I walk down Newark avenue and Tig starts pulling at her leash when we are three buildings away from Village Tropical—the small, crowded, pet store on the corner. There is a new place a few buildings away that is a combination Doggie Day Care and trendy dog supply store. It sells hip, urban dog clothes, and designer collars and leashes which are just regular collars and leashes with expensive grosgrain ribbon sewn onto them, but Tig doesn’t care about the new Doggie Day care place for whatever reason, she is only interested in going to Village Tropical. And my first instinct is to say, “She likes going to Village Tropical because the owner’s Chihuahua is always running around and because there is a large gray cat that she both hates and is fascinated by, but I am not really certain why she prefers one over the other.

When I was younger I was equally enamored with small, crowded pet stores and would pull my mother’s arm taut, pleading that she allow us in to look at the animals, that she allow us to look at the puppies. Not that I thought she would buy me a puppy, because I knew she wouldn’t, but looking at them and holding them brought a sweet, transitory pleasure, like having a baby smiling at you. It doesn’t have to be your baby to enjoy watching it laugh and it doesn't need to be your puppy to enjoy having it pounce at your feet, and so I sat in the small gated booth where I pretended I was considering buying it, watching it stand awkwardly on my lap. I smiled, longingly, watching as it tried to balance on my shifting thighs, its tiny needle-like claws fumbling for a grip on my neon orange shorts.

Village Tropical is not as nice as the pet stores of my youth, but it feels the same in that it reminds me more of a dollar store than a boutique. In one window display there are three neon blue signs that say “PETS PETS PETS” and in the front there are two additional signs that say, “PET SUPPLIES” and “PET SHOP,” surrounded by sun-faded posters for Holistic Select Dog Food: Simple, Natural Solutions for Food Allergies and Food Intolerance. A piece of computer paper has been taped to the door with a list of do’s and don’ts typed in Arial Bold. The first line reads: Shirt and Shoes Required!!! The next reads, “No dogs or other animals in the store,” but someone has drawn a small arrow and inserted the word “sick” between “no” and “dogs.” And following that it announces that there is no food or drinks allowed, and, in a somewhat dated reference, “No rollerblades.” In the window is a box labeled “Enclosed Cat Pan!” and a kit that allows you to build a koi pond easily in your backyard.

Tig and I walk in. Or I should specify that most of the time we don’t walk in. Most of the time we walk right past it on the way to the grocery store or the post office, Tig’s feet helplessly scrambling the way the characters in Scooby Doo scramble when they are climbing a set of stairs that mysteriously turns into a ramp—their legs circle frantically in the same place until they realize their efforts are futile and they slide down in a ball of cartoonish dust. But today we walk in because I am looking for a harness for Tig, so we walk in, past the displays of plastic fishtank plants and the bulletin board plastered with kittens and cats needing adoption. We squeeze into the left-most aisle where the harnesses are—where the leashes and collars are hanging in a colorful clump, like a tangled mass of hair. None of the leashes are tangled in the new doggie day care place—each one hangs neatly beside the next—uniform, like linguini emerging from a pasta maker. But at Village Tropical everything is tangled and usually dirty, which is fine because it is a pet store and owning animals does not lend itself to cleanliness. When we first got Tig we came here to get supplies—I found a set of stainless steel bowls in partially collapsed box that was thick with dust, as if someone had taken the lint from their dryer and lain it across the merchandise. I brought it to the counter and said, “Is this the only one you have?” even thought I knew it was, and the extremely overweight woman with permed black hair who is attached to an oxygen tank held up the bowls and said, “Mickey, tell me if we’ve got any more of these.” And a man who was presumably Mickey walked into the pet bowl aisle and re-appeared 30 seconds later shaking his head, saying, “It’s fifteen, but we can give it to you for eleven.”

Everything in Village Tropical is crowded together with little rhyme or reason—the organizational motto of the store appears to be, “Just put it somewhere for now.” There is a display of studded harnesses hung above a poster for something called “Angel Eyes,” which eliminates tear stains for small, light colored dogs. There are wedges made from corrugated cardboard labeled as “Alpine Scratchers,” beside a large jar of peacock feathers, and opposite that there is a rotating display for aquarium backdrops. The backdrops are bright, colorful posters, intended to fool your fish into thinking that it is swimming through the great barrier reef or the bikini atoll—to make it believe that it is not in a sullen glass tank in a living room in Weehawken. It is a wild fish, free and daring, wily escaping predators. It lives in whatever part of the tropics has beaches lined with tiny blue rocks and plastic mermaids, a chest of buried treasure lifting its lid every fifteen seconds to release a stream of bubbles beside a miniature underwater sign that reads, “No Fishing.”

I patiently untangle the dog harnesses and place all but one back on the display rack and as I do I notice, next to them, a tiny leash and harness combo fashioned over a piece of shaped cardboard, labeled, “Rabbit Leash.” I am struck by the design of the rabbit leash because I purchased this exact one when I was a child and either the rabbit leash company has never in its history tampered with its design and packaging, or this leash has been sitting in Village Tropical, unsold, since 1991. Both options, I realize, seem feasible.

My sisters and I weaned our mother onto the idea of having pets. First the fish, which I won at my elementary school fair by throwing a red rubber ball into a floating glass bowl. The ball went in smoothly, without hitting the rim, and the woman running the booth gave me a slip which entitled me to one free goldfish at Pets Place 2. I brought it home to my mother who was fond of sayings such as, “Of course you can have a fish--for dinner tonight.”

“I won a fish,” I told her.
“I bet you did.”
“Can I get one?”
“I don’t know? Can you?”
“May I get a fish?”
“I don’t know,” she said, with predictable hesitation. “I don’t know if you’re old enough for the responsibility.”
“Can I please get one and I’ll take care of it?” I asked, handing her the small white slip of paper.

And miraculously, after a minimal amount of sarcastic banter she said, “I want to make it very clear that I’m not going to feed it and I’m not going to clean its bowl and if you don’t clean out its bowl regularly I’ll throw it into the toilet. But if you think you can keep it clean, you can have a fish.”

And so we got Phinneus, whose bowl with its fake plastic plant sat on top of the refrigerator. And a year later I turned ten. And asked if I could have a rabbit. And she said yes.

There are rabbits in the back of Village Tropical, huddled in cages that are stacked on top of the Guinea Pig cages, placed next to a three story enclosure that sometimes houses ferrets and sometimes houses chinchillas. Tig is always very excited about the rabbits but is never sure what to do with her excitement, which is similar to how I felt at ten years old, picking one out at Pet Palace in the Spring Valley Marketplace. You are excited because it is a living thing and it is cute and small and you are in charge of it, but there is nothing to do with a rabbit besides hold it, having it occasionally urinate down the front of your shirt. And so I got a rabbit and heeding the unwritten rule that pre-adolescent girls must give their rabbits incredibly unimaginative names, I named it Flipsy. And I bought the rabbit leash with the little brass knob that adjusts the length, and learned that you cannot “walk” a rabbit any more than you can walk a goldfish. Fastening the loops around Flipsy’s front and back legs, I would tug ceaselessly while she stood motionless on the lawn, patiently chewing mouthfuls of grass.

“Come!” I would yell, to no avail. Rabbits are much like deaf people and young children in that they do not heed verbal commands. Occasionally I would pull her gently, lugging her across the yard like a fat bag of soup, but it was never the outing I had envisioned.

Flipsy lived in a rabbit cage under the deck for a few months, after which she pushed out the wooden side of the cage and ran away, breaking my heart. And my mother, whose heart had suddenly grown three sizes, felt so bad for me that she allowed me to get two baby flop-eared rabbits, brother and sister, who lived in a new, more durable cage under the deck, and spent their time eating alfalfa and having sex with each other.

“Maybe we should put them in different cages,” I suggested, and my father, after observing their regular bouts of lapine incest, bought a second cage and put it next to the first cage. Two weeks later I walked down after breakfast to check on them and found the female rabbit in a cage strewn with seven baby rabbits. She had pulled out clumps of her fur to build a nest but, my family not knowing she was pregnant, we had failed to put a box or container with a solid bottom into the cage and the babies squirmed horrifically, their feet dangling through the bottom of the wire cage, their bodies writhing as clumps of fur flew like frantic tumbleweeds throughout the enclosure. Their mother, who was herself only a few months old hopped throughout the bedlam. I opened the spring latch on the door and tried to pull her out, but she bit me on the finger and I quickly closed the door, horrified. The babies looked like hybrid creatures—halfway between demons and rats, and one, near the door of the cage, opened its small mouth, screaming silently. I looked at the bright red of his back and his head and realized that he was missing a large patch of dark gray skin. I looked, horrified at his mother. She was eating him.

I ran inside to tell my mother what had happened and her face fell and her mouth became a straight line and she said, “She’s too young. She knows she’s too young to take care of them. I’m sorry, Kelly.” And I said, “What can we do?” and she said, “We can’t do anything,” which was horrible and sad but, in retrospect, true. And I cried, horrified, but the bus was arriving in ten minutes and I had to go to school. I sat, thinking of the rabbits all day and when I got home I ran straight from the bus stop to the rabbit hutch without even going inside to tell my mother I was home. I ran to the hutch and the floor of the cage looked like a battlefield littered with tiny corpses, many with their skin or ears bitten off. I cried into my mother’s arms and my mother, who had been prepared to nag me about unfreezing the rabbits’ waterbottles in winter or to console me when they eventually passed away, was not fully prepared for this.

“Having animals is messy,” she said, as calmly as she could muster. “They’re not people. You can’t expect them to act like people. They’re going to do things you’re not going to understand.” And I swallowed the lump in my throat as my mother hugged me and my father, outside, blanketed by the darkness of the evening, emptied the cage and stoically disposed of the babies.


I take the harness to the counter at Village Tropical and the woman with the oxygen tank says, “14.99” and I pay her. Tig is staring, fascinated, at the large grey cat which is lying, curled up in a box of rawhide bones. The woman goes to put the harness in a bag and I say, “It’s fine, I don’t need it,” and she immediately sits down on the metal folding chair behind the counter and goes back to her romance novel. She has a very tan chest and is wearing a red, scoopneck top with little blue beads embroidered around the neckline, and the beads remind me of the rocks lining the floor of the aquarium beside me. It is filled with tiny neon fish swimming against a backdrop of an elaborate coral reef. The fish are not fooled by the poster of the reef, if they can see it at all, and no one owning a fishtank is fooled by the poster of the reef and maybe it would be better if someone wanting fish kept them somewhere less deceitful, like a bathtub or an empty apple juice bottle. Something that cried out, “I want to own fish, even though I cannot in any way re-create their natural environment.” Above the aquarium is an index card thumbtacked to a shelf that reads, “Do not touch or tap the tanks,” and beside that is a random box of Pig Ear chew treats and beside that is a container of turtle food.

“Having animals is messy,” my mother explained calmly. It is exciting, but it is also messy. Village Tropical is thrilling in all its disorganization. I think of myself pulled by unseen forces toward the cages of puppies in the mall and I think of Tig straining for the Rabbit cages, filled with a desperate canine unknowing. Life, for whatever reason, is excited by life.

I drag Tig out through the doorway, her body straining against the leash, every fiber in her being wanting to stay in the grimy, jumbled petstore with its uneven, damp smell. She glances once more at the gray cat and I glance one more at the woman immersed in her novel, the plastic oxygen tube encircling her neck, a sweaty lock of hair plastered to her wide forehead. Tig whimpers and I sigh. I say, “Tig, come!” and she reluctantly but obediently walks toward me. We close the door behind us and the brown Chihuahua sits in the glass window, looking at us longingly, watching us walk away.