Animal Appetite

money. Perhaps you’ve read my column? Holly Winter? So Rita and I deal with identical problems—mismatches, lost love, inappropriate conduct, needless suffering, failures of communication, and all the rest—but Rita gets paid more than I do because her job is a lot more complicated than mine. In Rita’s profession, everyone is always fouled up. In my work, it’s usually clear right away that an emotional block, a lack of moral fiber, or, in most cases, fathomless ignorance is causing the owner unwittingly to reinforce undesirable behavior in a potentially perfect dog, which is to say, almost any dog at all. In other words, even deep in her heart, Rita has to suspend judgment. I, too, can’t go around voicing blame. Instead, I mouth the same shrink dictum Rita does: “It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility.”
    But I digress. This story is supposed to have almost nothing to do with dogs. So let’s magically let you peer at us again and conclude what you will of us. Can you guess that I have a mad crush on my vet? That he, Steve Delaney, is my ardent lover? And that Rita, in her prolonged longing for a human male soul mate, constitutes consummate proof of the unutterable density of men? If you are perceptive, perhaps yes.
    So, with European delicacy, Rita was carefully transferring morsels of crust from her fork to her mouth and, as usual, listening to my complaints, which moved from my foolishness about the gas gauge to the advanced age of my Ford Bronco to the failure of the proud yet humble profession of dog writing to pay enough to feed one human being, never mind myself and two big dogs. What I expected her to say in reply was the kind of thing she always says: She’d interpret dog writing as a symbolic representation of a withholding maternal imago, demand to know whether I’d been abruptly weaned, or inquire about some other such developmental crisis that it was thirty plus years too late to fix.
    But she didn’t. In fact, Rita astonished me by putting down her knife and fork, looking me directly in the eye, and asking a radically practical question: “Holly, has it ever occurred to you to take a break from dogs and, for once, write about people instead?”
    A large lump of mozzarella stuck in my throat. To save my life, I was forced to wash it down with a big slug of wine. “Well, yes, of course, Rita, but it’s like what Robert Benchley said about exercise—sometimes I feel the impulse, but then I lie down, and the feeling passes.”
    “Has it ever occurred to you,” Rita demanded, “that you are selling yourself short?”
    I was suitably insulted. “Of course not!”
    “Or that, by your own account, the book you want to write about the sled dogs of the Byrd expeditions will take you ten years to finish and will have a maximum possible readership of maybe two hundred people?”
    I inched my chair back from the table. My eyes drifted to Rowdy and Kimi, whose ancestors went with Byrd to Antarctica. I looked back at Rita. “It’s still worth doing.”
    “Or,” she persisted, “that, in fact, your only practical alternatives are—”
    “A real job,” I finished. “No!”
    “Or,” Rita said gently, “economic dependence on someone else.”
    “I am NOT getting married! You are worse than Steve! And even if I did marry him, I would never, ever even think about marrying him or anyone else for—”
    “Money,” Rita said.
    “Money,” I echoed. “Rita, really! I am staggered that you would even suggest—”
    “I was not suggesting anything, Holly. I was merely pointing out your options.”
    “Well, that one is totally unacceptable.”
    “Then,” said Rita, swallowing a sip of wine, “you’d better get serious about expanding your readership.”
    “I am serious now!" I countered. “And I do not appreciate your condescending hints to the effect that I need to grow up!”
    “What you are,” Rita informed me, “is afraid you can’t do it.”
    “Can’t do what?”
    “Write about people. Or, for that matter, anything else that has nothing whatsoever to do with dogs.”
    I dug my incisors into a juicy slice of pizza. When I’d finished ingesting it, I daubed my mouth with a paper napkin, drank more wine, and said defiantly, “That is not true! I write about dogs because, in case it isn’t overwhelmingly obvious, dogs are what I’m interested in. Furthermore, as you know, I happen to be a person with a mission, namely, animal welfare.”
    Rita sipped her