Mavis (494 words)

I found her after our, “Where's the baby” fight. I saw her trying to hide from us under a neighbor's bushes. She was a tiny trembling, mange covered skeleton with pious brown eyes that bore down into my soul. They say we don't own our pets. They own us. She owned me the moment our eyes met. I scooped her up into my arms and headed back up to my apartment. My husband looked up in bewilderment.

“What does this mean?” he asked

“It's a girl. We've got the perfect family now. A little boy,” I said, pointing to Frankie, “and a little girl. Gimme the debit card. You're walking Frankie.”

With that, I walked out and took my new angel to the vet.

Mavis wouldn't let anyone in the kitchen for the first three days I had her. Well, nobody but me. I broke right through her barred teeth and hostility and applied ointment to her mange whether she liked it or not.

Before I had Mavis to tend to, I couldn't face the fact that my marriage was falling apart. My lack of children, I was told, was making me hostile. So Mavis's growling was nothing to me: we were soul sisters, hostile on the outside and deeply scarred on the inside.

It took eighteen months to heal her mange, during which time Mavis taught me first hand all about fearful aggression. Mavis could wriggle out of her collar and run across a four lane highway to go bark at a dog she saw on the other side of Kennedy Boulevard. Obedience school helped, but she hated it.

In the meantime, her mange still had not been cured. It was now in her feet. Her paws were the size of baseballs and her toe pads had been replaced by open weeping sores. Twice daily I would clean out her toes and then bind her feet in gauze and stuff them into Mutt Lukk booties just to take her for a walk.

With no end in sight for the mange, my original vet said it was time to try steroids. Then one of the vet's interns suggested we try a vet who was a specialist in doggie dermatology. She prescribed oral ivermectim, everyday, until the mange was gone.

It took four months, but by June 3rd of 2003, Mavis received her first ever clean bill of health. On June 6th, we moved out of our apartment in New Jersey and came to Ohio.

In the months after leaving my husband, there were many days when having to walk Mavis and Frankie was the only reason I'd get out of bed at all. If I only had one dog, if I had never found her, would I have this ridiculous wrestling duo to laugh at? Did I save her, or did she save me?

Today Mavis is nine. Her fearful aggression, her mange, and my bad marriage, are things of a past long gone.