Calypso(28)

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Like hell it is.”

This Thanksgiving my brother-in-law, Bob, was deep-frying the turkey. It has to be done outdoors, so while he scoped out a spot and constructed a wind barrier, I took my frozen tumor and headed to the canal with Lisa and my niece, who was eleven years old at the time and very shy. It was cold, and during the fifteen-minute walk, I asked Madelyn who the most popular girl at her school was.

She answered with no hesitation.

“And is she nice?” I asked.

“She wasn’t last year or the year before, but she is now.”

“You will never forget the name of the most popular girl in the sixth grade,” I said. “Even when you’re old and on your deathbed it’ll come to you. That is her triumph.”

“My most popular girl was Jane-Jane Teague,” Lisa told us.

“That’s such a good name,” I said.

Lisa nodded. “And you had to call her Jane-Jane—even the teachers. She wouldn’t answer to anything less.”

We arrived at the canal to find three boys standing on the footbridge and looking down into the water, their bikes sprawled like bodies on the ground around them. I leaned over the rail, but instead of the snapping turtles I was expecting, I saw only sliders, which are significantly smaller and less awe-inspiring.

“You looking for Granddaddy?” the boy beside me asked.

I said, “Granddaddy?”

“People call him Godzilla sometimes too,” the kid told me. “He’s the one with the messed-up head. Me and my brother feed him toast a lot.”

“And grapes,” the boy next to him said. “We give him them and crackers if we got ’em.”

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

“I never knew the turtle had a name,” I said.

The kid shrugged. “Sure does.”

“So where is he now?”

“Hibernating,” the boy told me. “Like every year.”

I was crestfallen. “And when will he wake up?”

The kid reached down and picked up his bike. “Springtime, ’less he dies in his sleep. What, you bring some bread for him?”

“Me?” I said. “No.” Ashamed to admit it was something more intimate.



“And after everything I went through!” I whined on our way back to the house.

“Your lipoma will keep,” Lisa assured me. “We’ll just put it back in the freezer and you can feed it to Godzilla or Granddaddy or whatever his name is when you return in May.”

“And what if there’s a storm between now and the spring, and the electricity goes out?”

Lisa thought for a moment. “Something that’s going to eat a tumor probably won’t distinguish between a good one and a bad one.”



I won’t say the hibernating turtle ruined my Thanksgiving. He did make it feel rather anticlimactic, though I’m not sure why. If you were to throw a lipoma to a dog, he’d swallow it in a single bite, then get that very particular look on his face that translates to Fuck. Was that a tumor? There’d be something to see. Turtles, on the other hand, never change expression and live with fewer regrets. I’m certain that when I return in May and drop my little gift into the canal, the snapper will eat it unthinkingly, the way he’s eaten all the chicken hearts and fish heads I’ve thrown to him over the past year. Then he’ll look around for more before disappearing, like the ingrate that he is, back into his foul and riled depths.





A Modest Proposal



London is five hours ahead of Washington, DC, except when it comes to gay marriage. In that case, it’s two years and five hours ahead, which was news to me. “Really?” I said, on meeting two lesbian wives from Wolverhampton. “You can do that here?”

“Well, of course they can,” Hugh said when I told him about it. “Where have you been?”

Hugh can tell you everything about the current political situation in the U.K. He knows who the chancellor of the exchequer is, and was all caught up in the latest election for the whatever-you-call-it, that king-type person who’s like the president but isn’t.

“Prime minister?” he said. “Jesus. You’ve been here how long?”

It was the same when we lived in Paris. Hugh regularly read the French papers. He listened to political shows on the radio, while I was, like, “Is he the same emperor we had last year?”

When it comes to American politics, our roles are reversed. “What do you mean ‘Who’s Claire McCaskill?’” I’ll say, amazed that I—that anyone, for that matter—could have such an ignorant boyfriend.

I knew that the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was expected at ten a.m. on June 26, which is three p.m. in Sussex. I’m usually out then, on my litter patrol, so I made it a point to bring my iPad with me. When the time came, I was standing by the side of the road, collecting trash with my grabber. It’s generally the same crap over and over—potato-chip bags, candy wrappers, Red Bull cans—but along this particular stretch, six months earlier, I’d come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You’d think that if someone wanted a sex toy she’d go for the gold, sizewise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who had this person been hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I’d get hit by a car and killed. That’s just my luck. Medics would come and scrape me off the pavement, then, later, at the hospital, they’d rifle through my pack and record its contents: four garbage bags, some wet wipes, two flashlights, and a strap-on penis.