The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

by Laurie Notaro

  And lady, if you’re reading this, you’d better know that we’re not done, you and I. We’re not done. I remember your face, I remember that pinchy, wrinkly cavern of a mouth, I remember your purple and blue Bossy Old Lady–issue rain jacket, and somewhere, somehow, you and I will be in line together again, if I have to go to every food-related festival in the general vicinity to track you down. I will see you in line, somewhere, somehow, and when I do, I will swiftly and stealthfully exact my revenge, even if it calls for bringing my own pooping bird to season all of your food.

  As Jamie and her husband ate their food in a parking garage across the street and I stood next to them, I made a mental note: If we do this again next year, I gotta remember to bring an umbrella and pack a lunch.

  Ready or Not

  I knew right away that she was the one.

  “That one.” I pointed at the computer screen to my husband, who was looking over my shoulder.

  “Hmmmm, I don’t know,” he said cynically, and I knew he wasn’t kidding.

  “That’s her,” I insisted, knowing that I was not going to take no for an answer. “That is my dog!”

  “We’ll see,” he said, like he had any power over the decision. “We’ll talk about it when I come home.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even look at him.

  “Laurie,” he said firmly—and that’s when I know he’s really mad, because he never says my name unless I’ve pissed him off enough that he actually has to spend the energy to remember it—and turned me around by the shoulder. “I’d better not come home and find that dog here. I mean it. This is something that we need to talk about first.”

  “Fine,” I said as I shrugged, then turned back around to look at the photo on the monitor.

  “I mean it,” he said again before he headed out of my office and left the house for school.

  I knew that little dog on the county pound site was my dog. I just knew it.

  I knew it in the same way I knew it when I first saw Bella, five years earlier, a shivering, screeching, wet little puppy clawing at the gate to her cage where she sat all alone, the only one of her litter not yet adopted. She looked like a little red rat, although the animal attendant assured me she was of German shepherd lineage. Honestly, she could have been a jackal with hair poking out of her red-stained teeth and we still would have taken her home. She was all alone and scared to death. You would have had to be soulless to pass that puppy up, with her tiny red velvet mouth and her huge brown eyes outlined in black that looked like Maybelline eyeliner. We knew we had found our girl.

  She couldn’t have behaved better on the drive up to Eugene from Phoenix, especially since we were in the car nine hours a day and she was forced to share space with the cat, who farted, squeaked, and hissed his way the fifteen hundred miles there, despite my best efforts to chew up a tablet of Dramamine for him like a mother bird since all of his teeth were gone and and I wanted to keep him as drugged up as possible.

  But Bella was a dream, and to be honest, I was a little worried. Six months before our move, my brother-in-law had been over at the house, picked up one of her balls, and thrown it into the air in front of her.

  “That dog can’t see,” he said a moment after he caught it.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I pooh-poohed him. “Of course she can see. We play ball every day.”

  “Well, look at her,” he said as he threw the ball up in the air again and caught it, as she sat, looking straight on. Her eyes never moved. She just stared straight ahead.

  “That’s crazy,” I said again. “I swear I play ball with her every day.”

  But he was right. I saw that for myself as I followed him out to the backyard and he threw the ball, and I watched Bella, who waited to hear it bounce and then shot in the right direction. And after several appointments with her vet, then a doggie eye specialist and numerous tests, including one that involved attaching feelers to her eyes and measuring her reaction to lasers, it was determined that Bella had sudden acquired retinal degeneration syndrome and wasn’t entirely blind but had only about 20 percent of her vision left. And that, I was told, wouldn’t last much longer. In just a short period, she would be completely blind.

  I felt like someone was playing a bad joke on us, and I still had trouble believing it. She didn’t bump into furniture; she ran around the backyard; she even chased after balls. Bella could catch a French fry when I tossed it at her. What blind dog does that? I insisted to the vet, hoping to catch him in a web of his own very expensive “let’s hook your dog’s eyeballs up to sensors and spin a disco ball at her” lies.

  Her vision had degenerated over several months, I was told, and as that happened, her other senses, particularly smell, became sharper. She knew the layout of the furniture and the house, and she’d adapted. She could smell a French fry coming at her. She could hear where the ball went.

  “Don’t feel sorry for her and let her just lie around the house all day,” the specialist urged. “She’s not feeling sorry for herself. She’s using what she’s got to get along.”

  And that’s when I decided that if my dog could do that, if she could catch a French fry in the dark, then she could do anything. So I decided to become Bella’s Seeing Eye person, and we went straight home and started working on “up.” Down. Forward. Left. Right. And she learned all of it. I searched out toys that made noise, bought anything with a bell on it, and dabbed them with scented oils to help out a little more.

  Bella did great. I wouldn’t say she was a natural at being blind, but she adapted better than I could have ever hoped for. I took her off commercial dog food and started making her dinner, and I researched supplements and vitamins that were thought to improve vision. Though the specialist said she would be completely blind within weeks, when we got to Oregon six months later, she still retained a substantial amount of her sight.

  We had been in our apartment for about three weeks when one night Bella didn’t eat her dinner, didn’t even seem interested.

  “Come on,” I tried to coax her from where she lay resting on the floor. “There are eggs in it, and green beans, and a bunch of hamburger. Yummy!”

  She looked at me but didn’t move.

  “Maybe she’s bored with it,” I assessed. “I should have made her chicken.”

  “Come on,” my husband said, laughing. “If she won’t eat that, I will!”

  “Maybe she doesn’t feel good,” I said. “Maybe she has a cold or something.”

  “Give her a cookie,” my husband urged. “See if she’ll take a treat.”

  I got a liver treat, her favorite, from the pantry and offered it to her. She moved her head to look at it but didn’t sniff it, then moved her head away.

  And that was our first sign that something was wrong. By the next morning, she wouldn’t even get up. I grabbed our vet’s list of recommended animal hospitals in Eugene—we hadn’t even been there long enough to have a new vet. I called the closest one as soon as they opened the next morning, and they agreed to see her right away.

  “Why isn’t she walking?” Dr. Greer asked when he saw my husband carry her into the office.

  “She can’t get up,” I said, thinking that in a minute it would all be fine. In a minute Dr. Greer would be able to fix her and then I could give her a cookie and we could take her home and laugh about what a lazy little dog she was, making us carry her into the vet!

  He took some blood, then went into the back to analyze it. When he returned, he took a deep breath. “She’s anemic,” he said, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  Thank God, I thought. Barnaby’s anemic. All we have to do is give her some medication and she’ll be fine. She’s just tired. Thank God.

  “Her red blood count is very low,” he said slowly. “It’s at sixteen.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding along. “Okay, so what can we give her for this?”

  Dr. Greer was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said, barely shaking his head. “At twelve, death occurs. I�
��m going to send this blood work up to a lab in Portland. It could be caused by a parasite, cancer, or autoimmune disease.”

  “She wasn’t sick yesterday,” I insisted. “She was fine yesterday. We played ball, we went on a walk. She wasn’t sick yesterday. We were at the beach this weekend; she ran all over the place.”

  The vet said that Bella was also dehydrated and that he wanted to keep her at the office to give her some fluids and for observation until the test results came back that afternoon. To be truthful, I was angry; I knew all too well that our vet in Phoenix had his own lab attached to the practice, and we would have had results in a matter of minutes. There wouldn’t have been any waiting and second-guessing. But no. We had to move to a town so goddamned small that it didn’t even have a lab, couldn’t even tell us what was wrong. This would have never happened in Phoenix. It would have never happened.

  He sent us home and said there was nothing for us to do but wait to hear from him.

  By six that night, we still didn’t have any results, but Dr. Greer suggested that we move Bella to the emergency animal hospital that opened at six-thirty. He had already called over and explained the situation, he told me, and he recommended that Bella receive a blood transfusion. Her red blood cell numbers had dropped again.

  “You’re a good girl,” I said, holding her in the back of the car as my husband navigated the dark, rainy streets of a new town we didn’t know. “You’re a good girl, and we love you so much.”

  Bella raised her head and licked my hand.

  When we pulled into the parking lot, several vet techs and the vet on duty were waiting at the door for us, and they took Bella from my husband and carried her to the back.

  “She’s blind,” I called out after them, something that I realized I didn’t even think about anymore, it was just the way we were.

  I felt a tear slip down my face. And then another, and then another. My husband took my hand. The room became blurry, and the other people in the waiting room looked away.

  At six the next morning, the phone rang loudly, and I froze. I held my breath as my husband answered it, then exhaled when I saw a smile stretch across his face.

  “She’s doing good!” he whispered to me as the emergency vet told him that the transfusion had gone really well. Her red blood cell numbers were back up. She hadn’t eaten but she’d drunk some water. She was alert, they said. Come down and see her.

  And when we got there, Bella stood up and wagged her tail at the sound of my voice. We were petting her through the wire door when the vet came over and opened it for us. We both hugged her.

  “She’s so happy you’re here,” the vet said. “She still needs quite a bit of rest. She’s not out of the woods yet, but things are looking up.”

  I was thrilled. I couldn’t wait to take her home. I handed the techs the container full of Bella’s food that I had brought, hopeful that she might eat something. I could tell that she was still so tired, but at least she was standing up and wagging her tail.

  “Let’s let her rest,” the vet recommended after several minutes. “Come back at about noon and you can visit again.”

  My husband and I were both smiling when we left. I wanted to skip to the car. Bella was going to be okay. She’d be back home in a couple of days. I felt elated. I loved that little dog. She was the only friend I had in this new little town. We only had each other so far.

  We went back home, and made breakfast, delighted that she’d soon be joining us. Barnaby, on the other hand, took advantage of her absence and demanded some one-on-one cat time.

  Minutes before noon, I had just put on my coat and grabbed the keys to the car to head out to the animal hospital when the phone rang again. My husband answered it and listened intently for a moment, then slammed down the receiver.

  “We’ve got to go,” he said, running for the door. “It’s the vet. They’re losing her. We have to get there now.”

  “Go faster,” I said quietly, staring at the car in front of us. “You have to go faster.”

  “It will be okay,” my husband said as if to reassure himself. “We’ll get there in time. We will. We’ll get there in time.”

  I didn’t ask what the vet had said exactly. I didn’t want to know. I wanted simply, purely, to get there in time. That’s all. That’s all either one of us wanted. I didn’t want her to be alone.

  My husband swerved into the parking lot and stopped the car; we flew out of it and ran toward the animal hospital door.

  I saw a vet tech rushing into the waiting room, and as I frantically opened the door and rushed inside, I heard someone yell, “Don’t let them back here!”

  “My dog,” I said, looking at the tech, who looked at me and shook her head.

  “She’s gone,” she told me in a low, quiet voice.

  We went back to our empty, quiet apartment. Her leash was on the counter. Her water bowl was full.

  The vet had euthanized her as soon as they knew we were on our way.

  “I couldn’t let you see that,” she told me. “There was a lot of blood. It was coming from everywhere, you wouldn’t have wanted to see that.”

  The blood didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have mattered. She was just a little dog. And she died alone, scared, shaking, and without us.

  I felt like someone had peeled my skin off. The sting was so constant and raw. When I looked at my husband, I knew he felt the same way.

  Three weeks earlier, we had packed up our house and moved across the country. I took a picture of my husband and Bella in the living room of the house we left. In the picture, her coat is shiny and she is smiling, because I do believe that dogs can smile. She sat in between us for fifteen hundred miles and the three days it took to get to our new town. And for three weeks, we went on walks in our new home, exploring the streets and neighborhoods together. She already had a favorite fir tree on Eleventh Avenue that she liked to visit, and she was starting to get the lay of the land, remembering smells, places, and sounds, getting to know the park.

  A week after Bella died, Dr. Greer called us with some test results he had ordered from the emergency clinic. He told me that she had died of autoimmune hemolytic anemia, and that anything she was allergic to could have triggered it. A new smell, a new food, a new plant. It could have been anything, he added; we’ll never know exactly what it was. The desert is strikingly different from a rain forest; there were countless new things she had encountered over her last three weeks.

  In our empty, quiet apartment, I knew as I put on my walking shoes that if I didn’t go back out to Eleventh Avenue and pass that fir tree and go to the park, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to for a long time. And that if I didn’t, every time I passed one of the streets that we had walked down, I’d resent this new town more and more until I began to hate it.

  I went on that walk every day by myself, as the mornings got colder and the leaves began to turn and drop. I bought an iPod because I couldn’t handle the silence of not saying “left,” “right,” “forward,” and “down,” words that had become so automatic with our walks that I just expected to hear them. I took the same path again and again, morning after morning, until I passed that fir tree and my eyes didn’t burn as bitterly, and I could walk by the park without my throat swelling up quite as tightly.

  And then, one day, I had just left the park and was walking back to the apartment when a girl walking in front of me turned left. I turned left, too, even though I needed to go straight. She walked for two blocks and then turned right, so I walked for two blocks and turned right. I quickened my pace to try and catch up with her. When she began to turn in to a driveway, I started to run. I had done this before. Not to her, not to the same girl, but to other people, but I had never gone this far. I was stalking her, and I could not let her get into the house at the end of that driveway.

  “Excuse me!” I called out to her as I waved my arm. “Excuse me!”

  She turned and looked at me, and I could tell she was confused as I came closer.

/>   “I’m sorry,” I said as I laughed a little and tried to catch my breath. “But I lost…it was sudden, we lost…I…I was wondering…Can I…pet your dog?”

  She looked at me oddly, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should come closer or run away screaming.

  “Please?” I said, smiling a little and still breathing heavily; my voice cracked.

  “Okay,” she said as she nodded and warily came closer, bringing her golden retriever with her.

  I scratched the dog on its ears, and I rubbed its head. “You’re so pretty,” I said to it.

  The dog was very nice and let me pet it some more. When it looked at me, it was smiling.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized to the girl, who had stood there not saying anything. “I don’t mean to be weird. This is so weird. I’m really sorry.”

  “You lost your dog?” she asked me.

  I nodded and smiled firmly with my lips closed.

  “I miss her,” I said finally, and petted the retriever on the head one more time, and then I thanked the girl.

  I turned around and went home, back to the apartment, that quiet, quiet apartment, and when I got there, I already knew that I was never going to walk that way again.

  In February we finally found a little house in a wonderful neighborhood that even had a park without one single tweaker, a Good Morning Tranny grilling her bacon steak at dawn, or a gang of homies dominating the picnic tables. Kids played baseball and soccer at this park, and the swing set actually still had swings. We moved in at the end of March, just in time for spring.

  And puppies.

  I wasted no time scouring Petfinder.com, the local no-kill shelter, and the county pound. I found Rosie, a seven-month-old German shepherd that had just passed her Canine Good Citizen’s test and was trained by a convicted juvenile offender as a part of his rehabilitation.