Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

  “What about dating, though?” Jenny snaps me back to attention.

  “Dating. I don’t know. It’s fine. Uneventful. Soporific.”

  “Juvenile?” she asks.

  “Not sophomoric.” God, I want cookies. “Soporific. You know, tedious. Tiresome.”

  “Why is it tiresome?”

  “Because it is.” Cookies.

  “It’s always interesting to meet new people, isn’t it? Couldn’t you look at it that way?”

  “I could.” I say it in a stubborn way to make it clear that I don’t and I won’t. I don’t know if it’s me—maybe I’m not ready to date. I don’t know if it’s them—maybe the good ones are already taken. I don’t know if it’s my age. Los Angeles is a Neverland of Lost Boys who preen and crow far too often and demonstrate substance far too seldom. I started dating with enthusiasm and put my best foot forward in the task. But soon I found myself on a string of first dates where I couldn’t remember if the story I was telling was one I had already told, or if it was a story I had told a previous date a night or two earlier. In an effort not to be boring, I had concocted a string of my best anecdotes, a highlight reel of witticisms, and in employing them over and over again, I ended up boring myself.

  All of this I should be saying out loud, if only because my insurance company is paying for this time and I am paying for my insurance (as a freelance writer it’s no small expense), but instead I offer an anemic “I just … I don’t know.”

  “Tell me,” Jenny implores.

  “No.”

  “Come on. Tumor me.”

  The octopus swooshes its powerful arms in front of me, and in a chaotic flash exposes its hungry beak as it leaps for my face.

  I flinch, swatting my hands in front of my nose. “What did you just say?” It comes across as accusatory.

  Jenny looks at me, concerned. She has to see the sweat forming just along my brow line. I look frantically around the room for the octopus, but as quickly as it appeared, it is gone.

  “I said, ‘Humor me.’ ” Her concern melts into a smile.

  Did she?

  My butter prison is closing in; the walls seem closer than they did five minutes ago. This is usually a sign of an oncoming panic attack. They used to be rare, but lately I’ve had several. The best way to stave off a full-blown meltdown is to do the one thing I don’t want to do—talk about dating. To remember life continuing. To not give in to that which causes the panic. So I relent. “There’s this one guy. Handsome. Smart. Funny. Handsome. I said that twice, didn’t I? Well, his looks merit it. I just can’t tell if he’s that interested.”

  “In you.”

  “In the art of puppeteering.” I cross my arms protectively. “Of course in me. We went out a second time. And it was good.” This is stupid. I should be talking about the octopus, but I can’t think about the octopus. I can’t feed the panic. “But still, I didn’t know. If he was interested. In me. So, I thought when we say good night the second time, if he tries to kiss me, that’ll be some indication. And if he tries to hug me, I won’t break the hug first.” Pleased with that plan, I point to my head—like it’s more than just a hat rack. Then I realize perhaps the octopus is hiding on my head, heads being a place he seems to be fond of, and I give myself a top-to-bottom pat down. Jenny looks at me like I’m experiencing some sort of debilitating seizure, but forges ahead.

  “Smart. Then you could see if the hug was a friendly hug or a romantic hug. So, what happened?”

  “I broke the hug first.”

  Jenny looks at me, disappointed.

  Defensively: “Well, he didn’t break the hug, either, so we were just standing there like two stroke victims propping each other up!” The walls are now so dangerously close that I wonder if they will crush me or if I will be pressed into their buttery softness, creating a perfect mold of my form after I suffocate in clotted cream.

  “That in itself should have told you something.” Jenny makes a doodle on her notepad, darkening the ed in my name to match the bolded T. She’s being paid to listen to me, and even she finds me boring. But it’s not her fault. Less than twenty-four hours since the arrival of our … cephalopod houseguest, I already recognize a trait we share: I, too, am hiding in plain sight. I am walking through life invisible, skulking like a failure, hoping few people notice me. I’ve been doing that since things went south with Jeffrey.

  “I think you need to allow for the fact that some people have difficulty expressing themselves,” Jenny muses.

  Jenny always employs the phrase some people when she’s talking about me. But once again, this is the wrong conclusion. This guy did not have problems expressing himself. I do not have problems expressing myself. This guy just didn’t know if he liked me, and that made me anxious. Even if it was my fault he didn’t know. Even if I was not letting myself be seen.

  C is for cookie, that’s good enough for meeee. Cookie cookie cookie starts with C.

  I filter her analysis through the voice of my preferred, imaginary therapist and he comes up with sharper advice: It has only been two dates. Why do I need to know how this guy feels about me? Why does everything have to be settled? Do I even know if I like him? I mean, beyond his looks? I have to be better about living in the not knowing.

  And suddenly it’s not about dating, it’s about the octopus. I have to be better about living in the not knowing.

  Friday Evening

  June in Los Angeles is the opposite of June everywhere else. Here, it means only one thing: gloom. The sun disappears behind clouds and fog and smog and haze and doesn’t reappear for weeks. Normally, I like it. Normally, I’m fine with it being the price we pay to have sunshine the rest of the year. But tonight there’s no sunset, and it bothers me.

  Trent calls and proposes dinner and I say no, but Trent doesn’t take no for an answer, so I say yes to save us from going twelve rounds. I feel bad about leaving Lily for even another hour, but I also know I need to talk to someone, and if it’s not going to be Jenny it might as well be Trent. He knows how to get through to me and always has, ever since we met on our first day of college in Boston. He was a loud Texan and I was a quiet Mainer and I was immediately captivated by his southern charm, much as he was fascinated with my northern chill. It was a friendship that worked from the moment he knocked on the door of my dorm room and asked if I wanted to walk to 7-Eleven for cigarettes; he was the Ferris Bueller to my Cameron Frye.

  From the time we were twenty-two, Trent would tell me not to worry. He said it was all going to happen for us when we were twenty-nine. Bad breakup? Who cares. Dead-end job? It wasn’t a waste of time. Any other stress? Why waste even a moment caring—it was all going to happen when we were twenty-nine. I questioned him at first. Why twenty-nine? Why not twenty-eight? And then I started to panic. What if it didn’t happen for me until I was thirty-one? I didn’t know how to use swear words correctly until the seventh grade, or what the Internet was until 1995. I worried about falling behind. Still, the bravado of the statement, and the confidence with which he delivered it, eventually made me a believer. I never bothered to ask what “it” was—the it that was going to happen for us. I’m not confident he entirely knew.

  And then, in the very waning hours of my twenty-ninth year, I found Lily. The day before my thirtieth birthday.

  Trent is already inside the restaurant when I get there. It’s our usual place. We like it because when you order a martini it comes in a chilled martini glass, and then, when you’re halfway through the drink, they bring you a fresh chilled martini glass for the rest of it. They even transfer the drink for you and bring you fresh olives. Astonishing, right? Service.

  “Hi, friend. I ordered you a martini,” he says.

  “Thanks. Do you have the other thing?”

  “Teddy,” he says, scolding me for even thinking he might have forgotten. He slides a single Valium across the table. I put the pill into my mouth, chewing it slightly before I press it under my tongue. It works faster if you press it unde
r your tongue. Trent gives me a minute to make it happen.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s the matter?”

  I hold up my finger for him to wait as I carefully massage the pill fragments between my tongue and lower jaw until they dissolve.

  “Lily has an octopus.” The words taste chalky and raw, and they’re out of my mouth before I can stop them, which means I really do need to talk about this.

  Trent looks confused. “What?”

  “An octopus. On her head. Above her eye.” Spelling it out does nothing to alleviate his confusion. He’s giving me a look. So I sum it up and say, “Kind of like yours.”

  Trent is the only other person I know who has had an octopus other than, like, on a salad. His came in 1997. We were roommates then, here in Los Angeles. I found him one night on the couch rubbing his calf and looking bewildered. “My leg is numb,” he said.

  I don’t know if it’s my imagination, or my anticipation of the Valium’s effect, but I exhale and ease into a Diazepam vision of Trent and me at twenty-six, our old, dilapidated apartment as real to me as when we lived there.

  Turns out the left side of his body had been growing numb for months, and a doctor-ordered MRI revealed an octopus still in its infancy. Within weeks he was in surgery, and although it was traumatic at the time, his recovery was quick and we soon put it behind us. Later I wondered why it took him so long to say something. We routinely spent hours analyzing every last one of life’s events and details: That time we broke up a lesbian fistfight. The proper thread count for sheets, and what made Egyptian cotton so great. How many celebrities could we realistically get to come to one of our parties. Why we always burned oatmeal. Was it okay to ask out a male nurse I met on fifty-cent drink night at The Apache. Why did we go to a bar called The Apache in the first place? (Fifty-cent drinks.) There was plenty of time for it to come up before I found him on the couch looking confused.

  Trent taps me on my arm and I look up. The restaurant is busy tonight, busier than usual.

  “You drifted,” Trent says. The Valium must be kicking in. “How is it like mine?”

  “Well, not exactly like yours, because you couldn’t see yours, but Lily’s is just sitting on top of her head for all to see.”

  “Her … octopus.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never had an octopus.”

  “Yes, you did! And if you didn’t I’d like to know what the hell they took out of you at Cedars when they cut open your skull.”

  “They took out a t—” he starts, before stopping.

  “What the hell do you think we’re talking about?”

  “I thought we were talking about an octopus.”

  “Exactly.”

  Our martinis arrive. Three olives each. We sip our drinks in silence. The vodka is a cold salve on my throat and a welcome way to wash the powdery aftertaste from under my tongue. It burns as I swish it around my mouth.

  “Do you want to get the deviled eggs?” I don’t know why he’s asking me this, because I always want to get the deviled eggs. He flags down a waitress and puts in an order. I don’t even have to say yes. “Did you call the vet?”

  I nod. “They can’t see her until Monday.”

  “When did you first notice the …”

  “… octopus? Last night. It just showed up. If it was there before, I didn’t notice. It’s weird, though. It doesn’t really move, it just sits there with its arms hanging down the side of her face. I think it’s … sleeping.”

  Trent muddles two of his olives into his martini with his fingers and I pull one of mine off the toothpick with my teeth. I can see him doing math in his head.

  “How old is Lily again?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No.” I am firm. “I can see what you’re doing, weighing the probative value of my options here. One, I haven’t been to the veterinarian yet, and I don’t know what’s involved in removing an octopus that’s clinging to her head.”

  Octopusectomy.

  “Two, I am not letting that thing have her. I won’t allow it.” In my twenties, I had another terrible therapist (therapists!) who concluded that since my mother never says “I love you” (at least not in the same way that other mothers do), there was going to be a limit to my ability to feel love. Love for someone, loved by someone. I was limited. And then on the very last night of my twenties, when I held my new puppy in my arms, I broke down in tears. Because I had fallen in love. Not somewhat in love. Not partly in love. Not in a limited amount. I fell fully in love with a creature I had known for all of nine hours.

  I remember Lily licking the tears from my face.

  THIS! EYE! RAIN! YOU! MAKE! IS! FANTASTIC! I! LOVE! THE! SALTY! TASTE! YOU! SHOULD! MAKE! THIS! EVERY! DAY!

  The realization was overwhelming—there was nothing wrong with me! There were no limits to what I could feel!

  And just as Trent had predicted, with only moments left to go on the clock, it all happened for me when I was twenty-nine.

  I slam my fists on the table and the silverware jumps and the vodka sloshes to the very rim of our glasses and I grit my teeth and glare. “It cannot have her.”

  A chill runs down Trent’s spine. I know this, because a chill runs down my own. He puts his hands over mine to calm me. He has a dog, a bulldog named Weezie. He loves her like I love Lily. He knows my heart. He understands. He would fight this fight.

  The waitress comes with our deviled eggs and with two freshly chilled glasses and transfers the rest of our martinis. She smiles at us awkwardly and disappears.

  I watch as ice sluices down the side of my new glass in slow motion.

  It.

  Cannot.

  Have.

  Her.

  Friday Night

  Friday nights are my favorite nights. You wouldn’t think a twelve-year-old dachshund would be good at Monopoly, but you’d be wrong there. She can stack up hotels along one side of the board like nobody’s business and usually does so with little commiseration for others who might not be able to afford her upscale rents. Me, on the other hand, I like the first side of the board. The one with the deep purple and light blue properties with vaguely racist names like Oriental Avenue. Something about the color palette on that side of the board calms me. Lily is colorblind; she doesn’t undertake any such considerations when buying property. Also, I never feel too aggressive building hotels on those properties if I’m lucky enough to get the monopoly. The rents are reasonable and people are usually flush from having just passed Go. I guess I just don’t have the killer instinct.

  Lily always makes fun of me when I want to be the wheelbarrow or the shoe. She considers these the game pieces of weak, feckless players. She always wants to be the cannon or the battleship or the “shot glass.” (I haven’t had the heart to tell her she’s been playing that piece upside down and it’s actually a thimble. She would be furious if she ever found out.)

  Tonight our hearts aren’t really in it, but it’s what we do on Friday nights, so we go through the motions. I might have suggested we just skip it and do something less involved, like watch a movie (although Saturday nights are usually Movie Night), but I’m feeling some guilt from having left earlier today for therapy and dinner with Trent. As always, I have to roll the dice, move her game piece, conduct the transactions, buy her houses and hotels, and be the banker—because, well, she’s a dog.

  Double fours.

  “That’s doubles two times in a row. One more time and you go to Jail,” I say. She lands on one of the green properties. “North Carolina Avenue. No one owns it. Do you want to buy it?”

  She shrugs. She is a shell of my usual Monopoly partner, both of our minds elsewhere. But while I’m putting on a brave face (maybe it’s the vodka and Valium), she’s just warming a chair. I look across at her. As always, I put a pillow on her seat so she can see above the tabletop, but tonight she looks smaller to me. Maybe she was always that small—I don’t think she’s ever weighed more than seventeen
pounds—but her presence in my life has always been outsized.

  “Do you not want to play? We don’t have to play.” She sniffs at her pile of money. When she bows her head I can see the octopus, so I look away. I’ve decided not to engage it, to look at it, to talk to it, to even acknowledge it, until our vet appointment on Monday.

  We’ll see how long that lasts.

  “Tell me again about my mother.” This is something Lily likes to hear from time to time. It used to bother me, her curiosity about where she came from. I guess maybe I was feeling some remorse about tearing her away from her dachshund family when she was only twelve weeks old, away from her mother and father and brother and sisters who later came to be called Harry and Kelly and Rita. But now it’s a story I like to tell. It’s a story about beginnings, and heritage, and our place in the greater world.

  “Your mother’s name was Ebony Flyer, but people called her Witchie-Poo. Your father’s name was Caesar, after a great Roman general. I only met your mother once, on the day that you and I were introduced.”

  “My mother’s name was Witchie-Poo?”

  “It was a beautiful day, the first week of May. Spring. I drove hours into the country to this old white farmhouse with clapboard siding and peeling paint, my heart in my throat the whole way. I was so nervous! I wanted you to like me. The place sat a ways back from the road and the lawn was almost yellow; we hadn’t had much rain that spring, which was good for you and bad for just about everyone else.”

  “I hate the rain.”

  “Yes, you and every other dog. Anyhow, there was a little wire pen on the front lawn and inside were you and Harry and Kelly and Rita tumbling all over one another like noodles in a pot of boiling water. It was hard to even tell where one of you ended and the next one began, you were just a pile of paws and tails, so the lady who lived there picked you up and set you gently on the grass. The four of you ambled and tumbled and stumbled and bumbled, and I stood there thinking, How on earth am I ever going to choose?”