Sad Janet

by Lucie Britsch

  Melissa was bulimic in college, so she can’t deal with Sarah. I think she should be made to, like a weird form of aversion therapy, but Debs thinks I’m just being mean. I’m not, I just don’t want to deal with it either.

  Debs is mostly pissed because we don’t have food to waste like that.

  You’d think dogs like Sarah would be lost causes, but sometimes they turn into different dogs altogether once they actually find a home. Turns out dogs hate being locked up—who knew? We all should have understood that, being prisoners in hells of our own making, me and Debs anyway. Melissa somehow still believes she’s free, though we constantly remind her otherwise.

  * * *

  My first year at the shelter, I realized that making Christmas for a bunch of dogs is the most depressing pastime humankind has ever developed. That’s nice, my mum said when I told her, which says it all.

  They think it’s cheery, Melissa and the volunteers, because they’d rather be with us for the holidays than with their own families. Even though all the tinsel they string up will inevitably get ripped down and eaten, giving the dogs worse shits than normal. Happy fucking Christmas, Janet.

  After the whole Christmas-for-dogs charade is over and the volunteers have all gone home feeling better about themselves, we still have our regular jobs to do. The extra-broken dogs still need their meds and their shit cleaned up, and we have to double-check that no inmates are trying to dig their way out. Some nights I dream about sneaking into the sanctuary after dark and letting them all out. We all want to escape sometimes.

  * * *

  Sometimes when it’s quiet and there’s no one around I crawl into the kennels and get into one of the tiny dog beds. I curl right up and pretend I’m a dog. Sometimes I let the dogs curl up with me. (Only if they want to—I’m not forcing anyone to do anything they don’t want to do.) I squash right in there and the dog gets in there with me and we curl up like this is what our bodies were made to do. Only that dog will know what I need in that moment. I’m supposed to be the caretaker, but the dog knows I’m barely taking care of myself.

  Melissa almost rumbled me once. She was looking for me, and I poked my head out of the kennel and nearly gave her a heart attack. I never explained what I was doing in there, and she never asked. Maybe she does it too. I don’t know what people do. I don’t think she told Debs. It’s not like she caught me sleeping or anything. I was just snuggling—but then isn’t that way worse? If word got out I was a secret snuggler, I’d never live it down. I spent the next few days after she caught me being a little meaner than normal, in case Melissa thought I was anything other than a pain in the ass.

  * * *

  Sarah is in the food bins, like Debs said. What she left out is that Sarah has already vomited and now she’s eating her own vomit. When I approach, she doesn’t even snarl at me as usual. She just looks at me like, We’ve all got issues, Janet, this is mine. I manage to get past her and then use my body to slide her out of the storeroom so I can lock it. Once she’s away from the food, there’s no problem, and she lies down and looks at me like, What? I let her rest for a few minutes before dragging her back to her kennel.

  Thanks for the memories, I say, locking her in. She looks at me like, Likewise.

  Some days at the shelter feel like the dogs are trying to teach me something, but I’m done with people trying to teach me things, even dogs. I just want it all to be over.

  Not my life as such, but this version of it.

  I’m ready to feel different.

  8

  It was the pill for shyness that cemented my feeling that pills were garbage, that we were one step away from a pill that would make you straight, when all most of us wanted was to be allowed to be crooked, broken, flawed.

  That shyness pill broke me. Enraged me.

  It might be great, the boyfriend had said, like he too saw my shyness as a disease, something that needed curing. Like he was only with me because he hoped one day they’d find a cure, some proof that I wasn’t really ugly, just shy and sad.

  We loved the Smiths, and I remember how, when their song about shyness being nice came on, I was blinded by what I thought was love. I didn’t even hear the part about how it can stop you. I didn’t care if it stopped me, now that I had this boy in my arms. Because I was stupid.

  He probably remembers it differently. That’s the problem with love, or what you think is love. If I loved myself more, maybe things would be different.

  What if someone can’t get out of bed because they’re so shy? he said.

  What if it’s not because they’re shy? I said. What if they’ve just seen how pointless life is and can’t be bothered anymore?

  I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, Janet, he said, still talking.

  He meant when I’m Bad Janet. The Janet who swears at other people’s children. The Janet who won’t answer the phone in case it’s anyone’s mother. The Janet who chooses to work in the woods with dogs rather than have more conversations about what’s wrong with her and how it needs fixing.

  I never used to say, There’s a pill for that, when he couldn’t get it up.

  Debs is the only one who leaves me alone, so naturally I sniff around her all the time, wanting her to notice me.

  Everyone is taking all the pills, Janet, they tell me, like that’s ever worked on me. I’m still wearing clothes from five years ago. If they really want me to take the pills, they should just say, No one’s taking them. It’s all super nerdy. Or, It’s French. Or, It’ll kill you.

  * * *

  Debs is always saying she’d be dead in a ditch if she didn’t have her pills, and I believe her.

  She has her kids to keep alive now, as well as herself, and that’s not easy. I get it. Before she was a mom, maybe she could have afforded to be selfish, to see what would happen if she stopped taking them. Now she knows she has to take them forever. She has to think of the children. So she dutifully takes them every day. I’m sure she assumes that one day I’ll join her, if I’m ever stupid enough to get knocked up, and we’ll sit out on the porch in the evening, not talking about all the things we’d hoped to do with our lives.

  * * *

  I lie awake most nights now thinking about everything that has ever happened to me. I can’t switch it off—switch me off—but I want to.

  I’ve always been like this. It doesn’t matter if I’m alone in bed or not. Stuff that happened today at work, last week, last year, five years ago, it’s all just there at the front of my brain when it’s supposed to be shelved away, like I’ve stored it all wrong, like my brain is one of those closets you never want to open because everything will fall out and crush you. My brain is all abandoned board games and broken lamps. Unworn sweaters you were too lazy to return. I worry that if I live long enough, the stuff will be too much and I’ll be glad when I start forgetting.

  If I lie awake long enough, my mind always goes back to the boy I used to share this bed with, this life with. Some of those broken lamps were his fault.

  * * *

  A young couple comes in to Joe’s looking for a dog. I swerve them and hide in the food store. I know just by watching them that they’re newly in love, that no crud has formed there, not yet. It reminds me of the day I met my boyfriend.

  He had worked in a Tex-Mex restaurant. I asked him to explain it to me, this “Tex-Mex,” and he couldn’t. It was my version of flirting. He should have known then I was a tricky one.

  He rode a bicycle, which I thought was hilarious. Not the bicycle itself, but the fact that he rode one. Like he was from the old days. Or Cambridge.

  I had him cycle over to see me after his shift finished at one in the morning. He’d appear on my doorstep, exhausted and dirty, and I’d search his pockets for tips and those tiny umbrellas they put in the drinks at his restaurant. I was obsessed with those tiny umbrellas. To me they represented a sort of pocket-sized joy, where t
he regular-sized ones represented despair. I was happyish then, as you are at the beginning of relationships, before the crud starts forming—literal crud, because you can’t be bothered to clean, just to have sex, but also the crud that forms on your heart from having to defend it all the time.

  Agnes and I would show up at his restaurant and order drinks and see if we could get him fired. We wanted him to be free like us—because that’s what we thought we were—but already I wasn’t free anymore, because of him. That’s what love is, even the best versions of it: a weight you carry. Sometimes you want to be weighed down, sometimes not, but you rarely get to choose. I always want to choose.

  It was all part of our courtship. Me showing up at his job and being a pain. Him showing up at mine and me being a pain. He didn’t know it, but I had chosen him. One day I’d just decided I was bored of myself, dangerously so, and that being part of something bigger might solve that, might fill the hole inside me. Life is all about how you fill the holes. I am all hole, most of the time, a cave of a person.

  The boyfriend was in school, but his parents insisted that he work too, because they knew eventually he’d give up one of the two. I was the best thing that ever happened to him, they told me—and told him, over and over again, so he’d know not to fuck this up too. This made me sad, because I knew me, and I was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We clung to each other, probably longer than we should have, because we knew what came next wouldn’t be better, only different. I didn’t know how to say Fuck me but don’t fuck me up; it seemed like a paradox.

  Everything seems awful and scary when you’re young, and then one day you realize that it actually is, so you push through—and sometimes you’re pulling someone else along with you. And it can get desperate and messy, especially when you mistake it for love. I’d wanted to be part of something else, and for a while I was. I could tick relationship with a semi-functioning human boy off my list, and someday, I told myself, we could just part ways and move on, forget about how it ended or most of what came before. Keep things positive, keep it moving.

  And now it’s just me again, lying awake.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, Debs’s brother comes to paint the kennels.

  I didn’t know you had a brother, I say. Yep, she says.

  He paints with one hand and smokes with the other, and I can’t say I’m not impressed, because I totally am. Like when you see someone standing in the rain outside a restaurant smoking a cigarette. It’s a statement, more than an addiction. It says, Fuck all of you.

  Debs leaves him to it. This is her style of managing. I look over at Melissa and see her staring at him. I wonder if she’ll go over and say hi or ask if he wants a drink or try to braid his hair, but she seems to sense that he’s someone she should stay away from. We’re becoming more like dogs every day. Soon we’ll start sniffing people.

  Paint fumes and cigarette smoke—you’re really spoiling us, I say to him as I walk past. He mistakes this for flirting, because men are stupid. All the other women ignore him, but I make a joke when I see him, so I must be interested.

  The men who come to Joe’s—the volunteers, those hoping to adopt, and now Debs’s brother—have all heard about us. They know what people say, about these women who live out in the woods with dogs. I heard they’re lesbians, they say, but really we can’t be bothered with either sex. I heard they’re witches, others say, and we might be if we ever got our shit together. All women are witches if they can be bothered, Debs has been known to say. The truth is, there are nicer shelters—plenty of them in the city, where the staff wear name tags and goofy smiles and bright-colored sweatshirts covered with paw prints. Shelters where the air smells of flowers and not dog shit, where the dogs are all in good moods because they don’t have to live in the woods with us. I sometimes wonder if the people who do make it out to Joe’s come because they want to look at us, not just the dogs. Women come too, and some of them look at us like the way they look at the dogs, like they’re wondering, What is wrong with you that you ended up here? Though every now and then I think I can sense one of them wondering, Have you got room for one more?

  Debs sees her brother looking at me and shuts it down immediately. Don’t waste your time, she says, she’s basically a eunuch. Which I appreciate.

  When Debs’s kids get home from school, she has them sit and do their homework in the break room so she can keep an eye on them. I like seeing Debs with her kids, because I can see her brain switch to mum mode—though it’s only ever half-assed, as the dogs are her real babies. I know this for sure because once, when she was a little drunk, she told me that she had a recurring dream where she gave birth to puppies not humans, and she was cool with it.

  When Debs does mum stuff, like school runs and grocery shopping and homework, she’s just making it up as she goes—and the kids don’t notice or care. They don’t know yet it’s not how other people live. They just think everyone grows up at a run-down dog shelter with a mum who’s wondering how a man can leave a dog chained up outside for two days while he goes off drinking, instead of just trying to remember if she washed the school uniforms.

  Watching her, I think, I could do that if I wanted to, but I don’t, not really. People make such a big deal out of having a family, but when it comes down to it, you just do it. You make mistakes, sure, but you keep plugging away.

  Debs asks her kid what he had for lunch. He just says something about gorillas. We all do our best.

  * * *

  As I’m leaving work, a van goes by bearing the logo of the local cat shelter. Things are getting too quiet around here, I think. We need a bit of excitement. So I flip the van off.

  If any cat turd turns up on my doorstep, Debs says, you’re taking it home.

  Sometimes I like to think the lady who runs the cat shelter is Debs’s nemesis, or her ex-lover, that they used to do it behind the sacks of kitty litter. I tell myself stories like this to make our little hovel more bearable, to hang on to the idea that even here, among the shit stains and fur balls, some form of love could grow.

  The truth is a little more pedestrian. Debs had a husband once, and she still has the kids, the remnants of a more normal life. There must have been a wedding; someone must have bought them fancy glasses. All before my time, but the ghosts are still there. I wonder about her husband, and I’m sure soon Debs will be wondering what happened to my boyfriend. We never mention our missing men, like they’re soldiers who went to war, only we hope they don’t come back. If they do, they’ll find us all remarried but to dogs.

  You think I’m joking, but before I can escape for the day, Melissa has cornered us to show us some pictures on her phone of some dogs getting married. I’m sure Debs is about to grab her phone and throw it out onto the road just as a truck is passing, but instead she just says, People are idiots, and goes back to pretending to listen to her kids.

  Melissa still has hope for us all, and sometimes that’s enough.

  9

  My mother asks me to come over because she’s done something stupid to her computer. She won’t ask my dad, she says, because she did the same thing yesterday and doesn’t want to look even stupider, and she knows I don’t want her to bug him. Fine, I said, but I can’t stay. Turns out it was all a ruse to get me to come to the house, so she could see me and kiss me and confirm that she does indeed have a daughter. I am not pleased.

  When you leave home, you should insist that your parents move, or at least let you burn down your bedroom. When I come home, I can’t stay far enough away from that room and that bed. That bed where once, when I was fooling around with a boy and he told me to get naked and then said, Do something sexy, and I cried, which I know now is the opposite of sexy. Never have sex in your childhood bedroom. It will fuck you up for life.

  I’m so proud of you, my mother says, because she thinks that’s what we all want to hear, that our parents are proud. When really wha
t we want is to be accepted, to feel that their love isn’t contingent on anything we’ve done. That just being us is enough.

  Have you thought about the Christmas pill? she says.

  I haven’t made any commitments, I say.

  But you will take them, won’t you? I mean, I would, she says. This is no surprise. My mother takes so many pills she rattles.

  She doesn’t realize that I’m not above regressing to my best teenager self by doing the exact opposite of what she wants, just to piss her off. It’s been my only consistent joy.

  I mean, I love my meds, she says, but who wouldn’t want a little extra at Christmas?

  Ugh, I say, stop already.

  What? she says. I’m just saying.

  Well don’t, I say, and she seems to get it and she kisses me and says she’s proud of me again. She hasn’t kissed me for at least ten years. Air-kissed, maybe, but not a proper kiss. No pressure, I think. What sort of world is it when parents are proud that their kids are considering getting medicated?

  The fact that Christmas is such a big deal tells me that everyone knows life is shitty, and that every so often we really need it not to be—say, a few weeks at the end of every year. It’s a necessary release, the world’s yearly happy ending.

  This is what used to happen at Christmas: The holiday season would start to seep into our collective consciousness in late November. By early December it would be in full swing, enough that even I felt like participating. People would ask me to do stuff and I would, because it was Christmas. Bake cookies? Check. Wrap gifts? Check. Laugh at carolers? Check. Only when I grew up did it all start to feel a little empty. For a while I told myself it was all fine, because it was like that for everyone. Only it wasn’t.