kitchen floor.

Eventually the barking would stop and the intensity of the lunges would diminish until they could almost be described, were you so inclined, as affectionate nudges. One of the dogs (usually Spanky, as food-driven as he was loving) had noticed the cheese. And though at times we might have forgotten to mention it in all of the excitement, the very,
very
important part was our helpful suggestion that the cheese be broken into separate pieces, one for each of the dogs.

The dogs would take the cheese and disperse, and it all suddenly seemed so simple. Someone might say, “Well, that was that.” Someone else might wonder, “Has anyone seen Brentwood?” In retrospect, it all seemed a relatively small price to pay for the endless joy and happiness that came from living with a minimum of four dogs at any given time.

At some point, and I’ve never been completely clear on why, the location of the greeting ritual moved from the kitchen to the den. Anything that was gained in terms of proximity to the front door and immovable qualities of the couch was perhaps lost in the fact that said couch now provided the dogs with the opportunity to jump up on it and be at eye level with the guest during the bark-and-lunge phase. On the plus side, if you situated yourself on the stairway once the cheese was handed out and the kitchen door was opened, you were able to watch as the dogs rounded the corner and occasionally, just for an instant, lost their footing. No one ever got hurt or even fell, but there was this fantastic, exhilarating moment as eighty toenails scrambled for purchase on the hardwood floors. It had a wonderful cartoonlike quality to it, magical, really, if you looked at it the right way.

As the Shar-Pei years stretched out across the landscape of my childhood, I became hostile and belligerent or, rather, adolescent. Eventually, I lost the sense of camaraderie I felt with the Shar-Peis at the prospect of visitors. I literally became the person on the outside of the front door: a junior in high school and then a senior who knew she’d never be able to linger undetected in a car in the driveway, who knew there’d never be a way to sneak in or out of the house after curfew. Because there was a workforce inside—at the ready, ever vigilant,
cheeseless
—ruining, I was sure of it, my time. But as I got older, almost immediately after it was a thing of the past, I forgot the exact details of the hostile and surly ways of my adolescence (as I imagine people do) and now I’m always able to remember the Shar-Pei years so fondly.

There is a very handsome Shar-Pei named Wally who lives on my block, and whenever I see him walk by, he always reminds me. But then, I don’t really have to wait for Wally. Merely a glimpse of any dairy aisle in any supermarket will remind me exactly of that feeling I had when we unwrapped a slice of American cheese and handed it to someone: that it was us and our dogs, and that was all that mattered. And that clearly, we made sense.

[
The Shar-Pei’s face looks as though a child left the project unfinished.—Dan Liebert
]