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unmatched will to survive. In Czar, we see the living history of the Alaskan malamute. Because of bilateral detached retinas, Czar is completely blind; he spends all day, every day, as his own sightless lead dog.”
    Too sappy? A lot of tissues. No airsickness bags. And no one, I thought, had guessed upon seeing him that Czar was blind. How did Czar end up with detached retinas? Another ordinary story: turned loose on a highway, hit by a car. Happens all the time.
     

 
     
    AS THE SHOWCASE ENDED, at least four show people interrogated me about Frosty’s origins and remarked that he looked an awful lot like Sherri Ann Printz’s dogs. He looked like a lot of people’s dogs, I replied. No one wondered aloud about Cubby’s ancestry; no one saw Sherri Ann’s Pawprintz lines in his background.
    Betty and I had been so busy that we’d forgotten to eat. We agreed to meet at the smaller of the hotel’s two restaurants, the Liliu Grill. She was involved in an intense discussion with the owners of one of the rescue dogs. She was going to walk the people to their car. My bladder was as full as my stomach was empty. On my way to the restaurant, I stopped in the public ladies’ room.
    Serving as the principal toilet facility available to female patrons of the big restaurant in the Lagoon and to other women who weren’t staying at the hotel, the ladies’ room was only slightly smaller than the hotel lobby, with dozens of little chairs set at equal intervals along miles of countertop, so you could sit down to reapply your mascara; acres of mirror, so you could get your lipstick on straight and make sure your slip wasn’t showing; a dozen sinks, so you could have a choice of where to wash your hands; and a couch covered in beige vinyl, so you’d have somewhere to faint while waiting your turn at the stalls, of which there were four. And were all four occupied? Hah! Only a man would ask. I took my place at the end of the line of three young women, the first of whom, Crystal, was chatting to the other two, who must have been guests at the bride’s dinner. Crystal wore what looked like a gigantic baby dress, a smocked pink garment decorated with ruffles and lace. Her friends were thin and wore black. All three held drinks.
    ”And,” Crystal was telling her buddies, ”I go, ’Geez, Greg, a puppy! Whyn’t we think of that?’ and Mrs. Lofgren pipes up, ’Now, now, Crystal, dear’—she hates me; she just really hates me—’you’re forgetting that my baby boy Greggie’s allergic to everything, especially you!’ And—”
    ”Crystal, she did not!” shrieked one of the friends. ”She didn’t say ’especially you.’ ” After a pause, the friend added, ”Did she?”
    ”No,” admitted Crystal, ”but that’s what she meant. You should see how she looks at me! She gives me the evil eye. She must spend half her life watching Rosemary’s Baby, for God’s sake. Wait’ll she finds out it’s twins! She’s gonna go totally ballistic. The first thing that’s gonna come out of her mouth is, ’What! You mean, my Gregory did it twice!’ ”
    Crystal and friends burst into screams that abated only when one of the stall doors opened. Handing her glass to one of the friends, Crystal said, ”Hold this for me?”
    The friend took the glass, sniffed it, and said, ”Crystal, really! You know, you aren’t supposed to—” Crystal’s voice came from behind the closed door.
    ”Oh, yeah? Well, no doctor’s telling me I can’t celebrate my own wedding, okay? And don’t you dare tell—” The other two stalls freed up simultaneously. Crystal’s friends abandoned the three drinks on one of the counters and took their turns. I considered upending Crystal’s glass over one of the sinks and substituting tap water. Before I could act, however, she emerged from the stall. I entered. While I was inside, she told her friends about the husky in the lobby and all the other beautiful huskies, except that they weren’t really