The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (16 page)

“Excuse me!” I called out to her as I waved my arm. “Excuse me!”

She turned and looked at me, and I could tell she was confused as I came closer.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I laughed a little and tried to catch my breath. “But I lost…it was sudden, we lost…I…I was wondering…Can I…pet your dog?”

She looked at me oddly, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should come closer or run away screaming.

“Please?” I said, smiling a little and still breathing heavily; my voice cracked.

“Okay,” she said as she nodded and warily came closer, bringing her golden retriever with her.

I scratched the dog on its ears, and I rubbed its head. “You’re so pretty,” I said to it.

The dog was very nice and let me pet it some more. When it looked at me, it was smiling.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized to the girl, who had stood there not saying anything. “I don’t mean to be weird. This is so weird. I’m really sorry.”

“You lost your dog?” she asked me.

I nodded and smiled firmly with my lips closed.

“I miss her,” I said finally, and petted the retriever on the head one more time, and then I thanked the girl.

I turned around and went home, back to the apartment, that quiet, quiet apartment, and when I got there, I already knew that I was never going to walk that way again.

I
n February
we finally found a little house in a wonderful neighborhood that even had a park without one single tweaker, a Good Morning Tranny grilling her bacon steak at dawn, or a gang of homies dominating the picnic tables. Kids played baseball and soccer at this park, and the swing set actually still had swings. We moved in at the end of March, just in time for spring.

And puppies.

I wasted no time scouring
Petfinder.com
, the local no-kill shelter, and the county pound. I found Rosie, a seven-month-old German shepherd that had just passed her Canine Good Citizen’s test and was trained by a convicted juvenile offender as a part of his rehabilitation.

“She’s adorable,” I said to my husband as I pointed to her picture on the computer screen, showing one floppy ear.

“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t think we’re ready. I know I won’t be ready at least until this semester is over.”

A month later I found Snowball, an Alaskan malamute who was completely blind in one eye, partially deaf, and being fostered in Tacoma.

“We will talk about this when the semester ends,” my husband reminded me. “In the meantime, please stop looking at those websites. I don’t like saying no to you all the time, and every time I do, it breaks your heart. We are not ready for a dog. I am not ready for a dog, plus we have a nineteen-year-old cat with shabby kidneys. Something that big and white would look like a polar bear to him. And we need a dog that likes cats.”

I wasn’t trying to replace Bella, and we both knew that. But at the same time, I hated the quiet. I wanted to hear the tinkling of tags and the
bump-bump-bump-bump-bump
behind me when someone with a wagging tail dropped a ball, signaling that playtime needed to commence and quickly.

I wanted a friend.

The morning that my husband was to take his last final exam of the semester, I logged onto the website for the county pound. And there, halfway down the list of dogs available for adoption, was a picture of four little puppies.

“Well, there you are,” I said to the little blond baby with her head down, the only one whose face I couldn’t see.

“Today is your last final, right?” I called to my husband, who was putting his coat on in the next room.

“Yup,” he said.

“Hurry home right after you’re finished taking the test,” I advised.

“Oooh, why?” he asked as he grabbed his book bag. “Are you planning a surprise?”

“Not really,” I said, and then pointed to the screen. “We have to go and get her. That one.”

And it was fine if my husband wanted to talk about it after the test was over. That was okay. We had plenty of time to talk about if getting a dog was the right thing for us as we were driving over there to pick her up.

When my husband came home, he put down his book bag and I picked up my car keys.

“We’ll do the ‘good dog’ test,” I told him. “We’ll test her temperament, and if she’s a wild beast, if she’s aggressive, if she shows dominant signs, we won’t bring her home. How’s that?”

“I need a promise from you,” my husband said, looking simply defeated.

“I’m promising,” I said as we pulled out of the driveway and into the street.

And the moment I opened the front door to the pound, I saw her, being cuddled by the lady at the front desk.

“Can I help you?” said a woman sitting next to her.

“I’m here for her,” I said, pointing at the little blond-and-white puppy, who, when she looked at me, revealed her one pony-brown and one sparkling blue eye, both rimmed in black, like Maybelline eyeliner.

From behind me, my husband let out a gasp as if he’d been punched in the gut.

“She’s the last one left of that litter, and we never get puppies in here,” the lady who was holding her said as she came around and handed me the four-pound, cream-and-white-colored Australian shepherd mix puppy, which I then promptly handed over to my husband and watched him begin to melt like a Milky Way in the sun.

She was our girl, and by the time his hands wrapped around her little chest to hold her for the first time, he was ready for a dog.

The Extended Warranty, the Extended Waistband, and the Repairman Who Almost Became a Hostage

S
uddenly,
my treadmill came to a halt.

It didn’t let out an aching, tired groan, it didn’t shrilly emit a gasping, high-pitched shriek, it just stopped. Without much fanfare or struggle, it simply ceased operations and slowly exhaled its last breath in a near-silent
poof
.

Unbelievably, I was on it when it lapsed into the deepest of comas as it slowly rolled to a complete halt and then turned quiet. I attacked the control panel with my fingers, pushing this button and that button, then pushing them harder so the treadmill understood that I meant business, but I couldn’t get any life signals on it at all. It wouldn’t beep, wouldn’t turn on; the console and the display were dead. Nothing. There was just horrible, complete silence.

That is, until I jumped off the treadmill and gave out a whoop worthy of a hillbilly trapping a possum, because, in that moment of sudden silence, my dream had amazingly come true. It was the day I had been waiting for, the day that my investment would pay off, and it had been five years in the making, even if the timing was a little bad. In three months, I would be going on a book tour, and I wanted to lose a good thirty pounds. Because honestly, the ass had to go. It
had to go.
Man, I knew it was out of hand when I completely outgrew the size selection at Banana Republic, but I tried to tell myself they were just cutting corners and outsourcing their sizing to Caracas, where the people are much smaller and eat more fruit. Then I was at the mall when I saw a portly girl with an enormous butt in a green jacket strutting down the walkway like she was something else—really, she looked like a giant avocado. Then as she got closer, her eyes met mine. She gave me the same dirty look I gave her, and then we both gasped in horror as we realized we were both looking into the mirror. And not a metaphorical one, either. I had experienced the Awful Glimpse—a sudden and unexpected look at yourself in which you have no preparation, no warning, and no time to hide behind a couch or landmass. It is gruesome. The Awful Glimpse is an unforgiving, unfiltered portrait of the real you when you least expect it.

So in light of that nightmare, this dead treadmill was my reverie, full and bountiful and golden, come to fruition to pay me handsomely for five years of patience and five hundred dollars’ worth of Sears fitness equipment warranties.

Now, I know you think I’m a sucker for actually buying the extended warranty, and the fact of the matter is that I am. Nobody buys the extended warranties unless they’ve also just transferred some money into the bank account of the prince of Nigeria or, like my mother, are currently a member of the Decorative Spatula of the Month Club and have, at their disposal, spatulas for any given holiday, plus auxiliary spatulas with delightful images of things like flip-flops, bumblebees, or cartoon characters on them. The sorts of things you’d envision while looking at a regular, naked spatula, thinking, My God, you’d be exquisite if you only had an image of a delicately striped candy cane embedded in your transparent, lithe little body!

Nobody.

But I bought the extended warranty, along with the likes of the meek who are afraid to disappoint the salesperson if they say no, the people who put more than a buck in the church basket on Sunday, and the spookers who start buying extra canned food every time they hear the words “bird flu.” These are the people who buy extended warranties, and although it’s true that I have a secret compartment in my closet that hides two cases of Dinty Moore beef stew in case a ravenous, surly mob invades my house after society has collapsed due to one of a variety of events, I did not buy the extended warranty because I was a sucker necessarily, but because I’m
me.
I have years of purchasing experience with myself, and I knew that when the timer tick-tocked on the very second after the manufacturer’s ninety-day warranty was up, I would somehow spill a two-liter bottle of Pepsi all over the console or a chunk of Milky Way Midnight bar would fall out of my mouth and work its way into the wheels of the conveyor belt. I’m no fool. Ninety days after I refused the extended warranty and brought my new microwave home, the plastic ceiling dripped all over my last bag of Extreme Psycho Butter microwave popcorn like alien guts and charged toward the finale by bursting into flame, taking the popcorn with it. Three months after I unpacked my new vacuum cleaner, it suffered a stroke after ingesting a particularly girthy hairball and a nickel that took me five tries of rolling over it before my new vacuum would even suck them up. And then there was the twenty-one-inch television that was purchased after my six-month-old, mere infant TV/DVD combo went on strike, and held disc two of
Gilmore Girls, Second Season
hostage, which despite attempted surgery with a fork and a wad of chewing gum was never recovered. The twenty-one-inch TV never even survived its toddlerhood, as a year into its life it simply stopped responding, and, extended-warranty-less, I wrapped up the cord and talked a friend of mine with an electronically handy husband into taking it. Despite my better judgment, I allowed her to plug it in before carting it away, and within a mere moment of turning it on, a full-color picture bloomed onto the screen, as Lorelai and Rory sipped their twelfth coffee in as many scenes, roll-eyed each other in delightful banter, and basked in the glory that is being a size double zero tagteam. My friend was delighted and waved “thank you” from her car before driving away with the free television in her backseat that had not been defective after all but merely unplugged.