Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog, Page 5

  Somehow, having Marley aboard with us, and seeing how strangers eyed him so warily, gave us a sense of peace we might not have had otherwise. He was a big, loving dope of a dog whose defense strategy against intruders would surely have been to lick them to death. But the prowlers and predators out there didn’t need to know that. To them he was big, he was powerful, and he was unpredictably crazy. And that is how we liked it.

  Pregnancy suited Jenny well. She began rising at dawn to exercise and walk Marley. She prepared wholesome, healthy meals, loaded with fresh vegetables and fruits. She swore off caffeine and diet sodas and, of course, all alcohol, not even allowing me to stir a tablespoon of cooking sherry into the pot.

  We had sworn to keep the pregnancy a secret until we were confident the fetus was viable and beyond the risk of miscarriage, but on this front neither of us did well. We were so excited that we dribbled out our news to one confidant after another, swearing each to silence, until our secret was no longer a secret at all. First we told our parents, then our siblings, then our closest friends, then our office mates, then our neighbors. Jenny’s stomach, at ten weeks, was just starting to round slightly. It was beginning to seem real. Why not share our joy with the world? By the time the day arrived for Jenny’s examination and sonogram, we might as well have plastered it on a billboard: John and Jenny are expecting.

  I took off work the morning of the doctor’s appointment and, as instructed, brought a blank videotape so I could capture the first grainy images of our baby. The appointment was to be part checkup, part informational meeting. We would be assigned to a nurse-midwife who could answer all our questions, measure Jenny’s stomach, listen for the baby’s heartbeat, and, of course, show us its tiny form inside of her.

  We arrived at 9:00 A.M., brimming with anticipation. The nurse-midwife, a gentle middle-aged woman with a British accent, led us into a small exam room and immediately asked: “Would you like to hear your baby’s heartbeat?” Would we ever, we told her. We listened intently as she ran a sort of microphone hooked to a speaker over Jenny’s abdomen. We sat in silence, smiles frozen on our faces, straining to hear the tiny heartbeat, but only static came through the speaker.

  The nurse said that was not unusual. “It depends on how the baby is lying. Sometimes you can’t hear anything. It might still be a little early.” She offered to go right to the sonogram. “Let’s have a look at your baby,” she said breezily.

  “Our first glimpse of baby Grogie,” Jenny said, beaming at me. The nurse-midwife led us into the sonogram room and had Jenny lie back on a table with a monitor screen beside it.

  “I brought a tape,” I said, waving it in front of her.

  “Just hold on to it for now,” the nurse said as she pulled up Jenny’s shirt and began running an instrument the size and shape of a hockey puck over her stomach. We peered at the computer monitor at a gray mass without definition. “Hmm, this one doesn’t seem to be picking anything up,” she said in a completely neutral voice. “We’ll try a vaginal sonogram. You get much more detail that way.”

  She left the room and returned moments later with another nurse, a tall bleached blonde with a monogram on her fingernail. Her name was Essie, and she asked Jenny to remove her panties, then inserted a latex-covered probe into her vagina. The nurse was right: the resolution was far superior to that of the other sonogram. She zoomed in on what looked like a tiny sac in the middle of the sea of gray and, with the click of a mouse, magnified it, then magnified it again. And again. But despite the great detail, the sac just looked like an empty, shapeless sock to us. Where were the little arms and legs the pregnancy books said would be formed by ten weeks? Where was the tiny head? Where was the beating heart? Jenny, her neck craned sideways to see the screen, was still brimming with anticipation and asked the nurses with a little nervous laugh, “Is there anything in there?”

  I looked up to catch Essie’s face, and I knew the answer was the one we did not want to hear. Suddenly I realized why she hadn’t been saying anything as she kept clicking up the magnification. She answered Jenny in a controlled voice: “Not what you’d expect to see at ten weeks.” I put my hand on Jenny’s knee. We both continued staring at the blob on the screen, as though we could will it to life.

  “Jenny, I think we have a problem here,” Essie said. “Let me get Dr. Sherman.”

  As we waited in silence, I learned what people mean when they describe the swarm of locusts that descends just before they faint. I felt the blood rushing out of my head and heard buzzing in my ears. If I don’t sit down, I thought, I’m going to collapse. How embarrassing would that be? My strong wife bearing the news stoically as her husband lay unconscious on the floor, the nurses trying to revive him with smelling salts. I half sat on the edge of the examining bench, holding Jenny’s hand with one of mine and stroking her neck with the other. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t cry.

  Dr. Sherman, a tall, distinguished-looking man with a gruff but affable demeanor, confirmed that the fetus was dead. “We’d be able to see a heartbeat, no question,” he said. He gently told us what we already knew from the books we had been reading. That one in six pregnancies ends in miscarriage. That this was nature’s way of sorting out the weak, the retarded, the grossly deformed. Apparently remembering Jenny’s worry about the flea sprays, he told us it was nothing we did or did not do. He placed his hand on Jenny’s cheek and leaned in close as if to kiss her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You can try again in a couple of months.”

  We both just sat there in silence. The blank videotape sitting on the bench beside us suddenly seemed like an incredible embarrassment, a sharp reminder of our blind, naïve optimism. I wanted to throw it away. I wanted to hide it. I asked the doctor: “Where do we go from here?”

  “We have to remove the placenta,” he said. “Years ago, you wouldn’t have even known you had miscarried yet, and you would have waited until you started hemorrhaging.”

  He gave us the option of waiting over the weekend and returning on Monday for the procedure, which was the same as an abortion, with the fetus and placenta being vacuumed from the uterus. But Jenny wanted to get it behind her, and so did I. “The sooner the better,” she said.

  “Okay then,” Dr. Sherman said. He gave her something to force her to dilate and was gone. Down the hall we could hear him enter another exam room and boisterously greet an expectant mother with jolly banter.

  Alone in the room, Jenny and I fell heavily into each other’s arms and stayed that way until a light knock came at the door. It was an older woman we had never seen before. She carried a sheaf of papers. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said to Jenny. “I’m so sorry.” And then she showed her where to sign the waiver acknowledging the risks of uterine suction.

  When Dr. Sherman returned he was all business. He injected Jenny first with Valium and then Demerol, and the procedure was quick if not painless. He was finished before the drugs seemed to fully kick in. When it was over, she lay nearly unconscious as the sedatives took their full effect. “Just make sure she doesn’t stop breathing,” the doctor said, and he walked out of the room. I couldn’t believe it. Wasn’t it his job to make sure she didn’t stop breathing? The waiver she signed never said “Patient could stop breathing at any time due to overdose of barbiturates.” I did as I was told, talking to her in a loud voice, rubbing her arm, lightly slapping her cheek, saying things like, “Hey, Jenny! What’s my name?” She was dead to the world.

  After several minutes Essie stuck her head in to check on us. She caught one glimpse of Jenny’s gray face and wheeled out of the room and back in again a moment later with a wet washcloth and smelling salts, which she held under Jenny’s nose for what seemed forever before Jenny began to stir, and then only briefly. I kept talking to her in a loud voice, telling her to breathe deeply so I could feel it on my hand. Her skin was ashen; I found her pulse: sixty beats per minute. I nervously dabbed the wet cloth across her forehead, cheeks, and neck. Eventually, she came around, though she was
still extremely groggy. “You had me worried,” I said. She just looked blankly at me as if trying to ascertain why I might be worried. Then she drifted off again.

  A half hour later the nurse helped dress her, and I walked her out of the office with these orders: for the next two weeks, no baths, no swimming, no douches, no tampons, no sex.

  In the car, Jenny maintained a detached silence, pressing herself against the passenger door, gazing out the window. Her eyes were red but she would not cry. I searched for comforting words without success. Really, what could be said? We had lost our baby. Yes, I could tell her we could try again. I could tell her that many couples go through the same thing. But she didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t want to say it. Someday we would be able to see it all in perspective. But not today.

  I took the scenic route home, winding along Flagler Drive, which hugs West Palm Beach’s waterfront from the north end of town, where the doctor’s office was, to the south end, where we lived. The sun glinted off the water; the palm trees swayed gently beneath the cloudless blue sky. It was a day meant for joy, not for us. We drove home in silence.

  When we arrived at the house, I helped Jenny inside and onto the couch, then went into the garage where Marley, as always, awaited our return with breathless anticipation. As soon as he saw me, he dove for his oversized rawhide bone and proudly paraded it around the room, his body wagging, tail whacking the washing machine like a mallet on a kettledrum. He begged me to try to snatch it from him.

  “Not today, pal,” I said, and let him out the back door into the yard. He took a long pee against the loquat tree and then came barreling back inside, took a deep drink from his bowl, water sloshing everywhere, and careened down the hall, searching for Jenny. It took me just a few seconds to lock the back door, mop up the water he had spilled, and follow him into the living room.

  When I turned the corner, I stopped short. I would have bet a week’s pay that what I was looking at couldn’t possibly happen. Our rambunctious, wired dog stood with his shoulders between Jenny’s knees, his big, blocky head resting quietly in her lap. His tail hung flat between his legs, the first time I could remember it not wagging whenever he was touching one of us. His eyes were turned up at her, and he whimpered softly. She stroked his head a few times and then, with no warning, buried her face in the thick fur of his neck and began sobbing. Hard, unrestrained, from-the-gut sobbing.

  They stayed like that for a long time, Marley statue-still, Jenny clutching him to her like an oversized doll. I stood off to the side feeling like a voyeur intruding on this private moment, not quite knowing what to do with myself. And then, without lifting her face, she raised one arm up toward me, and I joined her on the couch and wrapped my arms around her. There the three of us stayed, locked in our embrace of shared grief.

  CHAPTER 7

  Master and Beast

  T he next morning, a Saturday, I awoke at dawn to find Jenny lying on her side with her back to me, weeping softly. Marley was awake, too, his chin resting on the mattress, once again commiserating with his mistress. I got up and made coffee, squeezed fresh orange juice, brought in the newspaper, made toast. When Jenny came out in her robe several minutes later, her eyes were dry and she gave me a brave smile as if to say she was okay now.

  After breakfast, we decided to get out of the house and walk Marley down to the water for a swim. A large concrete breakwater and mounds of boulders lined the shore in our neighborhood, making the water inaccessible. But if you walked a half dozen blocks to the south, the breakwater curved inland, exposing a small white sand beach littered with driftwood—a perfect place for a dog to frolic. When we reached the little beach, I wagged a stick in front of Marley’s face and unleashed him. He stared at the stick as a starving man would stare at a loaf of bread, his eyes never leaving the prize. “Go get it!” I shouted, and hurled the stick as far out into the water as I could. He cleared the concrete wall in one spectacular leap, galloped down the beach and out into the shallow water, sending up plumes of spray around him. This is what Labrador retrievers were born to do. It was in their genes and in their job description.

  No one is certain where Labrador retrievers originated, but this much is known for sure: it was not in Labrador. These muscular, short-haired water dogs first surfaced in the 1600s a few hundred miles to the south of Labrador, in Newfoundland. There, early diarists observed, the local fishermen took the dogs to sea with them in their dories, putting them to good use hauling in lines and nets and fetching fish that came off the hooks. The dogs’ dense, oily coats made them impervious to the icy waters, and their swimming prowess, boundless energy, and ability to cradle fish gently in their jaws without damaging the flesh made them ideal work dogs for the tough North Atlantic conditions.

  How the dogs came to be in Newfoundland is anyone’s guess. They were not indigenous to the island, and there is no evidence that early Eskimos who first settled the area brought dogs with them. The best theory is that early ancestors of the retrievers were brought to Newfoundland by fishermen from Europe and Britain, many of whom jumped ship and settled on the coast, establishing communities. From there, what is now known as the Labrador retriever may have evolved through unintentional, willy-nilly cross-breeding. It likely shares common ancestry with the larger and shaggier Newfoundland breed.

  However they came to be, the amazing retrievers soon were pressed into duty by island hunters to fetch game birds and waterfowl. In 1662, a native of St. John’s, Newfoundland, named W. E. Cormack journeyed on foot across the island and noted the abundance of the local water dogs, which he found to be “admirably trained as retrievers in fowling and…otherwise useful.” The British gentry eventually took notice and by the early nineteenth century were importing the dogs to England for use by sportsmen in pursuit of pheasant, grouse, and partridges.

  According to the Labrador Retriever Club, a national hobbyist group formed in 1931 and dedicated to preserving the integrity of the breed, the name Labrador retriever came about quite inadvertently sometime in the 1830s when the apparently geographically challenged third earl of Malmesbury wrote to the sixth duke of Buccleuch to gush about his fine line of sporting retrievers. “We always call mine Labrador dogs,” he wrote. From that point forward, the name stuck. The good earl noted that he went to great lengths to keep “the breed as pure as I could from the first.” But others were less religious about genetics, freely crossing Labradors with other retrievers in hopes that their excellent qualities would transfer. The Labrador genes proved indomitable, and the Labrador retriever line remained distinct, winning recognition by the Kennel Club of England as a breed all its own on July 7, 1903.

  B. W. Ziessow, an enthusiast and longtime breeder, wrote for the Labrador Retriever Club: “The American sportsmen adopted the breed from England and subsequently developed and trained the dog to fulfill the hunting needs of this country. Today, as in the past, the Labrador will eagerly enter ice cold water in Minnesota to retrieve a shot bird; he’ll work all day hunting doves in the heat of the Southwest—his only reward is a pat for a job well done.”

  This was Marley’s proud heritage, and it appeared he had inherited at least half of the instinct. He was a master at pursuing his prey. It was the concept of returning it that he did not seem to quite grasp. His general attitude seemed to be, If you want the stick back that bad, YOU jump in the water for it.

  He came charging back up onto the beach with his prize in his teeth. “Bring it here!” I yelled, slapping my hands together. “C’mon, boy, give it to me!” He pranced over, his whole body wagging with excitement, and promptly shook water and sand all over me. Then to my surprise he dropped the stick at my feet. Wow, I thought. How’s that for service? I looked back at Jenny, sitting on a bench beneath an Australian pine, and gave her a thumbs-up. But when I reached down to pick up the stick, Marley was ready. He dove in, grabbed it, and raced across the beach in crazy figure-eights. He swerved back, nearly colliding with me, taunting me to chase him. I made a few lunges
at him, but it was clear he had both speed and agility on his side. “You’re supposed to be a Labrador retriever!” I shouted. “Not a Labrador evader!”

  But what I had that my dog didn’t was an evolved brain that at least slightly exceeded my brawn. I grabbed a second stick and made a tremendous fuss over it. I held it over my head and tossed it from hand to hand. I swung it from side to side. I could see Marley’s resolve softening. Suddenly, the stick in his mouth, just moments earlier the most prized possession he could imagine on earth, had lost its cachet. My stick drew him in like a temptress. He crept closer and closer until he was just inches in front of me. “Oh, a sucker is born every day, isn’t he, Marley?” I cackled, rubbing the stick across his snout and watching as he went cross-eyed trying to keep it in his sights.

  I could see the little cogs going in his head as he tried to figure out how he could grab the new stick without relinquishing the old one. His upper lip quivered as he tested the concept of making a quick two-for-one grab. Soon I had my free hand firmly around the end of the stick in his mouth. I tugged and he tugged back, growling. I pressed the second stick against his nostrils. “You know you want it,” I whispered. And did he ever; the temptation was too much to bear. I could feel his grip loosening. And then he made his move. He opened his jaws to try to grab the second stick without losing the first. In a heartbeat, I whipped both sticks high above my head. He leaped in the air, barking and spinning, obviously at a loss as to how such a carefully laid battle strategy could have gone so badly awry. “This is why I am the master and you are the beast,” I told him. And with that he shook more water and sand in my face.