“She’s adorable,” I said to my husband as I pointed to her picture on the computer screen, showing one floppy ear.
“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t think we’re ready. I know I won’t be ready at least until this semester is over.”
A month later I found Snowball, an Alaskan malamute who was completely blind in one eye, partially deaf, and being fostered in Tacoma.
“We will talk about this when the semester ends,” my husband reminded me. “In the meantime, please stop looking at those websites. I don’t like saying no to you all the time, and every time I do, it breaks your heart. We are not ready for a dog. I am not ready for a dog, plus we have a nineteen-year-old cat with shabby kidneys. Something that big and white would look like a polar bear to him. And we need a dog that likes cats.”
I wasn’t trying to replace Bella, and we both knew that. But at the same time, I hated the quiet. I wanted to hear the tinkling of tags and the bump-bump-bump-bump-bump behind me when someone with a wagging tail dropped a ball, signaling that playtime needed to commence and quickly.
I wanted a friend.
The morning that my husband was to take his last final exam of the semester, I logged onto the website for the county pound. And there, halfway down the list of dogs available for adoption, was a picture of four little puppies.
“Well, there you are,” I said to the little blond baby with her head down, the only one whose face I couldn’t see.
“Today is your last final, right?” I called to my husband, who was putting his coat on in the next room.
“Yup,” he said.
“Hurry home right after you’re finished taking the test,” I advised.
“Oooh, why?” he asked as he grabbed his book bag. “Are you planning a surprise?”
“Not really,” I said, and then pointed to the screen. “We have to go and get her. That one.”
And it was fine if my husband wanted to talk about it after the test was over. That was okay. We had plenty of time to talk about if getting a dog was the right thing for us as we were driving over there to pick her up.
When my husband came home, he put down his book bag and I picked up my car keys.
“We’ll do the ‘good dog’ test,” I told him. “We’ll test her temperament, and if she’s a wild beast, if she’s aggressive, if she shows dominant signs, we won’t bring her home. How’s that?”
“I need a promise from you,” my husband said, looking simply defeated.
“I’m promising,” I said as we pulled out of the driveway and into the street.
And the moment I opened the front door to the pound, I saw her, being cuddled by the lady at the front desk.
“Can I help you?” said a woman sitting next to her.
“I’m here for her,” I said, pointing at the little blond-and-white puppy, who, when she looked at me, revealed her one pony-brown and one sparkling blue eye, both rimmed in black, like Maybelline eyeliner.
From behind me, my husband let out a gasp as if he’d been punched in the gut.
“She’s the last one left of that litter, and we never get puppies in here,” the lady who was holding her said as she came around and handed me the four-pound, cream-and-white-colored Australian shepherd mix puppy, which I then promptly handed over to my husband and watched him begin to melt like a Milky Way in the sun.
She was our girl, and by the time his hands wrapped around her little chest to hold her for the first time, he was ready for a dog.
The Extended Warranty, the Extended Waistband, and the Repairman Who Almost Became a Hostage
Suddenly, my treadmill came to a halt.
It didn’t let out an aching, tired groan, it didn’t shrilly emit a gasping, high-pitched shriek, it just stopped. Without much fanfare or struggle, it simply ceased operations and slowly exhaled its last breath in a near-silent poof.
Unbelievably, I was on it when it lapsed into the deepest of comas as it slowly rolled to a complete halt and then turned quiet. I attacked the control panel with my fingers, pushing this button and that button, then pushing them harder so the treadmill understood that I meant business, but I couldn’t get any life signals on it at all. It wouldn’t beep, wouldn’t turn on; the console and the display were dead. Nothing. There was just horrible, complete silence.
That is, until I jumped off the treadmill and gave out a whoop worthy of a hillbilly trapping a possum, because, in that moment of sudden silence, my dream had amazingly come true. It was the day I had been waiting for, the day that my investment would pay off, and it had been five years in the making, even if the timing was a little bad. In three months, I would be going on a book tour, and I wanted to lose a good thirty pounds. Because honestly, the ass had to go. It had to go. Man, I knew it was out of hand when I completely outgrew the size selection at Banana Republic, but I tried to tell myself they were just cutting corners and outsourcing their sizing to Caracas, where the people are much smaller and eat more fruit. Then I was at the mall when I saw a portly girl with an enormous butt in a green jacket strutting down the walkway like she was something else—really, she looked like a giant avocado. Then as she got closer, her eyes met mine. She gave me the same dirty look I gave her, and then we both gasped in horror as we realized we were both looking into the mirror. And not a metaphorical one, either. I had experienced the Awful Glimpse—a sudden and unexpected look at yourself in which you have no preparation, no warning, and no time to hide behind a couch or landmass. It is gruesome. The Awful Glimpse is an unforgiving, unfiltered portrait of the real you when you least expect it.
So in light of that nightmare, this dead treadmill was my reverie, full and bountiful and golden, come to fruition to pay me handsomely for five years of patience and five hundred dollars’ worth of Sears fitness equipment warranties.
Now, I know you think I’m a sucker for actually buying the extended warranty, and the fact of the matter is that I am. Nobody buys the extended warranties unless they’ve also just transferred some money into the bank account of the prince of Nigeria or, like my mother, are currently a member of the Decorative Spatula of the Month Club and have, at their disposal, spatulas for any given holiday, plus auxiliary spatulas with delightful images of things like flip-flops, bumblebees, or cartoon characters on them. The sorts of things you’d envision while looking at a regular, naked spatula, thinking, My God, you’d be exquisite if you only had an image of a delicately striped candy cane embedded in your transparent, lithe little body!
Nobody.
But I bought the extended warranty, along with the likes of the meek who are afraid to disappoint the salesperson if they say no, the people who put more than a buck in the church basket on Sunday, and the spookers who start buying extra canned food every time they hear the words “bird flu.” These are the people who buy extended warranties, and although it’s true that I have a secret compartment in my closet that hides two cases of Dinty Moore beef stew in case a ravenous, surly mob invades my house after society has collapsed due to one of a variety of events, I did not buy the extended warranty because I was a sucker necessarily, but because I’m me. I have years of purchasing experience with myself, and I knew that when the timer tick-tocked on the very second after the manufacturer’s ninety-day warranty was up, I would somehow spill a two-liter bottle of Pepsi all over the console or a chunk of Milky Way Midnight bar would fall out of my mouth and work its way into the wheels of the conveyor belt. I’m no fool. Ninety days after I refused the extended warranty and brought my new microwave home, the plastic ceiling dripped all over my last bag of Extreme Psycho Butter microwave popcorn like alien guts and charged toward the finale by bursting into flame, taking the popcorn with it. Three months after I unpacked my new vacuum cleaner, it suffered a stroke after ingesting a particularly girthy hairball and a nickel that took me five tries of rolling over it before my new vacuum would even suck them up. And then there was the twenty-one-inch television that was purchased after my six-month-old, mere infant TV/DVD combo went
on strike, and held disc two of Gilmore Girls, Second Season hostage, which despite attempted surgery with a fork and a wad of chewing gum was never recovered. The twenty-one-inch TV never even survived its toddlerhood, as a year into its life it simply stopped responding, and, extended-warranty-less, I wrapped up the cord and talked a friend of mine with an electronically handy husband into taking it. Despite my better judgment, I allowed her to plug it in before carting it away, and within a mere moment of turning it on, a full-color picture bloomed onto the screen, as Lorelai and Rory sipped their twelfth coffee in as many scenes, roll-eyed each other in delightful banter, and basked in the glory that is being a size double zero tagteam. My friend was delighted and waved “thank you” from her car before driving away with the free television in her backseat that had not been defective after all but merely unplugged.
And even though an extended warranty doesn’t cover electronics not working because your U-boat feet have repeatedly kicked the plug from its union with the socket, the extended-warranty people could have told me that and then mocked me, respectively, which would have cost me far less than the resulting sixty-nine dollars for a new TV and sixty-nine dollars for the ensuing extended warranty.
And the truth of the matter is that my treadmill breaks. Quite often. It has broken at least once a year since I bought it, therefore, I’ve just about broken even or may even be a little ahead of the extended-warranty game, and once a year, some very nice lady from India will call me and remind me of that, right before I give her my Sears credit card number to renew my sucker status.
“Thank you very much, Miss Laurie Notaro,” she says.
“I love papadum,” I gush.
Whenever the treadmill broke, I shut the thing off and called the lady in India, who called the repair person to come and fix it, and in each case, they showed up within their designated forty-eight-hour appointment window with their toolboxes and their treadmill wisdom and greeted me with a smile and a handshake—with one exception.
Her name was Maria, and she had been fixing my treadmill for three years in a row when I felt the machine shudder and shake and I knew it was time to make the call. I made an appointment for later that week, but the day before she was to come, Maria called and said she couldn’t make it because she had a bad cold, so was Monday okay? I agreed, happy that I could sleep in, and I did exactly that. Due to my sleep mask and earplugs and blessed be thy Tylenol PM, it was a long, luxurious sleep. When I rose, my husband was already up, judging by the empty side of the bed, so I got up, found my big, fuzzy slippers (which completed my bold ensemble of a white pair of grandma panties and a far too tight tank top), and shuffled down the hall past my office and past the living room to the bathroom to get my morning business started.
And a grand morning it was, with a hearty business agenda to attend to, and I called the meeting to order. As my morning thunder rumbled and my colon went bowlin’, my husband suddenly appeared in the doorway of the bathroom.
He looked angry, very angry. “What are you doing?” I sort of figured he was saying, since I still had my earplugs in and couldn’t hear a thing.
I winced and got a little offended myself. I mean, come on, it was morning. Things needed to be attended to, like my morning symphony. I didn’t bother him while he was having his morning time!
“Oh, sure,” I said as I waved him away with my hand. “It’s not like this is something you haven’t seen before!”
“SHUT THAT DOOR!” he seemed to be yelling, and his brow was furrowing deeper.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, lay off, would you?” I replied, starting to get angry at his suddenly offended demeanor. “We had Mexican last night! I’m sure your potty activities weren’t all that dainty, either!”
At that point, he began to get very animated and pretended to shut an imaginary door, and was saying things that I could neither read on his lips nor even hear. And damned if I was taking my earplugs out. I liked the muffled, droning silence of my private universe, and I was going to enjoy it for as long as I could. If he was going to play Miss Priss, that was his problem. I looked at him, furrowed my brow, and shook my head, and very quickly he appeared to become outraged. Frankly, I couldn’t figure it out. All of a sudden, after how many years of being married to me, and now he’s upset that all semblance of propriety and decorum had faded away and crumbled after our third date? If he had always been appalled at my open-door policy, why not say something to begin with? Why let it fester for years and years and years until it spurred a reaction such as this, leaving him angry and myself embarrassed? Not to mention that I’m not the only one in the house with that policy, thank you very much. So why pick on me, in the morning when I’m still groggy, quite deaf, and so full of bean-and-cheese-burrito by-products that if I was to come into contact with a heat source, I’d go up like the Hindenburg?
“Whatever,” I said as I expended a little extra effort, even squeezed my eyes shut, and delivered something I knew was spectacular. “That one’s for you, weirdo!”
The horror that attacked my husband’s face was simply unparalleled. He shook his head, and with his hands balled up into little fists, he began marching in place like a little soldier.
I shrugged and threw my hands up in the air. I had no idea what he was doing.
“Are you calling me a bathroom Nazi?” I queried, and got no response.
Then he pretended to be carrying a bag, proceeded to “open” the bag, took some pretend stuff out, and then embarked on what looked like knitting. This was even more insane than his previous antics.
“You want me to make you a hat?” I asked. “A soldier hat? Now? You want me to make it now? Did you eat something that didn’t smell quite right from the fridge or take the dog’s arthritis pill instead of your multivitamin?”
Suddenly, my husband stopped marching and began furiously pointing toward my office. Then he marched again. Then he opened his pretend bag and returned to his mime knitting.
In my office, I began to piece together, is a knitting Nazi. No. In my office is a walking knitter. No. In my office, I can walk and knit.
“In my office, I can walk on my treadmill and knit?” I guessed, to which my husband shook his head and began pretend hammering.
In my office, I can walk on the treadmill and build things? I can walk on the treadmill and work with tools? Work with tools? Using tools on the treadmill? Fix things on the treadmill? Fixing the treadmill with tools the broken treadmill awwww holy shit in my office is being fixed by a repairperson with tools while I’ve been performing my best trumpet imitation on the crapper with the door open half naked not to mention I just walked down the hallway with nothing on but a tank top, slippers, and my grandma panties holy shit good God holy shit!
If there were an Olympic event for mortified half-naked women to jump off of a toilet and slam a bathroom door shut with the might of a hurricane, I would have at least won a bronze.
At least.
Oh no, I thought. She heard everything! Maria heard everything, and even I didn’t hear everything. I can’t come out now. I’m going to have to stay in the bathroom until she leaves.
And then I heard a muffled, tiny knock knock knock on the door before it opened and my husband stuck his head in.
“Why didn’t you shut the door when I told you to?” he hissed at me in a harsh whisper.
“I didn’t know what you were talking about!” I shot back.
“I can’t believe you were prancing and farting around with someone else here like you didn’t even care!” he continued.
“Maria canceled her appointment! She’s not supposed to be here until Monday!” I replied. “How was I supposed to know she came anyway?”
“I tried to tell you,” my husband answered. “It’s not her! They sent another lady! You just kept sitting there, making those…sounds! And you didn’t stop! You just wouldn’t stop!”
“I couldn’t hear you from over there!” I hurled back. “I have my earplugs in!”
?
??TAKE,” he said as he raised his hands, “THOSE,” put them close to my face, “THINGS,” stuck his left hand in my right ear and plucked out a conical piece of yellow foam, “OUT!” and did the same with my left ear. “Now will you please cover yourself?” he begged, and I heard that loud and clear.
“Sure,” I said spitefully. “I have a shower cap and a washcloth. Which would you prefer?”
“I’ll go get your robe,” he said, exasperated, but it didn’t matter. There was no way I was coming out of the bathroom, even if the repair lady decided she was going to build me a whole new treadmill and it took days. Surely, she knew I was in there, and I knew I was in there, but never would the two of us meet. I had my husband bring me a can of Diet Pepsi and a Pop-Tart. I hung out in the bathtub for quite a while until I heard her toolbox shut, the front door close, and her truck rev its engine and then pull away.
Needless to say, I am especially careful about scheduling any morning appointments, lest my methane version of The Ride of the Valkyries makes a redux while a repairperson is quietly lurking around my house after I’ve drugged myself up with over-the-counter sedatives.
So this time, after the treadmill ground to a halt and my whooping and hollering was all done, when time to call the lady in India came, I made an afternoon appointment, and I couldn’t wait. You see, I’ve heard that treadmill wheeze, I’ve watched as the walking belt was severed, I’ve felt it jolt and shake. But this time it was different. It had never simply just stopped before, unable to be revived by putting the plug back in the socket or rebooting the console. Nope. This time, I knew it was gone for good, I had finally worked it to death, and that meant only one thing.
If it couldn’t be fixed, then a new one, a brand-new treadmill, would be delivered to my doorstep as a reward for paying one hundred dollars a year for half a decade.
I wanted the new treadmill. And not only would it be a new treadmill, it would be the new model. Have you seen them? They have built-in fans and cup holders and fluffy shock absorbers that make climbing at a 6 percent incline like walking up the cottony steps of Heaven. Some even have snack stations where your Oreos can wait until you devour them like a caveman in your primal sweat as an “I burned sixty calories!” reward. I wanted one of those, one of the treadmills that all you have to do is stand on them and your chunkosity melts away. So when I called Sears to claim my prize of a new treadmill, they told me a technician would come out to repair the problem—in four weeks. Four weeks. By then, I assumed, I would have gained enough weight to grow out of my big girl clothes and come home one day to find my living room full of strangers holding duffel bags as my husband explained, “You don’t have any friends here or people who like you, so I paid people standing at the bus station five dollars each to be here. This is your Fat Intervention.”