Mavis (981 words)

I found her two mornings after our quarterly, “Where's the baby” fight. We had just left the front porch when 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 with one glance. 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.

“Tell me you're going to keep this one, or I'm putting a needle in her right now, Gabby. She's not adoptable.” said the vet.

“She's mine. I'm keeping her.” I told him.

“Then give her a name.”

“Her name is Mavis, like the Staples singers.” I said.

Mavis wouldn't let anyone in the kitchen for the first three days I had her. Well, nobody but me. I wasn't heeding her threatening growls. I broke right through her barred teeth and hostility and applied ointment to her mange whether she liked it or not. By day four she stopped growling but still hadn't wagged her tail.

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 turning me into a hostile bitch. So Mavis's growling was nothing to me: we were soul sisters, hostile on the outside and deeply scarred and empty on the inside. I knew her better than she knew herself which is evidenced by the fact that I am the only person she's never bitten.

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. I'd end up dodging cars with Frankie in tow, screaming and begging the other dog's owner not to kick her.

It is only by the grace of God that I was never issued a ticket or ordered to put her down. I believe Mavis was meant to survive, but to what end?

Mavis hated obedience school. She would only listen as a last resort and never mastered heal. She would pull me up and down every hill in spite of her halti-collar. She pulled so hard, she rubbed all the hair off the bridge of her nose where the halti-collar lay.

In the meantime, her mange still had not been cured, despite my consult with a holistic vet. 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 horse tape and stuff them into Mutt Lukk booties just to take her for a walk.

I was on the phone to the head nutritionist of every holistic dog food company I could think of. I even tried the Billinghurst BARF diet which had me chopping up seventy chicken wings a week between both dogs. The raw bones were causing both dogs to bleed rectally, so I scrapped the raw diet.

With no end in sight for the mange, my original vet said it was time to try steroids. Mavis had just been successfully potty trained. She had just graduated obedience school. Steroids made her gain thirteen pounds and left her incontinent. Once again, my kitchen floor was covered in newspaper.

Then one of the vet's interns suggested we try a vet whose book she was reading. This was a specialist in doggie dermatology. She prescribed oral ivermectim, everyday, until the mange was gone. Ivermectin is the key ingredient in heartworm medication. On a lark, I had tried giving Mavis a Heart guard pill every two weeks at one point since it kills parasites. The owner of the Solid Gold dog food brand had told me to stop immediately, because ivermectin is a poison.

“It is if you're a parasite.” said the doggie dermatologist, “But we have a blood brain barrier. Dogs do too.”

That conversation taught me to put holistic “knowledge” in perspective.

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.

I think if Mavis had not come into my life on the morning of December 20th 2001, I may have stayed in a suffocating marriage. But because my emotional energy had something else to focus on, I could see clearly enough to summon up the courage to leave him.

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. Watching Mavis chase her big brother, and tackle him in the snow gave me something to smile about even in my darkest moments. If I only had one dog, if I had never found her, would I have this circus wrestling act to laugh at? Did I save her, or did she save me?

Today Mavis is nine, and lives to dig holes in my new husband's otherwise pristine lawn. But that's the only bad thing she does anymore. Her fearful aggression, along with her mange, are a thing of a past long gone. I'm inclined to forgive her for her one remaining fault.