Second Chance

‘Diddah you yust caw heh a cuppa day ago?’ he said, sounding like an old man who’d removed his false teeth as he contorted his face to shave under his nose.

‘Yes, but I didn’t talk to him. I never talk to him, I just leave messages.’

A little laugh from the bathroom, accompanied by his razor swishing in a sink full of water.

‘Aw, Dee. He’s just busy, having fun. You remember college, don’t you? It’s a whole new life for him. We’re not his life anymore. We’ve got to accept that.’ Meaning I had to accept that. Neil seemed to be fine with the fact that we’d gone from three kids to two, and that the two would also soon disappear from our lives.

Slowly, morosely, I pulled the leg of the hose up over my ankle, then calf. I stopped, just above the knee, wondering if there was an expiration date on panty hose. The nylon felt more granular and restrictive than I remembered. I gazed down at the box on the bed. No ‘use by’ date. It should at least give a use by weight. Which, come to think of it, it did on the chart on the back. I flipped the box over to the height and weight chart; I was precariously close to the outer limit. Darn near expired.

I pulled the hose up over my knee. I wondered if the fabric got unstretchable with age. There just simply did not seem to be enough material here, considering how far I had yet to go. I gathered up the other leg, slipped my foot into the suntan donut, then slowly pulled that side thigh-high. I put my stockinged feet on the carpet and stood. I tugged on the right, then the left, then the right, all while swinging my butt hither and yon trying to stretch a couple feet of fabric up on to an acre of hips. I took a breather and caught my hunched-over reflection in my dresser mirror, my pale flesh bulging out in more than the usual spots. There was the familiar boobies-in-the-back bra bulge, the see-I-have-two-waists! panty bulge, and now I had added the glorious bisected-saddlebag thigh bulge. Worse, it was not only me staring at my bulginess. There in the mirror, staring at my reflection, was Neil’s reflection. He was leaning on the doorframe of the walk-in closet, mostly dressed now, a twinkle in his eye.

‘What d’ya say we show up fashionably late to this thing, Dee?’ he said suggestively.

Oh. My. God. If he could get turned on by this, a bent-over, middle-aged manatee-shaped woman wrestling her way into a garden hose, it was indeed Neil who needed some hormone therapy.

‘Give me a break,’ I said, irritably. I stood upright, yanked on the hose, and promptly poked a fingernail through the fabric. As I watched the run cascade down the side of my leg, the tears slid down my cheeks. ‘Goddamnit! Goddamn them! Goddamn them to hell!’ I started to sob.

‘What’s wrong? Calm down, Deena. Who are you mad at?’

‘Everyone! Men. The men who made the first panty hose!’ I glared at him. ‘You know it was a man, don’t you?!’ I actually didn’t know it was a man, but I’d have bet good money on it.

Defensively, Neil held up both palms toward me.

‘Well, it was a man! Goddamned men. They invented high heels, too. And girdles. And makeup.’ Again, I had no idea if this was all true, but at the moment, it felt it could be no other way. ‘All the things that tell women we’re not good enough the way we are. We need to be tanner, smoother, taller, prettier.’ Neil looked at me as if my face was familiar but he couldn’t recall my name. ‘And especially younger and thinner!’ I screamed. Whew. When the lid blows off a pressure cooker, it blows hard.

Suddenly Neil was sitting on the bed next to me, patting my knee and talking as if I was a four-year-old. ‘Now, now, Deedle.’

‘Don’t patronize me.’

‘Who said I’m patronizing you?’

I just stared at him. I half expected him to pull out a roll of stickers from his breast pocket and hand me one, the way he placated his youngest patients. But suddenly his expression changed, softened. Quietly, he said, ‘Do you just want to stay home?’

Tears of relief slipped down my cheeks. ‘Oh, Neil, can we? Yes. Thank you.’ Instead of forced chitchat in tight shoes, I saw us walking around our neighborhood lake, in comfortable sneakers, and hand in hand. Like old times. Maybe I could even broach the idea of the dog thing I’d seen on TV.

He looked sheepish, then impatient. ‘Not we, you. I have to go. I want to go. I’ve put my life into this clinic. It’s important.’

I just looked at him. Part of me wanted to say, And your family isn’t? Yes, the past couple of years you’ve put your life into the clinic. Not your kids. Not your marriage. No wonder he seemed so unaffected by Sam’s departure, and Lainey’s and Matt’s growing independence and absences. He was able to throw himself into his work with impunity.

Neil stood, walked to the door, put a hand on the knob, then turned toward me. He looked as handsome in his dark gray suit as I’d seen him in years. ‘What’s it going to be, Deena?’

I stared at the blue dress, the blue tights with the shot elastic waist now my only option. We wouldn’t even look like we belonged together.

‘I’ll stay home with the kids.’

‘For God’s sake, they’re teen— They don’t need a—Oh, never mind.’ He closed his eyes, shook his head, and left.

I sat on the bed, peeling the panty hose from my legs. I looked up to see myriad fat Deenas looking at me. The closet door mirror was angled just right to catch my reflection in the dresser mirror, making multiple mes, each disappearing into the next. I wadded my panty hose up in a ball and threw them at the mirror. But they had no substance or weight and merely arced limply for a few feet, and dropped silently to the carpet.

When the house was still again after Neil had driven away, I came downstairs in my pruney bathrobe, walked into the kitchen, and was greeted by three unpacked lunch bags on the counter and Hairy sitting on the desk meowing for food again.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘You have your dry food. You only get wet food in the morning.’ His meowing ratcheted up a notch. I couldn’t stand the noise, so I gave him several Pounce treats in his bowl. As he devoured them, I began unpacking the lunch bags, pulling out dirty Tupperware containers, chip bags and largely unused napkins. As I was throwing the trash away, Matt came into the kitchen.

‘Hey, Mom,’ he said laconically, not looking at me, walking straight for the pantry. ‘How come you didn’t go with Dad tonight?’ He’d pulled open both pantry doors and was hanging on the handles, which I’d asked him approximately three hundred times not to do. He stared with a bored expression at the choices in front of him.

‘I— I’m not feeling well.’ I was struggling to open a small Tupperware container in which I’d packed Matt’s favorite homemade chocolate pudding. Lainey preferred the store-bought variety, feeling that anything else would make some sort of horrific social statement to her friends. But Matt said he preferred mine, which made me happy, although I’d evidently packed too much because he hadn’t finished it. I pulled again at the stubborn top, unable to leverage it. Just once I’d like to see a commercial not about how well a lid holds, but how the hell to get these small ones off their containers.

Matt grabbed an opened bag of popcorn from the pantry. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he said, shoving a handful in his mouth.

‘Yeah, I’m hungry.’ Lainey had suddenly appeared behind me. I was sure the only reason they were home on a Friday night was because they’d expected their parents, both of them, to be out.

‘I thought you guys were going to order pizza. Didn’t Dad leave money on the desk?’

‘No, he said since you were home, you’d cook.’ Lainey was fingering the tie of my robe. ‘You know, Mom, I don’t like this color as well out of the store. You should have gotten the pink. Don’t take this the wrong way, but this purple kind of makes you look a little fat.’ She stood a step back from me, a sympathetic expression on her face.

And just what was the right way to take that comment? I wanted to ask her. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to start crying again. What was it about adolescent girls that they thought some sort of verbal disclaimer made plunging a knife into your gut okay? It didn’t really help that I knew she wasn’t trying to be deliberately hurtful.

I looked at Matt, who was crunching another mouthful of popcorn, his hand already back in the bag, gathering the next handful. ‘So, like, are we going to eat soon?’ he said, rather messily.

My hands tightened into a chokehold on the Tupperware. Then, to punctuate the tenor of my evening, I felt the perspiration begin to ooze out the pores of my forehead and upper lip, the familiar temperature surge building in me like an overheating engine.

I pulled off my bathrobe, grabbing the top of my worn pj’s, pulling it in and out rapidly, trying to cool myself. I looked at my kids. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t planned anything. I knew I could always make a tuna casserole. But I hadn’t planned on cooking tonight. I didn’t want to cook tonight. The anger I’d felt upstairs surged again. I wondered if other women going through the change had anger flashes, in addition to hot flashes. I put the Tupperware bowl on my hip and ripped the lid off, losing my grip and inadvertently flinging the lid across the kitchen. It Frisbeed its way right into Hairy, who, his white fur spattered with chocolate pudding, stood, yowling and hissing at me.

‘Dammit!’ I yelled.

‘Maw-ahm!’ yelled Lainey, rushing toward Hairy, but stopping just short. ‘Poor kitty!’ She glanced back at me, eyebrows up. ‘And you owe me another dollar.’

Matt bent forward, laughing and spewing little globs of half-chewed popcorn across the tile floor. ‘Now he’s a Dalmatian cat!’ He convulsed in laughter again.

‘Poor kitty,’ repeated Lainey, still not touching him, trying in vain not to smile.

I handed her a wet paper towel. ‘Wipe him off, please, Lainey.’ I dabbed at the chocolate on my robe with a wet sponge.

She took the paper towel from me but merely held it, as she was overcome finally with laughter. ‘I’m not the one who threw pudding all over him,’ she said, leaning on the desk and covering her mouth, then turning away, as if she didn’t want Hairy to see her laughing at him. He had a blob of pudding on one side of his forehead, a Groucho Marx eyebrow. I was worried it would go into his eye.

‘Okay, fine, I’ll clean him up.’ I snatched the paper towel from her, and she grabbed her stomach with both hands and bumped into Matt, who was also still convulsed with laughter. I wiped Hairy’s eye, then, with a grunt from both of us, lifted the enormous chocolate-spattered cat from the desk and took him to the sink. ‘Sorry, Hairy. It was an accident.’ He glared back at me, the angry-looking face that is every Persian’s lot in life now looking downright murderous.

‘I’ll be downstairs,’ said Matt breathlessly.

‘Me too,’ said Lainey. ‘Call us when dinner’s ready.’ Holding Hairy firmly in the sink, I watched, my mouth open but nothing coming out, as she reached over Matt’s shoulder into the bag of popcorn as they descended.

In the next couple of hours I bathed the cat, put a bandage on the scratch on my arm, swept the kitchen floor, made and served a tuna casserole, and folded and put away some laundry while the kids ate. I wasn’t hungry after Lainey’s comment. While the kids watched a movie, I did the dishes, mopped the floor and dusted, all in the name of therapy.

At nine o’clock I headed up to bed, wanting to be asleep before Neil got home. I wasn’t, but I again faked it. It was a mystery to me how I could perpetually be so tired and yet have so much trouble sleeping. But I was getting very skilled at playing possum. I lay still, on my side of the bed, the edge really, my back to the center. Neil came into the room, undressed, was in the bathroom for quite a while, then finally slipped in on his side. Thankfully, he didn’t reach for me.

But pure guilt made me reach for him. I fulfilled my wifely duties then returned to my edge.

I lay for close to an hour, frozen in my assumed position, till I was sure he was asleep. Then I silently slid out of bed, wrapped myself in my new prune-colored, fat-emphasizing robe, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I pulled out the tuna casserole, grabbed a fork, and shoveled in a big mouthful. Then another. Still chewing, I loaded up the fork again, gazing at the pictures and memos on the door of the fridge. An upcoming birthday party invitation from one of Lainey’s friends. A shopping list. Matt and Lainey’s wallet-sized school photos. A picture of Sam with his friends at a graduation party. Another mother had given it to me. And under a magnet from a car mechanic was an old snapshot of Rocky and Fordy, both going after a stick in the lake. I stared at it, holding in one hand the ancient white CorningWare we’d gotten so many years ago as a wedding gift, and in the other my laden fork. I swallowed what was in my mouth, looked at my forkful, and let it drop back into the casserole. I put the lid on and pushed the dish back into the fridge. I put my fork in the dishwasher and quietly closed the door. Tightening the tie on my robe, I walked down the second flight of stairs to the den. I sat, turned on the computer, ner-vously pulled at the cuticle of my index finger, waiting. As it hummed into being, the monitor’s dim blue screen softened the too-clean room. I clicked, typed, and clicked again, until the Google box appeared. I took a deep breath, then carefully typed in the letters, one by one:

RAISING GUIDE DOG PUPPY

FIVE

I had just set the last, and biggest, bouquet on the coffee table of the sunroom. I’d been extravagant, buying two different bunches at Costco, mixing and arranging them anew into four bouquets, adding some of my daffodils that had bravely emerged in the early spring warmth. In the morning I’d put the finishing touches on some of the most furious cleaning I’d ever done. And for me, that was saying something. I’d even pulled out the toothbrush again, despite Elaine’s admonishments. I hadn’t told anyone about my ‘project,’ not even Elaine.

At a little after two in the afternoon, I emerged from the shower, blew-dry and styled my hair, and put on a crisp white oxford shirt and my just-pressed khakis and stared at the mirror. God. Was this the best I could do? The fat, preppy look? I touched the gray hairs at my temple, the lines at my eyes. I wondered if I’d be judged too old to take on raising a puppy.

By three o’clock I was ready for my first job interview in a very long time. I was glad it was in my home. If I’d had a résumé, my home and my kids would be the only things on it.

‘Wow,’ said Bill as we finished the tour and sat down to tea in the sunroom. ‘Your house is so pristine, inside and out.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, beaming. It felt so good to beam. And Bill, the local leader for the K-9 Eyes group, turned out to be someone who elicited beaming. He was tall, with thick dark hair and bright blue eyes, an irresistible combination. The sprinklings of gray in his hair looked sexy, not old.

He looked down at his teacup, his brow furrowed, and said nothing else. My beam retracted.

‘Is everything all right?’ I asked. ‘Would you like some sugar for your tea? Or a brownie?’ I picked up the plate of my famous Death and Resurrection chocolate brownies and offered him one. ‘They have four different kinds of chocolate in them!’

Bill averted his eyes. ‘No, thank you, Deena.’ He gazed around the room. When he finally looked at me he was smiling, but a cosmetic smile. A smile that is the Band-Aid in advance of the cut.

‘Deena, I’m not sure you’re really the best candidate to be a puppy raiser.’

The words echoed in the silence. I felt my throat constrict. I hadn’t won the inspection. I hadn’t even passed. My hand went to my open collar, clutching it closed.

‘Why?’ I whispered. My faults and shortcomings lined up in my mind like obedient soldiers.

Bill reached out and put his fingers on my other hand, trembling on the table. His touch surprised me, making me look up into his kind, blue eyes.

‘You obviously put a great deal of love and care into your house, and you have some gorgeous things.’ He pointed to the colored glass on the windowsills, then to the largest bouquet, which I’d strategically placed for greatest effect on the glass coffee table. ‘Everything is so tidy and clean. I’m worried that a dog will not fit into this picture. Especially a K-9 Eyes dog. They’re not like pet dogs and can’t be treated that way. You have to be with them nearly all the time, morning, noon, and night. And there are lots of restrictions. For example, they can never go off-leash in an open area. And they have to learn to go to the bathroom only when you say. They can’t be working guides and have a strong retrieval instinct, so they can never chase a stick or ball or Frisbee.’ He looked at me, compassionate but concerned. ‘And Deena, dogs, puppies especially, chew and dig and knock things over and get into all kinds of mischief. Your house and yard just aren’t set up for that. Is a clean house very important to you?’

Oh, God. How was I supposed to answer that one?!

My house was … it was my … what? My life? Oh, God.

How had I, a farm girl, come to this? Well, probably because my mom, a farm wife, worked her whole life to prevent the farm from coming inside. Rocky and Fordy were never allowed in the house, even on subzero winter nights. They did get to sleep in a heated barn, so they were comfortable, but they and their muddy paws and constant shedding were not welcome inside. I knew that K-9 Eyes required that the puppies sleep in the house, so I’d set up a little bed in the laundry room on the vinyl floor. Easy to clean up little accidents down there. When I’d shown him around the house, Bill had clarified that the requirement was not only that the dogs sleep indoors, but that they sleep near the bed in the room with you, since that’s how it would necessarily be once they were assigned to a blind person.

Here I’d gone to greater lengths than usual to clean my house and prepare for this inspection, and now I was about to be denied because of it. My life was becoming too damn ironic.

I put both my hands up to my face. Do not cry. Do not cry. I took a deep breath, removed my hands, and looked directly at Bill.

‘Yes. It has been very important to me. But not as important as doing this. I’ll do whatever it takes. Tell me what to do. I’ll bring a wheelbarrow full of dirt in here and spread it around, I swear to God.’ I took a breath, calmed myself. ‘I really, really want to raise a puppy for K-9 Eyes.’

Bill was silent, staring at me, but to my relief he looked intrigued rather than alarmed by my outburst.

Finally, he spoke a single word. ‘Why?’ His gentle, sincere voice pulled a lump up into my throat.

Why indeed? Now I was on guard. I’d missed all the cues about the house. It seemed like everything was riding on my answer to this one-word question.

The silence stretched across the room like a taut rubber band.

I forced a smile so I wouldn’t cry. ‘Because I’m a dog person, and I’m, well, trapped in—’ I realized I was nervously twisting my wedding ring. I stopped, put my hands flat on the table, but then to my horror realized I’d begun the sentence without knowing how to finish it.

I looked around the sunroom, my breathing shallow and rapid. Hairy was snoozing in a warm pool of March sun on the couch. A single cat hair was floating with the dust motes in the yellow shaft above him. Without looking at Bill, I told him: ‘Because I’m a dog person trapped in a cat existence.’ Now I turned. He was smiling.

I’d never really thought about how much meaning different kinds of smiles conveyed. Bill’s eyes crinkled, his face softened.

‘Okay, then. Let’s get started,’ he said, and reached into his briefcase and handed me my thick training manual.

At first no one spoke. Matt, Lainey, and Neil each stared at me, sitting artificially all together on the couch in the den. You’d think goldfish, not words, had just spewed from my mouth. In fact, they themselves looked like three gap-mouthed carp sitting in their green plaid bowl as I stood before them.

Finally, Matt spoke. ‘A dog, Mom? You’re gonna let a dog come into the house?’ The three of them looked at each other as if to confirm they’d heard right.

‘Yes.’

‘Unbelievable,’ said Matt. One of his eyebrows lifted, the other dropped, as did his jaw.

Lainey had only one concern: ‘What about Hairy?’

‘Hairy can hold his own against a wolf. I’m more worried about the puppy,’ I said.

‘But Hairy will feel jealous,’ she whined.

‘Well, maybe you could spend more time with him.’

She folded her arms across her chest and glared at me.

‘Deena,’ said Neil quietly, ‘don’t you have enough to do around here without having to look after a puppy? Besides, I thought we’d agreed on this. No dogs. They tie—’

‘I know,’ I cut in, raising my palm, ‘“they tie you down.” But it won’t! Not at all! I’ll take him everywhere with me. It’s required. And the local puppy group has lots of volunteer sitters. If we go away for the weekend we can just call and they’ll take care of it.’ Why I felt compelled to mention this, I wasn’t sure. We never went away for a weekend. Our last family vacation was a road trip to Disneyland when Sam was twelve. Neil and I hadn’t been away, just the two of us, in … well, we’d had that honeymoon trip to Vail after our wedding.

Before he could mull over another argument, I added, ‘And besides, we didn’t agree. I’ve always wanted a dog. And this is exactly the kind of dog you’ve said is a good one: someone else’s. This dog will really always sort of belong to someone else. And, if everything goes well, the dog we raise—’

Neil’s eyes widened.

‘I mean, I raise, will be a huge gift to a blind person.’ I waited. No one spoke. ‘It’s something I can do for someone. I can do this.’

‘DeeDee,’ Neil said in that pediatrician voice. My skin crawled at ‘DeeDee.’ Years ago it had been affectionate. Now most of his nicknames for me just irked me. ‘You know you’re going to fall in love with this dog, and then what? You’ll be devastated having to give it up.’ He said the word with uncharacteristic drama.

‘You say that as though you think I’m a basket case perched on the edge right now.’ Maybe I was, I thought, but I’m fighting to hang on. This was my fight. ‘I’m going into this with my eyes wide open, Neil. I will fall in love with the dog. It’s part of the assignment. But I love Sam and Matt and Lainey, also part of the assignment, and Sam’s off at college, and soon, Matt and Lainey will be. Do you think my world will fall apart then?’

He looked up at the ceiling, pulling at his chin with his hand. His thoughts were all too visible. Yes. He did think I would somehow cease to exist without the kids. I had told him that it felt like a little part of me had died when Sam left for college. Neil had evidently surmised that it was one-third of me, and when the two-thirds sitting on the couch right now left home, that would be it for Deena Munger. No kids, no life.

But the prospect of this dog, this worthy work, had put a tiny spark of life back in me. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. Was it simply the idea of having a dog again? Was it going up against Neil? Or was it that I needed to nurture another dependent being so I could feel useful? Whatever was driving me, I didn’t care. The point was, I was driven for the first time in a long time.

I took a deep breath. ‘Look, I really think it’ll make a difference that I know I’m sending this dog on to a really important job and a good life. The blind people who ultimately get these dogs get all kinds of training and support and probably provide some of the best homes a dog could ever want.’ I knew I was persuading myself as much as Neil, but something was making me bullheaded about this.