Stories. Maybe the Only Dog Story

Mother and Child with Dog Vomiting, Brian Kershisnik

When I was very small my grandparents on the distaff side raised dachshunds. I can hardly remember anything about those dogs other than that they were in all the houses on my mom's side of the family. That's honestly how I was first able to tell for sure which cousins were which. Gretel and Danke are the only two dog names I remember, though I have a hazy memory (I don't research these memories before I write them, because that would be recording family history, and I don't do that) of my dad calling someone (not a sister) Puddle. Or Piddle. Maybe Tinkle. Till I was an adult I had this hazy assumption that Danke meant something along the lines of "Pees on the Floor," (a Native American/Germanic name) even though I had been using that word to express thanks for forever. I don't remember caring much for these little creatures but I did love their puppies. All puppies are darling, but dachshund puppies are a special intervention of nature. A more improbable baby can scarcely be imagined. On one visit to Grandma's house I found my three year old heart breaking for them, for snaky little puppies to carry, to squeeze, to rub against my face, to chase and to fall over, laughing to death while they jumped and nipped.

My cousin Laura was at Grandma's, too. Laura was my most beloved child friend. She was also my blessed and everlasting inferior, having had no more sense than to be born six months after I was. I was always going to be older. The Oldest. Period. No appeal. Must have been awful, as I am not one to rest humbly on any sort of laurel. But Laura took it out of me in myriad ways. One of my very, very earliest memories is of her smashing my head onto the fender of a car and making one of my front teeth disappear. It hurt. I cried. My father was very surprised and upset. So was my mom. I kept looking for my tooth with my tongue. My parents looked for it on the ground. Then my uncle looked at my mouth and said my tooth was still there, it had just gone "up," and would come "down." Which I guess it must have done. Laura I loved as a part of me.

Laura ached for puppies, too, and went with me to ask Grandma to please have the dogs make us some. Grandma laughed to us in her special way, as though we were tiny darlings and as though she had heard not a thing we said. She would respond in that particular way to most of what we said to her all her life. Listen kid, she told us in her brisk, slangy grandma tone, the dogs can't just make puppies. They have to be bread. But, Grandma continued, in her special way that somehow led you to believe she was now addressing a new person , someone you were not altogether smart enough to see, we don't want the dogs to have puppies right now, do we? Who's we, white Grandma? But anyhow, who cared what she thought? She had tipped her grownup hand and now the secret was out. We knew how it was done.

Food magic.

Laura and I conferred. The solution to our puppy hunger, as accidentally explained by Grandma, was laughably simple. We didn't even think we needed to try to hide our actions. Just as well, we lacked the experience for successful deceit. I think our combined age was maybe six. We were not skilled (yet), rather, we were lucky in that most of the time no one looked at us. We strolled into the kitchen, pushed something movable and stable, maybe a chair, over to the counter, climbed onto the counter top, opened the cupboard, removed two loaves of whatever end-of-the-sixties-sliced-bread-in-a-bag my grandma had up there (not a baker, she) and went into the backyard to bread us some puppies. Two loaves so we each had a bag. It seemed an embarrassment of slices. Still, doesn't do to scrimp on spells to make offspring. Plenty of fairy tales preach the perils of that sort of miserliness. We commenced making the puppies, flinging bread in the soft southern California sun, happy in Grandma's backyard, almost knee deep in the ocean of her two heaving dachshunds. It was a idyllic moment of animal husbandry. We pair of blissful cousins, casting slices wide, cheerfully counting our puppies before they hatched, naming and apportioning them; dogs in a frenzy of adoration for us, gulping and snarfing processed white flour like they might never eat it again.

It seems a fair surmise, judging from events as they unfolded once we were noticed, that we were killing the dogs. With malice aforethought and extreme prejudice. We had certainly murdered some body's plans for lunch. Parents and other relations poured out of the house, summarily separating us from the dogs and from our bread before we knew what we were about and certainly before the spell had a chance to take. Carried shocked and sobbing into the house, I watched over some adult's shoulder as the useless, grownup dogs bobbed away into the distance with nary a puppy in sight. Nevernevernever, I mourned and hiccuped to myself, there will nevernevernever be any puppies now because Grandma doesn't want the dogs to have bread and she never will ever again. Noooo puppies. Too sad even to contemplate such a dark future.

To their credit, aside from the damage they had already done, they didn't officially punish us. I think they were a mite surprised at the screaming, lunging and grieving following our apprehension. (Good thing I grew out of all that. Sheesh.) They let us roll about for a bit, work it through our systems, then asked us, carefully, what exactly the matter was. That we answered, and answered truthfully, shows how terribly young we were. Later, we got older. While we explained, accused and told in lurid detail the terrible thing they had done, the adults started glancing quickly at each other in that dumb, sneaky way they have when they think they might laugh while somebody tiny is dying of a real problem that they have grown too big to remember isn't at all funny. This was a strange response and we faltered, our tale petering out in the face of their badly controlled amusement. What? Laughing at us? At thwarted but serious food magic?

"No, no, sweethearts," they explained, "that wouldn't have worked. (Gasp and giggle.) It isn't bread like that. It has to be with other dogs. Now, we know how much you love puppies but blah blah blah..." and they were gone in a swamp of fake understanding and trite comfort. It didn't matter. Laura and I exchanged looks of our own, tears stemmed as if by magic. We had the clue, the next part of the riddle.

Other dogs.