THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 59
to wear underwear at night until they’d
gone four nights in a row without an
accident. This final phase of toilet train-
ing was taking too long.
My parents were worried, and I wanted
a dog, so I offered them a deal: I’d put
an end to my sisters’ nocturnal enuresis
once and for all if we could get a dog.
“You think you’re clever,” my father
said.
“He is,” my mother said.
“He knows that even if he fails we
won’t have the heart to take the dog
away—you won’t have the heart to.”
“He does know,” my mother said.
“He’s smart.”
“I’ll tell you what,” my father told
me. “You get them to quit wetting
themselves, and then you get a dog.
You’ve got one week.”
That night, after bedtime, while my
parents watched television down in the
family room, I sneaked into my sisters’
room. They slept on beds with rails on
the side, and I squatted in the corner
where their heads would have met if it
weren’t for the rails, and said their names,
and said, “We’re getting a dog.”
“When?” they said.
“In just a few days,” I said. “But you
can’t tell Mom and Dad I told you. If
you tell them I told you, then we don’t
get a dog.”
The following morning, their diapers
were wet.
That night, after bedtime, I woke
them again.
“We didn’t get the dog,” Paula said.
“It won’t be for a few more days,” I
said, “but I saw it this afternoon, while
you napped. It’s even better than I
thought. Furrier, smaller. We might not
get it, though. Dad was angry you wet
your diapers. He’s really sick of that. He
told Mom no dog if you wet them again.
Either of you.”
“For how long?” Paula said.
“Forever,” I said. “Or we’ll never get
a dog, and it’ll be your fault.”
Paula started crying.
“It’s O.K., Pauly,” Rachel said. “It’s
easy. We just have to get up when we
have to pee.”
For the next four nights, neither sister
had an accident. We visited a breeder and
bought a Pomeranian. My mother named
her Puffy, which mostly stuck. Some-
times, though, we just called her the Puff.- The Puff was very cute, but the Puff
wouldn’t house-train, which was not
very cute, and got less and less cute.
After three months, we brought in a
specialist. The specialist said that, when
the Puff had an accident, we had to show
the Puff the accident. If the accident was
liquid, we had to bring the Puff ’s car-
rier cage within inches of the accident
and lock the Puff inside the cage for an
hour. If the accident was solid, we had
to put the accident in the cage and lock
the Puff inside for an hour.
He was a behaviorist, the specialist, and
so am I. When I talk about behaviorism,
some people feel attacked. They think
I’m trying to tell them that I think they’re
puppets, when what I’m trying to tell
them is that they think they’re puppets.
Perhaps I’ve gotten off track. It’s hard
to say.
Anyway, the specialist was not a par-
ticularly good behaviorist—he was art-
less in both senses of the word, com-
pletely uncharming, had a weak sense
of narrative—and I, back then, was not
yet a behaviorist, none of us were, we
all believed in our own free will, and the
specialist’s instructions seemed too cruel
to follow, and none of us followed them.
After some weeks, the Puff still
wasn’t house-trained, and so we re-
turned the Puff to the breeder.
I don’t think we got a refund.
I think that’s what all the yelling
was about.Four years later, it was 1987, and, on the
school bus, I told the Puffy anecdoteto Ronald Stanton, who was new at
school and smelled. I told it mostly the
same, but without any mention of the
behaviorist stuff, and instead of saying,
“I don’t think we got a refund. I think
that’s what all the yelling was about,”
I said, “Isn’t that totally hilarious?”
“It’s cute,” Ronald said. “Too cute.
It’s bullshit.”
“You made the end up,” Tommy
Esposito, a kid a grade above me with
an oily nose, said. He sat across the
aisle from us, and he’d eavesdropped.
“Or if you didn’t make up the end,”
Tommy said, “then you made up the
beginning. The whole thing is way
too pat and ironic. It’s like one of
those O. Henry stories, but shittier,
because there isn’t even a moral about
how people should be. And if you
really had a dog and you had to get
rid of it, you would have cried like a
baby, ’cause that’s the kind of person
you are.”
“You fat-ass greaseball,” Ronald said
to Tommy. “Who was even talking to
you, anyway?”
This took me by surprise. I didn’t
understand the re-triangulation. I still
don’t understand it.
“You’re trash,” Tommy said to Ron-
ald. “And you smell.”
“I smell like your sister’s hairy pussy,”
Ronald said.HUM, 1988
T
here was something almost cute
about the way that Giles Crow-
ley, when you shoved him, said, “Hum.”
I was the first kid at school to appre-
ciate this, and I’d shove him at lockers
in the hall between classes, shove him
at a backstop or a post during gym,
and I’d shove him at drinking foun-
tains, occupied and un-.
I never shoved him at girls, because
that was for friends, but I didn’t shove
him into urinals, either—that was for
enemies.One outdoor recess at the start of
eighth grade, I came up from be-
hind him and shoved him at noth-
ing. He stumbled forward three steps,
instead of just one, and said, “Hum-
um-um,” before catching his balance.
I got behind him again and shoved