My Eye Talian Greyhound

Before I sold my house in western Massachusetts and moved to Wisconsin to begin full-time blended family life, M and I had a commuter marriage, with me doing the commuting between states. His life was in one state. I straddled two.

We figured we didn’t have enough challenges to keep marriage fresh and exciting. So one of the first things we did when we got married was to move my four animals to his house (two dogs by car, two cats by plane). The plan was he’d hold down the fort in Wisconsin while I was in Massachusetts with my kids. For those doing the math, that’s one man, four kids, four cats, and at least two dogs, sometimes four, depending on whether or not it was the ex-wife’s week.

M didn’t mind the company of my Fanny.

Apologies to my UK friends. I am talking about a dog. Although to be fair, he didn’t seem to mind the company of my fanny either.

Dog Fanny was an incredibly gentle, loving collie mix. She’d been found injured on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library on Fourth of July weekend in 2009 or 2010. She had third-degree burns and deep lacerations on her back — one almost clear down to her spine that gave her a Frankendog vibe as it healed. She was caked in black soot, and the pads of all four of her paws were mostly burned off. This poor girl had been through it. No collar, no chip.

There had been a warehouse fire in Brooklyn just a few days earlier, and the rescue wondered if she might have been inside it when a section collapsed. It looked like she had crawled through glass and flames. When he saw the extent of her injuries, Brooklyn CACC vet was going to euthanize her. But as he examined her, she didn’t show any aggression, despite the awful pain she had to be in. She just kept kissing everyone, grateful for the attention and touch.

The vet told the rescue, You have to find a family for this girl. My friend emailed me her intake photo: a hunched, scared, fluffy black dog with the saddest eyes I had ever seen.

I wrote back immediately: Just tell me when and where. Waiting for me at a Friendly’s parking lot in Vermont a week later was the shiny, copper-penny-colored dog they’d found under the soot. Dear Fanny Cranberry would live out the rest of her life with us, never giving anyone a lick of trouble.

And then, there was Bella.

She was — and is — my spicy Italian greyhound, who lived up to the official AKC ranking of the breed as dead last when it came to housebreaking. No matter what I tried, no matter how many times she went outside, Bella peed on the floor. Even if she had just peed outside, she’d immediately find a spot indoors and go again.

At a certain point in her youth, tired of swearing, I gave in and bought pee pads to try to save the floors. Often, Bella would pee next to the pee pads, while staring deep into my eyes. But sometimes she hit the target and even Fanny and the cats looked impressed.

I knew Bella, despite her petite size, was going to be a tough sell for M. She was small in stature, but her presence was mighty. The only part of her AKC breed description she cared to emulate was the bit about the housebreaking being a lost cause. Italian greyhounds are supposed to be clingy, cuddly, and quiet. Bella was aloof, insisted on personal space, and guarded the house more fiercely than any of my prior dogs, most of whom were large German shepherd mixes. If you made the mistake of sitting too close to her on the couch, or slipping a wayward toe toward the blanket she was hiding under, she would go into a Tasmanian devil fit, making terrifying noises I can only describe to you as audio B-roll for The Exorcist, or a wild animal with a kazoo.

When M first visited me in MA, I boarded Bella, then four years old, for a few nights at our local kennel. I really liked him. Things were new and exciting. I wanted to keep the whole pee-pad-Exorcist Bella situation from ruining the vibes.

If it worked out between us, I figured, they’d eventually meet. And then he’d quickly learn why pee pads were invented. I had some hope that it would all work out and he would grow to appreciate her unique appeal. Bella was pretty cute, despite her terrible potty habits. I sent him a photo of her taken by my friend Amanda Jones, an amazing pet photographer. In it, Bella is about six months old, a wee beige Bambi, wearing a pink knit sweater vest that’s unraveling at one seam.

This is how I know I love you, he wrote me. I’m taking in a dog who wears pink sweaters.

Look at it this way, I told him. When I make a commitment, I make a commitment. She’s not the easiest but I am in it for life.

I maintain that Bella is a walking peeing pooping wheezing symbol of my loyalty. You want a good wife? Find one who sticks by her animals, no matter what, no matter how ridiculous, inconvenient, or expensive they may be.

If you are familiar with Bella’s origin story, feel free to skip to the next section. For those unfamiliar with Bella’s origin story: You must know that I did not go looking for a tiny dog. I like big dogs and I cannot lie.

I was in the wrong place at the right time: the Albany Mall on Christmas Eve 2012, passing time before I picked up a bad boyfriend from the airport. Bella was in puppy jail at the mall’s crummy pet store, the kind all good people know to hate in 2026.

I knew better than to go inside the pet store. I was headed for Williams-Sonoma to see how many kinds of forks fancy people were buying these days. But then I spotted her: A baby Italian greyhound whose cocktail straw of a leg had pierced the suspended mesh flooring of her wall-jail kennel. Her front leg had gone clear through and the mesh was up to her doggy armpit. She was thrashing around, frantic to pull it free.

I knew this puppy was going to snap her leg. I went to tell the clerk that you can’t have a big open grate under a baby Italian greyhound with toothpicks for legs. So the clerk handed the puppy to me to hold while she fussed with the kennel.

I didn’t mind snuggling a puppy smaller than my all-time favorite guinea pig (Henrietta Brunhilda, RIP). I had time to kill before bad boyfriend arrived at the airport.

That’s when an older white lady with big hair wearing a camel coat entered the store, screaming WHERE’S THE EYE TALIAN GREYHOUND? I CAWLED. I CAWLED AND I RESERVED THE EYE ITALIAN GREYHOUND.

I had the wee girl tucked under my chin and was minding my own business in a little Get to Know Your New Puppy! corner. I had no intention of leaving with a puppy that evening.

But Eye Talian Greyhound Lady didn’t see the puppy in wall jail. She proceeded to lose her damn mind.

The clerk that had handed the puppy to me told Eye Talian Greyhound lady, I’m sorry, we don’t reserve puppies. And right now she’s with that lady. She pointed at me like the whole thing was out of her hands, which I suppose it was.

Eye Talian Greyhound Lady looked enraged and somewhat disgusted, as if she’d just caught her husband with two strippers and a one-eyed donkey.

THAT’S MY DOG! Then Eye Talian Greyhound Lady shoved the clerk, as if this were a perfectly normal way of punctuating sentences. I CAWLED!

At this point a crowd was forming. I was growing uncomfortable. I didn’t love the idea of this fragile creature going home with somebody with anger issues, but I was broke and depressed and wasn’t sure how I was going to pay for oil to heat the house, let alone distemper and rabies boosters for an American Girl-scale greyhound.

So I was getting ready to relinquish the puppy when two sullen teenage boys entered the scene.

Yo, is that it, Ma? Eye Talian Greyhound Lady had spawned sons.

They fuckin gave her to that fuckin bitch even though I CAWLED AND I RESERVED IT I’M CAWLIN THE POLICE.

The sons took a good look at the puppy on my shoulder. The taller one said It’s so fucking dumb for dogs to be that small. The shorter one said Yeah we can kick her around like a hacky sack.

Welp.

At that point everyone was very invested. The customers, the clerks, and even a few people who had drifted in from Aunt Annie’s to see what the fuss was about all started lobbying for me to take the nice Eye Talian Greyhound, because this lady was crazy and her sons looked like school shooters and the puppy would have a terrible life if it even survived.

Maybe this was just a performance they put on on Christmas Eve at this pet store: everybody in on it, like Candid Camera, or that What Would You Do? show. Nice way to move the merchandise during the holidays. You wouldn’t believe it if it happened to you, because I still play it over in my head and think, Did that really happen? fourteen years later.

They gave me a military discount because my grandfather was in World War Two but puppy Bella still cost me $3000. I paid by tossing five credit cards — including the one my mother gave me for emergencies only — onto the counter while total strangers cheered me on. Meanwhile, Eye Talian Greyhound Lady called 911, even though she was the one throwing hands.

I did not dare let go of the puppy until I got to the car and locked the doors. I sat her on my lap and blasted the heat as high as it would go. She was so tiny. We regarded each other with great solemnity. I think we were both realizing that, for better or for worse, we were now each other’s lot in life.

When I returned home that night with bad boyfriend (angry) and a purse containing a single pee pad (wet) and a shivering three-pound toy dog (no fur), my girls were thrilled (thrilled!). My mother, a benign soul if there ever was one, did not speak to me for two weeks. I think I still owe her $900.

About a year into our marriage, around 2018, M had another trust freakout. This one was about Bella, who by then had made herself and her urogenital and gastrointestinal systems right at home in the Wisconsin abode. All the stress of refusing to use pee pads for moral reasons, then stepping in the consequences with his work socks, was making him rethink his life choices. He told me I’d “hidden” Bella from him that time he first visited. Looking back, he said, it was another red flag, like the luxury Icelandic yogurt.

Personally, I think carving out sexy time for a new partner free from the scent of an Italian greyhound crapping at the foot of the bed is incredibly thoughtful. In my defense, I wasn’t ever pretending not to own a tiny incontinent sighthound. I’d told him all about her and her myriad of quirks. I just didn’t think he needed to meet my mom, my girls, my cats, and both dogs on the same trip. But that choice still wound up on the big dry-erase board in his brain, in the Deception column. (The luxury yogurt was in the Takes Advantage column, if you’re keeping score at home.)

Fanny and my two kitties, Carlita and Moe, have all gone to the good place in the sky with Messi. But Bella lives on. This is our fifth house together.

Bella has crossed this great land by automobile and she has seen the messes that men can make. There is no pee pad large enough for the messes of men is what she tells me with her filmy blue-gray eyes that used to be taupe. She is almost 14 and partially blind in one of these eyes. She is also completely deaf, or she is doing a very good job of acting deaf for at least three years.

Bella also has mitral valve disease, a 5/6 heart murmur, and the beginnings of congestive heart failure. Her heart is severely enlarged from working too hard, so now it presses on her trachea, which has partially collapsed. Because of this, she hacks and wheezes if she overexerts herself, or blinks too hard.

She has arthritis and hypothyroidism and takes almost as many medications a day as I do, which is really saying something. The trazodone is supposed to help her stay calm despite me ruining her golden years with a stupid mongrel boy, but it works better when she and I give him the trazodone instead.

The other day she sneezed and one of her teeth flew out of her mouth and landed on the coffee table. She’s had several thousand dollars of dental work done and numerous teeth extracted but there always seem to be more teensy gnarled yellow spikes in need of help. Her breath is no bueno because I wasn’t nuts enough to try brushing the teeth of a Tasmanian devil.

She almost died a while back from pancreatitis, another emergency vet visit that cost a chunky-chunk of change (also filed under Takes Advantage). She can’t eat fat but she can’t eat grains and she can’t eat too much protein so it’s all pretty simple. She likes any soft food I give her for a maximum of three days before she hates it and I have to start all over again trying to find one that doesn’t give her diarrhea, which is impossible.

At age 12, at the Stillwater house, she miraculously started going to the back door and barking two or three times to be let out to potty. She just got up one day and was suddenly housebroken. It only took twelve years and a outsized contribution to the landfills of America to get her there.

Then I ruined the housebreaking miracle by bringing a puppy home in March.

My husband stopped speaking to me when my old dog died on December 26. He never really said much to me after that except to tell me I am the worst most complacent emotionally ungenerous and entitled wife ever. And that he was never going to have another dog in the house again because Doesn’t he get a say in anything?

Three days after that decree, he started breaking my brain, or continuing the breakage of my brain, by texting me pictures of dogs needing homes. I want you to be able to have a dog, is what he said. At first I thought he meant he had reconsidered. Then I figured it out.

I sat next to a bottle of Draino and thought about it for two seconds. And then I adopted a puppy instead. I could feel myself slipping and needed a little creature to force me outside, to keep me in the land of the living. I could feel how close I was getting to taking to my bed with Bella and not ever leaving it.

I feel bad about it sometimes. There she was, a senior girl freshly housebroken, and suddenly sharing space with an annoying, hyperactive puppy dying to play with her.

Bella’s response to Ollie hasn’t changed. She shoots me the What fresh hell is this evil eye daily and cloisters herself in her big pen with her pee pads. So twice a week now, I send Ollie to daycare, so Bella and I can have Mommy and Me time. We take slow walks around the neighborhood at old-lady speed or take a ride in the car. Sometimes Bells and I sit out back on the deck. I’ll put her fluffy pink donut bed on the umbrella table and work at my laptop beside her. I wonder what she makes of all the people who have gone missing, the house and the yard and the cats, everything she used to know in Stillwater.

We have a lot in common. Two old girls making the best of things, still each other’s lot in life. I think there was probably a much better human for her out there than me, someone who understood tiny dogs and how they think. There was probably a house in a warm climate where she would have been the biggest animal or the only animal. She would have had her own Instagram and new toys and treats weekly, and she would have been allowed to grow old in peace. Five moves is a lot for a little dog, more than it is for a regular-sized human, I expect.

But I’m in it with this girl. I hope she forgives me for all that’s gone wrong in her life with me. That’s the thing with dogs: They give us grace much better than we know how to give it to each other.