My dad likes to talk about four things. Dogs, the Yankees, cars, and money—in order of their safety of mention. He and my mom run a dog rescue, which means in addition to the nine or so animals they own, there are five to ten foster dogs coming in and out at all times. Because of this, you can stay on that first topic for an exceptionally long time. Just don’t ask about Delilah’s hip surgery, or Maggie’s collapsed trachea, because then you spill over into topic number four, and that, of course, is the topic you work actively all evening to avoid. You might notice that the cost of Delilah’s new hip equals precisely the amount of debt you’ve accumulated with your dad, money which he expects back in full—and which reserves him the right to veto any trips you might take, and any bicycles you might consider buying. My mother has a notebook titled, “What Dani Owes.” It’s blue and filling up. What Dani Owes is my dad’s favorite subtopic of his favorite topic, Money. You ask about the Yankees. They lost. You ask about Shelby, Lucy, that new one, the pug/pekingese mix. Delilah. Anyone. Zubi.
“Zubi’s dead,” he says.
“Of course,” I say. “What I meant was, how are you doing without her?”
“Not well,” he says. “How’s the car? You still running it on no oil?”
“I filled the oil.”
“That’s my car,” he says, as if I’ve forgotten.
“Would you like it back?”
“Keep talking like that and you can walk the 70 miles home,” he says.
If my mother’s not there to step in with, “Did you see that church on the corner? That giant, tacky cross? There should be a town ordinance against that thing,” then we’ll likely crawl along the trenches we built when I was two, or whenever it was I began to speak. I’ll wind up in the corner of whatever room we’re in. His pointer will punctuate every third word against my temple. If he lands on “worthless” I’ll risk what comes next to remind him I’m an investment, worth at least $15,000 by now, which’ll buy his dogs two gastric torsion corrections, six urinary tract reconstructions, and three cataract removals. He’s the Dog Whisperer. He’s never laid a hand on any of them.
* I can’t post this without adding: I love my dad to bits. This is written in the conditional for a reason - in my adult not-living-with-him years, we get along quite well. No more pointing and yelling. As long as we don’t talk about money.
FYI, right before writing this (for an assignment) I listened to this beautiful song.
I remember how she used to kneel down by the still birds after they’d passed. “Finally you get a good look at the feathers,” she’d say. Then she’d carry them to the corners of the yard, away from me and her mom, and the neighbor’s dog, Guiseppe. There’d be dirt to her elbows.
One Thanksgiving when her mom was squeamish, Rachel stepped up and threw her hand deep into the turkey. She scooped out the insides to make room for the stuffing, rinsed off her hands, then asked if she could run around with Guiseppe while there was still light. She was six and didn’t know what she was holding.
Late at night, once, I argued with her mother. Two ants walked together toward the ceiling and parted. Andrea said it was a sign. Next day I asked Rachel what she thought about the ants and she asked to be taken to the scene. We walked to the bedroom and I plotted their paths in pencil. “Here they were together,” I said, making a circle. “Then right at the crease, here, they went off.” I drew lines on the ceiling that forked.
“Ants look like aliens up close,” she said. She climbed onto the bed, looked up at the penciled map. “Was it very dark?”
“Light enough that we could see them,” I said. “But it was night.”
“And night is dark,” she said, instructively. “Do you know that ants have bad eyesight?”
“I did not.”
“Since they can’t see so good they have their antennae. Miss Roberts calls them feelers.” She put her finger to my shoulder. “If I were an ant and this were my feeler I could tell you a message just like that.”
She was bony like a bird. She decorated the house with pinecones and snake skins. That morning she had burrs in her hair and grass stuck to her knees.
“My theory,” she said, “is they got lost. Each thought the other was behind them. And then they weren’t.”
Rachel fixed a lot of things this way.
The class I’m taking with Roger Rosenblatt is called “Imagining What You Know.” First assignment: fictionalize a family member. Here’s grandpa:
Hips like a belly-dancing Turkish gypsy, my grandfather didn’t just land on the shores of Normandy—he undulated, swayed. Killed twenty-six German soldiers that day and walked away nearly perfect, save a nick in his earlobe. There had been a smudge on his gun. He ducked behind a piece of driftwood, untucked his uniform, spat on the coattail and polished that small spot until it shined like the moon. When he stood up a bullet took half an inch of lobe. “Screw earlobes,” he was known to say. “Who the hell needs earlobes?”
He almost didn’t see those shores. Back in Devon, England, where his troop rehearsed for the D-Day landings, my grandfather received a Dear John letter which, awful on its own account, proved just stressful enough to re-activate his latent Tourette’s Syndrome. On free nights at the pubs he’d shout, “Screw Mona! Who the hell needs Mona?” and, “We’re gonna attack Normandy! Heeeee-yeah, Normandy!” His fellow soldiers tried women’s lips to shut his mouth, women’s merciful hips, but every time he roamed the town, he’d announce the secret mission: “June 6th, Normandy. Attacking from the shores.” And the addendum, “Screw Mona!”
Finally, on an especially thick evening, the fog filing in neatly and on schedule, my grandfather met a worthy distraction. The appropriate combination of voluptuous and clumsy, a yellow-haired Brit who repeatedly spilled beer on her bosom. Grandpa spent entire evenings carefully removing stains from her blouse, forgetting all about Normandy and Mona.
To this day, if you want to keep my grandfather’s mouth shut, you have to keep those obsessive hands occupied. Give him stickers to peel off your car bumper. Scratch up your tabletops. As people get older, there are more and more things they ought not to say. My grandmother scuffs up his shoes every night so she’ll never have to hear them.
There is a thick raised reddish scar on the inside of my thigh. Ask me how I got it.
There are two answers.
One, I fell from an orange tree onto barbed wire. It was four o’clock, the clouds had come in and it was misty. I was planting seedlings in the nursery and got hungry. The mist had settled into the moss, and the surface of the bark was slick. I slipped.
I prefer two. After years of loving people I finally turned to the ground. Learned to grip a machete so I wouldn’t blister badly and cut mandarinas open in the fields. The juice burned in my scratches, the bugs swarmed and bit. Everything left a mark—the earth never hurt me quietly. And only where it showed.
Men say a lot of things when they see it. “Poor thing” is one and “is it as bad as it looks?” is another. “Yes,” I tell them. Often they ask to touch it and I let them. The scar is hard and waxy. “Can you feel this?” they ask. One touch sends all my pain there. Right there. “No,” I tell them. “This isn’t hurting me.”
America really wanted to be there for Iranians protesting the results of their 2009 election. It did. It liked the idea of being there, and it seemed like the right thing to do. But sometimes America loses its King of Pop and it forgets about other things, like Iran, and everything else that ever happened, or continues to happen during the mourning period of Michael Jackson’s death. Fans in other countries were upset, too, but no one really cares about the rest of the world. They’re a blur. They speak English all wrong, if at all.
I am America, but worse. I wasn’t paying attention to Iran or the KOP’s death: I was thinking about my ass. After a year at a desk job and an apartment with no strong light and no full-length mirror, I had put on ten pounds, and my ass was enormous. These are the sorts of things America worries about. When not worrying about its ass, America is rubbing lotion onto its dry elbows or is turning in its bed because it woke up to pee one hour before its alarm went off, and it knows it has to get up for its soul-numbing desk job, so it cannot fall back asleep. America drinks a lot of coffee and dies a little every day.
I, America, like to stare at myself in the mirror a lot. Me, I think, it’s me! How glorious! I wasn’t sure why we’d invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, but more pressing was the question of when and how my ass had decided to take over the back half of my body. Hell, for a long time I didn’t even know Iraq and Afghanistan were two separate countries, but I did know that my eyebrows were supposed to be two separate things and that it was time to pluck my unibrow. There are a lot of hairy situations in the world, but sometimes America’s own face is hairy, and America needs to take care of that first.
America might not even get around to caring about politics until she lands a soul-numbing office job and has to fill her time with something, lest she cry herself into a red, white and stupor. Red, white and cubicle. Dead, white and blue. America’s boss had a habit of looking over America’s shoulder to make sure she wasn’t reading anything not work-related, so she read the news. See, America had gotten a temp job as an editor at a Jewish orthodox magazine. And while she primarily wrote lifestyle articles, like her popular, “How to Dress Modestly Sexy: Just Because You Can’t Show Your Ankles Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Still Be Seductive,” she wrote about news sometimes as well. She followed her assignments to write in praise of Republican policy and against socialized health care. She developed a strong gag reflex.
And so it happened gradually: America ran on the elliptical twenty minutes per day, got her expanding ass situation under control, and began to look out into the world. She was excited by politics and economics. She still didn’t understand banks, but she took interest in a slew of other things. “Go ahead,” she said, “talk to me about Barak Obama! Talk to me about Iraq and Afghanistan, which are two separate countries! Weapons of mass destruction, construction in New Orleans. Serbia, Bosnia, Americans in Dubai. Gay marriage. Israel. Gays in Israel!” Naturally, the topic of Israel got thrown around quite a bit at the Jewish orthodox magazine offices. Soon America learned that if she so much as mentioned Palestine, her boss would go on about the Arab-Israeli conflict for hours. He was a propaganda-spouting moron but it gave her eyes a break. The rocket’s red glare, and bombs bursting in air, had nothing on eight hours of computer screen light.
Come to think of it, this is probably how America got so nearsighted.
As America grew confident in her knowledge of current events, she began to argue. One day she argued with Steven, her boss’s religious, conservative son, for two whole hours about Israeli foreign policy and got so angry she had to leave the room. Once outside, she remembered that this was a man who did not believe in dinosaurs.
“You do not believe in dinosaurs,” America told Steven.
Steven offered to show America a video called Why Dinosaurs Couldn’t Have Existed. “The evidence,” said Steven, “is irrefutable.”
America didn’t like the idea of irrefutable evidence. She preferred confidence, which she got a lot of from listening to NPR. She directly quoted the radio hosts, who were intellectual and sounded very handsome. When her boss wasn’t looking over her shoulder, America would Google the names of the radio hosts and sometimes she was pleasantly surprised to learn the host in question looked precisely as she had imagined him to look. Other times the host in question was Garrison Keiller. He really threw her for a loop.
Increasingly confident, America began to talk quite a lot. Often, America would start to say something she felt was important but forget where she was headed in the middle of her second sentence, and went on talking anyhow. Half the things America said was meaningless. But she did have a smart, new haircut and lovely ass. Even the boss’s son, Steven, would admit to that last part.
At first America loved the attention. People trusted her hair and the sound of her voice. When an argument sprang up in the office, America was there to snuff the flame. All was well and good—kosher, even—until one particular Monday. America’s coworker, Susan, brought up the topic of multiple wives, which Steven’s sect of Judaism condoned, and which Steven, too, condoned.
“I’m not even sure how you got yourself one wife,” said Susan.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” replied Steven.
America flew over and within seconds, was there to mediate the conflict.
“Everyone is entitled to have his own beliefs,” said America, “even if they are a little bit ridiculous. Let’s just enjoy this Monday, shall we?”
America gave Steven a friendly pat on the shoulder but he mistook it for slight aggression and the volume escalated and before America knew it, she had referred to the Jews as “you people.” It was an accident. America had always enjoyed friendly relations with Jewish people, had worked with them for years now.
“Surely you know it was an accident,” America told Steven. “I respect you, and all people. I am deeply sorry for my remarks.”
Steven did not forgive America, and shortly after, the rest of the office began its shift toward a mood that one could safely call un-American. Once a helpful flame-snuffer, she was now accused of being an instigator. What’s more, she was tired of hearing about the Middle East, tired of irrefutable evidence, tired, even, of NPR. She was tired of trimming her bangs for people who couldn’t even recognize that she was only trying to help, was only looking out for the best interest of everyone else. An instigator!
That was it. She quit her job at the magazine. She needed a break, something less political.
America’s sister got her a part-time job, observing potheads at the drug abuse research center she worked for. Every three minutes a buzzer sounded, and America would record what each of the study participants were doing. She loved the busyness of her mind. The study itself was not altogether interesting: something about marijuana withdrawal, which America was pretty sure did not really exist.
That’s where America was during the 2011 Egyptian protests: in a small office writing, “Participant three is complaining about being given the end piece of bread. Says he’s ‘vexed.’” She watched the protests on the office computer and she paid attention, until participant 3 asked for a new piece of bread for his sandwich. She got up and brought him a fresh piece, a plump one, from the middle. She thought about her ass: it had been weeks since she’d been to the gym, and she caught a glimpse of it the other day in the mirror. So America put the protests on pause and googled “exercises to tone butt.” Then she added the word “quickly,” because America, for all her beauty, was also quite impatient.
There’s no way this thing I wrote will measure up to the beautiful or disgusting image you’ve just conjured up, but don’t let that deter you from clicking through anyhow.
