A HIT ON THE PETS by Sherril Jaffe
Yes, my wife Daphne and I put a hit on our pets–a thirteen-year-old purebred Golden Retriever named Toffee and a fourteen-year old black alley cat our children named Ray. It may be happening even now, back in San Francisco, a thug-like individual sneaking up behind them with a cord, or a lead pipe, or a ball peen hammer. We requested not to know the details, but money has changed hands. Meanwhile, Daphne and I are on our way to visit my mother in Westchester County, my old mother who has Alzheimer’s and wears diapers and doesn’t even know who I am; my mother, who needs round-the-clock caretakers to put her into her chair and to take her out of her chair and to put on her CDs of show tunes so she can hum along with her mouth while her eyes remain a stony fortress protecting a vast cave filled with sawdust. Maybe you would like to know how we could even contemplate doing such a terrible thing to our pets as to put a hit out on them, these poor defenseless creatures with their innocent round eyes which are always looking up at us with complete unvarnished trust, with pure uncomplicated love, I being a rabbi, after all, a man of the cloth, so to speak, and Daphne being a rabbi’s wife, and universally acknowledged to be an extremely decent person. Well, after I explain, I’m not sure you will feel so ready to cast aspersions.
We did not always hate our pets. But we did not really want to have them in the first place, either. Once my wife and I had children we felt that was enough. However, once the children were old enough to reason, they began to argue in favor of having pets. But we said no. We were living in an apartment in New York City then. I was going to rabbinical school on the Upper West Side, and we were living in a dingy apartment on West 110th near Amsterdam already overrun with cockroaches and mice. It wouldn’t be fair to bring pets into this world, to have to live so confined in this way, never to be able to run free. We couldn’t even allow the children to go down in the elevator alone to play with their friends on the second floor. The only time they could run free was on those occasional Sundays when we took them up to their grandmother’s house in Westchester on the train, their grandmother, whose house we were on our way to now.
If we ever moved to the country, we assured the children, we would get them a dog the very next day. We didn’t think there was much chance that would ever happen. “Okay,” the children agreed, “get us a guinea pig, then.” So we got them a guinea pig. But there was something wrong with it, and it died the next day with its eyes all crusted over after a night of trembling and quivering. “Okay, so get us another guinea pig,” the children said, reasoning that we hadn’t really fulfilled our promise to them with a guinea pig that, instead of giving them something to love, introduced them to the horror of death and rigor mortis at just the wrong time in their psychological developments, according to the latest theories of child rearing my wife couldn’t stop herself from reading. “And this time, make it two guinea pigs, because we think Benny must have died of loneliness,” the children reasoned with us. We didn’t think this was really wise; we thought if we went right back to the pet store to replace the now very stiff guinea pig–which they had named and tried to interest in a cardboard toilet paper tube–with another guinea pig, or a pair of guinea pigs, so that there would be a spare one in case one of them died again, that this would be giving them the wrong sort of message; this would be teaching them that if someone dies you can just go out and replace them the next day, and what kind of a message is that? How much do they learn about the sanctity of life from that? But, against our better judgment, we did go right back to the pet store, and we bought two more guinea pigs, big robust ones this time, ones which resembled chirping, furry potatoes with shining button eyes. Our children were too young to have to grapple with the reality and finality of death, we thought; but the fact was, they had already been down this road, this dark narrow road which only went in one direction.
Two years before, when our older child was three and our younger one, at just the wrong time in their psychological development, according to the books the psychologist we consulted suggested we read, my father, our daughters’ grandfather, who had been pitching up in our daughters’ lives bearing giant blue teddy bears which wound up with keys and played unearthly plaintive melodies, died in the most ghastly manner, writhing in a hospital bed gasping for breath which was being sucked out of him by the Angel of Death as we watched. The younger one, of course, could not even ask where her grandfather had gone after he was buried, but the older one asked about him every day for a year after that, a year of night terrors and phobias at midday, and my wife and I, who had planned on giving our children the happy carefree childhoods Adam and Eve must have had in the Garden of Eden–before eating of the tree of knowledge that they were going to die–my wife and I cursed Death for coming at his own whim, without any consideration for what was appropriate, for what was decent, for what was nice. Death came, mucking up the works, the happy childhoods of our daughters in progress, and there was nothing my wife or I could do about it. It was all out of our control.
But replacing a dead guinea pig with two live ones was something within our control, or perhaps we were simply acting within our children’s control; it doesn’t matter, we were just as anxious as they were, by this point, to say to Death, “Death, thou shalt die!” with all the bravado of parents who really can protect their children from the harm lurking everywhere in the shadows and waiting to grab them.
So the new Benny and his companion, Burt, came to live with us in our apartment on West 110th Street, where they were pretty much completely ignored, except by my wife, who had to feed them, freshen their water, and change their sawdust, since this is always the job of the mother. Benny and Burt barely moved, but they did not die. This was clear from the annoying, chirping squeaks they emitted when you came into the room where they were. Or maybe these noises weren’t really for you, but just constantly coming out of them.
And this is how we all got on for the next little while. The two guinea pigs sat in their tank atop our girls’ chest of drawers, watching without interest while my wife combed nits out of our daughters’ hair in the evenings. There was an epidemic of lice in New York City during those years. And then one day, two years before I would be ordained as a rabbi, I took a weekend student pulpit up in the country.
I suppose you are thinking that this was when we got a dog, but this was not the case, as we hadn’t actually moved to the country, we were just staying there on weekends. My wife and I wanted to leave Benny and Burt in the city on weekends with plenty of food and water, but the children wouldn’t hear of it. They were too traumatized by the death of the first Benny.
It wasn’t that they really believed that if you carted your guinea pigs around with you wherever you went you would be able to protect them from death, but that dying alone without anybody human to watch you in an apartment on West 110th Street with salsa music welling up from the street below and leaking through the windows was simply too cold. So we took them with us every weekend in a plain cardboard box, down the elevator where the other occupants of the building always felt they had the right to make comments about them and always mistook them for hamsters. It became tedious to keep trying to explain that they weren’t hamsters, so we just let it ride. Benny and Burt then rode between the girls in the backseat of our Toyota, and when we arrived in the country, we plopped them into the tank which we kept for them in our little apartment in the basement of the country synagogue. Like us, now, they were both country mice and city mice, though I’m quite sure they didn’t know what the difference was any more than a computer mouse might. They were part of our family, and our daughters loved them, or, at least, we assumed that they did.
Then in the spring we stayed up in the country for our daughters’ entire spring vacations, and that was when the cat showed up. He was about three months old, he was wearing a red collar with a bell on it, and he came walking up to where our daughters were playing in front of the synagogue. They were delighted.
“Don’t feed him,” Daphne told them. “If you feed him, he’ll never go away. And obviously he belongs to someone. He has a collar. Somebody’s looking for him right this minute.”
They put a bowl of milk out for him.
“Don’t let him in the apartment,” I told the girls. “If he comes into the apartment, he won’t be able to go home. And you’ll just become attached to him, and you’ll be devastated when he does finally go home.” Then I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed to read, propped up on some pillows with my knees up. My wife came in and got on the bed with her book. Pretty soon the cat came in and curled up under my legs and went to sleep.
“I think that cat loves you,” Daphne said.
“I love this cat,” I admitted. But, in spite of these inexplicable feelings which had erupted in me, I had to do the right thing. I had to advertise in the local paper to try to find the real owner of the cat. During the course of that week our girls organized all the other children in the synagogue into prayer groups to pray that no one would answer my ad. We were reading “Re’eh” in the Torah that week–“Behold! I put before you this day a blessing and a curse . . .” and that was why the children decided to name the cat “Re’eh,” which instantly morphed into “Ray.” Then just when it seemed like we were home free, that the cat was ours, the call came.
It was a teenager. He said the cat jumped out the window in front of the synagogue when he was driving by.
“Was it wearing any sort of a collar? Can you describe it?” I asked, hoping against hope that he was the owner of some other lost cat who had jumped out of his car in front of the synagogue, one who had hightailed it in the other direction. But when he described not only the collar but the bell I decided to use my last card. I decided to put a stumbling block before the blind. I offered him fifty dollars for his cat. And he took it.
If only we could go back in time, go back to the moment right before I made this fatal mistake. It just goes to show, nothing good ever comes out of unethical behavior.
The girls were delighted. And the cat seemed to be happy as well. As soon as he was ours, Ray jumped into the window with a live snake in his mouth. Our older daughter immediately rescued the snake, took it outside and put it in an apple tree. But the cat brought it, or one of its cousins, back the next day.
At the end of the week, we took the cat and the guinea pigs back down to the city. Ray was able to adjust perfectly to apartment life where he took to shredding the couch. He liked to watch the cat across the street walking along the parapet fourteen floors above the street. But we didn’t let Ray do that. And on the weekends we all went back to the country where Ray could climb trees and bring us snakes.
We no longer needed to go to my mother’s to get out of the city, but she occasionally came across the river to visit us. The antics of our pets would sometimes make her smile, which gratified me as she hadn’t smiled very much since the day my father died. This is how we lived until I was ordained as a rabbi and we moved to the country synagogue full-time, and the very next day we got our children a dog.
They were giving away puppies down at the local supermarket. The puppy had eyebrows and his breath smelled like coffee. The vet said he was going to be a Rottweiler. We didn’t know what that was. It turned out to be a very large, muscular dog that crowded people on the stairs. But we loved him. By this time, we were living in a little house on a lake and going to the apartment in the synagogue on weekends. One weekend the girls and I were already over at the synagogue when we got a hysterical call from my wife, who was supposed to be here already with the food for our dinner and Coffee, our Rottweiler. Coffee had been running free, as he always did, and when she called him, he didn’t come. Then some neighbor kids came running over and told her that Coffee had been following them across a busy road, and a car had hit him. Daphne was calling from the vet. It wasn’t clear the dog was going to survive.
We didn’t know what to pray for. If the dog survived, he would be horribly maimed, and the cost of his rehabilitation was going to exceed our means. But when he finally died, none of us was prepared for what we felt. We felt like amputees; we felt like a shelf of love sticking out in front of us had been lopped off. We were all four in shock.
That was when a member of our congregation offered to give us an eight-week-old purebred Golden Retriever puppy, the last of a litter. They said when they saw us all so upset at Friday night services that they knew it was meant to be. They brought the dog over the next day. The children lined up to hold it. It was a baby, a big baby, trembling to be away from its mother. We were all still in shock over the death of our Rottweiler. We hadn’t even been able to grieve for him yet. We didn’t know if we’d ever be able to feel something for this dog. If you could just replace one dog with another, then there was nothing to the idea of the sanctity of each individual life. We watched while the new dog, which we named “Toffee,” made puddles on the rug, pulled the liners out of all of our shoes and dismembered the girls’ Barbie dolls. We were all too stunned by the death of Coffee the Rottweiler to do anything, or perhaps we were too overwhelmed by the energy of this dog, who would bound suddenly after Ray the cat, pulling us over before we could let go of the leash.
We left the cat and the guinea pigs in the house by the lake when we went to the apartment at the synagogue, puppy in tow, from Friday night through Saturday night. We left a window open in our upstairs bedroom so he could go in and out. He jumped from the window to the dogwood tree outside. When we came home on Saturday nights we found dead birds lined up on the floor of our daughter’s room. Feathers would be everywhere. My wife and the girls would always send me into the house first to take care of the carnage. Sometimes when Daphne and I were lying in bed, Ray would jump in the window with a live bunny screaming in terror between his jaws. If you’ve ever heard a rabbit scream, it’s one sound you never forget. Other times he would have moles or gophers. This is how we lived in those days.
In the meanwhile, Toffee was chewing everything in sight. He devoured all of the girls’ toys, he ate the remote control to the television, and he chewed through a wall. We started keeping him in a big cage in the bathroom of the apartment at the synagogue while services were in session. It was an odd feeling to be upstairs praying while our dog was downstairs in a cage.
Then one day my wife walked into our younger daughter’s room, where the guinea pigs now lived in their tank on her dresser because the older girl couldn’t sleep with the chirping sound they made, and Daphne noticed that they weren’t chirping at all. She took a good look at them. They were dead. How long they had been dead, she couldn’t say. We weren’t sorry; none of us was. It was appalling, really.
I took a pulpit in San Francisco soon after that, and we moved. We found, while walking Toffee down the city streets on the way to the park, that there was a lot of pizza under cars in San Francisco, pizza and bagels, and other bits of fast food which Toffee would lunge for and devour, foil wrappers and all, though the vet said he should only be eating one cup of measured kibble in the morning and one cup in the evening. At the dog run other dog owners always asked, “How old is your dog?” All the dog people always asked each other this question, and we wondered why, why was this the most important question to ask?
That first winter my widowed mother, whose house in Westchester County my wife and I are on our way to now, came out for a visit. “Whose house did you say this was?” my mother asked me, and a minute after I had answered, she asked me again. This was the first sign we had that there was something amiss with her, that she was coming down with Alzheimer’s, which, over the next decade, would completely erase her personality, though she would go on living.
Even though she didn’t know whose it was, my mother loved this house. I have a fond memory of her on her yearly visit, sitting in the big red velvet armchair we bought for the living room reading–or pretending to read–by the fire. There were a number of years when the Alzheimer’s had robbed her of her former functions but not yet her ability to pretend she still had them. During this period, Toffee began going grey in the muzzle and Ray started peeing in our closets. There was a band of dirt now on all our walls where Toffee rubbed himself, and pulled–places all over the carpet where Ray sharpened his claws. The carpet was also quite spotted from places where the animals had puked or peed. There was no sense in painting or even getting the carpets cleaned while these two were living with us. One day our younger daughter had a friend over, and the friend said, “Is that poo in the corner of your room? How disgusting.” It was. “How can you live like this?” the girl asked. Our daughter didn’t know. Finally she left for college.
About a year ago, Ray developed a severe problem with constipation, and had to have a series of enemas. When he came home from the vet, he started yowling horribly all the time. Then he would jump up on our bed with shit half in and half out of his anus and trail spots across our white comforter. The vet suggested we give him Metamucil, and we did, and this did help him poop, a big one right next to my wife’s face when she was sleeping one morning, and after that in various places all over the house, but never, anymore, in his cat box. Toffee had taken to eating plastic razor blades off the rim of the bathtub and breathing heavily whenever anyone came over, and he was now peeing regularly on the front hall rug.
“I can’t take it anymore,” my wife said.
“What can we do?” I asked.
“I think we should put them out on an ice floe,” my wife said.
“No, really,” I said.
“I think we should just open the door and let them out,” my wife said. “Born free.”
“No, really,” I said.
“I think we should call the vet and tell her we can’t go on like this. Surely she’ll suggest then that we should just put them down. That it is the most humane thing to do,” my wife said.
“Go ahead and call her,” I said. “But I don’t think she’ll say that.”
She didn’t. She suggested more Metamucil. She suggested taking Toffee out to pee more often. My wife gave her every opportunity to offer to kill them for us, but she refused to take the bait. And life continued in this depressing manner.
Then one day I was on my way home from my office at the synagogue, and I stopped to admire a beautiful silver S-class Jaguar parked a few houses down. It had a license plate which read “Sonja,” and it was parked just behind a large plumbing truck. “Plotz Plumbing” was written across the side. Obviously, the plumber, a Russian émigré, had bought this Jaguar for his wife with the proceeds from his lucrative plumbing business. But how lucrative was plumbing, really?
“Nice car,” I said to the plumber, who came out of his house just then.
“You like it?” he said.
“Very much,” I said. “Say, I need someone to perform a certain service for me,” I said.
“Plumbing?” the plumber asked.
“Something like that,” I said. “Are you interested?”
“I might be,” he said, and then he gave me his card. “Call me,” he said.
“I will,” I said, and then I got into my Jetta and drove home.
“I was thinking that maybe we could put a hit on the pets,” I said to my wife when I walked in the house. She was on her knees, scrubbing the front hall carpet, as usual.
“How could we do that?” she asked.
“There might be a way,” I said.
“When?” she said.
“When we’re in New York, visiting my mother,” I said.
And now we were in New York, on our way to visit my mother. We were both worried about how we would find her. The last time we were with her, she was quite stony. Just sitting in her chair, listening to show tunes. We sat on either side of her. My wife had patted her hand, and she had turned around and slugged me. What quality of life did she have? How long would this go on? A little part of me was wishing that she would just die, but how could I wish that? I did not believe in euthanasia, and had preached against it many times from the pulpit because I saw the sanctity of life as an absolute value. Moreover, even if assisted suicide were a nice option for a person who wants to die, what did it do to the doctor? It turned him into a murderer. My position had always been clear. But I had not had a mother in this condition before.
“Look who’s here!” my mother’s caretaker chirped to my mother when we arrived.
“It’s your son! And your daughter-in-law!”
“Hello, Mom! It’s so good to see you! Would you like to go sit in your chair? Would you like to look out the window?” I asked her. It was like talking to a stone.
“You take her on that side,” the caretaker said, and we raised her from her kitchen chair and steered her into the living room. Daphne followed with the boom-box, the CD of old standards playing. “First the tide, rushes in, plants a kiss on the shore, then rolls out to sea, and the sea, is very calm once more.” We sat her down in her chair, and my wife and I took the seats on either side. “They say, Ruby, you’re like a dream, not always what you seem.” The caretaker had rearranged the room so that my mother’s easy chair faced the window now, not the couch against the wall the way it always had before in order to facilitate conversation. My mother had no conversation any more. All she could do was hum. “Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry,” the boom-box sang. “La la la la la la la la la la,” my mother hummed.
Outside the window the gardener had set out some flats of begonias ready for planting in the flower beds beyond the terrace. A bird feeder hung in the red maple, its leaves lifting and falling in the breeze as if it were breathing. “If I loved you,” the boom-box sang. “La, la la la?” my mother hummed. The emerald lawn swooned down to the oak trees at the bottom of the hill. Big pouffy clouds peeked between the branches and rose in the powder blue sky. “Longing to tell you, but afraid and shy, I’d let my golden moments pass me by,” the boom box sang. “La, la, la,” my mother hummed.
A big gray squirrel jumped into the begonia seedlings and jumped out. Then a black squirrel jumped into the seedlings, pulled off a leaf, and sat up and nibbled it, its tail rising behind it, its eyes bright and its whiskers twitching; and it too jumped away. “Who can explain it, who can tell you why?”
A cardinal swooped onto the bird feeder, bobbed its head down, and flew off as a woodpecker with a red head and black and white tail feathers replaced it, and a blue jay replaced it. “Caw” screamed a big crow, swooping in. “Bloody Mary is the girl I love!”
A chipmunk and another gray squirrel hopped in the begonias, munching. “La la la la la la la la la!” Now some brown doves made their way up the lawn to the terrace. “Maria! Say it once and there’s music playing!” A bird with a bright yellow belly was now bobbing in the feeder.
The squirrels hopped in and out, decimating the begonias. But who cared? There was something exquisitely perfect about this whole little scene.
I had grown up in this house, but had never simply stopped and looked out the window before like this. I had never stopped to see that without ever noticing it, I was living inside a Walt Disney movie. It was a lovely, happy, bouncy world, if slightly ghastly, this world my mother now inhabited, which I had assumed was a meaningless horror. Why had I assumed that meaning had left her life as soon as she had stopped recognizing me? What ego! What did I know? I turned to my wife. I could tell she was having the same thoughts I was. She was having second thoughts about Toffee and Ray. She took her cell phone from her bag. I took my wallet from my pocket and pulled out the card for Plotz Plumbing. We had to get to Plotz before it was too late.
When we returned from our trip the pets were waiting for us the same as usual. There was pee on the front hall rug and a trail of cat shit going down the stairs to the laundry room. I volunteered to take the dog out, and my wife said she would do what she could to tidy up. Toffee struggled to navigate down the steep front steps. After we had crossed the street, he stopped to defecate on the neighbor’s lawn, in front of a sign which had a picture of a dog rather like him with a line through it. An old man approached us from behind.
“How old is your dog?” he asked me.
I saw that Toffee was a lot whiter in the muzzle than the last time I had looked at him. I saw that the man was probably not any older than I was.
Why was he asking me this? Why did he need to know? Was he pointing out that my dog, who in people years would be ninety-three, was much too old to live? Was the age of my dog something I should be ashamed of, because it reflected on me? Or was he saying what a marvel it was that this dog was now an elder statesman? Just a moment ago, it seemed, he was a dopey, floppy-eared puppy.
“He’s thirteen,” I said, “and he’s just as alive as he ever was.”
The canopy of leaves over our heads rose and fell in the breeze, and the evening breeze caressed the trees, tenderly.
Sherril Jaffe is the author of The Unexamined Wife (Black Sparrow Books, 1983) and Scars Make Your Body More Interesting (Black Sparrow Press, 1975). Her recent stories have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, and Volt.