The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (20 page)

Ralph awakens to the sound of chewing. Sitting in a chair at his bedside is Monica, eating a bag of Cheetos and reading a magazine. “Monica?” he says softly.

She stands quickly. “Oh, you’re awake, thank God. Listen, Ralph, you’re fine. Let’s go.” She drops the bag into the garbage, picks up her purse, and slides it onto her shoulder. “Come on.”

“What are you talking about? I just had a heart attack!

I’m not going anywhere!”

“No, you didn’t, Ralph. You did not. They did an EKG

and checked your blood—cardiac enzymes, don’t you remember?”

Ralph smiles.
Cod
iac, Monica says. What a goil. He chuckles.

“Ralph?”

“What?”

“Are you a little . . . Are you stoned? Do you feel stoned?”

Stoned!
Now he laughs out loud.

“Shhh!” Monica squeezes his shoulder. “Ralph. Act normal. It was indigestion. That’s all it was, indigestion and anxiety. And they knocked you out a little bit, is why you’re stoned. But wake up, now. We have to go home.

Dogling’s all alone.”

Ah.
He remembers. He thinks, in fact, that he has just been with Dogling. A dream? A vision?

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“Get dressed, Ralph, I’m going to find the nurse. They said you could go home when you woke up. So wake up, already.”

Ralph nods, then slowly sits up. “Where
are
my clothes?”

Monica comes impatiently back to the bedside, pulls a plastic bag out from the bedside stand, and throws it at him. “Here!”

“How should I have known that?” Ralph asks.

“Oy. Don’t start a fight now!”

“Get the nurse!”

“I am!”

Ralph pulls on his trousers but gets stuck trying to figure out how to put a shirt on over his IV. So he sits at the side of the bed, waiting. The bed across from him is empty, pristine-looking. You’d never know that someone had been in it before. Anything could have happened in that bed. He wonders if the beds get washed, if they go down to some gigantic car wash–type thing and then get put back into use. He hopes they get washed. God. Anything could be on them. Maybe somebody died in that bed. Or in the one he is sitting on now. Or gave birth in it. You never knew, from one day to the next what—

“Mr. Aronson?”

The nurse. A short little redhead, God bless her, big smile, real cute. “Hello,” Ralph says. He reaches up self-consciously to smooth down his hair.

“What do you say we get rid of that IV?”

“Be okay with me.” Ralph watches as the nurse—

DIANNE, her name pin says—takes out the IV, then covers the site with a Band-Aid.

“World War Three,” Ralph says, referring to the many bruises on his hand.

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“Guess you were hard to get a line in,” Dianne says, and from behind him Ralph hears Monica say, “He has bad veins.”

The nurse instructs Ralph about what to watch for in the future, how he must never ignore such symptoms, he was exactly right to call 911, just sign here and he’s a free man. Then he and Monica are out in the sunshine and walking toward the car. Ralph climbs into the passenger side of the car slowly, adjusts his legs with great care, and draws in a long breath. He may not have had a heart attack, but he’s been in the hospital, by God! “It seems like so long since we’ve been out together,” he says.

“We’ve been out,” Monica answers. Then, “
Watch
it, you
idiot
!” she yells at a car that has come nowhere near her.

“Only on the deck. I mean, we’ve mostly been . . .”

“I left him a can of cat food,” Monica says.

Ralph nods. The dog loves cat food—they discovered this when friends visited with their Siamese; they put down cat food, and Dogling raced over and vacuumed it up. Ever since then, he’s gotten to have a can of cat food on special occasions. He likes the salmon supreme best. Liked.

Monica drives home at speeds well over the limit, and Ralph says nothing. He wants to get there, too. Old Butchie.

When they come into the house, Ralph hears the sound of the TV. “Is someone here?” he whispers to Monica.

“No,” she says. “I turned the TV on for Dogling before I left. Animal Planet. First I had on channel five, but what did he need with that crap? It was some comedy that wasn’t even funny. And the Food Network, they weren’t talking enthusiastic enough.”

“Jesus Christ, Monica. I was being rushed to the hospital and you were channel-surfing?”

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“He was being left
alone,
Ralph. And he’s
dying
!”

“
I
could have been dying!”

“You were not, it was only indigestion!”

“You didn’t know that then!”

“You were in the ambulance! What could
I
do? I was coming!” She takes in a breath, calms herself. “Now stop it. The least we can do is give him a tranquil environment his last few . . .” She takes off her jacket and hands it to him. Then she goes into the living room, turns off the television, and calls, “We’re
home,
sweetheart!
Hiiiiiiiii,
Dogling! Where’s my good
boy
?”

It’s been a while since the dog greeted them at the door, Ralph thinks, hanging Monica’s jacket. She got yellow from the Cheetos on the sleeve, he sees, and he tries to brush the stain off, which only makes it worse.

Yes, it’s been a long while since they walked into the house on a normal day and had Dogling run over to them, snorting and turning around in circles, his little tail wagging so fast it was a blur. Ralph tries to remember the last time it happened. A month ago? Two? So often, you never know the last time’s going to be the last time. There’s so much you don’t get to know. Something tugs at Ralph’s mind, some memory, some thought. But then he hears Monica cry out, and he walks quickly into the kitchen.

Dogling is on his side, lying still in that unequivocal way, and Monica is crouched down beside him, her hands over her face, weeping.

Ralph lowers himself beside Monica and rubs her back.

Then he picks the dog up and cradles him against his chest. Already, the legs have grown stiff. “Ah, buddy,” he says. “My little man.”

And then his heart seems to crack wide open and he sobs, hoarse, choppy sounds he has never heard coming
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from himself before. The dog died alone. He cries and cries, and snot runs freely down his face and he gets the hiccups. On and on he weeps, for what surely must be only minutes but feels like hours. He hears Monica saying,

“Ralph?
Ralph?
” but she might as well be miles away. He cannot see her. He cannot feel her.

Finally she says,
“Ralph!”
and he is able to turn to her and say in his anguished voice, “What?
What,
Monica?”

She nods. “Okay. You know why I’m crying?”

“Yeah. Because he died alone.” Another sob, unbidden, unmanly. What the fuck, who cares.

“No. Not because he died alone.” She wipes broadly under her nose, then under Ralph’s.

“Because he died,” he says.

“No. It’s because he
ate,
Ralph.” She shows Ralph the half-empty cat food can. “He ate, he tried, oh, what a champ, what a
great dog
!”

Through his tears, Ralph smiles, then begins to sob again.

“He was!” Monica says.

“I know he was.”

“And . . . see? I’m crying from happiness,” Monica says.

“I’m so glad that one of the very last things he did was eat that salmon supreme.” She folds her hands in her lap and speaks quietly. “Oh, Ralph. Everything’s so much more important than we think.”

Now Ralph remembers what eluded him before. The sense of peace he’d had when he thought he was dying, how
willing
he was, for whatever came. For whatever had happened, to have happened. He lays Dogling out on his lap. One of the dog’s eyes is open, and he gently closes it.

“Oh, God,” Monica says softly, but there is more relief than sorrow in it. And then—could you believe it?—she 158

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d begins to laugh a little, and through his tears, Ralph does, too.

“You know, Monica? When I was in the ER and I thought . . . I mean, I didn’t know. I heard voices, but I couldn’t speak, I felt kind of floaty and I didn’t know if I was dying or what. But I felt the opposite of you. I felt like nothing really mattered. In the good way.” He takes in a deep breath. He thinks he’s done crying, now. “You know?”

“Maybe it’s the same thing,” Monica says. “Maybe we’re saying the same thing.” She strokes one of Dogling’s ears. “I think we are.” She looks over at Ralph, and there is in her face a girlishness, a lucent shyness he has not seen in a long, long time. “Ralph? I’m really glad you didn’t die.”

Doi.
Ah, Monica. Ah, Butchie. Ah, spring day, come to a close, with the night wind rising up.

He kisses her forehead. “I’m glad I didn’t die, too.”

“I want to bury him under the rhododendron bush,”

Monica says. “He liked it there. When he was lying under there, he thought he was king of the hill.”

“Yeah, he did. Do you want bury the rest of the cat food with him?”

“No. It will get all on him.”

“We could wrap it up in foil.”

She considers this, then says, “Okay. And . . . Let’s get another dog. A puppy.” She sighs.

“Okay,” Ralph says, the word wide for his mouth, barely able to fit. But yes. Okay.

They sit for some time in the kitchen, in a silence rich with a shared sentiment that gives up nothing of itself to words. Finally Ralph stands and offers his hand to Monica, and she stands up, complaining that, oy, her elbows hurt.

“Do they?” Ralph asks, and they head out to the yard to-

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gether, continuing a quiet conversation up to and including a starlit graveside ceremony, meant to honor and say farewell to a dog who with his life brought them joy, and with his death flapped their future like a rug, straightening it out before them.

truth or dare

After dinner, Laura ushers her friends out onto the front porch. It is a Friday evening in early spring, the buds tight on the trees, the grass greening in spots. Joyce settles herself into one of the wicker chairs, still stiff after the insults of winter, and sighs. “It’s so light outside,” she says. “I’m always so happy when it stays light later.”

“Everybody is,” Trudy says. She has stretched herself out on the little sofa, hogging all the room, so that Laura has to take the bad chair, the one with one leg ready to break off—when one sits in it, one fears moving. But Laura likes the way Trudy feels so comfortable taking the best seat, likes the way she is so unapologetic generally. It’s refreshing, a marked change from many of the women she knows, who routinely begin conversations with an apology.

T r u t h o r D a r e

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Even a phone call!
Laura: Hello? Friend: Oh, I’m sorry,
were you busy?

The three of them are relatively new friends, having met a month ago, when they all signed up for Yoga Plus! in a just-opened studio. They were in the back row, next to one another, when the teacher told them to assume a certain pose and shout out, “I love my beautiful face!” (This, Laura assumed, was the “plus” part.) They none of them shouted it. They said it, but they didn’t shout it. When they assumed another pose and the teacher told them to shout out, “I love my beautiful rectum!” they all burst out laughing. “Focus!” the teacher said, but they couldn’t stop laughing, and finally they left and went across the street and had lunch, where they agreed they
might
have said, “I appreciate my rectum.”

The women have a lot in common: they’re all in their late fifties, they’re all divorced, they all live alone in condos they’ve bought in this newly gentrified neighborhood, they’ve all had cancer scares, and Joyce has in fact had a mastectomy. This is the first time they’ve had dinner at Laura’s, and they have found it so agreeable, they’ve decided to have homemade dinners together once a week, rotating houses. Trudy has volunteered to be next and has already announced her menu: an Indian meal, all vegetarian. And a killer dessert. She complimented Laura on the dessert she made when they were served it; now she brings it up again. “That really was a good tart you made. Lemon curd and fresh strawberry. I really like that combination. And that cookie crust—it was like shortbread.”

It is quiet for a moment; the women can hear the sounds of some neighborhood boys playing basketball a 162

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d few houses down, the ball being dribbled. Then,
“Dude!”

one of them yells. Someone must have scored.