The question of where to put my laptop since my lap is now occupied by the dog is an adjustment at first, until I realize that I don’t actually have to have the dog on my lap—Charlotte can be half on my hip and half on the bed. This isn’t an Olympic sport, after all. There are no rules, no mandatory movements or positions, no points taken off for bad form. I can make it up as I go along, just like I do with my work. “Are dogs the ultimate antidepressant?” “Can dogs ease empty-nester heartache?” Anything is possible with a well-placed question mark and an endless supply of dubious functional MRI conclusions available from a simple Google search. Any thought, question, or half-baked idea of mine can become a Well/er piece.
About an hour before it’s time to pick Teddy up from school and before Gary gets home from work, I take Charlotte off, hide the sling in the middle drawer, and bring her out to do all the things a normal dog should be allowed to do in the course of a normal dog-day—including a long walk—slingless, on and off the leash, in the neighborhood or around the reservoir that we drive to, where she gets to play and socialize with other dogs. Once home, she finds a place to nap on the floor or on the bed or on the couch before I leave. The afternoons and evenings pass easily, usually—laundry, cooking, a little more content-generation distracting me from missing the weight around my neck, against my hip, balancing my laptop next to that warm cotton sack of dog fur.
Eventually, though, the hours in between sling-time drag, and I find myself wanting, then needing, to wear the dog like a baby all the time. Who wouldn’t? But need leads to impulsivity, and impulsivity is how accidents happen.
* * *
It doesn’t take long for my secret to get discovered. A few weeks after I start wearing the dog, right after school starts, I get sloppy and lose track of time. I forget that every third Tuesday Gary leaves work as a part-time snackologist at a large communal work space near MIT—managing the infinite selection of organic non-GMO snacks and beverages for the hordes of startup teams and independent contractors half our age paying for daily shared office space—and races home, eager to do a few one-hits out the upstairs bathroom window hours before Teddy gets back from school and while I am usually still out running errands. That September afternoon, as I lumber from refrigerator to sink with the sling, fixing myself and the dog a little snack—cheddar cheese cubes and a few stale Fritos, our favorite—Gary suddenly appears in the kitchen. Tall and rangy and fit, he is wearing his mandatory company black fleece zip-up vest with the WORK IT TOGETHER (WIT) logo over the left breast, black jeans, and black T-shirt, a uniform he hates. With his still-full head of longish salt-and-pepper hair and rimless round Lennon glasses, he looks like an architect or designer, not an underemployed former musician trying to fit into a new corporate culture to help make ends meet.
When I see him I stop short. How will I explain why our dog’s slender pointy-snouted head is poking out of a diaper across my chest? I look down at the sling as if I’m as surprised as Gary to find it hanging there. “I was just cleaning out the basement,” I say, implying the basement cleaning was today, not almost a month earlier. I reach into the bag for another handful of corn chips but don’t eat them. I hadn’t planned on being discovered. I don’t have my story down yet. But as freaked out as I am, I’m actually relieved. It’s time. I’m tired of having a secret, of having to pretend that everything’s fine. This is who I am now in middle age—lost and confused and shifting constantly between my own world and the real world. If the dog is helping me survive these dark days, then good for me. I shouldn’t be ashamed. In fact, I should be applauded for finding a harmless, nonalcoholic, nonnarcotic, noncannabinoid solution to my pain. (Right?)
Gary leans forward an inch or two, waiting for the rest of my explanation, which is not forthcoming. “And . . . the sling just jumped out and demanded to be worn?” He looks at me like I could not possibly be weirder, like I have a bird on my head.
I slip a corn chip into the sling, then nod at him above the sound of the dog’s crunching, a sound I love almost as much as I love the sound of Teddy crunching Cheez-Its or Goldfish. “Actually, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”
His eyes dart over to the freezer. “You didn’t eat any cookies, did you?”
“Pot cookies?” Sensing an opening, an opportunity to divert attention from my sling-problem to his pot-smoking problem, which started innocently enough a few years ago as a medically prescribed solution for extreme anxiety but has, in the past few months, gotten completely out of hand, I shake my head slowly. “Seriously. You can’t keep pot cookies around: we have an actual teenager in the house.”
He opens the freezer, finds what he’s looking for—a small tinfoil square in a nondescript Ziploc bag marked DOGGIE SNACKS—then leans back against the counter. He looks at the dog and then at me, his relief at finding his stash safe already turning to disappointment: If pot cookies aren’t the reason for my bizarre behavior, then what is?
“So, how long have you been carrying her around like a baby?”
I’m about to lie but again, we’re so beyond that now that I can’t come up with a reason why I should bother. We’re separated. Sort of. Technically. None of this is his business. I have nothing to lose. In fact, the more estranged we are, the easier it will be when we can afford to actually split up.
“A few days. A week. Maybe more. Does it matter?”
“Wow,” he says, then shakes his head. “That’s sad.”
I straighten, feel my chin jut out and up. I might be an increasingly strange, increasingly invisible middle-aged woman, hiding an ever-expanding perimenopausal body in boxy sweaters and boyfriend jeans, but clearly I’m not the only one who is struggling. “Said the dude who vapes one-hits out the window and eats pot cookies.”
“They’re called edibles now,” he says, patting the dog’s head inside the sling and then, with affection, mine, too, on his way to the basement.
* * *
Wearing the dog is ridiculous. An act of desperation. I know this. I know that the strain of a twenty-pound animal hanging around my neck in a cloth sling, no matter how well constructed or convincingly it guarantees to “distribute weight and swing evenly on the shoulder, back, and hip,” isn’t good for me, physically or mentally; I know that it will become a bad habit I’ll come to love and then have to give up, like cigarettes, like falling for a married man. No good will ever come from this; this will never end well. Going in, I know I’m doomed.
But there is the loneliness. The aloneness. How I startle awake in the dark, panicked, full of dread, floating on the night sea on a tiny raft surrounded by all that vast blackness. I see myself from above. The light from the moon guides me nowhere. I’m connected to nothing and no one, lost, and certain only that I’m destined to die broke and alone from one of the swift lethal cancers that took my parents in their later years, without getting another chance to turn things around. Even before Gary starts sleeping in the snoring room, when the marriage already feels like a suffocation, his florid debilitating anxiety disorder having turned my desire into maternal concern years ago, I wake like that, worried about the short run, the now, the present: How will I get from this moment to that moment? Where is the vine that will swing me to the other side?