How will we know which dog is for us? he would ask. And I’d repeat what my dog-lover friends had told me: we’ll know.
And so in and out of the shelters we’d go—leaving after a quick survey of the cages lining the walls—mostly pit bulls and rottweilers and scrawny mutts and mixed breeds with missing eyes and paws and patches of fur. Hiding under his long hair and baseball cap, Teddy would look and shrug, which was his way of not saying that none of the dogs was our dog.
And none of them were. Until a cold January day—Martin Luther King Jr. Day—when he was home from school, and Gary was home from work—and when the house vibrated with so much tension between us that I took Teddy to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to look at the giant bugs and the glass flowers. Afterward, as I drove more slowly than usual in an effort to postpone the inevitable—I didn’t want to go home and deal with Gary’s jumpiness and anxiety, always worse in the winter when the weather was bad and we were all trapped in the house together—Teddy tapped me on the shoulder from the backseat: Can we go to the pet store?
The pet store was the same one that I had gone to when I was young—it’s where my parents got me my first (and last) goldfish and the pair of gerbils that gnawed and burrowed in a glass aquarium until they killed each other and their litter in a crazy act of murder-suicide. For serious dog people, pet stores were evil sellers of dogs from puppy mills, but we were desperate: we’d been looking in shelters for over a month and hadn’t found a single dog that called to us. Until that freezing cold afternoon when I opened the door to Debbie’s Petland and saw, instantly, in the cages along the right wall of the shop, a perfect fluffy fur-ball—a tiny Lassie—and announced to Teddy and anyone else in the store who may have had designs on her: that’s my dog.
I still remember Teddy on the floor of the pet shop playing with her, then just three months old, that cold gray afternoon—how he said he wanted to name her Charlotte because they’d just finished reading Charlotte’s Web at school—a smile under all his long hair and looking happier than he had since preschool. So I bought the puppy, and the crate, and the food and the bowls and the leash and collar and the chew toys, over a thousand dollars’ worth of pet and gear, loading everything—except the dog itself, who sat on Teddy’s lap in the backseat—into the trunk. Which was a small price to pay for what would become my full-time companion; my life vest; my vine; my dog-baby.
Inhabitancy
Having the always-costumed People Puppets in our house feels strange and quickly creates a cloud of shoulds in my head: we should entertain them, we should treat them as special guests; we should put out snacks, make dinner with all their favorite foods, fix all the broken and leaky things (“The top 10 ‘should’s and why you should [see what we did there?] ignore them”). But for the first few days of their stay, I’m off the hook: after they load in their giant duffle bags, stomping their hoof-boots on the front hall mat before scuffing the walls with their massive plastic storage containers on their way to the basement, we barely see them. They leave early in the morning and come home late, after dark, already working long hours at the school, building sets and sewing costumes. Morningside Montessori Autumn Inhabitancy is in full swing, apparently, but the only thing Teddy has told us is that the themes for the big finale “Spotlight” performance in a few weeks have been decided on: a combination of “Resistance” and “Together We Rise”—an echo of the country’s pushback against the political turmoil in our country.
“Great,” I say in the car on the way home from school, barely remembering what it was like to wake up without that sick the-world-as-we-knew-it-is-ending feeling in my stomach because every day it’s clear from the news that the world as we know it is ending. “I especially love the positive message in ‘Together We Rise’—how depending on others for support helps us survive difficult times.” I practically tear up, thinking about how I shouldn’t have to defend my sling ever again. Shouldn’t everyone be wearing a dog for improved mental health?
“That’s not exactly how Mr. Noah described it,” Teddy says with a dubious head-tilt. “You’re making it sound like a self-help book. He made it sound political. Like civil rights and stuff.”
“The personal is political,” I shoot back, as smug as a college freshman who did some but not all of the assigned reading. “Tell them to remember their history. It’s Feminism 101.” Fuck Mr. Noah and Ms. Grace, I think, moving beyond defending my dog to more pressing matters. Together we will rise and resist our awful new government and the Secret Pooper, whether they help us or not. No wonder Teddy barely tells me anything.
But the strangest thing about the People Puppets’ stay by far is how it has forced Gary and me back into the same room and the same bed, Gary’s clothes and toiletries brought up from the basement and piled in a corner of the room and in a heap on top of my dresser without any thought to acquiring permanent drawer or shelf space.
I text Glenn.
We’re like best friends sharing a motel-double on a longer-than-expected road trip. Side by side, absolutely no touching. Like we did that time we got snowed in in Rochester, after that huge “Bird” book signing.
Don’t tell me you’re making him sleep head-to-toe.
Good idea! Even safer!
Oh Judy . . .
* * *
Even Teddy is confused by the temporary arrangement. On the first night of the Puppets’ stay, he stops into our room with a made-up question about what time we’re leaving for school in the morning—we always leave at the exact same time every morning—late—and then stares at us suspiciously, as if the minute he turns his back to go to his room we’ll break character and dive into sleeping bags on the floor. The idea, frankly, is tempting, since I feel claustrophobic with Gary in the room and in the bed: he is so big and unwieldy, and noisy, with his anxiety-related constant throat-clearing—a sound that causes me such annoyance that I self-diagnosed myself with a mild case of misophonia (“Is marital misophonia an actual thing?” “Can marriage cause misophonia?”). I’ve grown so used to having the room all to myself that it’s become a “safe space,” a respite from the daily annoyances of normal marriage. Any infringement on it, however temporary, seems almost too much to bear. In the dark, very much on my side of the bed, I am already counting the days until the Puppets are gone.
On the second night, Teddy comes in to pet the dog, passed out on my feet, and then lingers, staring at us—Gary reading and me scrolling through the news feed on my phone. He is at a particular phase of his age where he won’t voluntarily or spontaneously speak without being prodded to.
“Yes, Teddy?” I say, over the glow of my screen. I have a vague idea of what he’s thinking before he says it.
“I thought you guys couldn’t sleep in the same room because of the snoring.”
Gary puts down his book and I put down my phone. “That’s true,” he says. “But there are extenuating circumstances. We have guests.”
“Yes. We have guests,” I repeat. A mantra, a magic word. Gary and I nod and smile cordially at each other, and then at Teddy—we’re playing the parts of two good-natured adults in a romantic comedy, suffering in the short term—housing People Puppets in our snoring room, which was really our separation room!—to keep our son in private school and to spare him the true meaning of our arrangement. I feel my fake smile start to fade. Even Sandra Bullock couldn’t pull this off.