Chapter One
And Puppy Makes Three
We were young. We were in love. We were rollicking in those sublime early
days of marriage when life seems about as good as life can get. We could
not leave well enough alone. And so on a January evening in 1991, my wife
of fifteen months and I ate a quick dinner together and headed off to
answer a classified ad in the Palm Beach Post.
Why we were doing this, I wasn’t quite sure. A few weeks earlier I had
awoken just after dawn to find the bed beside me empty. I got up and found
Jenny sitting in her bathrobe at the glass table on the screened porch of
our little bungalow, bent over the newspaper with a pen in her hand.
There was nothing unusual about the scene. Not only was the Palm Beach
Post our local paper, it was also the source of half of our household
income. We were a two-newspaper-career couple. Jenny worked as a feature
writer in the Post‘s “Accent” section; I was a news reporter at the
competing paper in the area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, based an hour
south in Fort Lauderdale. We began every morning poring over the
newspapers, seeing how our stories were played and how they stacked up to
the competition. We circled, underlined, and clipped with abandon.
But on this morning, Jenny’s nose was not in the news pages but in the
classified section. When I stepped closer, I saw she was feverishly
circling beneath the heading “Pets – Dogs.”
“Uh,” I said in that new-husband, still-treading-gently voice. “Is there
something I should know?”
She did not answer.
“Jen-Jen?”
“It’s the plant,” she finally said, her voice carrying a slight edge of
desperation.
“The plant?” I asked.
“That dumb plant,” she said. “The one we killed.”
The one we killed? I wasn’t about to press the point, but for the record
it was the plant that I bought and she killed. I had surprised her with it
one night, a lovely large dieffenbachia with emerald-and-cream variegated
leaves. “What’s the occasion?” she’d asked. But there was none. I’d given
it to her for no reason other than to say, “Damn, isn’t married life
great?”
She had adored both the gesture and the plant and thanked me by throwing
her arms around my neck and kissing me on the lips. Then she promptly went
on to kill my gift to her with an assassin’s coldhearted efficiency. Not
that she was trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing to death.
Jenny didn’t exactly have a green thumb. Working on the assumption that
all living things require water, but apparently forgetting that they also
need air, she began flooding the dieffenbachia on a daily basis.
“Be careful not to overwater it,” I had warned.
“Okay,” she had replied, and then dumped on another gallon.
The sicker the plant got, the more she doused it, until finally it just
kind of melted into an oozing heap. I looked at its limp skeleton in the
pot by the window and thought, Man, someone who believes in omens could
have a field day with this one.
Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora
in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds. Kill a plant, buy a
puppy. Well, of course it made perfect sense.
I looked more closely at the newspaper in front of her and saw that one ad
in particular seemed to have caught her fancy. She had drawn three fat red
stars beside it. It read: “Lab puppies, yellow. AKC purebred. All shots.
Parents on premises.”
“So,” I said, “can you run this plant-pet thing by me one more time?”
“You know,” she said, looking up. “I tried so hard and look what happened.
I can’t even keep a stupid houseplant alive. I mean, how hard is that? All
you need to do is water the damn thing.”
Then she got to the real issue: “If I can’t even keep a plantalive, how am
I ever going to keep a baby alive?” She looked like she might start
crying.
The Baby Thing, as I called it, had become a constant in Jenny’s life and
was getting bigger by the day. When we had first met, at a small newspaper
in western Michigan, she was just a few months out of college, and serious
adulthood still seemed a far distant concept. For both of us, it was our
first professional job out of school. We ate a lot of pizza, drank a lot
of beer, and gave exactly zero thought to the possibility of someday being
anything other than young, single, unfettered consumers of pizza and beer.
But years passed. We had barely begun dating when various job
opportunities – and a one-year postgraduate program for me – pulled us
in different directions across the eastern United States. At first we were
one hour’s drive apart. Then we were three hours apart. Then eight, then
twenty-four. By the time we both landed together in South Florida and tied
the knot, she was nearly thirty. Her friends were having babies. Her body
was sending her strange messages. That once seemingly eternal window of
procreative opportunity was slowly lowering.
I leaned over her from behind, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and
kissed the top of her head. “It’s okay,” I said. But I had to admit, she
raised a good question. Neither of us had ever really nurtured a thing in
our lives. Sure, we’d had pets growing up, but they didn’t really count.
We always knew our parents would keep them alive and well. We both knew we
wanted to one day have children, but was either of us really up for the
job? Children were so … so … scary. They were helpless and fragile
and looked like they would break easily if dropped.
(Continues…)
William Morrow
ISBN: 0-06-081708-9
Excerpted from Marley & Me
by John Grogan Excerpted by permission.
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