Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  Then I thought about Ashley, my horror-movie star, and her real origin became clearer as I realized her harsh message of terror and doom should have been buried with the rest of my unhappy female relatives. At the very least, it seemed like a smart idea for me to insist that she change film genres. Time to force-feed Ashley some new movie plots or stop inviting her altogether.

  Back in the circle, it was now time for Cheryl, the math teacher, to take the talking stick. “I had a really bad childhood,” she said, starting to cry, “and I probably would have killed myself in high school if I hadn’t met Tammy.” She was talking about her best friend, who was sitting next to her and for whom she had purchased this outing as a birthday present. “This trip really opened things up for me,” said Cheryl. “I’m going back to school tomorrow with a whole different outlook on life.”

  Next the talking stick was handed off to Cindy, the woman who had wept when she was asked to relax. Not so surprisingly, she was weeping again. “I’m going to be really vulnerable, you guys,” she said. “I don’t handle female friendship well.” This surprised me. From a distance, Cindy seemed easygoing and gregarious, the kind of woman for whom female bonding was invented. “I wanted to come on this trip and be liked and accepted and make some friends,” she said. “I’m trying to learn not to be so judgmental.” Now she turned to look at Susan Ann. “Like at the beginning, I saw you and I thought, ‘Oh God. She’s going to get out her crystals.’ ” Susan Ann smiled beatifically as Cindy now turned to me. “And I saw Merrill acting all nervous and concerned about flooding and storms and I thought, ‘She’s going to get hurt and freak everyone out.’ But I ended up liking you both.”

  Hey, wait a minute, I thought, a little humiliated by this revelation. YOU were judging ME? Who the hell are you to judge me? Ashley and me, we’re the ones who judge YOU! And by the away, where the hell is that damn Ashley when I actually need her support? That was when it occurred to me that, for the first time since I was fifteen, I had forgotten to wear any eyeliner.

  When the dreaded talking stick got to me, I didn’t want to speak. But I also didn’t want to ruin an emotional evening for everyone else. So I said a few words about how courageous everyone was to leave their usual routines and try something different by taking a trip like this. Then I realized I had done that, too.

  DAY FIVE

  Leave it to me to not get around to the coolest, most fun thing until the last day. I’m referring to the paddle boat, the option I elected not to take from day one. It was the only raft where all the passengers rowed and wore helmets. All along people had been advising me to try it, but I was refusing to listen.

  I can live without all that extra work, I thought.

  But today, I finally got on board. Though I’m embarrassed to admit that the reason it happened is not because I was more filled with esprit de corps. It was because I was so busy talking to Cheryl and Tammy that I missed my chance to board the regular raft. So, reluctantly, I took a paddle and strapped on a helmet and had the best time of the whole trip. As river guide Rebecca shouted out orders (“Forward left, back right, forward all”), Cheryl, Tammy, Sabrina, Cindy, Diane the artist, and I all maneuvered through rapids as though we knew what we were doing. “Everyone lean right,” Rebecca yelled, and we all tucked our feet in so we would not come out of the boat as we leaned way over. The smaller raft bounced and crashed in the white water. “And forward left,” she yelled again. “And right. And lean.” So we did. Sprays of water hit us, followed by big, freezing splashes. We were on high alert and in the moment as the raft became a roller coaster. Why had I forgotten how much more fun it was to lose yourself in doing a thing than to watch from a passive position?

  “You’ve got to remember not to make decisions based on laziness in the future,” I scolded myself, being careful to remind myself that I was not referring to boarding elevators during electrical storms.

  “Okay, okay,” I sighed.

  On the very last stretch of river, joke telling started. Though during the past four days there had been little talk of boyfriends or husbands, now it was hard not to notice that there was a definite cast to the jokes a group of women elected to tell in the wilderness.

  Exhibit A: “Which one is real? A smart man, a dumb man, an honest man, or the Easter Bunny? A dumb man. The other three are figments of your imagination.”

  Exhibit B: “What are the three stages of sex in marriage? Kitchen sex, where you have sex everywhere. Bedroom sex, only in the bedroom. And hall sex, where you pass each other in the hall and go, ‘Fuck you.’ ‘Fuck you, too.’ ”

  Exhibit C: “What’s the difference between a prostitute, a nymphomaniac, and a wife? The prostitute says, ‘Are you done yet?’ The nympho says, ‘Are you done already?’ The wife says, ‘I think I’ll paint the ceiling beige.’ ”

  When I got to the airport that evening to board the small plane that would take me to Salt Lake, I was sunburned, gritty, and lithe, a heartier, more rugged version of myself.

  Unfortunately, Ashley was already waiting for me in the lounge area. Bracing herself with a gin and tonic, she was ready to remind me of the high incidence of small-plane catastrophes.

  “You can’t really get to me now,” I told her. “I feel too tan and fit.”

  “Just like Ashley Judd at the beginning of Kiss the Girls,” Ashley came back, “right before the serial killer imprisons her in an underground grotto.”

  “No … more like something from Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat Pray Love,” I countered.

  “We intentionally avoided seeing both of those movies,” Ashley said with a smirk. “We really really hate movies like those.”

  “I know. And I still don’t want to see them,” I admitted. “But I think for both of our sakes, before we travel together again, you need to sit down and internalize the premises of a couple of chick flicks.”

  WHAT I LEARNED

  1. Sunblock really does work.

  2. Do the hard thing you don’t want to do right away. That way, if you decide to reject it, it will be for a good reason.

  3. Cryptic foreshadowing and scary plot points don’t always add up to a horror movie. Not even when the cast includes girls in bikinis.

  4. Things really do come in fours, after all. For instance, there are four things on this list.

  Jimmy Explains His Wake-up Techniques

  IT WAS MIDMORNING ON A TUESDAY, AND I HAD BEEN SITTING behind my desk, surrounded on all sides by my dogs. Even so, I was edgy. I had been trying unsuccessfully to write since six A.M. Creatively, everything had come to a halt. When that happens I often turn to my dogs for inspiration. But what inspiring thing about them hadn’t I already mined?

  Well, it occurred to me, I hadn’t yet written about how I came to adopt my two retrievers, Jimmy and Ginger, after their paterfamilias was arrested for Ponzi schemes three years ago. With a posse of angry, torch-bearing fraud victims hot on his trail, the man in whose house my two dogs had once lived fled our city, leaving his dogs at my vet’s, along with his unpaid bill. A friend mentioned the dogs to me because the black one resembled my recently deceased, greatly beloved dog Lewis.

  So I decided to pay him a visit.

  I found him sharing a cage with a reddish female counterpart in the boarding area of my vet’s hospital facility, where they had been sitting for five months, waiting patiently for someone who was never coming back. There they were: two seventy-five-pound dogs, a golden retriever and a flat-coated retriever, sharing a dog bed on the floor of a cell that was just slightly larger than the two of them. They seemed bored but otherwise in good health and sensibly cautious when I opened the cage. A few minutes after that, they both became very friendly. Once I agreed to “foster” them for a while, the staff at the vet’s office sighed with relief. They all knew it was out of character for me not to fall in love with any dog once I took him home.

  Where do they think we’re going and who do they think I am? I asked myself as I led both dogs out to my car. I marveled at
how they both jumped in without hesitation. After all, here I was, driving them to a place they’d never been where they might be spending the rest of their lives. Are they worried or disoriented? I wondered. They don’t really look stressed. Do they miss their original home? But by the time we arrived at my house, they seemed totally comfortable. Talk about a classic tale of death and rebirth: it was like they’d lived here their whole lives.

  How did they manage to readjust so quickly? I mused. When a human being leaves a traumatic situation that involves abandonment and prison, it takes years of therapy to get past the pain, the trepidation, the hurt, the nightmares. Posttraumatic stress disorder, they call it. Yet these two went right to the communal water bowl, had a drink, then sat down in the living room next to my other two dogs and took a nap. When, a little while later, I got up to go to work in my office, all four of them followed me in like they’d done this a million times.

  Thinking back on it now, I viewed the process with a certain amount of awe. In this era of economic strain, endless war, and environmental upheaval, might these two dogs have some worthwhile advice to offer about coping and readjusting? Enough time had passed, I supposed, for them to have gained some valuable insight.

  I decided to ask them about it.

  “Jimmy?” I said, calling to the flat-coated retriever. From my office desk chair, I could see him lying on his left side next to the closet, snoring.

  He roused himself out of a deep sleep, sat up, and looked right at me. “Yes!” he said, coming over and sitting down beside me. “To all three questions. Yes, yes, and yes!”

  “I didn’t ask you even one question yet,” I pointed out. “I just called your name. I have no idea what you think you are answering.”

  “Will you come here, do you want to go for a walk, and do you want a cookie?” he said. “The three questions that are always implied when you call my name. And for the record, the answer to all three is always yes.”

  “I’m not always offering a walk or a cookie when I say your name,” I told him. “I called you over to ask you something else. I want to know what you remember about the day that I first brought you here to my home.”

  “When I was a puppy? I was much too young to remember.”

  “You were five years old,” I said. “By common dog/human calculations, that means you were in your mid-thirties. It was only three years ago. You don’t recall being confined to a cage at the vet’s? I opened the cage door and said, ‘Hello, big boy! Who are you?’ ”

  “I don’t think that was me,” he said.

  “Being trapped in a cage for five months doesn’t ring a bell?” I asked. “You and Ginger were sitting side by side on the same cushion? I took you out on a leash to see how you’d act around other dogs?”

  “You’re talking about someone else,” he said.

  “No, I am definitely talking about you,” I said as he ran off to get a rope pull, hoping to initiate a game of tug. “Sit still and think for a minute,” I continued. “You have no memory at all of spending the first few years of your life with a man who robbed people of their life savings?”

  “Here,” he said, pushing a filthy rope into my hands. “Take the other end of this rope and pull on it for a minute. It will help me clear my head.”

  “What is she talking about?” asked Ginger, who had wandered over and was now sitting beside him. “Does it involve cookies? I tuned out after ‘you.’ ”

  “No cookies,” said Jimmy. Ginger yawned loudly, then collapsed lethargically onto her side.

  “I see,” I said. “I thought it would be interesting to write about your amazing resiliency. But obviously I’ve hit a dead end, I guess. Anything I say on this topic will have to be pure conjecture.”

  “I have a suggestion,” Jimmy offered. “Have you ever written about the way I wake you up in the morning?”

  “No,” I said. “I, um … I must have overlooked that somehow.”

  “Well,” he announced, “then thank me, because I just did your work for you. As usual, you are overlooking the obvious. Wake up, woman. Most of what I do on a daily basis is so magnificent that I’m surprised you ever write about anything else. Like my motto says: ‘I am a delight to all.’ ”

  “I didn’t know you had a motto,” I said.

  “More proof that you haven’t been paying attention!” he said. “Sulum est usquequaque laetus video vidi visum mihi. It roughly translates to ‘Everyone is always glad to see me.’ ” Jimmy yawned loudly, ending with that sound of a creaking door hinge that he favors. “Seriously. You need to write about the way I wake you up.”

  “I don’t know if I have anything to say about that,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” he said, so startled by my response that he stopped chewing his foot. “Don’t you claim to be a storyteller? Aren’t you supposed to be an observer of life? How can you live here right beside me and not have noticed how like a ballet it all is?”

  “A ballet?” I snorted. “Here’s a better idea: write this homage yourself.”

  “You know I can’t write,” he said. “Come! Let’s relive it together!”

  He sprang to his feet and surprised me by hurling his front legs and upper torso onto my lap.

  “Picture this,” Jimmy said. “There I am, standing on that slippery wood floor in your bedroom, when I am overcome with an urge to say hello that is so strong that I begin a glissade that ends with a grand jeté–like leap to the top of your bed. Everyone is riveted. Will he make it? Will he crash into her? Will she be pissed off or happy to see him?”

  “When you say ‘everyone,’ you mean the three sleeping dogs?” I asked.

  “Set up a camera tomorrow and see for yourself,” he challenged. “That way you can also slow it down and watch my muscles ripple. Pay special attention to how my lips flap along with my ears. Call it ‘Doggy Allegro.’ I guarantee: instant viral hit on YouTube!”

  As suddenly as he had jumped onto my lap, he now flounced back to the floor, racing unpredictably to a spot underneath my desk, where he began to energetically, even frantically, chew on the base of his tail. “Just a second. Mouth full of hair,” he said before plopping his head in my lap and resuming his lecture. “Anyway, once I arrive safely at the edge of your mattress, I gaze across the peaks and valleys of your comforter and instantly know which of the unidentified lumps before me is you. How do I do it? No one can say. Yet I have a one hundred percent accuracy rating.”

  “It’s because I am always the lump on the right,” I said.

  “Nice try, but I can’t tell right from left and you know it,” he said. “Go ahead. Test me. Ask me to give you my right paw.”

  I obliged: “Give me your right paw.” He just sat there, panting.

  “See?” he said. “Nothing. Yet because of my keen sense of smell, I find you, stand on your chest, and begin to slowly lick the entire length of your arm. One long, slow lick from your wrist to your shoulder. It’s my signature move. No one else does it. Ginger licks fingers. Puppyboy just does faces. Hedda doesn’t lick.”

  “Well, that’s true. I’ve never had another dog lick my whole arm,” I agreed. “I’m not sure why you do it, either.”

  “It helps to wake you,” he said. “By the way, whatever that sauce is that you put on your face before you go to sleep at night is fantastic.” He licked his lips. “You should cook with that stuff!”

  “No,” I said. “That ‘stuff,’ as you call it, is expensive moisturizer. And it’s not supposed to be eaten. It may not be good for you.”

  “You say that about everything,” he complained. “You even say that about horse shit. It saddens me the way you limit yourself.”

  “So are we done with this topic?” I said, thinking that this was going nowhere and that I’d like to turn off the computer and run some errands.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “I was just getting started. I am practically writing this story for you. Have you ever noticed how you always have to go out to run errands whenever we start
to talk about something real? I no sooner mention the way you limit yourself and … kaboom. Errands. Always errands. I think you’re running from something.”

  “That’s a troubling thought,” I said. “I do put a lot of unnecessary limits on myself. I should probably try to be more open to other possibilities. It’s so easy for me to get into a rut. Whether it’s from laziness or habit or fear, I often do the same thing day after day, and the next thing I know, I—”

  “Okay. Enough,” said Jimmy, “No need to go on and on. I wasn’t finished explaining my special wake-up sequence. Anyway, the overture has ended and now we’re up to the adagio, which, as you know, is the part where I lie down next to you and squirm around on my back. My head and my body go at equal speeds in opposing directions. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.”

  “And you’re going to tell me that this has a function besides screwing up the blankets?” I scoffed.

  “Of course it does. But like all great art, it’s open to interpretation,” said Jimmy. “Some might say I am expressing my vulnerability and subservience by showing my belly. Others might claim I’m figuring out how much of the space you’re currently occupying I can take from you without a fight. Territorial acquisition. Similar to the rules of football or the battlefield.”

  “I always wondered what you were doing,” I said. “But now that you explain it, I realize you’re just being inconsiderate.”

  “Come on! You’re really going to argue with Pack Rule Number One?” he said. “ ‘Dominate or be dominated’? It comes with my species. That’s just how the world works.”