Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (41 page)

And their combined age is still less than mine.

So I thought, I should do this. I should take a lesson from the kids. Maybe if I used a moisturizer at night, my face wouldn’t look like a roadmap of wrinkles, with I-95 running parallel to the turnpike on my forehead. So I went home, dug some cream out of the closet, spackled my cheeks, and went to bed. Which is just when Little Tony the puppy trotted over to my pillow and sat on my face.

Whoever said you should use a night cream didn’t have a dog who sleeps on their cheek.

To interrupt the story, I never had a dog sleep anywhere near my head, much less on my face. All my dogs always sleep at the foot of the bed, and it works out just fine. My feet are always warm, and I doze off listening to the rhythm of their contented snoring.

It’s like Ambien, only with fur.

But Little Tony, the new black-and-tan Cavalier puppy, sleeps on my pillow, with his head resting on my cheek or my neck.
I know it sounds weird, but it’s cute, cozy, and fun. I highly recommend it, if your social life is at an all-time low, too.

In any event, I forgot about this habit of Little Tony’s as I put on the night cream, so when he plopped his puppy tushie on my cheek, it took me a second or two to understand the implications. And by the time I detached his butt from my face, stray black hairs clung to my cheek like a beard.

Not a good look, for a single gal.

Of course, I didn’t give up, as I need both smooth skin and warm puppy, so since then I’ve gone to bed with the night cream and Little Tony, craning my neck to keep his fur off my face, or my face off his fur, generally twisting and turning most of the night until we both fall into an exhausted, albeit glossy, sleep.

The plot thickens when Little Tony has the first of what would be three operations. As you may remember, the poor little guy had a mother who accidentally bit off his foreskin, evidently taking literally the term “castrating bitch.”

In any event, he needed an operation to reconstruct his foreskin, but it came out too big. So he had a second operation, but it came out too small. He just had his third operation, and this time it’s just right.

It’s like Goldilocks, only with, well, you get it.

Why this matters is that after each of these operations, he had to wear one of those plastic Elizabethan collars for dogs, shaped like a cone over his head. He wears it for two weeks after every operation, and with three operations, he has spent six weeks of his young life in the plastic collar, or, as I call it, the Tony Coney.

So you know where this is going.

If you thought it was crazy to have dog face stuck to your night cream when you sleep, try wrapping that puppy in a
plastic cone, slapping it on top of your face cream, and trying to catch forty winks.

It’s fun.

The only experience I’ve had like this happened ages ago, when I was in sixth grade, trying to clear up a case of adolescent acne by using Cuticura ointment. Please tell me I’m not the only person in the world who remembers old-school Cuticura. I went online before I wrote this and am astounded that the product still exists, though I’m sure it’s improved.

It would have to be.

Back then, it was a round orange tin full of smelly, gooey, black-green gunk. Somebody told my mother it was good for pimples, but they must have been criminally insane. In retrospect, it was good for greasing axles. Yet I smeared it faithfully on my skin every night, reeking like a motor pool, and every morning my skin looked worse.

In any event, I digress. My fancy night cream is better than Cuticura, even though I get the occasional dog-hair sideburn. Two weeks later, I am sleepless but happy, but there’s not a wrinkle on Little Tony.

So maybe it works.

Now that we have an economic stimulus plan, everybody is trying to figure out how it will work.

Me, I opt out.

I’m trying to figure out how Jennifer Aniston spent $50,000 on her hair during her movie tour to London and Paris.

I’m not sure she got her money’s worth, unless they blew her dry with gold.

Although I admit, there’s part of me that gets it. Hair matters to women. If I won the lottery, I might pay somebody $50,000 for great hair. In fact, I bet if you asked the average woman how much she would spend to get hair like Jennifer Aniston’s, that woman would answer, “Anything.”

So already, it’s cheaper.

Plus, it’s a bargain if you break it down by strand. By my calculations, Jen spent only fifty cents a hair. I got that number by going online and plugging “how many hairs on a woman’s head” into Google. I didn’t bother to verify the information. This is the comic relief department, remember?

Anyway, the computer reports that the number of hairs on a woman’s head varies with her haircolor. Who knew? A blonde has 140,000 hairs on her head, but Jennifer Aniston isn’t a natural blonde, because they’re extinct. They died off millions
of years ago in a meteor shower, or maybe they ran out of vegetation, scientists aren’t sure, but either way, nowadays we all highlight our hair and forget our natural color.

People with brown or black hair have 110,000 strands, but the computer says that the average person has 100,000 hairs. I used 100,000 because it’s easier and I hate math.

Therefore, Jen spent fifty cents a hair.

That’s nothing. I can’t remember the last thing I bought for fifty cents. Chewing gum costs twenty-five dollars, and sandwiches are a million. Your basic bailout starts at ten billion, and we owe China twenty trillion, so why split hairs?

Sorry.

By the way, the same week that Jen spent $50,000 on her hair, Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady bought a Rolls-Royce Phantom for $405,000.

He also got married to Gisele Bündchen, and I sense that these things are not unrelated. If you’re gonna marry Gisele Bündchen, you’re not carting her around in a Ford Fiesta.

She’s tall.

The news also reported that Tom Brady put a baby seat in the Rolls-Royce, for the child he conceived with the woman whose name he forgot when he met Gisele Bündchen.

But that’s not my point.

I’m trying to understand how Tom could spend $405,000 on a car. To be fair, men do love cars. I bet if you asked the average man how much he would pay to drive Gisele Bündchen around in a car, that man would answer, “Anything.”

So $405,000 is a bargain.

I went online to the Roll-Royce website and learned that the Phantom has four “coach” doors, which means that the back doors are hinged wrong and open in a counterintuitive way. But they’re only $100,000 a door, so it’s still cheap.

Also the Phantom has a statuette on the hood, which looks like a Barbie doll with wings. The statuette has a name, “The Spirit of Ecstasy,” and if you take into consideration that you’re getting the car, the Barbie doll, and the pornographic name, then $405,000 is more than fair.

Plus the Phantom has a quiet, powerful engine, specifically, “453 bhp at 5359 rpm and 531 lb/ft 720 Nm at 3500 rpm.” I have no idea what that means, but I bet it translates to five miles a gallon.

So you see where this is going.

Buying a car for $405,000 is as crazy as spending $50,000 on hair, and it brings me to my point:

Cars are hair for men.

Conversely, hair is cars for women.

I doubt that a man would spend $50,000 on his hair, and no women I know would spend $405,000 on a car.

Now, here’s the hard question:

Do men care if women have great hair?

No. If I were a woman who wanted to interest a man, I would take the $50,000 and buy the best breasts ever.

And do women care if men have great cars?

No. If I were a man who wanted to interest a woman, I would save the money and mow the grass.

And what have we learned?

The best things in life are free.

Or plastic.

Little Tony and I just completed our first day of puppy kindergarten, and we flunked.