Tell On Me
She says go to your house, and the dog nudges open with her flat face the swinging door of the pen. She says good girl, Tina, and the dog trips across her bowl of water, and looks up to confirm that it must be cleaned up. This dog is small; not in the shriveled, strident manner of a chihuahua but more like a compact, dense little version of a bigger dog. Her skin hangs loosely on her body, like a sock, and her root-beer eyes are all liquid and surprise. She’s had babies you know. It seems impossible, suggesting her previous owner’s propensity for inflicting a curious kind of cruelty. Anything that comes out of her body could be no bigger than a cigarette butt. But the scars on her pigmented nipples testify to her maternal history. I’m sure she’ll do fine, but just in case. There are post-it notes on various surfaces throughout the house.
Tony, who is Antoinette to others at the firm, is a sort of friend and a client this week. She is also small, with rubbery yellow curls and wide grey eyes like cracked glass. She doesn’t get along with women in a platonic sense- has a history of victimization of some sort. My first week at the office, we share a wet, creamy salad at the “welcome party” and discuss- without noting the obvious irony- our mutual feelings about young adult women. After that, we meet occasionally over mocktails and Caribbean food to tentatively tap at friendship. I am often afraid of her firm boundaries and rejection of discomfort. She approves of my New Year’s resolution to try and be less intense.
Three months ago, Tony adopted Tina from some kind of not-for-profit, independently run Instagram adoption service. She has not left her since. This weekend, Tony is going to a lesbian bachelorette party in Destin, where there will be many women. She says that sexual orientation definitely makes a difference.
I’ve sent out a message on the firm’s Whatsapp chain to offer up my pet-sitting services over the holidays. One man says a woman of many talents, and I wonder why he doesn’t just reach out and touch my breast. He might as well have. Tony says I didn’t know that you were a pet-sitter! This strikes me as comical somehow. As though I were an actress in an improv group, taking on a temporary yet archetypal identity. I am a pet-sitter.
Tony leaves a note. It says: Welcome home. Thank you so much for watching Tina. The house is yours. Eat all of the food in the fridge. The wifi is on the modem. Remember to tape the key to the door before you leave. I realize then that she expects me not only to feed and walk the dog, but also to use her toilet and her bed, to provide the dog with companionship and camaraderie. I wonder if she is thinking about a fine layer of my hair and dust and skin coating the surfaces of her home like a stubborn mist. I wonder if I will be able to sleep here. With this thought, I am swimming out in a cold black ocean of unfathomable depths- just how deep is too deep?
The day that Tony leaves for Destin, I am drinking fizzy, foaming lemon drinks at the Bakery Bar and watching a football game that I don’t understand. Because I am ambivalent about the outcome, I drink many of these throughout the afternoon. In the bar, there is a woman who loudly proclaims to the bartender that she is happily awakening sober in her car every morning. She left the married man behind and collects disability checks at a P.O. box around the corner. Her ankles are swollen and laced with greenish veins like tangled seaweed. I wonder if, beneath her hat, she has any hair.
When the night settles into itself, resting its elbows on the hot, pockmarked pavement, it is time to visit Tina. Once, twice, I misplace the key. The empty loft smells of pine needles and unopened books. Tina runs around her pen in concentric circles, leaking droplets of urine in geographic patterns across the hardwood floor. Okay, Tina. She retrieves a purple thong from beneath her zebra-printed bed and brandishes it proudly. Okay.
Tina is all business once she’s outside. Walk her to the corner of Carrollton Avenue and she begins to shake and shimmy out of her loose collar, instinctively itching to remain in close proximity to the only room she’s ever known. She poops right away, no bigger than a cigarette butt, leaving me with no reason to linger outside. A homeless man with a sign that says Won’t lie, need a beer says he’s vicious isn’t he. It doesn’t much matter if I think it’s funny, it would be strange not to laugh. Tina is startled by the sound. So am I.
Upon our return, Tina does a clumsy dance around the carpet, undoubtedly expecting food. This should be easy. With food and water, a purple thong for chewing, Tina can surely withstand an evening alone in the comfort of her house. I’ve got nightly rituals to attend to, a new water-colored set of Egyptian cotton sheets recently purchased from Goodwill, a plan to write something, anything in the morning. She’ll be fine. I wait until she is immersed in eating, and back up slowly on muffled footsteps, through the kitchen, out the door. I don’t want her to see me leave. At the sound of the sticky door popping open like chewing gum, she pauses and her ears perk up like flags. She listens to me leaving, but does not look up from the bowl.
It feels, that night, like I don’t sleep at all. Outside, the lilting sounds of people talking to their dogs, the faint smell of plastic and car exhaust, the 2 A.M. clinking of bottles and clanging of curse words- all keep me tethered to the world of the living. I think of the dog that I have locked in a plastic pen, of blooming fires and the slippery shadows of nighttime intruders. I think of Tony, sleeping between sand-strewn sheets, oblivious to the maelstrom of catastrophes unfolding in her apartment, thousands of miles away.So at four in the morning, I pick up the key and misplace it, once, twice as I am getting ready to leave the house. I pick up the key and squeeze it at an angle, as though attempting to turn a lock in the lines of my palm. I squeeze it until the blood is hot and sweet in my hand. I squeeze it until the very moment I open the door to Tina, who is sleeping without a sound, and has not peed on the floor.
