Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [52]
“Yours is the one over there,” the breeder said, “under the stairs.”
Turning around, Jed and I saw, standing in a different part of the room by itself, something that looked quite different from the other puppies. It was taller, leaner, less furry—and less cute. Its hind legs were two inches longer than its front legs, giving it an awkward tilt. Its eyes were narrow and very slanted; its ears, oddly protuberant. Its tail was longer and fuller than the others’ , but maybe because it was too heavy, it didn’t curl up, but instead swung from side to side like a rat’s tail.
“Are you sure that’s a dog?” I asked dubiously. This wasn’t as preposterous a question as it may sound. If anything, the creature most resembled a baby lamb, and given that the breeders raised some farm animals on their property, one easily could have wandered in.
But the breeder was sure. She winked at us, and said, “You’ll see. She’ll be a great beauty. She’s got that great high Samoyed rear, just like her grandmother.”
We brought our new puppy home and named her Pushkin—“Push” for short—even though she was a girl. When our family and friends first met her, they felt sorry for us. As a puppy, Push hopped like a bunny and stumbled over her own feet. “Can you return her?” my mother asked at one point, as she watched Push bump into walls and chairs. “I know what the problem is—she’s blind,” it dawned on Jed one day, and he raced her to the vet, who concluded that Push’s eyesight was fine.
As Push grew bigger, she remained awkward, often tripping as she came down stairs. The trunk of her body was so long that she didn’t seem to have full control over her back half, so she moved like a Slinky. At the same time, she was strangely limber; to this day, she likes to sleep with her stomach plastered against a cold floor and all four limbs splayed out. It’s as if someone dropped her from the sky and she landed splat on the floor—in fact we call her “Splat” when we see her like that.
The breeder was right about one thing. Push was an ugly duckling. Within a year, she had transformed into a dog so breathtakingly magnificent that when we took walks cars constantly stopped short to marvel at her. She was bigger than Coco (who, due to the oddities of breeding, was actually Push’s grandniece), with snow-white fur and exotic cat’s eyes. Some dormant muscles had clearly developed because now her tail curled high up over her back like an enormous, lush plume.
But in terms of talent, Push stayed solidly in the lowest decile. Coco was not especially impressive, but compared to Push she was a genius. For some reason, Push—while even sweeter and gentler than Coco—couldn’t do things that normal dogs could. She couldn’t fetch and didn’t like running. She kept getting stuck in funny places—under the sink, in berry bushes, halfway in and halfway out of the bathtub—and needing to be extricated. At first, I denied that there was anything different about Pushkin, and I spent hours trying to teach her to do things, but all to no avail. Oddly enough, Push seemed to love music. Her favorite thing to do was to sit next to Sophia’s piano, singing (or in Jed’s view, howling) along as Sophia played.
Despite her shortcomings, the four of us adored Push, just as we did Coco. In fact, her failings were what made her so endearing. “Oh-h-h, poor thing! What a cutie,” we’d coo when she’d try to jump onto something and miss by a foot, and we’d rush to comfort her. Or we’d say, “Aw-w-w, just look at that. She can’t see the Frisbee! She’s so cu-u-ute.” Initially, Coco was wary of her new sibling; we saw her testing Push in cagey ways. Push, by contrast, had a more limited range of emotions; wariness and caginess were not among them. She was content to follow Coco around amiably, avoiding any moves that required agility.
As sweet as Push was, it made absolutely no sense for our family to have a second dog, and no one knew it better than me. The distribution of dog responsibility in our household was 90% me, 10% the other three. Every day, starting at six in the morning, I was the