Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  “What was wrong with her?”

  “Nothing. She was an incredible hypochondriac. Still is. She went to a million doctors. Every one of them said she was a hundred percent healthy. But she didn’t believe ’em. Told them they were all quacks. She used to say that she just felt things too strongly. I remember her always going, ‘Life makes me sick.’ And it did. She hurt all the time. Or she was exhausted, even though she didn’t do a fucking thing. My dad would come home from work and I’d make dinner after I did my homework. Horace would bring her the food on a tray and she’d eat in bed. I’d clean up.”

  Anna adjusted her weight so I wasn’t quite so heavy on top of her. She didn’t shift enough to topple me off. She wanted me on top of her, which made me happy. “All we did was argue,” she went on. “About everything. My clothes. My lipstick—she didn’t want me wearing any, and all I wanted to do was wear the brightest, reddest, most garish stuff I could smear on. Does ‘smear’ get you hot?”

  “No. Schmear gets me hot. Big difference. ‘Smear’ is an actual English word.”

  “Oh. Right. Anyway … the biggest fight we had was over a school dance. One day, when I was, I don’t know, eleven or twelve, she came into my room on a Saturday, around five o’clock, and said, ‘Why aren’t you dressed?’ And I said, ‘For what?’ She went, ‘Young lady, there is a dance at your school and it starts at six sharp!’ I went, ‘What are you talking about?’ She just kept saying, ‘Get dressed! You get dressed now! There are boys goin’ to this dance and you are goin’ if I have to drag you there myself!’ I didn’t even know about any dance. And if I did, there was no chance in hell I was gonna go. Boys? Dancing? Getting dressed up? Oh my god, that was a nightmare for me. So I just shook my head. She screamed at me for what seemed like half an hour, but I didn’t move or say a word. I just kept shaking my head.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She went into my closet, took out my favorite skirt, and went downstairs. She came back up with the skirt and a pair of scissors. She said, ‘You get dressed right this minute or I’m gonna cut up your favorite skirt.’ I didn’t move. So she cut it to ribbons. I wanted to cry—I loved that skirt. It was dark green and had these little pleats. But I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. So she took my favorite shirt and she cut that up, too. Then another skirt, and a dress. When she saw that she could cut up every single piece of clothing I had and I still wasn’t going to speak to her or go to the damn dance, she left.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  Anna laughed. It was a little harsh but it still was Anna laughing. “To the dance. By herself. I heard from one of my friends that she pretended I was there. She was going up to other mothers and saying things like ‘Have you seen my Anna? I don’t know where she got off to!’”

  I started to say something, but she was on a roll now.

  “You know what happened to you in the pantry? That wasn’t the first time. When I was sixteen, some boy was taking me to the prom. He picked me up at home, here, and when I came downstairs in my prom dress, she was kissing him on the couch. And I mean practically sucking his brains out of his head.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The boy was pretty embarrassed. Thinking back on it … can you imagine? He didn’t know what the hell to do. But he just kind of hopped off her and acted like nothing had happened, and then he took me to the prom. When we were almost out the door, my mother said, ‘Bye, honey, have a wonderful time. I’ll be here when you come home.’ She wasn’t even talking to me. She was talking to Jimmy—Jimmy Williams, that was the boy’s name. He didn’t come in the house afterward. Actually, he didn’t even take me to the prom. He just dropped me off at the gym and ran like hell. I didn’t go in. I hung out by myself for a couple of hours, then got a ride home. My mother was waiting in the living room when I got there. All dressed up, tons of makeup. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ That’s what she asked. ‘That Jimmy’s an awful nice boy. You should bring him around more often.’”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing. I thought about saying a million things, but I knew it would get really bad if I even opened my mouth. I just went upstairs.”

  “So why aren’t you angry? Or at least angrier.”

  She thought about this one for a while. Then she said, “’Cause I won. I left home the second I could, I went where I wanted to go, got a scholarship so I didn’t have to take anything from them—for two or three years, nobody in my family even knew where I lived. I learned what I wanted to learn, started becoming who I wanted to be.” She smiled that smile, the one that could only be meant for me. “I met who I wanted to meet. Once I learned I didn’t have to be them, I wasn’t angry. I was just relieved.”

  “So why the tears?”

  Now she shifted my weight off her, rolled to her right, and settled on her back. She smiled, happy to breathe freely again. “Because … I know I’ll never actually have to come back here and live this life. But sometimes you see your past and, I don’t know, I can’t help thinking that it’s still risky. Something could happen that’ll turn me from the princess back into Cinderella, no matter where I am.” She waved her arm around so that it took in the yard, the town, the whole world. “It’s just all so awful. The emptiness. The people. The sadness. Sometimes it feels so overwhelming to me, so inescapable.”

  “I won’t turn into your father,” I said. “And you definitely won’t become your mother. I’ll never be distant from you. I’m always going to be so interested in you and everything you do, you won’t be able to stand it. You can wear the most garish lipstick in the world, I will never ask you to go to any place of worship as long as you live, and when we have a guaranteed-to-be-perfect child, I swear I’m going to be so loving and caring that you’ll be nauseous just thinking about it. I can’t do anything about the emptiness in the real world. All I can do is make sure that our life together is never empty. Or sad. Or anything you don’t want it to be.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know you think that. And I love you very much.”

  “I am getting this really weird, overpowering desire to go shoot some form of refrigeration device, however. Is that a problem?”

  She said it wasn’t.

  So we went back inside. Anna’s mother didn’t grab my testicles again, although she did rub her breasts up against my shoulder twice. Her father spoke to me once, asking me if I wanted a drink. Her brothers were friendly and one of them even patted me on the back and told me to take good care of his sister.

  The next day we all met at Emily’s house for brunch, which was chipped beef on toast. Frozen chipped beef on toast. I was mostly thrilled that the toast wasn’t molded into the shape of a turtle.

  I found out many things about the Johnsons during that trip, but one of the oddest was that none of them seemed to have any real friends. Even Anna, as I thought about it. She hadn’t stayed in close contact with her college pals. She didn’t have any childhood chums who called or e-mailed her. The Johnsons’ friends were one another, even though none of them seemed to like the others much. They didn’t talk about anything of import or share any real intimacy. It was a bit like Invaders from Mars—they took the form of humans, but with the exception of Anna they all seemed vaguely alien and soulless.

  I was the guy who was supposed to be bad with people, good with things that barked and meowed. But I had relationships. I felt connections. I had people I loved and cared about or, at the very least, was interested in, whether they ran a bowling alley in my hometown or were Norwegian women who cried all the time and annoyed the hell out of me. In some way, I cared about everyone I’d ever gotten close to. My parents were difficult—they’d made mistakes and I didn’t always like them, but I loved them. Even Teddy. Maybe especially Teddy. I didn’t like the Teddy who lived in the present, but I loved the Teddy from the past probably more than anyone I’d ever known until I met Anna.

  Anna and I couldn’t pretend that the past didn’t exist. But we didn’t have to allow it t
o live with us every minute of every day. Our lives apart, before we met, were entirely different from our life together. We were creating something new. Something we refused to bundle up and throw in with the detritus of our pasts. Still, I was beginning to understand Anna’s worries about parenthood. If the Johnson clan had taught me everything I knew about family, I’d have a few hesitations, too. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I was really strong enough to beat my way through the Johnson past to make our family work. Worse, I knew that Anna was wondering the same thing.

  Despite so many things simmering under the surface, despite the entanglements and the complicated relationships, the weekend went off without a hitch. The wedding was perfectly pleasant as long as one overlooked the total underlying despair that permeated everything from the Swiss cheese chunks served as appetizers to the groom’s tuxedo, which was approximately seven sizes too big. The after-party was perfectly palatable. Anna’s dad, Todd, downed six or seven scotches and spoke to me a second time. (Okay, he asked me where I’d served in the armed forces, and when I stared at him, bewildered, he said, “I thought you were a vet.” The conversation didn’t progress much beyond that, but I considered it a solid start.)

  The brunch at Emily and Roger’s (the Reagan-worshipping CPA) was tolerable. Emily’s neighbor, a nasal woman named Gretchen, insisted on telling me about every single piece of artwork in her house and how much each piece cost, but even that didn’t really bother me. (I kept myself occupied by imagining how ugly each too-expensive-for-me-to-buy painting or sculpture probably was.) I kept my eye out for Anna and made my way over to her if any interaction looked remotely traumatic or potentially difficult. And I even saw her smile three or four times during the course of the bash.

  The brunch started at eleven. The chipped beef was gone by twelve-thirty. The alcohol had pretty much disappeared by one-thirty. At two, we kissed appropriate cheeks, made the necessary thank-yous, wished the best of luck to everyone who needed or expected it, and got a taxi to the airport, telling the driver to step on it. In the back seat of the comfortably rickety cab, smelling of old leather and a decade of fast food sandwiches, all we cared about was that we were together.

  Promises had been made and allegiances had been sworn. Now it was time to see if we were capable of making life conform to our desires.

  By dinnertime, we were back on Greenwich Avenue with our cats and dogs and our foul-mouthed parrot and the pizza smells and honking car horns and urinating drunk guys on the street. We were where we both wanted to be, and where we both belonged.

  * * *

  From the New York Daily Examiner:

  ASK DR. BOB

  Dr. Robert Heller is one of New York’s leading veterinarians. He is the author of a book about taking care of pets, They Have Nothing but Their Kindness, and is a regular on the Today show, with his monthly segment, “The Vetting Zoo.” Dr. Bob takes care of cats, dogs, horses, birds, snakes, turtles, frogs, small pigs, snails, various kinds of fish, and many varieties of rodents. You can e-mail him at AskDrBob@NYDE.com and ask him any question about the animal you love. His column runs Tuesdays and Thursdays in NYC’s most popular newspaper.

  Dear Dr. Bob:

  My husband, Ken, and I have two dogs, Bjorn (a wirehaired fox terrier) and Ivan (a German shepherd). Bjorn, the sweetest little thing imaginable, is not doing well. I know we’re going to have to put him down soon, and this has created a problem for Ken and I. Ken wants to get another dog now. He doesn’t want Ivan, who has lived with Bjorn since he was a puppy, to mourn and be sad when Bjorn crosses over. He believes that Ivan needs companionship and shouldn’t have to experience being an “only dog” (that’s the way Ken refers to life after Bjorn). I just can’t replace my baby so easily. Bjorn is much more my dog, and Ivan is much more Ken’s. Bjorn sleeps next to me, and while Ivan isn’t allowed to sleep on the bed because he’s so big, he sleeps on the floor on Ken’s side and follows Ken wherever he goes. I’m not ready to simply discard Bjorn and pretend to love a newcomer. Ken feels we have to do what is right for Ivan. But I don’t think he’ll feel a loss like this the same way I will. I feel like I’m about to lose my right arm, and I’m not ready to get a new one. What advice can you give me?

  Sincerely,

  —Getting Ready to Mourn for Bjorn

  Dear Ready:

  First of all, I do feel your pain. That’s one of the reasons I hate to be so picky, but I’m afraid I can’t help myself: It’s “a problem for Ken and me” not “Ken and I.” I know that people write in for pet advice, not grammar advice, but I’m starting to think that our whole culture is falling apart because no one knows how to communicate properly anymore. Actually, our whole culture is falling apart for many reasons, one of them an amazing (at least to me) lack of compassion for people less fortunate than ourselves. But poor communication skills and bad grammar don’t help the cause, okay? I know that, for some weird reason, people think that “I” sounds more intelligent than “me” in sentences like the one you wrote. But it doesn’t. It just makes people sound like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. I will be glad to explain and pontificate further on this subject so that you never make such an error in the future. If you have any desire to get the lecture, e-mail me separately and I promise to keep it private. And now on to your question.

  You and Ken do have a problem, and it’s a tough one to solve. People express their love in different ways. When love is lost, some people need to replace it right away. That doesn’t make their love less valid; it just means that they need a physical representation of their love. They can’t love a memory. Or if they can, a memory isn’t enough for them to love. Other people need time to get over their grief and can’t immediately transfer their love to another creature. Grief is cured by one thing and one thing only: time. So these people need to wait a bit before replacing a beloved pet. In the end, there is no perfect solution to your problem because it’s rooted in human nature.

  I may have a practical solution, however: Make sure you spend as much quality time with Bjorn as you can before he … um … “passes.” (Okay, this is another peeve of mine: I hate euphemisms. It’ll actually make it a lot easier to deal with Bjorn’s death if you use the real word. Bjorn isn’t passing; he’s dying. It’s not a bad word. Dying happens to everyone. It’s the ultimate common denominator, so I don’t understand why it’s such an uncommon word. Sorry. I won’t digress like this again.) Here’s my other important tip: Try loving Ivan as much as possible, too. I know he’s Ken’s dog, but make a point of petting him. Talk to him. Play with him. See if some of the emotion you feel for Bjorn can be transferred. It might not only help your problem, it might help his. If you feel able to love the dog you already have, it could allow you to feel that kind of love for a brand-new dog sooner rather than later. Here’s another thing to consider: A lot of people feel they can’t possibly love another pet after a favorite one dies. But when they’re confronted with a wonderful new animal, love just naturally follows. So don’t feel as if you’re being disloyal to Bjorn. And don’t worry that your heart won’t open again. It will. And it will happen a lot faster than you think, if you realize that not only will you be helping Ivan deal with his loss, you’ll also be helping Ken deal with his.

  —Dr. Bob

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  As I became more integrated into the daily life of Marjorie’s clinic, I became more connected to and more in tune with the community around me. Gradually, something began to occur that I found astounding: I slowly became as interested in the pet owners as I was in the pets. As they began to learn from me about how best to live with and treat their animals, I began to ascertain some truths—small and large—about life from listening to their stories and seeing how they dealt with their triumphs, their losses, and their day-to-day lives. I observed and learned and then started to keep notes on the people who were becoming an extension of my newly developing family. I’m not a hundred percent certain why I began writing about them, but I suspect
it was so I’d have a constant reminder that they were real and that I valued them. I think it was also because I knew that this family would likely prove to be temporary, that it might last only as long as there was a necessary connection: their pets and my ability to ease their pain. And as I got a little older and more attached to their world, I felt an urge to make these people—some remarkable, some remarkably ordinary—a permanent part of my life.

  LUCY NELL ROEBUCK

  Lucy Nell Roebuck was not technically a client, although we did take care of her many pets. She was our receptionist, and she became a crucial part of my daily existence. I probably spent more time listening to her talk and coo and explain—to me, to patients, to patients’ owners, to Marjorie—than I did to Anna.

  Greenwich Village has a substantial gay community, and Marjorie had a high percentage of gay pet owners as regulars. Particularly lesbians—I have no idea why, but I would guess that a third of our clientele was composed of lesbian cat owners. Long before I arrived, Lucy had started out as a lesbian cat-owning customer of the clinic. Over time, because she spent so many hours in the clinic and exhibited such curiosity about everything going on while she was there, she became a lesbian cat, dog, and pig owner who doubled as the office receptionist. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why she spent so much time hanging out at Marjorie’s refuge for injured pets and discombobulated humans: Lucy needed as much care and attention as her two lovely cats, Franklin and Eleanor.

  Lucy had come to New York from South Carolina. She thought she wanted to be a schoolteacher, but her parents repeatedly told her that she wasn’t intelligent enough. Their reasoning—remarkably faulty, because Lucy was not just bright, she was obsessed with learning—seemed to be based on nothing other than their daughter’s size. Lucy was enormously fat; she’d been fat since birth and had gotten ever fatter as she grew older. Her parents berated Lucy for her supposed lack of intelligence when she was quite young, and the fatter she got, the stupider her parents decided she was. When she hit three hundred pounds, her parents decided she wasn’t capable of grown-up decisions or grown-up anything else, so they refused to pay for her to go to college. To replace campus life, Lucy got a minimum-wage job at the local Walmart and prepared to spend the rest of her days and nights subsisting on fast food and low-level cable shows, living in the room in which she’d grown up.