Paws before dying

or eighty-five, rich or poor, chunky or svelte, dressed in denim or velvet, the first thing people notice about you isn’t you at all, but your dogs and how you treat them. After that? After that, I suppose it’s a matter of looking at home, which doesn’t necessarily mean having a dog with you, but does mean looking as if you should and, certainly, keeping your eyes on every dog in sight. Or maybe it just means looking happy. “Finally!” our faces say. “Finally! For once! For these few hours, enough fur! Bliss.” In spite of the handsome shepherd and the green ribbon, Willie and Mitch didn’t have that look. But I remembered where they’d come from.
     

Chapter 18

     
    IN the hours I slept after coming home from the match, a heavy rain fell, and cold, beautiful Canada delivered its most valuable export, a sudden temperature drop of about twenty degrees. In the late afternoon, Steve and I drove to Newton to let the dogs run in the woods that stretched behind and far beyond Eliot Park, the beer-lovers’ lane that Rose and Jack had complained about. It wasn’t a place I’d have gone alone at night even with two Akitas instead of two Alaskan welcome wagons, but in the late afternoon with Steve and his two dogs as well as Rowdy and Kimi along, the woods felt safe enough. Besides, they were wild-looking, with unpruned maples, oaks, evergreens, and underbrush. Any sensible dog owner realizes that in an unmaintained park like that, the narrow, rough trails may appear to meander and fork at random, but they don’t. If viewed from on high, God’s perspective, those paths spell out a hidden message: “Great place to violate leash law.”
    “The main thing,” I was saying to Steve, “is that I don’t trust kids at all. I at least understand dogs, but I don’t understand children except that what I do understand is, if you try to house-break them, it screws them up for life, and they chew things, and then they make a lot of noise, and then they leave. So if you want golden-haired babies all that badly, take Leah for the rest of the summer or get another dog. And could we talk about something else?” I snapped.
    “PMS?”
    “Shock collars.”
    “Radical remedy,” said Steve, stopping to encircle my neck with his hands and making a loud zapping noise, “but it’s not such a bad idea.” Then he moved his hands and said softly, “When you took that nap this afternoon, you could’ve called me. Just because you live alone, it doesn’t mean you have to sleep alone.”
    “In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t live alone until Labor Day. Leah and about five other kids were in the kitchen boning up for the SATs.” I nuzzled my face in his once-navy T-shirt. Like| everything he owns, it was faded and had a faint, lingering odor of chlorine bleach. A streak of adolescent self-consciousness 1 makes him want to avoid smelling like dogs and cats. Actually, he smells like dogs, cats, and chlorine, but only if you’re really close to him.”
    He ran his hands over my face and pulled my hair back, then started to kiss me, but Kimi and Rowdy came zipping down a wooded slope and landed at our feet. They squirmed around, tilted their big heads upward, widened their almond eyes, and began wooing. They weren’t trying to protect me from Steve, of course. They just didn’t want to be left out. When Steve’s dogs—Lady, the pointer, and India, his perfect shepherd bitch—joined the circle, we gave up and resumed our walk.
    “Actually, I do need to know about shock collars,” I said. “You must hear about them, right? In veterinary school? Or you have clients who—?”
    He shook his head. “Those people don’t work with us. I probably don’t know any more about shock collars than you do.” j “You don’t see burns? They do bum, don’t they?”
    “Oh, the old ones burned,” he said sadly, kicking a small log off the path. “But not the new ones, at least not the expensive ones. Not unless they malfunction.”
    “But if they do? Or an old one. There ought to be two burns, right? I’ve seen the ads. And the catalogs. That’s basically all I know, from that propaganda. Anyway, there are these plugs that go in the collar, with contact points, metal spikes. And that’s what delivers the shock.”
    “Stimulation,” he corrected sarcastically.
    “Oh, right. Pardon the slip. Anyway, that’s what would bum, right? The whole collar isn’t electrified. It isn’t a circle of electricity around the