Or Not to Be

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Or Not to Be Page 5

by Laura Lanni


  “What was that?” I worried where this would go.

  “Write a letter to the owners and complain,” he said simply.

  I thought he was joking, but I was clearly at the desperate stage, so I’d drafted a dog memorandum instead of grading tests during my break that day. I dug the pages out of my purse while we sat in the line of cars full of tired parents in front of the middle school. “Listen to this, Ed. I drafted my letter.” His smile encouraged me.

  I began, “Dear Neighbors: I have lived among you in silence and misery for a long time. I avoid confrontation. I’d rather be mad at you than have you mad at me. This is a costly way to live. Among other things, it appears to be costing me my mind. Granted, it is not the only thing wearing down my mental capacity, but it is one of the obvious things, and I have deemed it fixable, so I am compelled to write you this letter.”

  Eddie smiled and nodded, yet looked oddly saddened by my words. I continued.

  “My husband is the true dog hater at our house. He yells out the windows and into your yards for your barking dogs to ‘shut up.’ He rides to your house on warm evenings on his bike and rings your doorbell at midnight to wake you up and tell you ‘your dog is barking.’ He calls your house in the middle of the night with the same message. Why don’t you hear it? We don’t know. Maybe your mind is missing, too.” This made Eddie snort a laugh, which made Joey stir in the backseat.

  We both froze. “Oops, sorry,” he whispered. Laundry duty for a week was the consequence in our family for waking a sleeping baby. I was lucky: my voice never woke Joey. It just made him smile and gurgle in his sleep.

  Eddie said, “Take that last part out, will you?”

  I made a dramatic X through the offensive section that pinned the dog hate on him.

  “Thanks. Go on. I’m still listening,” he whispered.

  “Your expressions of love have resulted in your dog behaving like a brat. He does not know or follow traditional, standard dog rules. He barks excessively. He does not stay in your yard because you have no fence. You do not leash him. You let him out the front door, and you stay inside. He runs free to my yard and craps on my lawn. He crushes flowers and runs through bushes. He has no idea where his boundaries are. You are happy because you love your dog. He is happy because he does not know any better. I am miserable because of you and your dog. The anxiety and frustration of your actions are overwhelming.

  “I honestly have never lived in or even heard of a place where packs of large dogs ran free through neighboring yards. Where they barked and played and crapped wherever and whenever they pleased. It is baffling and has led to a partial loss of my mind.

  “I feel better for having told you. Now you can be mad at me. Hopefully, while you hate me, you are also keeping your dog quiet and at your home. Then the cost of sending this letter was worthwhile and, maybe, part of my mind will return to me.”

  “Good!” he declared. “Let’s stop at Kinko’s on the way home and make copies. But don’t sign it. Then tomorrow in the middle of the night, we’ll drive around the neighborhood with our headlights off and put one in every mailbox. Nobody will suspect us.” He was so brilliantly deadpan, I couldn’t help laughing.

  “I could never send it, Eddie. But it felt good to write it.”

  “I know. I’m glad you did.” He put his large hand on my leg and squeezed.

  “What other kernels of advice do you have for me, Mr. Fixit?”

  “How about this? When Joey learns to walk, we’ll get him a little shovel and train him to pick up poop in our yard and fling it into the street. If we start early, he’ll think it’s just naturally his job and never complain.”

  “Nope. My son will not be exploited as a pooper-scooper. Next idea, please.”

  “Then you could do it. Each day, pick up the piles of fresh dog droppings and dump them in a paper bag. Then deposit it on the dog-owning-neighbor’s front porch, set a burning match to the bag, ring the doorbell, and run.”

  “No! I’ll burn their house down!”

  “I doubt it. They’ll open the door, find the burning bag, and put out the fire by stomping on it.”

  I lost myself in giggles. He was crazy.

  For the next few months, I developed my own strategies—which also failed. Daily, I called my neighbors or found their children outside playing. I reported the newest loads, and I asked them to pick up the poop, which, of course, they always did. But it was usually a big production and rather embarrassing for all involved. Often they came to my door and insisted that I come out and help them find the smelly heap.

  Finally, without any real forethought, I tried a new tactic. After arriving home to find Goliath happily relieving himself by my garage door, I ordered the wind to hold my caution and all calls, and I abandoned my mind. I picked up the mess, gross and still warm, in a plastic bag and walked across the street to deliver it. I didn’t intend to set it up in flames and run. Instead, I rang the doorbell with the stinking bag in my hand, a sick look on my face, and Goliath prancing around and occasionally sneaking a sniff at my crotch. Sometimes in life, I wondered how I ended up where I did. Exactly like now. How can I be dead?

  That night, I confessed my impulsive strategy to Eddie over dinner, with Bethany groaning in embarrassment and Joey gleefully tossing mashed potatoes at the wall.

  “It was a large load, Ed. Sorry, you’re eating. But you’re a doctor, so you’re used to blood and poop, right?”

  “Actually, no. The nurses are good with that stuff. I still have a weak stomach.” He put down his fork and rinsed his mouth with milk.

  “Anyway, Lisa didn’t open the door. Her sister did, and she invited me to come in.”

  “With the poop?” Bethany asked.

  “Yep, with the poop. She didn’t know what it was—yet. Don’t worry, I didn’t go in. I said I couldn’t come in with ‘this,’ so she offered to take it.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Bethany complained, “why can’t you just be nice?”

  “Me? I am nice! I’m not the one pooping on their lawns!” It was impossible to make a teenager see justice when her primary goal was acceptance.

  Eddie stepped in. “What did you do, Anna?”

  “Well, it obviously wasn’t going as planned. Is there a good way to effectively deliver poop? I considered whether I should just hand the bag to her. I thought about doing it.”

  “So you just lit it with a match and ran like I told you?” Eddie teased.

  “You guys! What is wrong with you?” Bethany threw down her fork. “I have to live in this neighborhood, you know. I have to go to school with those kids!”

  “No, I didn’t light it up,” I said to Ed.

  “No, I didn’t hand it to her,” I said to Bethany.

  I spooned mashed potatoes into Joey’s open mouth. “You don’t care what I did, do you, Joey?” He gurgled.

  I took a big gulp of wine and continued with my poop saga. “I just shook my head like an idiot and told her she shouldn’t take it into the house. Finally, Lisa came to the door all chipper. You know how fake nice she is? I smiled back, but mine was more a shit-eating grin.”

  “Language!” my daughter admonished me.

  “Well,” I continued, ignoring my teenage conscience, “then I just gave in and did it. What else could I do? I handed the bag of shit to her,” I glanced at Bethany, daring her to correct me again, “and said, ‘I believe this is yours.’” Eddie snorted milk out his nose. “I explained its origin, and asked, as sweetly as possible, that she keep her dog at her house.”

  Eddie declared, “Good for you, Anna!”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. It wiped that smile off Lisa’s face, for sure. She said I didn’t have to bring it over. She would have come to pick it up if I’d just called. Damn. She completely missed the point.”

  “Lang—!” Bethany started. Eddie cut her off by holding up his hand, palm to her. She would pick at me, but she wouldn’t defy her father.

  Mr. Fixit morphed into Professor Wixim. “Think
about it, Anna. This has two distinct sides. Although we want Lisa’s dog to never crap in our yard, she is confident that her mere willingness to clean up the individual piles at your daily request is sufficient to keep peace and harmony. No amount of explaining can fix this. It’s just the way people are. Not people like us. But the rest of them.”

  Bethany groaned. “People like you two. I’m one of them.”

  “We know, Bethany,” I said. “After dinner, you can pooper-scoop the whole yard for us. That might help you appreciate the Wixim perspective.”

  She ran to her room and slammed the door. Joey began to wail. Stink the cat licked spilled milk off the floor under the highchair. Eddie laughed and came over to hug me. As my mind returned to me, I realized that attempting to comprehend the reasoning ability, or lack of it, of the rest of the human race was exacting a huge toll on my own intellect.

  Best to just give up.

  | | | |

  Back on the day after I died, Eddie sits alone on our driveway and throws a wet, chewed tennis ball for Lucy, our neighbor’s black Labrador. Although we were declared “not dog people” by the rest of humanity, this sweet canine never got the memo. She adores Eddie. Lucy chases the tennis ball as it bounces through the trees and turns to race back to her friend. Although he’s watching her, Eddie doesn’t react when Lucy pauses to dump a fresh load on the edge of our lawn.

  Whoa, he is really gone. No, I am really gone. Poor Eddie.

  Then I feel the tug—so much like when he crept into our bedroom at night, no talking, in the dark, and got into the bed. That feeling of having him nearby, so close and quiet. Wanting to roll to him, my Eddie. But no, it hurts too much. I will not listen to him think. Keep me out of that head. I think he knows I’m here, but I will not go into that head.

  Lucy romps joyfully back to Eddie, who sits on the driveway and wraps his arms around her neck. This playful three-year-old twitches with excitement whenever she sees him and wants to play fetch, but she settles down in his arms and lets him hold onto her.

  Eddie is sitting still.

  Lucy is sitting still.

  These are things that never happened when I walked among the living. How did things change so fast? And why am I wasting time thinking about dogs?

  10

  Bookstore Shenanigans

  “G’night, Anna,” Eddie whispered as he kissed my forehead. I opened my eyes in time to see him remove the book from my stomach. He picked up our sleeping baby boy from beside me and carried him to his bassinette.

  Joey is an infant, barely beyond a newborn. My body is still pudgy with retained water. Great. I can’t even follow the time line of my own life.

  “It’s all right, Anna,” my mother’s voice breaks in. “You’re traveling on thoughts and associations instead of on a forward time line.”

  “Eddie looks good here. I always liked him in his scrubs.”

  She makes a noise like “hrmpff” and leaves me to watch my life, like old TV reruns from which I cannot turn away.

  When Eddie came back to turn out the light, he saw me watching him. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “That’s all right. I had a little nap. Come here and see me. I miss you.” I yawned and stretched.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and held my hand, and we whispered together.

  “How’s the new book?” He picked it up and checked my page. “Going slow? Do you like it?”

  “I love it, but reading makes me sleepy these days. I have to keep rereading pages to remember where I was.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “It’s about a mom who disappears and her odd engineer husband. She used to be an architect. I like it so far.”

  Joey gave a content baby sigh and wrestled his strong arms up and out of his wrap. Eddie and I both froze and waited for him to settle back down. After a few little grunts, he did.

  “Want a glass of wine?” Eddie whispered and pointed to the door.

  “Oh, yes, please.” I wiggled out of the covers. He took my hand, and we snuck out of our own bedroom.

  We snuggled together on the couch in our quiet house and shared a whole bottle of wine. That’s when I told Eddie about my bookstore adventure. My life with a new baby was in quiet, slow-motion, autopilot mode, with long days somehow comprising short weeks, so even a trip to the bookstore was fodder for analysis.

  “It happened again. The guy at the bookstore asked me to buy a membership card.”

  “Huh. Too bad for them. Even I know you’ll never do that. You’re way too cheap.”

  “Well, yeah, there’s that, and I like being anonymous. If I had one of those cards, they’d know every book I bought.”

  “They already do, Anna. You use your credit card, right?”

  Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I drained my glass before I triumphantly reported, “Today, I got the discount without the card.”

  “What?” He refilled my wine glass. “How’d you do that?”

  “By being very, very observant.”

  He laughed. “You? Observant? You don’t pay attention to anything.”

  “Don’t laugh at me. I was paying attention today, and it paid off. I saved eight bucks.”

  He took a slurp of his wine and covered us with the blanket on the couch. “Tell me all about it, please.”

  So I told him. I’d heard the cashier ask a customer ahead of me for her discount card. When the lady said she didn’t have it with her, the cashier asked for her name and looked her up that way. He didn’t even ask for identification.

  So when it was my turn and I was asked for my discount card, I lied and said, “I forgot to bring it.”

  Then he asked, “What’s your last name?”

  I met Eddie’s smiling eyes and confessed, “I said ‘Muckenfuss.’”

  “Seriously? Muckenfuss?” Eddie mimicked what the cashier was undoubtedly thinking when he’d asked me to spell it.

  “Yep. Then I spelled it for him, but I was nervous that I would get caught. When he asked for my first name, I lost my nerve and thought I should just give it up and run. What if they were recording the whole charade on a security camera?”

  “You’re sneaky and paranoid. And like an onion. Year after year I just keep finding more interesting layers of my wife,” he mused.

  “You’ll never know all of me. I’m way too complex.” The wine was going straight to my head, which I rested on his shoulder.

  “So, he found a Muckenfuss then?”

  “Yeah. That’s the funny part. I said something like, ‘I think it’s probably under my daughter’s name,’ thinking that would end the panic induced by lying. I was digging in my purse for some cash when I heard him repeating, ‘Emily? Is it Emily? Ma’am, is your daughter Emily?’

  “That’s when I realized he was talking to me. I looked up from my mess of a purse with a dumb look on my face and mouth hanging open and said something smart like, ‘Huh?’

  “He said, “You can use your daughter’s card. We allow family discounts. Is her name Emily Muckenfuss?’

  “I said, ‘Yes. That’s her.’ My hand shook as I gave him some cash, afraid to get caught if I used my credit card.”

  Eddie lost it. He doubled over laughing.

  “Shh!” I giggled with him. “Don’t wake Joey.”

  “Oh, man, that was so worth the eight bucks!”

  I still felt guilty about it and asked Eddie’s opinion, hoping for reassurance. “Was this petty theft? Did it cost Emily Muckenfuss anything that I used her discount card and I didn’t even know her?”

  Despite his laughter, he didn’t disappoint me: Eddie took my side. “Nah. It’s the store’s fault that their lax discount policy doesn’t require having the actual card.” He hugged me and said, “Anna, the world is immensely improved by your presence.”

  My husband used to love me. And then, he stopped.

  | | | |

  A couple of years later, I was in a different bookstore with my kids in tow. Bethany had Jo
ey by the hand while we waited in the slow line to purchase a big pile of books. I switched to the other line, but my presence just made that one go slower and the other one speed up.

  When it was finally my turn, the cashier asked for my membership card, and I was honest this time to make up for the Muckenfuss saga and said I didn’t have one. He asked if I wanted one, and of course I asked if they were free. He said not for most people but it would be essentially free for me that day. He said the card cost ten dollars and gave a ten percent discount. Since I was spending almost a hundred dollars, the ten-dollar card and the ten percent discount would cancel each other out.

  Well! This was an entirely new way of looking at things. No one had ever done the math for me before. I had no frugal card left to play, so I pulled out my privacy-freak trump card and asked, “Do I have to use my real name?”

  From my shoulder, I heard Bethany admonish me with a two syllable, “Mom!”

  The clerk smiled indulgently and said, “You can be whoever you wish to be.” He sort of sounded like a wizard. Or maybe he was my fairy godmother. Bethany stood at my side, agitated and embarrassed, likely calculating the years until she could drive herself to the bookstore and avoid her mother’s shenanigans.

  As I considered my identity choices—Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, Freddy Mercury—I glanced at Bethany and winked. She rolled her eyes when I said, “I am Martha Washington and I would like to buy a free membership card.”

  He asked for my address. When I asked whether that had to be correct, he grinned. He was on my team. Bethany pulled Joey away from me to look at a gumball machine—anything to escape from the hell of my presence. We settled on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the phone number I used was one from my old apartment in college.

  Bethany didn’t waste a minute to tell on her ridiculous mother to her sane father that night. “Daddy, Mom gave the guy at the bookstore a fake name to get a discount card!” she announced at dinner. Joey, wide-eyed two-year-old, nodded his agreement. Their mother was nuts.

 

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