Have a Nice Guilt Trip

by Lisa Scottoline

  “I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, Muggy, and I’m sorry to disappoint you. But I want you to know that I took it very seriously, and I respect you too much not to tell you the truth.”

  My grandmother remained silent on the line, highly uncharacteristic.

  I was sure I overwhelmed her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she said, finally. “Thank you very much. I am satisfied.”

  I was shocked. And then I kicked myself for underestimating her.

  It was like she said; just because she’s old, doesn’t mean she can be dismissed. Who are we to be her judge and jury? Because in a family, unlike a court of law, there’s no statute of limitations on being heard. In a family, you can air your grievances, however crazy they may sound. I was glad my grandmother felt listened to and could finally put the matter to rest.

  And, Stevie Wonder, you can thank me later.

  Ho for the Burn

  By Lisa

  I couldn’t be more excited about two new fitness crazes—exercising in high heels and/or on a stripper pole.

  I can’t think of a better message for young girls than exercising is important, but only if you look pornographic.

  Obviously, whoever said women couldn’t achieve equality in athletics had no idea what they were talking about.

  Or maybe it’s called a craze because it’s crazy.

  We begin with Heel Hop, which is an hour-long workout, including sit-ups, stretches, and lunges, but you do all the exercises wearing high heels.

  Don’t forget your stilettos—and Blue Cross card.

  The instructor is a backup dancer named Kamilah, who says, “I came straight out of the womb with some high-heeled pumps.”

  I have one word for Kamilah:

  Ouch.

  I wish I knew Kamilah’s mother, so I could give her a big hug—and a Bronze Star.

  I’m hoping Kamilah doesn’t start a new craze among fetuses, who will begin demanding high-heeled pumps in the womb. Because we don’t need babies making their exit—or their entrance, depending on how you look at it—in even an infant-size pair of heels.

  Unless you want to save the doctor fees on your episiotomy.

  But that’s not where I’d cut costs.

  No pun.

  I read online that Heel Hop is taught in classes held in Los Angeles.

  I know, it makes you want to move to Los Angeles.

  And if you do, you should. Move there. And stay there. Go away and never come back. I don’t want to run into you in the market.

  I’ll be the one in muddy clogs.

  The article I read about Heel Hop contained an interview with a podiatrist. They asked him about working out in high heels, and he said, “Exercising in them just doesn’t make sense in any way, shape, or form.”

  But what does he know?

  He’s only a doctor, not a dancer, and therefore unqualified to give an opinion.

  I bet he can’t even walk in heels.

  In fact, I challenge him to pronounce Louboutin.

  Hint: Louboutin is French for you’re-gonna-break-your-ankle.

  But an even better fitness craze is exercising on a stripper pole, which I saw on one of the Real Housewives reality shows, where the housewives were taking lessons, spinning around the pole.

  I’m sure this is exactly your reality, spending your free time spinning around poles with your girlfriends.

  Of course that’s not reality.

  Real women don’t have free time.

  In any event, you’ll be happy to know that you can find lots of DVDs online that will teach you how to work out on a stripper pole. I like the website called FlirtyGirlFitness, which says, “Treadmills, bench presses, and stair climbers have been replaced with dance poles, kitchen chairs, and pink feather boas.”

  This may be news to Nike.

  I bet right now they’re figuring out a way to paste a swish onto a boa.

  Maybe they should just paste it onto a pastie.

  Buy two.

  Also I’m wondering what FlirtyGirlFitness is doing with their kitchen chairs. I need mine for sitting on while I eat chocolate cake.

  The problem with exercising on a pole is that you need to install a pole in your house, which could be embarrassing when it comes time to sell. Unless you convince potential buyers that you’re a fireman.

  And think about what happens when you abandon your pole exercises, as you inevitably will. A pole isn’t like a treadmill, in that you can’t leave your dirty clothes on it. They’ll fall right off.

  I don’t buy exercise equipment that I can’t use for a hamper.

  But amazingly, FlirtyGirlFitness has an answer for what to do with your abandoned pole. The website says that their poles come with “a special hook that will allow you to use this space to hang a plant.”

  How’s that for a sales pitch?

  Ladies, now you can combine your love of gardening with your need to look like a hooker!

  I’m sure there’s a market for that, and it’s born every minute.

  I just hope it wears flats.

  Magic Kingdom

  By Lisa

  It’s the rich versus the handicapped.

  Guess who’s winning.

  Bingo.

  I read it in the paper.

  The first incident I read about took place in Newport, Rhode Island, where there are stately mansions owned by families like the Vanderbilts, who got here a long time before the Scottolines.

  The Vanderbilts came over on the Mayflower, in contrast to my ancestors, who took the bus.

  With about ten transfers.

  Anyway, according to the news story, lots of tourists go see the mansions in Newport, so many that somebody proposed to build a visitor center with handicapped-accessible ramps and bathrooms. This idea evidently caused the rich people in Newport to write letters opposing the visitor center, and in particular, the gift shop.

  That’s un-American.

  I can’t imagine anybody being opposed to a gift shop.

  Everybody knows that the best part of any attraction is the gift shop.

  You can go to any art museum, fancy mansion, or pretzel factory, and the best time you will have is in the gift shop.

  Where else can you flatten a copper penny?

  When Daughter Francesca was little, her favorite part of the zoo was the gift shop, which came at the end. She loved the monkeys, giraffes, and the eagle named Kippee, but throughout the entire zoo, she would talk about the punchball she would get in the gift shop.

  And by talk, I mean whine.

  In time I figured out that it would be smarter to take her to the gift shop first, so that she got her punchball right off the bat. Then we got a membership to the zoo, to go for free, and we would skip the animals altogether and go only to the gift shop.

  Whatever, giraffes.

  Long necks. We get it.

  To return to point, evidently Gloria Vanderbilt didn’t appreciate the need for a gift shop or a bathroom, much less one that’s accessible to the handicapped. She called the mansions a “magical kingdom” and opposed having a handicapped-accessible visitor center because she didn’t want a “new building selling plastic shrink-wrapped sandwiches.”

  Obviously, this is the epitome of discrimination.

  Against shrink-wrapped sandwiches.

  Shrink-wrapped sandwiches are the equal of any other sandwich.

  I would think that a woman as classy as Gloria Vanderbilt could look beyond the wrapping to the content of the sandwich, but no.

  So let’s review.

  Thus far, the rich people are winning.

  The handicapped are holding it in.

  And triangular tuna sandwiches don’t stand a chance.

  The second incident I read about takes place at the real Magic Kingdom, where the handicapped strike back against the rich.

  But they still don’t win.

  It turns out that rich people at Disneyland have been taking advantage of the park’s prac
tice to let handicapped people go to the head of the line.

  The handicapped get all the breaks, don’t they?

  If you had a million bucks, you could see how waiting in line would burn you up. You’d have to stand in the lovely California sunshine, spend time with your family, and listen to your kids talk.

  And by talk, I mean whine.

  Anyway, time is money, and no one knows that better than rich people, who reportedly started paying random handicapped people $1,000 a day to tell the Disneyland officials that they were part of the family, so that the rich people could get to the front of the line.

  If you ask me, that’s win-win.

  The rich people get to go to the head of the line. And the handicapped people get to push them off Space Mountain.

  To digress a moment, I’ve had a lot of strange jobs in my broke days. I volunteered for focus groups, I waited tables, I even practiced law.

  So yes, I can be bought.

  But you couldn’t pay me enough to steer rich people around Disneyland and pretend they were my family.

  Okay, maybe I would.

  But I would not take them on the It’s A Small World exhibit more than one time. You couldn’t pay me enough. When Daughter Francesca was little, she wanted to go on that exhibit four times in a row. Of course, I took her.

  I didn’t even charge her.

  Also she was only five years old, and I don’t think she was good for it.

  But I read that Disneyland has just suspended the practice of letting the handicapped go to the front of the line, even though it was making money for handicapped people willing to hang out with rich people who would teach their kids it’s okay to lie if it gets you to the front of the line.

  Who was handicapped, again?

  A Wall of Guilt

  By Francesca

  “I think he swallowed it,” my boyfriend said, his eyes full of worry.

  “The whole thing?” My heart dropped.

  My little dog was in trouble.

  It had begun as one of those perfect early-summer days. My boyfriend and I had taken the train with my dog, Pip, in tow to a friend’s Memorial Day barbecue. On the way there, I had been so charmed by how cute my two favorite boys looked together—Pip’s adorable face popping out of his travel bag from underneath my boyfriend’s arm—I’d snapped a picture.

  Now my boyfriend was telling me that Pip had swallowed an entire cooked chicken leg bone.

  “I gave it to him to chew and looked away for a second, and it was gone. I just thought he would chew on it, I never thought he would eat it,” my boyfriend said in a rush of words. “Is that bad?”

  A lot went through my head at that moment. A lifetime of owning dogs had ingrained the cardinal rule that you can never give a dog a cooked bone. I knew that chicken bones in particular splinter inside a dog’s body and can wreak havoc on the intestines. I knew that my dog’s small size would not work in his favor. I knew that I loved Pip as if he were my own child. But the face across from me was one I also loved, and he looked stricken—and he didn’t even know how bad it was.

  So I swallowed it.

  “It can be,” I said with false calm. “No need for alarm, but I do need to make some calls right now to take care of this.”

  I left him in the yard and asked the host of the party for the number of a local emergency vet. In a private room down the hall, I spoke with the vet’s receptionist. I also called my friend who just graduated from vet school. All of the advice was that if he already swallowed it, it was too late. They couldn’t get the bone up without possibly damaging the dog’s throat. There was nothing to do but wait and see if he got sick, and if he did, he might need surgery. I called my mom.

  When my boyfriend came looking for me, I hung up the phone.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.

  “Oh, yeah. They say just to keep an eye on him.”

  “I’m so sorry, babe.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t blame you at all.” That was the truth. It was an accident. Pip could have just as easily eaten it off the trash or off another guest’s plate. I didn’t care how Pip got the bone in his body; all that mattered was that we get it out.

  And I knew my boyfriend loved Pip, but he never had a dog growing up, so he didn’t know what they can and can’t eat. Most of all, I knew my boyfriend felt terrible. And I didn’t want him to feel any more guilty.

  It was much easier to focus on my own guilt.

  My mind circled over all of my own lapses that led to Pip being able to eat the bone. I never let him off the leash, but the yard was fenced and some of the guys at the party wanted to play fetch with Pip. I’m usually sitting next to my boyfriend, but I wanted to have some girl time, so I wasn’t at his table. I’m always so careful with Pip.

  Until I wasn’t.

  On the train home, my dog and my boyfriend fell asleep leaning on me. I stayed awake, worrying.

  As much as I needed comfort and reassurance, I didn’t feel like I could ask for it from him. Because to ask for it would be to confess how scared I was and how devastated I would be if something were to happen, and I didn’t want to make him feel any worse. But he wouldn’t leave my side. I spoke to my mother on the phone in clipped sentences and optimistic intonation to hide her worried reaction on the other line.

  And to hide my own.

  I went into the bathroom and cried silently into my hands.

  It wasn’t sitting well with me, this whole “watch and wait” advice I had gotten earlier. I made Pip a special dinner of boiled chicken and rice and pumpkin filling to help him pass anything easily. I considered calling the ER vet in my area, but what was the emergency? We had already gotten an answer, it was late at night now, and I was probably being paranoid.

  I didn’t mention my concerns to my boyfriend.

  Instead, we watched a movie on TV, as we had planned to earlier in the day. Or rather we both looked in the direction of the TV while a movie played. Both our minds were elsewhere.

  The next morning, we went about our usual routine, walking Pip to a nearby coffee shop, but my boyfriend stayed about three paces ahead or behind me.

  I asked him what was wrong, even though I knew.

  “I just can’t believe it. This is all my fault.”

  “Anyone could’ve given him the bone.”

  “But anyone didn’t. I did.”

  I could see him beating himself up. “Hey, don’t do that to yourself. I told you, I don’t blame you at all. But I need your support right now. You can’t pull away just because you feel bad,” I said, even as I knew that I had been doing exactly the same thing.

  He nodded, but the space between us remained.

  After breakfast I reassured him I was fine and encouraged him to go home. He told me to keep him updated as to how Pip was feeling and left.

  As soon as he was out the door, I called the vet hospital I would normally go to in my area and explained the situation, asking if they thought I should bring him in.

  “When did this happen?” the vet tech asked over the phone.

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “I wish you had brought him in right when it happened. We have more options the sooner we get to the dog. But yes, bring him right away.”

  I hung up the phone and bawled. Had I not pursued Pip’s care as aggressively as I would have because I was trying to protect my boyfriend’s feelings? Had I denied my own gut instinct? And was my dog about to pay for it?

  The thought alone ripped me in two.

  I called my mom again.

  “Are you by yourself?” she asked. “Why don’t you have him go with you?”

  But I didn’t want my boyfriend to come. I wanted to be alone so that in case I got bad news, I could have whatever reaction I needed to, even if it was hysterical.

  The way I saw it, he couldn’t make it any better, so why make him feel worse?

  I needed to deal with it by myself.

  But once at the vet’s office,
all that pent-up emotion was busting out at the seams. I teared up telling the vet tech simple things like Pip’s age, weight, and whether he was neutered or not. I cried when I told the vet what happened. I cried as they took Pip in the back to be X-rayed.

  At first I felt freedom in being alone. But after the initial relief of letting some emotion out and sitting in the waiting area, I just felt … lonely.

  There was another woman in the waiting room, calling attention to herself by raising her voice at the vet, who was clearly trying to keep the conversation in lower tones. I caught the drift that they were waiting on blood-test results, but the vet was not optimistic as to her older dog’s prognosis. The woman was not taking it well. She was being rude, in a way, but I could see she was panicked. I saw other people in the waiting room turn away out of embarrassment.

  The vet left and the woman took a seat not far from mine. She began crying noisily.

  By herself.

  There was a box of tissues on the side table next to me and I brought them over to her. I asked if she was all right.

  Her words rushed out like a dam had broken. Her toy poodle was fourteen years old. She knew the dog had a heart condition, but her regular vet was unavailable for the holiday, and now this new vet thought she should put the poodle down. She’s been living out of hotels because her apartment has black mold, and this little dog goes everywhere with her. It sleeps on her head. She said she couldn’t sleep without it. The dog was her sole companion.

  And it sounded to me like she was going to have to say good-bye.

  “I’ve never killed one of my dogs before,” she said, blowing her nose.

  I knew I couldn’t make her situation any better, but I talked to her anyway. I got her a cup of water from the cooler to help calm her down. I assured her that the vets were only trying to help and offer their expert opinion, but that ultimately she had to make the decision she felt comfortable with. I told her about the times I had to put a pet down, and how it can be loving and peaceful.

  I identified with her, and how important her pet was to her. But then I realized, she didn’t have anyone else there to comfort her, while I was alone by choice.