Divorce Dog

The trick is to love somebody . . . If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

—James Baldwin

My dog Stella follows me everywhere. Down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, upstairs to the room where I write, downstairs again when I need more cream.

Stop, I tell her. Back off. Please, you’re suffocating me. Have your own life. Have some dignity.

She doesn’t listen. Instead she follows me into the bathroom for my shower, nosing open the door. One minute I’m standing there daydreaming beneath the water, lost in my lavender-scented dreams, and the next there’s a pair of lipid brown eyes gazing up through the spray. Such adoring, undemanding, unrelenting love. It makes me furious.

“Go away, Divorce Dog,” I mumble, tripping over her as she sprawls beneath my feet on the kitchen floor. It’s six o’clock and I’m rushing to make dinner for my children. Were it just me I’d have a bowl of cereal and be done with it. Cooking bores me to tears. Food is fuel as far as I’m concerned. Except for French fries. I love French fries. But you can’t serve a French fry and baby carrot to your children. They’ll gain a few pounds in their ugly duckling stage and the pediatrician will treat you like a criminal.

Instead you must calculate each meal as carefully as a scientist: this much protein (though you really should become a vegetarian) and this many fruits and vegetables (you aren’t giving enough or enough variety) and this much starch (so what if the kids want more? Pasta is poison! White flour is like cyanide! Refined sugar is worse than heroin!).

But this is a first-world problem, how much food to cook. To even complain is indulgent and self-absorbed. Guilt upon guilt. I take it out on the dog, who lies directly in the path between oven and sink.

“Get out of here!” I yell. Under my breath I add, “Damn divorce dog!”

Under my breath because the children are home: one in the living room watching television, the other in the dining room rotting her brain on the internet. I do not refer to Stella as Double-D in their presence. They probably sense she’s a divorce dog, but we do not speak of it.

I wouldn’t say I was a dog person.

I wouldn’t say, in fact, that I was an animal person, in general. I mean, I like animals well enough. I think horses are awesome and dolphins are slick and I spend the extra two dollars to buy eggs from hens which have been allowed to live free on the range. I like to watch those PBS specials on the impressiveness and intelligence of working dogs—dogs that help the blind or track the lost or detect epileptic attacks before they take place.

But I am not, in general, sentimental about animals. Stella is not like a child to me. When the lovely young trainer at the MSPCA dog obedience class kept referring to me as Stella’s mommy I’m afraid I had to object. Only two beings in this world can consider me “mommy,” I told her, and both of them possess the ability to sweat. I would not pay thousands or even hundreds of dollars for an animal (I consider the SPCA adoption fee a donation toward their good work and also toward neutering my animal). Every time the vet tries to guilt me into anything more than the basic rabies-heartworm cocktail, I just hold up my hand. I find the fact astonishing that Americans spend $50 billion a year on our pets, which is like a gazillion dollars more than the GNP of 64 countries, and about six times what we spend grudgingly on Head Start. I mean, to each his own, it takes all kinds, different strokes and judge not lest I be judged—but this is just wacky. Another word might be obscene.

Moreover, if pressed to take a side on that age-old domestic animal divide...