Lily and the Octopus(31)

I finish plating (or bowling, in Lily’s case) our meals and drizzle our food with gravy. Between Trent and Lily, it’s hard to say who digs into the food more ferociously. I don’t touch mine. Instead, I watch Lily consume every bite, observing the strange faces she makes as she drags her bonnet straps through the gravy and then desperately tries to lick them once there is no more food in her bowl.

Dammit, Jenny.

I am in mourning. That much is clear to me now. There is a recognizable departure from the normal attitudes of life: An eighteen-pound turkey is an acceptable meal for three. A dog’s supper dish can be on the people table. Pilgrim hats are appropriate haberdashery in June. An octopus may take my dog.

There may not be a November.





Monday


The day after our impromptu Thanksgiving, it’s mid-afternoon before it occurs to me that it’s not Black Friday. It’s not even Friday at all—it’s Monday—but I’m already at The Grove wandering the sidewalks of the outdoor shopping mall aimlessly in search of a good sale. I pass a number of stores that usually interest me, but my mind is somewhere else. With every good memory comes the memory of a mistake. A parallel memory. A darker recollection. The memory of Lily as a puppy transporting all my shoes to the top of the stairs calls up the terrifying incident of her falling down those stairs because I hadn’t had the foresight to block them with a gate. The triumph of expressing her bladder after surgery ushers in another flashback, when I was frustrated that she wouldn’t pee and I yanked her leash so hard she squealed in pain. The memories of our longest talks couple with those of our longest silences, either when we were mad or when we weren’t, when maybe we just presumed the other was mad and we never bothered to ask if that was true.

If I remember all of the good things, isn’t it my responsibility to also remember the bad? If I remember the consumption of happiness at Thanksgiving, shouldn’t I also remember the downing of poison, the force-feeding of hydrogen peroxide? If I can feel her heartbeat through her chest as she sleeps nights snuggled next to me, shouldn’t I also hear her gasping for breath when that same peroxide went down wrong?

The bookends of these memories join to create a vise. My head is stuck between the moveable jaws, which also act as giant conch shells to create the white noise of the ocean, as someone cranking the vise handle makes everything tighter and louder and more unbearable until I struggle to remember why I’m even here. A sale, yes, but a sale on what? What am I shopping for? I search vainly for my bearings in a place that is not that big, not that overwhelming, and not at all unfamiliar. A trolley of tourists passes by with its deafening clang, a sound simultaneously muffled and piercing. I think of the trolley bench in the veterinarian’s waiting room; does the trolley make its last stop there? People exit shops like they’re coming right at me. A man walks two dachshunds on leashes; they cut through the crowds, laser-focused.

Just as they pass me, I start to dry heave.

Everything is a blur, and the only thing that registers in my brain is that I’ve got to get out. My car is on the sixth level of a parking garage that I suddenly feel incapable of navigating. Escaping it would require a tight series of right turns down a central vertigo-inducing ramp that would be the end of whatever shreds of equilibrium I have left—never mind driving home. I stagger past two restaurants, both so unappealing and bland that even on my best days I wonder who dines in them. I know these restaurants mark the exit from the mall, the way to the garage, but I can’t bring myself to walk the narrow path between them. My brain fills with thoughts of the man who jumped off the roof of the parking garage and landed with a splat at the base of the escalator some months ago. Not thoughts about the man, exactly; I know nothing about the man except what they reported on the news. But of death.

Of bones crunching.

Of finality.

Of strangulation.

Of the octopus.

I stumble forward, knowing this commits me to another lap around the eastern end of the mall. Out of the corner of my eye a sign registers, announcing a J. Crew Men’s store that is “coming soon.” I think to myself that I would like that, if I ever get out of here alive. If I ever have the nerve to come back.

Somehow a table presents itself near the grassy area where they erect the skyscraperlike Christmas tree each November, the one that would be here now if it were actually Black Friday. I slump into a chair and put my head down. The tabletop is sticky, but I don’t care. I don’t even know who this table belongs to. I’m probably supposed to purchase a H?agen-Dazs ice cream or a Wetzel’s soft pretzel to sit here. And maybe I will, but for now I just need the spinning to stop. I need thoughts that don’t squeeze me. I need good feelings that don’t bring bad ones; I need the deafening roar in the conch shells to subside.

I need to not be rankled by self-doubt.

My head continues pounding, and the air is thick, like trying to breathe custard. I’ve sweated through my shirt; it sticks to my back like Saran Wrap. I think of pills, little candies of pleasure and relief. I can’t remember if I have any at home. Goddamned Jenny, not prescribing me more. I try to imagine the calming whoosh of a Valium. The mounting clumsiness as the brain’s messages are transmitted more slowly. The calming happiness. The warming embrace. Maybe I can will myself into a more placid state just with the idea, the memory, of pills.

A piece of fuzz lands near my feet. Then another. I wonder if it’s snowing. Not actually snowing—it never snows in Los Angeles, except at The Grove at Christmastime when they launch fake snow from the roof of the movie theater with these cannonlike machines. Have two flakes coasted on a gentle breeze for six months, only now coming in for a landing? No. A mother chases a toddler blowing dandelion fluff. I should have known. Nothing floats effortlessly in limbo—not for six months.