by Tori Ritchie.
When our dog Caesar died, my father went to the pound and got a Pekingese and named him Sun Yat-sen. My father had a thing for imperious names and this one did have a regal bearing, with his flat nose held high and his spiraled tail waving aloft. But his origins were a mystery. No one at the pound knew where he had come from or how old he was. And while Pekes may have been bred for the royal Chinese court, this one ended up as my family’s pet in 1960’s San Francisco.
“We’ll call him Sonny for short,” my father declared, “and we’ll spell it with an O because he doesn’t look like Sunny with a U.” From that point on when people asked us what our dog’s name was, my brothers and sister and I parroted what our father had said. “It’s Sun Yat-sen,” we would say, “but we call him Sonny with an O.”
I was six years old, the youngest in my family, when Sonny showed up. His long yellow fur, silky white paws, and brown Super-Ball eyes made me want to cuddle him like a toy, but Sonny had other plans.
******
My mother bought an emerald-green cushion for Sonny to lie on in the front hall. She placed it at the bottom of the stairs, beside the newel post, where Sonny could keep an eye on the front door. Not that we expected him to scare anyone. Pekes are small and dainty, but they are also said to resemble the Guardian Lion statues that protected the entrances to Chinese palaces so we decided Sonny could protect the entrance to our house.
This led to an immediate problem. We had a big glass front door and Sonny could see who was coming and going through it. People came and went all the time. My parents loved houseguests and we had lots of them staying in our spare rooms: a Japanese student in the basement, a Canadian man on the third floor, and on the floors in between, my Hungarian aunt’s brother, a Buddhist-monk second cousin, and an Englishwoman who played “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” on her guitar. We had a housekeeper who came on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We had plumbers and the Fuller Brush Man who came by and a laundryman who picked up my father’s shirts and our sheets every week and dropped off the crisply starched results the following. That’s how it was done in those days in San Francisco. There were dry cleaners for suits and sweaters, but for linens the laundryman came to the house, like the milkman. Our laundryman was named Donald and he arrived on Mondays around 7pm, opening the door with a key and shouting, “Donald! Donald here!” so we would know it was him.
This had been going on for years without incident until Sonny arrived. But of all the people coming and going through our front door, the one Sonny didn’t like was Donald. He growled when Donald walked in, snapped while Donald placed his blue-paper-and-white-string parcels of clean linens on the hall table, and barked as he followed Donald up the stairs to my parents’ room to pick up the dirty laundry, then barked all the way back down to the front door until Donald walked out and closed it.
Here was the problem: Donald was Chinese. My brothers and sister and I were so embarrassed that our Chinese dog tormented our Chinese laundryman that we didn’t know what to do so we hid in the kitchen when Donald was there. If my parents had been around, they would have grabbed Sonny and dragged him away and apologized to Donald, but my parents were out every night. If we tried to grab Sonny and bring him into the kitchen ourselves, he would snap and try to bite us, and if we got him in there somehow, he would sit at the kitchen door and bark and growl until he heard Donald leave. Then he would be calm and wag his fluffy tail and we would let him out of the kitchen, relieved that the ordeal of Donald and Sonny was over for another week.
We had theories about this. Maybe Sonny had been a guard dog in a previous life and his instinct was to bark at Donald because he looked like someone approaching the Imperial Palace. Maybe Sonny had been kicked by someone else’s laundryman before we got him. Maybe Donald didn’t like Sonny and Sonny could sense this, but that was unlikely because Donald was very friendly and brought us the most delicious cookies in a red tin with gold Chinese characters on it every Christmas. We considered Donald part of our family, as we did our housekeeper and houseguests and everyone else who came and went through our big glass front door, because our parents were home so rarely that these people were as much a part of our life as our parents were.
What we didn’t understand was that this problem had nothing to do with Donald being Chinese, that Sonny was just protecting the sheets and shirts that had our scent on them, that Sonny wasn’t really Chinese; he was a dog. We rarely discussed matters like this in our house and it never occurred to us to ask. Our parents were so busy they didn’t have time to guess at our feelings or, for that matter, to walk the dog. Their solution was to open the front door and let Sonny out to do his business on his own. When my father left for his real estate office at 7am, he would let Sonny out. When our housekeeper arrived at 8:30, she would let him back in. On days when she wasn’t coming, Sonny would wait until one of us saw him waiting outside the glass door and let him back in. When we left for school, we let him back out. When we came home, we let him back in. As my mother came and went during the day on her way to show houses (she was in real estate, too), she would let him in and out. It worked fine. Then one day, my father let Sonny out and he didn’t come back until that night.
This didn’t alarm anyone because we never knew what Sonny was up to. Then the same thing happened the next day. This time we decided to stand on the front steps and shake a box of Milk Bones. Whenever Sonny heard the Milk Bones box shaking, he would come running, but it didn’t work. We shook the box again. He didn’t appear. Hmmm, we said, and went back into the house.
Around 6pm, my sister was looking out the living room window when an unfamiliar car slowed down in front of our house. It stopped and the door opened and out jumped Sonny. He went to the sidewalk and turned and watched the car drive away. The man at the wheel waved at Sonny then Sonny turned around and trotted up to our front door and barked to be let in.
This development was discussed as we ate the ground-beef-and-olive casserole our mother had made before leaving for a party that night.
“Who was that man?” my sister said.
“Why was Sonny in his car?” my brother said.
“Why did Sonny wait for him to drive away?” my other brother said.
“Why did the man wave?” I said.
When we told my parents about it, they thought it was a scream. They were unconcerned with who the man was. “Sonny has lots of friends,” they told us.
The next evening, my brothers and sister and I waited at the window and watched as the car pulled up, Sonny got out, the man waved, the car drove away. The evening after, my eldest brother, who was 13, got up the nerve to wait outside and when the car slowed down in front, he spoke to the man through the window. Then Sonny jumped out and the car drove away. The man waved and my brother waved back and he and Sonny came up the steps to the house.
“He’s the golf pro,” my brother told us. “He’s very nice and he has a dachshund named Herman who was in the car. Herman and Sonny are best friends.” That seemed satisfactory and we ate the pot roast my mother had waiting in the oven for us while she and my father went out that night.
The next day when we told our parents this news, they decided to pay the golf pro a visit. He worked in the shop at the golf course behind our house, which was part of the Presidio military base on the northern tip of San Francisco. Our street had a back stairway that led to the Presidio and Sonny must have found the stairs and sniffed his way up to Herman. The golf pro told my parents that Sonny just started showing up one day and he gave him treats and decided he was good company for Herman. Sonny had a dog tag on his collar with our address on it so the golf pro knew where to drop him off at night. My parents thought this was wonderful.
The crazy thing was that the golf course was closed on Mondays and somehow Sonny always knew when it was a Monday. My father would let him out of the house and when our housekeeper arrived, she would find Sonny waiting on the doormat. She would let him in and he would spend the day on his green cushion. Tuesday morning my father would let him out and Sonny would go back to the golf shop for the day.
Sonny made many friends at the golf club, among them the General overseeing the Presidio. Sonny would ride in the golf cart while the General played 18 holes. We never saw this in action, but we saw the official portrait the General commissioned of our dog, sitting on a stone wall overlooking the putting green. Sonny looked happy in the photo, nose in the air, tail coiled, fur blowing back from his black-masked face in the foggy wind. The General had the picture framed and hung it in the clubhouse. Our family got special dispensation to become eating members of the club (none of us played golf), being that we were related to Sonny. Actually, non-golfers could join to eat there, but my father told us it was because of the General’s relationship to Sonny so that’s what we told everyone else.
*****
One day on his way to the club, Sonny got waylaid by the Belmont’s poodle. The Belmonts lived in a house on our street with the shades pulled down. Sometimes when we were playing Sharks & Minnows near their house, we would see Mrs. Belmont come out with her big black poodle. She would pull the poodle close to her on its leash as she passed us. We would say, “Hello Mrs. Belmont,” and she would nod, but she didn’t know our names and we didn’t know the name of her dog. I loved animals and had at least five stuffed ones living on my bed, but the Belmont’s poodle scared me.
My parents were out of town when Sonny and the Belmont’s poodle crossed paths. My mother’s parents were staying with us, which made me nervous because my grandparents didn’t seem to know my name. My grandmother always called me “Dear” and my grandfather always called me “Shorty,” as in, “No, Dear, we don’t have any ice cream to go on those cones,” or “Come here Shorty, and bring me the paper.” They also called my sister and brothers “Dear” and “Shorty.” I guess they didn’t know their names either.
It was a Saturday when my parents were out of town and Sonny was running late for the club since my father wasn’t there to let him out in the morning. Instead, my grandfather put Sonny out after breakfast and not long after that, the doorbell rang and a neighbor named Mrs. Carter was there to tell us that our dog had been attacked by the Belmont’s poodle. She had whacked the poodle with her purse to get him off, she said, but Sonny was lying on the sidewalk bleeding and could we come quick, please, with a blanket or towel or something to wrap him in.
I was standing nearby while Mrs. Carter was saying this and I ran to my grandmother and hid my face in her skirt, like I would hide my face in mother’s skirt when we were at the grocery store and strangers would approach us. My grandmother said, “Oh honestly, Dear, not now,” and went to get a blanket.
My grandfather took the blanket and all of us ran down the stairs to the sidewalk where Sonny was. My grandfather threw the blanket over Sonny and scooped him up and that’s when I saw Sonny’s eye dangling out of his face. His big round brown left eye was hanging by a thread and where it used to be was a hole. There was blood smeared on his forehead but there wasn’t any blood in the socket, just blackness and emptiness. I screamed, “Sonny lost an eye!” and then I start to gag, so strong was the stomachache that swept into me. Mrs. Carter put her arm around me and pulled me into her side and I pressed my face into her skirt, squishing my nose so hard I could barely breathe. I stayed there until I almost passed out, finally letting go to take a gulp of air. My grandfather put Sonny in his car and drove off and my grandmother thanked Mrs. Carter and told us children to go back inside, the excitement was over.
I don’t know what happened between the time Sonny left and the time he came back. I don’t remember talking to my brothers or sister about it or watching TV or doing anything but feeling sick to my stomach. I only remember that the next time I saw Sonny, he had a stitched-up eye and the fur around it had been shaved off. I felt sorry for Sonny, but I couldn’t look at him or pet him or sit by him as he slept on his emerald-green cushion, waiting to feel better, because the stitched-up eye scared me. I felt bad about being scared and even worse about not being nice to Sonny.
*****
After Sonny lost his eye, he became very grouchy. He took over a corner of the dining room rug and would go there, and only there, to chew his Milk Bones. If you happened to be passing by when he was on his corner eating a bone, he would turn up one corner of his mouth, bare his tiny teeth, growl, and eye you with his one eye. If you got too close, he would snap. I would walk wide of Sonny if I needed to pass him. Our cat did too, preferring to go around the other end of the dining table and take the long way to his bowl in the kitchen. But one of my brothers thought it was funny to get up as close as possible to Sonny and put his foot near the Milk Bone and make Sonny snap at it. It became a game, to see if Sonny could see his foot now that he had just one eye, but my brother always pulled away before Sonny could bite. This made Sonny even madder and it made me mad, too. My brother was a teaser and I thought teasing was mean.
I loved the animals in my family and thought they were easier to be with than the people, even more so as my brothers and sister became teenagers and war broke out between them and my parents. The only time there wasn’t a door slamming in our house was when I came home by myself after school and no one was there. If it was a Monday, Sonny would be home and he and I would lay in a sunray on the rug in the living room, soaking up the warmth through a window. I would daydream my favorite fantasy: that I was a grownup, living in the woods with my children where we grew our own food and made our own clothes. We had animals around us, squirrels, chickens, foxes, dogs, cats, rabbits. We were pioneers. We were happy.
On the rug in the sunray, Sonny and I would lie blond head to blond head and I would feel the warmth of his body radiate through the top of mine. Sometimes I would lay my cheek on his little ribcage and listen to his heartbeat. It was very soothing and I felt less anxious when we were together. It would be years before I would understand that children of unavailable parents often find solace in animals, that in many families like mine it was easier to express emotion towards a pet than it was towards a family member, that there is an actual physiological reason for this, an oxytocin exchange between human and animal that makes them both feel contentment and that for some humans this compensates for the lack of oxytocin exchange between a parent and child, or a sister and brother. I only knew that animals calmed me down and Sonny’s job was to do it on Mondays.
*****
Eventually Sonny seemed to have forgotten he ever had two eyes. Life at the golf club went on, except during summers when we went to Lake Tahoe. One year, my mother decided Sonny needed a haircut before we left on our trip. He was, she said, picking up too many burrs on his trips to the golf course and he had a dirty bottom to boot. No one wanted to comb him so my mother took Sonny to the groomer. He came back with a crew cut and a baby-blue hair bow rubber banded to his forehead. Only his head and tail were still furry.
On the first day of July, my mother packed the back of her station wagon with our luggage, tied four bikes on the roof, told three of us to sit in the back seat and one in the front (our father wouldn’t be coming up until the weekend). She placed our pet rat in its cage on top of the luggage then went back into the house and came out with our cat Flopsy under one arm and Sonny under the other. Both of them were handed through an open window to my sister in the backseat. The cat climbed onto the luggage and crouched down to stare at the rat. Sonny stood on my sister’s lap and put his front paws on the armrest and his face out the window as we took off on a 4-hour drive through the thick Central Valley heat with the windows down because cars had no air conditioning in those days. People in the other lanes on the freeway stared when they saw Sonny with his ears blowing back, his blue hair bow, and his one eye.
There was a golf course near where we stayed in Lake Tahoe, but Sonny showed no interest in it. What he did show interest in were the cows in the meadow between our cabin and the beach. In the mornings, we would ride our bikes past the meadow and Sonny would trot along behind us. Usually, we would lose track of him halfway through if he stopped to sniff at the fence where the cows were. We rode on, figuring he’d show up at the beach on his own and he did.
While we were playing Blackjack on our towels in the sand, Sonny would stand at the water’s edge and bark at the waves. They were tiny waves, just bumps lapping against the shore, but each time one hit, Sonny barked.
“Shut up, Sonny!” someone would yell, but he would carry on, yap yap yapping at the waves. To distract him, we would pull him onto our towels and tell him to sit. That lasted two minutes then he’d be back at the water, yapping. It really bugged us and we didn’t know what to do until my mother’s friend Mary, who was our houseguest, lit a cigarette. She was sitting in a low plastic beach chair and the smoke wafted over our card game, which we didn’t mind because we were used to grownups smoking. But the smoke did something to Sonny. He galloped from the water’s edge to Mary’s chair and lunged at her cigarette. He grabbed the burning ash with his mouth, which caused him to back up on the sand and try to spit it out, flipping his pink tongue over and over to get the thing off. We watched, open-mouthed, our tongues practically hanging out. Mary flicked her dead butt at the dog, called him a little shit (which made my mother flinch), and took out another cigarette. As she took her first drag, Sonny ran back to her chair and tried to bite the glowing end, only this time Mary was quick and pulled the cigarette away. Sonny stood on his hind legs in the sand, begging for the cigarette. “Would you take a look at that,” Mary said and waved her cigarette in the air like a conductor’s baton. With every move, Sonny dodged and danced, trying to get at the ash. By now we had lost interest in our Blackjack game and crowded around Mary to watch. She would take a puff and Sonny would sneak up closer, then she’d blow smoke in his little black face and raise the cigarette and make him dance around like a circus bear. Once in a while he outsmarted her and got his mouth on the hot ash then backed up on the sand to spit it out. Between cigarettes, he went back to the water and yapped while we took swims and suntanned and ate bologna sandwiches from waxed paper bags with the tops scrunched down. Sonny was so worn out at the end of the day that he went to sleep under a willow at the edge of the beach. My mother and Mary took off in the station wagon and we got on our bikes to ride home, leaving Sonny behind. He’d find his way back.
I was sitting on the deck of our cabin when something strange came down the dirt road. It was brown and wet-looking, like a blob but with dust on it. As it drew closer, I saw a spot of color on the front: a blue bow.
“Hey!” I screamed. “There’s something on the road and I think it’s Sonny!”
The screen door banged and my mother came out to the porch, a plastic glass of vodka and Fresca in her hand, the ice cubes clacking. “Oh honestly,” she said as the blob drew closer. “That damn dog has rolled in cow dung.”
The blob walked up the path to the cabin and I saw the one eye staring out from fur that was completely slicked with cow poop. Even his tail was slimy. “He must have found a really fresh patty,” I said.
Both of us looked down at Sonny as his looked up at us, wagging his tail so fast that dung was flicking off and hitting our ankles. My mother said he’d have to go in the lake and that she’d take him down in the car. I offered to take him on my bike instead. I reached down and picked him up by one paw and threw him into my bike basket. He stood with his paws on the rim so he could feel the wind on his face as I coasted down the hill gagging the whole time even though the cow poop didn’t smell. At the beach I hopped off the bike, heeled the kickstand down, and grabbed Sonny by a paw. I walked into the water and swung him as high and as far as I could and he rolled a few times in the air and splashed into the lake. I waited for his head to pop up and when it didn’t, I panicked that I had drowned him. Then he bobbed up, snorting for air through his flat nose, and paddled towards shore.
When he reached me, I rubbed my hands over his stubbly crew cut and his head, trying to get him clean. I pulled my fingers along his tail to swish away the cow dung then scratched along his body with my nails. I could feel his little ribs and shoulder muscles; I loved it when people rubbed my back, so I gave him a back rub. He licked his black lips (my brother called them “liver lips”) and wagged his tail and looked at me with the one eye. He showed his crooked pearl teeth and I swear he was smiling. I picked him up and kissed his wet forehead and felt how much I loved this dog despite his strange ways. “Let’s get rid of your dumb bow, Sonny,” I said, and pulled the rubber band holding the blue ribbon off his forehead. It looked just like the rubber bands I used to attach headgear to my teeth.
*****
Back home in San Francisco, there was an oval tray in our dining room with a silver dome on top. My father had won it at a car show and it sat, unused, for years until he had an idea what to do with it. My parents had a lot of dinner parties and my father decided he’d start serving dessert under the dome.
After the dinner plates were cleared, he went into the kitchen and there would be the sound of things scraping and metal clanging and some snarling; my father would shout “I’ll be right with you!” and walk out holding the tray with the dome on top like he was the butler. He’d place it on the table in front of an unsuspecting guest and tell them to lift it up. The guest usually hesitated. “Is this a dirty trick?” they would say, knowing about my father’s eccentric humor. “No, no! It’s a special dessert,” he would say. The guest would lift up the dome and there would be Sonny, lying on the platter like a roasted pig, minus the apple. It never failed to get a laugh, even after a hundred times — or what seemed like a hundred times to me.
*****
During my last year in high school, Sonny and I were the only ones at home. Our cat had developed cancer and had to be put down. Our rat had died of old age and I buried her in a cigar box beneath a tree. My eldest brother was in New Orleans, my sister was in France, my other brother was in Colorado. My parents were in and out.
Sonny was getting old and spending most of his time on his cushion in the hall. His days at the golf club were over. Not only had Herman died but Art, the golf pro, had retired. After that, when Sonny went outside, he would lie on the curb hoping for the golf pro’s car to come. Unfortunately, one day someone ran over Sonny while trying to park. I thought the dog was a goner, but my mother raced him to the pet hospital and a few days later he came home with his stomach shaved and stitched the way his eye socket had been when he lost an eye.
“The doctor said they took his insides out and pumped them up and he’s going to be fine,” she told me. Still, my mother was shaken by the experience and she took Sonny to see the vet regularly from then on. On one of these checkups, the doctor detected a heart murmur and told her we should not expose Sonny to any loud noises or startling events.
A few months after that diagnosis, my parents took a trip to Peru. Sonny and I stayed home alone and while I was busy with friends and school and being in a play, I tried to spend as much time as I could petting Sonny and keeping things quiet. He was good company and I was glad to have him with me in our big empty house.
My parents came home from their trip late one night while I was asleep and early the next morning, my father let Sonny out the front door then went to get a few things for the office. When he left for work, he found Sonny lying on the doormat, his one eye shut, his body slack. When I woke up later, my mother told me Sonny had died. “He must have had a heart attack, he was so startled to see us again,” she said. “Your father took him to the pet hospital. They’ll know what to do with his body.” I cried and felt sick to my stomach, but I went to school anyway. I didn’t want to stay home and look at the empty cushion.
*****
After Sonny had been dead for many years and I was in my late twenties, my family was gathered for dinner one night in our dining room. My parent’s latest Pekingese, Saki, who sometimes wore a plaid tam o’shanter on his head, was sitting by my mother’s foot. My father was next to my mother at the head of the table. Partway through dinner he said, “Kids, I have an announcement to make.” My mother put her hand over his and whispered, “No John, don’t,” but he said it was something that had been eating at him for years and he could no longer hold it in.
My siblings and I put down our forks and looked at each other over the tops of our glasses. I don’t know what they were thinking but I thought, he’s got another family in Salt Lake City. Some years before this, in a spasm of mid-life crises, my father had converted to Mormonism. I had heard about 20th-century polygamous families in Utah and my father had made a pilgrimage to Salt Lake every year since his baptism and I was convinced he had another wife and kids up there. My stomach churned, waiting to hear the inevitable.
Then he said, “You know when Sonny died? The morning after your mother and I came home from Peru?”
“Yeah, he had a heart attack because he was so shocked to see you, ” I said, relieved I didn’t have half-siblings in Utah after all.
There was a pause. “Well, he didn’t die of a heart attack,” my father said. “I ran him over. In my Cadillac.”
“You what?”
“I ran right over him. I let him out the door that morning and when I backed my car out of the driveway, I felt a bump” — at this, my father rose up slightly in his chair then sat back down with a thump to mimic the rise and fall of his car. “I stopped and got out and there was Sonny, squashed flat.”
There was a pause while we let this news sink in. Then I asked, “But you took him to the pet hospital to have him cremated, right?”
Another pause.
“Well, no,” my father said. “I put him in a Cal-Mart bag and threw him in the incinerator at my office building.”
Cal-Mart was the grocery store where my mother shopped. The ingredients for the dinners we had eaten as kids, the ground beef casseroles, the pot roast with Lipton’s Onion soup, had come from Cal-Mart. The food we were eating right now was from Cal-Mart. There was a drawer full of Cal-Mart grocery bags in our kitchen that we used to line the garbage can. I didn’t want to picture Sonny in one, especially not squashed flat.
Instead, I pictured Sonny flying into Lake Tahoe, his little body spiraling in the air, his head and heart-shaped ears rising up above the water as he snorted his way back to shore, the crooked smile on his face when I rubbed him down. I wondered if he hadn’t seen my father’s car coming down the driveway because of not having two eyes. I looked down at Saki, the two-eyed Pekingese sitting at my mother’s foot. He was much sweeter than Sonny, although not half as smart. Saki would always go on the silver tray without a struggle, unlike Sonny who would kick his stubby legs and snap and growl and refuse to bow his head every time my father tried to lower the silver dome over him.
