The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

by Laurie Notaro

  “That’s in a month!” I cried to the operator.

  “A month is not four weeks, ma’am,” the operator scolded me.

  Four weeks. I looked at my old, dusty treadmill, sighed, and agreed.

  I could wait for four weeks for a new treadmill. Four weeks and a brand-new one, with built-in fans and the Stairway to Heaven belt, would be in its place.

  I waited patiently during those weeks. I gained weight and went up a size. Had to buy new pants. Had to buy two pairs of new pants. Had to buy a skirt. And three shirts. Getting fatter. Waiting for the treadmill. Watchin’ lots of TV. Started using safety pins to keep my shirts closed. “How fat do you plan on getting?” the worry in my husband’s eyes said to me. “Have you seen your ass? I looked at it last night and it looked like two bags of gravel hanging from your waist!”

  The days of the calendar finally peeled away to the day of reckoning. The day before, I had started cleaning my office to get the piles of boxes and house overflow off the treadmill where they had accumulated for the past month while my body doubled and dimpled. I cleaned the dust off the treadmill belt, wiped it from the dead, lifeless console.

  I detailed that treadmill to show the technician how good I was to it.

  It took hours. Milky Ways are hard to scrape up, especially after they’ve turned white.

  Then the phone rang. It was Sears. The technician couldn’t make it, so was tomorrow okay? Even though I ground my teeth (which had also gained weight) together, I wanted to appease the technician, to grease the gears, shall we say, and make him or her more disposed to granting me my precious treadmill dream.

  Sure, I said, I can wait one more day.

  Then the hallowed day arrived. It was yesterday. The technician was supposed to arrive between 1 and 5 P.M.

  It was 1:30.

  2:30.

  3:30.

  4:00.

  4:15.

  4:37.

  The phone rang.

  “Yep, this is Ted,” he said. “So your treadmill is running slow, the report says.”

  “NO!” I yelped, desperate at the thought that he might not fully comprehend the starkness of the situation. “It’s not slow! It’s just dead. It stopped when I was on it. And there’s been nothing since.”

  Ted was silent.

  “Nothing!” I cried again for emphasis.

  “Anything on the console?” Ted asked. “Does it light up, beep, make any noise?”

  “No,” I replied. “It’s just dead.”

  Ted paused for a minute.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “Do you see where the power cord connects to the treadmill?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Now, next to it, there’s a little switch,” he instructed. “Push it twice.”

  “Okay, hang on,” I said with an exaggerated sigh, agitated that I had to crawl onto the treadmill to push a stupid button that I knew wouldn’t work. The treadmill was dead. There was no bringing it back. I just wanted him to do his job, get to my house, and give me a new one with the snack station.

  I crawled onto the treadmill, found the button, and pushed it. Twice.

  Beep. I heard from above me. Beep.

  “I hear a beep!” Ted said. “That’ll do you. If it happens again, hit that circuit-breaker switch. I’m gonna get going, I’m running late.”

  He hung up before I could respond, before I could even say anything. He was just gone; he never even walked inside my house; I never even had a chance to fart him out. I believed my dream was dashed.

  But the very next day, as I trudged along, a spark of hope renewed my big, fancy plan.

  I smelled smoke. Then I saw smoke, and as if I needed an excuse to jump off the treadmill, I did just that, my hop followed by a jig of happiness. This was not something pushing a little button would fix. This was smoke. That meant a burning something. So I called the lady in India. In four weeks, she said, someone would come to my house and fix it.

  Four weeks later, a new guy named Chris showed up, and by this time, I was wearing my husband’s T-shirts and sweatpants and had even become too fat for my own shoes. He looked at the treadmill, which I had now begun calling the Dreadmill, assessed its damage, nodded when I said, “Do you see it smoking?” and said that he’d need to order the part from Portland because Sears didn’t let him carry parts on his truck anymore.

  “Are you sure you just need a part?” I asked carefully. “Because that, right there, is smoke. Maybe it’s better if we don’t take our chances, you know? Can’t you just total it out, because if my car was on fire, I think State Farm would call that a total.”

  “I think all we need is a new motor,” Chris said cheerfully. “That should fix the problem.” Then he said he’d be back in one week, which was fine. From my waistband, I heard some elastic pop.

  The following Friday, Chris showed up with a new motor, just like he said he would, and put it in, just as he said he would, and then ran the Dreadmill, which within seconds flat began emitting smoke.

  “See, I’m thinking I could cook a hot dog under there,” I pointed out. “Will you total it out now?”

  “Hmmm,” Chris said, pondering his obvious miscalculation and diagnosis. “Oh, no, that’s another part. I thought it was the motor, but I ordered the wrong thing.”

  Now I tried to calm myself, because at this point, I could clearly see that I was not getting the snack-station Dream Barbie Treadmill, I was going to be stuck with my same of piece-of-shit, breaking-down-every-year Dreadmill, and not only was I stuck with it, but in the last two and a half months it hadn’t worked at all and the immediate future wasn’t appearing too bright, either.

  And I was still paying for the extended warranty.

  So I gathered myself together and asked if he had a part on the truck.

  He mentioned that he used to carry those parts, but gave me the same line about getting them from Portland, and it would be another week before it arrived.

  Now, to be very, very truthful, I tried so hard to keep myself together, I really, really did, but I felt my eyes get all hot and watery, and so I looked straight at him for a couple of seconds and it was evident to me that I was on the verge of having a full-on emotional meltdown, complete with tears, blubbering, and possible drool.

  So I just said to him, “I have to ask you to leave. You have to go, because I am going to start crying and I don’t want you to see me cry.”

  And he got really flustered and didn’t know what to do. I think the only thing that could have made him more nervous is if I had uttered the word “hostage.” He just kept apologizing over and over again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was that part, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be back as soon as I can, maybe next Friday,” which was, indeed, in exactly a week.

  And that, as it turns out, was the pin in my grenade. That was all it took. I looked at him again, and this time, I looked hard right at him, and said almost quietly, “Do you see how fat I am? Do you see how FAT I AM? I have ONE pair of pants that fits me and this treadmill has now been broken for almost three months. I have four weeks to lose thirty pounds so I can fit into something to go on this book tour. I had three months before; now I have FOUR WEEKS!” Then my voice cracked. “People are going to see me fat! Would you like it if people saw you fat?”

  And then, as Chris was scurrying to his van, his fingers clutched tight around his toolbox, doubtful to ever return, I realized that indeed, there might have been one thing that was worse than farting out a symphony within earshot of an unsuspecting treadmill repairperson.

  A Kung Fu Person, a Tollbooth, and a Swinging Bridge in Less Than Twenty-four Hours

  “You didn’t say we had to stay,” my husband said out of the corner of his mouth as we stood in the entrance to the doggie day-care center. “I thought you said we were dropping her off. I would have never come if I knew you were dragging me to a little dog’s birthday party.”

  “I didn’t know, either,” I said from behind my teeth, which were sho
wn in a wide, big, fake smile. “I thought we just dropped her off and picked her up. Like kids.”

  “We had to bring a present, like kids,” my husband added.

  “Maybe we can tie our kid to something, slip away, then come back in an hour,” I suggested, still smiling broadly.

  “If you make me go to a dog’s birthday party, I will never forgive you, and after you die, I will marry the first blonde I meet in an act of retaliatory revenge,” he cautioned.

  “Big deal,” I shot back. “I was planning on haunting the shit out of you, anyway. A blonde sleeping in my bed and drinking out of my Bigfoot mug will make it all that more rich and rewarding when I hover over her at night and freeze her with supernatural terror.”

  “Well, look who’s here!” Mandie, the proprietor of the day-care center, said when she saw the three of us huddled. “You’re just in time for Lola Chanel’s birthday party!”

  All right, go ahead and say it. Just say it. I’m an asshole for taking my dog to a birthday party, and I know it. I’d be the first one to agree. But when we brought our new puppy home, I knew that I wanted to do things different with her than we did with Bella. As a puppy, Bella didn’t encounter too many other dogs because we were terrified to take her on a walk after our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Crowley, described the horror of having an unrestrained dog charge at her and Pinky, her ten-pound poodle concoction, after it decided that Pinky looked like Pup-Peroni and forced the eighty-four-year-old woman to try to fight the predator off with her metal cane, to no avail. And as a result, when we moved into our apartment in Oregon, our silly little blind, unsocialized dog was terrified of every other dog in the building and occasionally challenged them to bring it on, believing with inappropriate fervor that they were trespassing and that what she only could kind of see couldn’t hurt her.

  Therefore, our new little puppy, who after three days was still unnamed, went for walks twice a day in our nice, new neighborhood, where mean dogs didn’t eat little poodle-dos on a Tuesday afternoon while being beaten by a handicapped woman with a piece of medical equipment, where I wouldn’t be afraid that the maleficent corgi leader of the dog gang wouldn’t try to jump my dog into his “club,” and we didn’t have to run past the house where four puppies had died in as many years from parvo, although the owners believed the dogs all expired from licking antifreeze rather than from not getting their shots.

  But she needed a name, and after my husband shot down my suggestion of Fanny, inspired by the way the puppy exuberantly shook her butt when she wagged her tail, I was fresh out of ideas.

  One thing I did know, however, was that I wanted to name her something that I was sure every other dog wouldn’t have engraved on a tag around its neck in a year. When we brought Bella home, she was the only Bella we knew of, but by the time she died, every dog I ran into was named Bella. Now, it’s not like I invented the name, but it sorta sucks when you think you’ve found something pretty, nice, and uncommon, then the next thing you know, it’s in the top ten, right under Buddy, and you can’t say your dog’s name in the waiting room at the vet’s without six others answering you. Ask any mother of an Ashley what she would do if given the chance again in 1989, and you get the picture. The same thing happened with Chelsea, our mildly retarded black lab, so eventually I just started calling her Chigger to see if anyone wanted to steal that name, too. Not a taker.

  So when it came to this puppy, I wanted to make sure she was the only on the block. We went through all of our typical names, but they sounded either too contrived or too pompous. Daisy. Ruby. Aria. Molly. Nothing seemed to fit, not to mention that we weren’t even agreeing on the names that didn’t work.

  “You know, I really don’t like Walt Whitman for a girl,” I mentioned kindly. “What about Janis?”

  “Please,” my husband jeered. “Why don’t we just name her Obligatory Dead Rock Star and get her hooked on Beggin’ Strips before she even loses her puppy teeth? What about Edna?”

  “Dear Mr. Poetry Graduate Student, every Edna but the vixen St. Vincent Millay is a hundred pounds overweight and wears nothing but a housedress, socks, and slippers,” I ridiculed. “Here’s a good one! What about Zelda?”

  “Well, that’s quite a namesake,” he scoffed. “Do you want a manic-depressive dog who goes crazy and dies in a fire? Do you? What about—”

  “Once and for all, we are not naming the dog Emily Dickinson, who lived in self-imposed exile for most of her life by not coming out of her room,” I insisted. “Or Gertrude Stein, who was chunky and had a bad haircut, or Anne Sexton, who committed suicide wearing a fur coat and holding a tumbler of vodka.”

  “All right then, I want to name our dog Christiane,” he relented. “Amanpour. Christiane Amanpour. Or Sylvia Poggioli.”

  “You and your foreign-correspondent fetish!” I shot back. “Let’s bring it back to America, okay? Anderson Cooper!”

  “Kate Winslet,” he replied.

  “I’d rather eat the dog than name her after your fantasy significant other!” I volleyed. “What about George Clooney?”

  “We are not naming our new puppy George Clooney!” he cried. “This is madness. We need to think of a good name and think of one fast. For the past three days we’ve been calling her Dog Not Bella, and that can’t continue. So put on your thinking cap, and let’s make a pact that we won’t vocalize it until it’s something good that can work, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  We were quiet for the rest of the night. Every now and then, one of us would lurch forward a tiny bit, open our mouth, think better of it, and sink back into the cushions of the sofa.

  We went to bed after putting Dog Not Bella into her crate that sat alongside of us, closed the tiny wire door, and listened to her whimper.

  “How long do you think she’s going to keep crying like that?” my husband asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This is the first time we’ve tried to raise a dog the right way, otherwise I’d toss an old pair of my panties in there and we’d be asleep by now.”

  “I guess we just have to let her cry,” my husband murmured. “I guess she has to get used to the crate.”

  “I know, but it’s so hard,” I agreed. “She is so adorable, her fluffy cream-colored fur, that speckled little nose, and those huge, huge, HUGE eyes just like Bella’s lined in black like Maybelline.”

  My husband turned toward me and stared.

  “Hmmmmm,” he said with a smile.

  “Hmmmmm,” I said right back.

  “Well,” he finally said. “What do you think?”

  “It’s better than George Clooney, I admit,” I replied. “But all I hear in my head is that Chuck Berry song.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I like that song, but not enough to hear it for the next fifteen years the first time we tell someone her name and they sing it at us.”

  “Thinking that they’re the only one who has ever sung it to us and that it’s so clever,” I added.

  “Do you think Maybelline was Maeby Fünke’s full name on my favorite but ill-fated yet critically acclaimed series Arrested Development?” I wondered aloud for the sake of any reader who was unaware of the show and thus complicit in its premature death.

  “The teenage cousin who pretended to go to high school but lied her way into becoming a movie executive in a single afternoon?” my husband asked. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Maeby,” I said with a final nod, and with that, the little dog with the speckled nose and one blue and one brown eye had a name.

  I decided to invest in a behavioral puppy kit and began studying how to raise the best-socialized and well-adjusted dog I possibly could and at the same time, according to the workbook, “not change the dog’s personality or natural spunk.”

  This required a great deal of participation on my part, and I had to be willing to activate my suspension of disbelief, which is sometimes a challenge to turn off, particularly if I’m watching something with Samuel Jackson in it (seriously, the ma
n might really want take a good look at the coiffure requirements of a role before he signs on for his next project, because with every successive movie his wigs get nastier and nastier. I don’t see how it can get any worse unless Jackson pops up in his next movie wearing a fright wig or gels all of his hair into one big horn).

  For example, as instructed by one of our assignments in the How to Not Ruin Your Dog and Avoid Lawsuits, Too, Handbook, I assumed the role of a toddler and rolled around on the ground babbling nonsense and poking at Maeby, gently tugging at her ears, tail, and coat, simultaneously giving her treats so she wouldn’t one day bite the face off a baby who most likely wasn’t invited to my house in the first place.

  But as I got further into the handbook, things became a little more complicated. If I really wanted to socialize my puppy and prepare her for today’s urban world, the kit told me, I needed to be fully committed to broadening her horizons as big and wide as possible. And to ensure that I would accomplish all of my objectives, the puppy kit included a checklist of potential Objects of Terror that Maeby needed to encounter and get a treat from before she reached her sixteenth week, which would mark the end of the most crucial socialization and imprinting stage of her life. Looking at the list, I was instantly overwhelmed at the sheer number of targets, which included