When Life Gives You O.J. (10 page)

And I stood there, frozen, wishing to be somewhere, anywhere else. In Brooklyn, maybe, or in that big field that used to be behind The Farm. Looking for treasures with Bubbles or just running with Tallulah and the puppy chasing after me. Wishing to be someone else too. Some other kid, part of some other family, one of those families who dressed normally and whose kids decorated their bikes normally and who would have said yes to Camp Sonrise. So instead of being here right now, I’d be far away, arm in arm with my best friend, singing songs or doing craft projects.

Maybe even making some fudge.

After the parade, we went home, and I tried—hard—to put the whole Batman episode out of my mind. Which was made harder by the fact that Sam refused to take off his costume and kept running around singing his theme song. Luckily, distraction came in the form of our next-door neighbors, the Stanleys, who we had invited over for a cookout. Unfortunately, the best thing about the Stanleys is their beagle, Bridget, who it turned out they had left at home. From our backyard, we could hear her howling on the other side of the fence.

“Cool it, Bridget!” yelled Mr. Stanley in the direction of their house.

Mrs. Stanley shook her head, amused. “Bob!” she said. “You know she can’t hear you.”

“Can I go get her?” I asked Mrs. Stanley. I was pretty sure Bridget was making so much noise because she felt left out. It’s true she can’t see or hear that well anymore, but I’m pretty sure she still senses stuff somehow. Mrs. Stanley said it was okay with her, so I went around to their gate. Since I didn’t have a leash and since she’s so old, I carried Bridget to our yard. Bridget didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she licked my face a lot to say thanks for getting her an invite to our party.

My dad was in a really good mood, tending the grill and wearing his red
KISS THE COOK
apron, which my mom gave him for his birthday last year. And the cookout got much better once Bridget was there. Her favorite thing is being scratched under her chin. When you do that, she loves it so much she kind of falls over and then demands what Mr. Stanley calls the Belly Treatment. Wait a second. Maybe taking care of Bridget could be part of upping the ante. I was just going to ask about this when Ace came out of the house. He was wearing an apron like my dad, only his apron was white and said
I LOVE SHIKSAS
on it.

“ ‘I love shiksas,’ ” read Mrs. Stanley. “Is that like shiksa-bob?” she asked. I heard my dad almost choke on his Pepsi.

Ace gave her a kind of amused smile. “SURE,” he said. “I LIKE YOU GUYS … SHIKSA AND BOB.” He gestured to each of them, palms up.

“Ace,” scolded my dad, “remember how you said you’d behave?”

“WHA?”

My dad turned to the Stanleys. “Ace is making a little joke. A
shiksa
means ‘a non-Jewish woman.’ ”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Stanley. “I see.”

“It’s not a derogatory term,” my dad told them. “At least, not in this context.”

“Well, I learned something new today, didn’t I?” said Mrs. Stanley, nodding at Ace. Ace shrugged.

“Dad, can I have a word with you? In the kitchen?” called my mom through the screen door.

Ace shrugged again, but he headed inside. Since Ace had moved in with us, my mom would periodically try to “have a word” with him. It usually ended with Ace storming off, yelling something like, “THIS LIVING ARRANGEMENT WAS YOUR BRIGHT IDEA, MARILYNN, NOT MINE.”

Bridget came over to me and started butting me with her head, so I sat down on the grass next to her and began scratching her chin again. With a contented
wurfff!
Bridget flopped over on her back and presented her stomach.
Belly Treatment! Belly Treatment!
she practically begged. “Oh, all right,” I told her teasingly.

“Mrs. Stanley?” I asked, scratching Bridget’s stomach while she wriggled with pleasure. “I was wondering if you might need someone to walk Bridget sometimes?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Stanley, looking at Bridget, then looking over at Mr. Stanley. “Well, yes, sometimes. Although usually we just take her with us to our camp.”

“Your … camp?” This didn’t make any sense. Grown-ups didn’t go to sleepaway camp.

My dad, who had been listening, laughed. “It’s not a camp like you’re thinking, Zelly. A
camp
is another name for a summer house.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid.

Mrs. Stanley laughed too. “It’s nothing fancy. Just a little cottage on the lake where we go on weekends and for a longer stay in August. A ‘camp’ is what everyone around here calls it. I always forget that you’re not from here!”

She said it in a nice way, but my heart kind of fell anyway. Mrs. Stanley obviously hadn’t seen Batman in action that morning. The parade had made it pretty clear to everyone in the Greater Burlington area that our family was definitely Not from Here.

“I’d just as soon leave her home when we go next weekend,” chimed in Mr. Stanley. “If you want, you can take care of Bridget then. That is, if it’s okay with Bridget. OKAY, BRIDGET?”

Bridget seemed to hear something, so she ran toward Mr. Stanley, crashing into the picnic table in the process.

I ran over and knelt down beside her.

“Heyyyy, Bridgie,” I said. “You okay, old girl?”

Bridget gazed happily up at me with her milky eyes. Her tail began to wag.
Time for more Belly Treatment?
she seemed to say.

“Dad?” I asked later, after the Stanleys went home. “Did you hear I’m going to be taking care of Bridget?”

“I did,” said my dad, spooning coleslaw from a bowl back into a plastic deli container.

“And do you remember how you said when we moved here that it wasn’t a good time to get a dog?”

“Sounds like something I could have said, yes.”

“Well, is now a better time?”

“A better time for what?”

“To get a dog?”

“Speaking of dogs,” said my mom, carrying in a platter, “what shall I do with these extra ones that are cooked but didn’t get eaten?”

“We should keep them. Ace will eat them,” said my dad.

“Dad!” I said. “I’m trying to talk to you about something important.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Say it again.”

“I said, can we get a dog? Can I get a dog?”

My dad sighed. “Zellyboo, haven’t we been over this?”

“Well, yeah, but not since I got O.J. I’m almost eleven now too. Plus I’m going to be taking care of Bridget.”

“Zelly, that’s just for a couple of days. Owning a dog is for ten or fifteen years. That’s a big commitment that I’m not sure your mother and I are ready to make.”

“You guys wouldn’t have to do anything! It would be my dog.”

My dad raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh,” he said evenly.

“It would!”

“Every day? Every walk? Even if it is raining? Or snowing? If you think it snows a lot in Brooklyn, just wait till you see how much it snows here in Vermont.”

“I know, Dad. Please!”

My dad put the coleslaw in the fridge, then went over to the sink and started using the spray hose to wash off a pan that had been soaking.

“So?” I said.

“So what?”

“So, can I get a dog?”

“Zelly, I just told you what I think. If you need an answer right now, the answer is no. And if you insist on discussing this any further,” he paused and pointed the spray hose at me, “I shall be forced to use this.”

“SPEAKING OF DOGS, YOU GOT ANY LEFT?” asked Ace, who had wandered into the kitchen. “I COULD USE A LITTLE NOSH.”

My mom put the platter of cold grilled hot dogs on the kitchen table and said, “Dad, sit down. I’ll get you a plate.”

“Mom,” I tried one last time, “can I talk to you in my room?”

“Sweetie, if this is about the dog thing, I agree with your dad. It is a big responsibility, so it is a decision we need to make as a family.”

“What about if I start a dog-walking service? Or volunteer at an animal shelter, or both?”

“Those sound like great ideas.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Sure! That way, even if we don’t end up getting a dog, you’ll still be able to spend as much time as you want with animals.”

“They didn’t go for it,” I told Jeremy the next day on the way to the tennis courts.

“Who didn’t go for what?”

“My parents didn’t think dog walking or volunteering would make any difference. In fact, they think those are great ideas because they’ll give me plenty of time with dogs without having to actually get a dog!”

“Wait, did you really
do
those things?”

“No. But, like I told you, it wouldn’t matter.”

Jeremy, who had been trying to balance his racket on one finger while walking, lunged forward to keep from dropping it. “It might,” he told me.

“How do you figure?”

Jeremy caught his racket as it fell, then set it up on his finger again. “You can’t just talk the talk. You have to show them. You have to actually do it.”

“Okay, so … how?”

Jeremy’s racket fell again. This time, he picked it up and put it back in his bag. “C’mon,” he said. “I have an idea.”

By the time we got back to my house, I was as hot and sweaty as if we had played tennis. Jeremy’s idea had been to go by his dad’s office, where we were able to use a computer and printer to make flyers for my new dog-walking service, The Zelly Treatment. According to the flyer, a responsible student (me!) would walk, feed, bathe, and groom dogs at reasonable rates, owner’s (and dog’s!) satisfaction guaranteed.
We printed fifty, borrowed a box of thumbtacks and a roll of masking tape, and ran around putting them in mailboxes and on every telephone pole and community bulletin board between the university and my house.

“What if I end up having to walk fifty dogs?” I asked Jeremy nervously when we posted the last flyer. I pictured myself, fifty leashes—fifty-one, counting O.J.—in one hand, getting dragged down the block.

“You won’t,” he said confidently. “But it’s better to have too much business than too little, right?”

“I guess so,” I said, going into my house ahead of him.

“There you are!” said my mom. “You two wouldn’t happen to know anything about something called The Zelly Experience?”

“It’s The Zelly
Treatment
,” Jeremy corrected her.

My mom looked at us suspiciously. “Well, whatever it’s called, it has two phone messages.”

“See!” said Jeremy excitedly. “I told you!”

As I took the notes from my mom, the phone rang again.

“Yessss!” yelled Jeremy, pumping the air.

“Jeremy …,” I said, “I can’t walk fifty dogs.”

“Not even if it gets you a real dog of your own?” he asked.

“Uh, okay, maybe I can.”

The Zelly Treatment ended up having exactly four canine customers, one of which was Bridget. I was also hired to walk the Dixons’ German shepherd, Attila, who made me a little nervous because I had seen him wearing a muzzle before. Mrs.
Brownell said she’d pay me to give her poodles a bath, but they were so cute I offered to take them along on my group walks, free of charge. My parents, who were impressed with Jeremy’s and my initiative, were less thrilled about the fact that we forgot to ask first, so they made us go take the signs down at that point. I was more than a little relieved, since taking care of four dogs—plus O.J.—seemed like plenty of work.

The only problem was, when I went to pick up the poodles—
grrrrrrr!!!
—Attila would start looking like he wanted to eat them, so I had to walk the small dogs on my left and Attila on my right, with my arms sticking straight out to the sides. However, the surprisingly good thing about walking a whole bunch of dogs was that O.J. wasn’t so obvious. In fact, I could sort of loop his leash through my belt and he’d just lag behind, barely noticeable as anything but the straggler in my pack.

Unfortunately, O.J. still bounced around unpredictably and noisily, which sometimes upset the other dogs. Bridget would get confused and flop over to get her belly rubbed, and when she did, Maddy would take the opportunity to bark because Maddy barked at everything. And one time when O.J. bounced too close to Attila, he lunged forward with a growl, chomped onto O.J.’s handle, and shook him.

“Atti, drop!” I commanded, grabbing hold of O.J. to wrench him loose from Attila’s giant jaws. Strings of drool trailed out behind him, connecting O.J.—and my hand holding him—to Attila’s mouth like a long, wet leash.