Then I told her about my shambles of a nonexistent love life and asked for her help and intervention in that arena. I asked for fortitude for times I see Patrick at work. I asked especially that she help me to 100 percent get over the ghost of Brant Bitterbrush. Then I closed things out by reading the traditional “Orphic Hymn to Venus.”
Then, in Venus’s honor, I made a batch of kombucha. I used to always have a batch of booch brewing, but I’d fallen off the fermentation wagon a few months ago. Luckily I still had a SCOBY (that’s a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast to you, Everett!) chilling in vinegar. This time I decided to cast a spell over my booch. “I bless and consecrate you, oh creature of water, and cast out from you any malignancy so that you return to your state of purity, refreshing, cleansing, and blessing all who partake of you,” I said. “You turn sugar into healing medicine. Anyone who drinks you will be strong and confident, and will attract good luck and success in love and work.” I covered up the sweet tea and SCOBY with a cloth and stuck it under my sink to do its thing.
I was so cheered up and it was such a lovely day that I loaded Roscoe into the car and drove him down to the Hike and Bike Trail. I knew we’d have just enough time to walk the three-mile loop. Then I could drop Roscoe off at home and head to work. I parked by ZACH Theatre. After I got Roscoe on his leash I spotted a serious hottie doing pull-ups at the pull-up bars right at the trailhead. He was shirtless, with great tattoos and ripped abs, and he smiled at me! It made me feel as if Venus was saying, “Here’s a little treat for you, Roxy, and there’s more where that came from!”
Roscoe and I set out on the trail, both of us walking along jauntily. The sun shone brightly, filtering through the trees to create a magical sun-dappled effect on the gravel. It was boiling hot and I was sweating like a pig, but I wasn’t fighting the heat in my mind like I sometimes do. I just accepted it and that made it easier to handle. We walked a couple of miles and when we made it to the sandy bank of the lake by the water fountain, Roscoe looked at me mournfully and whined to be let off the leash. I felt so guilty for leaving out chokeable pleather panties that I couldn’t deny him his great wish of a swim on a hot day. So I unhooked his leash and he immediately dog paddled out into the middle of the lake!
“Roscoe! Roscoe!” I called, at first playfully, then with increasing anger, then panic. He wasn’t coming back. He managed to keep his head above water, but wasn’t budging. A glance at my watch revealed that I was going to be late for work if I didn’t get Roscoe back to shore quickly. He whined and started to paddle more frantically with his short little legs, as if he’d realized he was out of his depth and was panicking, too. But he still wasn’t really moving toward shore. With a sigh of frustration I took off my shoes, put my phone and wallet in them, and stuck them behind a rock. Then I took off my shirt and swam out into the dirty lake wearing only my shorts and sports bra. I hit a slimy clump of algae and let out a squeak of horror, but pushed forward with a determined breaststroke, all the while keeping my eyes on the prize of my very bad little dachshund.
I had girded myself so that when I hit the next algae patch I didn’t even scream. Roscoe’s pleading eyes seemed to be saying: “Why am I out here? Will you hurry up and help me already?”
When I made it to him he barked as if he’d never been so overjoyed to see anyone. I grabbed his collar and side stroked toward the shore, the dirty lake water sloshing up into my ears. My presence seemed to have given Roscoe renewed energy—he paddled hard and we made slow if unwieldy progress. My feet hit the muddy bank and Roscoe and I stepped onto dry land. The bottom half of my hair was drenched, and disgusting strands of lake algae hung from my arms and shoulders.
Passersby stared at me, most looking alarmed, though a couple of them chuckled. Roscoe shook himself of water and danced gratefully at my feet, then charged at a couple coming toward us with an impossibly wide baby stroller. He jumped up, putting his dirty wet paws on the husband’s leg. “Roscoe!” I yelled, running toward the family. I was still barefoot and dripping and I grimaced at the pain of the gravel on my bare feet. Right before I reached Roscoe I looked up at the man he was jumping on. Our eyes met. BOOM! I was face-to-face with none other than Brant Bitterbrush!—who Roscoe clearly recognized even though he was only a six-week-old puppy when Brant left me. A puppy we had meant to raise together. I wiped some algae from my hair in an attempt to be more presentable, but it was a lost cause. Cold Connie Caldwell stood next to Brant. She was pushing a triple-wide stroller that held three chubby babies. She looked a little tired but also fairly svelte, as if she’d never been stretched out to ungodly proportions in order to birth three little Brant Bitterbrush look-alikes.
“Roxy!” Brant said.
Cold Connie Caldwell stared at me with the contemptuous eyes of a woman who has never found herself running barefoot, half-dressed, and covered in lake algae through a public space. Though she said nothing, one eyebrow shot up in arch disdain.
As Brant bent to pet Roscoe, I looked at the three little identical baby boys in matching sky-blue sailor suits. They looked so much like Brant it made me think if I had birthed them rather than Connie, they would look exactly the same. For the first time in my life, a pang of longing pierced my uterus. And then one of the babies began to wail. Like a line of Brant Bitterbrush dominoes, the second and then the third tot began to cry. Connie bent down to comfort them and also block them from my sight, as if feeling my mere gaze upon her progeny could cause them harm. “Oh, honeys,” she cooed. “Did the Creature from the Black Lagoon scare you?”
In the wailing chaos Brant said, “Roscoe, buddy, so good to see you.” Roscoe was jumping around like an orphan who’s encountered his long-lost father.
“He swam out into the lake,” I stammered.
“I see that,” Brant said. His eyes scanned my soaking wet body, naked except for a sports bra, shorts, and copious amounts of lake algae. His eyes locked on mine. For a split second it felt like the old days. I remembered that night we made love for the very first time on the warm tar roof of the Barton Springs Pool office. I imagine he remembered it, too.
As if they could sense their father’s wander down memory lane to a time before their existence, a time when their mother had been relegated to anal-and-annoying coworker, the babies wailed even louder. One of them spit up an alarming amount of white liquid all over his sailor suit.
“Hang on,” Brant said. He bent down next to Connie and extracted the vomit-covered minion from his seat. Somehow he whipped off the baby’s shirt and began to wipe him down with a wet wipe that had materialized from Goddess knows where. He laughed. “Bruno,” he said. “He holds the family record for projectile barfing. Our own little poltergeist.”
Connie chortled at Brant’s terrible dad joke as she handed him a tiny spare shirt she extracted from a large ziplock bag full of infant clothes. (Where did they have that stashed? This breeder stuff seemed to require such organization!) She pulled the shirt over the baby’s head, then took him from Brant and set him back in the stroller next to the other sprogs, who were now totally calm. “I guess, we’d better—” Brant said, gesturing at the triple-wide stroller.
“Yeah. We better get going,” Cold Connie said with great hauteur, as if I was Gregor Samsa and she had better things to do with her time than spend it chatting with a dung beetle.
It would have been like me to say, “I’m glad you’re enjoying your life of sloppy seconds.” Or even: “WOW! I bet those adorable babies WRECKED your vagina.” But instead of using my usual take-a-swing-with-the-olive-oil-bottle-now-ask-questions-later approach, I paused for a moment. And then in lieu of spitting out something mean on impulse, I ignored Cold Connie Caldwell completely. To Brant I just said, “Yeah. Sure. Of course. I have to go, too.”
I turned and walked back toward my shoes and shirt, hunched over to hold tight to Roscoe’s collar so he couldn’t escape and make another beeline to Brant. As I walked, my mind raced to process all that had just happened. Brant had seemed
so happy as a dad, so natural. And Connie, she’d laughed like crazy at his terrible joke. As annoyed as she was to run into me, as a mother she was clearly in her uptight element. Wet wipes, spare clothes—I bet she kept the whole operation running smoothly.
I realized it then. Brant had wanted so much to be a young dad. And not just a young dad of fur babies, but of real human babies. For my sake, and for the sake of our love, he’d tried to sublimate that wish. I had been too caught up in our romance to see it. I had been impractical. Dare I say it? I’d been selfish. Maybe he had bailed on me with no explanation, but hadn’t he been honest about what he really wanted all along? And hadn’t I basically ignored his wishes and instead worked to convince him he didn’t need fatherhood in order to have a happy life?
As I fastened Roscoe’s leash and sat down on a rock to pick gravel out of my feet and pull on my shoes, Connie and Brant passed me by. Brant gave me a lame wave and a final glance over his shoulder. I watched their retreating backs, the jumbo stroller rolling along smoothly in front of them. To my great surprise, I didn’t feel heartbroken. I just felt wistful. If I was a different person—a person who longed for babies myself—that could have been me. But I’d been true to myself and refused to have kids. And in the end, Brant had been true to himself, too. I was oddly happy for him.
I mean, I’ll always feel that in some way Brant Bitterbrush was my soul mate. And maybe if we’d met when we were fifty and his kids were grown we could have had decades together. But our timing just wasn’t right. Not for this lifetime, anyway. It was time for me to stop thinking about what might have been. What might have been was done for the moment those three babies emerged from Cold Connie Caldwell’s uptight vagina. And in reality, I had to admit it was probably done for long, long before that.
I was ghosted by Brant Bitterbrush, and as a result, Brant Bitterbrush had been haunting me for a whole year. But now I’d seen that Brant Bitterbrush was actually not a ghost at all. He’s a real, living guy who made a choice to follow his dream. He could have stuck around and pressured me to have kids. But instead he moved on. And I promised myself that no matter how much it hurt, I would move on too.
I’ve walked around Town Lake at least fifty times since Brant left me and I’ve never seen him, but today I was finally ready and Venus knew it. Our run-in caused me to die a little bit—of embarrassment and a dash of envy—but like a snake, as I stood by the lakeshore I shed my skin of heartbreak and longing and became fresh and new. Like a phoenix, after burning up in the fires of humiliation, I rose from the ash. (I’m mixing metaphors, but after what happened to me today, who could blame me?)
But I couldn’t think about Brant Bitterbrush or my rebirth anymore, because I had to race home, rinse off the algae, throw on some clothes, and hurry to work. I was an hour late and as I walked into the kitchen Dirty Steve said, “That’s it! You’re fired.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “An hour is really, really late.”
“Are you developing the ability to own up to your mistakes, Poxy Roxy? I never thought I’d see the day. What were you doing, anyway?” he asked. I summed up the Hike and Bike Trail debacle for him. “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” He laughed. “That’s a good one. Okay. One more chance. But only because your ridiculous antics entertain me. Next time the firing is going to be real.”
So the day was strange and full of revelations. I’m still a bit confused regarding Venus—during my invocation this morning I asked her for help with my love life and instead got a very embarrassing run-in with my ex. Perhaps she is more fickle and brutal than I imagined. Or perhaps she’s the wrong planetary deity for me altogether! (But what other planet could I work with? Jupiter would be the obvious choice—except that while Venus loves offerings of flowers and chocolates, Jupiter expects roast meat on his altar, which as a vegan, I can’t in good conscience provide!) I’m choosing to believe Venus was just helping me clear my emotional deck. I know well enough by now that magic always comes with a bit of a surprise. But I have to wonder—if relationships are all about timing, then when will the timing be right for me? The stars have aligned for Brant Bitterbrush—and I can’t help wondering when and if the stars will ever align for me. One thing I know for sure: Roscoe is an incorrigible and very badly behaved wiener dog.
Emotionally spent,
Roxy
P.S. In an unusual flash of insight, I realized the only thing that could get me to stop obsessing about my bizarre day and my longing for love would be doing something nice for someone else. So even though it’s late, I called my dad and asked him if he would fix Captain Tweaker’s teeth as a retirement side project. After I told him the whole story, and really talked up Captain Tweaker’s epic recovery from addiction resulting from the tragic loss of his mother, my dad finally agreed. Before my parents’ trip to Peru, my dad’s going to try to do a couple marathon dental sessions with Captain Tweaker! Yippee! Hurray! I now have the glowing (and slightly unfamiliar) good feeling of having done something selfless for someone else!
September 21, 2012
Dear Everett,
I slept like a log last night and when I woke up this morning and went out onto the patio to drink my coffee, the air felt cool and fresh—a cold front had arrived in the night, and for the first time in five months, the heat of summer has finally broken! If that isn’t a sign of Venus rewarding me for shedding my skin like a snake, I don’t know what is! I’m ready for love, Venus! I’m open to whatever this day may bring!
Renewedly,
Roxy
CHAPTER EIGHT
September 22, 2012
Dear Everett,
I may be officially done with men permanently and forever. Yesterday was the day of FAIL BETTER!’s in-store performance at Waterloo Records. I had vowed not to go, and had to work anyway, but things were slow at the deli and Dirty Steve told me I could leave a little early. I thought it would do no harm to walk across the street and catch the tail end of the performance. While I told myself I had no desire to see Texas again, it felt silly to deny myself a chance to hear one of my favorite new bands play live. I took off my apron, put on a little lipstick and mascara in the bathroom, and headed across the street.
Waterloo Records was packed and I made sure to stand at the very back of the store, where I could watch the band but wouldn’t be spotted by Texas. I only caught their last song: a new original called “Plea Deal” that the lead singer said Texas wrote himself. As soon as the band was done playing, I slipped into a listening booth with a CD to hide out until Texas and the other members of FAIL BETTER! had packed up their gear and exited the premises. I heard a knock on the glass and looked up. Texas was standing there with a piece of paper pressed against the glass that read: “Hey, Vet Girl!”
I pulled off my headphones and opened the door. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said back. “I saw you come in during our last song.”
“It sounded good,” I said. You could have cut the awkwardness with a cheesecake knife. “Hey, last time I ran into you—”
As if to spare us both from my explanation, Texas cut me off. “I was there getting some CLEs—you know, for work.”
Whatever that meant. “I was just at a work training the other day, too,” I said. “Getting some BFDs.”
He laughed. “Those are probably more interesting.” Another agonizing pause ensued, during which I’m sure both of us were remembering our horrid last encounter. I’d just decided to move to Alaska when he said, “We’re all going to grab some pizza in a bit. Want to join?”
“I have to go give my dog Roscoe his insulin shot.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked disappointed. “Okay then.”
“But I could meet you after,” I said.
His face brightened. “We’re going to The Parlor.”
“I love The Parlor! It’s my favorite anarchist pizza joint.”
“So I’ll see you there in a bit?” he asked.
I ran home, gave Roscoe his shot, rinsed off
the deli slime, put on a little more makeup, and raced over to The Parlor. I walked in and it took my eyes a bit to adjust. As dark as it was outside, it was dimmer still in The Parlor, which was all concrete floors and blaring punk rock. I looked around for Texas and the FAIL BETTER! crew, but they weren’t anywhere to be found.
I sat at the bar, lonely and starving, and drank a pint of beer.
“Hey, Roxy!” I turned around, hoping for Texas, but it was only Ken, who I’ve known since junior high. He’s a history teacher now at Griffin School, a neighborhood private high school for artsy weirdos. “How’s it going?”
“Been better. I just got stood up,” I said.
“Then you better have a beer and some pizza with us.” He gestured to a table full of misfit teachers.
So I did. They even had half a pizza with soy cheese. Every time the door opened I looked toward it to see if it was Texas. But it never was. Ken and the other Griffin School teachers told great stories about their students, though—one of whom showed up to school yesterday wearing only hot pants and duct tape on her nipples. “I didn’t say a fucking word, just made sure I didn’t look below her nose EVER,” Ken said. “Eventually she got embarrassed and put on a sweater.” We all laughed. Then Ken looked at me. “Hey wait, the guy that stood you up—did he say which Parlor he was gonna meet you at?”
“Which Parlor? This is the only one.”
“Nope. They opened up a new one in Hyde Park, at Guadalupe and Forty-First Street, where the old Tae Kwon Do studio used to be,” he said.
The Roxy Letters Page 17