The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

  “Fine,” Tom says.

  “And I just also want to say that this is partly your fault.”

  “‘This’ being…?”

  “This dieting! I mean, I try very hard to stay attractive to you, and I know I’m just not attractive to you anymore!”

  “Yes you are!”

  “Oh, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. Let’s just tell the truth. I know you love me, but you no longer find me attractive like you used to!”

  “Well, Marsha. Come on, do you find me attractive like you used to?”

  “Yes!” This is not so, actually. But she finds, oddly, that at this time of demanding the truth, she herself cannot offer it. She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. And anyway, she doesn’t want to talk about him. She wants to talk about her.

  She moves to sit on the sofa and leans forward earnestly, just like her stupid therapist. She says, “I look in the mirror now, and even if I lost weight, there’s just…There’s nothing I can do. It’s over. My bodyness. My attractiveness in my body. I can diet forever but it will never make me like I was. I’m…Well, I’ve gotten kind of square and melty-looking. I will never be attractive like I was again. In the bodily way of before, which is impossible.” Oh, she hates it when she gets this way. When her emotions gobble up her reason, making her wildly inarticulate.

  “So why try?” Tom asks, and she wants so very much to go and get the yellow pages and bring it squarely down on his head.

  “Because you want me to! You respond to me differently when I lose weight! I can see it in your eyes that you find me more attractive when I’m thinner! My husband! So I feel I have to keep trying and trying—”

  “But you don’t have to keep trying.”

  “Tom. Do you or do you not find me more attractive when I’m thinner.”

  He frowns, thinking. Then he says, “Well, I guess you might look a little nicer when you’re thinner. I mean your clothes aren’t as tight and everything. But, Marsha, don’t you know this? I don’t care. Do I notice a beautiful woman on the street, even if I try very hard not to look at her? Sure. But do I care about her? No. I care about you, sweetheart: then, now, forever. Marsha. I love you. I love you with all my heart, and I always will. Look, I’m overweight, too.”

  “Not anymore,” Marsha says, bitterly.

  “No, not anymore. But it will come back, I can’t keep this up forever.”

  “You can’t?”

  “No! And I don’t want to! I’ll be reasonable; I don’t want to create health problems. But I’m not going to go to that clinic or follow diets or count points or any of that crap.”

  Oh, Tom, she thinks. You’re back.

  He comes over and embraces her. “Listen, if I don’t put the moves on you, it’s because…Well, sometimes the dog just won’t come to the whistle.”

  She doesn’t answer. She knows this.

  “But also, I guess I just don’t think so much about that anymore. I think about other things. You know?”

  Buried against his shoulder, she nods. She feels the bodywide relief of having had a good cry without having had a good cry.

  “Suppose we agree to try to be a healthy weight, and that’s all,” Tom says.

  “Okay.” She wipes under her nose, pulls away to smile at him. “Okay.”

  “And suppose we agree to go and get a pizza right now.”

  “I’m kind of full,” she says. “But I guess I could eat a little.”

  “There you go. And I brought something home for dessert that would make the girls at my clinic hold the sides of their heads and scream.” He takes Marsha’s hand and leads her to the kitchen, where there is a bakery box on the table from Butterflake, their favorite. He lifts the lid to show her a cake that must have been beautiful before. But it appears the cake must have slid sideways, for it is smashed on one side, and the frosting is smeared so that none of the pretty designs are intact.

  “Uh-oh,” Tom says.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I dropped it.”

  She laughs. “It’s fine. It’s better.”

  “Forget the pizza,” Tom says. “Let’s eat this.”

  “We can have pizza for dessert!”

  Marsha goes to the cupboard for plates, she knows just the ones she wants to use, the ones she got at an antiques store; they have scalloped edges, and they feature bouquets of violets at the center. Cake forks, of course, they’ll use them, too. The very name thrills her: cake forks.

  She pulls down the plates and then stands still for a moment, remembering the day she and Tom brought their first child home from the hospital. They were so young, barely twenty-one, they didn’t know anything. The baby was in a car seat in the back, and they both kept turning around to say things to her. Passing a memorial site, Tom turned around to say, “We don’t believe in war.” At a stop sign, he told her, “Art matters. We really believe that. We really like dogs, too, Alice. There will be many, many dogs in your life, so please don’t be allergic. There is a dog waiting at home for you. Teddy. Because he looks like a teddy bear, you’ll see.”

  For her part, Marsha leaned over the seat to very gently touch the baby’s hand, which was curled into a tiny little fist. She said, “We love you so much. We’re so happy you’re here. We’re so happy we’re bringing you home. We’re so happy you were a girl, we wanted a girl.” She was crying, a little; her voice trembled.

  “I guess you could say we’re happy,” Tom said, and Marsha lightly punched him.

  Alice has children of her own now. Marsha wants to say something about Alice, about how many hopes and dreams were pinned to that baby sleeping in the car seat that day. Alice fulfilled many of those hopes and dreams. She brought them joy, and she brought them sorrow, too, but oh, the joy. The joy. Marsha wants to say something about that to Tom, now, it seems to fit the moment. But she decides not to tell him. She doesn’t need to. He knows.

  THE ONLY ONE OF MILLIONS JUST LIKE HIM

  It was Monica who began calling the puppy Dogling. At first it was in jest, but then it stuck; even her tough-guy husband, Ralph, used the name with no sense of irony. But the name fit: the dog was small and adorable-looking even into old age, a ringer for the dog who starred in Benji, only cuter. Sometimes when Monica bathed, Dogling sitting devotedly beside her, Ralph heard her sing to him in her loud Brooklynese, “You oughta be in pictures, you’re wonderful to see…”

  Dogling really should have been in the movies. He had the kind of dog face that made people act foolish, made them crouch down and speak in a high voice and say everything twice: “Are you a sweetheart? Are you a sweetheart? You are, aren’t you! Yes you are!” Then came the inevitable “What’s his name?” and both Monica and Ralph always answered “Butchie.” No point in everybody knowing everything about nothing that was their business, as Monica’s mother used to say. She was an intelligent woman, Shirley, but every now and again she would come out with these head spinners. Once, watching Dogling staring into the fire, transfixed by the flames, she asked, “Do dogs have brains?”

  But now Dogling barely eats, he barely drinks, he barely interacts with them at all. When he’s not sleeping, he stares off into space as though seeing the canine reaper, ethereal leash in hand. Dogling is thirteen years old and has had a good run for the money, as Ralph says. He couldn’t have had a better home, a better time. The way he loved unwrapping his birthday presents? The way he’d slept with them every night? The way he liked riding in the car, running in the woods, eating White Castle burgers? Ralph says the dog doesn’t know he is dying, and really, isn’t that dying’s worst problem?

  None of this makes Monica feel any better. She tells Ralph he doesn’t understand the relationship she has with the dog, how he really is her best friend. All right, so Dogling is thirteen, but a lot of small dogs live much longer than that! Tootsie, that disgusting, runny-eyed miniature white poodle down the block, she’s fifteen. And why is she alive, anyway? All she does is tremble and bite. Not just strangers and the postma
n, she bites her owners! And they just laugh! Wave around their bandaged fingers like a trophy! “Oh, boy, you really drew some blood this time! Good girl! Want a cookie?”

  On this warm spring afternoon, Monica lies in the chaise longue on the back deck wearing her red pedal pushers and yellow blouse and bangle bracelets and Liz Taylor sunglasses, holding Dogling to her ample bosom, drinking Tom Collinses and weeping with abandon. Her mascara is running, her lipstick has smeared, and her foundation, mixed with her tears, has dripped onto her blouse, making for pale orange spots that have dried stiff. Oh, it is just too much, it is willful hysteria, plain and simple, and she knows it (as do her neighbors), but she can’t seem to stop. Finally Ralph tries to take Dogling from Monica’s arms, suggesting that, dying though the dog may be, he might want to pee, or have a drink of water, or eat something. Or for Christ’s sake, be alone, he thinks but does not say. “What,” Monica says, “you think I’m not trying to feed him, here? You see this baloney, all cut up? You think I’m not trying to give him water?” She holds up an eyedropper. “What’s this, Ralph?”

  He squints in her direction. Ralph’s vision is shot. Also his hearing. Also his you-know-what, but what the hell. He is not without his charms. A bit overweight, but with kind blue eyes and a full head of hair. “A swizzle stick?” he asks.

  “It’s an eyedropper, Ralph! An eyedropper! For…Well, of course it’s for dropping things in eyes.” She sniffs and pushes at one side of her hair. “But I remembered something. When I was a little girl, I once found a baby bird that had fallen out of the nest, and I fed it water with an eyedropper. Also I fed it hamburger. With my fingers.”

  “Did it work?” Ralph says. “Did you get to watch it grow up and fly away?”

  Monica shakes her head, and her face screws up into what looks like a human asterisk. “No! It died! Everything dies!”

  That’s right, Ralph wants to say. Everything dies and you are turning what is a completely natural process into a big fat soap opera. Instead, he says, “Well, that’s a good idea, the eyedropper. So he’s drinking, at least?”

  “No! Because he wants to drink out of his Butchie bowl!”

  Dogling has food and water dishes with his photo imprinted on the insides, one of his gifts last Christmas. More than once, Monica has wondered aloud if it might have been the printing process for those bowls that gave him cancer. And now she starts up again, here she goes, Ralph could say the words right along with her: “Everything in the world is poisoned, Ralph! The land, the sea, the air! Everything! And nobody cares one whit!”

  “Monica,” Ralph says, sighing. “You’re just…You’re making too much of this. You’ve got to stop.”

  Monica stares at Ralph, slowly gathering the fabric at the neck of her blouse into her fist. Then, in an oddly matter-of-fact tone, she says, “You don’t care. I don’t think you ever did.” Her words sound suspiciously like lines of dialogue from an old Bette Davis movie.

  “Of course I care,” Ralph says. “I love him! He’s the old Butcheroo!”

  “No,” Monica says. “As I have said on more than one occasion, Ralph, I’m not sure you really know what love is.” She turns away to caress the head of the sleeping dog, then suddenly turns back to her husband. “He farted! Ralph! Do you think he’s getting better?”

  Ralph comes to kneel beside Monica and stares into the face of the sleeping dog. Well, the dog did fart. But when Ralph looks up at his wife, he doesn’t have to answer the question she asked him. Monica begins again to cry.

  Ralph stands, watching helplessly, his hands in his pocket. Finally, he says he’s going out bowling and to drink a cold one.

  “Fine,” Monica says.

  “I just need to get out a bit,” Ralph says. “I’ll be back in less than a hour. One beer.”

  “By then…who knows?” Monica says.

  Well, exactly.

  That evening, while Dogling sleeps in his basket at Monica’s feet, they watch American Idol and eat coconut cream pie that Ralph brought home from the bakery. “You know, you’re right, Ralph,” Monica says. “You have to do something else. You can’t just hold him and…” She points at the screen. “Oh, look! Look who’s coming, I like her, she’s my favorite. She should win. She’s kind of weird-looking, but if she wins, they’ll fix that. Look what they did for Clay, my God.”

  Ralph watches as another young hopeful belts out a song—or so they call it, it never really seems like a song to Ralph. What these people call singing Ralph would call…what? Riding the scale up and down as though in frantic search of the note, that’s what. “The Way You Look Tonight,” there’s a song!

  “Want another piece of pie?” Monica asks, after the show is over, and when Ralph says yes, her face fills with sorrow and he wonders if he’s answered incorrectly. “I don’t have to,” he says. “Either way is fine. I could drop a pound or two, God knows.”

  “No, no, eat the pie,” she says. “I’m just fragile right now, Ralph. He’s not even gone and I already miss him so much.” She lifts Dogling out of his basket and kisses the top of the dog’s head. An ear twitches, but he doesn’t wake up. “Dogling?” she whispers and then smiles broadly.

  “There you are! Hi, baby! Hi!”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she tells Ralph. “Though how I can have anything in me after the tears I’ve been shedding, I’ll never know.” She hands the dog to Ralph.

  “Here. Hold him. Don’t let his legs hang down like that! Keep him comfortable! And talk to him!”

  “Well, look who’s up and at ’em,” Ralph says. Dogling’s tail wags once, twice. “How about we get the hell out of here?” Another wag. Ralph carries Dogling out into the backyard and gently sets him down. “There you go, pal. Let her rip.” The dog stands still before him. Blinks.

  “Come on,” Ralph says, “pee for Daddy before Mommy comes back.”

  The dog starts to lift his leg but falls down, and Ralph quickly picks him up and brings him inside. When Monica comes back into the living room, he says, “Sweetheart. It’s enough.”

  She stares at him. “What do you mean?”

  Ralph shrugs. “He can’t even stand up. He’s starting to smell. I think we should…you know.” He draws his finger across his neck and whistles, then instantly regrets it.

  “Oh, my God,” Monica says. “Oh, my God.” But then she draws in a shuddering breath and says, “Okay. All right. I know. But, Ralph?”

  “What?”

  “This is our last dog.”

  “We’ll get another one,” he says. “In time.”

  “No,” she says. “We absolutely will not. I could never go through this again. I won’t! And I want to sleep with him alone in the guest room tonight.”

  “Go right ahead,” Ralph says. Good, then he himself can sleep in peace. Christ. It’s a dog! It’s a good dog, but it’s a dog. Ralph takes his transistor radio out into the back-yard and smokes a cigar while he listens to the White Sox cream the Cubs after four extra innings. And no one to celebrate with; Monica would take exception to his happiness.

  When he comes back inside, the living room lights are off and Monica has gone to bed. He cracks the guest room door and watches the sheet over Monica rise and fall. Dogling is loudly snoring. For a moment, he regrets his decision. If a dog snores in a forest, should he be put to sleep the next day?

  “I’ll get our jackets,” Monica says the next morning, after she and Ralph have had their coffee and determined that Dogling is indeed no better and probably worse. She goes over to the coat closet while Ralph sits in a living room chair, wrapping Dogling in his blanket for the trip to the vet. At the center of Ralph’s chest, a terrible pressure is building. Grief, of course. Only then he feels a rush of nausea, and begins to perspire. He leans back in the chair. The pressure intensifies; he can hardly breathe.

  “Monica?” he calls.

  “I’m coming!” she says. “Just can’t wait to kill him, can you. And cover his ears, that he shouldn’t hear that.”
br />   “Monica!”

  “I’m coming!” She walks into the room, tightening a brightly patterned scarf around her neck. I gave her that, Ralph thinks. She stops abruptly a few feet from him.

  “Ralph? What’s the matter?”

  “I just had this big pain in my chest. I think…I think I’m having a heart attack!”

  She stares at him. “Ralph, you can’t! Dogling is dying!”

  “Call 911.”

  “Really? Are you serious, Ralph?”

  “Now!”

  She drops her purse and runs into the kitchen. He hears her giving their address. Then she says, “Well, you know our dog is dying and all of a sudden he had this terrific chest pain…. No, my husband.”

  Sweet Christ in heaven. Does he have to speak to them himself? Ralph starts to stand, then falls back into the chair. Before his eyes, the loveliest violet curtain descends.

  Ralph awakens to the sound of chewing. Sitting in a chair at his bedside is Monica, eating a bag of Cheetos and reading a magazine. “Monica?” he says softly.

  She stands quickly. “Oh, you’re awake, thank God. Listen, Ralph, you’re fine. Let’s go.” She drops the bag into the garbage, picks up her purse, and slides it onto her shoulder. “Come on.”

  “What are you talking about? I just had a heart attack! I’m not going anywhere!”

  “No, you didn’t, Ralph. You did not. They did an EKG and checked your blood—cardiac enzymes, don’t you remember?”

  Ralph smiles. Codiac, Monica says. What a goil. He chuckles.

  “Ralph?”

  “What?”

  “Are you a little…Are you stoned? Do you feel stoned?”

  Stoned! Now he laughs out loud.

  “Shhh!” Monica squeezes his shoulder. “Ralph. Act normal. It was indigestion. That’s all it was, indigestion and anxiety. And they knocked you out a little bit, is why you’re stoned. But wake up, now. We have to go home. Dogling’s all alone.”

  Ah. He remembers. He thinks, in fact, that he has just been with Dogling. A dream? A vision?