The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (14 page)

It was true. Not only had the bird soiled my best friend, but it had released its intestinal cargo on our chicken makahni, on our vegetable korma, on our delicately fried pakoras like it was a curry Porta Potti. I pulled the plate away from her longing eyes, and pulled it out of the hand of her husband, who, fork poised, was going in for another mouthful.

“Awwwww,” he moaned as I plucked it from his tightening fingers. “Come on! Can’t we just eat around it?”

“You are a
medical doctor
!” I reminded him. “I have substantially fewer diseases than that foul bird. If I crapped on your food, would you eat around
that
?”

My best friend’s husband looked at me and then looked at Jamie with a “Why is she here?” expression.

With sincere regret and anguish, four steps, and a very unceremonial, craptastic
plop!,
our chicken-poop combos went straight into the trash, never to be heard from again.

“I stink!” Jamie said angrily, trying to look over her shoulder to take a gander at the stains that striped her back. “The smell is making me want to hurl. I’m going to throw up if I don’t get this off of me. I need new clothes, and I need them now.
And by the way, I’m still hungry!
”

I didn’t want to say anything, but I was still hungry, too. I had only managed to get a bite or two of my combo down before the attack occurred, and honestly, no matter how hungry I was, I would begin to eat things from my own body before thinking that eating off of that plate was anything less than parasitic suicide.

Luckily for us, there was a sportswear store directly across the street from the festival, where salespeople kept asking me how I was doing while Jamie tried on T-shirts, and I got to say three times, “I’m great, but my friend just got defiled by sky turds,” but no one seemed to think that was out of the ordinary, they just smiled and nodded, or maybe they thought I was homeless, since I am sure I had that hungry, deranged “I’ll do anything for saag paneer, I’ll pave you a driveway or grant you a wish! Any wish!” sort of look.

My stomach, by that time, had flipped itself inside out and was hopping around my abdominal cavity like a trout on the deck of a boat. My eyes had gotten quite wide, my belly was getting extended and round like a basketball, and flies were starting to land on me,
I was that hungry.
Jamie emerged from the dressing room wearing the new, clean shirt, paid for it, and then we headed back over to the Indian Festival.

Redemption waited for us somewhere on another food line, I knew it, but to my horror, the lines hadn’t gotten any shorter—in fact, they had grown since our first visit to the food court. The three of us, by this time, were depraved, haunted souls, eager to take any food and just be satisfied with it. We chose the shortest line and hopped onto it silently. Every two to three minutes we’d take a step forward, a step closer to placing our order.

We waited on that line for a very, very, very long time, and this time, we didn’t look on happily as people passed us with their food, smug and arrogant as they were, the prickly bastards. So proud they had food. “Look what we’ve got!” their bright, stupid eyes said. “We’ve got food!”
Yeah, well, we had been there. We had food.
We were actually
eating,
sitting down and eating, not that you’d know it by looking at our pallid complexions, our sallow cheeks, and our thin, pursed lips, only to be forced by nature’s cruelty and a leaky fowl bowel to stand in line all over again.

“What are you getting this time?” Jamie asked me weakly as she swatted a fly away.

“I dunno,” I replied, barely audibly. “Maybe some rice. Broth, if they have it. It’s been such a long time since I’ve eaten that I’m not even sure my system can take it.”

“Look at that,” she noticed, and pointed with a limp hand at me. “I think one of your collarbones just surfaced, like a submarine.”

I nodded. “I’m going through my reserves quickly,” I agreed. “They’ve been buried under a layer of fat permafrost since the 1990s. God. If I start seeing the bones in my feet, I know I won’t have long to go. I’ll tell you right now, if someone drops a piece of naan, I’m going for it. I won’t eat bird shit, but I will eat shit off the ground.”

Then, finally, we were at the front of the line, and as Jamie and her husband were getting ready to order, holding out their cash, an old, horrible hag stepped in front of us and began screeching like a gorgon.

“This isn’t the paying line! This is the ordering line! You need a token! A token! You have to stand on that line to get a token first, and then you wait on this line to order!” she warbled like the nasty old biddy she was, waving around her stupid blue token like it was a flag.

Jamie ignored her, pushing past, and gave the food vendor her order. The old hag stood in front of Jamie’s husband, clearly trying to block him from going any further.

“That’s my wife, and she’s already ordered my food,” he said, trying to reason with the old woman, who must have known she was no match for him. She stepped aside, and as she did, something of a floodgate opened. People from the very poorly marked token line began to swarm in front of me and actually physically pushed me completely out of line.

I stood there, not really knowing what to do. It had happened as quickly as that, and suddenly the line was not a line but a bulge of people trying to hand someone a stupid token and order some food. The next thing I knew, Jamie and her husband were standing next to me with two new plates of food, and honestly, I couldn’t do it again. There was no way I could get in the back of the token line, which didn’t remotely resemble a token line, by the way, but looked like just a regular old line, and wait one more time. I was just all waited out.

As we walked out of the food court, trying to find a covered place to eat, I saw the old biddy ahead of us a couple of steps, not even waiting to sit down before she dug in. She shoved food into her mouth like it was a dump, and at this point, I knew what I wanted most in the world. I didn’t want naan, or a pakora, or some saag paneer. No I didn’t. I wanted to take five steps ahead, pop the bottom of her plate up like it was a tambourine, snap off her head, rip out her spine, and start sucking the bone marrow out of it. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.

But as we passed her on the way to a spot beneath an overhang, I looked at her kindly, and with a big smile I said, “I really hope a bird shits on you. And I mean aaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllll over you.”

And lady, if you’re reading this, you’d better know that we’re not done, you and I. We’re not done. I remember your face, I remember that pinchy, wrinkly cavern of a mouth, I remember your purple and blue Bossy Old Lady–issue rain jacket, and somewhere, somehow, you and I will be in line together again, if I have to go to every food-related festival in the general vicinity to track you down. I will see you in line, somewhere, somehow, and when I do, I will swiftly and stealthfully exact my revenge, even if it calls for bringing my own pooping bird to season all of your food.

As Jamie and her husband ate their food in a parking garage across the street and I stood next to them, I made a mental note: If we do this again next year, I gotta remember to bring an umbrella and pack a lunch.

Ready or Not

I
knew right away
that she was the one.

“That one.” I pointed at the computer screen to my husband, who was looking over my shoulder.

“Hmmmm, I don’t know,” he said cynically, and I knew he wasn’t kidding.

“That’s her,” I insisted, knowing that I was not going to take no for an answer. “That is my dog!”

“We’ll see,” he said, like he had any power over the decision. “We’ll talk about it when I come home.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even look at him.

“Laurie,” he said firmly—and that’s when I know he’s really mad, because he never says my name unless I’ve pissed him off enough that he actually has to spend the energy to remember it—and turned me around by the shoulder. “I’d better not come home and find that dog here. I mean it. This is something that we need to talk about first.”

“Fine,” I said as I shrugged, then turned back around to look at the photo on the monitor.

“I mean it,” he said again before he headed out of my office and left the house for school.

I knew that little dog on the county pound site was my dog. I just knew it.

I knew it in the same way I knew it when I first saw Bella, five years earlier, a shivering, screeching, wet little puppy clawing at the gate to her cage where she sat all alone, the only one of her litter not yet adopted. She looked like a little red rat, although the animal attendant assured me she was of German shepherd lineage. Honestly, she could have been a jackal with hair poking out of her red-stained teeth and we still would have taken her home. She was all alone and scared to death. You would have had to be soulless to pass that puppy up, with her tiny red velvet mouth and her huge brown eyes outlined in black that looked like Maybelline eyeliner. We knew we had found our girl.

She couldn’t have behaved better on the drive up to Eugene from Phoenix, especially since we were in the car nine hours a day and she was forced to share space with the cat, who farted, squeaked, and hissed his way the fifteen hundred miles there, despite my best efforts to chew up a tablet of Dramamine for him like a mother bird since all of his teeth were gone and and I wanted to keep him as drugged up as possible.

But Bella was a dream, and to be honest, I was a little worried. Six months before our move, my brother-in-law had been over at the house, picked up one of her balls, and thrown it into the air in front of her.

“That dog can’t see,” he said a moment after he caught it.

“That’s ridiculous,” I pooh-poohed him. “Of course she can see. We play ball every day.”

“Well, look at her,” he said as he threw the ball up in the air again and caught it, as she sat, looking straight on. Her eyes never moved. She just stared straight ahead.

“That’s crazy,” I said again. “I swear I play ball with her every day.”

But he was right. I saw that for myself as I followed him out to the backyard and he threw the ball, and I watched Bella, who waited to hear it bounce and then shot in the right direction. And after several appointments with her vet, then a doggie eye specialist and numerous tests, including one that involved attaching feelers to her eyes and measuring her reaction to lasers, it was determined that Bella had sudden acquired retinal degeneration syndrome and wasn’t entirely blind but had only about 20 percent of her vision left. And that, I was told, wouldn’t last much longer. In just a short period, she would be completely blind.

I felt like someone was playing a bad joke on us, and I still had trouble believing it. She didn’t bump into furniture; she ran around the backyard; she even chased after balls. Bella could catch a French fry when I tossed it at her. What blind dog does that? I insisted to the vet, hoping to catch him in a web of his own very expensive “let’s hook your dog’s eyeballs up to sensors and spin a disco ball at her” lies.

Her vision had degenerated over several months, I was told, and as that happened, her other senses, particularly smell, became sharper. She knew the layout of the furniture and the house, and she’d adapted. She could
smell
a French fry coming at her. She could
hear
where the ball went.

“Don’t feel sorry for her and let her just lie around the house all day,” the specialist urged. “She’s not feeling sorry for herself. She’s using what she’s got to get along.”

And that’s when I decided that if my dog could do that, if she could catch a French fry in the dark, then she could do anything. So I decided to become Bella’s Seeing Eye person, and we went straight home and started working on “up.” Down. Forward. Left. Right. And she learned all of it. I searched out toys that made noise, bought anything with a bell on it, and dabbed them with scented oils to help out a little more.

Bella did great. I wouldn’t say she was a natural at being blind, but she adapted better than I could have ever hoped for. I took her off commercial dog food and started making her dinner, and I researched supplements and vitamins that were thought to improve vision. Though the specialist said she would be completely blind within weeks, when we got to Oregon six months later, she still retained a substantial amount of her sight.