Sad Janet

by Lucie Britsch

  Min-seo makes more sense to me than anyone I’ve ever met, man, woman, or dog, and she’s been living right there across the hall all this time. She could have saved me a lot of time, a lot of feelings. That’ll teach me to be so insular, I think, which is just another word for snobby, shut off, shut down, unfriendly, sad, lonely, scared of change, of letting people in—even scared of no longer feeling sad, because anyone who’s been sad a long time knows that you get so used to it that it’s hard to give any other feelings a chance.

  I hadn’t really thought of it that way, I say to her. It’s important to let people know when they’ve blown your mind, even if it’s a tiny mind in a tiny building. Min-seo had blown my mind a little, offering me an alternative. Sometimes we just want options. Until then, I didn’t feel like I had many.

  My mother wouldn’t agree, I tell her. You know, about not being happy. I tell her this so she’ll know I have a mother, against all appearances. I even had a boyfriend once, I want to say, but she knows, she heard it all through the wall.

  So your mum wants you to be happy? What a bitch, Min-seo says, smiling. I laugh so she knows I’m not completely dead inside. Ha ha, yeah, I say, laughing at my awful or maybe wonderful mother.

  In the space of five minutes this girl has pointed out that I’m a spoiled white girl with shitty white-girl problems, yet I still want to marry her and have her babies, if that’s possible, which I think it actually is now. We could name the baby something festive, like Carol.

  It’s no big deal, she says. I mean, my family, some friends maybe. Come if you want, she says.

  Don’t ditch your pills, though, she adds, starting down the stairs. I’ve seen them do great things. You know that guy in 12B? He used to keep throwing himself off his balcony.

  But he lives on the ground floor, I say.

  Yup, she says. But now he has a job and a boyfriend and a plant on that balcony.

  Should I bring anything? I ask. I always hope the answer is no, but you’re supposed to ask.

  Just yourself, she says.

  Not even a little smile? I joke, so she knows I’m not all about the white-girl problems.

  If you feel like it, she says. My dad’s pretty grumpy-looking, but that’s just his face.

  She turns back to the staircase, and I panic. My friend wanted me to spend Christmas with her in Ibiza, I say, to keep her from thinking I’m a complete loser. It’s not true, of course. Emma has never invited me anywhere.

  Ibiza, she says. Lucky you. But . . . you didn’t go?

  I don’t really dance, I say.

  They make you dance there? she says, and I can’t tell if she’s joking or not.

  I think so, I say.

  Well I’m glad you stayed, I guess, she says.

  Me too, I say, and not just because the thought of Ibiza did something funny to my butthole.

  When I finally get inside my apartment, I dump my bag on the floor and sit beside it, processing our conversation. Sometimes I feel like I need to do this every time I interact with anyone who isn’t a dog.

  * * *

  I will never understand people.

  Dog breeders and puppy farmers are scum to us. Debs always says that if she hadn’t had her accidents—that’s what she calls her kids; she doesn’t even say the “happy” part—she probably would have adopted. I can see her at the adoption agency now, trying to convince them that a run-down dog shelter in the woods is a great place to raise kids. It’s better than a third-world country, she might argue, but you’ve got to wonder.

  When her kids begged to go to Disney World, like all kids do, even ones raised by crazy dog-shelter feminists who live in the woods, she just told them, This here is the happiest goddamn place on earth—now go pick up that poop out the front before one of you skids on it. And her kids would pick up the poop and only curse her a little, because they knew there was no point cursing the most powerful of all witches.

  A spaniel called Lady comes in. I say comes in, but I mean she’s dumped on our doorstep. Some days we come in and find a dog just tied up outside. Sometimes I think Debs lets us find them, so we’ll know how good we have it. There’s no note this time, just a collar, so she has a name at least. Lady is so exhausted she looks to be past caring. She isn’t the first one who comes in that way—the dam who gets dumped on us when the owners have got every last drop out of her, when she’s too exhausted to breed from anymore. They come to us as husks. You should have seen me back in the day, I imagine them saying. They can barely lift their heads now, their bellies swollen and sagging, nipples sucked dry. The parts that made Lady a lady barely recognizable. She pees all the time. Sometimes from joy, like when we pet her and tell her everything’s okay now. She’s such a sweetheart. So trusting, even when she has no reason to be. She has this look in her eyes that says, Where are my children? My hundreds of children? Someone took them, I want to say. You’re safe now, I want to tell her, though how safe are we all, really?

  We’ll look after you, we tell her, try to make you as comfortable as we can.

  She lasts two weeks.

  We called the vet out three times in those two weeks, more than I can ever remember calling the vet for a single dog, but we’re all rooting for Lady. Each time he examines her and he shakes his head. She’s all sucked dry, he says. Is that a medical term? I want to joke, but I am capable of a modicum of tact.

  Debs lets us bring Lady to her house, to breathe her last on a comfortable couch. We carry her in there like she’s the queen. I put the TV on. What’s wrong with her? the kids ask. She’s all used up, Debs says. They don’t ask where her puppies are. Everyone seems to know this is one hell of a sinkhole of sadness that has just opened, and we tiptoe around it to keep from falling in.

  * * *

  Once a month, a dog trainer named Fran comes to the shelter. She comes as a favor to Debs. She’s an old friend. An old flame, maybe. She brings her girlfriend, who is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, like Beyoncé if she ate what she wanted and was a lesbian. Too beautiful, apparently, to get out of the car.

  Fran comes to help Debs out with the problem dogs. Really, she comes to talk shit about the girlfriend she’s got waiting in the car. That’s why she has to wait in the car. Debs lets us visit with her for half an hour, then tells us to fuck off, the grown-ups need to talk. I like to think they’re planning some crime. So we all go out into the front office and sit there, in too many clothes, wishing we were a pretty girl waiting in a car.

  The dogs get quiet when Fran is here. They know that soon someone is going to make them do shit they don’t want to do, like sit on command and walk in a straight line, and who wants to do any of that?

  Fran is an old-school butch dyke and proud of it. She scares Melissa. Melissa always makes sure she’s next to me when Fran’s around, almost hiding behind me. I can hear her trying to slow her breathing so she doesn’t say anything stupid, anything at all really. Melissa would be easy prey for Fran in most circumstances, but here it’s clear she’s one of us, one of Debs’s girls, so she must be okay.

  She knows I’m cool because on the first day we met I said, So you’re the dyke, and she said, And you’re the Janet, and we smoked a cigarette until Debs came and told us both off because this isn’t the fifties and you can’t just smoke over babies, which is what the dogs are to Debs.

  It’s on visits from Fran that I find myself thinking, What happened to us? Nothing, really. Or everything. Men, mostly. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it hasn’t yet happened to you, but it will. All the tiny sadnesses will build up until they make you into whatever monster you are that keeps you up at night. They tell you it’s under your bed or in your closet, because if they tell you it’s going to be inside you, there’s no coming back from that.

  When Fran’s not hovering around Debs, she does spend time with the dogs. They all need so much work, and we do wh
at we can, but it’s nice to have professional help.

  Like all of us, Fran has her favorites. Hers are the big stupid dogs who are soft as shit, but they’re always at risk of crushing some whiny toddler by accident, and their owners tend to get skittish and dump them. She spends time with them, tries to teach them not to be so huge, but it’s like teaching elephants how to ballet dance. She doesn’t give up on them. If she can get them to walk on a lead without pulling your arm off, to sit when asked and only crush children who deserve it, she’s winning. It’s all a favor to Debs; she usually gets paid handsomely to fix people’s dogs, but we get it for free.

  Fran goes away for Christmas. She can’t deal with that bullshit, she says, so she takes her girlfriend to some island somewhere. She’s with Debs in that she thinks Christmas should really be about Mrs. Claus, and until Mrs. Claus leaves Santa for a woman, she’s not into it.

  It wasn’t always just us three and the visits from the lesbians. Once, even before Melissa came, Debs hired a boy. He lasted two days. Debs was humoring him, I think. Not because the work is hard and most people can’t cut it, but because half the point of the shelter is that it’s a place where women come to sort their shit out, or to do something that’s so exhausting that at the end of the day your desire for sleep leaves no room for the sadness you’ve acquired. Debs isn’t sad, she’s angry mostly, but no one knows why. She pretends it’s for the usual reasons, but I just know there’s something else.

  When this boy came, we were open to the idea, but we knew he’d be eaten alive—by us, not by the dogs. We didn’t treat him any differently because he was a boy, and that might have been the problem. We expected him to get on with it like we all did. He said he thought the job would be more about playing with the dogs. We all thought that, I wanted to tell him, but instead I just told him to go and pick up the shit in Block A.

  That was the end of male coworkers, at least the steady-paycheck kind. On weekends a couple of male volunteers come to walk the dogs, but we all breathe a sigh of relief when it’s just us again. And we like it best—at least I do—when we’re alone with the dogs, our private suffering drowned out by the very public suffering of twenty abandoned dogs.

  A lot of dogs who come in have been abused by men, if I’m honest, so they’re no different from us. We’re all happier when they’re off to new homes. I think we’re all secretly afraid that someday the local men will realize the service we’re providing and try to take the shelter away from us.

  To be fair, we did have one dog who had been neglected by a woman. Having been neglected by all women, including myself, I could relate. The woman had been a drug addict, and I felt sad for both her and the dog, and I wanted Debs to let us have them both. Deb wasn’t so understanding. She tried to use the whole incident as a cautionary tale for her kids, but the kids were too excited about the new dog. Those kids love every single mangy mutt that comes through our doors, oblivious to all the suffering around them. Whenever we have puppies, they can’t wait to tell their friends. Sometimes Debs will let them have friends over, but usually she tells them it’s not a good time.

  That should be our slogan, I joked once: Never a good time. Debs doesn’t do jokes.

  16

  I leave work and shuffle in to meeting #2, leaving my hoodie up until the very last moment. Everyone else is already seated. I’m always disappointed I’m not invisible.

  With the grace of a hippo ghost, I sit down in the only empty chair. Karen welcomes us all. The pharma guy says, Hey, and then, I’m not here, but with jazz hands, which is confusing for us all.

  How are we all feeling? Karen asks, because she’s being paid to. It’s her one job. The reason we’re all here. It’s sadness conversion therapy: they don’t care if we’re straight, they just want us happy.

  Karen reaches in her giant disgusting bag again, and I think she’s going to pull out some festive flash cards and ask us on a scale of one to ten how murdery they make us feel. When we don’t feel murdery at all, they’ll know the pill is working.

  No one says anything. There are no words to describe how we all feel. I think about telling them all those words I know for sadness, but I know I’m not supposed to talk about sadness. It’s our We don’t talk about the war.

  Okay, well, it’ll take a few weeks, she says, believing in us all, bless her.

  Then she starts telling us how we can get the most out of our pills. I can feel the entire room zoning out. We’re all still in our heads. None of us can believe this is our life now.

  Remember to let your doctor know if you have any side effects not listed, she says, but every possible thing a human could feel is listed. Then a silence fills the room, as if we’re all silently revisiting the litany of dangers.

  Ten minutes go by. How are we all doing? she asks, as if the pills might have suddenly kicked in. We all stare at her with the same glazed-over eyes. We’re not doing so great, Karen, I want to say, but I don’t. I know not to speak for other people, but it’s pretty obvious. This is not how any of us imagined our lives would be. You can’t even enjoy yourself at Christmas, the voice in my head says constantly. What’s wrong with you?

  You already asked us that, the girl next to me says. Her cuticles are all bloody. The thought of Christmas will do that to you, make you pick yourself to death.

  The time does not go by. I really need to shit, which only adds to the magic.

  Finally, the hour is over. No one is more relieved than Karen. I don’t know what medication she’s on, but she might need more of it.

  * * *

  As I pull my big coat on, I see a few people gathering by the door. They’re going for a drink, it seems, not because they’re friends now, just because they’re all going to the nearest bar, because alcohol, and it would be weird for them all to go and sit separately when they’re coming from the same place. I could go to a different, farther-away bar, I think. Better still, I could buy a bottle of something and go to a park, relive my youth.

  No one asks me if I want to come. Nevertheless, I turn and smile and say, No, but thanks anyway. They all look at me like Whatever, which is the correct way to look at me.

  Then one girl, whose name I can’t remember, asks what my lipstick is. Usually I’d laugh, but I’m not feeling myself, so I tell her it’s ChapStick and I bite my lips a lot.

  I can tell she thinks I’m disgusting, but she says, Oh, I wish I could pull off that natural look, and I smile and nod and say nothing about her eyebrows, which are drawn on badly. For a moment I think I feel sadder about her eyebrows than about my life. It’s a Christmas miracle.

  I don’t tell the girl I don’t do makeup, because from the looks of her she might assume I’m somebody’s outdated idea of a militant feminist, but really, it’s because I can’t be fucked. I used to wear makeup, when I was a teenager. Sometimes when people look at me with pity I want to shout, I was a teenage girl once! so they know I can survive anything. Anyway, one time a boy told me that he liked how I didn’t wear a lot of makeup like the other girls, and I felt so cheated because I’d actually bothered that day. I had spent the little money I had on a bunch of cosmetic crap and he didn’t even notice. Boys are fucking stupid. I still slept with him, but I was mad as hell.

  I spent my whole teenage years that way, having too much faith that one day boys would no longer be so stupid. I always knew I would be.

  * * *

  I survive that second meeting by feeling sad about that girl’s eyebrows and feeling like a boy-hating teenager again. Now it’s just me and Karen and the pharma guy, standing awkwardly in the hall. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here, Karen says, and laughs at herself.

  Then it’s just me and the pharma guy, and we walk out together like it’s the most natural thing, like we maybe came here together, and in the moment I like how it feels, so I keep it going, because I know these things have a habit of being fleeting.

 
; I hear myself asking if he wants to get a drink, and he must say yes because my legs are moving now and we’re walking to a bar and I can hear myself laugh at something he says and he tells me he has a dog and I hear myself ask if I can meet it, because of course he has to have a dog, doesn’t he? Behind every okay man is a better dog. I watch myself leave the bar with him and go to his apartment and I tell myself it’s for the dog, it’s always for the dog. When life throws you lemons, remember there are dogs.

  I do things like this and I don’t know why. I pretend I don’t want to be part of the stupid world and all its heterosexual bullshit, then I go home with some dude. Some bro. Not even for the sex, but for the feeling—something I pretend I don’t need, because if I did, then what?

  I’m drunk enough to not care, though. I’ve always thought I would make a great drunk. One of those ladies with droopy breasts and eyes who hang around bars in leopard print, terrorizing young men. I’m just not sure I could handle the commitment.

  The sex with the pharma bro is weird—as it should be, because sex is weird, and if it’s not, you’re doing it wrong. I’m drunk enough to not care about any of it, except maybe about my body. I’ll care later, maybe. Or just forget to. I have important Christmas feelings to feel, goddamn it.