Stay!: Keeper's Story by Lois Lowry Page A

be the worst. Never in my entire existence had I had a bath. My mother, when I was a pup, licked me clean often enough, sometimes quite roughly. Once I had played in a mud puddle near our alley home, and although I shook myself ferociously afterward, sending dirty water flying everywhere, my mother had nonetheless cleaned me endlessly, scolding all the while and warning my brothers and sister about the obvious damage a puddle could do to one's appearance.
    Then I had lived for a long time with Jack. Jack and I did not take baths. The river, our only water source, was coated with yellow foam and did not lend itself to missions of personal hygiene. And it was a kind of badge of honor, I think, for Jack and me, that even encrusted with grime as we were, we maintained our dignity at all times.
    Jack had confided once, chuckling, that one damp morning he had found a mushroom growing out of his shoe, at the place where the sole separated from the upper leather and had mildewed.
    I was sorry that our language barrier prevented me from describing the mushroom to the photographer that morning. Fond as he was of Italian sauces on his pastas, I thought perhaps the possibility of homegrown mushrooms might have steered him away from his determined course toward a bath.
    When I heard him filling the bathtub, I tiptoed silently into the bedroom and flattened my body until I was able, though uncomfortably, to slither under the bed.
    "Pal?" I heard him calling. But I stayed silent and hidden.
    "Pal?" He called again, and he was using a kind of falsely sweet tone, a pseudo-friendly voice. I disregarded it.
O silently, stealthily, safe in my lair!
If only—
    As happens so often, I had not completed my couplet because I was searching for the perfect concluding rhyme. I was toying with the word debonair, or perhaps even the wonderful phrase devil-may-care, and how it could apply. But my usual problem—lack of awareness of my tail's whereabouts—betrayed me.
    "Gotcha!" the photographer exclaimed. He grabbed the tip of my tail where it extended from the underside of the bed. From there it was just a brief and painful moment of tugging, and I was caught.

    I submitted grudgingly to the indignity of it. I sat in a half-full bathtub and allowed him to rub dog shampoo into my fur. I gritted my teeth and kept my poise as he poured buckets of rinse water over me. I permitted him to wrap and rub me with a thick towel. Finally I let him aim a hair dryer at me for a few warm and terrifying moments and then scrape at me with a steel comb.
    But I did not let him buckle the leather collar that he had somehow slipped around my neck. When he suggested it, I glittered my eyes and growled. The photographer was gracious in admitting defeat.
    "Actually," he said, "I think it enhances your look, that primitive nakedness. We'll leave it as is. Good idea, Pal."
    As if it were his, the idea. Ha. But he put the collar away in a drawer.

    Before long the calendar was full, and my price, apparently, had risen. I watched as the photographer opened envelopes that contained checks, and heard him chortle with satisfaction as he put them away. He and I were busy every day, driving in the Jeep from location to location. It wasn't difficult work. For the Vogue shoot, I stood on the steps of the stock exchange beside a skinny woman wearing a long, billowing gown. When the photographer gave me the signal, I sneered and the camera clicked.
    For a Calvin Klein ad, I posed, sneering, beside a man wearing nothing but a plaid towel and a bored look.
    On the cover of Gourmet, I sneered at a picnic lunch on a Tuscan hillside. I sneered wearing a milk mustache in several publications and eventually on a billboard as well, and in Vanity Fair I sneered at a group of paparazzi blocking my path to a showing at the Cannes Film Festival.
    I became a world traveler, adroit in airports and taxis, and added some Italian to the French I had understood since infancy.
    I sneered at Paul Newmans