Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog Read online

  I didn’t read it.

  I won’t go on at length about Lucy, except to say that she was a wonderful dog. You may remember John Grogan’s great book about Marley, the “bad” dog he loved so much. Well, Lucy wasn’t Marley. She was a saint, in the form of a golden retriever.

  She did all the things dogs are supposed to do. She was always loving and happy. She learned her words. She sat and stayed with pride. She followed her people everywhere. She snored with gusto. I never minded her snoring, although Thing Two always hated it. I swear, the night he threw her out of the bedroom for snoring was the beginning of the end for me. Six months later, he was gone, and she was back in place.

  She grew up with daughter Francesca and was devoted to her. Lucy let herself be ridden around the house like a pony, dressed in T-shirts and makeshift bonnets, and had a piece of paper stuffed in her collar, making a cape for a Superdog. She even had her toenails painted pink.

  Lucy looked damn good in pink.

  She slept upstairs and never came down until Francesca did, even if my daughter slept until late, as teenagers are wont do.

  And Lucy had many talents. She could reach anything on any counter, no matter how far back you put it. If you forgot you left food on the table, she never did. She could locate a carbohydrate with the accuracy of a doggie GPS system. She never destroyed or damaged anything. She never had an accident on the rug. She could rough-house with the other dogs, yet be mild when a baby was around. She was friendly to UPS and FedEx people, but she was never pushy to get affection. She’d come up beside you and lean against you, warming the outside of your knee.

  Though she was good, Lucy was no goody-goody. Once she bolted from obedience class after Francesca, who had left to go to the bathroom.

  She didn’t care much for rules. She made her own. Which is the only nub of resentment I have this morning, at the way she died. I had been away for the weekend visiting Francesca, and when I left Lucy and the gang with a dog sitter, she was doing fine. I came home last night to find her breathing labored. She wagged her tail when she saw me, but didn’t get up. And she hadn’t eaten in a day.

  So I got her in the car and drove her to my great vet, who made time to see her, even at closing. The vet heard a heart arrhythmia and thought she needed emergency bloodwork and tests done, so I left there and drove to the emergency vet’s, which is nearby. Lucy breathed hard in the back seat, her head flopped listlessly between her paws, her neck stretched out more than usual. I knew she was dying, even in the car. I could see it. This time, there would be no surprise diagnosis or magic pill.

  When we got to the hospital, amazingly, she rallied and walked out of the car, wagging her tail at the nurse.

  To Lucy, a stranger was just a very new friend.

  So I explained to the nurse that I thought she was dying, and the nurse took the leash and told me she’d come back to give me a report. I said that I wanted to go in with Lucy while they examined her, but they said no.

  It was against the rules.

  I made a fuss. If they couldn’t save Lucy, I wanted to be with her. But the nurse promised to come get me if things took a turn for the worse. For a minute, I didn’t know what to do. I looked at all the upset faces of the people in the waiting room and knew I was making a scene. Lucy stood between the nurse and me, wagging her tail. Because she doesn’t sweat the small stuff.

  So I let her go.

  She left happily through the swinging steel doors, and I sat down and stared at a magazine.

  I was remembering the day my father died. I knew he was going to die, and when his heart gave out, after a battle with cancer, our hospital room flooded with at least thirty doctors, four of whom went to his bed and tried to save his life, while all the rest were there as observers, edging us out of the way, to the far wall. Brother Frank fought through them to hold my father’s hand, and I hugged my stepmother as she cried, and at some point somebody told us to leave.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  A woman doctor, who was observing, turned around and said to me, “But unnecessary people aren’t supposed to be in the room.”

  She actually said that. I’m not making it up. I could never write such bad fiction.

  You know what I said to her? I said, “He’s my father, and you don’t even know him. Who’s unnecessary?”

  And so I got to be present when my father left this earth, which is the least I owed him.

  With Lucy, I wasn’t in the room yet, so I let them keep me out. I tried to fight, but I didn’t want to make a scene.

  My heart failed.

  So I sat down and waited, and not ten minutes later, a different nurse rushed out, looking for the owner of “the golden.”

  Because they didn’t know her.

  And I got to be with Lucy at the very very end, which is the least I owed her. I don’t know if she knew I was there. The vets tell me yes, and they were nice people, trying to save her life and following the hospital’s rules. It wasn’t their fault. I don’t blame them, and I even thanked them for all they did. But after being with Lucy for all of her thirteen years, I hated being excluded from her last ten minutes.

  Next time, I’m kicking those doors open.

  And the truth is, it hardly matters much, the next day. Maybe they didn’t know Lucy, but I did. Francesca did. So did my mother and brother.

  And now, you do, too.

  And yes, she was golden.

  Just Dandy

  I have detected another difference between men and women, in addition to the one you’re thinking of.

  Before I begin, the credit for this observation goes to best friend Franca. She told it to me the other day, and I agreed. That’s the great thing about having a best friend. We agree on everything. In fact, I can’t recall the last time we disagreed about anything, and Franca would be my first phone call after I murdered someone. She wouldn’t even ask why I did it. She would know I had an excellent reason. She’d just drive over with a shovel and a Hefty bag, no question.

  A best friend is just another name for accessory after the fact.

  I would do it for her, too, though Franca’s too nice to kill anyone. She’s the good twin to my evil.

  So here’s what happened.

  Franca lives in the suburbs and she loves this time of year, when dandelions appear on her front lawn. We agree about loving dandelions. We’re not dumb, we know that they’re weeds, but that’s a technicality, isn’t it? They’re beautiful, and where do you draw the line between weeds and wildflowers? And if it’s a pretty weed, grows naturally, and costs nothing, why don’t we welcome it?

  Don’t start in with the fact that dandelions kill grass. There’s room on the planet for both dandelions and grass. In fact, I think it’s high time that grass learned to share.

  But it turns out that some of the people in Franca’s neighborhood don’t like dandelions, and they’re men. One of them knocked on her door to suggest that his lawn guy could give her an estimate on getting rid of her dandelions, and another left a bag of Weed N Feed at her door. She thinks they were trying to do something nice, but I’m not sure. If someone left a six-pack of Slim-Fast on my doorstep, I wouldn’t see the upside.

  The dandelion issue reminded me of scenes from my second marriage, which is like watching a horror movie without the Raisinets. Thing Two liked the lawn to be dandelion-free, so we paid somebody to strew pretty balls of poison all over the grass, like nightmare Skittles. They made the yard reek of high-school swimming pool and left greasy spots on the front walk. Plus I worried that the dogs would eat them and grow a fifth leg.

  Sadly, the dandelions went away, and happily, so did Thing Two.

  Now my dandelions grow freely, bright splotches of yellow dotting the green lawn. They make me happy every time I see them. I love them so much I might paint my shutters that color, which Benjamin Moore calls Mellow Yellow (2020-50).

  Franca likes dandelions even after they’ve changed to balls of wispy seeds. S
he reminded me that when our kids were little, we used to pull the dandelions, make a wish, and blow the seeds into the wind. She said that her lawn is full of “fuzzy heads of wishes” and when she looks at it, she sees the “magic of our babies’ childhoods.”

  I told you she was the good twin.

  And really, who hasn’t wished on a dandelion? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if there were less Weed N Feed and more wishes?

  I wonder if this difference over dandelions applies to lawns in general. Thing Two was fetishistic about the lawn, and assistant Laura tells the story of the day her sons were playing wiffleball and her husband felt bugged that home plate was messing up the grass. Laura told him, “We’re not raising grass, we’re raising boys.”

  He agreed, and he likes dandelions, too.

  So I can’t decide if this is a boy/girl thing or not. I’m curious about what you think.

  And I wonder what this means for buttercups.

  Graduation Day

  Daughter Francesca is graduating from college, and I spent the last hour trying to figure out her school’s incredibly complicated commencement schedule. According to the website, there are three separate commencement exercises, and the main one will be attended by “approximately 32,000 people.” The gates open at 6:45 A.M., and not everyone will get a seat, so the website advises me to get there in advance.

  Ya think?

  And how exactly do you play musical chairs with a small city?

  And how early should I get there—1986?

  Nor does the website advise how to wake up my 83-year-old mother at that hour, much less provide her with the requisite coffee and apple fritter from Dunkin’ Donuts. Our fancy hotel doesn’t serve breakfast until 6:00 A.M. and it offers items like steel-cut oatmeal imported from Ireland and omelets with organic eggs. The website doesn’t seem to understand that if you try to sell my mother a $30 breakfast, she will throw it at you.

  The website also states that the commencement exercises will be held outside, but neither does it state how to get my mother to walk on grass, which she regards as exercise and therefore against her religion. Nor can the website conceive of how slowly Mother Mary walks. The hotel is only three blocks away, but she will have to leave two days prior to make it by dawn.

  The solution would be for her to skip the first graduation ceremony and attend only the second ceremony, which will be smaller, attended by only ten thousand people. But the website gives no clue as to how to find her in a crowd that size, as she is only four foot eleven inches tall and the oldest member of the Lollipop Guild.

  She’d stand out if she wore her lab coat, but then she could end up at the medical school graduation.

  In theory, brother Frank could escort her to the second ceremony, but that would require him to find me in a warren of colonial brick dorms, all of which look alike and are badly signed, the better to keep out the unwashed. Like the Scot-tolines, until Francesca got in.

  The other possibility is that my mother goes to the third graduation ceremony, to which alumni and bigwigs are invited because that’s where the celebrity intellectual is speaking. The only problem is, the third ceremony has nothing to do with my daughter, and to us, she’s the celebrity intellectual.

  The fourth option is that my mother waits in the hotel and watches all three ceremonies on the local cable TV, but for that she could have stayed in Miami and not missed her personal marathon of Law & Order.

  So I’m confused.

  I need an advanced degree to figure out how to deal with college graduation. Or maybe a chart with color-coded highlighting or a map with flag pins. But maybe all this confusion is good, because it distracts me from the larger topic—that my daughter is graduating from college.

  Of course it’s an enormously happy occasion, and it goes without saying that I’m proud of her. It doesn’t go without saying to her. I tell her how proud I am at least three times a day and I think every kid needs to hear it, even big girls in caps and gowns. But what I mean is that while I’m so happy with the fact that she’s graduating, we haven’t had a chance yet to talk about where she’s going to live until she finds a job. You know my answer:

  Home.

  Or better yet, in a convent.

  Now that college is over, it seems only right that she should move home and get back into her diapers.

  I mean, that was the deal, right?

  I let my kid go to college, now she should come home. It’s only fair, even though I have enjoyed being an empty nester, and it seems like only yesterday I wrote about missing her. Well, I do, and now I want her back. When I told this to a friend of mine, she told me a joke:

  What’s the difference between an Italian mother and a Rottweiler?

  The Rottweiler eventually lets go.

  So college graduation is good news and bad news. The good news is that my kid is healthy, happy, and now, well-educated. And the bad news is that her life is beginning, without me in earnest, so that boo-hoo-my-kid-is-going-to-college was only a step in the separation that began when they cut the umbilical cord.

  That was my first mistake. I should have stopped them, right there. In my view, it was medical malpractice.

  And after the initial snip, the separation proceeded incrementally to first step, then first date, first car, and first degree. She’s beginning her life as an adult, on her own.

  I guess they call it commencement for a reason.

  And so we will attend, our raggedy and irregular little family, there to bear witness at this awesome event. I can picture it now. The golden girl we all raised, beautiful in cap and billowing gown. We will bring roses too cumbersome to hold. We will shift on hard wooden chairs. Mother Mary won’t be able to hear or see anything, yet she will weep. We all will. It will be an estrogen fest. Thank God that brother Frank is gay, so he can join in.

  And back at the hotel, Ruby The Corgi will be ordering the imported oatmeal.

  Nothing but the best, on this very, very special day.

  Congratulations, Francesca.

  We’re proud of you.

  Trouble in Paradise

  Mother Mary and brother Frank were getting ready to fly up for daughter Francesca’s graduation when trouble broke out in Miami. It began when I got a text from Frank, which read:

  CALL ME ASAP ABOUT MOM.

  I freak out. Mother Mary isn’t in the best of health, and Frank never texts me. I grab the phone and speed-dial him. “What’s the matter? Is she okay?”

  “It’s really bad.” He sounds upset, and my heart pounds in my chest.

  “What happened?”

  “I got a tattoo.”

  Huh? “And she had a heart attack?”

  “No, she won’t speak to me. She won’t even look at me. She turns her head when I go to kiss her cheek.”

  My blood pressure returns to normal, though I still don’t understand. “This is what you texted me about? This is nothing!”

  “Really? You try living with her.”

  An excellent point. The two of them battling in their little house gives new meaning to cage fighting. I say, “But you already have two tattoos. Why is she so upset?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the tattoo look like?”

  “It’s red roses under a sentence.”

  “What’s the sentence?”

  “ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “This is ironic. Doesn’t Mom realize she’s judging you?”

  “It’s not funny. Do something.”

  “I’m on it.” I hang up and speed-dial my mother. When she answers, I cut the small talk. “Mom, he’s 51 years old. If he wants a tattoo, he can have a tattoo.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “So what? He’s upset.”

  “So am I.”

  “Why can’t you just let it go?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s ironic, isn’t it? I mean, his tattoo should say, ONLY MOM CAN JUDGE ME.”

  “I don’t g
et it.”

  I don’t explain. Evidently, irony doesn’t come easily to The Flying Scottolines. We’re too literal, or maybe insane.

  Mother continues, “I don’t know why your brother has to be this way. What’s the matter with him? What did I do to deserve this? Why is he like this? Was he born this way?” She then throws the kind of fit that other parents throw when they find out their kid is gay. But that, she had no problem with.

  Ironic, no?

  She was fine with it from day one, when Frank told us that his friend Arthur was really his boyfriend. She even invited Arthur to move in with us, and she was happy to make extra meatballs for dinner. Now Arthur is gone and she lives with Frank in South Beach, where the two of them have a social circle of moms, gay sons, and meatballs. Their house smells like gravy and aftershave.

  “Mom, you have to make up with him. Francesca’s graduation is coming up.”

  “I won’t speak to him there, either.”

  “You have to. You’ll be sitting with him.”

  “No. You sit between us.”

  I try to argue with her, but I get nowhere. When my mother sets her jaw, she’s an Italian Mount Rushmore. I cannot imagine them flying from Miami together, side-by-side, then going through the entire three days in Boston not speaking to each other.

  Actually, I can, which is worse.

  I have to prevent it, but I have only one weapon.

  Guilt.

  I choose my next words carefully. I don’t want to give her a heart attack. My brother and I have been worried about giving my mother a heart attack ever since we woke her up too loudly and she told us we could give her a heart attack. I’m telling you now, if my mother gets a heart attack, it’s my fault.

  “Mom, think about it this way. None of us knows what will happen in life. What if something happened to you, or Frank?”