Page 47 of Happiness for Beginners

“I bet,” Windy said.

“I put the medicine on, but she licks it off and then it gives her diarrhea. All over my seagrass rug.” I shook my head. “So many other rugs in the house, but she chooses the seagrass.”

I shined my flashlight on Windy’s face, which was compressed into a sympathetic frown. “Sometimes they have a favorite place to be sick.”

“She chews the furniture, the rugs, and the electric cords. She hates all dogs and all humans. She lunges and growls at everybody who comes into my apartment and everybody who walks by. I have to wait to walk her until all the other people and pets have gone to bed. And you have to guard your ankles at all times. She’s totally vicious. She’s a dog piranha.”

“Not good,” Windy said.

“I thought getting a dog would get me out more. You know, that I’d visit with the neighbors on walks in the evenings. Go to the dog park. Befriend the world of dog lovers. But, actually, it’s the opposite. It’s isolating. She’s so bloodthirsty, I just have to keep her in all the time—and I feel guilty for going out.”

Windy wrinkled her nose. “Not fun.”

“She makes my life a living hell,” I said. “She’s the worst pet in the world.”

Windy read my face, and then broke into a smile. “But it’s too late now.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s too late. Because I already love her.”

Windy was still smiling as she shook her head. “Isn’t love awful?”

I shouldn’t have gone on and on like I did—but Windy was such a good listener, asking question after question, that it all came tumbling out. How I’d become obsessed with the idea of getting a dog, and how I’d gone to Petfinder.com every night for months and months, scrolling through the rescue dogs listed there, looking at their pictures, their videos, their personality profiles. I’d wanted something fluffy and adorable and sociable and hypoallergenic, and I’d scoured the poodle mixes ad nauseam. Windy’s guesses hadn’t been that far off: I bookmarked endless labradoodles, cockapoos, golden doodles, malti-poos, schnoodles. I’d made lists of traits for my ideal dog and done searches by color, fur style, temperament, age, and proximity of foster home to my apartment. I’d danced right up to the edge of getting several different ones—all of them blond and fluffy with bright eyes and little smiley dog mouths.

Finally, one night, I was ready. I’d found the perfect pet. I’d e-mailed one of the rescue groups to make an offer on a smiley yellow pup named Lola, and filled out an application and been accepted, and set a date to go out and meet her later in the week, and I was finally, finally going to take the plunge at last—when somebody abandoned Pickle by tying her to a street post on the sidewalk in front of my building.

The first time I saw her, with that mottled fur and skin tail, I thought she was a possum.

As soon as it was clear she was a dog, it was also clear she’d been abandoned. And mistreated beyond belief. Her fur was matted, her skin was scabbed over, she was covered in fleas. She didn’t bark at me—or anyone—that day. All her fight was gone.

I couldn’t leave her out there like that. I found a vet clinic with late hours and took her in. It turned out she had a broken leg, too. It was going to be three hundred dollars to fix it.

“What if I can’t afford that?” I asked.

The vet looked at Pickle, then back at me. “Then probably the kindest thing would be to put her down.”

I paid the three hundred dollars. And with that, she was mine.

As she recovered her strength, she also recovered her abiding hatred for all living creatures. In theory, I admired her moxie, but in practice she was a grade-A pain in the ass.

“It sounds like she’s got some post-traumatic stress disorder,” Windy said then.

“We’re talking about a dog, of course,” I pointed out.

“Whoever tied her up to that pole outside your apartment really did a number on her. The defense strategies she developed when her life was unsafe made sense at the time—but now she can’t let them go.”

“We’re going to psychoanalyze my dog?”

“Hello? That’s what I do.”

“Well,” I said, “she’s unfixable. I called in a trainer—at seventy bucks an hour—and he gave me a whole program, and I followed it to the letter for months, and it didn’t work.”

“Did he tell you to become an alpha?”

“Yes.”

“And why do you think it didn’t work?”

“Because Pickle is the alpha,” I said. “She’s way meaner than I am.”

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