The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  Now, what was it my husband wanted? Coriander? Ground, not the seeds?

  December

  A WEEK AFTER WE MOVED TO CALIFORNIA OUR DOG, BODHI, RAN AWAY. It was my fault. I left the front door wide open. I’m sure he was in shock. We were all in shock: the cloudless skies, the smiling baristas, the drivers that let you into the stream of traffic. What was wrong with these people? Surely they couldn’t be this happy. Was it the six months a year of constant sunshine? Could this explain why they walked across the street so slowly, looking stunned and sometimes a little screwyouish, especially when you were trying to make a right-hand turn in your car?

  We were all adjusting, but it was hardest for Bodhi. Just a few days ago his yard was fourteen acres of woods, fields and meadows. Now he was confined to a small fenced-in area and to heap insult upon insult, it seemed every other dog in California was named Bodhi. Who knew that what was a one-of-a-kind name in Maine was the dog equivalent of Smith in the Bay Area, where if dogs weren’t named Bodhi they were named something that rhymed with Bodhi, like Oatie, or Cody or Roady. That kind of thing could make anybody a little disoriented.

  I made signs and posted them around the neighborhood and in town. I wrote a letter and slipped it into every mailbox on our street. I got a call the next morning.

  “Is this the house that lost the dog?” said a man.

  “Yes! Did you find him?” I cried.

  “Do you know it’s illegal to put unsolicited mail into people’s private mailboxes? You could be arrested for that.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “I’m perfectly serious,” the man said.

  “But we lost our dog.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What you did is illegal,” he said.

  “But we just moved here and we lost our dog,” I whispered.

  “Maybe you should move back,” said the man and hung up.

  You can tell a lot about people by the command they use to tell their dogs to shit. There are many different commands in the Language of Elimination, just like in the Language of the Eskimo there are many different words for snow. Here are some examples:

  Do your business.

  Hurry up.

  Do it.

  Do it now.

  It’s freaking cold out here. DO IT RIGHT NOW.

  Go potty.

  Go poo.

  Do you feel like making poo?

  Do your duty.

  The Do Your Business people are usually male. Or females with Type A personalities. Which in my experience are all females over a certain age. Many females start out as Go Poo people and by the time they reach forty they turn into Do Your Business people.

  The Hurry Up people clean the pads of the dog’s feet with baby wipes before allowing them back into the house. The Hurry Up woman talks to herself in the car. She says: Calm down, this is not a catastrophe. That asshole cut in front of me—it’s not the end of the world. Perhaps he’s having a bad day. Perhaps he just got fired from work or found out he has genital herpes.

  The Do It, Do It Now, and It’s Freaking Cold Out Here DO IT RIGHT NOW people tend to live in the Northeast or Minnesota. They are usually jocks and they have a low percentage of body fat. They may do jumping jacks or make snow angels or twirl around while waiting for their dog to crap. They like to swat their dog on the butt after he’s taken a particularly big shit.

  The Go Potty and Go Poo people are without exception married with children, and usually highly educated. Often as they stand there on the sidewalk waiting for their dog to shit they are thinking about how all day long all they say is Go Potty and Go Poo and they never would have attended Princeton, Harvard, or Yale if someone had told them that ten years later they’d be talking to their dog exactly the same way they talk to their toddler. They would have saved themselves the money and the all-nighters spent in the library and just gone to some State U, where the weekends started on Wednesday nights and ended on Mondays.

  The Do You Feel Like Making Poo? people tend to be in the counseling professions. Often they are practitioners of Reiki, massage therapists, or life coaches. If you are fortunate enough to be walking your dog at the same time as a Do You Feel Like Making Poo? person, you will be offered helpful suggestions such as: an empty feeling is telling me something important. They are very nice people. If you forget to bring a bag they will give you one of their bags. If you say, no, thank you, I’m allergic to plastic, they’ll scoop up your dog’s poo and take it home with them.

  And finally, we come to the Do Your Duty people. I am a Do Your Duty person. Now, Do Your Duty people are sometimes mistaken for Do Your Doodie people. This is a big mistake, as the two types could not be more different. Do Your Duty people are either lawyers or doctors or the children of lawyers and doctors. Do Your Doodie people are clowns. No, really, I mean it—clowns, or whatever politically correct name they have for themselves now.

  I am a Do Your Duty legacy, as my parents (both in the medical professions—my father a retired pediatrician and my mother the director of a psychiatric ward) used Do Your Duty with great success on our childhood dog, Greta. You know you are a Do Your Duty legacy if one of your memories is of your mother asking you if you had a BM today.

  I am not proud to be a Do Your Duty person, I find the phrase a little cold and Third Reichish, but you can’t help the elimination phrase that’s been passed down to you. If I could, I’d make a new category and become a How About You Do It on the $3,000 Rug person.

  Ben was only two when Bodhi ran away, so he doesn’t remember how empty the house was without him or how mad my husband was at me for leaving the front door open. It was a sign that we never should have made the move across the country to a place where we had no family or friends. We should have left Bodhi in Maine with my sister Sara, where he could have lived his life being the one-of-a-kind dog he really was. But we were selfish. We could not imagine our new life without Bodhi in it.

  We were lucky. A doctor found Bodhi and took him to his house. Then this kind doctor posted notices at all the pounds and area vets even though he’d instantly fallen in love with Bodhi and decided he would keep him if nobody came to claim him.

  It was a shimmering Northern California day when we got Bodhi back. We were so grateful that we gave the doctor a wad of cash and a package of Fudge Stripe Cookies (Ben’s contribution), neither of which he accepted. He left quickly. He had tears in his eyes. I think Bodhi would have had a fine life with this man, a different life to be sure, but a fine, happy life, but I can’t think too much about that because you could drive yourself crazy thinking about all the lives you almost lived but didn’t.

  It’s seven years later, and I am watching Bodhi poop on my antique kilim rug because he’s too lame and incontinent to make it outside anymore. I will never have to say Do Your Duty again. In fact, I am no longer in charge of his doodie. Neither, it appears, is he.

  I get the roll of paper towels and the spray bottle of 409.

  “Bad boy,” I say, but I don’t mean it. His decline is heartbreaking. Soon we will have to do something about it.

  After we found Bodhi, I suggested to my husband that we rename him. Life might be easier for him if he had more of a stand-out name. Something to make him feel special again. Something retro, a name that hadn’t yet resurfaced and become fashionable—like Spot.

  “Spot?” said my husband.

  “Yes. Nobody in the Bay Area would name their dog Spot,” I say. “Dogs in Northern California are named after gods and operas and planets. You have Hera and Puccini and Saturn, but no Spot.”

  “Barky,” said Ben.

  “That would be perfect,” I said, “if only he barked.”

  Bodhi never barked, not even when robbers backed their van up to our house and carted nearly everything away, including all my husband’s suits and Ben’s globe (which explains why to this day he thinks Florida is a continent).

  “How about Bodhi spelled Bodi?” said my husband.

  “Like Patrick Swayze i
n that surf movie?” I said.

  “I think this is a terrible idea. You can’t just change somebody’s name,” said my husband.

  “Even if they’re going through a midlife crisis?”

  “Dogs don’t go through a midlife crisis.”

  “Of course they do. Bodhi’s seven—that’s forty-nine in people years. That’s why he ran away. He needs a new name. He needs to shake things up. He’s wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.”

  “I’ll tell you what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. Eat, sleep, shit, drool, look at us wistfully, and catch balls. The same thing he did with the first part of his life.”

  I was getting nowhere. I decided to speak in a language my husband could understand: “Bodhi’s running away was his 108-day Outward Bound course. His ascent on Mount McKinley He’s looking for a new identity. He wants to reinvent himself.”

  This was a bit of flattery. My husband did a 108-day Outward Bound course and made an ascent on Mount McKinley.

  “Didn’t you have a secret name on the OB course? Like Trail-feather or Mongo?” I asked.

  My husband glared at me. “Have you been reading my journal?”

  At that time we’d been together for eight years. Did he really think I was still reading his journal?

  I couldn’t get anyone to agree with me to change Bodhi’s name so I changed it secretly. When my family was around I called him Bodhi, but when I was alone in the house I called him Spot. Bodhi had no idea I was talking to him, but calling him Spot made me unduly happy, as though I’d found a way to cheat time. I felt like a child again, like he and I were living inside the Dick and Jane books I read when I was a kid. This was a world where nothing bad ever happened, where dogs stayed puppies forever, where nobody became incontinent or had any problems getting up off the floor.

  I ran away from home once when I was eleven. Why? Well, it could have been for any number of reasons. I was wrongly accused of eating more than my share of the Nilla Wafers. I was wrongly accused of eating an entire one-pound package of Twizzlers. I was rightly accused of eating six bowls of tapioca.

  “I’m going to run away,” I told my mother.

  “Need any help packing?” she asked.

  I remember the feeling of freedom as I walked down the street. It was summer. The air smelled of tar and faintly of the sea. I had a secret name for myself. Whenever I endured some hardship, something that would literally bring me to my knees, like being forced to muck out the horse’s stall or weed rhubarb, I became Sara Crewe of A Little Princess. It was the orphan Sara who was running away, in search of her savior who unbeknownst to her was living in the building across the street from her mouse-infested garret.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” said my father, pulling up behind me in the Plymouth Valiant.

  Dawn was in the front seat sucking on a Charms Blow Pop that she had saved from the previous Sunday’s candy day She was a saver and I was a spender. It was so annoying.

  I kept running away. They kept creeping behind me in the Valiant, cramping my style. Sammy Johns’s “Chevy Van” was playing on the radio, and despite the dire situation I perked up. Every fifth-grade girl I knew loved that song (although none of us knew what it was really about). I began singing along.

  I gave a girl a ride in my wagon

  She crawled in and took control

  She was tired ’cause her mind was a-draggin’

  I said, get some sleep and dream of rock and roll

  ‘Cause like a princess she was layin there

  Moonlight dancin off her hair

  She woke up and took me by the hand

  We made love in my Chevy van

  And that’s all right with me.

  I had never seen a Chevy van but I really wanted to lie in the back of one. Thinking about it made me all tingly.

  “You should get in the car,” warned Dawn.

  “Get the hell in the car,” shouted my father, stabbing his fingers at the radio dial, trying to turn it off.

  I got in the car and started sobbing. The kind of sobbing that Sara Crewe must have done when she found out her father’s friend, Mr. Carmichael, had been looking for her the whole time she had been emptying chamberpots and befriending mice.

  The next day my father took me to Woolworth’s. He let me buy all the candy I wanted, even though it wasn’t Sunday. I bought fudge and peanut brittle and a box of Mike and Ike’s for my mother. I bought nothing for my sisters.

  After I was done stuffing my face he asked me why I had run away.

  “I want to live somewhere different,” I told him.

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere where there aren’t so many antiques,” I said.

  We lived in a 1700s colonial that my parents had painstakingly restored and decorated with period pieces. We watched TV on uncomfortable wooden settees. We slept on horsehair mattresses and every Christmas we stuck cloves into oranges to make pomanders.

  “One day you’ll appreciate the antiques,” said my father.

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  On the way home I looked out the window and whispered the truth. “I wish I was an only child.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that,” said my father.

  “You could send me to boarding school,” I said.

  All the girls in the books that I read went to boarding school. It sounded romantic and glamorous.

  “You would miss your sisters,” he said, after a pause.

  “No, I would not.”

  “You don’t think so, but you would.”

  When my father was five his mother died, and he was sent away to boarding school, but he wouldn’t tell me that for another ten years. It would take another ten years and a child of my own for me to grasp the magnitude of this fact.

  My father reached across the seat, picked up my hand and held it. He was not a hand-holder and he didn’t hold my hand for very long, but it was enough.

  When we got home I gave my mother the box of Mike and Ike’s.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said.

  I went up to my room. Through the open window I could hear my sisters playing outside: the pounding of their feet on the lawn as they did round-offs and back flips; the soft thrum of their voices as they lay in the grass and stared up at the sky.

  I was very full from all the fudge and peanut brittle. Right before dinner my mother came upstairs and rapped on the frame of the bedroom door.

  “I would have found you,” she said. “I wouldn’t have let you go. You know that, don’t you?”

  I gave a little groan. “My stomach hurts.”

  “I’m sure it does,” she said. “Have you had a BM today?”

  There have been times in my life when I envied Bodhi. The day we brought Ben home from the hospital, for instance, and he cried for six hours without stopping until I screamed, “What the fuck have we done!” at my husband. Bodhi heaved a big I-told-you-having-this-baby-was-a-bad-idea sigh and went upstairs and stayed upstairs until Ben turned two.

  Things I do not envy about Bodhi: he has had to eat the same thing day in and day out for thirteen years; he has never had dinner at Dona Tomas; he has no idea that we’re plotting his death.

  We’ve arranged to have him euthanized at home. Our friends who have been through this tell us this is the humane thing to do, but it feels like we’ve paid a thug to come in and shoot him in the head. We’ve had many conversations with the vet. The vet is not a thug. He’s gentle and patient and we keep telling him the same things over and over again.

  He can’t make it up the stairs anymore. But we’ll carry him.

  He can’t make it outside. But we’ll pull him in the wagon.

  He’s confined to one room. But we live in a one-room shanty.

  And then one day when we tell the vet he can’t make it up the stairs anymore for the umpteenth time the vet says, How about I come next Sunday?

  How does one go about the days burden
ed with this terrible knowledge?

  I try to act perfectly normal around Bodhi. I don’t want him to suspect anything is wrong. He’s a typical Lab: he parses everything with his heart. If I do anything out of the ordinary he will know something’s up. So I say what I have always said. I say “bad boy,” when he pees on the hardwood floor. I say “yuck” when I wipe the twin strands of drool off his muzzle. But in my mind I am imagining him on his best day. A svelte one hundred pounds, leaping off a rock into the middle of the St. George River in Maine. Gobbling down an entire cooked turkey that we had left on the counter to cool.

  I must have a very strange look on my face when I’m summoning up these memories, a kind of twisted grin because Bodhi gives his worried-for-the-people-I-love murmur. Erm, Erm, he says, trying to comfort me.

  “No, it’s all right,” I say, trying to focus on him flying through the air, enjoying the perfectly browned turkey breast. But right after he leaped off that rock he climbed back up another one and in doing so tore his Achilles tendon.

  There was lots of blood. We raced him to the vet.

  And that turkey he ate was for our Thanksgiving dinner, which was put on hold because (A) we no longer had a turkey and (B) our dog had eaten an entire turkey!

  There was lots of vomit. We raced him to the vet.

  We call our old friend the vet. What do we do? How do we prepare Bodhi? Really we are asking what do we do? How do we prepare ourselves?

  The vet knows this, of course, and his answer for both of us is treats. Treats apparently distract the dog from the fact he is about to be given an injection and die. Treats will distract us too, from the fact that we are horrible people who set up the appointment where our beloved dog will be given an injection and die.

  I go to the pet store. I get the storeroom guy to help me put Bodhi in a carriage and then I wheel him through the aisles. He holds his head erect like Henry the VIII. Anything he shows the least amount of interest in I buy: Pup-Peroni, pig’s ears, Baa-Baa-Q’s and liver biscotti. Bodhi is drooling all over the carriage in anticipation, but I’m sure they’re used to that kind of thing. We are in a pet store, after all, and we are in California, where people have birthday parties for their dogs and take them on day trips to Napa where they drink special doggie wine and do doga. I race past the toy and ball aisle. We are on the other side of toys. We are also on the other side of treats supplemented with omega-3’s and wheatgrass. We are not, however, on the other side of Woofy Pop. I toss a package into the carriage.