Zoe isn't my type of dog. A rat terrier, small, agile, a little disconnected at first. A bit of a leg humper, a barker when left alone. Eyes as soft as pools of brown chocolate cream, hairs akimbo all over her muzzle, small feet that barely touch the ground when she runs, a stub of a tail which shoots up in delight at the sight of a Rhodesian Ridgeback 70 pounds heavier than she is, or a haughty Pomeranian with a diamond encrusted collar. The same tail clamps down tightly against her ass when she first meets a person, as if an innate protective device covered her most intimate place.
Zoe, like most of the dogs that have cruised through the chaos of my life, came from an animal shelter. And over the two months I have known her she has gone from a dog that would pry open the smallest crack in a door to disappear down the street, to a dog that I couldn't lose unless I had thrown her off a ten story building and run for the hills. And when her new family took her, they had to bodily pick her up off the roadway where she had flattened herself into a pancake. My pack of dogs were leaning out of the wndows of the car, looking in disapproval at this display of desperation.
She'll be fine. The beagle, the two kids, the cat and a stay at home Mom will ensure she is rarely alone and never without love. But I, who suffer from the worst kind of abandonment fears, feel this dreadful empathy for a dog whose life just got plunged into the unknown. And we? We just expect this creature to adapt, to move from one home and one bed, to another home, new sounds, smells, routines, languages, animals, foods, and to never see again the person and the animals with whom she has achieved such miraculous and passionate connection.
What goes through her mind the first night? That some terrible mistake has been made, and that there must have been a switcheroo at the park? That I, without realising it, have driven home without her? Of course she's not 'thinking' as we do - but feeling, sensing.
Does she feel that knife in her chest, that fear in her gut, that awful feeling of being out of control and away from the familiar. And then I remember the days, many of them, when I was left, as a child. And the terror of the dark, the desire to just disappear into a mammoth hole just overpowered me. The first day at the boarding school, watching my mother drive away in a borrowed car, the dark cloud that descended, the cruelty of the other girls, and then my descent into the basement of the red brick fortress, where I found a man who no-one even seemed to know existed. I was 12 and he was in the embers of his life, in a dank room where he collected newspapers piled and heaped all around his metal cot. Perhaps he had once been a caretaker at the school, who knows.
There was no air in the basement, and the door was was always closed. And he and his filthy room became my refuge from the life above stairs. Every day I would escape, at some point when others were playing tennis or cramming for exams, into his den. And in his room he had a small dog, as matted as he was, as rejected as he was. We would sit, the three of us, while he boiled a kettle on a small gas ring, in silence and compassion for the other.
I once smuggled a hamster into the school only to have it confiscated and returned to my grandmother in Wimbledon, to the southwest of London. And one day, a year or so into my miserable existence at the school in the Titsey Hills, I snuck down to my friend's room. The door sat completely and wide open, the windows flung out. The newspapers, the cot, the smell were gone. The gas ring and the kettle and his mug from which he drank his tea thrown in a careless pile on the ground outside.
The little dog sat on a cardboard box. Workmen sauntered by. A teacher saw me and yelled an instruction to go back upstairs. I never saw the man or the dog again. I never said a word. Every time a dog leaves my life, there is a moment when the stench of the little room, and the feel of the dog's matted fur overpowers me, and I feel as if I have betrayed another trust. Over and over again.
The dogs and what we ask of them. We ask that they accept these betrayals with nothing more than a shrug and a backward glance that says 'it's Ok, I'll be fine, really. don't worry about me".
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