Mindy jumped off the balcony that summer. She flew three stories to the parking lot below and laid herself out like a cherry pie smashed on the blacktop. I watched from above as my boss peeled her warm fuzzy body off the ground, my eyes like two Red Hots. We would have to build a higher fence. We would have to call her owners. We would have to say, “Your dog is dead,” but we would not say, “We train dogs with behavioral issues, not self-esteem issues.”
In weeks to come, Linda, the owner of the boarding and training business she ran out of her Sunset Park apartment, would also lose Willy, the Weimaraner, on the Upper East Side; he would bolt out of the back of her mini van and up Third Avenue. She would try to step on his black dragging leash, but would instead trip and fall to the pavement. “Somebody grab him! Please! Grab that dog!” she would yell. I would make colorful flyers showing Willy with his big gray elephant ears that would read, “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG?” But no one called.
I decided I did not want to work with someone who, although relatively well-known in dog training, was capable of letting such things happen. Linda’s apartment was small and ill-equipped: the dog facilities were larger than her actual living quarters, the two spaces often colliding. There would be dog hair in the dinner bowls and coffee mugs, urine on the floor of the bedroom, and old dog food bags filled with granola for breakfast.
Linda was built like a bulldog: shoulders thick, jowls swinging and stubborn as hell. She expected me to clean up after her, like wash her crusty dishes that mingled with dog bowls in the sink and launder her menstrual covered bed sheets. I ignored these requests daily and told myself I would quit when I had acquired enough of my own dog walking clients in Manhattan and rid myself of the unrelenting days of putting up with her miserable Ibizan hounds. There were three of them, a gangly gang with impossibly long legs and ears like fennec foxes. They would taunt the smaller dogs and try to bite me as I shooed them into their crates. Linda barely lifted a finger while I was there. She mostly sat in front of the computer brushing her long black hair and managing to get more mashed potatoes on the keyboard than in her spitty mouth.
The day finally came when I had no choice but to quit when I saw Linda’s breasts. I refer to this moment at the “boob pop,” a defining moment in my self-respect through someone else’s humility. I had been out on the balcony hosing away the dog shit, the smell of bleach stinging all the openings of my face, when I had started to cry. My mother had only died two months before, and since I worked six days a week, I had little time to see my family. I dropped the running hose and went to find Linda. She was inside, sitting at her computer, in nothing but a lavender terrycloth robe and her wet hair making curlicues on the sides of her face. When she saw me crying she invited me into her bedroom where she sprawled her large body across the bed with one of her hounds on top of her, with his body between her legs and his head on her stomach. She rubbed the dog’s belly as she told me she knew about the death, but she was waiting for me to come to her. I asked for some time off, thinking there was no way she could deny me grieving time. Unfortunately, she told me, things would be way too busy in the upcoming weeks to allow me any time off. She would say this to me completely deadpan while I stood before her, smelling like bleach and dog shit, and could feel myself about to lose control. That was until the dog abruptly leapt off the bed, flinging Linda’s robe open to expose her two gigantic breasts like a second set of merciless eyes between us. I stared at them, and then at her, and let out a laugh that I could only imagine resonated with her for weeks to come.
I quit then and there, and a few weeks later I would hear that she let another dog turn into pie.
