by Allie Larkin
I felt gross-repulsive-obvious. Even though I’d never taken my mom’s advice-I’d never said anything to Peter- everyone knew. Everyone knew I was such a pathetic loser that I went dateless to watch the love of my life marry my best friend.
I threw the cell phone down on the passenger seat. I bit my nails until my fingers bled, spitting chips of Raisin Sunset polish into the console. I drove with my knee while I put my hair in a ponytail and then used one hand to rip the elastic out of my hair two minutes later.
I ate the gumdrops I picked up in the rest stop gift shop. They stuck in my teeth, and just as I’d free the remains of one, I’d pop another one in my mouth like I couldn’t control it. I grabbed a green one after I swore I was done, so I rolled down the window, chucked it out, and watched it bounce down the road in my rearview mirror like a frog jumping. I grabbed two more and threw them out at the same time. They bounced into each other and disappeared. I threw gumdrops out the window until I had one left. I ate it, and spent the last twenty minutes of my drive picking orange goo out of my teeth.
I wasn’t comforted by the bump at the end of the driveway, or the sound of the garage door opening. Coming home wasn’t the refuge that it usually was. I felt like Diane’s check was working to evict me already. I tapped the garbage can with my bumper, so I knew I was in far enough, and closed the garage door. I grabbed my purse but didn’t bother taking my overnight bag out of the trunk.
My condo was stale. It was cold and I could smell the carpet pad. It wasn’t a home. It was just a place to crash. I had tried to make it a home. I spent a week taping paint chips to the walls and studying them at different times of day like I’d read you were supposed to do. I went to Home Depot and bought every little roller, corner brush, and width of blue tape I could find. I got a different color of paint for every room, and a big orange book on home repair that had a chapter on painting. I read the chapter over and over until I was sure I knew the drill. I started in the living room. I taped and put down drop cloths and cut in like the book said. I got the wall behind the couch painted bright blue. But the blue didn’t have that midnight-in-Venice kind of quality the little chip had. It looked like Superman’s tights, so I stopped with that one wall, thinking I’d fix it eventually. I told Janie and Pete I’d picked it on purpose, and painting one wall was the newest style on the design shows that plagued the cable channels late at night.
Except for the blue wall, the whole condo was department store white and neutral. Even the things I’d bought for the condo were neutral. I was going to buy a red toaster, but Janie talked me out of it.
“That’s awful, Van. Who buys a red toaster?”
Every time I saw that eggshell-colored toaster I wanted to scream.
I kicked off my shoes, pulled a plastic pitcher out of the cabinet under the counter, and made some grape Kool-Aid. I grabbed one of the twenty-four-ounce plastic cups the pizza place gives you when you get delivery, and filled it halfway with ice. I filled it up another quarter with Kool-Aid, and topped it off with vodka. I stuck a bendy straw in it, and walked around to check on the rest of the house. No phone messages. I didn’t bother going out to check the mail. I never got anything other than utility bills and credit card offers. The bathroom smelled like mildew, because I hadn’t cleaned up my wet towels before I left. The spider plant I never watered was more brown than green now. Other than that, nothing changed. Everything was right where I left it. No surprises.
I slurped my Kool-Aid down to the ice and went back to the kitchen to make myself another drink. The toaster was sitting on the counter, mocking me. I unplugged it and threw it in the garbage. It was almost as satisfying as it would have been to chuck it out my car window like a gumdrop.
I was still wearing my awful laced-up high school jeans, so I took my new drink upstairs with me to change. The stairs felt longer and steeper than usual.
It had been a few weeks since I’d done laundry, and I’d packed all the clothes that were both decent and clean. The only clean PJs I had left were the ones I absolutely hated. They were infamous. Old and worn; pale blue and red plaid; big, boxy, and, like most of my clothes, they had pale yellow coffee stains everywhere.
When it first happened-when they met and it was love at first sight-I blamed it on those pajamas. As much as I hated them, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out because they gave me something substantial to blame.
Janie came to visit me at the U of R over her spring break, junior year. She drove up on a Friday afternoon. I told Peter I couldn’t make our dinner because I thought I was going to fail my psych midterm.
“In fact,” I told him, while we were walking to the dining hall for breakfast, “I’m just going to put myself in seclusion this weekend.”
Peter met me at my dorm every morning and we walked over together. It was his solution to the fact that I was chronically late for my first class. He thought if I was up and out, I was more likely to make it on time-so, he came to get me every single morning. It was the best part of my day.
“Come on,” he said. “I found this Indian place.” He raised his eyebrows up and down at me and smiled. “Apparently, it’s a total dive, but Connor from my lit class says it’s really good, and he’s a total food snob. He says you’ll actually see Indian people eating there. That’s how good it is.”
“You don’t like Indian food,” I reminded him, fighting the urge to touch his face. Every time I was around Peter, no matter how much time we spent together, I had to make a concentrated effort to keep my hands off of him. Something about the line of his jaw, and the smoothness of his skin, just made me want to grab him, smell his neck, hold his body against mine. I’d never felt that way about anyone before. It was hard to focus on anything else.
“You like Indian food. You were just talking about it. And I always make you eat Chinese.”
“You’re always the one buying,” I said, calling out something we never talked about.
“I’m a gentleman.” He scrunched up his nose and shook his head at me like I was being ridiculous. “Come on, Van. Indian. We’ll order in if you want. You can smell up my room with curry and I won’t even complain. Friday. It’s our thing. Come on!”
“Pete, I want to, but I can’t,” I said. It was killing me to turn him down. “I really have to study.”
“It’s just dinner. I’ll leave you to study for the rest of the weekend.”
I made a fist and pushed it into his shoulder. “Next week. I promise.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” He looked hurt, but I thought my absence might make his heart grow fonder. And I knew that I didn’t want him to meet Janie.
When Janie came up to visit me at the U of R, she brought charcoal masks and nail polish. We painted our toenails and hobbled around with toe separators stuck to our feet, and it was so nice to just hang out with her again. It was familiar and fun, and in my head I rationalized that this was why I didn’t want Pete around. I didn’t want him getting in the way of me spending time with my best friend. I wanted a weekend with Janie that was just like old times.
I’d swept the video store clean of Matt Dillon movies. We were all settled in with pizza and Pop Rocks, watching The Outsiders, when Pete knocked on the door.
I opened it without thinking. Peter didn’t live in my dorm, so he usually had to buzz me to get in. It didn’t occur to me that it could be Peter, but it was. He’d snuck in with some other girl’s boyfriend.
“Wow,” he said, surveying the scene. It must have been drizzling outside. Droplets of water sparkled on the fuzz of his black Patagonia fleece. “Seclusion usually means staying by one’s self. And studying means actually looking at bo- ”
“What are you doing here?” I felt for leftover globs of mud mask around my hairline and tried to hold my arm across my chest to hide the coffee stain over my left boob.
He looked right in my eyes, wrinkled up his forehead, and let out a quick sigh. “Thought you might want my psych notes from last semester. I thought if I hel
ped you study, we could grab dinner tomorrow. Silly me,” he said flatly, handing me a maroon notebook, and walking past me into my room.
Janie was sitting cross- legged on my floor in front of the TV. She had her hair pulled back with a thick black headband. When we’d washed our masks off, she’d carefully wiped away every trace of hers, and smoothed pale pink gloss over her lips.
He stretched his hand out to her. “Peter, and you are?”
“Janie,” she said, standing up. Her pajamas were adorable: pink satin pants with rosebuds on them and a matching tank top with a big beautiful rose blooming across her chest.
And that was it. That was the beginning of the end. I could see it in the way they looked at each other. Not only did I lose him to Janie, but I couldn’t continue on with my theory that maybe he was gay and that’s why he’d never made a move on me.
A few weeks later, Peter canceled our Friday night dinner.
“I’m going into seclusion for the weekend,” he said, flashing me his movie star smile.
Seclusion meant Rhode Island.
He visited Janie at Brown and brought me back an I’d Rather Be in Rhode Island T-shirt.
“I guess we both would,” he said. “Right? She is your best friend and all.”
I had no problem throwing the shirt out. I wadded it up in a ball and threw it off the second- floor balcony into the Dumpster after Peter went back to his dorm to call Janie.
I couldn’t blame the shirt, but the pajamas I could blame. If only I’d had cuter pajamas, maybe Janie wouldn’t have looked so freaking spectacular in comparison. I knew it was ridiculous, but it was all I had.
I left the evil pajamas in my dresser drawer and dug through the pile of clothes in the bottom of my closet until I found a pair of black capri leggings. I pulled the jeans off. They stuck on my calves, and I pulled so hard that they turned inside out. I left my mom’s Boston sweatshirt on. The inside was worn down to soft, nubby pills, and the rubbery decal of the spaceship was cracked and peeling off. Pulling up the collar and tucking my nose under, I breathed in deeply, convincing myself that I could still smell my mom’s perfume on it.
Three more drinks put me on the couch with my laptop, checking my e- mail and watching TV. I had forty-seven new messages, but they were almost all spam. The only real new message I had was a long e- mail from a client updating me on a project so I wouldn’t have to “waste time” getting caught up Monday morning. I didn’t write back.
I got up to make myself another drink, sucking down half of it in the kitchen and filling up again, before I stumbled back to the living room, narrowly avoiding a collision with the coffee table. I flopped down with my legs over the back of the couch and grabbed the remote.
There was a show on about a wedding. The wedding party was standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean in perfect wedding attire. It was on Lifetime, so most likely, the bride was going to find out her husband was really married to women all over the country, or her maid of honor was trying to kill her, or she and her new husband would have a kid and the babysitter would try to move in on her territory and start wearing her clothes. But right at that moment in the movie, everyone was all smug and delighted with themselves, and it made me sick.
“He doesn’t really love you,” I yelled at the television as I changed the channel. “He doesn’t really love you,” I whispered, slowly, feeling the sting in my eyes as I said the words. I sat up, took a long sip of my drink, and wiped my teary eyes with the back of my hand. “Fuck him,” I said, getting up to make another drink. “Fuck.” I dropped a few more ice cubes into my cup, splashing myself. “Him.”
I walked back into the living room, tripping a little when my sock caught on the carpet. I grabbed the remote and flipped through couples kissing, a sale on manufactured diamonds on the Home Shopping Network, and some design show where a couple celebrating their twenty- fifth wedding anniversary was getting a makeover for their big celebration. Everything reminded me of Peter.
Finally, I settled on an old black-and-white episode of Rin Tin Tin. The dog dwarfed the child actor who played his sidekick, and a bunch of men in uniforms wearing toy guns on low-slung holsters delivered wooden lines like, “I’m the fastest shot in this town, sir!”
I got comfortable on the couch with my laptop, and started deleting my junk e- mail with the TV on in the background, but the dog was incredible, and I couldn’t stop watching. He saved people and warned of certain danger. He was always there when needed. He never let anyone down.
I typed Rin Tin Tin into my search engine, and got the official Rin Tin Tin website. Apparently, it wasn’t just one dog. There had been a long line of Rin Tin Tins. German Shepherds. I read the history of the first one, slurping through my fourth Kool-Aid. I got to the end, and was putting my laptop aside to get a refill, when I noticed a heading on the sidebar: PUPPIES. I poured another drink and raced back to the computer, only to learn that the next litter of puppies was all sold before they were even born.
I looked for German Shepherd puppies in Rochester, but all I could find was a breeder in Canada who specialized in police and cadaver-recovery dogs. There was a detailed explanation of training the dogs with a coffee can punched with holes and filled with human remains. I snapped my computer shut, but then Rin Tin Tin jumped over a burning hay bale to save his master.
That’s what was missing. That’s what I needed. Rin Tin Tin wouldn’t leave me for thin thighs and an aristocratic nose. Rin Tin Tin would be a loyal friend.
I went back to looking for a puppy. The words on the screen were starting to blur, but I didn’t care. I needed a dog, and I wasn’t going to stop until I found one. I clicked from one site to another, and then, I saw him.
He was a shaggy ball of fur. Jet-black, except for a small pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. His head was tipped to one side like he was listening to something intently. One of his ears flopped over. The breeder was in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the site wasn’t in English, with the exception of a few shaky translations. At the top of the picture of the puppy, it said something I couldn’t read, and then MALE 11/5. The puppy was only a few weeks old. He was just a baby. Under his picture, there was a link that said ORDER FORM. I moused over it, ready to click.
I took another long slurp of my Kool-Aid. I couldn’t just decide I wanted a dog and order one off the Internet. It was crazy. Crazy! I tried to go back to watching Rin Tin Tin, but I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of the puppy. It was like one of those paintings where the eyes follow you everywhere. From every angle, I felt like that dog was looking at me. He was going to be taken away from his mother. He was going to be given to some random family and he was going to get lonely and miss his mom and they wouldn’t understand. Not like I would.
“You need me, don’t you?” I asked him. I felt like his eyes looked more and more sad and lonely every time I looked at the picture.
I clicked on the link. The order form said that the cost for the dog was one hundred and forty thousand koruny, which, seven drinks in, I figured was like pesos or lira or something like that, where a thousand of them equaled a dollar. I thought about looking it up, but my vision was starting to blur, and I wanted a dog. Now. I didn’t want to wait any longer than I had to. What if someone else was sitting around in their pajamas watching the Rin Tin Tin marathon, realizing they needed a dog too? What if, in the time I took to look up the conversion rate, someone else bought my puppy? Someone else would get to cuddle up with that little ball of fuzz. Someone else would get sloppy dog kisses on their cheek. Someone else would have a true and loyal friend who would hop over burning hay bales for them, and I’d still be alone. It was probably really cheap. Cheaper than buying a dog from the United States even, I was sure. I grabbed my purse off the coffee table and riffled through the mess of business cards and discount cards, dropping them all over the couch, until I found my credit card.
Ha, Diane, I thought, remembering the time my mom asked her if we could get a dog. I was eleven
and had just read The Call of the Wild in school. I spent an entire weekend planning for my puppy: where he would sleep, how I could pay for his food with my allowance. I made a chart of how I could squeeze in homework and take him on long walks, and Diane stuck a pin in it in two seconds. “Dogs are filthy. They lick their assholes. You can’t be serious, Nat,” she said when my mom asked her.
Well, this was my house and my dog, and Diane was done with me anyway.
I had to type my credit card number into the website four times before I got it right and it went through, but finally, it worked. The site said to expect a confirmation e- mail shortly.
Holy shit, I thought, as I flipped my credit card onto the coffee table. I just bought a dog. I felt like I should be panicking, but on TV, another Rin Tin Tin episode was starting. A tinny horn played a revelry while soldiers scrambled to attention, and a noble-looking Rin Tin Tin stood high on a rock watching them all, the breeze blowing his fur ever so slightly, a flag waving in the background. I could feel the excitement building. I was going to watch this episode carefully. I had to learn about German Shepherds.
I made myself another drink. I was almost out of Kool-Aid, so this one was mostly vodka. I sat down again, clicking the refresh button on my e- mail compulsively, waiting for information on when I could pick up my dog. But ten minutes later, there was still no e-mail. Fifteen minutes later, nothing. Twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, then a half an hour and still nothing.
What if there is no dog? I thought. What if this was some kind of scam like those Nigerian prince e-mails? What if some Slovakian pervert was using my credit card number to buy porn and crack? I could picture him, in a dirty white undershirt, drooling over disgusting pictures in a dimly lit room. Maybe he wasn’t even Slovakian. Maybe there was some kind of messed-up crime ring that preyed on lonely women watching dog movie marathons by pretending to be dog breeders in post-Communist countries.