Must Love Dogs

by Claire Cook

  “Would you like to tell us about your mouse, Austin?”

  Austin smiled. “Yeah, look. Topo Grigio has stuff underneath to clean your toilet. Wanna see?” Austin pulled off the top half of the mouse, uncovering a white cylinder. He leaned over and placed it on the floor in front of me. A powdery cloud arose from the holes at the top, then settled noticeably on my black slacks. I tried to brush it off. It smudged.

  Dolly, I thought.

  “Dolly gave Topo Grigio to me because my father listened to all her boyfriend stories. Dolly said she likes to give presents to big, strong men like us. And we shouldn’t worry about letting any cats out of their bags.”

  Austin was still talking. “Dolly said my father did her a big favor by helping her figure out how to handle that smooth operator Billy Hurlihy.” He paused, took a deep breath. “Ms. Hurlihy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you, like, related?” he asked.

  *

  By the time the food arrived, I knew Ray Santia had great hands. First, there was a light touch on my forearm when we met in the parking lot of Oceana. We walked toward the restaurant and I held my purse in front of the smear on my right thigh. I’d tried washing off the powder from Topo Grigio’s canister, but that seemed to have only activated the bleaching agent. I’d have to call Carol to find out if there was any hope for my pants.

  Next came a slight pressure on my back with one hand as he opened the restaurant door with the other. A breezy palm on my shoulder as we followed the hostess to our table. And the lightest graze of my collarbone as he helped me off with my jacket.

  I was a goner.

  Ray Santia was wearing another flannel shirt. Deep red plaid, probably wool. I wondered if it felt scratchy around his neck, or if it was lined with a slippery, satiny fabric. The waitress was pretty, but Ray didn’t seem to notice. He kept looking into my eyes as she placed the salmon in front of me, the haddock in front of him. We smiled at each other and switched plates. “Oh, sorry,” the waitress said. We ignored her.

  “Nice scarf.”

  “Thanks.” I looked down, saw pink chiffon, realized I’d forgotten to change it after school. So much for fashion versatility.

  “Pink’s a great color on you.” Ray rubbed his hand back and forth over the stubble on his right cheek. I imagined the way it would feel under my fingertips, against one of my own cheeks.

  “Thanks.” I turned my attention to the way his mustache curled under at the bottom. I wasn’t really crazy about mustaches, but on Ray it worked.

  I held my own during our conversation, which was peppered with Ray’s touches. Soft grazing of the back of my hand, firm pressure on my forearm. I actually remembered that I was a teacher, and said so, and even managed to tell a couple of cute kid stories. I added my reading and long walks to his interests in softball and basketball. I followed his one brother with my five siblings. His parents both alive and safely out of the way in the Midwest led to my father probably lurking outside the restaurant to tell Ray one more time what a catch I was.

  When the conversation dwindled, I used the lag time to practice my smile. During breaks, I managed to finish my dinner without dunking a corner of my pink scarf in the tartar sauce, which I knew would make it less flattering. The firm and constant pressure of Ray’s knee against mine didn’t make it any easier.

  I balanced my fork and knife carefully on my plate, folded my hands on the edge of the table, smiled again. Ray reached across the table, placed both hands on top of mine. “So how about let’s get the sex part out of the way so we can get on with the rest of this relationship?”

  “Okay,” I said, or at least I think it was me.

  Incongruously, I heard my mother correcting me. “I,” she said. “It was I.” Growing up, she always corrected us when we answered the phone.

  May I please speak to Sarah? Or Christine. Or Michael.

  This is her, we’d say. Or him.

  She! He! Hands on her hips, my mother would await our revisions. This is s/he, we’d mumble into the receiver.

  What was my problem? I was married and divorced and hadn’t lived with my parents in years. But when my live father wasn’t meddling in my life, my dead mother was correcting my grammar.

  Fortunately, Ray didn’t seem to notice my flashback. He scarfed down the rest of his meal, then reached across the table to hold my hand again. He ordered espresso for two without checking in with me. Great, I’d be a wide-awake consenting adult.

  *

  Now why exactly had I said yes? I wondered, as I followed Ray Santia to his house. Flecks of snow twitched in my headlights, but not enough of them for a snow cancellation. It would make a good announcement, though: Attention, all sex has been canceled due to inclement weather.

  I tried not to think. Then I tried to think. They felt pretty much the same. Okay, maybe I was exaggerating, but it felt like I was beginning a sex spree of sorts. A mild one, but it was quite possible that was how it always started. Probably I’d end up on morning television someday, talking about how I became sex-addicted. It all started innocently enough, I’d insist.

  I parked my Honda a discreet distance behind Ray’s Toyota. Several compelling questions emerged from my confusion and whirled around in close proximity to my brain. First and foremost, what the hell was I doing? Several other questions, no less pressing, followed quickly. Did adults often sleep together on the first date? Was there an age limit for being a slut?

  I walked toward Ray’s house as slowly as I could.

  *

  “Creases!”

  “Pardon me?”

  I hadn’t even heard the yipping behind the bathroom door. Ray’s hands had been working their magic. I’d held up my end by rubbing my hands along Ray’s back, around those great shoulders, down along his considerable biceps. Wool, just as I suspected, I thought as his rough shirt scratched my palms. We’d had a long kiss in the hallway, another one in the first room we came to, the kitchen. At that point, Ray lifted me up onto the edge of the kitchen counter, ostensibly to find a new kissing angle. There was a bit of a Tarzanic quality to his hoist, but since he’d refrained from beating his chest afterward, I decided it was more endearing than not.

  He stopped to listen, midkiss. “Creases. I gotta get Creases. Stay right here.”

  I sat on the counter, pointing and flexing my feet for something to do, while Ray went to rescue the puppy. “Forgot all about you, little fellow, didn’t I,” he crooned, passing me without a glance. I sat, marooned on Ray’s kitchen counter, while he took Creases outside to pee. Maybe they both peed, standing side by side, male bonding. I thought about jumping down, but then Ray might have to lift me up all over again. Twice might seem redundant.

  Eventually, Ray and Creases walked by me again, then disappeared once more. I waited, listening to the opening and closing of doors, which escalated into the banging of a cabinet or two. “You don’t have any condoms, do you?” Ray yelled from somewhere deep in the house.

  I slid off the counter and tiptoed out the door.

  *

  I stared at the roughened red patch on my chin in my bathroom mirror. A beard burn, Kevin and I called it back in the days when he still bothered to kiss me but not always to shave first.

  I opened the medicine cabinet. No condoms. Kevin always said they were like taking a shower wearing a raincoat. Part of my horror when I found out about Nikki was that I knew, absolutely knew, he hadn’t worn one with her either. Hadn’t cared enough to keep me safe. Oh, the amazing rage I felt toward Kevin while I awaited the results of my blood test. And the odd, quick flash of disappointment when it came back negative, and I didn’t have a terminal disease to throw in his face along with his infidelity.

  I heard a ring from wherever I’d left my cordless phone. Then two, three. The machine picked up on four. My plastic diaphragm case hadn’t moved an inch on the shelf from where I’d left it last time I used it. I held it in the palm of one hand, opened it with the other. Careful as always, I hel
d the circle of rubber up to the light to check for holes that might admit wayward sperm.

  Pinpricks of light shone through, creating an entire constellation, roughly the shape of the Big Dipper.

  *

  I thought the knocking on the front door would never go away. If Siobhan hadn’t moved around to my bedroom window, the one closest to my bed, and yelled Auntie Sarah, I never would have believed it could have been anyone but Ray Santia.

  I turned on my bedside light. Pulling my down comforter off the bed with me, and wrapping it around my shoulders like a bad version of a superhero’s cape, I met Siobhan at the kitchen door. She was shivering and hatless, her eyes seriously puffy. Tendrils of her multihued hair stuck to the sides of her face. She wore her school backpack over an old wool peacoat. The handle of her ample suitcase was extended, and after she bumped it up three steps, it rolled effortlessly into my house.

  We sat on the couch, my comforter wrapped around both of us. “What happened?” I asked.

  “My parents suck.”

  “You’re sixteen. Your parents are supposed to suck.” I pulled the comforter over Siobhan’s legs so she’d stop shivering. “Do you want some hot chocolate?” I asked, hoping I had some.

  “No, thanks.”

  “So what specifically happened?”

  “They won’t let me get my navel pierced. Can you believe it?”

  I sort of could, but didn’t think saying so would be constructive. “Well, you have a fair amount of holes already.”

  “Big deal. Everybody has their ears pierced. And, besides, this is the only thing I’m asking for for Christmas. One measly thing and they can’t even give it to me. So I told them I’ll get it pierced in the spring when I go to Spain with my Spanish class because you don’t have to be eighteen to do it there and a whole bunch of girls did it last year.” She paused for a ragged breath. “So now they say I can’t go to Spain.”

  I was in over my head and I knew it. So I talked Siobhan into getting some sleep and said we’d figure out what to do in the morning. I got her an extra pillow from my room, found a clean set of sheets to drape over the couch and gave her my comforter. I asked if her homework was done, found out what time she had to get up for school and sent her into the bathroom with her toothbrush.

  While she was brushing, I called Carol from my bedroom. She picked up on the first ring. “I just wanted you to know,” I whispered, “that Siobhan is here.”

  “Of course she is,” Carol answered. “I dropped her off. How did you think she got there?”

  *

  I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to wake Siobhan so I tiptoed past her to the kitchen. I’d turned off the ring of the phone so I wouldn’t have to explain to Siobhan why I wasn’t answering. I wondered how many times Ray had called. I wondered how long I’d have to ignore his calls for him to stop calling. I stood there, the light on my answering machine winking at me suggestively. I turned my back on it and opened the fridge. Poured some milk into my favorite Flintstones jelly glass, jumped up to sit on the kitchen counter. Blushed and jumped back down. Great, I’d never be able to sit on a kitchen counter again without thinking about making a fool of myself with Ray Santia. One more pleasure lost.

  Oh, God. Okay, I would drink milk, that’s what I’d do. The extra calcium would calm my nerves and lull me back into a comfortable level of denial. I glanced over my shoulder at my answering machine. If I were in an old Western I would simply shoot its nasty little light out. I took another sip of milk, walked over and pressed erase. There, that was better, maybe he’d go away now.

  Chapter 27

  After I drove Siobhan to school, promising to pick her up again afterward, I called Christine. “You know what Carol’s like,” I said. “If I try to tell her what to do, she’ll just do the opposite. But, I mean, what’s the big deal, it’s not like it’s a tattoo or anything. When and if Siobhan outgrows the phase, she can just take it out.”

  “Why don’t you just bring Siobhan to have it done and then we’ll deal with Carol and Dennis afterward.”

  “I love the ‘we,’ Christine. I can just hear you saying that it was all my idea. And, besides, Siobhan says that if you’re under eighteen, both you and a parent have to show IDs before they’ll pierce anything but an ear. And if the last names don’t match, you have to show a birth certificate.”

  “Why don’t you steal Carol’s license again?” Christine giggled at her reference to a famous story from the Hurlihy family archives. All these years later, I still couldn’t quite find it funny. In a lifetime of fairly honest behavior, I’d strayed one night. Just home from college for winter break, I borrowed Carol’s license to go to a local club with my friends who’d already turned twenty-one. Carol noticed it missing immediately, thought she’d lost it, and was already making plans to drive to the registry to get a duplicate. In the back of my mind, the evil plan to keep the license permanently was simmering, but I thought I would probably tuck it back into her wallet at the end of the weekend.

  I wasn’t really that nervous as I stood in line to have Carol’s license checked by the bouncer at High Tide. Carol and I looked a lot alike. Besides, I’d memorized her Social Security number and year of birth, and practiced rattling them off quickly. The bouncer was cute, blond and beefy with intelligent eyes that made me think his job was an interlude rather than a dead end.

  “Are you sure you’re Carol Hurlihy?” he asked.

  I wasn’t too worried. “Yes,” I answered.

  He quizzed me on every bit of information contained on that little plastic rectangle, and I passed it all with flying colors. The line was backing up behind me. “Are you sure you’re Carol Hurlihy?” he asked again, peering into my face.

  I was more annoyed than nervous. “Yes,” I said again.

  “Funny, you look different than you did last night on our date.” The bouncer, of course, was Dennis, and sometimes I thought he only married my sister in order to be able to say to me, thousands of times over the years: Can I check your ID?

  I laughed a little to let Christine think that the decades had eased my embarrassment. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “I’ll call Carol and see what I can arrange.”

  *

  Just before Thanksgiving we’d made hula skirts. We used single horizontal strips of green construction paper for the waistbands. To make the skirt part, we stapled on evenly spaced vertical strips of the same paper. The kids each decorated an empty paper towel holder with brightly colored poster paints. Even the goopiest ones had dried over the long holiday weekend.

  And now, the morning after I’d crept out of Ray Santia’s house, the morning after Siobhan had shown up at my house, June and I began to staple the hula skirts around the children. We started side by side, worked in opposite directions around the circle. When it was his turn, Jack Kaplan said, “I’m not wearing a skirt.”

  “Okay,” I said, turning to staple Molly Greene’s hula skirt over her ankle-length black velvet jumper.

  “Okay, I’ll wear it,” Jack said, moving to stand in line behind Molly.

  The kids had to hike their waistbands up practically to their armpits in order to sit on the circle. June and I passed out the carefully labeled paper towel rolls after first cutting fringe with scissors. I explained that they would now be called puili sticks. “Can you say poo-ee-lee sticks?” I said, using my best teacher voice, which was a bit of an effort this morning, I had to admit.

  “Pweelie sticks,” the children said in unison.

  The classroom telephone rang. I nodded to June to answer it. Turning back to the kids I said, “Hawaii is a place that is made up of many islands, which is why many Hawaiian dances are about the water.”

  “Sarah, it’s for you,” June stage-whispered from the other side of the room.

  “Take a message,” I stage-whispered back, not without sarcasm.

  “It’s a….” June’s last word was lost to me.

  “A what?”

 
“A guy,” Austin said. “June says there’s a guy on the phone.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Amanda McAlpine.

  “Handle it,” I hissed at June. I unclenched my teeth enough to smile at the children, made myself keep going. “Can you say hey-ey-ee-ah?”

  “Hey-ey-ee-ah,” they said in a perfect imitation of my voice. I tried to ignore the annoying fact that June was still talking on the phone. “Hey-ey-ee-ah is a very, very old dance from Hawaii. It’s about a canoe trip for spearing fish.”

  “Does it hurt the fish?” asked Jenny Browning.

  June was laughing and throwing her hair around. I, however, maintained my professional demeanor. “Well, Jenny, in many cultures people have to eat the fish to keep from starving.”

  “Can’t they just have a sandwich?” Jack Kaplan asked. “I can make a sandwich.”

  If June didn’t get off the phone in two minutes, I was going to strangle her. I decided to ignore Jack’s question, move on. I mean, why did teachers have to do all the hard stuff? Shouldn’t parents have to explain some things?

  “Okay, everybody. Hold your puili stick in this hand, and put your other hand like this, palm up.” I showed the children shading their eyes (maka malumalu), churning the water (wili wai) and all the rest. They followed along like brightly colored little parrots. When we were ready, I put an actual record on an actual record player, a scratchy version of Dances Around the World that had been recorded so long ago it didn’t even have a cassette version. We made it through the dance two complete times before June finally hung up the phone.

  After she finished passing out snacks all by herself, which I thought was only fair, June sidled up to me. “That was Ray Santia. He is just like the nicest guy” she said, still whispering. “He’s dying to see you again.” She paused, watched my face. “You are just so lucky. I mean, I hardly ever meet nice guys anymore. Sarah?”

  I was working up to a response when June added, “Do you know that Ray Santia has a puppy from the same litter as Wrinkles?” I looked at her, not saying a word. There was absolutely no reason to admit to a thing. “He was a little confused though. He seemed to, like, think you had one too?”