Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family (6 page)

As I was about to pick her up from the counter, Betty came up behind me, spraying a mist of something in our direction. “It’s
a nice parfum for dogs that we use,” she said.

“Yeah,” added De De matter-of-factly, ready to make a sale. “It’s a floral bouquet with a soft powder-and-vanilla background,
perfect for females,” though I never did buy it (or want it used again), instead preferring the clean, fresh smell of just
the shampoo.

Betty planted a parting kiss on Katie’s wet nose—“see you next time, sister!”—and off we went.

There wasn’t one person on the street who didn’t turn around or stop us, as Katie was now irresistible.

D
espite the grooming, within a few weeks of Katie’s arrival, my apartment smelled “doggy”—a combination of puppy chow, her
not-so-clean fur, and the accidents in the kitchen. And with Katie’s toys and dog equipment strewn all over the place, it
felt as if my entire existence had been thrown up into the air, in a happy way.

Although I tried, at first, to keep Katie in her crate next to me at night, she refused, and would cry unless I took her out
of it and placed her on the bed.

I kept this a secret from Joe, who totally disapproved of dogs in beds, while I found my puppy’s ability to burrow into the
perfect warm spot quite entertaining.

She’d poke her head under the blanket and travel south, face down, heading toward my feet, finally resting her head on my
toes.

During the night, she’d gradually make her way north again and lean against my side, my own little heating blanket. And by
morning, her head was on my pillow, her long ears tangled around her face.

In her daytime hours, one of Katie’s favorite recreations
was the sock game, the reason for all my mismatched socks. She’d pick one up from the floor and spit out half of it for me.
I’d hold one end, she the other, and what ensued was a vicious tug-of-war. She’d growl and shake her head and pull on that
poor sock until it was in shreds.

Sometimes I let her win, and she’d pounce on it, triumphantly trotting into the other room with it. She’d shake her head back
and forth as if she’d caught some delicious prey. But when I won and pulled it out of her mouth, those eyes never left me
until I threw it across the room again. I bought plenty of socks.

Within a week, I was so consumed with puppy care that my apartment was in complete disarray, so it was definitely time to
have the place cleaned.

So the next “first” on our list was introducing my puppy to Ramon, my longtime housekeeper, who was also one of my best friends
and confidantes, an energetic, incredibly optimistic person who always buoyed my spirits.

Ramon arrived every Tuesday morning and was horrified that first week, when he found Katie loose in the kitchen, energetically
jumping up on the gate to greet him. He was terrified of dogs. Months earlier, when I had just mentioned the possibility of
getting a dog, the ordinarily congenial Ramon turned stony. “I hate them,” he said matter-of-factly, “and if you get one,
I’ll quit.”

But I had defied his warning. I’ll never forget that first Tuesday morning when he looked into Katie’s pen and said, “Forget
it!” He started to pick up his things and leave. I begged Ramon to stay. “I promise that she’s harmless, and I’ll keep her
in the kennel with the door closed. She won’t bother you at all.”

Ramon slowly considered my offer, peering into the cage as
if he were looking at a wild lion. “Okay,” he told me grudgingly, “we’ll try it. But I don’t think so.”

Over the next few months, Katie worked on him, demonstrating how cuddly she could be, lying tenderly in my arms, seductively
passive, or turning over on her back. The more Ramon resisted her advances, the more she tried to shake hands with him, throwing
her paws in his direction, sometimes both at one time.

Katie knew what she was doing, sensing Ramon’s fear and moving to melt it. It wasn’t long before Katie was out of the cage
and allowed to walk around, following Ramon as he worked. This was amazing progress.

One day, Ramon even ventured to pet Katie, and she licked his hand in return. He pulled it away, disgusted. “Yuck!” I could
tell she was growing on him—but it was going to take a little longer for him to adjust.

In the meantime, I had to make sure that Katie was well on her way to being housebroken. Although as a puppy she was endlessly
curious, she was also eminently trainable—at the perfect age to master city-style living.

For starters, she needed to be certain that relieving herself was an
outdoor
activity. To accomplish this, I took her out every two or three hours. I was determined to train Katie as quickly as possible
because I had wall-to-wall carpeting throughout my apartment, the only washable floor space being in the kitchen.

In the morning, I’d scoop her up right out of the kennel and off we went—so she never had a chance for an accident. But by
the afternoon, of course, it was inevitable that accidents would appear in the kitchen, most of them on the newspaper spread
all around her kennel.

So for now, that room remained Katie headquarters. “I’m
not going
in
there,” Ramon warned me. “And she’s not coming
out
here.”

Indeed, the baby gate barricaded Katie in, though it wasn’t foolproof and didn’t always stop her. As Tom had warned me, she’d
been the first of the litter to escape the kennel.

So during her first week, I found the gate on the floor twice, with Katie lounging in the living room under a coffee table,
casually chewing her bone. Another time, I found her sound asleep on a velvet pillow.

I then bought a stronger, higher gate. Most of the time, though, Katie had no reason to attempt a getaway, as I was usually
home, in and out of the kitchen, and had her up and outside all the time.

And as Joe had predicted, Katie never had an accident
inside
her kennel, except once when she was sick. On that day, as I cleaned out her little house, she stood hovering close by, poking
her nose around my arm, possessive of her territory and curious to supervise my invasion of it. And just as soon as I had
finished fluffing up the freshly laundered blankets and pillows, she jumped back in, snugly content.

Beyond housebreaking, the next step was teaching Katie basic commands. As I knew nothing about obedience training, I hired
a young man named Jonathan Klopp, an accountant-turned-trainer in horn-rimmed glasses who promised he’d whip Katie into shape
within five easy lessons at fifty dollars an hour.

“Now the first thing we’re going to do,” he explained, “is teach Katie to
sit
whenever you want her to.” As a reward and prompt, he recommended using Velveeta cheese “because puppies love it and it works
perfectly.”

He demonstrated this by putting his left hand out and gently pressing down on Katie’s back, as he emphatically said,
“Sit,” which she immediately did, hungrily eyeing that piece of cheese in his right hand. Jonathan popped the orange treat
into her mouth every time she complied.

“Goooood girl!” he exclaimed, reinforcing good behavior with his tone of voice and the cheese, and then showing me how to
do it too. Within a few minutes, Katie had “Sit” down cold—an expert.

A few days into practicing this, touching her back wasn’t even necessary. With simply a finger motion in the down direction
together with the verbal prompt, Katie sat like a little soldier, waiting for a treat, her brown eyes intently focused on
the cheese. Gradually, we weaned her away from the cheese and she sat anyway.

Next, we worked on “Stay” and “Come,” using the long red-carpeted hallway outside my door—a perfect “backyard” for fetching,
running, and playing. Soon enough, with Jonathan holding a mouthwatering piece of that gooey cheese, Katie was racing down
that corridor at the command “Come,” triumphantly retrieving the treat. “Goooood girl!!” we’d both shout.

Katie became especially adept at “Shake,” one of her favorite commands. At first, she’d hesitantly lift up her right paw,
then the left, but once she got the hang of it, all you had to do was tempt her with a cookie and she furiously offered both
paws—back and forth, like playing patty cake—until she got what she wanted.

Finally, and most difficult, was differentiating “Sit” from “Down,” in which case Katie had to drop to the ground into a crouch,
keeping her head flat on the carpet and not moving until told to. But after just a few weeks of practicing and keeping the
refrigerator stocked with cheese, Katie had mastered it all—that is, until we went downstairs for a real-life test-drive.

So confident was I that she would obey me that we tried a walk inside the lobby
without
a leash. When a tenant opened the front door of the building, Katie slipped through it, gone in a flash. She raced outside
like a jackrabbit, escaping at a blindingly fast speed, running across the circular driveway—where a car could have killed
her. Then, she took off through the adjoining garden.

Naively, I hadn’t expected such a surge of energy from a puppy so small.

“Katie, Katie! Come!” I furiously hollered. She totally ignored me. No cheese—no results. I chased her down quickly, scooped
her up and took her home, expressing my displeasure at her disobedience.

But she had a mischievous grin on her face, her tongue hanging out in pleasure as her little body heaved with the exertion.
She was most pleased with herself.

Like any toddler, Katie was going through “the terrible twos.” If she didn’t have her favorite bone to chew, my sneaker sufficed.
Shoelaces were fun too. And a black knit hat made a nice lunch. Her big brown eyes missed nothing.

One day, after grocery shopping, I left a sealed box of snack bars unattended for a few minutes as I went down to the laundry
room. When I returned, all the green plastic wrappers had been neatly removed from each half-eaten bar, and Katie’s face was
covered in granola.

“What did I tell you about ya manners?” I’d exclaim, a common refrain over the next years. She’d look up at me, that pert
black nose pointed in the air, tail down, then trot away, disenchanted with my tone.

One night, my decorator friend, Michael, came over for a spaghetti dinner. As he was sitting in the living room balancing
a plate on his lap, Katie eyed it with great interest. When
Michael, who always had a great sense of propriety, looked away for a moment, Katie pounced, diving into his pasta headfirst.

“No, no, no!” I shouted, pulling her by her red collar away from the plate. She was licking her chops with pleasure at the
caper, her entire face stained with tomato sauce.

Michael looked horrified. “She’s completely out of control,” he snapped.

I poured her briskly back into the kennel, though I admit to remarking that she did look kind of cute in her stained state.
(We scrapped the spaghetti and went out to dinner—my treat.)

“I told you this would happen if you handed her the moon and the stars,” clipped Joe the following day, satisfied that Dinah
would never err on this side of danger.

“You’ve got to discipline that dog of yours,” he warned, though I had no intention of ever hitting Katie or frightening her,
instead preferring the slow, steady, firm approach. So I used lots of no’s and Velveeta cheese, while secretly enjoying Katie’s
puppy pranks.

Once Katie was housebroken, she had full access to her extended “crib.” This meant my entire apartment, including the newly
renovated living room, a cozy space with red-striped wallpaper, ivory carpeting with a diagonal pattern of pale green vines
on it—and lots of dog-comfy chintz.

With so many pieces of upholstered furniture to choose from, Katie discovered lots of soft places to snooze, observe, and
hide.

Her favorite was a green tufted chair, and she’d often fall asleep on it, her head hanging down off it as she softly snored.
Off-limits was the white silk couch, and she knew it, though it didn’t stop her from trying.

“Katie, NO!” I’d exclaim, as I found her dozing on it more than once. And, with a knowing guilty expression, she’d leap quickly
off it, her tail down.