Who Can Resist a Dog Like This?

The Boston Herald

February 22, 1995

Their house is immaculate. The floors gleam. The sofa is fluffed. The windows, even the window on top of the door, are invisible. Objects placed on the coffee table - a small vase, a candy dish - are safe where they sit.

The living room smells like spring. Flowers are being coaxed in the picture window and the scent of new life fills the house. When you drink coffee or Coke, you don't find a dog hair at the bottom of the glass. When you flop into bed at night, dog hair doesn't float around the room.

"I like dogs. We've always had dogs," says the master of the house. "But I'd never get another one. They're too much work. The last one we had ruined the back door and was always walking in mud then getting it all over the carpet. Our days of dogs are over."

I understood why. There were no pawprints here, no wet nose imprints on the doors, no 80-pound beast jumping and barking and drooling and pestering. Our friends could put food on a table and leave the room and know that when they returned the food would still be there.

Dogs are a nuisance. You have to walk them and pet them and feed them and, I am told, you're even supposed to train them. They make a mess. No matter how you brush them they leave a trail of dirt and hair wherever they go. They slobber. They smell.

Molly, our fat, clumsy, loveable black lab, would have turned our friends' house into a hovel in minutes. Her tail would have demolished the vase and candy dish. Her nails would have scratched the shiny floors. Her hair would have caught on everything. If she were around, the house would smell, not like flowers in spring, but like wet dog.

No wonder my friends decided on a dog-free environment.

Who wouldn't? During our weekend visit, they didn't have to worry about getting home in time to feed a dog or walk a dog or spend quality time with a dog, something I was concerned about though my dog was miles away.

I called home twice a day to check on Molly. Did somebody feed her and play with her? Was the gate locked? Was she getting enough fresh air?

See what we mean? our friends said. We loved our dogs when we had them, but life is a lot simpler without them.

My husband, who could get along quite well without Molly, silently agreed.

When we arrived home, Molly was in the back yard knee-deep in newly thawed earth. The car pulling into the driveway was her signal to begin howling and hurling herself against the storm door. The commotion alone contrasted with the calm from which we had just come.

We opened the door and Molly burst in, wailing and groaning and racing around like a toy wound up too tight. Her tail sent a pile of newspapers flying. Her paws turned a white floor brown. She jumped. She squealed. Molly had missed us. This was her way of showing just how much.

Upstairs later, where she doesn't belong, where she isn't allowed but where she sneaks every chance she gets, I sensed her. I didn't hear her creep up the steps. I never do. There is no pitter-patter of paws, no creak on the steps, no tail hitting the dowels. Molly, a fat, awkward creature who cannot walk anywhere without mishap, whose wagging tail always gives her away, had, with the stealth of Tonto, once again slithered her way into the forbidden zone.

She rested her head on the bed. She licked my hand. She stared at me with her big, cow eyes.

"You're not supposed to be up here," I told her. "Go downstairs now," I said in a firm tone.

Molly, like a kid in a game of freeze tag, sat as still as stone.

"OK," I finally said. Who wouldn't have said OK? She leaped then onto the bed, curled herself into a ball and sighed.

"She doesn't belong up here you know," my husband said a little while later. I knew she didn't. And she knew she didn't. But this night, after a few hair-free nights without her, I felt she didn't belong any place else.