I had never seen my dog look scared until yesterday. He is a small thing with soft white sheep fur and two spots of coffee-brown on his backside, and most importantly, he is mean.
That’s how I described him as a child, too. I went to a Montessori kindergarten, the kind of school run by women in draped shawls where everything is all about choice, and so I spent every single day for a year at the tiny birch stools – the bulbous ones made by some Swiss company – drawing with crayons until my grandmother picked me up. I drew a lot of fairies. Tried to make some kind of economy built on side-profile fairies with long braids and triangle dresses. Lacking any very firm grasp on money, I settled for tattoo Fruit Rollups and spare change in my pockets. Fairy after fairy materialized until strong gusts of wind caught those pinned-up pieces of printer paper, and their wings nearly came to life. Punctuating this fascination, however, was a desire to create something more real. More tangible. Once the fairies grew old, I indulged in a longstanding urge to draw family portraits.
In peach, I first scrawled five little circles and, in black, I placed tiny eyes and eyelashes on four of them: the girls, I mean. I made sure the girls had eyelashes and my sister had her two moles right under her lip. Next, I used cherry red and placed tiny blushes on everyone and painted ruby red lips on one of them. I wasn’t keen on the role of the mother so this arbitrary red-lipped and eye-lashed peach figure filled in a role the best I could piece together. When we played House during recess, I chose the role of the family dog, anyway. I liked to imagine that I was a Bernese Mountain Dog or even a Saint Bernard. The kind of dog that lets itself slobber on the leg of toddlers and licks his lips before slowly marching around the house like some common retired soldier, padding around linoleum tiles before leaping to a tiny twin bed and crossing my front legs in front of me and allowing my eyelids to shut. I was a small thing, too, so this felt like a proper costume, and I got to feel the gurgling of forcing my voice low, low, low, to bark.
Sometimes, I pictured my friend’s big mutt, Coco. I worried about her because she wasn’t chestnut or cedar or chocolate colored; she was like a perfect blend of chestnut and ash, and I thought maybe she was sick, like when my great-grandmother on her hundredth birthday looked halfway dead to me. Her eyelids were very blue, and her skin looked more grey than the peach I drew with. I worried she would crumble. I was scared of her, too, but only because I didn’t know if I would ever get to be there. It felt like her longevity was completely dependent on eating long noodles on her birthday and a weird regiment of repeated trips to guasha massages on her soft, loose skin. Thought she was on thin ice. My friend says that her parents have a pact so that once they’re 75, they can start smoking cigarettes again. I nod along when she says this, but I saw a statistic once about second-hand smoke and family members being at almost higher risk than smokers. It was a TV ad in between Pink Panther marathons when I visited my grandmother in Hong Kong, and it showed gnarled lungs, sad kids, and the widest-eyed schnauzer I had ever laid eyes on. I worried myself by the notion that second-hand smoke was a problem that reached around the world. I comforted myself with the notion that at least the ad had English subtitles.
Coco was sweet, though. Happy, too. Always had liver or kidney and quail eggs for breakfast (which surprised me because I still thought her coat wasn’t colored quite right). She always had a warm nose, and her eyes looked human, though not as much as my sophomore best friend’s dog, Bruno’s, did. Initially, I took her docility as fear of me and would try to leave her presence after a courtesy ear scratch. She wasn’t allowed in bedrooms anyway, so I would wrap the master bedroom duvet around my torso and drag myself on the hardwood floor for a while until resigning myself to the head of a king-sized bed and braid my friend’s hair the way her older sister taught us. All the while, I kept an eye on Coco, who was, without fail, peeking around the corner of the doorframe. Eventually, I realized Coco’s eyes just kind of looked like that. Just happen to be a little too human and a little too dilated – the way that Drew, this guy majoring in journalism like every other “this guy” is, is on depression medication that dilates his pupils so wide I have trouble making eye contact with him
I stopped avoiding her presence as much. In fact, after that, when I sat with Coco I would try and look in her eyes enough to really harness some kind of unnamable frequency she was riding. I began interpreting her near-humanness as greater insight. I was envious but not jealous of this specific Hertz she ran on. I would hold her face between my sweaty palms and her eyeballs would dance around avoiding my gaze as I felt mine water with effort. I thought a lot about dog pageants or whatever they’re called in those times because I had a pipe dream of training Coco with her curly fur and weird coloring into a pageant queen. Imagining her getting inspected recalled monkeys picking bugs out of each others’ fur and picturing that intentional effort and care was a tender image. I didn’t know at the time how common her name was or that mutts don’t have much luck in pageantry, but when I finally realized, I was not only more hopeful but thrilled by the prospect that this was an underdog story in the literal sense.
It motivated me to draw more portraits with a disproportionately large dog scrawled in less than coordinated 7-year-old hands. It would accompany my peach and side-profiled figures but it was hard for me to verbalize why it looked nothing like the dog that accompanied my grandmother to pick-up in the gymnasium. She was usually late and didn’t speak much English, which no doubt added to the mystery of whatever family unit I was scribbling down hour after hour. The importance of the curls was crucial and I put the pressure into my elbow to scrawl loopy furs into the paper. Whatever I made, it was nearly opposite my little lamb-ish puppy. I always wished I knew what breed to call him, my dog, so I entered a studying mindset of trying to find the most similar pooch. I learned of the Bichon Frise and got a kick out of the phonetic sounding “Bich” even though it felt undignified to actually refer to him with that word.
My neighbor’s family had a beagle. I guess they still do, but I don’t see him very much anymore even though he is in their Christmas cards. Charlie didn’t bark much. He was more prone to whimpering and curling with his big ears into the shape of a six. I don’t know if I wanted to be him as much as I wanted to curl up like that at all times of the day and disappear into the throw blanket on their couch. When he got a brother, Maximus, another beagle with darker coloring, it took Charlie a while to adjust. He started stretching more. Less like a six and more like a two (from the side this time). I felt I understood him even more because parallel to this, my father married some weird broad and suddenly I had a little brother, too. I remember seeing him a few hours after his birth and getting stuck on the sheer amount of black hair coating his head and the slick wetness attached to his skin. His tiny penis, too, but mostly because it looked like Charlie’s.
For a long while, I felt a kinship toward Charlie, the age gap between my actual brother and me felt vast, and his whines felt unnatural, not wolfish or canine in the way I was used to. When we played house at school, I was even more invested than usual. It felt more real than any actual blood relation. I also repetitively tried to do the math of how old he was in dog years. Every time, I found he was older than I thought, and it freaked me out. It worried me how quickly he seemed to age. Again, I recalled my great-grandmother, and my palms began to sweat. I didn’t want to be confronted with that old beagle and I stopped going to her house so often after a while.
I guess that same fear is just what I imagined my dog was going through yesterday. He has a clip to his car seat when we drive the Prius and so on our way to the airport, he was pawing the leather with each sharp turn. While trying to cradle his head, I realized that he was feeling a sensation I never had before – a confusion I didn’t know to anticipate. I don’t feel that often with him. Usually, on our morning walks we run into neighbors and old terriers named Maja and Moose with even older owners. My dog barks, but he is small enough that it is more accurately just a high-pitched yap. Still, I understand his reaction; the fear of being smaller and holding more yap than bark in your throat. Objectively, I suppose he is mean, but it is hard to be so nice and so confused at once. I try to be gentle and gracious with him. I think about how I would draw him now, letting my wrist guide the motions of his fur and using an X-acto knife to whittle the tip of a white crayon. Plotting his tiny teeth in order to denote a tiny underbite. I would still have black eyelashes, my lips would still be red, and my triangle dress would be the navy blue of my roommate’s, whose clothes I routinely steal. My dog would be attached to one peach stick leg with his coffee spot back blocked away and big baby blue eyes gazing up at my dotted black ones. It isn’t so important, really, because the only dogs I am around now are my friend and her not-girlfriend – and I say everything moving forward affectionately. My friend is the most LA lesbian with blonde-tipped curly hair that shapes her head like a darling football, and her not-girlfriend is a Pittsburgh-born lipstick-wearing sweetheart. They talk at frequencies I swear only dogs can hear and it is damn near the sweetest thing to bear witness to.