by Dawn Davies
“Mom, I think it’s over. He wants me to transfer to Sunshine State U. Get a respiratory therapy or teaching degree or some other fuck-all degree people get from Sunshine State. An economics degree from there is a joke, do you hear me? A joke!”
“I hear you.”
“I can kiss any sort of meaningful internship good-bye if I go to Sunshine State.”
“I believe you.”
“He says our marriage should be worth the sacrifice, but I don’t see him offering to move up here and practice law until I graduate.”
“Nope. He’s not. Baby, what do you want to do?”
“I want to stay here. I started here. I want to finish here. I want an education from a top school. I want doors to be open for me that couldn’t be opened in other ways. It’s what I have to do, Mom. I’ve worked for this my whole life. I’ll never be happy if I don’t get it.”
“I agree,” I said.
They broke up for good during finals. My daughter made herself sick crying for a few weeks. The following summer she interned as a researcher at a hedge fund in Boston, and the summer after that, won a fellowship to a think tank in D.C. She moved to Paris after graduation, like she swore she would so many years before.
I bought a plastic protector for the gown, zipped it up, and draped it over the deep freezer in our garage, where it sat for a year. Every once in a while, I unzipped it a few inches to see the white-hot bullet my daughter dodged. Yep, it still looked like frilly, cheap queso blanco on a stick. Eventually I sold it on Craigslist for fifty bucks. I used the pictures of my second daughter wearing the dress, disguising her identity by putting an enlarged emoji over the sneer on her face.
I met the new bride-to-be in a Hooters parking lot in Pembroke Pines, Florida. She looked low-rent, possibly hungover, too sallow of skin to look good in such a frosty white. Her mascara was smeared and it was only eleven in the morning, and she had pockmarks on her face and cigarette-brown teeth. She handed me fifty dollars in cash, asked no questions, and shoved the dress into the backseat of her car, draping it over the baby seat. She didn’t wave good-bye. Because I’m me and I can’t stop, I have imagined this woman’s wedding day several times: someone with a stringy weave and tattoos zipping this new bride into her shock-white monstrosity while she sucked in what was left of her baby weight, then walking down the aisle in an unloved dress, which was perhaps lovingly made, perhaps haphazardly so, then squeezed into a tiny package, and shipped across the world, to be opened by a heartsick mother of the bride who wanted the best for her young daughter, even if the best ended up being a broken engagement, and for a while, a broken heart.
She wakes up to fifteen new e-mails. Eleven from America and three from Britain. She will be busy this season. There will be satin to order, organza to size and slice, new designs to copy, and impossible promises to make. She begins.
Dear Gilbert Rebecca,
Yes, I can make dress exactly like original. Please upload pictures of the dress you want and pictures of you. You have found the right dressmaker. I make perfect dress, but please be patient. Special things take time.
Yours truly,
Joan
WeddingGown96
KING OF THE WORLD
You are being romanced by William Wallace, the real one, not the blue-faced, thick-fingered Mel Gibson version, while in real life you lie sleeping next to your snoring husband. That kilt, those thick, dirty thighs, all that bushy chest hair, the crust of Scottish sweat dried over older layers of Scottish sweat, smelling of bog moss and political passion. He grabs you by the hair and stretches your neck taut and you wake up at civil dawn, the boulders of the Highlands disappearing into Ikea curtains and coordinated wall art from Marshalls HomeGoods. Your seven-year-old is standing at the side of your bed, with paths of tears coursing down her cheeks and a mutilated hamster in her soft, cupped hands.
“You left my bedroom door open again,” she says.
Damn that stinking cairn terrier. He bided his time until you were all asleep, didn’t he, waiting for a still night, driven nearly mad by the daily smell of the cedar bedding in the dark, or the little turds of buried poo, or the hamster snatch he could smell from as far away as the laundry room he was locked in while the girls played with the fuzzy hors d’oeuvre. He waited until the Labrador was asleep so he could enjoy the carnage alone, after watching the girls’ half-cracked bedroom door that you left open when you went in to check on them in the middle of the night, waiting until the nearly oppressive pre-sunrise hours when the birds were still dreaming on their perches, while he knew you were all deep into your REM, to slink along the walls of the living room, and slip into the bedroom, climb up on the hope chest, leap onto the dresser, and knock the Habitrail to the ground, releasing the hamster to run for its life before he made a sport of it. The cairn didn’t have the decency to consume the animal, but left it with neck bent and broken in a tiny patch of dark blood, eyes dull and empty, for your daughters to find.
“This is the worst day ever,” this daughter says to you through her tears, through her deep sorrow, while you sit up and take the hamster from her cupped hands, wrapping it in the bottom of your nightie. That is the first hamster the cairn gets to. There will be four more.
* * *
Rocky weighed in at fifteen pounds. All work, no play. He hated fetch, he hated chasing or being chased, he hated tug-of-war and disdained any kind of toy unless it was stuffed with peanut butter for him to eat. He regularly patrolled the perimeter of our property, keeping out stray lizards, flying birds, crooked crabs, canal ducks, neighborhood cats, and other creatures, real or imagined. His greatest foes were the fish that leaped for their lives in the canal, tempting him to jump in after them with loud smacks of their fat white bellies against the water, though he would never voluntarily go into water of any sort. He would stand at the seawall and retch at the fish with all his might, his back legs pointing out rigidly behind him, his anus winking in and out with each bark, afraid to take a false step lest he splash into the brackish water and melt like grubby sugar. Yet, when we threw the double kayak down, he would beg to go with us for a ride. We would lift him over the seawall and into the boat, where he would position himself at the pointed bow, legs locked, standing in silence and leading with his nose—the king of the world.
At dark he would snap through the dog door, called to midnight sentry duty by the whispers of tree frogs, the sniffling of possums and raccoons on the other side of the fence no one dared cross. He would bark at the glinting stars in the night sky that perhaps, to him, were the eyes of his foes, foes that never blinked or barked back.
Rocky had no time for pampering. He ossified like a carcass when you picked him up, he shuddered when you brushed him, and he had no interest in a cuddle on the lap. His most powerful love language was a flick of table scraps. Rarely, after a long day of work in the yard, he would come to me when I was lying on the floor, push his snout into my armpit, and fall asleep there, his body sticking out awkwardly from mine. When I petted him, he woke up annoyed. We appreciated him, though—in fact, when we brought him home as a pup, I recall the girls saying, with shining eyes, their hearts full of love, “We love him. This is the best day ever!” We did love him, but he stank to high heaven, no matter the bath schedule, and killed almost all of our other pets.
We were a pet-friendly family. My daughters, especially, were drawn to small animals, and I, who liked all things biological, and didn’t have as much pet opportunity as I would have liked as a child, rarely said no to their pleas to bring in a new family member.
We started with hamsters. Rocky killed all of them, no matter what protective system we devised. Like a highly trained hit man, he could wait as long as necessary until he marked a chink in the armor, a small break in routine that would give him an opportunity to strike. After the death of the second hamster, a soft blackish teddy bear with a gentle spirit, my younger daughter stopped crying when she found their bodies, and took it as a matter of course that there
are no guarantees in life, especially when you take the kind of risks we forced upon those hamsters each time we brought another one home.
Most of the deaths were my fault. I am extremely forgetful, and even when I followed a system, such as locking the dog in the laundry room before taking out the hamster cage to clean it, or closing the door to the bedroom the hamster was in, I would neglect a small step, popping back in to get something and then not latching the bedroom door all the way closed, or not shutting the door to the laundry room all the way when we put the dog in. I could do everything right for a year and a half, long enough for the dog to appear to have forgotten that a rodent was in residence, and the moment I assumed he had released his desire to kill or I slipped up on the safety protocol, he would strike with sure-footed confidence, without batting an eye, as if all time were lost to him and it is what he was born to do.
Somehow, despite the hamster carnage, my older daughter became bent on getting a pet rat. I wasn’t keen on it. The only people I knew with pet rats were the kind of people who wore pewter, Anglophilic jewelry and long black trench coats. They frequented Renaissance festivals, watched Doctor Who, and worked at RadioShack. They often looked like rats themselves, and what’s worse, they were also the kind of people to keep a lot of cats, or a lot of ferrets, which I noticed they dressed up on occasion like little jesters for Internet photos. I did not want to align ourselves with this division of folk. My daughter, however, had an early interest in psychology. In eighth grade she declared that she wanted to write some sort of thesis on the domesticated rat. She presented me with a study that demonstrated how rats laughed when tickled, and likely, swayed by her precocious drive to write a thesis in the eighth grade—for like all mothers, I labored under the misapprehension that my children were exceptional—I broke down and said yes. There was a thesis at stake, after all (one that would never be written, but that’s another matter).
Posy was darling, for a rat. We locked my daughter’s bedroom door and allowed the thing to run free for much of the day. She loved chicken bones, and when presented with one, would scurry behind the night table to gobble it in secret. She bit holes in all of my daughter’s pockets, stored treasures around the room in private piles, lunged at a pair of socked feet as if it were an enemy, and was occasionally slightly aggressive toward fingers, which my daughter thought was cute, though I found it terrifying. Rocky had smelled the rat but had never laid eyes on her. We had a strict closed-door policy to my daughter’s room, only partly because of the dog. My husband also hated everything about the rat.
“It’s a destructive, disease-riddled pest,” he said.
“This is a clean rat,” I told him. “She washes herself all the time.”
“There are no clean rats. You want proof, Google ‘rat king.’ I don’t want to ever see this thing, or hear about it. Do not ask me to touch it or feed it or take care of it in any way. It seems you have forgotten my one pet request.”
“Don’t keep any pet that shits in the house?”
“Oh, you remember.”
“Of course I do. You still love me?”
“I’m trying to.”
“You are the best husband ever,” I said, and flashed him a boob.
“We’re getting there,” he said. I flashed him two boobs.
“Now you’re talking.” I left to go look up “rat king,” and was subsequently horrified enough to purchase a gallon of hand sanitizer, which I then kept outside of my daughter’s bedroom.
Once, when the kids were away for the weekend, Posy took a fall from between the bed and the night table and broke her front leg. I called thirteen veterinarians before I found one who would cast a rat’s leg. I lined a shoebox with a soft hand towel and drove the rat to another county, where I paid 165 dollars for an X-ray and a tiny splint job that I could have done at home. That evening, I gave Posy a drop of baby Tylenol, and her very own chicken wing, which she ate quickly at once. Then she sat at the back of her cage like a princess, her broken leg, wrapped in hot pink splint wrap, resting on the scepter of leftover chicken bone, which she licked from top to bottom, then shredded for the marrow. I called my daughter and told her the rat was resting comfortably.
“This is what I get for leaving you alone with my rat,” she said.
“I just took your rat to an orthopedic surgeon.”
“Pet her on the tail. She likes it. It will make her feel better.”
“I can’t even look at her tail,” I said. Her tail was fleshy and ringed and pocked with sparse hairs and looking at it reminded me of a rat king. I couldn’t.
“Mom. She’s injured. She needs it.”
“All right. I’ll do it, but if she bites me, she’s sleeping outside.” I reached out to Posy’s tail and she lunged for my fingers. I screamed.
“Posy is the best rat ever, isn’t she, Mom?” I could hear my daughter’s mean streak crackle through the phone.
* * *
We made it past a year. One Saturday morning, we took Posy’s cage outside to clean it. When we cleaned her cage, we would lock Rocky in the laundry room, and put the top wire part of the cage over Posy in a patch of grass. She liked digging in the dirt to bite juicy roots and grubs.
“She needs bricks on her cage, Mom,” my daughter said. “We have to weigh it down or she will get out.”
“We’re almost done. It’ll only be a minute,” I said. While we were hosing out the bottom of the cage, I got a phone call. The girls went inside to get a drink, and when we weren’t looking, Posy dug herself out and took a stroll across the back deck. At the most inopportune moment, someone had forgotten Rocky and opened the door to the laundry room, and within a few seconds, he shot through the dog door and shook the rat to death, before we had time to register it. My daughter saw the whole thing.
“You’re the worst mom ever,” she sobbed later, as she cleaned up runes of tiny chicken bones that Posy had laid out behind her night table. “I told you we needed to put the bricks on her cage.” She had been right.
Later that night, my husband said, “Thank God for Rocky.”
“No more rats,” I said. “In fact, and I’ll say this once only: I was wrong. I don’t care how cute Posy was, I can’t get the image of ‘rat king’ out of my mind. When you hear ‘rat king,’ you think it’s going to be one big, pimpilicious, mac daddy rat. It’s not that at all.”
“I told you,” he said. I flashed him two boobs.
“You are the best wife ever.”
* * *
After watching twenty-two YouTube videos on the proper care and feeding of parakeets, you find a used cage on Craigslist, buy it when the children are at school, bring it home, and scrub it in the front yard using a bucket of bleach water and a sponge. It is hot and you are wearing a tank top and cutoffs and no one else is around, so you spray yourself with the hose, then look down at your chest and think: I’ve still got it. Or maybe not. A male neighbor pulls out of his driveway and drives past and you wave and watch his eyes to see if he notices your wet T-shirt. He doesn’t. You’ve been married so long that nobody will ever notice you again, you think. Sure, men will still open doors for you, but it’s not because you are delicious; it’s because no matter what pants you wear, the shape of your ass turns them into mom jeans, and opening the door has become a social obligation, a thing younger men do for their elders.
You run the sponge back and forth over the metal bars of the cage with no inkling that this cage will soon make you crazy, that you will hate keeping birds locked up in it the same way you hated seeing other animals in their cages, but you do not know this now. You think of your daughters, and how this birdcage, and the parakeets you plan to keep in it, might act as a recovery gift, aimed to repair the trust they have lost in you, but then you consider that you might just be bored. You have been home with these children for fourteen years, after all, and the routine is mind-sucking: shoving stinking aggregations of stiff, sticky laundry into the washing machine’s pie hole, monitoring homework like a Nazi,
constantly decluttering kitchen counters and bathroom counters and floors and cars, battling closets stuffed with sports gear, and planning menus that include a variety of nutritious, yet affordable foods when you don’t even like to cook and you never once had an interest in elementary education, and the best part of pre-marriage life included such minimalist living that everything you owned could be packed into one midsized car. Admit it: Part of the reason you are so open to getting new pets is because you need something different to do or you will scream.
The cairn is outside with you, traumatizing the lizards that live in the bushes, pouncing on them and ripping off their tails with his teeth. He is as immersed in this as a teenage boy is in a video game. When you call his name, he startles. Runs over to you. Sniffs the birdcage and begins to guard it stiffly, hunching over in the same manner he uses when he attempts to guard a new bag of dog food you bring into the house.
“Go play,” you tell him, but he doesn’t. You have to shove him with your foot before he goes back to the lizards. You walk over to the bushes and begin to pull a few weeds, and he suddenly growls once and pounces into a pile of brush a foot from your hand. He plucks out a snake, and shakes it quickly at the head, two, three, four times, and flings it several feet away, then runs to check if it is moving. It is not. You hate snakes.
“You are the best dog ever,” you say to him, and you reach over to pet him, but he is adrenalized from the kill, shaking, not interested in anything you have to say. He goes back to work in the bushes, checking every three minutes—like a serial killer revisiting the scene of the crime—the dead state of the snake, which remains so.
* * *
The first two parakeets were Felvis and Pretzel. They were dark blue and white and bright-eyed and innocently trusting. They liked to sit on the girls’ fingers and cock their little heads in academic concentration while my daughters taught them phrases such as “Pretty bird” and “Here, kitty kitty.” I thought it would be smart to hang the cage high on a ceiling hook in the dining room, several feet above Rocky’s peak vertical jump. While I cooked or while the girls were doing homework at the table, the poor parakeets would climb up and down the sides of the cage and cry, like the incarcerated monkeys at the zoo I had recently seen that had made me so sad. I hate to see a thing in a cage, so I took them out as often as possible.