The Family Man — By Peter Sipe

artwork by Ciara Duffy

I have, on the bathroom wall, a photograph of my daughters screaming. They are two months old - only weeks home from the hospital - and are lying on the couch, the tiny pair enclosed by throw pillows. Both are raising their forearms, a bit like that statue of those other twins, Romulus and Remus, nursing at the wolf. There is a canine present in this tableau, too, a West Highland White Terrier, but most people don’t notice him. Only his head is visible, and from the angle it looks like a fluffy pillow.

Their mom had wanted to run some errands, and asked if I was ready to look after the girls solo. (It was, you see, her first expedition without them.) I assured her we’d be fine. And we were, for a few minutes. Then they noted her absence, and quickly their displeasure grew to fury. It is stressful to be on the business end of two furious infants. Before them I had zero experience with babies, and my bag of tricks was meager. However, I remembered what one of the nurses in the NICU told me: if you feel overwhelmed, put them someplace safe, and go into another room for a few minutes. The racket they make sounds bad, she said, but they’ll be ok.

I was walking out of the sunroom when Roosevelt ran in. He’d come from upstairs. He paused and tilted his head up at me, in seeming disbelief. If dogs could talk, I swear he would have asked just where the hell did I think I was going. He jumped up on the couch and began licking their feet.

For a long time, screaming infants was a problem I didn’t think I was going to have. As Project Baby neared its end, with nothing to show for it but years of accumulated disappointment, I fell to despair. So too did my then-wife. When things began looking irreparably grim, I decided it was time for the dog. She’d been wanting one for ages, whereas I was fine without. I’m not a big pet person. But a dog would distract us, I hoped, from impending grief. And so we got a puppy, a Westie.

Predictably, I was smitten. My favorite thing to do was to roll a tennis ball at him, then prize it from his jaw and hold it aloft, saying like Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark, “Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away!” We could do this for hours.

The problem was, Roosevelt didn’t really take to his new mom. He wouldn’t cuddle with her. When she picked him up, he’d squirm out of her arms. His preference for me was obvious, to a degree that would be comic if not for the circumstance. “Listen, you little SOB,” I’d tell him, “the whole reason we got you was to cheer her up.” He did not care, alas, and the household now had two emotionally unavailable males.

The course of events that brought us to the maternity ward is, believe me, another story, but the following summer, there we were. During the delivery it took the twins a minute to make noise, and when at last they did, such was my relief that I remember thinking I’d never be sorry to hear their cries. This sentiment diminished (see above).

Their mom spent a week in the hospital, and I’d go check on Roosevelt. He was not the same dog. He was disquieted. He didn’t want to walk far from the house, and while indoors he was fretful. I sent my brother by to walk him once, and Roosevelt snarlingly refused.

When she came home, he literally jumped for joy. He followed her around the house, waited outside the bathroom, and slept beside - at times atop - her. And when the girls came home, Roosevelt was a devoted big brother. He licked their heads, trotted alongside the stroller (ask me about the time he growled at the Saint Bernard who approached), and slept on the rug between their cribs. He still had time for me, but I’d descended the hierarchy, never again to climb.

I have a more recent photograph, taken last month. In this one, my daughters are bigger than Roosevelt, and it is they who are tending to him, feeding him from a bagful of gourmet treats. He has the contented expression of one being spoiled again. After taking the photo, I grasp his head, hold it to mine, and thank him for being a good boy. The next day, on his final trip to the vet, he is held by his mother, whom he has now long adored.

Peter Sipe's fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and Guernica, and his op-eds in the Boston Herald and USA Today. He teaches 6th graders at a public middle school in Massachusetts.