Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

  “But you did. You chose me!” Lily picks up a little red wooden hotel and chews it enough to put a few teeth marks on it before spitting it out onto a railroad. Normally this is not behavior I would allow, but she does it quite gently, sort of nonchalantly.

  “No. No, that’s not true, exactly,” I say, and she looks up at me, startled.

  Like any good adoptive parent, I have always fed her that line of horseshit: A mommy and daddy who have a baby get stuck with whatever baby they get. But adoptive parents choose their baby, and so they love them that much more. Of course, in most cases, it’s blatantly untrue. Adoptive parents are lucky to get the call whenever and wherever they do, and so they get the baby they get just the same as parents who actually give birth.

  “No?” Lily sounds offended.

  “No,” I repeat, because it’s the truth. Then I pause for dramatic effect. “You, in fact, chose me.”

  And she did. While Harry and Kelly and Rita carried on in a game that involved rolling and somersaulting, Lily broke free from the group and wandered over to where I was standing talking to the lady who bred them.

  “I was thinking of keeping the boy one myself, unless you have particular use for him. He’s high-spirited, but I think he can be trained to show.”

  I hadn’t given much thought to whether I wanted a boy or a girl. Not wanting to appear sexist and get on the wrong side of the woman who had the sole say in whether I’d be taking one of her puppies home, I said, “No, I’d be glad to choose from among the girls.”

  I studied the pups, looking for the girls, and was at a loss to tell which one was male. I would have to pick each one up and make a subtle determination; worse than appearing sexist would be to come off as a pervert.

  It was then that I noticed the puppy who became Lily gnawing on my shoelace. She clamped down and put herself in reverse until the lace had been gently untied.

  “Hello, you adorable …” I crouched down and made my inspection. “Girl.”

  “That’s the runt, that one there,” the lady replied, just this side of dismissively.

  I picked up the runt and she snuggled under my chin, tail wagging like the pendulum of the smallest, most fragile grandfather clock.

  “I’m Edward. People call me Ted,” I whispered into her ear before lowering my own ear to the top of her head. I heard her speak for the first time.

  THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW!

  And so it was.

  “I choose this one,” I told the lady.

  “You can have your pick of any one. The male, even, if you really want. I’m not sure this one will show all that well.”

  “All the same, I’m not really interested in showing her. So I choose this one.”

  I worried for a second she was going to try to discourage me further from choosing this puppy. She studied us both for a moment as I held the runt protectively, and eventually her face softened and relented. I wondered if she wasn’t just relieved to have someone take the runt so she could charge more for the rest of her flawless litter.

  “Seems like she kind of chose you.” And then, after a beat, “I suppose that’s how it works.” She finished with the off-center smile of a car salesman who’s just sold a lemon for nearly full price.

  I tell Lily this story over the Monopoly board and she seems satisfied. Touched, even. I smile at her, but sideways so I don’t have to acknowledge the octopus. She shakes her head and her ears flop back and forth and the familiar chime of her collar and dog tags jingle the room alive. It’s only after she stops that I realize I’ve been gripping my chair so tightly my fingers are white. I suppose I was hoping she would shake her head so violently that the octopus would lose its grip, sail across the room, and splat against the wall, dying instantly.

  For the first time tonight I look at her head-on, and the octopus is still there, still holding on tight, only now (and I kid you not) the son of a bitch is smiling at me.

  You motherfucker.

  Lily looks at me, confused. “What?”

  I compose myself as quickly as I can. “It’s your turn,” I say, hoping to reengage her in the game.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. You rolled double fours so you get to roll again. Do you want me to roll for you?”

  “Does it look like I’ve suddenly grown hands?” She’s learned that sarcasm from me, something I used to be proud of but now find abrasive.

  I roll the dice. Double twos. Lily and I look at each other for a few long seconds—both of us know what it means. I reluctantly pick up her battleship and move it directly to Jail.

  Saturday Late Afternoon

  There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac-violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you’re pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times—like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain—Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.

  I’m flipping through a menu of such salads, overwhelmed with the ridiculousness of it all. Do I want a dressed array of greens with pickled yardlong beans? Perhaps I am more in the mood for sautéed beetroot and chicory. Or do I go all in with the fifty-ingredient Guatemalan salad? This is the city I live in. Can I even name fifty salad ingredients? I purse my lips with indecision. They feel dry.

  “I think I’m addicted to ChapStick.” I look up. Did I just say that out loud?

  “How can you be addicted to ChapStick?” he asks, tossing back the last of his drink. His forehead is dripping sweat, but I don’t think it’s nerves. I think he’s just the kind of guy who sweats a lot.

  “Someone once told me they put trace amounts of ground-up glass in ChapStick. That’s how they get you addicted to it. The little shards of glass give you hundreds of microscopic cuts that dry out your lips, making you need … more ChapStick. I seriously looked at the label one time, as if in addition to 44 percent petrolatums, 1.5 percent padimate, 1 percent lanolin, and .5 percent cetyl alcohol it was going to say 4.5 percent broken glass. It doesn’t.” He looks at me, stunned. Not knowing what else to do, I continue. “It’s a cover-up. The Whitehall-Robins Healthcare Company of Madison, New Jersey, which distributes ChapStick, is probably owned by The Altria Group, which is a made-up name for what used to be Philip Morris to make people associate them less with tobacco.” And then, to punctuate the sentence: “They own a lot of stuff.”

  I reach for the last piece of our jicama appetizer and shrug. Everything inside me told me I should have canceled this date, and now that I’m on it, I’m furious at myself for not listening. I should have held out for another date with the handsome hugger. But instead this is me living in the not knowing, and I hate it. This is a waste of our time. I know it. He knows it. He’s not saying it (or anything, really), so I’m babbling to fill the silence. But seriously, I’m coming off like an idiot. And a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Not even the fun kind who believes in little green men—the other kind, the kind who writes manifestos and Priority Mails them with explosive devices. I wouldn’t date me and neither should he.

  We had decent email chemistry, this new guy and I. But that happens sometimes in online dating. A few zippy emails, some decent back-and-forth, and then in person? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I should be better at detecting when that’s going to happen by now, but I’m not. It’s still a roll of the dice. That’s why I don’t get excited anymore by a few zippy emails and some decent back-and-forth. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have any real desire to see that person naked. Something like profuse sweating doesn’t usually show up in pictures—especially if the pictures
are of them being active. You think, oh, he’s sweating because he’s hiking Runyon Canyon, or tossing a Frisbee at the beach. You don’t imagine them sweating like this sitting at a table reading a menu of salads.

  “Are you addicted to anything?” I realize I’d better bring him into the conversation before I launch into my monologue about Robitussin.

  “Sex.”

  I have no idea if this is a joke or not. If it is, it’s kind of funny. If it’s not, I might get raped. I play it off like it’s a joke and move on.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a flight attendant, but I’m quitting that to become a professional dog walker.”

  Fucking L.A. Professional dog walker. Is that a thing? Are most dog walkers maintaining their amateur status to compete in the Dog Walking Olympics? I guess that’s what I am. An amateur dog walker. It’s where I should be now. Enjoying a walk with Lily in the early evening. The gloom has parted just enough by five o’clock that there’s some soft light streaming through that would make a walk with her seem nice. It could be the only sunlight we see for days. Suddenly I want to be here even less.

  “That sounds like a …”—how do I phrase this politely?—“lateral move.”

  “It’s kind of a step up, actually.”

  “That makes me feel bad for flight attendants.” I cringe, imagining him handing me a ginger ale with his sweaty mitts.

  “Well, here it’s a step up. In L.A., people will pay anything for their dogs. Do you have any pets?”

  “No.” I try to remember my dating profile (how much is on there about Lily?) and weigh the chances that he actually read my profile and would remember it well enough to know that I’m lying, or if he just flipped through my photos to find the one shirtless one. I shouldn’t have written that thing a bottle deep in one of New Zealand’s finer white wines and I certainly shouldn’t have posted a shirtless photo. That was the wine’s fault.

  “Me, neither. I want to, though. Have a pet.”

  This (aside from the maybe sex joke) is the most interesting thing about him. I don’t even know what he means by a pet—dog, cat, reptile, bird, one of those chirping key chains that Japanese children used to carry, hamster, fish, rock—but he wants one.

  I try to think of how to tactfully cut this short. If it’s not going anywhere (there’s so little connection here there’s not even interest in sex), there should be a socially acceptable way to just get up and walk out. I mean, if there’s nothing obviously wrong with the other person—they are “as advertised,” but you’re just not, for whatever reason, feeling it—there should be a way to get up and leave. If there is something obviously wrong with them, you can say so right up front. Maybe not in those exact words, but you can say something like, “I’m sorry, I don’t think this is going to be a match.” Once I got a particularly creepy vibe from a guy just from his handshake, and we weren’t meeting in a sufficiently public place, so I said just that and left. Another time, I wish I had said that up front but instead suffered through dim sum while having to answer questions like, “Do you think you’re the kind of person who could perform an emergency tracheotomy?” (For the record, no, I do not.) But once you’re in the middle of a date, you’re kind of committed to seeing it through to its natural conclusion. My first date with Jeffrey lasted two days—there was just so much to say! I suppose that sets a very high bar.

  Lily was asleep when I left, and I felt like one of those new parents who wanted to wake their sleeping baby to see if it was still alive. But while she normally sleeps on her left side, this afternoon she was on her right, octopus side down. Good. Maybe it will suffocate in her paw-print blanket. Otherwise she was curled up in her usual way, the way that made me call her Bean. I’m already looking forward to whatever movie she and I may watch together when this interminable date is over. On Saturday nights we watch movies. I hope she’s well rested. Maybe we’ll order Indian; the place up the street has these chickpeas in a tomato and ginger sauce that are really something. I think again about how to end this ordeal. Well, since you’re not really that interesting in person, I think I’ll head out. If only it were that easy. I should just go ahead and make a third date with the hugging guy. At least I was interested enough in him to want to know if he was interested in me. Why did I break the hug first?

  “What about kids?” I ask. “Do you want kids?” I like kids well enough—I have a niece that I’m crazy about. But I’m already too old to be a young father, and I don’t particularly want to be an old father, and I’m single and it’s not something I would do on my own. Nor do I have a particular drive to change my relationship status just to have kids, despite my being on a dating website. So I don’t really think kids are in the cards.

  “No. Definitely not. I don’t get kids.”

  “Oh, well, there you go. I want to have kids. Need to have kids. Lots and lots of kids. We’ll form a singing group and tour second-tier European cities like Düsseldorf.” And just like that, there’s my out.

  On the way home, I have a sudden craving for ice cream. I stop at the grocery store and head right to the frozen food aisle and select a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra for me and an individual cup of vanilla for Lily, because what the hell. One summer when she was young we were driving somewhere together, and I pulled over to the side of a road when I saw an ice-cream place with one of those walk-up windows. We got out of the car and marched together across the gravel parking lot and I ordered a mint chocolate chip ice-cream cone because the mint chocolate chip ice cream they had was green and it always tastes better to me when it’s green (even though the dye they use is probably carcinogenic). We sat at a picnic table on some grass and I scooped Lily up into my lap.

  WHAT! IS! THIS! CLOUD! THAT! YOU’RE! LICKING! I! LOVE! TO! LICK! THINGS! WOULD! I! LIKE! TO! LICK! THAT!

  Even on my best days, I always wished life excited me as much as it excited her. So I lowered the cone to let her have a lick. The response was immediate.

  THIS! IS! AMAZING! WE! MUST! HAVE! THIS! TO! LICK! EVERY! SINGLE! DAY!

  It was impossible, eating the rest of that cone. She stood on my lap and put her front paws on my chest, her tail ticking on its fastest setting. And then the back paws tried climbing, looking for footholds in my abs, anything to hoist herself closer to her minty prize.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” I objected. “Sit!” She did, steadying the paws on the right side of her body on my left leg and the paws on the left side of her body on my right leg while trying to maintain a semblance of balance. Her eyes looked up at me lovingly and with great anticipation.

  Someone once said give a dog food and shelter and treats and they think you are a god, but give a cat the same and they think they are the god.

  We shared the rest of that ice-cream cone, for I am a god.

  Sunday, 4:37 A.M.

  My legs jerk in that way that they do when I’m half-asleep and dream that I’m falling and about to hit the ground. I wake up in a cold sweat, prop myself up, throw the covers back, and reach for Lily all in one fluid motion.

  The octopus is rattling the bed. Its limbs have come alive, all eight, and they swarm around Lily, gently but with purpose, and I just know that its dormancy is ending.

  I put my hand on Lily’s chest. Nothing. I press down harder while my own heart stops. And then it comes, the familiar rise and fall of her muscled torso. She’s still here. She’s okay. The octopus’s arms slow and then stop and the terror becomes less immediate and things go back to more or less the way they have been since I first noticed the octopus on Thursday.

  I try to remember if I was dreaming just now, just before I awoke. Something about standing on a boat, and maybe Lily was there. Or maybe she was both there and not there, in the way that in dreams things can happen on several different planes. I think I was chasing something. Not chasing, hunting. I can’t even be certain there was a boat or a dream at all. It all feels less like a dream and more like a memory, albeit a memory just out of reach.

&nb
sp; Lily’s chest rises and falls again. Her breathing is deep, sonorous.

  For the first three months that she was mine, she did not occupy my bed. She slept in a crate beside me. It started out across the room, but the first several nights she whimpered and whined, unable to sleep away from the warmth of her littermates. Each night, my judgment increasingly affected by my own inability to sleep, I moved the crate a little closer to me, until I could lie with my finger between the bars of the swinging door. We slept like that—side by side, me in a bed, her in a crate, sometimes my finger and her paw touching—until it was time to spay her. After the surgery to remove her uterus she refused to wear the cone that would keep her from picking at her stitches. THIS! IS! THE! DUMBEST! THING! I’VE! EVER! SEEN! AND! I! WILL! TAKE! NO! PART! IN! WEARING! IT!

  Without the cone, she helped herself to licking at her wound whenever I was not there to stop her. So during the day I took her everywhere with me, and at night I brought her into my bed and slept with one arm stretched across her. I don’t know that I physically prevented her from pulling at her stitches, but it was an emotional comfort. Enough at least that it allowed her to sleep through the night, undistracted by the discomfort of her incision.

  She never again slept out of my bed unless we were apart.

  When her stitches were removed and her wound had healed, I no longer slept with my arm across her. Free to roam the mattress, she immediately burrowed beneath the covers to the very foot of the bed to sleep alongside my feet. Two nights I battled her, convinced of her imminent suffocation if she insisted on sleeping so burrowed. She would tunnel down to the bottom of the bed and I would drag her back up for air. Then she would tunnel back down to the bottom of the bed and I would drag her back up for air. We did this for hours ad nauseam, and late in the second night I hit my breaking point.