Picking up on our story from last week, my brother Gary and I thought we had established strong boundaries in our sunken rec room, but there were subtle changes in the air. Our once loyal toy poodle seemed suddenly cool to us, and much more confident around our grandmother.
To be fair, Coco had not always been so smug. Before G’ma came to live with us, Coco constantly scooted underfoot, leaving us wary of flattening her into the parquet floors. Now I realize it was some early signs of what parenthood would be like, that is, things underfoot all the time. The stress of trampling our toy poodle, coupled with the reoccurring threat of a civil defense drill, kept the anxiety around our house at a riveting level.
It was during this period a new name for our poodle was born: Coco la Puff. For the males in the house, the possibility of bonding with a la Puff suddenly took a left turn and careened off a steep cliff into dark ravine. For Gary, it was particularly dangerous territory. He could not find any concrete reference to any “la Puff” in the World Almanac, leaving him with an agonizing intellectual void. For me, the la Puff made Coco seem aloof and fragile, and I began to liken her to more of a dust bunny than an actual dog of any kind.
Additionally, there was never any evidence that Coco had increased in size since her birth. From our observation, there were no growth spurts, no puppydom, and it appeared that she was simply born already grown, one pound, and would remain in this stunted state the rest of her life. And that knitted sweater G’ma had made for her? Gary and I were not impressed, as it could have been made at any point during Coco’s development and still fit her. It was, in our view, a random sweater made for a dog whose size would never change from the time she was born until the day she died.
Our imaginations soared with sarcastic humor, a humor that began to infiltrate where love for Coco once had been. Perhaps if our parents had bought a St. Bernard, or a Peregrine Falcon, our family would have been the talk of the neighborhood. As it were, we got a wind-up pet, an over-hybridized trinket with huge eyes. Gary and I, embarrassed as I am to say it, thought of Her Toyness as an afront to our warrior status.
Standing in the doorway, watching my grandmother push Coco la Puff’s tail through the knitted fifth hole in the sweater, our pet became the fodder for cruel jokes, jokes that I was not old enough to laugh at yet. But laugh I did. Once a viable part of our family fabric, we imagined little Puff of Smoke a food source behind a large glass cage in a zoo, running around frantically, trying to hide from an Amazon boa constrictor coiled in a dark corner. This was resentment at its finest, and it took hold within the confines of a poodle.
Gary and I looked at each other, we looked down below at Coco, then back to G’ma. We didn’t know how or why or when, but we knew something had changed. Dogs may have extrasensory perception, and Coco may have had extraordinary intuition, but we brothers had the look. What we knew was that the family dynamic was changing forever. In that instant, somewhere between G’ma’s spilt luggage and the step down into our mid-century bomb shelter, Cocoa was relegated from our pet poodle to Grandma’s toy pet.
I’m not sure if that was a healthy switch. Now that I look back on it, Cocoa’s allegiance to G’ma seemed like it should have gone through Health and Protective Services, or an adoption agency. Or perhaps the switch should have gone through Goodyear Tire Company first, G’ma’s former employer, who might reconsidered her pension package.
Late that night, when Gary and I were tucked in and supposedly asleep, we began a hushed discussion, voicing our concerns.
“So, what is ‘tirement, Gary?” I asked. “Do you get it when you make enough tires at Goodyear? Or too many?”
“You mean re-tirement?” Gary said.
“Yes, that.”
“No numbskull, it’s got nothing to do with tires. G’ma worked making tires at Goodyear, and then she got old, and they told her they’d give her our dog if she left the company.”
“Nobody told _us_ G’ma was going to get Coco. Can’t you and I just make some tires and get Coco back?” I asked.
“Nope.”
And that was that. One day our poodle was sleeping under the sink in a casserole dish, snug as a bug in a rug, the next day she was glued to G’ma at the hip, being carted from here to there, secure from our footsteps and comments. Because of the one step down into the rec room, Coco was allowed to roam freely there, like a small rodent hunting for crumbs, occasionally stopping to lick herself free of any greenhouse gases that may have accumulated on her skin.
The problem was, for Coco, getting down that one wooden step, into this pasture of freedom. Since toy poodles feel very uncomfortable sliding across a wooden floor like Gary and I did, she had to negotiate a leap from the carpeted upper level to an Amish rug on the other side, a leap that appeared to us like sheer suicide every time she tried it. Noticing her hesitation, Gary began to move the rug ever so slightly outward, increasing the distance Coco would be “in flight,” so that Coco would be required to leap with increasingly more abandon.
Inevitably, Coco’s worst nightmare became reality. One afternoon, in the middle of an episode of the Road Runner, my brother and I watched Wiley Coyote free fall off a cliff and become a puff of annihilation on the desert surface below. Coco too, accelerated off the step and leapt into the void. But with the rug now too far to reach, she slid across the exposed wooden floor and disappeared under the edge of the Amish rug, coming to a dead stop, a small lump somewhere near the center.
There she froze, with not even a ripple coming forth. There was a moment, a heavy one, where Gary and I thought we may have committed second degree dog-slaughter. Fortunately, we began to hear Coco’s infinitesimal “yips” for help, the kind of yips we might hear in California, if Coco were lost in Nevada. During the throws of our unbridled laughter, it was unfortunate that our grandmother appeared on the step.
"Where is Cocoa?” she asked. “Gary?"
No answer.
“Jeff? Do you know where Coco is?”
I shrugged and attempted an innocent cough, but I saw the hurt in our grandmother’s face as she peered across the rec room expanse for any signs of poodle life. We did eventually rescue our former pet from under the rug, but we had lost her trust. From that point on Coco la Puff spent more and more time in the protective custody of G’ma’s arms, being hauled around like a fanny pack with legs, staring out at the world, and occasionally growling when she got too close to the rec room.
Later that same day, as Gary tired from cartoons, he turned to the World Almanac and discovered Darwin’s theory of evolution on page 3,722. He reported to me, much to my relief, that we did not need to worry about Coco. Since she was now in our grandmother’s arms all the time, Gary told me Coco la Puff would slowly be evolving into a new specie.
“That is why her legs are slowly withering away,” Gary announced at dinner that night, as G’ma served him a plate of tater tots. “Nature in her infinite wisdom has given Coco another person, our grandmother as a host animal to carry her around, which will slowly render her little toy legs useless. I read that in the almanac. It is a sad day for all America, but a great day for evolution,” Gary finished.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an arm come across the table, and the bowls of crispy tater tots that had been placed in front of us, freshly baked in the toaster oven, were taken away. In their place, G’ma gave us Brussel sprouts, slightly purplish, probably from radiation. In her other arm she held Coco la Puff, her adopted poodle princess, and began hand feeding her one crispy tater tot at a time.
Coco was a tot-eating toy, a toy tot, and a tote bag, all in one, the one-pound manifestation of poetic justice. She had not sunk to a lower level as we had but had moved up the evolutionary scale into the protective custody of our grandmother. We could return to our sunken hide-away underground, but our future was sealed. We were destined to slowly atrophy into some other inferior species, the sad effect of natural selection, surviving on a diet of radioactive vegetables in the lower echelons of a mid-century ranch-style house.