It Looked Different on the Model (26 page)

The man walked to the vestibule of the lobby, opened the door, and the old lady sauntered out of the building as we followed behind.

The man smiled at us as we walked past, and we smiled back.

“She takes too long for me to stand out in that cold,” he explained, and then laughed.

We laughed, too, and kept laughing all the way into the cab, especially when I turned to take one more look at the dog as we pulled away and, in a pile of leftover snow, she was making her signature move on the side of the building.

I
will do anything to prevent you from ringing my doorbell.

Honestly. I’m not fooling around.

If I see you heading toward my front door with your finger aimed at the doorbell, I’ll fly off the couch like there’s a promise of a Mormon standing on my porch that I get to yell at; I will open the door to my home dressed as a jiggly Jell-O burrito, with a towel on my head and another one wrapped around my girth; I will open the door after launching off the elliptical, dripping with sweat and sporting a yoga-pant cameltoe that reaches upward of my waistband.

What I really should do is disconnect it, but I’m too afraid I would hit a live wire and shoot across the street into the yard of the neighbors that hate me. It doesn’t make my situation any better that I’m married to a guy who believes that turning off the disposal and walking away from it when it makes a weird, bone-crushing noise is the best option because, he believes, it has the capacity to heal itself, given enough time. But that’s only if you don’t watch it and, more important, don’t interfere with the order of the sink disposal by sticking your hand in it to find the date pit that’s been bouncing around in there, which your wife found three seconds after you walked out of the
kitchen with the words “heal itself” still hanging in the air. So you see, silencing my doorbell is not an option and nowhere close to a reality, so there’s no need to clutch on to that reverie.

The fact is that I’m stuck with a doorbell, and I’m stuck with a dog that emits a solar-flare version of a bark when she hears it. And that includes not only the real doorbell but doorbells on TV, the sudden appearance of a xylophone on a Big Band mix on my iPod, and anytime someone remotely unlocks a car that is anywhere on our block.

I truly can’t do this bark justice with mere words; you have to experience in person the sharp, shrill pitch my dog is able to achieve to really absorb its power. Mariah Carey would seethe with jealousy, and she would lose the ability to sleep, knowing that a living, breathing creature out-screeched her by fathoms. Forget about run-of-the-mill eardrum-piercing pain; this bark has the potential to shatter your teeth and possibly pop out an eyeball. The only thing that I can equate it with is the sound an elderly woman would make if she believed she was being home-invaded and began running aimlessly through her house, confused, terrified, shrieking, and believing that death was moments away. That’s the sound my dog makes every single time someone rings that bell, even though it’s just the mailman with a package for me from Spanx, which has a body shaper inside that’s going to squeeze my inner organs so tight that my liver will poke out my nose.

“This has
got
to stop,” my husband said after my dog nearly propelled both of us into cardiac arrest when she lost her shit during an episode of
The Closer
. “I just saw stars. There’s something dripping down the side of my face. Is there blood coming out of my ear? Why does she do that? Why can’t she have a regular
ruff-ruff
bark like other dogs her age?”

“God, I wish I knew,” I said, wiping the spray of fruit punch
Crystal Light that had flown up onto my forehead and eyelashes after Maeby’s bark stabbed my brain like a shard of glass. I wiped a far-flying droplet from the side of my husband’s head. “Nothing bad has ever happened to her as a result of the doorbell ringing. If we had an idea of what freaks her out so much, maybe we could get her to stop.”

And as if In Dog We Trust was listening to me from up above, the following week I got the new issue of
Bark
, a magazine about dogs, in the mail. Always excited to see it, I opened up the issue immediately and was doing a preliminary flip through when something caught my eye. It was an ad for a “dog translator,” which said it could analyze my dog’s barks, determine her emotion, and then deliver a sentence about what my dog’s bark meant. It was touted as one of
Time
magazine’s greatest inventions of the year. I wasted no time in going to the website and buying it right there on the spot.

Now, I know it seems foolish to believe in such a thing, especially considering that earlier that year I had swabbed the inside of my dog’s mouth with a giant Q-tip, carefully placed it inside a sterile plastic tube, and mailed it off to get her DNA analyzed. And that wasn’t the most ridiculous part of the equation. That had come when I went to the website and paid this DNA lab seventy-five dollars to send me the kit.

I need to explain here that I got my dog at the local pound, so her gene pool is rather murky, at best. She’s fluffy, tan and white, and has one blue eye, one brown, and a speckled little nose. All paws pointed to Australian shepherd, that part was obvious, but it was the other half that had me wondering, especially when she was diagnosed with a form of lupus that affected her skin, nails, and that speckled little nose. If there was a breed that was more susceptible to that kind of illness and it could be identified, that might help prepare us for other directions
the lupus might take in the future. Most likely, her mystery portion was golden retriever, but curiosity was eating away at me to find out for sure.

That reasoning aside, the truth of the matter is that I thought it would rock to have my dog’s DNA tested, and I really am that kind of asshole who would write out a check for the amount of her weekly grocery budget in order to attain that bragging right.

But when I mentioned to the girls at the doggy day care how excited I was that I’d ordered the DNA kit, they advised me not to include a photo of my dog, as the kit encourages you to do, despite the claim that it’s to attach to the photo area on your dog’s Certificate of DNA when the results are returned to you. The girls informed me that according to their other clients—who were also apparently big enough assholes to write out seventy-five-dollar checks and rub a giant cotton swab all over their dogs’ mouths—when the results came back, the dogs with photos enclosed were determined to be of lineage very much in line with their appearance. The kits that were returned sans photos, however, had results that were all over the map. A toy poodle was determined to be 50 percent German shepherd. A German shepherd was relayed to be 76 percent cocker spaniel. A corgi was actually a Siberian husky. I held back on the photo and trusted that we had not eaten spaghetti with butter for the last week in vain.

I have to say that, despite the reports of DNA testing run afoul, I still had hope when I ripped open the envelope that I wasn’t a mark, a sucker, a rube, and that Maeby’s heritage would be mapped out very clearly for me across the page. Sure enough, there it was, the document that detailed how my fluffy tan-and-white dog with her huge sweeping tail was mostly Doberman, and whatever part of her wasn’t Doberman
was boxer. After the report, I wasn’t allowed to make any household decisions aside from blue or red Charmin for a very, very long time (and this may be insignificant to some, but we’ve been told that certain friends look forward to parties at our house because of the quality of our toilet paper. I’m not sure what that says about my snacks of celebration or hostess abilities, but if you want a smooth transaction after you’ve been drinking and eating finger foods, you know where to go).

But when I had to tell my husband that I’d ordered the dog translator, I knew things had to be different than they were with the DNA test.

“I think we might be able to crack the code of the hysterical bark,” I insisted, showing him the ad as he frowned at the spaghetti dripping with butter that he’d twirled around his fork. “The website says that ‘the Animal Emotion Analysis System analyzes the bark and determines the most accurate translation.’ It’s one of
Time
magazine’s inventions of the year!”

When it arrived the following week via UPS, there was no containing me. I brought it into my office and dove into the package, ripping it apart like it was a meal. This magnificent invention—the one that was going to save me from answering the door armed with an apology every single time—was right at my fingertips and was anxious to help us reach a solution. The package came with an instruction booklet, which somehow flipped out of the box and slid under the elliptical machine, where I would have to get up to reach it.

Well, now, that’s a shame, I thought as I looked at it for several seconds, knowing it was gone forever. “I bet that would have come in handy.”

I moved on to the shiny red parts of the package, which looked like a little walkie-talkie, and then another small oval piece, which looked as if it had something of a microphone embedded
in it. From the look of the box, the oval part slid onto the dog’s collar, and the walkie-talkie was the receiver and translator.

I wasted no time and got right to work. I attached the microphone to Maeby’s collar, put the receiver in front of me, and waited.

“Maeby,” I commanded her. “Bark!”

Maeby looked at me for a moment, then put her head down and took a nap.

When my husband came home, I was very excited to show him our problem-solver, and he looked it over skeptically.

“How is this supposed to tell us what she’s barking?” he asked.

“After she barks, it transmits to the walkie-talkie, and the translation pops up on that screen,” I informed him. “Does it work?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “She hasn’t barked all day. Everyone in the neighborhood and their dog has walked by our house today, but a little miss I know needed beauty sleep.”

“So this expensive, useless thing doesn’t work,” my husband asserted. “So much for the Animal Emotion Analysis System.”

“I didn’t say that!” I cried, and snatched the walkie-talkie out of his undeserving hands. “She just hasn’t been pulling her emotional end of the deal.”

My husband went up to Maeby, who was still draped over the end of the couch, looking at us.

Quietly.

“Maeby, bark,” my husband suggested.

She looked at him and then looked away, as if she was bored.

“Show her,” I proposed. “Bark at her. Maybe that will encourage her.”

“
Ruff
!” my husband said.

My dog was clearly insulted.

“Get closer to her, show her what you mean,” I instructed.

My husband moved closer to Mae, leaned down by her little doggy head, and said, “
Ruff
!”

My dog responded by getting off the couch and moving in front of the fireplace.

My husband threw up his hands. I shrugged. And then I noticed that on the little screen of the walkie-talkie, something was being translated.

“You have a sad face,” I informed him as I relayed what I saw on the screen. “The little dog in you said, ‘I can’t figure you out!’ ”

“Really?” my husband said, coming at me with his hand out. “It translated my bark?”

“Oh, oh,” I said, pulling my arm away. “Now you’re suddenly interested in my useless, expensive gadget.”

“Come on,” my husband said, reaching for it. “I wanna see.”

“Here,” I said, relenting and handing it over. I walked over to Maeby and scratched her ears, then kissed her little doggy head. “
Woooof
!”

“Wait … wait.…” my husband said, as if he was receiving signals from the International Space Station. “Oh, really? Is that what you think? It says, ‘We’re in trouble now!’ And you have a smiley face.”

“Ha-ha!!” I chortled. “You got that right!”

Mae got up and went back to the couch, where my husband bent down and barked rather loudly into her collar.

“ ‘Where’s my bone?’ This is off. Maybe you have to calibrate it. I have no desire for a bone. And I’m still sad!” he read, as Mae climbed down off the couch again and tried to leave the room. “Maeby, stay! Maeby, stay! Oh, never mind.”

He followed her down the hall and returned in a minute with Mae’s collar in his hand. I have no idea where the dog went.

“
Woo-woo-woooo
!” he howled to the collar, and then laughed when he looked at the translator.

“What? Let me see,” I said, reaching for the walkie-talkie, which had an angry face that pronounced, “Something’s bothering me!”

“You are a moody pooch,” I mocked, and grabbed the collar from him, then took a deep breath and released a “
Wooooooooooooooo
!” that would rival the call of any pack.

“Careful who you mess with!” the translator warned my husband.

Unfazed, he snatched the collar back and released a fierce bay of his own, as in “
Wooo-hooo-hooooooo
!”

“Please be nice to me,” the translator said, and gave a frowny face.

“Hello, Omega!” I laughed when I read it. “Awwwww! Are the other doggies picking on you?”