Must Love Dogs (23 page)

He stopped to listen, midkiss. “Creases. I gotta get Creases. Stay right here.”

I sat on the counter, pointing and flexing my feet for something to do, while Ray went to rescue the puppy. “Forgot all about you, little fellow, didn’t I,” he crooned, passing me without a glance. I sat, marooned on Ray’s kitchen counter, while he took Creases outside to pee. Maybe they both peed, standing side by side, male bonding. I thought about jumping down, but then Ray might have to lift me up all over again. Twice might seem redundant.

Eventually, Ray and Creases walked by me again, then disappeared once more. I waited, listening to the opening and closing of doors, which escalated into the banging of a cabinet or two. “You don’t have any condoms, do you?” Ray yelled from somewhere deep in the house.

I slid off the counter and tiptoed out the door.

*

I stared at the roughened red patch on my chin in my bathroom mirror. A beard burn, Kevin and I called it back in the days when he still bothered to kiss me but not always to shave first.

I opened the medicine cabinet. No condoms. Kevin always said they were like taking a shower wearing a raincoat. Part of my horror when I found out about Nikki was that I knew, absolutely knew, he hadn’t worn one with her either. Hadn’t cared enough to keep me safe. Oh, the amazing rage I felt toward Kevin while I awaited the results of my blood test. And the odd, quick flash of disappointment when it came back negative, and I didn’t have a terminal disease to throw in his face along with his infidelity.

I heard a ring from wherever I’d left my cordless phone. Then two, three. The machine picked up on four. My plastic diaphragm case hadn’t moved an inch on the shelf from where I’d left it last time I used it. I held it in the palm of one hand, opened it with the other. Careful as always, I held the circle of rubber up to the light to check for holes that might admit wayward sperm.

Pinpricks of light shone through, creating an entire constellation, roughly the shape of the Big Dipper.

*

I thought the knocking on the front door would never go away. If Siobhan hadn’t moved around to my bedroom window, the one closest to my bed, and yelled
Auntie Sarah
, I never would have believed it could have been anyone but Ray Santia.

I turned on my bedside light. Pulling my down comforter off the bed with me, and wrapping it around my shoulders like a bad version of a superhero’s cape, I met Siobhan at the kitchen door. She was shivering and hatless, her eyes seriously puffy. Tendrils of her multihued hair stuck to the sides of her face. She wore her school backpack over an old wool peacoat. The handle of her ample suitcase was extended, and after she bumped it up three steps, it rolled effortlessly into my house.

We sat on the couch, my comforter wrapped around both of us. “What happened?” I asked.

“My parents suck.”

“You’re sixteen. Your parents are supposed to suck.” I pulled the comforter over Siobhan’s legs so she’d stop shivering. “Do you want some hot chocolate?” I asked, hoping I had some.

“No, thanks.”

“So what specifically happened?”

“They won’t let me get my navel pierced. Can you believe it?”

I sort of could, but didn’t think saying so would be constructive. “Well, you have a fair amount of holes already.”

“Big deal. Everybody has their ears pierced. And, besides, this is the only thing I’m asking for for Christmas. One measly thing and they can’t even give it to me. So I told them I’ll get it pierced in the spring when I go to Spain with my Spanish class because you don’t have to be eighteen to do it there and a whole bunch of girls did it last year.” She paused for a ragged breath. “So now they say I can’t go to Spain.”

I was in over my head and I knew it. So I talked Siobhan into getting some sleep and said we’d figure out what to do in the morning. I got her an extra pillow from my room, found a clean set of sheets to drape over the couch and gave her my comforter. I asked if her homework was done, found out what time she had to get up for school and sent her into the bathroom with her toothbrush.

While she was brushing, I called Carol from my bedroom. She picked up on the first ring. “I just wanted you to know,” I whispered, “that Siobhan is here.”

“Of course she is,” Carol answered. “I dropped her off. How did you think she got there?”

*

I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to wake Siobhan so I tiptoed past her to the kitchen. I’d turned off the ring of the phone so I wouldn’t have to explain to Siobhan why I wasn’t answering. I wondered how many times Ray had called. I wondered how long I’d have to ignore his calls for him to stop calling. I stood there, the light on my answering machine winking at me suggestively. I turned my back on it and opened the fridge. Poured some milk into my favorite Flintstones jelly glass, jumped up to sit on the kitchen counter. Blushed and jumped back down. Great, I’d never be able to sit on a kitchen counter again without thinking about making a fool of myself with Ray Santia. One more pleasure lost.

Oh, God. Okay, I would drink milk, that’s what I’d do. The extra calcium would calm my nerves and lull me back into a comfortable level of denial. I glanced over my shoulder at my answering machine. If I were in an old Western I would simply shoot its nasty little light out. I took another sip of milk, walked over and pressed
erase
. There, that was better, maybe he’d go away now.

After I drove Siobhan to school, promising to pick her up again afterward, I called Christine. “You know what Carol’s like,” I said. “If I try to tell her what to do, she’ll just do the opposite. But, I mean, what’s the big deal, it’s not like it’s a tattoo or anything. When and if Siobhan outgrows the phase, she can just take it out.”

“Why don’t you just bring Siobhan to have it done and then we’ll deal with Carol and Dennis afterward.”

“I love the ‘we,’ Christine. I can just hear you saying that it was all my idea. And, besides, Siobhan says that if you’re under eighteen, both you and a parent have to show IDs before they’ll pierce anything but an ear. And if the last names don’t match, you have to show a birth certificate.”

“Why don’t you steal Carol’s license again?” Christine giggled at her reference to a famous story from the Hurlihy family archives. All these years later, I still couldn’t quite find it funny. In a lifetime of fairly honest behavior, I’d strayed one night. Just home from college for winter break, I borrowed Carol’s license to go to a local club with my friends who’d already turned twenty-one. Carol noticed it missing immediately, thought she’d lost it, and was already making plans to drive to the registry to get a duplicate. In the back of my mind, the evil plan to keep the license permanently was simmering, but I thought I would probably tuck it back into her wallet at the end of the weekend.

I wasn’t really that nervous as I stood in line to have Carol’s license checked by the bouncer at High Tide. Carol and I looked a lot alike. Besides, I’d memorized her Social Security number and year of birth, and practiced rattling them off quickly. The bouncer was cute, blond and beefy with intelligent eyes that made me think his job was an interlude rather than a dead end.

“Are you sure you’re Carol Hurlihy?” he asked.

I wasn’t too worried. “Yes,” I answered.

He quizzed me on every bit of information contained on that little plastic rectangle, and I passed it all with flying colors. The line was backing up behind me. “Are you
sure
you’re Carol Hurlihy?” he asked again, peering into my face.

I was more annoyed than nervous. “Yes,” I said again.

“Funny, you look different than you did last night on our date.” The bouncer, of course, was Dennis, and sometimes I thought he only married my sister in order to be able to say to me, thousands of times over the years:
Can I check your ID?

I laughed a little to let Christine think that the decades had eased my embarrassment. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “I’ll call Carol and see what I can arrange.”

*

Just before Thanksgiving we’d made hula skirts. We used single horizontal strips of green construction paper for the waistbands. To make the skirt part, we stapled on evenly spaced vertical strips of the same paper. The kids each decorated an empty paper towel holder with brightly colored poster paints. Even the goopiest ones had dried over the long holiday weekend.

And now, the morning after I’d crept out of Ray Santia’s house, the morning after Siobhan had shown up at my house, June and I began to staple the hula skirts around the children. We started side by side, worked in opposite directions around the circle. When it was his turn, Jack Kaplan said, “
I’m
not wearing a skirt.”

“Okay,” I said, turning to staple Molly Greene’s hula skirt over her ankle-length black velvet jumper.

“Okay, I’ll wear it,” Jack said, moving to stand in line behind Molly.

The kids had to hike their waistbands up practically to their armpits in order to sit on the circle. June and I passed out the carefully labeled paper towel rolls after first cutting fringe with scissors. I explained that they would now be called puili sticks. “Can you say poo-ee-lee sticks?” I said, using my best teacher voice, which was a bit of an effort this morning, I had to admit.

“Pweelie sticks,” the children said in unison.

The classroom telephone rang. I nodded to June to answer it. Turning back to the kids I said, “Hawaii is a place that is made up of many islands, which is why many Hawaiian dances are about the water.”

“Sarah, it’s for you,” June stage-whispered from the other side of the room.

“Take a message,” I stage-whispered back, not without sarcasm.

“It’s a….” June’s last word was lost to me.

“A what?”

“A guy,” Austin said. “June says there’s a guy on the phone.”

“What’s his name?” asked Amanda McAlpine.

“Handle it,” I hissed at June. I unclenched my teeth enough to smile at the children, made myself keep going. “Can you say hey-ey-ee-ah?”

“Hey-ey-ee-ah,” they said in a perfect imitation of my voice. I tried to ignore the annoying fact that June was still talking on the phone. “Hey-ey-ee-ah is a very, very old dance from Hawaii. It’s about a canoe trip for spearing fish.”

“Does it hurt the fish?” asked Jenny Browning.

June was laughing and throwing her hair around. I, however, maintained my professional demeanor. “Well, Jenny, in many cultures people have to eat the fish to keep from starving.”

“Can’t they just have a sandwich?” Jack Kaplan asked. “I can make a sandwich.”

If June didn’t get off the phone in two minutes, I was going to strangle her. I decided to ignore Jack’s question, move on. I mean, why did teachers have to do all the hard stuff? Shouldn’t parents have to explain some things?

“Okay, everybody. Hold your puili stick in this hand, and put your other hand like this, palm up.” I showed the children shading their eyes (maka malumalu), churning the water (wili wai) and all the rest. They followed along like brightly colored little parrots. When we were ready, I put an actual record on an actual record player, a scratchy version of
Dances Around the World
that had been recorded so long ago it didn’t even have a cassette version. We made it through the dance two complete times before June finally hung up the phone.

After she finished passing out snacks all by herself, which I thought was only fair, June sidled up to me. “That was Ray Santia. He is just like the nicest guy” she said, still whispering. “He’s dying to see you again.” She paused, watched my face. “You are just so lucky. I mean, I hardly ever meet nice guys anymore. Sarah?”

I was working up to a response when June added, “Do you know that Ray Santia has a puppy from the same litter as Wrinkles?” I looked at her, not saying a word. There was absolutely no reason to admit to a thing. “He was a little confused though. He seemed to, like, think you had one too?”

*

Siobhan and I sat in the waiting room at Pins and Needles, sandwiched between a mother and son combo on our right and a mother and daughter team on our left. They were surprisingly clean-cut and looked as likely to spend an afternoon shopping at The Gap as waiting for a turn at a body-piercing salon. The kids were about Siobhan’s age, not quite old enough to be here alone. I was probably just about the same age as the mothers, a depressing thought.

I hadn’t stolen Carol’s license this time. Instead, she’d loaned it to me in a belated decision that navel-piercing wasn’t a battle she and Dennis wanted to pick with Siobhan. It was, in fact, much better than either a tattoo or an older boyfriend, or even an out-of-the-country piercing experience during a school trip where who could imagine what the hygiene standards might be. Carol even decided this would be my Christmas present to Siobhan, because that way she could hang on to some vestige of parental disapproval.

Siobhan walked over to the display case to check out the navel rings, which gave me a chance to look around carefully for signs of cleanliness. PINS AND NEEDLES, said a sign over the register, CALL 1-800-STICK-ME. A larger-than-life ceramic ear, pierced within an inch of its life, hung on the wall to one side. On the other side, a long vertical file held clearly labeled information sheets: genital, nipple, navel, tongue.

I shivered a little, noticed an open book lying facedown on the counter, read the upside-down title:
Essentials of Human Anatomy and Physiology
. I wondered if someone was actually reading it or if it was just a prop.

“So tell me,” I said to Siobhan when she sat down again, “why exactly do you want to get this done?”

She pointed to a poster of a long-torsoed, hard- bodied, bikini-clad woman, wearing a tiny, sexy ring in her perfectly formed navel. “Look,” she said, “how cool is that?”

*

He was a bit hard to understand because of the three silver studs in his tongue, but Adrian, the owner of Pins and Needles, was really very nice. He gave Siobhan and me each a sheet of paper explaining that everything had been autoclaved and/or chemically sterilized. The misspelling of equipment —
equiptment
— made me a little uncomfortable, but that was probably just the teacher in me. While he photocopied Carol’s license and Siobhan’s learner’s permit, I forged Carol’s name on a form saying that I hereby released all agents from all manner of liabilities, actions and demands, in law or in karmic equity, by reason of complying with the undersigned’s request to be pierced.