Jane Vandenburgh - The Wrong Dog Dream: A True Romance

a true romance

Jane Vandenburgh

Jane Vandenburgh

COUNTER POINT

BERKELEY

Copyright 2013 Jane Vandenburgh

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Authors Note on Technique

This is a work of nonfiction whose events verifiably happened.

I do, however, employ the techniques of fiction in recounting dialogue, also in naming people and their dogs. I do this in order to avoid hurting either their feelings or their reputations, as this was not my intent.

My intent, as always, is to get as close as I can to a truthful story.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication is available.

ISBN 978-1-61902-209-6

Cover design by Natalya Bolnova

Interior design by David Bullen

COUNTER POINT

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for NOAH,

and for EVA,

children of our Wonder Years

Love awoke, and life awoke.

LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace

(translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

You ask of my companions? Hills, sir,

and the sundown and a dog large

as myself... They are better than [human]

beings because they know but do not tell.

EMILY DICKINSON

Someone in my family dreamed itno one now remembers who. The dream stems from something that happened when we were living in the East, and so begins in what feels solidly fact-based and actual:

Just back from a visit to Berkeley, we are stopping by the vets to pick up our dog from boarding. Were all theremy husband, my daughter, my son, and me, all in that state of high alert known as hypervigilance, all watching the door in the back of the waiting room. This is where the tech will appear, bringing our dog to us.

But here the dreamscape warps, time tilts, and everything starts to take too long: door opening, family standing, brought into slomo unison by their crazy love for this dog, an English springer spaniel named Whistler.

Nowas the dog is being led by the tech across the broad expanse of the tiled floorthe dreamer begins to get that somethings a little off: that the two keep coming but remain very far away, that this familys fake, too loud, everyone saying false and scripted thingsHey, boy! There you are! We missed you, buddy! Come on! Come here! Good boy! like they are all repeating lines of cartoon dialogue.

Because this is not our dogit only looks like him, a likeness in both appearance and behavior so uncanny that even the dog himself seems fooled, as this dog-who-is-not-our-dog comes wagging his no-tail rump at us, moving toward the strange family that now stands like a group of statues.

Only the dreamer notices what no one else yet sees: That dogs a ringer! the dreamer wants to say, somehow knowingwith a dreamers spacious overviewhow the mix-up came to be, that two lookalike dogs, so similar they might be clones, have been switched in grooming.

This is the wrong dog, the dreamer tries to say aloud to the tech. Our real dogs the one in back, but the dreamers frozen and cant seem to get the words out and so must struggle again to speak, as the tech keeps leading this dog-who-is-not-our-dog across the waiting room.

The dreamers now saying it more and more urgently, Wrong dog! Wrong dog! but locked together in the paralysis of sleep, lips, teeth, and tongue, all muscles of the dreamers face, are stilled, words slurring as theyre saidwrrrrnng dwwwg, wrrrnnnn dwwwwgggso no one pays attention, and the dreamer now understands the true horror here, that what started as a loving, joyful dream has just become a nightmare.

The whole neighborhood surrounding the vets is called Friendship, the word is used in a different way than youd ever hear it said in California. Here it indicates place, in the sense of township, from which you get that Friendship was the District neighborhood that had been settled by The Friends, also known as Quakers.

We got Whistler soon after we moved to Washington. Wed gotten a dog for many reasons, not the least among them our shared belief thatsince a dog is the most earthbound of creaturesmy having something land-based and terrestrial, who needed to be walked, would encourage me to get dressed and leave the house.

Because Im a writer who works at home and can live so contentedly within the rooms of my mind, I do sometimes forget to walk outside. And I did really need to remember to go outside if I ever hoped to participate. I needed to participate or Id never learn the first thing about this new place, nor would I meet anyone. I needed to meet people because wed just moved to a town where I knew no one aside from the others in my family.

Our house was on Ordway Street near Connecticut in Cleveland Park in what was calledas I was finding outthe Second Alphabet. The street names in the Second and Third Alphabets have either two or three syllables, so two-syllable Ord-way might be reasonably found roughly halfway through the alphabets second run-through. You could also deduce that Al-be-marle would lie so-and-so many blocks away, at the beginning of the Third.

Whistlers vet was on Bran-dy-wine.

If you studied the neat grid of the District mapas I compulsively did in trying to figure out how best to get from A to Byoud notice that the broad state-named avenues, such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, would go wildly slashing through the four quadrants like sword slices cut by Zorro.