It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [80]
The fact is that I’m stuck with a doorbell, and I’m stuck with a dog that emits a solar-flare version of a bark when she hears it. And that includes not only the real doorbell but doorbells on TV, the sudden appearance of a xylophone on a Big Band mix on my iPod, and anytime someone remotely unlocks a car that is anywhere on our block.
I truly can’t do this bark justice with mere words; you have to experience in person the sharp, shrill pitch my dog is able to achieve to really absorb its power. Mariah Carey would seethe with jealousy, and she would lose the ability to sleep, knowing that a living, breathing creature out-screeched her by fathoms. Forget about run-of-the-mill eardrum-piercing pain; this bark has the potential to shatter your teeth and possibly pop out an eyeball. The only thing that I can equate it with is the sound an elderly woman would make if she believed she was being home-invaded and began running aimlessly through her house, confused, terrified, shrieking, and believing that death was moments away. That’s the sound my dog makes every single time someone rings that bell, even though it’s just the mailman with a package for me from Spanx, which has a body shaper inside that’s going to squeeze my inner organs so tight that my liver will poke out my nose.
“This has got to stop,” my husband said after my dog nearly propelled both of us into cardiac arrest when she lost her shit during an episode of The Closer. “I just saw stars. There’s something dripping down the side of my face. Is there blood coming out of my ear? Why does she do that? Why can’t she have a regular ruff-ruff bark like other dogs her age?”
“God, I wish I knew,” I said, wiping the spray of fruit punch Crystal Light that had flown up onto my forehead and eyelashes after Maeby’s bark stabbed my brain like a shard of glass. I wiped a far-flying droplet from the side of my husband’s head. “Nothing bad has ever happened to her as a result of the doorbell ringing. If we had an idea of what freaks her out so much, maybe we could get her to stop.”
And as if In Dog We Trust was listening to me from up above, the following week I got the new issue of Bark, a magazine about dogs, in the mail. Always excited to see it, I opened up the issue immediately and was doing a preliminary flip through when something caught my eye. It was an ad for a “dog translator,” which said it could analyze my dog’s barks, determine her emotion, and then deliver a sentence about what my dog’s bark meant. It was touted as one of Time magazine’s greatest inventions of the year. I wasted no time in going to the website and buying it right there on the spot.
Now, I know it seems foolish to believe in such a thing, especially considering that earlier that year I had swabbed the inside of my dog’s mouth with a giant Q-tip, carefully placed it inside a sterile plastic tube, and mailed it off to get her DNA analyzed. And that wasn’t the most ridiculous part of the equation. That had come when I went to the website and paid this DNA lab seventy-five dollars to send me the kit.
I need to explain here that I got my dog at the local pound, so her gene pool is rather murky, at best. She’s fluffy, tan and white, and has one blue eye, one brown, and a speckled little nose. All paws pointed to Australian shepherd, that part was obvious, but it was the other half that had me wondering, especially when she was diagnosed with a form of lupus that affected her skin, nails, and that speckled little nose. If there was a breed that was more susceptible to that kind of illness and it could be identified, that might help prepare us for other directions the lupus might take in the future. Most likely, her mystery portion was golden retriever, but curiosity was eating away at me to find out