Bee is for Bitch

When December rolled around and it was clear I wouldn't be returning home anytime soon, my mother replaced me with a dog. It's hardly unusual. For most of my friends, it was returning home after Freshman year and realizing that their childhood bedroom had been converted to a gym, sewing room, midlife meditation oasis, etc. Disturbingly, the rooms never made a complete transition; patchwork quilts coexisted alongside overpriced elliptical machines, peeling Johnny Depp posters alongside 'revamped,' Martha Stewart designer wallpaper. Many a late night bitch-session was devoted to this subject, to the loss of the sense of 'home' that we mistakenly believed to be bound up in the permanent existence of a Shrine to our Personal Shit. Lucky for me, my parents have never been into sewing, nor trendy fitness. They prefer to get their exercise outdoors, bounding through the back hills of Mission Canyon, followed closely behind by the loving, panting presence of Maggie: a rescue mutt who is about two parts adorable companion and two parts bitch from hell.

I understand, I really do. I got the email with Maggie's picture, followed by Mom's enthusiastic report that they were adding a new member to the family!!--and part of me curled into that, in the somewhat deluded idea that my absence had left such a gaping hole in their lives that they needed to fill it by any means possible. Oh God, how can we ever survive without her? Then the emails became more plentiful, the photographs more flattering than any evidence of MY first few years on the planet, and I started to get suspicious. You see, I've observed my mother around animals; maybe it's one of those genes that skips a generation, but place her in front of a prison lineup consisting of humans and cats, and she'll be hard-pressed to tell you which one she gave birth to. She pampers her cats, snuggles them, cradles them, and feeds them to the point of no return. Take one look at Ernest, our tank of a cat who has now reached the point in his obesity where he struggles with bathing, and you'll understand. Anyhow. When I saw the same infatuation creeping up between my mom and the newest creature, I figured it would be like the cats only more: more energy, more responsibility, and more to love. More for her to love, sure, but more for me as well. After all, I had dogs once! I love dogs.

Correction: I love dog. As in, one. And she died when I was thirteen.

Memories of Nellie came flooding back to me, actually, as I approached Maggie for the first time. I'd like to say it wasn't an instantaneous hatred, but I'd be lying: she took one look at me rolling my suitcase into the driveway for the first time in seven months--first time ever, as far as she was concerned--and proceeded to bark within an inch of her life. I looked down at her kindly, thinking perhaps she was just protecting the homestead; and in retrospect, she probably was. But then the mailman arrived the next day, two or three other vehicles pulled in and out of our driveway, all depositing human beings who intruded upon her so-called 'territory'... and she did nothing but cough up a few measly barks as they entered and exited. The average visitor would never know her venomous snarl, nor the fury she is capable of when you meet in a dark room in the middle of the night. No. She saved it all for me.

When it first occurred to me that my parents had adopted a creature with a vendetta against my individual existence, I was saddened. I took it personally; I watched my two-year-old niece throw a chew toy without having her hand bitten off, laughing and playing, and felt like the only kid not picked for kickball. I obeyed when my mother told me to accompany them on walks, to assert my presence in front of Maggie in a way that was non-threatening; I jogged with her around the reservoir, watched as she galloped over bushes and around rocks, and felt a glimmer of hope. But then we'd arrive back home, I'd enter the living room, Maggie would growl, and we'd start all over. Once, I looked over at her and my mom curled up on the couch, and saw the hairs bristle on Maggie's spine. I tried walking closer, and she snarled. My mom threw her on the patio. "It's not right," I told her. "I was here first!" My mom gave a little sniffle at her baby, now quarantined outside in the perfectly tolerable 70 degree Santa Barbara evening. "Yeah," she said. "But to be fair, that is her couch."

I tried a different approach. I'm used to Bali dogs, after all... mangy little assholes that alternate between darting in front of motorbikes, eating trash, and barking furiously at anyone who gets too close to their property. They're more frightening than policemen, and probably do more to deter crime as well. So by the third week of Maggie's dictatorship, I had stopped feeling sad, and started to get angry: she'd stare up at me with glassy, judgmental eyes, and I'd glare right back. She'd snarl at me, and I'd flash her my opposable thumbs, indicating my biological superiority. Maggie may be cuter, but I am smarter. I am the firstborn. It's on, bitch. 

It's difficult to pinpoint why it bothered me so much, or why I should care whether my parents' dog loves me as much as she loves them. I'm here for one more week, and after that, who knows; and if I'm only returning for birthdays and holidays, living out of a toiletry bag, who cares whether I'm subjected to the occasional growl or raised haunches? The only thing I can say is that Maggie's entrance into my life served as a loud, exaggerated reminder of what was already flashing across my brain: you are not welcome here. It's not my family, but the city itself--Santa Barbara, my hometown, the place where I feel at once utterly comfortable and dangerously apathetic. Being here, especially after being away, is like having a pimple on your cheek that keeps cropping up into your peripheral vision: other people don't even notice it, but for you, it is there every time you lower your gaze. I can't quite explain it, but the culture shock after living in Bali for seven months was more than just re-acclimation... I felt positively allergic to things I never even saw before. To make matters worse, about 3 weeks after arriving, I was rushed to the hospital for a severe reaction to bee pollen. One second I was drinking a smoothie, and the next, my face had swelled up to the size of a balloon; I turned an impressive shade of cranberry, broke out in nasty, itchy hives, and spent the next three hours in the ER having a drug cocktail pumped into my arm. Physically, recovery was a breeze: I got off with little more than heightened awareness and an EpiPen to show for the incident. Emotionally, however, I felt damaged. I went home and collapsed into the couch, Maggie's couch, and wondered if it's possible to feel safe in a place that no longer holds you.

Not willing to give up on the dog front, Mom pressed for an intervention. She and my stepdad are leaving for Europe at the end of the summer, and they want me to housesit: an endeavor made slightly more difficult if I'm unable to come and go without a "body blocker." Enter Wency, the Dog Whisperer: "body blocking" is just one of many new terms that she taught us last Saturday, pulling into the driveway amid a cacophony of barks. I watched her approach Maggie, half-expecting the dog to greet her with a lick and a smile; leading the jury to the inevitable conclusion that the problem, in fact, is me, has always been me, and that Maggie is simply doing what no one else in my family is brave enough to do. I sucked down my carrot juice in self-pity and waited. But Wency walked right up to Maggie, backing her into the orange trees--and to my surprise, was met with a throaty growl. Suddenly, I had an ally.

"See that paw?" Wency asked me. "That raised front foot means, don't hurt me. Your dog isn't antisocial, and she isn't shy. She's terrified." This shocked me. Of what? "These old habits are hard to break," she continued. "You have to rewire her. Right now, she thinks everything is a threat, and you're reinforcing that bad behavior by allowing her to get away with it.

"And you," she looked toward my mother, "You gotta take care of your baby bear." I glanced at my mom and giggled. I get the whole dog/human connection, but a bear? Come on. "No," Wency said. Then she gestured toward me. "This is your child. You're the mama bear. And you have to start sticking up for your cub."

That was when she gave us the airhorn. She walked around the driveway with the leash pulled taut, and handed my mother a small, red can. "When Jenna approaches Little Sister and Little Sister growls, you blast this air at the ground." I approached, Maggie bared her teeth, and we waited. My mom, visibly uncomfortable, did as she was told... and we all jumped a few inches when the can let off a ginormous PSSSSSST! at Maggie's feet. All, that is, except Wency. "Good. Now, we work on positive reinforcement. Every time Daughter enters the room, I want some serious treats--I'm talking filet mignon, chicken, fish--to rain from the sky. If Maggie sits for the treats, excellent. If she doesn't, no treats. And no baby talk." She zeroed in on my mom again, who at this point, looked like she'd just been told she would have to spend the rest of her life in a coat made of tarantulas. Wency just smiled and pulled a glob of liver snacks out of her pocket. "When you enter the room, Jenna, come with a treat. From this point on, Little Sister is going to associate your presence with something good. And don't expect the progress to be totally linear, either." She yanked back on the leash as Maggie began to plead sanctuary behind my mother's knees. "It will be one step forward, one step back. Just stick with it."

"It's a process of rewiring. Undoing bad habits so new ones can take their place. It's not an easy task... but it is a possible one."

Other than the obvious creep-factor of calling Maggie my little sister, Wency had some interesting things to say. Did you know, for example, that it is submissive to stroke a dog beneath her chin, because it is typically done to the alpha in a pack? Or that dog owners should always walk through a doorway before their pet in order to assert dominance? I imagined what it must be like to live at Wency's house, where dogs of all shapes and sizes crawl over her body and in and out of her aggressively-planted legs, smelling the day's worth of misbehaving canines and wondering if Wency had given a piece of her heart to any of these new, foreign creatures. I imagine it must be rough on the self-esteem, being the pet of a professional Dog Whisperer; kind of like being Halle Berry's husband, or the girlfriend of one of those really slutty rappers. But Wency seemed like the loyal type, and well-versed on the subject of establishing boundaries. She told my mom that she needed to be more discerning about who touches Maggie on the head, as it could easily interfere with the training. "I don't get why people feel the need to walk up and pet other people's dogs, and why their owners are okay with it. It's like, you wouldn't just walk up and rub someone's kid... so why do it to their dog?" My brain flashed to an image of children gathering around a watering hole, sniffing each other's butts and barking as their parents check them for fleas and ticks. I decided this didn't bode well for my upcoming nannying job, and decided to push it from my head. Humans and dogs are different, after all. Aren't we? I looked down again at my opposable thumbs. Out of the corner of my eye, Maggie lay curled up under the table. The whites of her eyes were shiny with apprehension, and I couldn't help but feel sympathy. We've both been hurt. It's not up to her to explain where or how she developed the fears that keep her from approaching my hand without worry. It's not her fault that she can't tell what may or may not be contained in my palm.

As the week went on, Maggie and I tried our new "treat therapy" with mixed success. For a few days, she willingly obeyed when I commanded her to SIT for a handful of chicken sausage; she liked it even better when she was given treats just for letting me walk through the room. Around Thursday, she grew bored with the prospect of peace and began snarling at me from underneath the table. She gets the airhorn when she does this, which sends my mom into a tailspin of whatifshedoesn'tlovemeanymore... but as Wency pointed out, dogs don't hold grudges, and neither should we. If she's punished, Maggie gets up the next morning and slobbers just as excitedly as she did before she was thrown outside. Her fear issues may linger, but they don't make her any less willing to love.

Something to think about.

~

Last Wednesday, I woke from a dream that my hands and feet had swollen to ten times their normal size. Right before consciousness snapped me out of the panic that I'd never again tie my shoes without assistance, I remember thinking: is this normal? With my bee pollen incident still relatively mysterious, I'm unsure whether it is the pollen itself--or bees in general--that I need to stay away from. Until I know, I am the EpiPen carrier upon which a thousand Pulp Fiction jokes were launched, upon which a thousand more are bound to come when I go to Portland. (Insert boredom here.) All that aside, a swollen feeling haunted me for the rest of that day. My dream-being had run her hands up and down my body, monitoring the inflammation, wondering how much of what was going on could be accounted for in the realm of "normal" allergic reactions. Even while dreaming, I worry about how much I need to worry. If a heart remains broken for months, say, even years after the fact... can that be called normal? Am I whole? Am I allergic?

Thought #1: There's a science to the muscle memory of being hurt. We muscle ourselves into the position, and so we must muscle ourselves out. I sat in the car the other day, listening to an old love play a broken record; and as much as I wanted to help, wanted to be able to speak up in a voice that sounded like my own, my body felt glued to the spot. My mind fell into a groove worn slick from years of overuse. I sat with my gaze fixed forward, listening to the radio as it spat out the soundtrack to a clash of egos, and thought of how many instances in my life I have (re)acted out of fear.

Thought #2: There are two types of change, qualitative and quantitative. In the former, some have gone further than others: perhaps they don't feel the need to sit in cars and reenact scenes from nightmares past. In the latter, however--in the quantitative, the sum, the distance run--we are the same. Some of us have stickers to show for it, and some of us behave the same old way when an unfamiliar hand reaches toward our face: we bolt. It doesn't matter if it has treats in it.

But whether or not we run away, we've still changed. The same amount of days have passed between two people since the last time they met; and in that regard, we're all equal.

So. Sometimes, usually in a fit of caffeine, I believe that I'll move past the history that holds me down. I'm slowly, slowly creeping out from underneath the table where I feel invisible. It would be nice if treats rained down from the sky every time I made progress, rewarding me for sitting in the same space with a new mind; chocolate, ice cream, something to keep my mouth occupied while my brain catches up to the place where my heart is. 'Til then, however, I have a lap full of venison snacks, Maggie's favorite, and I'm about to go walk through the kitchen. We have an infinite capacity for change. I will throw them at her feet, and hope that one day she associates me with something good.

Post-Its from the Edge

Edge of reason, edge of the universe, edge of sanity; poised on the edge of a knife, as it were, as we always are.

It happens so fast. A minute ago, I was living in Bali; hot rains poured down my face and neck, and I held Olivia's hand as we pounded the steaming gravel with our bare feet. Just a second ago, I was on a plane home from Texas, and something called the Grand Canyon yawned across the land below. I pressed my face to the window, despite the hundreds of faces who had probably done it before me; like me, wanting to see if they could muss the un-foggable with their foggy, germ breath. The flight attendant told me to please place my seat in its full upright position, which was weird, because I never put it back in the first place. I adjusted. The plane adjusted. When my ears popped, I could hear my music more clearly. I do this weird thing whenever I wear earphones, which is to periodically take them out of my ears and assess whether the music is audible to the people around me...so there I was, causally pulling in and out of my ears, caring but not caring whether someone will care that I was listening to Anais Mitchell at a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet.

The lady sitting next to me thought I couldn't see her reading over my shoulder, these letters as they spilled from my fingertips, but I did. I wrote a sentence to her, a cryptic message without the bottle, wanting to know if she react. She didn't. She did, however, open her mouth and begin speaking to her husband in Chinese, and I felt like an idiot.

It had been a long day. I woke up in Texas to Thunder and Lightning, petulant twins who wouldn't quit their whining until I peeled my head off the pillowcase, pulled my earplugs out of their sockets, and padded over to the window. The lightning purple and the thunder boom hugged one another, flashing in such short succession that I wondered why they didn't just get it over with and crack into the flowerpot outside my door. That's the funny thing about watching lightning. You know the odds are slim, but secretly, every time it strikes across the sky, you know it has to be hitting somewhere--and part of you marvels at the fact that this time, just this time, it wasn't you. I pulled my things together and drank a VitaMineral smoothie, choking down the graininess in a vain attempt to make my stomach stop its gymnastics. The planes were all delayed. We climbed into the car and waded out into the San Antonio river-roads, the water rushing up to the knees of our jeep, hinting that the day's travels would be interesting if nothing else.

"I can't promise you happiness," my Uncle Andy told her, many moons ago. "But I can promise you excitement."

I don't remember the exact point when I realized that the situation was serious; it was more of a slow burn, an accumulation of vacant traffic lights and abandoned cars. Each time we barely got through a massive puddle, we laughed nervously and presumed it would be the last one of its kind. By that point, the rain was so hard that I could barely make out the cars on the freeway--just a parade of little red ants. Red. They were going nowhere. We revved our way through the largest puddle yet, and I had the distinct sensation of bobbing. Cars aren't supposed to bob. But I thought bob, and then I thought apples, and I allowed my brain to make its little free-association game for the 45 minutes that we sat there, motionless, on the swampy freeway. We were going nowhere. From the soft-rock station, someone asked, "Alfie... what's it all about, Alfie?" and I had the knee-jerk urge to pull headphones out of my ears, something, anything to feel control for a fraction of an inch of a second. My hands made a fingerball in my lap as I prayed, prayed, prayed. A man got out of the car ahead of ours, and went from window to window with a message: we were going to have to back up. Ha! Haha! There was no getting off this freeway except for the way that we came; pause, rewind. So we did. She did, and I did by looking out the window at the cars as they pulled K turns and U turns and all sorts of alphabet turns, all of us searching for the same word: out.

And we found it. When we finally got off the freeway, the butt of the car having pushed its way back through the flood and out into the road and awayawayaway from the deepest, from the worst of it, I realized what had happened. We pulled into to the airport, knowing full well that there'd be no flying for a good, long while--but still, it was somewhere to be. It was a roof and a sound barrier against the smashing rain. My grammy held me and I laugh-cried as residual adrenaline crackled through my body. "There were angel hands on my hands," she told me. Angel hands. I floated out of the car and through security, mistaking each and every person for my long lost love. The woman in front of me dropped her driver's license and we made pointless conversation, and I would have married her if she had asked me. That's how good, how completely reckless it felt to be alive.

Earlier that week, I had watched Moore, Oklahoma collapse from the seat of FOX news, compliments of my Republican grandfather. He sat in his chair for most of the day, a plastic glass of chablis balancing on the seat of his walker. He yells at the television. He's a stereotype in other ways, too, mostly in the fact that he loves me more than most other people on the planet combined. I sat in the leather chair next to his, photo albums splayed in my lap, scrutinizing their pages for any information I might have missed before; names and faces that mean something different each time they see the light of day. Frozen moments: weddings, reunions, graduations. Babies show up and then stop being babies, or they get more hair, and more babies show up and then it all happens again. I lost hours in those pages, only coming up for air when one of the FOX faces said something especially stupid. I walked to the kitchen now and again, pouring myself glass after glass of cold kombucha. Anticipating the question, I answered. "It's fermented Chinese tea, known for its health properties. It has, um, good bacteria in it. B vitamins. Stuff." He took a breath in that stuck, briefly, in the back of his throat. He gave one of his gnarled fingers a good, hearty tap against the clicker and blinked in that perfect way of his. "I have the weirdest granddaughter," he said. And I knew that I'd love him forever.

My life that week became a festival of wondering what I'd do with my future, what I could possibly say to assure the older generation that they hadn't wasted their time in creating me. Meanwhile, the world outside the window continued to fall apart in large, flaky pieces against the sky: I called Phil in Oklahoma, trying (but failing) not to sound broken when he said he'd barely missed the storm. When I finally made it home, Santa Barbara met me at the door with a brush fire and 4.8 earthquake. A thousand Facebook statuses were born, but none bore any of the information I was searching for. What about a family code? Should we have a family code? What if someone calls and says that you've gotten into an accident, mom, and I need to come get you? What about those girls that were kidnapped for so many years? What about the natural gas leak? What about that, mom? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I drove into the visitor's parking at Vista del Monte, a retirement community where my best friend's grandmother spent her final days. For the last week, she woke in a panic, thinking the world was falling apart; in her mind, there were always fires and earthquakes. "Did I die?" she asked. "No, grandma," he told her. "You're in Santa Barbara, at Vista del Monte." Her perfectly-glossed fingers clamped over his like a mousetrap, holding him there even when her gaze could not. I sat there, my hands in my lap, smiling but not wanting her to think I was staring; hoping that, even if she couldn't register my identity, that she knew I would never want to make her unhappy. I am desperate to please: the whole week in Texas, I wanted to please with the promise of a car, the kind they advertise for on national TV, and a job that looks good at the end of a sentence. But then the TV flipped to a disaster scene, and something else overtook me. "Don't ever get to 87," my grandfather said. He meant it as a joke, but I felt my stomach sink. Will I get the option? It feels sometimes like we're dancing on eggshells, overstaying our welcome on a sold-out stage. I keep picturing one of those hooks from a silent film, the kind that appears at the corner of the frame and yanks the human off the stage. Roses at her feet.

According to the photo albums, I have to have one of three things to be real: a wedding, a baby, or a graduation. One out of three ain't so bad, but I want more. We all want more for ourselves. It's the reason we get out of bed in the morning, despite whatever greets us on our homepage. It's the reason I still touch my finger to a hot plate before picking it up with my bare hand. I still picture a world where anything is possible. When an eyelash lodges on my cheek or the clock reaches 11:11, I make a wish. I catch myself feeling selfish when I wish for anything other than the safety of my planet, for the goodness of the whole; how could I possibly think about myself at a time like this? Doesn't the world need every little bit, even my little wishes, to get by? Then again, maybe it needs me just as badly as I need it. Maybe it needs me to hold my breath as I go through a tunnel, wishing for a first kiss, believing that there is still something to believe in.

I felt that in spades at St. Anthony's Cathedral, five rows back, at the Santa Barbara High School A Cappella concert. I remember what it was like to be up there, dripping under your robes, the music making its way through your mouth like breathing. In, out. I was in the audience, but I remembered; each person up there is the king of their own universe, the epicenter of what feels like The Way Things Will Always Be. Then each one will unpack a box or three, or thirty, in a dorm room that looks like everyone else's; each asymmetrical haircut, so deliberate from the perspective of one who looks out at the audience, will blend in with the collective mohawk that is UC Berkeley. I was overwhelmed with compassion for the singers, those seniors in high school, each one more confident than the last. They have no idea what they're in for. I worry sometimes that I hit my stride in high school; I see photos and, instead of marveling at how far I've come, wonder if my eyebrows will ever look as good as they did when I was seventeen. It was a very good year. Yet no matter what, I always return to this; I look down at my finger and the ring that contains Bali, or remember the epic pain that was freshman year at Scripps, and exhale a deep sigh of relief. Even if I could, I wouldn't go back and do it all again. Even if I had all the wishes in my pocket, all the DeLoreans in the world, I'd never choose to be anywhere except right here.

Because right here, in this room, lives the Wisdom of No Escape. On the freeway in Texas, I sought comfort in the idea that I'd soon be out of the extreme weather--I'd get in a plane and fly far far away, to California, where floods and hurricanes never happen. But they do. They burn up mountains and we call them fires, but in the end, they're the same. They're a reminder that we're only ever here, just this: there aren't enough planes in the universe to stay permanently suspended, thousands of feet above the place where all the bad stuff happens. A gigantic fault line runs up my California coast, and each time I enter a new relationship, we make a silent agreement that someone, eventually, is going to hurt. It's what happens when you care. Dying, I hear, is what happens when you live.

In the car on my last night in Texas, on the way to see a stage adaptation of Picnic, my grandfather was regaling me with his opinion of various world religions. My grammy's hands tightened on the wheel. "Not to be a fatalist," she said, "But say this is the last time you're ever going to see your granddaughter. Do you really want the last thing you say to be something to do with your obstinate politics?" "No," he told her, and laughed. "You're right." So we talked about ___________. It doesn't matter, in the end, what it was. It doesn't really matter what we talked about.

I've done, and continue to do, a variety of stupid things. While shopping in Lazy Acres, I tried to fill a bulk bag with chocolate-covered goji berries... and when they dripped out slowly, one at a time, I gave the thing a hearty thwack until SHOOMP--approximately three pounds of candy exploded into the sack. This provided, what ees it you say? A conflict of interest. I was interested in the candy, but not in the $25 price tag I had inadvertently acquired. So... I left it there. My moral alarm clock started clanging away, but I left the bag of candy in the store; accumulating a year's worth of bad karma, perhaps, but making my way into the sunlit parking lot all the same. The residual fire in the air had illuminated the sky in a flush of reds and yellows, poking out from behind the Santa Ynez mountains in what only can be described as glory. Sure, I knew it was bad; but it looked so pretty. There are natural disasters, and there are deaths. There are goodbyes and hellos, neither of which has a guarantee. But there's beauty in everything. There's really and truly, beauty in everything. Jeremy said something to me in the car, and I only half heard.

"Hold on a sec. I'm distracted by the apocalypse."

And distracted I was. And distracted I am.

But it's only for a moment. Tomorrow, I'll be new.