It Looked Different on the Model (25 page)

“I do,” I said blankly. “I’m starting the Patriot Act Timer Museum, if you must know. ‘Don’t Tread on My Timer.’ … Aaaaaaaand I won! Finally! This one looks cool; it has original paint and chrome, bakelite dial. There is another one that is very Art Deco, has these great tall, skinny numbers and it’s aqua, but that one doesn’t end until tomorrow.”

My husband nodded.

“Better be careful,” he added. “You never know. I might have to say something. Because I think I just saw something.”

T
he old dog had its nose buried in the can, shoving its snout in as far as it could go to get whatever was left inside. The snow fell, gathering in a thin film on the dog’s fur, then melting just as fast on the mangy, stringy coat.

“Oh, no,” I said to my husband, pointing at the animal trying to fend for itself on a cold day in New York City; person after person passed by, and no one seemed to notice. Without a leash and clearly with no owner watching it, the dog made its way along the side of the building, sniffing for more food.

My husband shook his head. “I don’t know what you think you can do,” he said simply. “We’re on vacation. It’s not like you can roll a dog up in a dry-cleaning bag and put it in your suitcase. I know it’s terrible to see something like that, but you’re going to have to forget it. There’s nothing we can do.”

I realized he was right. I mean, here we were in New York, two weeks before Christmas, on a five-day trip that didn’t include taking care of stray dogs. Frankly, I didn’t even understand how there could be a stray dog in a city like this; did someone forget to lock the seven dead bolts on their door and the dog just wandered out? I found myself getting angry,
wondering how people could be so careless. How do you lose a dog in the city?

But there it was, a large collie-shepherd mix, trying to eat rotten food out of a piece of garbage right on Bleecker Street, around the corner from the front door of the building we had rented an apartment in for our stay.

“Okay, now wait,” my husband begged. “Don’t get obsessive. Don’t let it ruin your time here. I’m sure someone saw the dog and will call the ASPCA, they’ll call the owner, and it will be back home by nightfall. Seriously. How can anyone lose a dog here?”

He was right. Someone must have realized their dog was missing and was probably looking for it right then.

“Do you really think so?” I said.

“Well, it certainly is in the realm of possibilities,” he said. The traffic light turned green and he grabbed my hand and stepped off the curb, while I looked behind me at the dog taking a poop on the sidewalk and the snow falling all around it.

And we had a wonderful day; the snow eased up and we walked up and down the West Village, the East Village, stopped in for a slice of pizza, and then wandered through Washington Square Park. I bought a dress from my favorite clothes store, we stopped and had coffee at a café, and never once did I stop thinking about that old, starving dog eating out of the trash.

But much to my relief, when we got back to the apartment building, the dog was nowhere to be seen. I had images of it shivering in a corner or covered in snow, still foraging on the street, but there was no sign of it. Happily, I imagined it reunited with its owner, the both of them snuggled up in front of a warm fire, except in my honest version of the fantasy, the dog
was forcing the owner to lick the remnants out of a crusty refried-beans can.

The next morning we hit Midtown, walked up Fifth Avenue to see the storefronts decorated for the holidays, then wandered around Central Park and went to the American Museum of Natural History. We returned to the apartment to get ready for dinner and were lucky enough to flag down a cab immediately after walking out of the door to the building. I got in the cab first, and when I turned to ask my husband the address of the restaurant, I gasped.

“There’s the dog!” I cried, pointing.

And there, on an otherwise empty corner, not another soul around, was the shaggy dog, peeing on the sidewalk as the taxi zoomed away.

“That was the dog!” I said to my husband again. “It’s lost again!”

“Either that or it never went home,” my husband added. “But there’s nothing we can do about it; it’s kind of on its own.”

I couldn’t believe that dog was still out there, in the elements, lost, and no one had bothered to help it.

“Really?” I wondered aloud. “Do people just walk by and not see an old dog wandering around by itself? I can’t believe it. That thing is probably starving. Order something big, because we’re taking half of it back with us for the dog.”

But when we returned that evening, with chops and steaks in hand, the dog, again, was gone.

It snowed again that night, and this time it snowed hard. I went downstairs twice to see if the dog was around, to give it our leftovers, but there was no sign of it or its paw prints in the snow.

The next morning, we woke up to a beautifully sunny day, although it was bitterly cold. We had brunch plans with my
friend Jenny and her husband, Joe, at a café a couple of blocks down the street. The air was crisp in the way that it is only after it snows, and the minute we stepped outside I saw the dog, gingerly finding its way along the ice that had formed on the sidewalk.

I bent down.

“Don’t,” my husband warned. “We have to meet Jenny and Joe in fifteen minutes. What are you going to do with the dog, bring it along? There’s no leash on it, Laurie. It’s a stray dog. I know you feel bad, but we’re a little powerless here.”

Regardless, I tried calling the dog, but it wouldn’t come, no matter how many times I pleaded “Here, girl!” or “Come!” or “Wanna cookie?” The dog looked at me suspiciously and then ignored me. The last thing I was going to do was try to put my hands anywhere near the dog’s face to look for a collar under that matted fur, plus I knew my husband was right. The truth was that I really didn’t want to call the ASPCA on the dog; it was so old and decrepit that I thought it might get put down when no one came looking for it. I knew that leaving it on the street was not good, either, but I thought the dog should have some sort of fighting chance. It was clear that it stayed in the same area, so maybe it had an urban “den” someplace close, like in
Hotel For Dogs
, which I have obviously watched too many times. I didn’t know, but I was willing to stretch all limits of reason, still hopeful that whoever was looking for it would find it.

But there was no way the dog was going to come to me, and I had no idea what I would have done with it if it did. It would be one thing if we lived here, but we were leaving the day after tomorrow.

“Come on,” my husband said, reaching out his hand. “I’m sorry. There’s not much you can do.”

So I left the dog standing in the snow as we went off to brunch, and when I looked back one last time, it was going to the bathroom by the side of the building.

Part of me said, “See? Aren’t you glad you left the dog? You’d have to carry dog doo all the way to breakfast,” but I couldn’t help but feel like I had just done something atrocious.

We were going to be late, but I was sure that Jenny would understand. Both of her dogs came from rescue; one was blind, the other had three legs, and she had had several other dogs in the years I had known her that came from foster homes or that were difficult to place elsewhere. If there was anyone who would get it, it would be Jenny.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” I said as my husband and I approached Jenny and Joe, who were already seated at a table. “There is a stray dog we’ve been seeing on and off at the apartment building for days now. We just saw it again, but I couldn’t get it to come to me.”

Jenny immediately looked alarmed.

“What do you mean, ‘a stray dog’?” she asked. “No one was with it? Was it running into traffic?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head and sitting down. “It stays close to the building. I haven’t seen it wander off the sidewalk.”

“Someone will call the shelter, I’m sure of it,” Joe said, trying to reassure us.

“No one’s called so far, and we’ve seen it for three days now,” I replied.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Jenny gasped. “It’s been snowing! It was so cold out last night! Did you feel how cold it was? Where is the building?”

“It’s about three blocks from here on Bleecker,” I replied.

“Oh, boy,” Joe said, looking none too pleased.

“I’m not going to let a dog die of exposure, Joe,” she said as
she reached for her phone and started looking up phone numbers.

The waitress came over and took our order.

“We don’t have time for a ‘Save the Dog’ mission today,” he protested. “I have a list of things I need to do.”

“Is letting a dog die one of them?” she replied.

I felt my face get hot as Joe raised his eyebrows, sighed, and then looked away. I realized I had done a bad, bad thing.

“What does the dog look like?” she asked.

“I’m not sure, it’s so matted,” I answered hesitantly, as my husband kicked me under the table. “Maybe a collie? Black and white. Some sort of shepherd mix?”

“Perfect,” Jenny replied. “I can call both the shepherd rescue and the collie rescue. How old do you think it was?”

“Old,” I said, shrugging. “It had a lot of gray on its face.”

Jenny snapped her fingers. “Elderly rescue!” she cried.

The waitress brought over our coffee.

“You know, I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” I said, trying to spread some optimism. “The dog’s been hanging out for who knows how long; it’s getting food somewhere.”

“So you think people are feeding it?” Jenny asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that, but it found a can of refried beans in the trash that it was licking,” I offered, saying anything I could think of to slow the quest down.

Joe did not look excited at all about the dog hunt. In fact, I think if this scenario had taken place two hundred years ago, he would have challenged my husband to a duel. And I need to say here that I had always known Joe to be a nice, patient guy, and I did not blame him one bit for being a little unenthusiastic about spending the day chasing a dirty dog that some stupid girl at breakfast had to open her big mouth about and spoil the lovely Sunday he had planned for himself. The dog, while not
necessarily my problem, was my hang-up, and now I had opened the gates and let it run wild with Jenny and her dog-saving networks.

“We’re going to have to take a cab back to Brooklyn. There’s no way I can get a dog on the subway.”

“It doesn’t even have a leash,” I stressed. “I don’t know how you’re going to get it to come to you.”

“Don’t eat all of your breakfast, Joe,” Jenny advised. “We’ll lure it.”

“This sounds familiar,” my husband said.

Jenny spent a good majority of brunch working the phone and calling every rescue group she could think of to see if she could find a place for the dog. Finally, one option looked hopeful, and I thought poor Joe was going to stab himself in the eye with a fork when Jenny, still on the phone, looked at him and asked, “How long do you think it would take for us if we got a cab to Long Island?”

With all of our breakfast leftovers boxed up, the four of us headed out of the restaurant and over to the apartment building on Bleecker. But once we got there, much to Joe’s unrestrained glee, the dog was gone.

“It was right here,” I said, pointing to the spot by the door, as if I was explaining to a news crew where I claimed to have seen Bigfoot selling knockoff purses out of a garbage bag. There was, again, no trace of the dog. I looked around the corner, then looked for the poop the dog had produced during our parting shot, and that was gone, too. Probably buried in the snow, I figured, and I sure wasn’t going to go digging for it just to prove I had seen a mythical stray pooch that could appear and vanish at will.

Before I knew it, Joe was hailing a cab and we were waving goodbye, and then they drove away for Brooklyn, their whole
day—the one I came within inches of detouring with matted fur—now before them.

With the exception of the fight I was pretty sure they were having in the taxi at that very moment.

On the day we left, we packed up our things, threw the leftovers away, and headed downstairs to hail a cab to the airport. We were alone in the elevator when it made a stop on a lower floor, and the doors opened to an older man with a very thin mustache.

“Can you make room for an old lady?” he said in a thick French accent, and smiled as he shuffled in to the elevator.

Oh, boy, I thought. What do you know? Dementia can give you a sex change even though you’re the only one who feels it.

Then from behind him waddled a black-and-white tube of matted fur—part collie, part shepherd, I didn’t know. But what I did know was what that dog looked like with its snout stuffed into a can of refried beans.

We rode the elevator the rest of the way in polite silence, mainly because if I opened my big mouth again about the hysterically funny story of a decrepit, dirty dog that we kept seeing around the building and that my friend tried to save, I was most likely going to be riding to the airport alone.