Me Talk Pretty One Day (8 page)

Unlike the rest of us, the Rooster has always enjoyed our father’s support and encouragement. With the dream of college officially
dead and buried, he sent my brother to technical school, hoping he might develop an interest in computers. Three weeks into
the semester, Paul dropped out, and my father, convinced that his son’s lawn-mowing skills bordered on genius, set him up
in the landscaping business. “I’ve seen him in action, and what he does is establish a pattern and really tackle it!”

Eventually my brother fell into the floor-sanding business. It’s hard work, but he enjoys the satisfaction that comes with
a well-finished rec room. He thoughtfully called his company Silly P’s Hardwood Floors, Silly P being the name he would have
chosen were he a rap star. When my father suggested that the word
silly
might frighten away some of the upper-tier customers, Paul considered changing the name to Silly Fucking P’s Hardwood Floors.
The work puts him in contact with plumbers and carpenters from such towns as Bunn and Clayton, men who offer dating advice
such as “If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed.”

“Old enough to what?” my father asks. “Oh, Paul, those aren’t the sort of people you need to be associating with. What are
you doing with hayseeds like that? The goal is to better yourself. Meet some intellectuals. Read a book!”

After all these years our father has never understood that we, his children, tend to gravitate toward the very people he’s
spent his life warning us about. Most of us have left town, but my brother remains in Raleigh. He was there when our mother
died and still, years later, continues to help our father grieve: “The past is gone, hoss. What you need now is some motherfucking
pussy.” While my sisters and I offer our sympathy long-distance, Paul is the one who arrives at our father’s house on Thanksgiving
day, offering to prepare traditional Greek dishes to the best of his ability. It is a fact that he once made a tray of spanakopita
using Pam rather than melted butter. Still, though, at least he tries.

When a hurricane damaged my father’s house, my brother rushed over with a gas grill, three coolers full of beer, and an enormous
Fuck-It Bucket — a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. (“When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck
it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”) There was no electricity for close to a week. The yard was practically cleared
of trees, and rain fell through the dozens of holes punched into the roof. It was a difficult time, but the two of them stuck
it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father’s shoulder to say, “Bitch, I’m here to tell you that it’s
going to be all right. We’ll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.”

I
N THE EARLY
1960s, during what my mother referred to as “the tail end of the Lassie years,” my parents were given two collies, which
they named Rastus and Duchess. We were living in New York State, out in the country, and the dogs were free to race through
the forest. They napped in meadows and stood knee-deep in frigid streams, costars in their own private dog-food commercial.
According to our father, anyone could tell that the two of them were in love.

Late one evening, while lying on a blanket in the garage, Duchess gave birth to a litter of slick, potato-size puppies. When
it looked as though one of them had died, our mother arranged the puppy in a casserole dish and popped it in the oven, like
the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

“Oh, keep your shirts on,” she said. “It’s only set on two hundred. I’m not baking anyone, this is just to keep him warm.”

The heat revived the sick puppy and left us believing that our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.

Faced with the responsibilities of fatherhood, Rastus took off. The puppies were given away and we moved south, where the
heat and humidity worked against a collie’s best interests. Duchess’s once beautiful coat now hung in ragged patches. Age
set in and she limped about the house, clearing rooms with her suffocating farts. When finally, full of worms, she collapsed
in the ravine beside our house, we reevaluated our mother’s healing powers. The entire animal kingdom was beyond her scope;
apparently she could resurrect only the cute dead.

The oven trick was performed on half a dozen peakish hamsters but failed to work on my first guinea pig, who died after eating
a couple of cigarettes and an entire pack of matches.

“Don’t take it too hard,” my mother said, removing her oven mitts. “The world is full of guinea pigs: you can get another
one tomorrow.”

Eulogies tended to be brief, our motto being Another day, another collar.

A short time after Duchess died, our father came home with a German shepherd puppy. For reasons that were never fully explained,
the privilege of naming the dog went to a friend of my older sister’s, a fourteen-year-old girl named Cindy. She was studying
German at the time, and after carefully examining the puppy and weighing it in her hands, she announced that it would be called
Mädchen, which apparently meant “girl” to the Volks back in the Vaterland. We weren’t wild about the name but considered ourselves
lucky that Cindy wasn’t studying one of the hard-to-pronounce Asian languages.

When she was six months old, Mädchen was hit by a car and killed. Her food was still in the bowl when our father brought home
an identical German shepherd, which the same Cindy thoughtfully christened Mädchen II. This tag-team progression was disconcerting,
especially to the new dog, which was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor.

“Mädchen One would never have wet the floor like that,” my father would scold, and the dog would sigh, knowing she was the
canine equivalent of a rebound.

Mädchen Two never accompanied us to the beach and rarely posed in any of the family photographs. Once her puppyhood was spent,
we lost all interest. “We ought to get a dog,” we’d sometimes say, completely forgetting that we already had one. She came
inside to eat, but most of her time was spent outside in the pen, slumped in the A-frame doghouse our father had designed
and crafted from scrap pieces of redwood.

“Hey,” he’d ask, “how many dogs can say they live in a redwood house?”

This always led to my mother’s exhausted “Oh, Lou, how many dogs can say that they don’t live in a goddamn redwood house?”

Throughout the collie and shepherd years we kept a succession of drowsy, secretive cats that seemed to enjoy a unique bond
with our mother. “It’s because I open their cans,” she’d say, though we all knew it ran deeper than that. What they really
had in common were their claws. That and a primal urge to destroy my father’s golf bags. The first cat ran away, and the second
one was hit by a car. The third passed into a disagreeable old age and died hissing at the kitten that had prematurely arrived
to replace her. When, at the age of seven, the fourth cat was diagnosed with feline leukemia, my mother was devastated.

“I’m going to have Sadie put to sleep,” she said. “It’s for her own good, and I don’t want to hear a word about it from any
of you. This is hard enough as it is.”

The cat was put down, and then came a series of crank phone calls and anonymous postcards orchestrated by my sisters and me.
The cards announced a miraculous new cure for feline leukemia, and the callers identified themselves as representatives from
Cat Fancy magazine. “We’d like to use Sadie as our September cover story and were hoping to schedule a photo shoot as soon
as possible. Do you think you could have her ready by tomorrow?”

We thought a kitten might lift our mother’s spirits, but she declined all offers. “That’s it,” she said. “My cat days are
over.”

When Mädchen Two developed splenic tumors, my father dropped everything and ran to her side. Evenings were spent at the animal
hospital, lying on a mat outside of her cage and adjusting her IV. He’d never afforded her much attention when she was healthy,
but her impending death awoke in him a great sense of duty. He was holding her paw when she died, and he spent the next several
weeks asking us how many dogs could say they’d lived in a redwood house.

Our mother, in turn, frequently paused beside my father’s tattered, urine-stained golf bag and relived memories of her own.

After spending a petless year with only one child still living at home, my parents visited a breeder and returned with a Great
Dane they named Melina. They loved this dog in proportion to its size, and soon their hearts had no room for anyone else.
In terms of mutual respect and admiration, their six children had been nothing more than a failed experiment. Melina was the
real thing. The house was given over to the dog, rooms redecorated to suit her fancy. Enter your former bedroom and you’d
be told, “You’d better not let Melina catch you in here,” or, “This is where we come to peepee when there’s nobody home to
let us outside, right, girl!” The knobs on our dressers were whittled down to damp stumps, and our beds were matted with fine,
short hairs. Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter.
“That’s what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.”

The dog was their first genuine common interest, and they loved it equally, each in his or her own way. Our mother’s love
tended toward the horizontal, a pet being little more than a napping companion, something she could look at and say, “That
seems like a good idea. Scoot over, why don’t you.” A stranger peeking through the window might think that the two of them
had entered a suicide pact. She and the dog sprawled like corpses, their limbs arranged in an eternal embrace. “God, that
felt good,” my mom would say, the two of them waking for a brief scratch. “Now let’s go try it on the living-room floor.”

My father loved the Great Dane for its size, and frequently took her on long, aimless drives, during which she’d stick her
heavy, anvil-sized head out the window and leak great quantities of foamy saliva. Other drivers pointed and stared, rolling
down their windows to shout, “Hey, you got a saddle for that thing?” When out for a walk there was the inevitable “Are you
walking her, or is it the other way ’round?”

“Ha-ha!” our father always laughed, as if it were the first time he’d heard it. The attention was addictive, and he enjoyed
a pride of accomplishment he never felt with any of us. It was as if he were somehow responsible for her beauty and stature,
as if he’d personally designed her spots and trained her to grow to the size of a pony. When out with the dog, he carried
a leash in one hand and a shovel in the other. “Just in case,” he said.

“Just in case, what, she dies of a heart attack and you need to bury her?” I didn’t get it.

“No,” he said, “the shovel is for, you know, her… business.”

My father was retired, but the dog had business.

I was living in Chicago when they first got Melina, and every time I came home the animal was bigger. Every time, there were
more Marmaduke cartoons displayed on the refrigerator, and every time, my voice grew louder as I asked, “Who are you people?”

“Down, girl,” my parents would chuckle as the dog jumped up, panting for my attention. Her great padded paws reached my waist,
then my chest and shoulders, until eventually, her arms wrapped around my neck and, her head towering above my own, she came
to resemble a dance partner scouting the room for a better offer.

“That’s just her way of saying hello,” my mother would chirp, handing me a towel to wipe off the dog’s bubbling seepage. “Here,
you missed a spot on the back of your head.”

Among us children, Melina’s diploma from obedience school was seen as the biggest joke since our brother’s graduation from
Sanderson High.

“So she’s not book-smart,” our mother said. “Big deal. I can fetch my own goddamn newspaper.”

The dog’s growth was monitored on a daily basis and every small accomplishment was captured on film. One could find few pictures
of my sister Tiffany, but Melina had entire albums devoted to her terrible twos.

“Hit me,” my mother said on one of my return visits home from Chicago. “No, wait, let me go get my camera.” She left the room
and returned a few moments later. “Okay, now you can hit me. Better yet, why don’t you just pretend to hit me.”

I raised my hand, and my mother cried out in pain. “Ow!” she yelled. “Somebody help me. This stranger is trying to hurt me
and I don’t know why.”

I caught an advancing blur moving in from the left, and the next thing I knew I was down on the ground, the dog ripping significant
holes in the neck of my sweater.

The camera flashed and my mother screamed with delight. “God, I love that trick.”

I rolled over to protect my face. “It’s not a trick.”

My mother snapped another picture. “Oh, don’t be so critical. It’s close enough.”

With us grown and out of the house, my sisters and I reasonably expected our parents’ lives to stand still. Their assignment
was to stagnate and live in the past. We were supposed to be the center of their lives, but instead, they had constructed
a new family consisting of Melina and the founding members of her fan club. Someone who obviously didn’t know her too well
had given my mother a cheerful stuffed bear with a calico heart stitched to its chest. According to the manufacturer, the
bear’s name was Mumbles, and all it needed in order to thrive were two double-A batteries and a regular diet of hugs.

“Where’s Mumbles?” my mother would ask, and the dog would jump up and snatch the bear from its hiding place on top of the
refrigerator, yanking its body this way and that in hopes of breaking its neck. Occasionally her teeth would press against
the on switch, and the doomed thing would flail its arms, whispering one of its five recorded messages of goodwill.

“That’s my girl,” my mother would say. “We don’t like Mumbles, do we?”

“We?”

During the final years of Mädchen Two and the first half of the Melina administration, I lived with a female cat named Neil.
Dull gray in color, she’d been abandoned by a spooky alcoholic with long fingernails and a large collection of kimonos. He
was a hateful man, and after he moved, the cat was taken in and renamed by my sister Gretchen, who later passed the animal
on to me. My mother looked after Neil when I moved from Raleigh, and flew her to Chicago once I’d found a place and settled
in. I’d taken the cheapest apartment I could find, and it showed. Though they were nice, my immigrant neighbors could see
no connection between their personal habits and the armies of mice and roaches aggressively occupying the building. Welcoming
the little change of scenery, entire families would regularly snack and picnic in the hallways, leaving behind candied fruits
and half-eaten tacos. Neil caught fourteen mice, and scores of others escaped with missing limbs and tails. In Raleigh she’d
just lain around the house doing nothing, but now she had a real job.