Divided by puppy love

Spayed and betrayed
In every marriage there are betrayals; the question is how soon they happen, how many and what shape they take. I remember quite clearly the first time I betrayed Benjamin. The puppies were growing, their fluff becoming fur, then, at four months or so, Lila’s urine came out tinged with blood. An infection? No — our vet told me it was time; Lila needed to be spayed. Musashi, who had testicles so tiny one couldn’t really see them, needed to be neutered.

Of course it sounds terrible — spayed — a sharp hoe, shredded earth, and neutered, not as violent sounding but shameful nonetheless. Still, the reason for the procedures far outweighs the recoiling they naturally give rise to. I told Ben. He was eating oatmeal and set down his spoon. Clink. “You’re going to remove Musashi’s testicles?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I could tell by his tone we were in for trouble. “You can’t remove a man’s testicles,” he said.

“Musashi’s not a man,” I said. “He’s a dog.”

“You can’t do that,” Ben said, his eyes alarmed. I could not believe that my husband, for all his professed distance from our dogs, was confusing his testicles with theirs, and I said so.

“I am not confused,” Ben said.

“Seems to me you are,” I said. “You can’t be a responsible pet owner and not neuter your dogs.”

“Remove an animal’s testicles and you cripple it,” he retorted.

“I thought you didn’t care about animals,” I said.

“I don’t,” he said. “I object on theory. You can’t take testicles from a male. I won’t have a neutered male in this house.”

“I see,” I said, my voice icy. “You won’t have a neutered male, but a neutered female is fine. And you say you’re a feminist?”

“I object to the procedure in Lila as well,” he said, clearly backpedaling. More talk followed until at last Benjamin said, “Don’t neuter Musashi. I am asking you not to do it.”

I knew, then, that I was dealing with an irrational man, and worse, it was an irrationality I could never quite forgive him for. What bothered me most was the ease with which my husband accepted Lila’s fate, despite the fact that fixing a female is far more dangerous than fixing a male. But I said I would not fix Musashi. The next day, Lila had surgery, came home in a cage and didn’t move for days. “Lila, Lila,” Benjamin said. He sat by her crate, brought her water in a saucer and pumped her medication into her mouth on a precise schedule, smiling when she took her first timid steps. It is the inconsistencies that make human love so snarled.

For better and for worse
When Lila was well, Benjamin came with me to the woods near our house and gently tied small twigs to the dogs’ heads, turning them into temporary reindeer. We watched as they cantered along, made magic by his hands; these, my husband’s hands. For better and for worse.

And the betrayal? I had Musashi neutered behind Ben’s back, planning my strategy with barely a twinge of guilt. I would wait four months, long enough so that our conversation would be all but forgotten but not so long that the puppy would have developed an observable scrotum. I’d bring the dog to a different vet, one we would never see again. I’d explain to Ben that Musashi had stitches between his legs because he’d gotten a deep scrape at the park. And when Musashi was mature and had no testicles, I decided I would feign concern, claim to take him to the doctor, then announce that he’d been diagnosed with undescended testicles. It all seemed so simple. And, in fact, it was.

Until one summer evening, the dogs lapping their water, Ben knelt to give the unusual but occasional scratch to Musashi’s rump. The dog rolled over, pedaling his paws in the air, a pose Benjamin found especially undignified and from which he usually recoiled. This time, he didn’t. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey what?” I said, although I knew what was coming.

“This dog has no balls,” he said.

“No balls?” I said. “C’mon.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Look here.”

“I see some balls,” I said, pointing to a place where there was a tiny bulge, a quirk the dog had had since infancy.

“You think those are balls?” Ben said. “Are you serious?”

“Well, couldn’t he have, um, high balls?” I gave a laugh.

Ben didn’t say anything, and now there was a ball in my throat; swallowing was suddenly difficult.

“What’s wrong with Musashi?” Ben said. “Could they have neutered him before you bought him?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I’ll take him to the vet to see.”

Which I didn’t. But three nights later I said, “So I took him to the vet,” and told my story.

“Undescended?” Benjamin said to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Musashi,” Ben said. He gave one of his magnificent whistles and the dogs came bounding into the kitchen.

“Hey, friend,” Benjamin said to Musashi, turning the animal over on his back and studying him hard.

“Undescended,” Ben said again, not a question but a statement. He looked from the dog to me and back. Time passed. At last he went, stood by the window. “Hey,” I said, but he either didn’t hear or wouldn’t listen. Then he left the room.

From puppies to parenthood
If it sounds as if our marriage was bad, it wasn’t. Benjamin called me “Pie,” short for sweetie pie. I loved to hear him talk in his sleep, monologues about dolphins and computer code. Two years in, we set about the task of conceiving and soon discovered we were having a girl, which made the prospect of motherhood only marginally more appealing to me. In truth, the baby was largely Ben’s idea. “Look how you care for the dogs,” my friend Elizabeth reassured me. “If you love them so much, you’re obviously capable of deep attachment. You won’t have a problem.”

But I did. It was easy enough to give voice to my ambivalence about having a child; maternal ambivalence is très chic these days. What I didn’t express was my worry that I wouldn’t love the baby as much as I loved my dogs, or that I’d love the baby and the dogs equally. Imagine admitting that!

Yet there are places and times when people loved animals as much as their own children. In the 1800s, Sir Francis Galton wrote of aboriginal Australian women who “habitually feed puppies from their own breasts, and show an affection for them equal to, if not exceeding, that (shown) to their own infants.” In the 1960s, an anthropologist studying the Semang Negrito people of Malaysia wrote of seeing a woman running down the street, a baby at one breast, a monkey at the other.

My own breasts grew large in pregnancy, the nipples swelled and sensitized, huge and indecent. Around month six I had my amnio. All was well, except the baby on the screen did not look human, nor animal nor plant. She came from a category not yet created by Linnaeus, all static and blips.

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