Free Bad Dog by Martin Kihn Page B

ring, slowly, and—”
    Suddenly, Hola bullets out, pulling me across the entiretraining area and coming to a heroic stop at the accordion gate, where she stands gazing into the next ring, which holds a Canine Good Citizen preparation program. For two long months—an entire semester in the Port Chester Obedience Training Club’s Family Manners program—as Hola finds new and amazing ways to display her love of all objects, people, and dogs, I peek longingly at the well-mannered CGC students as they stroll past distractions and sit gently at their owners’ sides as they shake hands with one another.
    I feel like I am watching
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
in a mobile home.
    “I’m not seeing much of a loose lead from you guys,” says Wendy, who obviously reads a lot of Oscar Wilde. “Does she know the loose lead?”
    “Um, we, I mean—”
    “Does she know how to sit?”
    Okay, now she is getting personal. That is like asking me if I know the Electric Slide. A dog that doesn’t know the sit command is basically a dog that hasn’t been trained at all.
    “Hola, sit,” I say.
    She sits. Then rolls onto her back and praises the god of her understanding with her four wiggling paws.
    Oh, Dad
, she seems to say.
I love this class! Thanks!
    It doesn’t help that the other pupils are a regular mutt Mensa. In particular, there is a handsome young boxer named Atticus who is obviously most likely to, and I develop what people in the program call “a resentment” (
n
., homicidal loathing) against him. It isn’t just that he is whip-smart, picking up new commands so easily I suspect he looks ahead in the curriculum.
    No, it is his loving upward gaze at his owner, a good-lookingwoman in her twenties who wears a baggy sweatsuit and doesn’t seem all that much more gifted than I am as a dog trainer. Well, okay, everyone is more gifted than me, but she is no Siegfried & Roy.
    Our only real enemy in life is ourselves.
    It amazes me how personally I am taking this dog training thing. Each week, I am nervous for two days before class and ashamed for two days after. Hola’s failure feels like an open expression of my defects of character.
    And it doesn’t help that Clark tells me to give Gloria time. This requires an act of God since, of course, I know her phone number. I rattle around. Work very hard. Talk to Hola. Go to meetings. Look at things Gloria has left around the apartment, her books on Emily Dickinson, hanging files with clippings of reviews of her shows in the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
, pink cashmere scarves and expensive little polka-dot umbrellas, her upright piano in the back room with thick scores of Bach and Aerosmith. Did she ever play Aerosmith?
    One day about two weeks after she left, she calls when she knows I’m in my weekly staffing meeting at work and tells me what I’d already guessed: she’s living about two hours away in the Catskill Mountains, in our one-bedroom vacation house, called the Rock House because it sits on a rock.
    “Don’t call me,” she says. “Just wanted you to know I’m okay.”
    I listen to the message a lot but still can’t hear the hidden code.
    I START GIVING Hola little pep talks in the Zipcar during our half-hour drive up I-87.
    “I’m going to need you to bring your A game here, Schmoe,” I say to the little Hola in the rearview mirror, using the adorably shortened version of the adorable nickname I give her—Schmola—when I’m nervous. “I’d like you to leave it all out there in the ring, okay?”
    Her narrowed eyes seem to say:
What are you talking about, Dad?
    “It’s a competitive group of dogs,” I say. “A young group. They’re going to be training to win, and we need to suit up and show up.”
    Are we going to the dog park? Are we going to Florida again? Where are you hiding the Pop-Tarts?
    “Listen to me. I need you be on point out there. Stay hungry.”
    I was born hungry
.
    And inside the facility, it is an utterly woof-centered