Today Will Be Different(2)

What can I say? I’m terrible with faces. And names. And numbers. And times. And dates.

The whole party was a blur, with one woman eager to show me funky shops, another hidden hikes, another Mario Batali’s father’s Italian restaurant in Pioneer Square, another the best dentist in town who has a glitter painting on his ceiling of a parachuting tiger, yet another willing to share her housekeeper. One of them, Sydney Madsen, invited me to lunch the next day at the Tamarind Tree in the International District.

(Joe has a thing he calls the magazine test. It’s the reaction you have when you open the mailbox and pull out a magazine. Instantly, you know if you’re happy to see this magazine or bummed. Which is why I don’t subscribe to The New Yorker and do subscribe to Us Weekly. Put to the magazine test, Sydney Madsen is the human equivalent of Tinnitus Today.)

That first lunch: She was so careful with her words, so sincere in her gaze, noticed a small spot on her fork and was overly solicitous toward the waiter when asking for a new one, brought her own tea bag and asked for hot water, said she wasn’t very hungry so how about we split my green papaya salad, told me she’d never seen Looper Wash but would put a hold on the DVDs at the library.

Am I painting a clear enough picture of the tight-assed dreariness, the selfish cluelessness, the cheap creepiness? A water-stained fork never killed anybody! Buy the DVDs, how about? Eat the food at the restaurant, that’s how they stay in business! Worst of all, Sydney Madsen was steady, earnest, without a speck of humor, and talked… very… slowly… as… if… her… platitudes… were… little… gold… coins.

I was in shock. Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way.

At one point I writhed so violently in my chair that Sydney actually asked, “Do you need to use the powder room?” (Powder room? Powder room? Kill her!) The worst part? All those women with whom I’d gladly agreed to go hiking and shopping? They weren’t a bunch of women. They were all Sydney Madsen! Damn that blur! It took everything I had to kink her fire hose of new invitations: a weekend at her beach house on Vashon Island, introducing me to the wife of someone for this, the playwright of something for that.

I ran home screaming to Joe.

Joe: You should have been suspicious of someone so eager to make friends, because it probably means she doesn’t have any.

Me: This is why I love you, Joe. You just boil it all down. (Joe the boiler. Don’t we just love him?)


Forgive me for long-hauling you on Sydney Madsen. My point is: for ten years I haven’t been able to shake her. She’s the friend I don’t like, the friend I don’t know what she does for a living because I was too stultified to ask the first time and it would be rude to ask now (because I’m not rude), the friend I can’t be mean enough to so she gets the message (because I’m not mean), the friend to whom I keep saying no, no, no, yet she still chases me. She’s like Parkinson’s, you can’t cure her, you can just manage the symptoms.

For today, the lunch bell tolls.

Please know I’m aware that lunch with a boring person is a boutique problem. When I say I have problems, I’m not talking about Sydney Madsen.


Yo-Yo trotting down the street, the prince of Belltown. Oh, Yo-Yo, you foolish creature with your pep and your blind devotion and your busted ear flapping with every prance. How poignant it is, the pride you take in being walked by me, your immortal beloved. If only you knew.

What a disheartening spectacle it’s been, a new month, a new condo higher than the last, each packed with blue-badged Amazon squids, every morning squirting by the thousands from their studio apartments onto my block, heads in devices, never looking up. (They work for Amazon, so you know they’re soulless. The only question, how soulless?) It makes me pine for the days when Third Ave. was just me, empty storefronts and the one tweaker yelling, “That’s how you spell America!”

Outside our building, Dennis stood by his wheelie trash can and refilled the poop-bag dispenser. “Good morning, you two.”

“Good morning, Dennis!” Instead of my usual breezing past, I stopped and looked him in the eye. “How’s your day so far?”

“Oh, can’t complain,” he said. “You?”

“Can complain, but won’t.”

Dennis chuckled.

Today, already a net gain.


I opened the front door of our apartment. At the end of the hallway: Joe face down at the table, his forehead flat on the newspaper, arms splayed with bent elbows as if under arrest.

It was a jarring image, one of pure defeat, the last thing I’d ever associate with Joe—

Thunk.

The door shut. I unclipped Yo-Yo’s harness. By the time I straightened, my stricken husband had gotten up and disappeared into his office. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to talk about it.

My attitude? Works for me!

Yo-Yo raced to his food, greyhound-style, back legs vaulting past his front. Realizing it was the same dry food that had been there before his walk, he became overwhelmed with confusion and betrayal. He took one step and stared at a spot on the floor.

Timby’s light clicked on. God bless him, up before the alarm. I went into his bathroom and found him on the step stool in his PJs.