The Lady with the Dog

There are some scary moments, but the dog ends up fine.

Au Jardin du Luxembourg, Félix Vallotton

This somewhat unsettling event occurred years ago, but it still troubles me.

I once had a roommate who, even though she was a woman, & pretty short even for a woman, worked as a bouncer at the Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, where, despite being a woman, & pretty short even for a woman, she took home a stripper almost every shift & played loud music for them in her room until morning. (She would also leave unwashed protein shake bottles in the sink, which smelled horrific, and she wasn’t even jacked. How much protein can a short woman drink and not even be jacked???)

I rarely saw the women she brought home, because they showed up late at night & didn’t leave till after I was at work. But one sunny midmorning I was relaxing in the common space when a whip-thin Russian blonde¹ passed me to leave, followed by her little unleashed dog. Since I don’t know her name, we’ll call her Anna Sergeyevna.

Anna hadn’t even been out of the door for a minute when I heard a sound that was so unlike anything else I’d ever heard that it aroused no emotion in me but curiosity. Only a few seconds after she stopped did I realize the sound was Anna screaming.

I ran outside. Anna’s little dog had been hit by a car. While she screamed, it was silent, blinking a lot. I tried to judge whether it was dying. After a few seconds it scrambled to its feet, raised its hips in the air & experimented with walking on just its front legs while its back legs dangled. Uncanny. By now, the driver who hit the dog had circled back to us, and kept saying, “He wasn’t on a leash, he wasn’t on a leash.”

At this point it was pretty clear that of everyone there, I was currently the most capable of handling the situation. I started calling nearby vets to see what could be done, and who could do it best and soonest, and most cheaply. My roommate was there somehow—had she come out, or been there the whole time? I’m not sure—and I whispered to her trying to figure out what Anna could afford. I felt shy about asking Anna directly. But my roommate turned out not to know Anna very well. The driver offered to help, frantic with remorse and defensiveness: “I’ll pay half, but he wasn’t on a leash, I’m so sorry, he just ran out.” And I found a vet who could help fast and was willing to be reasonable about payments. The number $600 came up, either what the vet would charge or what the driver would pay, and I got my sister to drive Anna and the dog (and my roommate, who also got in the car when we told her to) to the vet. As Anna got in the car, she was telling me and my sister over and over, “You’re so kind, no one is ever this kind.”

My sister kept me updated. The little dog had a fractured pelvis but it would be fine. And she let me know that Anna was still thanking me for my kindness.

What really bothered me about this, what I keep thinking about, was Anna saying “No one is this kind.” I really hadn’t done much, and what I had done wasn’t hard. It would have been hard for Anna because she had just watched her beloved dog get hit by a car, which I had not, so it was easy for me. I also notice that she didn’t say anything about the special kindness of the man who was giving her hundreds of dollars for something that really was not his fault. Also, when I have a genuine catastrophe I would expect strangers to help. Well, during the catastrophe itself I would expect nothing, because I can hardly think. But when I imagine having a catastrophe, I would expect random strangers to help me at least as much as I helped Anna, and in fact when I have had catastrophes (which I’m not writing about, because they are obviously much harder for me to write about than a stranger’s catastrophes) strangers have helped me out a lot. Until then it hadn’t even occurred to me that this was kind of entitled.

I could have dismissed the “No one is this kind” thing as just a figure of speech were it not for my roommate. This roommate stands out in my life as an inconsiderate person. Almost everyone I have met has been more thoughtful to me than this roommate, and she was less helpful to Anna in this emergency than me, a random stranger who had never met Anna before, much less just spent the night playing loud music for her. But this is who Anna decided to go home with, which does kind of imply she is indeed used to people who aren’t very kind.

Also, Anna was very pretty, and clearly knew how to leverage that. It wasn’t a matter of a lack of pretty privilege, or even clumsiness with it. Anna was just somehow moving through the same city as me, in the same neighborhoods, about my age, probably catching the eyes of the same people, and experiencing less kindness than I was. When I think about that I’m less surprised that she brought her little dog everywhere with her—to hookups, probably to the strip club for work beforehand—without a leash, following her just because it wanted to follow her.

1. with the angelic full cheeks that even very thin Russian women sometimes have