• People of different ethnicities (black, white, Asian, Indian, Native American, Latino, and if you could score a primitive jungle person from a tribe in New Guinea, your dog got membership in the UN)
• People in uniform (postal worker, firefighter, police officer, meter reader, telephone worker, ambulance attendant—apparently, the puppy kit had obtained my last blood-pressure reading and foresaw some tragedy in our future)
• Animals (other healthy dogs, hamsters, geese, and goats)
• People holding umbrellas or wearing sunglasses, hats, beards, helmets, punk hairdos, or raincoats, and the bald
• People with canes, legs in casts, metal-frame walkers, wheelchairs, baby carriages, luggage, erratic body moves, limps, or odd gaits (this is when living in Phoenix could have come in real handy, as most of our neighbors began to bring metal canes, walkers, or bats with them to venture outside after Mrs. Crowley’s poodle was turned into a chew toy by a cannibalistic pit bull.
• Environmental hazards and noise pollution: sirens, thunder and lightning, fireworks, the airport, building demolition, loudspeakers, and so on
The list continued for four more pages.
I broke out into a cold sweat. I didn’t know how I could possibly pull this off. I looked at Maeby, her adorable speckled nose resting between her two white-sock paws as she slept on a pile of my dirty underwear in the laundry room, and I thought, “How I have failed you already. You never had a chance when you came to this house. I might as well have locked you in a cage and thrown a black sheet over it. You poor, feral, frightened creature. I should have named you Sybil with all the damage I’m about to do to you!”
But then I had an idea. If I could combine these Objects of Terror, there was a real possibility that I could expose Maeby to all of them before her imprint-expiration date. After all, this was Eugene, bastion of everything odd, unlikely, and—as much as those in the Pacific Northwest want to argue the point, unnatural. During our first week here, for example, my husband saw a family bicycling down the street, each member dressed consistently in homemade, brightly colored knitwear made of yarn most likely spun from the fur of the animals living with them. The mom had an accordion balanced on her handlebars, the dad, typically identified as such by unruly facial hair and a “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” stocking cap, had a fiddle, and the little girl had a birdcage with a chicken it. Had I encountered them at the right time, I could have crossed about fifteen Objects of Terror Targets off our list. It would have saved me the equivalent of an entire day had I otherwise searched for all of those individual attributes one at a time.
I imagined her socialization period ending like the closing of a garage door, rolling down slowly, slowly, slowly, and in the final seconds hearing a disembodied voice proclaim, “…and your time…is…UP!” as the door hits the ground with a hollow, metal crash, and all of our future opportunities of getting a treat from a Filipino skateboarder wearing a witch hat and a raincoat while shooting off fireworks being gone forever.
“All right,” I said to my husband during Maeby’s fifteenth week as I rolled out the spreadsheet on the dining room table. “We still have a lot of incompletes here. She still needs to go to a rally or protest, and there’s a sit-in tomorrow at city hall, at which, if we play our cards right, we can knock out Hacky Sackers, a drum circle, a juggler, and if we’re lucky and things get out of hand, some cops. It’s a fiver, got it? This one’s important. Keep an eye out for a Rastafarian and someone from Vietnam, because we’ve got some ground to cover there, too.”
“Got it,” my husband said. “What’s the protest for?”
“The right to breast-feed in the food court at the mall without the use of a covering blanket,” I replied.
“Ooooh, that’s a good one,” he said with a smile.
“I thought you’d like it,” I said.
“No, I mean, we can also knock out infants, toddlers, strollers, and flapjack hippie boobs,” he said, pointing to each correlating category on the chart.
“Flapjack hippie boobs aren’t on here,” I said, laughing.
“They should be,” he opined. “They are far more frightening than most of the things on this list. It’s a good thing hippies don’t wear shoes, otherwise some of those women would get their boobs tangled in their laces.”
“Now, I need you to bring her back here by five because she has to see rush hour,” I reminded him. “And you still haven’t brought home a kite.”
“I haven’t had time!” he whined. “On Saturday she went to the rodeo, on Sunday I spent four hours looking for a tobogganist, although I did find some kayakers, and last night we went to that Republican fund-raiser to expose her to drunk people and strong scents.”
“You know, I don’t want to hear it,” I snipped. “If you want a dog that is tormented every time she sees a kite because someone was too busy to stop into Target for five seconds, then you’re the one who has to live with that, not me. How would you like to spend your whole life thinking a kite is going to swoop down and eat you with a big dowel-and-nylon mouth?”
“Come on,” he replied, obviously defensive. “Who was the one who got ‘spectators at a 10K’? I did! I did! That was me! I also got ‘people swimming’ and took her to the tarmac!”
“That wasn’t ‘people swimming,’ it was a Jacuzzi,” I reminded him. “Which isn’t even on the list. And on the tarmac, you couldn’t even get out of the car. The kit said ‘not on a hot day,’ but you decided to take her on a ‘hot day.’ Now I have to wait for some clouds to roll in so I can bring her back! And I already did ‘drunk people’ the night you finished off that wine by yourself.”
“That’s it,” he said, throwing his hands up. “I don’t have to take this! I’m leaving!”
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“Where do you think? I’m taking Maeby to ‘an active railway,’” he shot back.
“Now?” I questioned. “I was going to shoot her with the hair dryer!”
“I’ll knock out a homeless person, too, okay?” he said, then turned around and pointed his finger toward me. “But I am not doing ‘hot-air balloon.’”
I pursed my lips and shook my head, glaring at him. “You know I’m afraid of heights,” I hissed. “You always knew I couldn’t do ‘hot-air balloon’!”
“Then that’s something you have to live with,” my husband concluded.
“Try to walk her over a manhole cover and a grate!” I shouted after him after he picked up the puppy and headed for the door. “And we’re still missing ‘speed walkers’!”
“Oh, God,” I said to myself as I turned and rubbed my hand over my chin, looking over all of the empty spots still covering the chart. “Where am I going to find a kung fu person, a tollbooth, and a swinging bridge in less than twenty-four hours?”
When time was up, it was up. Our window had closed and was now bolted shut. We did the best that we could, and although, with a helping hand from Lady Luck, we were able cover “cars backfiring,” “beach party/bonfires,” and “hammocks,” I can admit with a regrettable sense of failure that if Maeby ever encounters a Native American mime involved in any sort of building demolition, I simply cannot predict what she will do.
After Maeby’s socialization was complete, we both thought that puppy obedience training should be next on the list, so I opened the phone book. The next thing I knew, I was driving along a country road deep in the forest somewhere with my puppy sitting between my husband and me, all of us wondering where the road was taking us.
And in about twenty minutes, we rolled up to a house in the middle of nowhere. A large woman in sweatpants and sweatshirt opened the door, her hair in a ponytail, her face entirely una-mused.
After I introduced the three of us, she stepped aside to let us in, and an unidentified and concentrated smell hit us from all angles. “I know that smell,” I said to myself as I took another whiff of the offensive odor. “I know it. Where is it from? Oh yes. Yes, I know. It smells l
ike zebras. Zebras and elephants and lions, the odors and aromas of Africa. Yet, I have never been to Africa, though I have been to the zoo, and in close proximity to the places where all of those animals go potty. And that is the part of Africa that I am smelling right now. The potty part.” Then I spotted the hall and saw that, oddly enough, the top half of the wall was white but the remaining bottom third was a blackish brown. Exactly at dog height.
Holy God, I thought to myself as I tried to resist the compelling urge to swoop Maeby off the ground and away from whatever disease and pestilence was living in that carpet. I’ve only seen houses like this on COPS or Animal Planet when people from the ASPCA come out to rescue millions of cats from the clutches of a seventy-three-year-old lady and her mentally stunted son. Even I don’t live like this, and before I got married, I almost needed an archeologist to come out and identify some things I hadn’t seen for a while that had been hidden under layers and layers of mess.
My husband and I looked at each other intently, as I’m sure we both realized how foolish it was for us, as a couple, to not have invested the time and effort into learning Morse code so that one day we could send secret messages back and forth to each other through eyeblinks and nostril inflation while trapped in the filthiest house on the planet, trying desperately to formulate a plan of escape with our baby dog.
When the sweatpants dog trainer went into the kitchen to fetch her paperwork, we had very little time to coordinate something acute and tricky to secure our release. But there were more important things to be discussed first.
“Look at that wall,” I whispered, nodding in that direction. “It’s all gross from dogs rubbing against it!”
“That’s not dirt,” my husband whispered back. “That’s from a dog in heat.”
Without hesitation, I picked Maeby up off the floor even though I was sure the carpet was doing wonders to boost her immune system, including exposing her to diseases that had been thought long eradicated.
“If she can’t teach her dog not to rub its coochie on the wall, how is she going to train Maeby to sit?” I whispered just as the trainer walked back into the room.
I looked her square in the eye.
“I forgot the money,” I said simply before we headed out the door.
Free from the obligation to return to the House of Bitch Blood for further “training,” we enrolled Maeby in puppy classes where certainly, dogs had peed, but there were minimum-wage workers to clean it up: at the clean, well-lit, concrete-floored PetSmart.
Which was great, and Maeby did very well with her trainer, Shari, learning to sit, lie down, drop things, to not eat until I gave the word, to heel, and all kinds of other stuff. The only thing the training was lacking, however, was playing with other dogs, and it was really important to me that in five years’ time, I didn’t wake up one day to a dog who believed she was the boss of everybody and was more than anxious to prove it.
I wanted a dog who played nicely with others, and if I couldn’t get that at puppy class, I needed to get it from somewhere. One ill-fated afternoon, we set out for our nearby dog park, and the moment I let Maeby off leash, a smarmy, tiny dog with Ernest Borgnine eyes sidled up to Maeby quickly, then jumped on her and began to do his nasty on her leg, even though he only reached midflank on the puppy, even in midthrust.
“Is anyone missing John Holmes?” I joked, thinking it was funny, and looked down to see Maeby looking back toward the dog, her eyes wide with fear. And then I remembered.
She’s a baby. She has no idea of what’s going on; this is her first time at the rodeo!
“You dirty uncle!” I hissed at the little dog, who showed no signs of stopping, even though he was too tiny to even be touching anything.
I tried to push him away, but he just turned and growled at me, looking much like a mouse might if it bared its teeth.
“Get off of her, you pedophile! Go chase an ice cream truck somewhere! She’s an infant!” I demanded, trying to move him off with the toe of my boot. “It shouldn’t hurt to be a puppy!”
I called out for someone—anyone—to come and get him, but no one stepped forth.
“You are lucky her sixteen-week window is already closed, you little shit, or I’d sue your little doggie balls off,” I hissed as I tried to push him off again.
It was useless. He would not leave her alone. Apparently, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for him, finally finding some fresh meat at the dog park that wasn’t wise to his greasy, predatory ways and couldn’t whack him out of the way with the swish of a fluffy tail.
“All right, that’s it,” I said, hooking Mae’s collar back up to her leash. “I used to live mere houses away from a real rapist, and if you really want to play this little game, it is on, Mr. Winkle! I still have the pepper spray on my key chain!”
I tugged on Maeby’s leash and we were off.
“Run, Maeby, run!”
I knew that little son of a bitch couldn’t keep up with us with his tiny toothpick legs, but he gave it the attempt of a lifetime, chasing us all the way to the fence and going in for one last lurch before Maeby made a final escape and I shut the gate right behind us.
He stood sorrowfully on the other side of the chain-link fence, still staring at us and barking that his young, nubile harem girl had gotten away.
“You’re an asshole!” I said harshly as I pointed at him, and then I looked up at the whole dog park. “This little dog is an asshole! And so is the asshole that owns him!”
Thus, our day at the dog park ended with me tearing out of the parking lot, but not before I flashed my personal sized can of Mace at a two-pound dog who was still standing at the fence, watching us drive away.
“That is ridiculous,” my mother said on the other end of the phone. “A day care for dogs? Why does she have to go to day care? Why did you get a dog if you didn’t want her to be home? And why does she have a last initial? Is she like Eman M.?”
“I told you before,” I said with a sigh. “Her name is not May B. It’s Maeby. One word, no initial.”
“Maybe? Like perhaps?” she asked. “That’s a stupid thing to call a dog.”
“I know it is, Mom,” I said. “I named her Maeby just so I could hear you say that.”
“I know you did,” my mother replied. “And you called me just to aggravate me about this moronic dog school. This is what I don’t understand: Dogs should be home all day, lying on the floor, not in a big yard running and playing with other dogs, right? Right? Am I right? That’s ridiculous. Since when do dogs even want to play with other dogs?”
“Um, I don’t know. Since they formed a subspecies of wolf. Fifteen thousand years ago, or some people say a hundred fifty thousand years,” I answered.
“Oh, come on,” she scoffed. “That’s stupid! A hundred fifty thousand years? Who was around then to write that down? You don’t know that!”
“Okay,” I relented. “Tuesday. The vote was Tuesday. Didn’t your dog vote? My dog voted. She even got a sticker that said ‘I voted today to play.’ It passed by a landslide, although the exit polls in Ohio were a bit iffy.”
“I can’t believe you pay to take her to a place where she can run around,” she went on. “It sounds like a waste of money to me. You could get a good meal for what you pay. Is that what all you tree huggers do all day in Oregon? Take all of your pets to different day-care places? If you had a fish, would it go to fishy day care? Is that what you like to do, living up in your trailer in the woods?”
“I happen to live on a very nice street of well-preserved historic houses,” I reminded her. “Where the trees form a canopy over the street in the spring. I have three professors, a librarian, a retired diplomat, and a psychiatrist for neighbors. I do not live in a trailer in the woods, Mom.”
“Well,” she began, “that’s what I tell people so I can hear you say that.”
“Oh, hang on,” I said. “Maeby wants to talk to Grandma! Say ‘Hi, Grandma!’”
“Oh, no! No no no! Don’t you pu??
?”
And then I fumbled with the phone a bit, panted into the receiver, then hung it up.
And Maeby loved day care. She loooooved it. She made friends immediately, and got report cards at the end of every day detailing what she did, and in Maeby’s own voice, leaving comments such as:
“I flirted with Samson a bit, but he’s not up to par intellectually for me.”
“I made a new friend, Nancy. She steals balls and brings them to me.”
“I was voted the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ of the dogs—beautiful and deeper than anyone knows!”
You know, a chunk of questionable sirloin drenched in Alfredo sauce from a mix and topped with tiny shrimp that’s been frozen for four months may sound like Heaven to the diners at Crapplebee’s, but frankly, I’d trade it in a second to read that my dog is smarter than boy dogs, has minions doing her bidding, and is the fairest of them all in the kingdom of day care.
But that’s just me.
If report cards weren’t enough, there were party invitations, and Maeby’s first one came when Lola Chanel, a Boston terrier/French bulldog mix, was turning one.
As we stood in the foyer with a dog’s birthday present wrapped and bagged in my hand, dogs and people filed in and got ready for the festivities. When Mandie spotted us, I had to be quick on my feet, and this time “I forgot the money” wasn’t going to fill the bill.
“I didn’t know we were supposed to stay,” I whispered into Mandie’s ear. “And we have a standing appointment for marriage counseling. We’re learning Morse code.”
“Oh, go, then, go,” Mandie said kindly. “Mae will be fine. She is the teacher’s pet! I’ll see you back here in…”
“An hour?” I said, hoping I hadn’t gone too far. I was also hoping that it would match the time for us to go next door, eat some lunch, and be done.