I CONSIDER MYSELF a New Age survivalist. I do some yoga and ingest a little Saint John’s every now and again. I have some crystals and my astrological chart and a book on feng shui. I have everything I might need to survive a crisis—batteries, water, freeze-dried entrees—everything but a firearm. I don’t believe in firearms even though Woody tried to frighten me into getting a tiny purse pistol. What he really wanted, I think, was to scare me into letting him move in and live here. I refused that. I did not want to repeat the ice sculptor affair. I would wait and decide when I saw where our relationship was headed. It didn’t take me long to understand where he wanted the relationship to go. He was not interested in the tête-à-tête so much as the crotch-à-crotch. There were some days I believed I might have to turn a hose on him just as I often have to do when we are boarding a large-breed bitch in heat. Some dogs leave me no other choice.
“I worry about you, Dog Girl,” Woody whispered and pinched my breast with no respect whatsoever for Richie, who was asleep right there in a Snugli strapped to my chest. “Bad things happen to women who are all alone in the world.”
“Well I don’t believe in firearms,” I told him and flicked his wandering hand off me. “I tell you what I do believe in though.” He waited for me to finish, his hand poised and ready to strike again. It is a shame how much cuter he is than he is smart, but that happens. You see that in quite a few breeds.
“For protection, I believe in dogs and baseball bats,” I told Woody. “If you come in here uninvited I’m prepared to beat you and to ask the dogs to assist me in handling the situation.” I told Woody that again after the collie incident, and that time he didn’t laugh because I had a Louisville Slugger in my right hand and the leash of a mistreated Akita in the other. I like to think I gave him fair warning.
PETS ARE OFTEN a good way to keep unwanted guests away. Dogs. Snakes. Cats presenting half a bird or mouse, a squirrel entrail. Birds who fly around and relieve themselves at will. All of them are a positive force if you don’t wish visitors. That’s what I told Woody. But his heart was not at all in the business. I don’t believe he even likes animals but bought into the Dog House only in hopes of earning more than his fair share of the almighty dollar. Woody is probably one of those boys who kick at a dog if it runs up beside their bikes; he is probably one of those who try to run over cats with lawn mowers. I prayed that Richie would have no memory of Woody there in my bed in his bikini underwear.
I said to myself, “When Woody leaves I’ll replace him pound for pound with dog.” I had no respect whatsoever for him. When he moved out I got myself a little shepherd mix and a Great Dane. Bubba and Bjorn. They weight the bed just right. And my little papillon, Princess, accounts for the five-pound fluctuation Woody got on the weekends from pizza and those creme horns he loves. Princess likes to doze up on Bjorn’s great big head like a little hair ornament. It tickles Richie to death to see them there like that. They are his family.
MARISSA, OF ALL PEOPLE, has said to me recently, “Why don’t you grow up? You have a child to tend to.” She said, “Adults don’t have a house full of pets.”
I said, “Well, Marissa, I don’t know that my habits are worse than yours—faking every bad illness known to man in hopes of meeting a doctor.” I wanted to remind her that I was there in junior high all those times she accidentally on purpose spilled a Kotex from her purse so boys would think of her as a woman. But I held my tongue. Friends cannot say everything they’re thinking.
I said, “I am a grown-up, Marissa. I have a child to raise on my own. I have a profession, a calling. I have a career. And it just so happens that what I always wanted in life was relationships with dogs of all sizes and shapes and colors. A whole universe that I could teach to get along with one another, share, be family. I’ve done that. If only the world could take note.” I said, “Tell me why your obsession with antibiotics and the cataloging of diseases you always think you might have is a better calling.”
“My sensitive medical issues are not a calling, as you so weirdly call it,” she said. “I am a professional designer, which is a grown-up thing, unlike you always talking about the Westie’s eczema or those wrinkled dogs’ respiratory problems. That is not a grown-up thing.” Marissa got red in the face. “And neither is marrying an ice sculptor.”
“Well, he was one of the very best ice sculptors around,” I said. “He once did a swan for the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta. Besides, I never claimed my marriage was a great thing but you know what? You know what?” I backed her into the corner and made her look at me. “Richie is a good thing. So which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“I agree about Richie,” she said and tried to move out of the corner but I wouldn’t let her. We have known one another since elementary school and she knows that I can take her on and beat her with both hands tied behind my back if I need to.
“So I like dogs. So what?” I yelled. “What in the hell is wrong with the fact that I like to talk about different kinds of dogs the same way you like to talk about different kinds of chairs: Here is a wing back. Thomas Jefferson sat here. And here is JFK’s rocker, perfect for those going off of theirs. Oh yes, and here’s the club chair like they use on all the late-night talk shows; the club chair is just what every little woman in Stepford needs so that when the man gets home she can lean back and say ‘Heeeerrrreee’s Johnny!’”
“Will you stop?” She pushes me away, and I step back and let her go. She clicks down the hallway just exactly like a poodle all coiffed and painted up. What a bitch. I can look at a person and tell you immediately by looks and personality what breed that person would be. I don’t think Marissa would be interested, though. But, for instance, I think if Marilyn Monroe had been a bitch she’d have been a yellow Lab. They’d have dressed her up like a poodle again and again but deep down she was definitely a Lab and who better for a Lab to hook up with than a fella with balls. And where has Joe DiMaggio gone? Dead. Like so many of the best dogs.
OTHER THAN MARISSA, I don’t have a whole lot of people friends. Go figure. I’d like to suggest they stop their yapping and go for a good long walk. Chase after something other than their own tails. I wish I could tell them that their depressions and neuroses are simply the by-products of the wrong diet and training. Think of the fortitude it takes to eat and pass a man’s tube sock. Try that as a cathartic, I want to say.
Woody had me wearing a choke for a couple of months there. The kind with spikes. Figuratively, of course, though if he could make a woman companion wear one legally he’d do that. He’s got a woman right now that he jerks around any way that he pleases. Bless her heart, she looks like a Chinese crested with that poof of frizzy hair like a pom-pom and her bad complexion. And Woody? He wants to be a pit bull of a man but he is a Chihuahua.
He thinks I am hurt when he parades his little poochie past me. He believes I have separation anxiety. He doesn’t know that I have saved enough to open my own little place and that I will soon be his fiercest competitor, that I will soon go public with the truth about the beautiful collie who died of old age and for whom Woody promised the family a proper burial complete with flowers and the dog’s favorite squeak toy inside the lovely walnut box he billed them at a couple of hundred dollars. I will divulge this: how, while Woody, two hundred dollars the richer, was in his office with Miss Chinese Crested, I took a trash bag of dog hair down to the Dumpster only to discover the collie lying there, all awkward, stiffened limbs covered over with soiled newspapers from the kennels.
There’s a lot I can forgive in the world but not that. I climbed down in there and pulled Bonny out, not an easy feat for a woman of my size, I’ll tell you. I went and got the display coffin, the only dog coffin that Woody had in the place, and I lifted the heavy body up and into it, put it on a dolly, and rolled it out to the field behind the kennels and their runs. I spent the rest of the afternoon digging a grave and burying Bonny. I was sickened that such a beautiful life could ever be left to the hands of somebody as stupi
d and careless as Woody.
SOMETIMES WHEN I am feeling particularly mad— I’m stressed, I’m crazed, I’ll bite your head off—I sit down and write myself a letter about how things will get better. I make out a list of what I should and should not do: do not bark and growl and flip off the crossing guard over at Richie’s day care center—this will not get you anywhere; do sit tight on the photos you took of the dead collie and the pictures you took of the kennel runs when Woody was in charge; do not breathe a word about how he has cheated on his income taxes for the past five years; do wait until it’s time to let go of that tube sock you’ve swallowed. I tell myself, there is no shame in being a bitch in heat, no shame in wanting a litter.
As a matter of fact, I may read a few of my thoughts aloud to Marissa when she comes over, once again all heartbroken by some jerk who gave her a prescription for tetracycline at the end of a stormy night of sex and then never called her again. I will tell her that I understand how important chairs and sofas and tables are in her life and how I respect this; I will not leave dog hair on the velvet upholstery of her new Chippendale dining-room chairs and I will not let Richie teethe on their legs. And I will tell her that loyalty is more important than any house-decorating item, the kind of loyalty—though she might not want to hear it—that you usually only get from a good dog. The kind that you need from a good friend. I will say, We want the same things, honey. You know we do. I will tell her everybody—bitch and dog alike—has those days when all they can think about is a piece of tail, anal glands, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of the throat.
Marissa will raise her hand in disgust and say I do not! and I will once again have to explain that I am using a metaphor before I move forward to say how what we really want, each and every day, is for someone to be willing to throw some love our way so that we can retrieve it and return the favor. All we really want, I tell her, is for someone we really care about to say Speak to me, girl, speak. Now stay.
Toads
AMONG THE THINGS my mother left me when she died much too young of cancer were the engagement ring my father gave her at a college football game when they were both nineteen, her mother’s prized mink cape sealed for decades in a plastic zipper bag with mothballs, a framed daisy made of her grandmother’s hair, and my stepfather, James T. Allen, who came complete with my mother’s handwritten instructions as if he were some kind of fragile orchid who needed this much light, this much water, and this much vodka at the end of the day.
James T. Allen had no children of his own and has certainly never considered me one, either. I didn’t even know what the T in his name stood for and—I’m embarrassed to say—my husband and kids and I have had many hours of fun coming up with possibilities. Tanless (contribution of my husband, Ron, avid golfer and sun worshiper); Tasteless and Toneless (I am the one who washes his beige polyester-blend belongings and listens to his rare monotonous utterings); Testosteroneless (from my oldest son, Sam, who at seventeen has enough to supply the whole state); and last but not least Turdo and Toadman (these from my ten year old, Matt, who spends much of his time flipping over rocks in search of the drab amphibians). It seems that most of our monikers, with the exception of Turdo and Toadman, have to do with what he isn’t rather than what he is. Because what, after all, is he? If he were a piece of furniture in a showroom he would be the beige Naugahyde thing in the corner, not a chair, or a sofa, more like an ottoman. If he were a car he would be the beige Impala. If he were shoes he would be beige Hush Puppies. If you were to go out and flip over a rock, he is what you would find burrowed there. Actually, all of these are understatements.
Basically he sits in the corner staring first at the newspaper, which he sheds section by section onto the floor around him, and then at the television, always on the Headline News channel or the weather station. He talks to my husband about investments, which he finds mildly exciting since he’d been an investment broker, though he says he himself never invested in anything. He talks to Matt about the virtues of being a boy who picks up after his elders, nodding toward the sections of newspaper on the floor as an example of elder litter. Who knows what he would talk to Sam about; he never gets the chance. Sam has it all figured out— the escape—he simply stops in front of James T. Allen’s chair, lifts one ear of his Walkman, cocks his head and says “check ya later,” and he’s off and running, laughter coursing through his veins. In private he whispers to me that James is the Zombie Dude; he is the Man Most Likely to Slip into a Coma—Man Who Most Resembles a Brussels Sprout—the Crash Dummy—Keeper of the Black Hole. These jokes have become our mother-and-son bondings of late, and though I sometimes feel guilty, I’ve done nothing to stop the game; we show our love for one another through our disdain for James.
JAMES WAS ONLY sixty-five when my mother died— a very old sixty-five—and I’m still not sure why it is that he lives with us. She died here and he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go? Maybe. He needs help remembering when to take his different medicines? Maybe that was what my mother thought, but he has yet to even let me read the labels. His one and only outing of the month is going to the drugstore to fill all those prescriptions himself. Once a year he checks in with the doctor who writes the prescriptions. He keeps his pills locked in a little box by his bed.
I don’t know what exactly is wrong with James. I asked my mother several times, more frequently as she was reaching the end and telling me how he needed lots of care. Her answer was “Many many things are a burden to James.” “Such as?” I asked and she would conveniently doze off with a whispered murmur of “poor thing.” Arthritis? Schizophrenia? Cancer? Could he have had a lobotomy in his youth?
If Poor Thing had any family they had apparently given up on him. He didn’t get phone calls or mail. My mother had explained that James had focused for so long on his job that by age fifty he found himself with nothing else in his world. That my mother could be the spark plug in someone else’s life was a shocker. I didn’t push much beyond learning that James was an only child and that he was friendless because, according to my mother, a man in a powerful position (was he?) can’t have friends. Nobody likes the boss.
To my knowledge the only friend he ever had was his former lawyer, an older gentleman who had been his neighbor for many years. James used to take the man a basket of fruit at Christmas but stopped when the old guy had a stroke that affected his memory and he moved into Turtle Bay Nursing Home. Sam said, “But you could still, like, take him something, right?” and James T. looked up, shook his head, and asked a bewildered “What for?”
“Oh I don’t know,” I offered. “Because you’re such a kind and generous man?” He thanked me for the compliment apparently missing my sarcasm and making me feel really small.
MY MOTHER, WHO I believe willed herself to die (if such a thing is really possible), also told me that James had “terrible digestive flow.” Exactly what that meant, I don’t know. What I do know is that he makes noises inside his mouth and chest cavity that sound like a host of demons trying to burst free. Burps and sucks and smacks, the kinds of sounds that leave a listener who’s trying to tend to her own business jerking and snapping with mini-Tourette’s. I sometimes find myself thinking that if he dared to open wide that cavernous mouth he would emit, like Pandora’s box, all the uglies of the world—a swarm of flies, locusts, the river Styx pouring forth in projectile vomit. But no. He opens only a crack, he smacks, he sucks his gums. He says, “You’re low on milk.” He says, “The TV reception is not good when you run the hair dryer.” He says, “I’m in need of Metamucil.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Are you through watching Headline News now?” Wouldn’t you like to take a walk? Call a friend? Ride a bike? Find a pulse?
He is stationary.
He doesn’t want to do anything at all.
He is so stationary, Ron says we could start using him as a clothes rack. We could rent him out to the circle of widows in our neighborhood as the Fake Man, like the thing we saw an ad for in a magazine no
t long ago. You can put the Fake Man by a window, or let him ride in your passenger seat. You would never ever feel alone with Fake Man by your side. For a more realistic effect, put a beige hat on him.
I HAVE TO find myself some ways to handle the anger I feel toward my mother for leaving me this boring ottoman of a man. I am, I realize, as angry as I was when my parents separated. My dad left and I couldn’t get as mad at him as I wanted to because, even at fifteen, there was a part of me that understood why he left. To outsiders (even to my older brother) he was the bad guy and she was the helpless defenseless martyr. I suspected this was what she had wanted all along. She wanted a good reason why she was so miserable, which she hadn’t had when she had a handsome, successful husband—a prince—and pretty good kids and a great house and a big circle of friends. She couldn’t do the happy thing. Or the healthy thing. She would much rather have been the victim and to die that way than to be a survivor who must hop to and get up off of her ass and do something.
When I say this sort of thing, I get looks of horror from friends and from my brother in California, who I might add did not inherit James T. Allen and has nothing to worry about but himself and his partner and the little Jack Russell they all but keep in a bassinet. Even Ron says I am sexist and unfair not to side with my mother. He says, “Sure your dad’s a great guy but he’s not perfect. He is human. Why do you believe that’s what she wanted? Give me one good reason?”
And I can give him two. First of all, the woman my mother claims my father left us for—he gave her the woman’s name and address and phone number—did not exist. My mother was perfectly willing to accept this name and address and number and sigh, shake her head, cry into the telephone to friends who promised to bring her casseroles and do her errands for her. I was only fifteen, but I knew better. I called the number—help line. I rode my bike across town to the address—psychiatric practice. I scoured the phone book and later the courthouse records for the name we’d been given. And lo and behold, it turned out that Theda R. Dunster had never existed, at least not in this part of the world. I told my mother that none of it was true. I said, “Don’t you see? This is a test.” But evidently she didn’t see or did not want to see and she failed the test. No retakes.
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