Wife Living Dangerously (3 page)

Even after the kids have given up all hope of getting a dog, I am still attached to the idea. Annie insists that I just need
to have more sex but I’m sure it’s not the lack of sex that drives me but the authentic desire for a dog who will curl up
on my lap and snooze while I read the paper in the morning, who will give me slickery puppy kisses, who will watch me worshipfully
while I’m dressing for work, and who will never ask me if I’m ever going to lose my post-pregnancy poundage.

I set out to soften my husband’s resolve. I cook his favorite dinner—chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes with garlic and
cream, and a dark ale served in a frosted stein. I iron the two striped oxford shirts that have been balled up in the laundry
room for six and a half months because I never iron except in emergencies, always without an ironing board, frantically on
my knees on the bedroom carpet.

After chicken fried steak and ironing, there is only one honeyed arrow left in my quiver. As Michael sits in the brown velour
recliner and watches the basketball game, I massage his feet and make my appeal during the commercial breaks. By the time
the massage is over, Michael has agreed to one small cage-restrained mammal. Specifically, a guinea pig. There are conditions:
he prefers not to see it, smell it, touch it, clean up after it, or dispose of it in the event of its death. I am surprised
to learn that my pet-averse husband has always had a soft spot for guinea pigs because his older cousin—the cool one, Edward,
who had an electric guitar and Carlos Santana’s autograph—owned two guinea pigs, Hendrix and Morrison.

Thank you, Edward, wherever you are.

It is my first ever visit to Pets-a-Poppin and I am stunned. The scale of the place, the breadth and depth of its offerings,
the fact that entire aisles are devoted to cat food and dog biscuits and bird toys—the total effect is both dazzling but also
troubling. In some parts of the world you can’t even find a can of evaporated milk for humans and here were frozen liver popsicles
and rawhides shaped like size nine moccasins. A sullen girl with no chin points me toward the “pocket critters” near the back
of the store where the Muzak is nearly drowned out by the constant whirr of metal exercise wheels as gerbils scramble in desperate
futility.

I am staring at the guinea pigs, hairy and inert in their glass enclosures, when a burly woman in a Packers sweatshirt sidles
up to me. “Guinea pigs are okay but rats are fantastic,” she says. I try not to stare at the constellation of round, meaty
growths on one cheek.

“Really? I always thought rats were, you know, ratty.” Michael would have a stroke if I came home with a rat. It’s totally
out of the question. “I didn’t realize that rats made good pets.”

“You’d best believe it.” She runs her hands through her mullet. “Jeez, these little guys are smart. And clean? Most people
don’t realize that. They’re thinking, you know,
eeewwww,
rats. Sewers and the like. But that’s just a stereotype. Rats are cleaner than you and me.
And
they’re affectionate. Like a dog. Just like a cute little puppy dog.” She utters this last line in a lispy baby-talk way.

Now she has my attention. If I can’t get a lap dog, at least I can get a lap rat. “Like a puppy? Seriously?”

“Honest to God. My little Joey is such a lover. He just wants to be snuggled all day. I swear he thinks I’m his momma.” She
scoops a small white rat from its cage and offers it to me. It takes a moment for me to overcome my revulsion to the creature’s
naked whiplike tail and then I am charmed. The rodent sits up in my palm, waggles his whiskers. He seems to be studying me.
I return him to its glass tank. He looks up at me, surprised, maybe a little confused. I lift him out of the cage again, and
let his whiskers brush against my nose.

“Julia!”

I turn to find Annie wheeling a shopping cart; in it, a ten-pound bag of food for overweight dogs and a bright blue squeaky
toy made to resemble a mail carrier. I describe my rat vs. guinea pig dilemma.

“Good grief, Julia. You want the rat? Get the goddamn rat.” Annie motions to the chinless girl. “Miss? My friend here will
take the rat, please.” Then she glares at me impatiently. “You only live once, Julia.”

It has been fifteen days since the beach trip and I decide that it is time to make good on my promise. You Only Live Once,
a concept as foreign to me as Rules Were Made to Be Broken, fully encapsulates the rationale behind the carefree conviviality
I’d sought for myself. The concept was a color not apparently suited to my complexion but appealing in its own right; I try
it on gingerly, apprehensively, hopefully, and I try not to remind myself that lurking just beyond joie de vivre’s shining
borders is its ugly twin, profligacy.

I would be lying to my husband if I brought home this rat. I thought of my children. They wouldn’t want a hairy, nonresponsive
guinea pig stinking up the house. I had promised them a real pet and that’s exactly what they are going to get because I honestly
believe that every child should know the joy of nurturing another living thing, and by living thing I don’t mean a moth, but
a companion capable of expressing loyalty and affection.

I bring the rat home and tell Michael it’s a dwarf Norwegian flat-coated guinea pig.

“He sure is a cutie,” Michael says, reaching into the cage to stroke our new pet. He lifts him out of the cage and, “But he
kind of looks like a rat, doesn’t he?”

“I know. Weird, isn’t it?” Oh, my God; oh, my GOD, I am lying to my husband, lying about the companion animal he’d trusted
me to choose for our family, the only four-legged mammal he has allowed into our home, the one that’s supposed to be just
like his cousin Edward’s beloved pet, and instead I return with a red-eyed laboratory animal. Then I have the gall to insist
that it’s not a rat, it’s some other creature I just made up in my head, like the time Jake told me he hadn’t really shoved
a peanut butter sandwich into the VCR, it was Mister Eugene Finkelopolis from Mexico. But I’d promised my kids a real pet
and I wasn’t about to break their hearts by bringing home a fat stinking pooping fuzzy slipper.

Michael names the rat Homer. Instead of feeling errant and remorseful, I am defiant and free. I saw something I wanted and
I lied to my husband to get it and I survived. The bond that soldered me to Michael is a little looser today. Much to my surprise
I actually like how this feels.

M
y neighbor’s sprinkler looks and sounds like a machine gun turret, aggressive and off-putting. The whole family—William and
Geneva Skaff, and their three children, Billy, Georgie, and Geena—are in the driveway conducting their semiannual garage deep-cleaning.
The entire contents of the Skaff garage have been temporarily relocated to the edge of the driveway. William is scalding the
cement floor with a pressure washer while Geneva, in clean denim overalls and pink paisley bandana around her neck, appears
to be oiling a pair of inline skates. The children are wiping down their respective bicycles with Orange Glo and paper towels
while Harley, their overweight and unusually quiet beagle, snoozes in the shade. The first time the Skaffs performed this
garage clean-out, I sauntered over to examine a set of golf clubs, then asked them how much they wanted for their old push
mower. It wasn’t until William silently rolled the clubs back into the garage that I realized with great discomfiture that
my neighbors weren’t having a yard sale, they were just cleaning out their stupid garage. None of the Skaffs look up as I
pull into the driveway, not a waved hand or head nod or any other indication of neighborly regard.

That’s the way it usually is in Larkspur Estates. When Michael and I moved from our scruffy stone and shingle rental house
near campus to this subdivision of culs-de-sac and driveway hoops, I thought we were moving into a happy place. Larkspur brought
to mind pretty purple flowers and little birds and the whole “happy as a lark” business. I had visions of hearty greetings
and fragrant gardens, block parties and kids playing tag in the yards.

We have lived here almost five years and have yet to meet most of this block’s inhabitants. They drive away in the morning
behind tinted windows and disappear into their garages at the end of the day, automatic doors descending behind them. I don’t
see my neighbors tending their gardens because they hire other people to do that work, just as they hire other people to rake
in the fall and shovel in the winter. There are no Labor Day block parties because everyone leaves town for Labor Day. Kids
aren’t outside playing tag in the street because they’re playing hockey or soccer or football or basketball somewhere else,
or taking riding lessons or karate, or they’re in advanced after-school science classes. Or they’re inside playing video games
and Instant Messaging.

Most of what I know about my neighbors I’ve learned from their trash. I am pretty sure that the people at the end of the street
recently had a baby because I saw the empty Enfamil cans in the recycling tub on Tuesdays. The Skaffs recently bought a new
microwave oven, someone in the Gilchrist family is on Slim*Fast, and farther down the street, the Chapmans have replaced their
mattress.

Annie once said that our neighborhood was doomed from the start because the developer had all the topsoil removed even before
the first house was built. Earl J. Jackson hauled away all the rich loam and sold it for a neat profit, leaving behind only
crappy red clay and rock. Now I know why even my most determined neighbors can’t grow the kind of lush lawns you see in the
less expensive subdivisions. “It’s all about fertility,” Annie would muse philosophically. “How can we expect our neighborhood
to be anything but sterile when Earl J. Jackson took all the topsoil away, the bastard.”

Everyone assumes that our family belongs here because my husband is an attorney with Wellman, Weimar and Bott, but that’s
a relatively recent development. Michael’s heart is still with his old job at Legal Services, where he represented poor people
and earned only a little more than our cleaning lady makes now but came home every day at 5:30
P.M.
with enough time and energy to play with the kids and make love to me. Now he works until seven or eight and sometimes falls
asleep in the family room with the remote control in his hand. But he wouldn’t trade his Honda Civic for a dozen Escalades
and refuses to hire one of those companies that sprays chemicals on your lawn to kill the weeds. Our front yard is, therefore,
not as constrained as everyone else’s but my husband doesn’t care. “I’d rather have weeds than cancer,” he’s always said.

I don’t fit here either. Unlike the women on my street who donate their time as reading assistants in the school library or
planning PTO fundraisers, I have my salaried job as assistant director of the Bentley Institute.

On most days I can say with all sincerity that I like my work. I am employed by the most prestigious name in sexuality research,
which makes me extremely popular at dinner parties. My office is only twelve minutes from my house so I’m home by the time
the children step off the school bus. I can work from my house when they’re sick or snowed in. My coworkers are pleasant and
undemanding. My job would be perfect, if not for my boss.

“You MUST work here,” Leslie Keen coos a mere fifteen minutes into my job interview. Her office is a crisis of heaps and piles
and half-empty coffee cups, ashtrays crammed with lipstick-smeared cigarette butts, cracked pots of philodendra in various
stages of death. There is a bottle of non-acetone nail polish remover on her desk, more ashtrays, a stack of autographed glossy
color head shots of Leslie Keen herself, a contract with WABC radio, and two half-empty cans of Diet Coke.

If her office is in desperate disarray, Leslie’s body is a hard-shellacked package of camera-ready womanhood. Her cream-and-violet
double-breasted suit fits her flawlessly and her violet Mary Janes look dyed to match. Her hair is a highlighted helmet of
champagne, platinum, and honey gold. Makeup is fashionably matte and the sculpted nails are squared, too long for typing or
any real manual labor, and judging by the way the bottom edge of the nail meets the cuticle—flush, no gap—I suspect they’ve
been recently tended to, probably by the Vietnamese manicurists on the north side of town.

Leslie leans forward in her chair and clasps her hands prayerfully. “Julia, PLEASE tell me you’ll take the job. You’d be PERFECT
here.” An egg-shaped secretary pokes her head in to say they’re ordering pizza and does she want anything. “You KNOW I can’t
eat that crap, Lorena. Jesus.” Leslie looks at me and rolls her eyes, as if we’re already on the same team, the management
team. “Nice lady but dumb as a box of rocks. I’ve already started advertising for her replacement. You know anyone?”

I shake my head and furrow my eyebrows in an expression of solidarity. I want to be on Leslie Keen’s team. I want to be on
anyone’s team. I have to get out of my house and working for this double-breasted cyclone is exactly what I need to counter
the stifling inertia of domesticity and whatever corrosive traces of Susie Margolis I continue to harbor, in spite of my vow
to forgive.

Leslie gives me the VIP tour of the Bentley, taking me through collections that aren’t normally accessible to the public.
She shows me Nazi pornography, underground magazines like
Girls and Donkeys,
photos of J. Edgar Hoover in drag. Though her aim surely is to impress, the tour leaves me nauseated and apprehensive.

Back in her office, Leslie makes her final appeal.

“So. Julia.” She leans back in her black mesh and leather ergonomically correct chair and touches her clasped fingertips to
her chin. “You’re smart, you’re organized, you’ve got a GREAT vita. I checked your references. Everyone LOVES you. You’re
much beloved, Julia. Do you REALIZE that? Please tell me you’ll work here, or I’ll go home straightaway and SHOOT myself!”
She opens a carved box on her desk and pulls out a pack of French brown cigarettes. I can’t make out the label. She shakes
out a slim cigarette and slips it between her lips. She doesn’t light up. “And let’s face it. There isn’t exactly an abundance
of job openings in this town. Unless you want to work at Arby’s. But for someone with your skills, you’d be hard-pressed to
find anything this good. Good salary, GREAT benefits package, flexible hours. It’s PERFECT for you, Julia. And you’re PERFECT
for us. So? What do you say, Julia Flanagan? Do I go home and SHOOT myself or can I show you your new office? I think you’re
WONDERFUL.”