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In the breezeway she gives a good, deliberate
head to tail shake, spraying off the rain. And that is that. She
heads back to the sunroom, dark now but for the light from the table
lamp by my rocker, and resumes her nap that was so rudely interrupted.
"Did you dry her with a towel?" my mother calls from the
kitchen a few minutes after I'm settled in the rocker and am back
into my Nantucket murder mystery.
"What?"
"Did you dry the dog with a towel?"
"Damn," I mutter.
"Make sure her chest is dry," my mother reminds me as I
walk out to the back hall to get from the bottom of the closet the
old orange bath towel. "The chest is the most important part to
get bone dry."
Now, since the time when man first invited dog to come live in his
house, there has always been a lot of give and take in making this cross-species
relationship work. At times, the relationship can be so close that
we believe dogs are very much like us, that we, indeed, are related,
that we're parents or children, brothers or sisters. And dogs,
studies have shown, watch us and know us better than we know them.
Maybe dogs find that we become more like them, and maybe we do. They
adopt us into their packs as we adopt them into our families. Yet
there will always be things about dogs we just cannot comprehend,
like what it is that is so ecstatically delightful in sliding into
something dead and smelly and squishing it up real tight behind the
ears, just as there must be many things about us that dogs cannot
fathom, like the endless idle hours we spend seated before the
flickering images in a big black box.
With few exceptions, what Amy might not fully understand, she gamely
accepts. And one of those few exceptions is getting toweled dry. For
the supreme leader of a pack to be dried off behind the ears and have
her tummy rubbed dry after being outside in the rain is, to her,
completely incomprehensible and unreasonable. Clearly it is unacceptable.
Carrying the orange bath towel into the sunroom is like pirouetting
with a red cape through the streets of Pamplona during the running of
the bulls. As soon as Amy sees it coming, she charges it, grabbing
hold of a corner, and, hanging on, shakes it like a partridge.
She has her end, I have mine, with which I quickly go to work.
"Oh, nice and dry, we're going to get you so nice and dry,"
I singsong chant, toweling under each ear and around her throat.
"Ohhhhh, so beautiful, such beautiful, lovely, luscious golden
hair, so soft and silky, golden blond, honey blond, lustrous honey
blond hair, uummm, so smooth and soft."
Nodding slowly in agreement, she momentarily succumbs to this
soothing beautyshop lullaby, almost letting her end of the towel drop
from her mouth.
She catches herself just as it does, and grabs it with a snap.
"Amy get dry," I patiently explain, prying open her jaws
and pulling out the gooey end, only to have her lunge for another
hunk of it.
She looks up at me to see how I'm taking it.
"Now wait a minute," I indignantly protest. "Wait just
a minute! They wouldn't put up with this in a beauty parlor, and you
know it."
With her hanging on to one end of the towel, all the while slyly
waiting to reel in more if I relax my hold on it, I work with the few
square inches of towel she's left me, drying around the ears, under
the chin, down the chest, the back, the tail, the legs, rolling her
over on her back to get the stomach. Swishing her tail back and
forth, her black lips grinning, she grabs more towel, which she holds
in her jaws and flails with her paws.
"This is so silly, Amy. Why would a dog even think of something
like this? What would a dog? What would a dog even be thinking?"
I ask Amy in astonishment as she rolls back over on her stomach,
tugging at her end of the towel and staring right at me, defiantly.
"What's she doing?" Marjorie asks, wide awake now that all
the dirty work has been done and the fun might be beginning.
"I think she's being defiant. To me, at least," I say,
tugging at my end of the towel to get more back, "this smacks of
defiance. Do we have to take it?"
"No we do not," Marjorie states emphatically, descending
from the loveseat to the carpet to the scene of impending battle.
"Give me that end."
And the games begin.
"Is she dry?" my mother calls in, not fully appreciating
the enormity of the task she has assigned. To her, Amy always is a
little girl who can be dressed up in ribbons and ruffles for tea
parties, a sweet little girl all sugar and spice and everything nice.
"Yup. As dry as she's going to get," I answer.
"Did you get the chest? The chest is most important."
"It's as dry as I can get it."
I neglect to report that our beauty parlor patron is currently
engaged in a rousing game of tug-of-war, with Marjorie manning the
other end of the orange towel.
Already the game is getting pretty intense.
"Amy, you're a brute and you know it," Marjorie says.
All golden retrievers like to fantasize that they can be fierce, and
Amy redoubles her tugging.
"Come on, one hand," I tell my sister. "Give her a chance."
"Give her a chance? Give her a chance?" she hisses at me,
hanging on to the towel for dear life. "This is not a retriever
you brought back in. This is some kind of wolf dog that's loose in
the house."
And sure enough, Amy's lovely and loving brown eyes have assumed the
frightening steely glint of the Big Bad Wolf's eyes in that split
second when Little Red Riding Hood suddenly perceived that it was not
Grandmama under the covers.
"One hand, one hand, those are the rules," I remind her
again. "She's only got one mouth."
"Okay, okay," my sister mutters, letting go with one hand
and instantly losing several inches of towel as Amy pulls back
against the momentary slack.
"I told you! She's not playing fair."
"She's playing fair, and she's going to beat you if you don't
watch out."
Now the match gets serious, and a gambling man in that dark room with
the wind wailing about the eaves would have had a hard time knowing
where to place his bet: on a Wellesley graduate sprawled on the
floor, one end of a towel clenched in her hand, pulling for all she
was worth, or on a wily retriever with the other end of the towel
clenched in bared teeth, her eyes becoming more and more demonic, a
low warning rumbling from her throat, watching, watching, waiting for
that split second of weakness, a moment of exhaustion, a repositioning.
Now!
In a movement almost too quick to see, Amy lets go of the towel and
pounces on it several inches closer to the middle, an ominous growl
in her throat defying anyone to call that cheating; and is that a
look of triumph in her eyes?
"See! I told you! That's cheating!" my sister declares.
Bully on you, Amy seems to reply as she repeats her tactic and lunges
again at the towel, grabbing it inches from my sister's fingers.
Marjorie lets go as if she touched a mouse crouched in the dusty dark
corner of a cupboard and jumps back out of the way.
"Good gods, Amy, you win. Okay? I quit. You win. You can have
the stupid towel. It's yours."
Amy already knows she has won without waiting for that gracious
concession speech. She grabs my sister's end of the towel, lying over
the rest of it, and begins a methodical ripping, viciously shaking a hunk.
Game over, right? Amy has won fair and square, everyone is ready to
concede that. But woe be unto whoever tries to retrieve that towel.
This is the really hard part of the game.
Left to her devices, Amy will make a great show of angrily ripping
loose every thread of the hated towel, mash around a bunch until
they're nice and soggy, and then swallow, which isn't good for the
drying towel or for a golden retriever. Our mission impossible is to
take the towel away and let it dry out for another rainy day.
"We've got some of that new sharp Cheddar cheese. Yup, the
strong kind. From Vermont. it's pretty good cheese."
The towel is dropped, long forgotten, the last thing on her mind. Who
wants a dry, tasteless towel when there's cheese being distributed?
She's up. She's herding us toward the kitchen six inches from our
legs, faster, faster. Must get that cheese.
Into the bright kitchen she skips, as sweet and innocent as little
Miss Muffet, her wolf mask put away. Straight to the refrigerator
door. It is laid on the counter. Two brown eyes watch in salivating
anticipation, like Ben Gunn's as it is placed on a breadboard, the
wrapper opened, a paring knife taken from a drawer, a nice hunk
neatly cut from ti and, like a pirate's gold bar, divided into thirds.
"What's that for?" my mother asks.
"We had to promise her cheese to get the towel back," my
sister explains.
"Oh, don't be ridiculous," my mother responds. "She
always lets me dry her, don't you, Amy? Amy, you have them buffaloed,
that what I think."
A tasty morsel of strong Vermont Cheddar cheese, down the hatch in a
gulp. And a healthy half of the other two pieces from the tug-of-war losers.
Pots bubble and simmer on the stove. The smell of chicken roasting in
the oven catches Amy's interest. She looks up at my mother,
expectantly, as if to ask, Is there anything I can do to help in the
kitchen? Is it ready yet? Can I have a piece now? Amy knows by heart
the answers to each of these kitchen questions, but her philosophy is
that it never hurts to ask. And she knows, too, that at dinnertime,
merely by resting her head in our laps and poking her nose into the
stomachs of those pack members she can so easily dominate, she will
secure all the chicken she wants, no hunting or skinning required.
Our work is done. We're in for the night, cozy and warm. The orange
towel is out of sight, having been secreted in the washing machine.
Everyone is content. We three head back to the sunroom to resume our
dozing and sleeping and reading, as outside the wind drives sheets of
rain against the house as if the storm will blow all night.
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--From Golden Days : Memories of a Golden Retriever, by Arthur
Vanderbilt. © June 1998
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