Bloodlines by Susan Conant Page B

though I knew it mostly by another name, TTouch. What is it? New Age massage and movement, a healing touch for dogs. Dog owners use Feldenkrais to heal those they love. Gloria’s mother evidently did, too. Gloria herself had never owned a dog or cat. She’d once had gerbils that had reproduced and promptly eaten their newborn offspring.
    At a stoplight, I glanced over at Gloria, who’d removed the ugly Peruvian cap and sat hunched in the seat, her knees drawn up in a fetal curl. Even in the dim light from the dashboard and a nearby streetlight, her face was painful to look at. She had the kind of acne you practically never see anymore, certainly never on children of privilege, children whose fathers are professors, who’ve traveled abroad, whose mothers can afford to pursue personal growth instead of working for a living. I felt furious at the parents who’d neglected this poor kid, who’d turned her loose to develop into a mangy stray. By the time we reached the intersection of Alewife Brook Parkway and Mass. Ave., which is to say, Cambridge, I was feeling disappointed and chagrined. I’d thought I was capturing Satan himself. What I’d caught was, at worst, a minor imp.
    I didn’t even bother to press her about why she’d released Rowdy. She’d already told me herself. “It was my own symbolic act,” she’d said. The sight, sound, and scent of two thousand show dogs, each one groomed, pampered, and adored? Two thousand beautiful dogs, each one loved and cared for? And there she’d been, ugly Gloria. Of course it had been a symbolic act. When I’d stopped to pick her up in Medford, I’d intended to beard one of those satanic animal liberationists in my own woofy den. Just force one of those bastards to meet my dogs and spend some time with us! Training is cruelty? Let the son of a bitch watch Kimi stubbornly refuse to go indoors until we’ve done our obedience work. And the joyful grin on Rowdy’s face when he finds his dumbbell and soars back over the high jump? Or let anyone, absolutely anyone, just hang around with us, listen to us, watch us, learn who we really are, homo sapiens, canis familiaris, two species delicately evolved in unison, biologically distinct, behaviorally meshed, the only two species to keep one another as companion animals. People keep cats and birds, too, of course, but dogs are more loyal to us than we are to them. We are uniquely theirs. Without us, there would be no dogs. Without them, we would be less human than we are now. No one should miss this transcendent miracle. No one but Gloria Loss, who didn’t need to learn that my dogs and I loved one another more than anyone had ever loved her.
    Fifteen minutes after we’d crossed Mass. Ave., Gloria stood awkwardly in the bright light of my kitchen. Faith’s description had been accurate, and so had Lois Metzler’s: Gloria was short, dark, and damp. Her hair had been treated with some oily gel or mousse that forced her thick locks to fall depressingly forward and downward. The paisley skirt Faith had mentioned was, in fact, the bottom half of a long, unflattering dress in shades of mustard, black, and navy. It dripped onto heavy hiking boots that had absorbed the rain. The raw, inflamed lesions that covered her face made it hard to see past her skin to the person inside.
    The beauty of dogs, though, is that if Gloria had had two or three heads, each as repulsive as the first, Rowdy and Kimi would have welcomed her with the same enthusiasm they now displayed. They’d both had a brief trip to the fenced-in yard, and now Rowdy, who had, of course, already met Gloria, was sprawled on his back on the floor, his mouth open in a toothy smile, his legs wiggling foolishly in the air in anticipation of chest-scratching and tummy-rubbing that Gloria failed to offer. Kimi sat neatly in front of Gloria and kept lifting her right forepaw, but Gloria missed or refused that invitation, too.
    “He wants you to rub his belly,” I translated.