Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  “There’s always a learning curve,” I explained; new smells and a break in routine caused confusion. “He’ll know the rules soon.” Then I’d grab him and say, “Bad Wiggy,” in as firm a voice as I could muster for someone so cute, then thwack him on the nose. “Bad.” It’s what trainers recommended, and it worked in Portland.

  We had a lot of fun back in Oregon, Wiggy and me. When he was young and I in my twenties, he clawed my feet in bed to wake me up, then I chased him around the apartment playing one of many games. We were always chasing each other around that apartment. Although I kept my tiny studio clean—dishes washed, papers organized—it bore all the signs of carefree bachelorhood. None of my silverware matched. The cupboard overflowed with vintage Tab, Seven-Up, and coffee shop glasses purchased at thrift stores over a decade. Shelves of books dominated the walls. Then there were his toys. Fuzzy balls, rubber chew toys, and fake mice lay scattered across the hardwood floor. Under my computer desk, not far from the bed, sat Wiggy’s “litter box.” It was just an endless series of disposable puppy pads made of diaper material that dogs-in-training use. I called it a litter box because saying “puppy pads” made it sound like I slept in view of yellow pee stains, which I did. He never took to my attempted box-training as a kit. Instead of being firmer or trying different techniques, I gave up, lazily setting the pads in a corner and changing them daily. That was a mistake.

  Surprisingly, Abby tolerated the puppy pads and found it amusing that Wiggy’s beds filled the apartment. His primary bed, a fleece lined sack, sat on the floor beside the couch. A down lap blanket he liked burrowing into lay bunched on the couch’s opposite end. I kept the closet open so he could climb in at his discretion and sleep in a pile of clothes I no longer wore. When I showered, I left my pajamas on the bath mat; this provided a place to wait until I got out and placed him in the tub to lick the water off the basin. This was our morning routine. “Everyone likes having options,” I told Abby, “even animals.” Being accommodating seemed a hallmark of a good roommate, even a good relationship skill. Like when I went grocery shopping. I’d set the paper bag down by the fridge while unloading items, and if Wiggy crawled inside it, I just left the bag on the floor for him to play and sleep in for hours. These were harmless adjustments to my environment that reflected my philosophy on cohabitation: sometimes you have to alter your lifestyle to suit the nature of the people in your life.

  It’s also why I let him dig deep channels into the interior of my couch. It was a crap thrift store hand-me-down whose purplish velveteen fit more in a goth castle than my sunny studio. So it was no loss when Wiggy clawed through the armrest and started displacing the stuffing so he could sleep there in winter. When Abby came over and asked, “Where’s Wiggy?” the answer was frequently, “In his hibernacula.” He’d stick his nose out the hole, and we’d hand him nuts and dried mango. Abby loved that. “Breakfast in bed,” she’d say. Bits of yellow foam drifted constantly across the floor as Abby and I made love on the bed and sofa. Because Wiggy enjoyed the exercise of excavation, allowing him to indulge his instinct seemed more important than preserving the structural integrity of the world’s ugliest couch. It seemed unwise to expect anyone to live contrary to their nature.

  In Oregon, Abby was a packrat. She squirreled receipts and photocopies and newspaper clippings away into cardboard boxes. When we moved in together in New York, all of that increased to smothering proportions. Boxes sat overflowing on the bedroom floor, where she frequently pawed through them in search of a Xerox or folder or sock that she needed immediately, or she’d be late for school. She kept nearly every New York Times Book Review and Sunday Magazine she bought. She let dishes and coffee cups and incense ashes pile up. Tables were usually coated with the papers and crumb-covered plates she insisted she would get to that day. Rather than folding them into dresser drawers, she draped many of her clothes over her tall IKEA shelf; pants and dresses hung as if deposited by a tidal surge. Granted, she had ADHD, but her legitimate medical condition created a source of static, as she struggled to deal with my stress, and I struggled to live comfortably amid clutter.

  While we shared a passionate physical relationship, and talked endlessly about literature and music, in our approach to daily living, Abby and I were opposites. I used file cabinets and coat hangers and kept pens in plastic containers. I rarely left ashes in trays for fear a breeze might blow them on the floor. After a meal, I immediately scrubbed pots and pans. Somehow I was tolerant of Wiggy’s accidents and muskiness, but only because, minus the prancing and weasel physiology, I recognized in Wiggy many of my own traits: the free spirit, the jester, the solitary adventurer. If Abby had ADHD, I suffered from something else, some still unnamed psycho-emotional malady I was too frightened to research. The main symptom: I preferred living alone.

  For a decade I had defined myself as a person who enjoyed solitude and inhabiting his own apartment. Whether my friends believed it or not, spending great stretches of time by myself never felt lonely, only liberating, and the fringe benefit was that no one else had to suffer the effects of me indulging my whims. Keeping my own hours, taking long road and hiking trips where and when I wanted, reading late into the night. With no one to worry about me, there was no one to neglect, miss or disappoint when I called to say, “I’m going to be home late tonight.” Bachelorhood seemed my natural state. Then I met Abby. Loving her made me wonder how much I’d been fooling myself. Life was more satisfying with someone special in it. I didn’t seem to want freedom so much as I wanted to meet my romantic companion, the love of all loves, my best friend and partner; if my apartment felt better empty, it was only because I had yet to meet the right person. Abby could be the one. Every time I walked through our messy apartment, I reminded myself: peace comes slowly; there’s always a learning curve. I loved Abby, so I squirreled my frustrations away, told myself that I needed to learn to adapt. We’d reach a compromise soon.

  Our two-bedroom apartment sat on the second floor of a hundred-year-old house. The Irish family who owned it lived on the first floor. Every morning, the scent of their cooking bacon permeated the halls. It took Abby five minutes to walk to school and me ten minutes to walk to the commuter train that led to Grand Central Station. I worked part-time in the City, the other time at home. Situated fifteen miles north of Manhattan, the “Village of Bronxville” was the poshest zip code I had ever inhabited, our apartment the largest I’d ever rented. Windows graced every room. Golden sunlight washed the interior. Views of our manicured streets could be had at any angle. We even had enough room for an office—our first separate work space. Wiggy liked it too.

  As if he were the owner and we the renters, Wiggy pranced excitedly through his new home. He sniffed every square inch of the unfamiliar carpet, then scratched his back against the books Abby shelved on the bookshelf’s lowest rung. I scattered his toys throughout the apartment, and he chewed the bloom right off the rose.

  “Aaron,” Abby frequently said, “Wiggy looks like he’s getting ready to pee.”

  I’d rush in to pick him up, and when Abby wasn’t looking, I’d take him aside for a pep talk. How could I get angry with him? I was the one who had failed to train him properly. When I lifted him to address him face-to-face, his body hung limp in my hand like a stole. “You’re making me look bad,” I said. This is how I talked to him, like a coconspirator, like he understood.

  Abby eventually devised a new arrangement. I moved Wiggy’s beds, toys and pads into the office and sealed the doorway between it and the kitchen with a tall piece of luggage. The knee-high suitcase blocked his exit without entirely shutting him off from our scents and sounds. It also sent a message. The office, bathroom and closet were his wing now. The kitchen, bedroom and living room were for humans. I made it as comfortable as possible: laid his fleece bed, my old pajamas, and the same blanket on the floor; kept the hall closet door open so he could sleep in my box of clothes. Neither he nor I liked the new arrangement, but I had Abby’s comfort to consider now,
so I voiced no complaints. He wasn’t as accepting.

  Some mornings Abby woke me saying, “Wiggy got out.” She’d been drinking coffee at the kitchen table when he sauntered past her, trotted into the living room and started riffling through her piles of New York Times.

  “All he wants is to be closer to us,” I’d say. “He’s lonely.” While I always returned him to his room, I secretly cursed her messiness and applauded his resistance. “Good work,” I’d whisper, alone in our office. “You can come out once she goes to school.” And after Abby left, I’d remove the luggage, stretch out on the couch to work on my laptop, and Wiggy would join me to run around the living room before falling asleep on a blanket on my lap.

  Putting things off isn’t normally one of my problems. But that winter, procrastination assumed the form of mantras: “We’ll take the subway ride next weekend,” and “Once things calm down a bit, we’ll take a Sunday to do the ride.” Sundays passed. Garbage trucks collected bags of autumn leaves. By the time twenty degree temperatures froze water in the cracks in our street, I tallied a list of all the things Abbey and I hadn’t done. We hadn’t visited the Statue of Liberty. We hadn’t visited my mother’s childhood home in Queens. We hadn’t openly discussed ways to lessen our rising domestic tensions. Time was part of the problem. There was never enough of it. And at age five and a half, Wiggy, it turns out, didn’t have much left.

  Abby enjoyed taking him for walks in the strips of woods lacing our neighborhood. His eyes brightened in the sunlight, fur fluffed as he sniffed dandelions and dug holes in moist dirt. Then, back home, we bathed him to combat flees and fluffed his hair further. “Look,” Abby would say. “I gave him a Mohawk.” Eventually the temperature dropped too low for walks. I bought a winter coat heavier than I’d ever owned. I never forgot about the planned subway trip, though.

  Aside from his ferret rule, all I knew about Mayor Giuliani were the standard sound bites. He’d turned Times Square into the symbol of New Corporate York. He’d eliminated the squeegee guys. He’d so efficiently shrunk the homeless population that people wondered where upstate he’d shipped them all. Many locals considered Giuliani a weasel, but I had no clue about local politics. I’d never previously set foot in the city or state before moving there. All I knew was that, from day one, NYC Health Code Section 161.01 seemed to suggest that maybe moving was a bad idea.

  Early on the morning of August 21, 2006, Abby and I were checking our luggage at the Portland airport. Everything we might need during our first week we had packed into our suitcases and carry-ons. Abby sipped coffee. Wiggy slept in his carrier. The airlines ticket agent told us, “I’m sorry, I’ll be right back.” She spoke for fifteen minutes on a phone at a distant counter. When she returned she said, “New York law prohibits ferrets within city limits.” I told her I was aware of that but didn’t see how that affected our flight into JFK. “It means commercial airlines are prohibited from even flying them into the city.”

  I’d spoken with three separate agents about pet-rules weeks before and had done everything they’d instructed: shots, pet carrier of specific dimensions, health certificate issued by a licensed vet within ten days of transport. Not one agent mentioned that this law banned us from airports. I said, “So what are our options?” Our flight was scheduled to depart in forty-five minutes. After investigating flights to White Plains, Boston and DC, she rebooked our flight to Philly with a layover in Cincinnati.

  “You really love that ferret,” she said, handing us new tickets.

  “He’s family,” I said. Numerous other people said the same thing. The Portland airport gate security, the Cincinnati flight stewardess, the beefy Philly car rental guy, all of them said, “You really love that ferret.”

  My parents found this amusing when I recounted it on the phone. When they called me in Oregon, they always asked, “How’s Abby?” Then, “How’s our grandson?” They’d been married for thirty-five years. The joke was that, as long as I had Wiggy, he was the only grandkid they were likely to get. Now my Dad liked to ask, “Is he driving Abby nuts yet?”

  Flying over Nebraska and Iowa, thoughts of Giuliani’s law sparked an adolescent resistance in me that manifested as a plan. “We’ll ride the F through Brooklyn,” I later told Abby, “the 7 through Queens. Then the 1, the A or C, the B or D, the 4, 5 or 6, completely webbing Manhattan.” In my mind, the ride took the form of a mock protest. With Wiggy dressed in a miniature sandwich board reading “Just another commuter,” maybe our minor revolt would get Wiggy’s picture in the New York Post, maybe the Village Voice. If anyone asked, “Is that a ferret in your backpack?” I’d say, “Why yes, in fact it is,” and hand them a flier. A preliminary design scheme formed in my mind. The Xeroxed front would feature two side-by-side images: a dirty, goiter-faced, one-legged pigeon eating trash by a subway vent; then, a cute sleeping Wiggy, curled atop his fleece bed. Above the images the caption would read, “Who’s the better neighbor?”

  The breadth of Wiggy’s and my travel itinerary broadened monthly. Soon I was planning to photograph him eating a knish at Katz’s Deli and sipping borsht at Veselka’s. “What if he wiggles out of his carrier?” Abby asked. “He could jump off the subway platform and be gone forever.”

  I said, “He won’t.” Back in Portland, he’d enjoyed walks in my neighborhood park, accompanied me a few times to the grocery store, once even to fetch Thai food take-out. He always traveled inside my roomy blue backpack, where he’d poke his head out and try to sniff things. Aside from the pandemonium of honking taxis and the extra eight million people, New York wasn’t so different.

  Abby said, “What if the cops catch you?”

  “I’ll say he’s got a PetCo Christmas catalog photo shoot in Midtown.’”

  Wiggy and I lived for adventure. That shared trait was one of the reasons we got along so well. He wanted to sniff and excavate new spaces wherever he went; I liked to read and learn new things and explore the furthest reaches of whatever region I was living in—especially this, our new home, one of the world’s greatest cities. Some people call ferrets nosy. I call them the Lewis and Clark of the mammal world. Plus, in Manhattan, no one would even notice him. A homeless man can take a shit on a sidewalk there and not elicit more than a sidelong glance from pedestrians. Why would a three-pound weasel draw attention?

  Like everyone else, Abby assumed I simply thought he was funny and cute. But in a deep, secret pocket of my psyche, I wanted to be Wiggy. He led the ideal life. Given a place to eat and sleep, the world became both his bedroom and frontier. Like John Muir in his Sierra Nevada sheepherding days, Wiggy spent the night wherever he wanted, explored constantly, followed his curiosity wherever it led, and got to love people at his own discretion. Cats may symbolize aloofness, but ferrets perfected it. When he got lonely, he’d find you and coil up nearby. When he wanted to be alone, he crawled inside the couch and emerged when he was ready. Back in Oregon, I had perfected this lifestyle: read, hike, eat, try and fail to forge a romantic relationship, then go back to my cave to read, hike, and eat. All I could do now was supply Wiggy the essentials for continuing that life.

  This left me in a strange situation. I was living vicariously through a weasel.

  “Uch,” Abby said. “Gross.” She stepped into our bathroom as I stood in front of the sink, getting ready for work.

  “What?”

  “What do you mean what?” she said. “Using your toothbrush to scratch your back? Nasty.”

  I looked into her eyes not face-to-face, but in her reflection in the mirror. “It’s not the brush end I’m using,” I said. “It’s the handle.” She scrunched her nose in disapproval as she lifted her nightgown and lowered herself onto the toilet.

  With Wiggy on lock-down, a trait-by-trait critique of my behavior had infiltrated our daily interactions, threatening to become the dominant thread of our conversations. Like when Abby told me, “Don’t do that with your leg.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  She placed her hand on
my knee to still its bouncing. “Tapping it all crazy.” We were at a restaurant. I had to whisper an explanation.

  “I’m a leg-tapper,” I said. “I’m full of nervous energy.” I stopped tapping to spare her the irritation, but when, unbeknownst to me, the tapping resumed, Abby shook her head, and I shrugged. “Sorry.”

  I kept tapping. The critiques continued. She disapproved of how I drank our green fruit smoothies straight from the container. “Get a glass,” she suggested.

  “Why waste the time getting a glass only to have to waste more time washing and putting it away?” I took a sip and returned the jug to the fridge.

  Another morning when she heard a loud honking coming from the shower, she pulled back the curtain and asked, “Are you blowing your nose in there?”

  Shampoo ran down my ears. “No,” I said, though I had been seconds earlier.

  She grinned. “Good, because that is nasty.” Her sister’s ex used to do that—she called it a “farmer blow”—and Abby said not only did the practice gross her out, it reminded her of that conniving, selfish dirtbag of a man who disrespected her sis. “Not even a man,” she said. “A boy.”

  Don’t drum your pen on the desk. The office smells like puppy pads. Being the target of intense reform makes you feel broken, insufficient. “Why are you nagging me?” I’d say. “I don’t nitpick everything you do.” Inevitably that deteriorated into, “If you don’t like it, too bad.” Why, I wondered, did she invite me to New York?

  One night, overwhelmed, I stepped onto the street outside the house to call my dad. “Maybe I’m not built for relationships,” I told him. It was scary to consider. Where does that leave you? Destined to spend the next forty-plus years alone and meeting brilliant, caring women you can never love or share experiences with?