‘Good girl,’ I muttered supportively, feeling slightly guilty that I was holding her in midair at arm’s length while her entire body shook, but a Newlyweds rerun was starting and the sneezing could last for ten minutes. I’d just recently reached the point where I could look at Millington and not think of my ex-boyfriend Cameron, which was definitive and welcome progress.
Penelope had introduced Cameron and me at some barbecue Avery had thrown when we were both two years out of school. I’m not sure if it was the shiny brown hair or the way his butt looked in his Brooks Brothers khakis, but I was smitten enough not to notice his tendency toward vicious name-dropping or the vile way he picked his teeth after each meal. For a while, at least, I fell madly in love with him. He spoke lovingly of bonds and trades, his prep-school lacrosse days, and weekend jaunts to the Hamptons and Palm Beach. He was like a sociological experiment – a not-so-rare but alien creature – and I just couldn’t get enough of him. Of course, it was doomed from the start – his family was a permanent fixture in the Social Register; my parents had once been on the FBI’s dangerous agitators list due to protest activities. But when paired with my job in banking, his aggressive preppiness went far in showing my parents that I wasn’t dedicating my life to Greenpeace. We moved in together a year after meeting, when both our rents went up at the exact same time. We’d been living together for exactly six months when we realized that we had absolutely nothing in common beyond the apartment, our jobs in finance, and friends like Avery and Penelope. So we did what any doomed-for-failure couple would do and immediately went shopping for something that could bring us closer together, or at least give us something to talk about other than whose turn it was to plead with the landlord for a new toilet seat. We opted for a four-pound Yorkie, priced at $800 per pound, as Cameron calculated for me more than once. I threatened to kill him if he announced one more time that he had, in fact, ordered entrées at Peter Luger bigger than this dog, and repeatedly reminded him that it had all been his idea. Oh, sure, there was the small issue of my being allergic to anything with fur, alive or stuffed, animal or outerwear, but he’d thought that one through, too.
‘Cameron, you’ve seen me around dogs before. I don’t know why you’d want to subject me – or yourself – to that again.’ I was thinking of the first time I’d met his family for a winter weekend in the Adirondacks. They’d rounded out the picture-perfect WASP gathering – real fire in the fireplace! no remote control! no store-bought logs! – with tartan-plaid J. Crew pajamas, free-standing decorative wooden mallards, enough alcohol to warrant a liquor license, and two loping, oversized golden retriever puppies. I sneezed and watered and hacked to such an extent that his permanently tipsy mother (‘Oh, dear, another glass of sherry should clear that right up!’) began making passive-aggressive ‘jokes’ about being contagious and his openly drunk father actually set down his gin and tonic long enough to offer me a ride to the ER.
‘Bette, don’t worry about a thing. I’ve looked into all of that, and I’ve found us the perfect dog.’ He looked smug and satisfied, and I mentally counted the days until the lease was up. One hundred seventy. I occasionally tried to recall what had attracted us in the first place, what had existed before the icy détente that had become the hallmark of our relationship, but nothing really specific emerged. He had always been a little dim, something that all the private schools had managed to mask but not repair. He was undeniably cute in that clean-cut, Abercrombie-catalog-boy way, and he did know how to pump out the charm when he needed something, but mostly I remember it just being easy: we had the same friends, the same fondness for chain-smoking and complaining, and a nearly identical pair of salmon-colored pants. Could a good romance have been modeled after my relationship with Cameron? Well, no, I don’t suppose so. But his unspectacular, watered-down version of companionship in those weird, early postcollege years felt perfectly adequate.
‘I don’t doubt it’s a very special dog, Cameron,’ I said slowly, as though I were speaking to a third-grader. ‘The problem is that I’m. Allergic. To All. Dogs. You understand that sentence, don’t you?’ I smiled sweetly.
He grinned, undeterred by the best bitchy, condescending tone I could muster. Impressive. He really was serious about this. ‘I’ve made some calls, done some research, and I’ve found us – drum roll, please! – a hypoallergenic dog. Can you say “hypoallergenic”? C’mon, B, repeat after me, “hypo—’’ ’
‘You found us a hypoallergenic dog? What, do they breed them to be that way? The last thing I need in my life is some genetic mutation of an animal that will most likely send me straight to the hospital. No way.’
‘Bette, don’t you see? It’s perfect. The breeder promised that since Yorkies have real hair, not fur, it’s impossible to be allergic to them. Even for you. I made an appointment for us to pick one out on Saturday – they’re in Darien, right near my office, and they promised to reserve at least one boy and one girl so we could have our pick.’
‘I have to work,’ I said listlessly, already vaguely aware that adding responsibility to this particular relationship was only going to sabotage it faster. Perhaps we should have just ended it then, but December’s such a tough time to find apartments, and the place really was a decent size, and well, dogs are cute and distracting … so I agreed. ‘All right, Saturday it is. I’ll go to the office Sunday instead, and we can go pick out our hypoallergenic dog.’
He bear-hugged me and told me all about his plans to rent a car and maybe visit a few nearby antiques stores (this coming from the boy who’d argued tirelessly to retain his beanbag chair when we’d combined our stuff) and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this little genetic mutation of a dog was the answer to all our problems.
Wrong.
So very, very wrong.
Well, that’s misleading. The dog certainly didn’t fix anything (surprise, surprise), but Cameron was right about something: Millington turned out to be hypoallergenic after all. I could hold her, snuggle her, rub her furry little mustache right against my face without so much as a hint of an itch. The problem was that the dog herself was allergic to everything. Everything. Somehow, her tiny little puppy sneezes seemed endearing when she was tucked among her littermates in the breeder’s kitchen. It was adorable … the only little-girl puppy had caught a little cold, and we were there to nurse her back to vibrant puppy health. Only the cold didn’t go away, and little Millington didn’t stop sneezing. After three weeks of round-the-clock care and nursing – Cameron chipped in, I’ll give him credit there – our little ball of joy wasn’t improving, even with the nearly $3,000 we’d spent on vet consultations, antibiotics, special food, and two late-night emergency-room visits when the wheezing and choking got particularly terrifying. We were missing work, screaming at each other, and bleeding money in the process – my banking and his hedge-fund salaries were barely enough to cover the dog’s expenses. Final doggy diagnosis: ‘Highly reactive to most household allergens including, but not limited to, dust, dirt, pollen, cleaning fluids, detergent, dyes, perfumes, and other animal hair.’
The irony was not lost on me. I, the most allergic person on earth, somehow now owned a dog that was allergic to absolutely everything. It would’ve probably been funny if Cameron, Millington, or I had slept more than four consecutive hours in three weeks, but we hadn’t, and it wasn’t. What would most people do in this situation? I remember asking myself as I lay awake on the first night of the fourth sleepless week. A sane couple in a functional relationship would simply shuttle the dog right back to the breeder and take a long vacation somewhere warm and laugh about what would surely become a fond memory and funny future party story. So what did I do? I hired an industrial cleaning service to remove every piece of hair, every particle of dirt, every smudge from every surface so the dog could breathe, and I asked Cameron to leave once and for all, which he did. Penelope told me eight months later – with what I thought was a little more excitement than the event required – that he’d gotten engaged to his new girlfriend while wearing a kilt on a golf course in Scotland, and that they were moving to Florida, where her family owned a small island. That clinched it: everything worked out exactly as it was meant to. Two years later, the dog had learned to tolerate the smell of Wisk, Cameron toasted