Stepdog (19 page)

I added “retracting tongue” to the list of what to look forward to in my golden years. But I already had my own woes to keep the medical industry busy. First, I got something called plantar fasciitis, a sharp pain on the sole of my right foot. I went to my internist, who referred me to a podiatrist, but not before she handed me a 1996 column by
Times
health columnist Jane Brody, who happened to sit next to me at the office! Jane wrote in her usual no-nonsense style that the condition was an inflammation of the ligament—the plantar fascia—that ran the length of the foot from heel to toes and could become disabling if ignored. It required stretching, massaging, and wearing a raised heel. The next time I saw Jane, I told her that she should collect my insurance co-payment from my doctor. I took comfort in the fact that plantar fasciitis afflicts athletes. Maybe I was exercising and walking too much? “No,” the podiatrist said. “Just wear shoes with at least an inch or so of heel.” No more cute flats for me. Ugly orthopedic shoes were surely next.

The pain in the foot gone, I looked in the mirror one morning and noticed that a couple of bottom eyelashes were growing inward. What in the world? Are they scratching the cornea? I went to the eye doctor and he said the cure for my condition was tweezers. A few months later, a pimple sprang up from the corner of my right eye (unrelated to either the wayward lashes or the tweezers). I was supposed to treat this with hot compresses or, as my other eye doctor suggested—and she wasn't joking—a potato heated in the microwave and wrapped in a towel. Sometimes I came out of my doctors' fancy Park Avenue and Upper West Side offices with the funny feeling that they were having fun at my expense.

Doctor #1: “Did she take the potato bit seriously?”

Doctor #2: “Yes. She even asked if she was supposed to get Yukon Gold or some other kind. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!”

Aging, as my friend Celia liked to say, was for the birds.

I guess I should have been grateful that my medical problems were minor, so far. Cancer was on my mind because of Hector and because Jim had just partnered up with Dr. Paul Marks, the longtime director of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to write Dr. Marks's memoir. We spent many dinners talking about his research for what would become
On the Cancer Frontier—One Man, One Disease, and a Medical Revolution
. I gained a deeper understanding of why there's no cure and why prevention and early detection were so critical to survival rates. What a crapshoot this longevity business was. Even if your body came through, the mind could say
“No más.”
My beautiful cousin Alma—a poet, an eternal optimist, my confidante and all-time favorite human being—started showing signs of Alzheimer's in her fifties. By her sixties, we had taken away her car keys and, gradually, more and more of her old life and privacy until we moved her into a long-term-care home. She no longer recognized me or anyone else. Alzheimer's, which seemed to run on my mother's side of the family and afflict only the women, was a terrifying subject of conversation among my other female cousins.

“What are we going to do with ourselves when the time comes?” we asked each other.

We found some genetic reassurance among the aunts and uncles who were healthy septuagenarians, especially Titi Edda, the youngest of my mom's siblings. A mother, grandmother, and former actress, she still went out on dates and she was still the life of the party. She sang, she danced, she recited poems, she drank rum and Cokes, she reapplied lipstick to go get the mail.

“Querida!”
—My dear!—she cried whenever she saw me, as dramatic as Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard
. All anyone wanted was to be like her.

My father-in-law, Hank, a retired engineer and World War II veteran, was far ahead in the endurance race. At ninety, he went to the gym every day, traveled internationally, headed the architecture committee at his assisted-living place, and lived with a new, younger wife, Anita, who was in her seventies. Jim was very close to his dad and we kept track of all his adventures, hoping to emulate them. My elders taught me that money and mobility—and continued interest, curiosity, and engagement with the world—were what was required for the golden years to be truly golden.

But these people were freaks.

Nowhere did I gain more insight into our mortality, nowhere did I see more clearly where we were headed—all of us, inexorably, one by one, on the same slow-moving line—than in our lump-on-a-log. Eddie was now approaching his seventies, in dog years. He was officially a senior and it was starting to show. It wasn't like the seventies were the new fifties for dogs. He was limping some and was going deaf. He no longer met us at the door at the first jingle of the keys. Jim now stood in the kitchen jiggling the leash in vain, but no Eddie came barreling through to the kitchen knowing it was time for his walk. Jim had to go rouse him.

“Tsk-tsk, come on, big galoot.”

Eddie and I no longer ran together. One day I put on my sneakers and said, “Okay, Eddie, we're going to jog.” But we couldn't. We went out and I started jogging on the street, staying away from the tempting smells of the sidewalk, but Eddie was sluggish and slowing me down, which was really saying something. I ran at a turtle's pace. Eddie struggled to keep up and looked fatigued. He had lost it. We gave up running. It felt like the end of an era.

Eddie's personality, always weird, became weirder. He switched allegiances and now barked at Jim.

Gotcha! What really happened was that he was more cranky and clingy than ever. When we were alone and I worked upstairs in the office, I could hear him whimpering downstairs. He had separation anxiety just one floor away. It was difficult to hear the interviewee on the other end of the line, or concentrate on writing the story that was due in less than two hours, with Mary Magdalene acting up downstairs.

Eddie became irredeemably dense. He used to follow commands like staying away from the kitchen when we were cooking. Sometimes he'd walk the length of the kitchen to his water dish pretending to be thirsty, just to check what crumbs had fallen along the way, but normally he'd be patient and lie down nearby to watch us. Now I shooed him away and he came right back. I could do that ten times and ten times he'd forget to stay out. I moved his food and water bowls from the kitchen to the nook between the kitchen and the dining room so he didn't have an excuse to be in between our legs. No deal. He acted more and more like a senile grandpa, looking disoriented, as if he had no idea what we were talking about and didn't really care.

Now everything had to be looked at through the prism of possible senility.

Still, I couldn't help but be suspicious of Eddie's “deafness” or “limp” (only indoors) or “memory loss”—how convenient!—as yet another ploy to ignore my commands, do what he wanted, and get one more scratch. How could we know that this was really senility? I didn't totally buy into the idea Eddie was losing his marbles. He wasn't consistent enough to convince me yet. He hobbled and limped, sometimes all he lacked was shackles to look even more pathetic, but it could be all an act. The minute Jim appeared or mentioned “walk,” Eddie was young again, galloping around like a pony.

The onset of Eddie's deterioration seemed to have happened overnight.

I realized just how feeble he had become on a Sunday afternoon. I was upstairs and heard paws on the steps. They were quiet paws, gingerly going up, getting closer and closer. I approached just as cautiously from my end to meet him at the top of the stairs and surprise him.

“Ha! Caught in the act!” I gloated. “Eddie! Go back down!”

He was positioned on two steps and had trouble turning around. When he tried, his body shook and he looked scared. It was as if he had forgotten how to walk down the steps, just like my Titi Alma. When I last visited her at her long-term-care home, she held on to me for dear life when we walked down a flight of stairs to go out to the garden. Her Alzheimer's advancing fast, she didn't remember how to do it anymore. I now contemplated Eddie with new regard for his growing frailty, and grabbed him by the collar.

“Okay, old galoot,” I said, helping him down. “Let's do this together.”

He was tentative, almost sitting before each step forward, but I didn't have to carry him. It was becoming harder to hate Old Eddie. He wasn't going to torment me forever. Eventually, he would be another loss. They said all that was left was the love. We had to share the man, why not the love too? It wouldn't be the first such threesome. I sometimes looked at Eddie and saw a cute, woolly pet with a purity of heart. He was usually asleep when this happened. Awake, Eddie couldn't help himself. We were set in our routines. Jim traveled regularly for events at Henry's and Arielle's schools, such as parents' weekend, and I stayed with Eddie. As usual, Eddie would instantly cozy up to me, only to turn against me or ignore me upon Jim's return. If there was a choice between saying hello to me in the morning or walking right past me to go park his butt somewhere new, it was always the latter. “Good morning, Eddie.” Tepid tail wag, no licks, no nuzzle, not even a look. He was saving his energy. At the first sounds of Jim upstairs, he whimpered to the stairway door and lay down to wait, ready to spring into his usual explosive greeting. I was resigned to my fate as second potato.

And he still had just enough spunk to remain an all-around pain, getting his way at all costs. I caught him twice in our bed—upstairs!—when I got home from work. We had left the stairwell door closed! He must have learned all by himself to hurl his body against the door to bang it open. Obviously he wasn't scared of stairs enough to go up them. From then on we were forced to leave a chair reclined against the doorknob.

Eddie didn't like Jersey mail carriers any more than he did their California counterparts, scratching the front door each time the mail was delivered, so Jim also had to recline a chair against the knob of the front door. When people asked, I just pointed to the dog and said, “Home-styling by Eduardo.”

I learned to appreciate the roomy house with a front porch and backyard and the pleasures of the suburbs—the humongous supermarkets, the uncrowded yoga studio, the quiet—and happily spent most of the week in the house. Jim left Bloomberg to return to Dow Jones, first to
SmartMoney
magazine, and after that magazine shut down its print edition, to
The Wall Street Journal
. Arielle and Henry were growing into young adulthood fast. Henry graduated with honors from his boarding school and started college. Arielle came to spend the summers with us and was able to get jobs in the city, becoming another Jersey commuter. Then she went to Ghana on her college year abroad and fell in love with the country. The next summer after that, after graduating, she headed back to Africa to work as an English teacher and later at an AIDS organization.

The only ones who still put up with Eddie in the bedroom were Henry and Arielle, letting him sleep with them when they visited. But Eddie was confused by the mixed messages. When visitors stayed over in the same guest room, he scratched the guest bedroom door, and if he was not let in, it was clack-clack-clack as he paced around, his paws on the hardwood floor making a deafening sound in the still of the night until the door opened. Our friend Clemson, a grade-school classmate of mine from Colegio San Antonio who was like a brother to me, let him in the first night he stayed with us, intending for Eddie to sleep at the foot of the bed. Five minutes later the dog was in bed with him. Thirty seconds later, Eddie was back out on his heinie. “I felt bad. He was alone and wanted company,” Clemson told us the next morning as we made breakfast. “I went back to bed but for the next five minutes I just heard clack-clack-clack. But I didn't open the door.”

Sometimes Eddie even tried his luck with Jim and me, scratching and rattling the stairway door after we said good night. Perhaps these two may let me sleep in their bed too? With no chair to block him, it sounded like he was throwing himself at the door. The first time he did it we tried to ignore him, but he was determined to keep us up all night on a work night. I felt Jim finally getting up.

“Don't go. Don't reward him with your attention,” I said and turned over in bed. But Jim went. A few minutes later the door was shaking again.

“My turn,” I told Jim. I got up and walked to the top of the stairs.

“Eddie, stop it!” I yelled. “Bad dog. Go to bed!”

That bought us a half hour.

When Jim's turn came again, he carried a rolled-up newspaper. We both had to get up early the next day and we were in no mood for let-me-in antics. At twelve fifty-four a.m. we all finally slept. A whack with the newspaper and Eddie finally got it, or so I thought. But the next morning I almost fell on my face as I tripped over Eddie's cushion, which Jim had moved to the hallway, “so he feels closer to us and less anxious,” he explained.

“Something is up with him,” said my husband as we all reassembled, bleary-eyed, in the dining room.

“I have no idea what it is, but he's unusually agitated and anxious. The last time I went downstairs at night he was jumping out of his skin, dancing all over the place and panting heavily, like he had been chasing squirrels. I scheduled his annual checkup for this coming Saturday, so I'll ask the vet what he thinks. I wonder if it might relate in some way to his hearing loss and sounds he might be hearing in his head? Something is really spooking him.”

Jim was up to his usual excuses, but I didn't mock him. I was too tired. Before he left on his bike, I heard Jim call Eddie “Bad dog!” by way of good-bye. Eddie looked suicidal, but even besotted owners have their limits.

“Hope you have a good day, darling,” Jim e-mailed me later that morning. “Sorry again for the bad night but very nice to see your smile this morning. I don't know what got into your neurotic dog. XOXO.”

Eddie just wanted what he wanted and he'd figure out a way to get it or make us pay. Peeing was still his favorite weapon, and he escalated the warfare in Montclair. On a night we came home from the theater late, I was getting water from the fridge when I heard Jim scream, “Bad dog!”