Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (11 page)

Little dog, big head

“Yes. And they’ll tell you what to do.”

I can’t believe my ears and I’m jumping in the car. “So I call for the diagnosis and I treat her myself?” That’s what I say, but I’m thinking: Really? Can I operate on her, too? And if I do your job, will you do mine? Because I got a novel that ain’t gonna write itself.

So, absurdly enough, I call Poison Control from the car, at speed, and for sixty dollars charged to my VISA, a vet tells me that Ciprofloxacin isn’t toxic in that dosage, but if I feed the dog a dairy product, it will prevent absorption of the drug.

Which is how Peach and I find ourselves parked at a convenience store, sharing a midnight pint of vanilla Haagen-Dazs.

Emergency carbs.

The Flying Scottolines Reach Out

By Lisa

Cell phones are supposed to make communication easier, but it doesn’t work that way for The Flying Scottolines.

We reach out and touch … trouble.

It begins when I pick up Mother Mary at the airport, or at least I’m supposed to. I’m there early, confounded by the hi-tech Arrivals screen. It’s guaranteed that no Arrivals screen will give you a quick answer to when anyone is arriving. Why? Because as soon as you manage to locate the Departure City on the lists, the lists shifts upward. Your eye found Miami on the fifth line from the bottom, but as soon your gaze traveled across to Flight Status, you’re in Glasgow.

In other words, once you find the Departure City, it departs.

Doubtless this is because the new technology receives new flight information in nanoseconds and transmits it in even less than that, so nobody can get a quick answer from an Arrivals screen, which is how you know it’s working.

So already you understand my theme of technology not helping.

The Arrivals screen, as best as I can tell, is informing me that Mother Mary has arrived, or at least her plane has, but she’s nowhere in sight. I pace and pace, and then I start calling her cell phone, but there’s no answer. Half an hour goes by, and I call Brother Frank, back in Miami.

“I can’t find her,” I tell him.

He laughs, thinking I’m joking. “Very funny. I gotta go. It’s a new job, and my boss is around.”

“Frank, I’m not kidding.” I know he has a new job, and I wouldn’t bother him at it, not in this economy. Never mind that I used to call him at his old job all the time and tell him I didn’t have her when I did, which is the kind of prank that The Flying Scottolines think is wildly funny. “I’m not kidding, Frank. I really don’t have her.”

“You’re gonna get me fired,” he says, and hangs up.

Long story short, I run back and forth, ask around, and finally go down to baggage claim, though she has no baggage. Actually, she
is
baggage.

Just kidding.

But there she is, out in front of the terminal. Mother Mary, all white hair and four feet eleven inches, standing outside the terminal at the curb. I run to the rescue. “Ma, what are you doing here?”

“The man brought me here.”

“What man?”

“How the hell should I know?” Mother Mary isn’t confused, she’s angry.

“But I never pick you up here. Plus I called you on your cell. Why didn’t you answer?”

“I had it turned off, for the plane. Now let’s go.”

So we do, because another problem with technology is that you have to turn it on all the time, and I hope they fix that soon.

And of course, the minute we get in the car, she wants to call Frank, to tell him not to worry. I know he’s not worried, and I don’t drive and talk on the phone if I can avoid it. But she’s convinced that he’s worried, and we can call from my car, hands-free. According to this technology, all I have do is to talk to my car and it listens, which would be great if it were fifty-five, single, and ran on testosterone.

So I hit speed dial, and in a few minutes, the call gets answered. “Hel-lo,” someone says in an English accent. He sounds like Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in
The Silence of the Lambs,
which doesn’t surprise me. My brother always answers my calls as Hannibal Lecter and calls me Clarice, which is another thing that The Flying Scottolines think is wildly funny.

“Frank, Mom wants you to know she’s fine.”

“Pardon?” Hannibal says.

“I got Mom, and she’s fine.”

“So sorry, Frank isn’t here.”

“Frank, cut the dumb accent. I thought your boss was there. She wants to talk to you.”

“Truly, Frank has stepped away. May I take a message?”

Which is when it hits me that this is the best Hannibal Lecter impression ever, and Frank’s new company has offices in Britain.

And this is probably his boss.

So I did the mature thing. I panicked and hung up.

Which is yet another problem with technology.

That you can get your brother fired, hands-free.

Don’t Look Now

By Lisa

Here’s what just happened to me:

I couldn’t turn around.

What am I talking about? Let me explain.

I was sitting at my kitchen island, writing on my laptop and watching the football game. The refrigerator was to my right, and an iced Diet Coke and a bag of tortilla chips were close at hand.

This is called a home office.

And the dogs were sleeping where they usually do, on round little beds behind me, like Muppets on tuffets. One of them made a funny sound, so I turned around to check on them.

Or tried to.

Because I couldn’t turn around, not all the way.

And there was nothing wrong with my back, and I wasn’t sick or anything. I just had to make an effort to turn all the way around.

What?

And this happened the other day too, when I was walking the dogs and heard a car coming down the road, so I turned around to see how close it was. But I couldn’t see.

My nose was in the way.

I couldn’t see behind me without turning my whole body.

What’s going on?

I went on the Internet and got the answer I feared.

I’m fifty-five.

I did a search, and there was article after article by doctors, physical therapists, and scientists, all saying the same thing. That women lose flexibility as they age.

Hmm.

I knew that, as an abstract matter, but I didn’t think it meant I couldn’t even turn the hell around.

I didn’t even know which part of me had gotten inflexible. One medical article talked about how “women 50–71 years could expect problems with shoulder flexion, shoulder extension, shoulder transverse extension, hip flexion, and hip rotation.”

I don’t know what they’re talking about, but it can’t be good.

And I don’t know whether it’s shoulders or hips that are the problem when you can’t turn around.

But in all the articles, the advice was the same. As one website said, “These data indicate that aging women can improve and/or maintain shoulder and hip range of motion through participation in regular exercise done three times per week.”

First off, “aging women”? How dare you. Go to hell.

Second, always, with the exercise. I walk the dogs two miles a day, every day, and I ride a pony that’s older than me. What else do you want?

Exercise was the wrong answer, to me.

It doesn’t seem fair that you should have to do something just to stay the same. Here’s my reasoning: I expect to exercise if I want to lose weight. That’s a change in the status quo. I also expect to exercise if I want to get stronger. Also a change in the status quo. If I want to change something, I should have to do something extra.

But that’s not this.

I don’t want to change anything. All I want to do is turn around. And until today, I could turn around like a champ.

I needed a better answer. I went back online onto Google and plugged “I’m 55 and I can’t turn around,” but I learned nothing new except that Isaac Hayes wrote a song called “I Can’t Turn Around.” He was in his thirties at the time, so I guess he really didn’t exercise.

Bottom line, I refuse to exercise just so I can turn around. So the answer is clear:

I’m going to stop turning around.

Then I started thinking.

Maybe it makes sense that as we get older, we can’t turn around. Maybe as we go along in life, we’re not supposed to be looking back.

This is especially true if you’ve lived my life, where I’ve made major mistakes, and I’m not even counting Thing One and Thing Two.

In other words, as we get older, don’t look back.

Look forward.

Keep going.

Walking is fine.

Put your past in the rearview.

If it were so great, you wouldn’t have left it behind.

See ya on the road.

Mousetrap Part III—Modicum of Solace

By Francesca

The week following my visit from Creepy Exterminator, I found myself back at my apartment without my best friend, my faithful spaniel, Pip, who was safely away from the mouse poison, staying with my mother.

Not that said spaniel did much to protect me from vermin or drug-fueled exterminators. Still, I missed him terribly. I was all alone.

With the mice.

I sat in the new quiet of my apartment, trying to work, but I was on edge. I caught myself listening, waiting for the suspicious rustling of a rodent, or worse, the sound of one of my not-so-humane traps going off, or the very worst, to see some poor poisoned mouse stumble out into the hall, foaming at the mouth, eyes wild and accusatory, shaking a tiny fist in my direction.

In my imagination, all mice die with drama fit for the stage.

Only a sense of guilt and revulsion could compel me to do what I did next; I decided to go to the gym. It seemed like a productive thing to do with all my nervous energy, and it would be good to get out of the house.

I arrived at the gym, buoyed by that smug sense of optimism that comes after I put on my sneakers but before I actually break a sweat. I was bounding up the steps to the second floor of cardio equipment, when I ran into my friend who works there as a trainer.

Before I could even say hello, she said, “You will not believe what I found.”

She led me to one of the back offices and reached into the wastebasket. “I showed it to my manager, and she said to throw it away, but I folded it up in this napkin so I could get it again.” She retrieved some wadded up paper. “Do you want to see it?”

“What is it?”

“Oh, sorry.” She looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “It’s a
bed bug.
”

I gasped. Bed bugs, the modern plague of Manhattan! Nothing inspires more dread and horror in a city-dweller than these hideous little bugs. Infestation and its accompanying shame are contagious. I actually took a step away from her.

“Oh don’t worry, I killed it first,” she said with a little too much pride.

Well, I was curious; I had never seen one in real life. I peered into the tissue. It looked kind of like a tick, only uglier.

“I found it on the stretch mats.”

Ew. “And your manager told you to just throw it away?”

“Yeah. But I had to tell you.”

“Thanks, hon.” I went to hug her but thought better of it—a pat on the arm would do. “Well, see ya!”

“You’re leaving?”

I nodded and jogged out of there. Fitness is not worth the danger of an insect that sucks your blood while you sleep.

Beauty is skin deep. Bed bugs burrow under your skin.

Later on, back at the apartment, I got a little hungry, but the prospect of cooking was less appetizing with the memory of mouse droppings on my kitchen counter still fresh in my mind. I decided that without the dog to worry about, I should take my laptop and go camp out at a café, like writers do in the movies. It seemed more glamorous than my usual writing on the couch in stretch pants.

I arrived at a nearby coffee shop, appropriately in costume with my shoulder bag and plastic-rimmed glasses, feeling like a romantic comedy might just pop up around me at any moment. I nabbed the last free table and ordered a veggie wrap and an iced tea.

I was bending down to retrieve my laptop, when an enormous cockroach skittered past just inches from my foot.

I fled to the counter, where I told the waitress, discreetly and politely, that there was a roach now climbing on the wall, and if she wouldn’t mind, would she please cancel my order?

Surprisingly, she was surprised.

“You don’t want the wrap?” she asked in a French accent.

“No, sorry. I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Because of the roach?”

No, because of the weather.

“Yes, because of the roach.”

“But it is only in the main room, there aren’t any in the kitchen where we make the food.”

Of course, roaches wait to be seated. For filthy, prehistoric insects, they’re impeccably well-mannered.

“Look, no hard feelings, but I don’t want to eat with a roach on the wall.”

She rolled her eyes and begrudgingly handed me my money. “You know, this…” she paused, presumably to translate the best euphemism, “this
problem,
this is so with all of New York.”

No it isn’t.

Not in my apartment.

I only have mice.

Accommodating

By Lisa

I am always amazed at the lengths people go to to accommodate their pets. Me, especially. Case in point, I own more baby gates than Octo-Mom.

Why?

Four dogs and two cats equals five baby gates.

I’m accommogating.

Sorry.

To explain, all of the Scottoline pets get along, except at mealtimes. They don’t like to share their meals.

They get it from me.

So when I feed them, I put Ruby The Crazy Corgi and her bowl in her cage, in protective custody. But Peach eyes Little Tony warily as they eat, then starts growling and barking until a dogfight breaks out. It’s not as scary as it sounds, because Cavaliers are small dogs, and their heart isn’t in it, so she just bitchslaps him.

Literally.

But still, it’s unpleasant. And since I feed them while I’m eating breakfast or dinner, I have to get up and down during my meal, refereeing while my eggs get cold, which annoys me no end. Not to mention that Penny, my sweet golden retriever, gets so upset she won’t even approach her own bowl. She ends up retreating to her closet, where she mourns Angie and the fun life they used to have, when there were no feisty Cavaliers and plenty of red balls.