How Did You Get This Number Page 12

  “Gross,” I whispered reflexively, repulsed but transfixed by the colors of it all.

  “The price of beauty, right?” She looked me up and down, ready to commiserate, but was clearly disappointed by what she found. Which was a college student in ripped jeans and clogs. I hadn’t plucked my eyebrows for a week, and a graveyard of hair elastics formed around my wrist, many with hairs tangled in them. She let go of my shoulder and leaned on the marble sink instead.

  “The pinkie’s the worst. What do you think that thing is?”

  “A wart?”

  “No, it’s not a wart.”

  She was incredulous. If I was going to be this unkempt and slovenly, the least I could do was be an expert in foot deformations.

  “Maybe it’s a blister. Have you tried popping it?”

  “You know, that’s probably what it is.” She hopped on one foot while trying to get a closer look at the other.

  “You don’t think I have to go to the doctor to pop a blister, do I? I can’t have strangers touching my feet.”

  “I say pop it. It’s just a layer of skin, it won’t scar. I’ve done it before.”

  “Really?” She hopped.

  “It’s a strangely rewarding thing to do.”

  I then watched as my words morphed in slow motion from suggestion to invitation. She unzipped a pocket inside her bag, produced a safety pin, and proudly handed it to me.

  “Care to do the honors?”

  “No, thank you.” I handed her a paper towel.

  I got out onto the sidewalk and leaned against the jeweled windows of Harry Winston, furiously scribbling down the scene I had just witnessed. My paper was due in just a few days. The sky was as dark as a rich lady’s big toe. I had been writing in my notebook since noon and was beginning to test the resolve of my dromedary-like bladder. A bad habit I had retained from my hall-pass days. So, after a day of hanging out in bathrooms and paradoxically never going to the bathroom, I ducked into one at random.

  It was in the back of a Chinese restaurant. I put on my best “I ate here earlier and left my scarf in the back booth” face. Against a pastel wall of the restroom were cheaply framed photographs of vegetable lo mein, whole fish fillets, and an especially unappetizing composition involving egg drop soup and a whole octopus. I’ve never met a restaurant photograph of food I liked, and these were no exception. They were hung directly above the toilets, as if meant to alert future civilizations to our digestive process. I popped into the stall farthest from the door and slid the lock with my sleeve yanked over my left hand. I faced a line of graffiti poetry I hadn’t seen since summer camp: If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be neat and wipe the seat. As a kid, this was etched in ballpoint on wood, just for the sake of the rhyme. As an adult, it struck me as a rather helpful tip. Thank you, Midtown restaurant toilet, for acknowledging that you are too disgusting for direct contact with human flesh and must be hovered over.

  As I finished up, I noticed two new sets of feet, one much smaller than the other, in the adjoining stall. The voice belonging to the larger set was narrating.

  “So you’ve wiped and pulled your pants up. Now what?”

  “I flush!”

  “You flush!”

  I ducked my head down. The larger feet were wearing expensive-looking gold sandals with beads that ran down the center of the foot like a spine. The smaller set bounced up and down, periodically causing red lights to explode from the rubber heels.

  So many years and miles away from the second-floor girls’ room where Zooey Ellis used her first tampon, her voice was unmistakable.

  My mouth dropped open. Was she not supposed to be in Arizona, fending off scorpions and practicing her golf swing? It’s difficult to conceive of the geography of the whole wide world when you’re in middle school. When your classmates move away, it seems impossible that they could ever come back. As if the world’s events since have happened to you but not to them. It’s the reason you can look at your middle-school yearbook and still see your peers. But someone else’s middle-school yearbook looks like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. Did I expect to find a prison anklet as I looked askance at the feet? It’s not like the woman was under house arrest. She was allowed to leave the state. And to breed, it would seem.

  Zooey’s voice had such a visceral effect on me, I sat directly on the toilet seat and lifted my legs. I kept them like that, in midair. When I used to have flying dreams as a kid, I would never go higher than this. In the dreams, I would run to gain momentum and then tuck my legs up. As long as I squeezed my abdominal muscles, I would be able to hover a few feet above the ground. I remember telling Zooey this once while we were on the cafeteria lunch line. She said my lack of soaring meant I had a limited subconscious and easily thwarted goals.

  I heard Zooey and mini-Zooey exit their stall. I had a choice to make. Did I want to run into her again? If I did, I had better act fast. What if I waited too long and missed her or, worse, what if I waited so long to exit the stall that it looked like I was having some sort of gastrointestinal emergency? All my life’s accomplishments fade away, and on the subject of how I’m doing, Zooey’s only reference is that I have diarrhea in Chinese restaurants.

  “Zooey Ellis,” I said, almost accusatory.

  As it is with anyone who has made an impact on your life, her first and last name are inseparable. The metal door bounced against the frame behind me.

  Zooey had not changed much. She had the same freckled face, inky hair, and blue eyes. There were lines around her neck but none around her eyes, which I took to mean she had been doing little smiling and much awkward looking down at the ground. But she was beautiful. If this were a movie, she wouldn’t have been. Her feet would have been a red herring. From the ankles up, she would have packed on the pounds and developed some adult acne. Maybe there would be an oversized scorpion tattoo jiggling on her upper arm. She would have giddily told me about her repetitive days cataloging defective remote controls for the cable company and how she plays our video yearbook on the flat-screen TV at the bowling alley, where she always has her birthday parties.

  Alas, this was not a movie. Zooey Ellis was well under two hundred pounds, smelled fine, and was enrolled in college. But she did have a kid with her. Her daughter was an exact replica, except blond and significantly shorter. She held on to her mother’s leg with one hand and hid behind her calf. My thoughts were especially graphic when I looked at this little girl, as my strongest memory of Zooey Ellis pertained to the logistics of her being a woman. The whole phrase “guess Zooey learned to stick more than a tampon up there” passed through my brain like a news crawl.

  “Oh my God, Sloane, hi!” And she hugged me, the miniature human still attached to her calf. “Do you live here?”

  Do I live here? Do I live here? Damn skippy I live here, you Marie Antoinette, you.

  “I’m uptown.”

  “Ah, I’m just visiting Emma here.”

  The child called Emma had since dislodged herself from Zooey’s leg and was preoccupied with jumping to trigger the sensor on the automatic paper towel dispenser.

  “Is she...?”

  “Mine? Christ, no, she’s not mine. She’s my sister’s.”

  I had completely forgotten that Zooey had an older sister. She certainly acted like an only child. My relationship with Zooey is not unlike a bag of potato chips that, once the chips were freed from their bloated prison of air, is about ninety percent space and ten percent chips. It was true that I had known her for more than ten years. But within that ten years, I probably had about half as many solid hours’ worth of quality interaction with her. And not unlike diet potato chips, those solid times had consistently left me feeling guilty and given me a stomachache. So I was surprised when, for the second time in our sporadic relationship, Zooey Ellis proceeded to open up that dam in her face and babble to the most unlikely of candidates: me.

  The fact that Emma wasn’t hers was pure coincidence. Since last we left off, Zooey had become a bit of a
harlot. She had not one but two abortions, one of which resulted from a one-night stand with her best friend’s boyfriend. She had gotten into drugs in Arizona, which seemed vaguely glamorous to me at first, incurring images of road trips and peyote, but significantly less so when Zooey described her abusive relationship with her dealer, who was also the assistant manager of a Whataburger. When not being smacked around or impregnated, Zooey found her “special moments” at the University of Arizona, majoring in geography.

  “Is that like cartography?” I asked, wondering if there was a use for such a thing anymore. I was under the impression that the world was kind of done, that we had accepted its parameters and moved on. Like ashtrays. Or ketchup. Or bricks. These things were about as good as they were going to get.

  “No,” she corrected me. “It’s more about maps.”

  There was a pause. Where was this useful education back when I was spouting theories about California’s coastlineonly population? We stood there smiling at Emma, using her as a visual crutch. The board game of our lives turned out to be significantly more complicated than the actual board game of Life. I made a note to myself to patent a Girl Talk for adults. You could spin the wheel, have some unprotected sex with an inappropriate partner, and your number of abortions would correspond to the birth month of the girl next to you. Let us not befriend December babies!

  “Aunt Zooey, look,” said Emma, who was busy pretending industrial-pink hand soap was “fairy guts.”

  Zooey went to collect her niece. It was time to go. The bathroom, after all, is a transient space. Not a place but a place in between. There’s a reason the bathroom fixture in my apartment is host to the only lightbulb I’ve never had to change. People are not meant to dawdle in places like this. Besides, what more did I have to say to Zooey Ellis? The Zooey I knew and loathed was back in my suburban bedroom, her face pressed like a flower in my middle-school yearbook, where we were both living in the past and playing catch-up.

  As I turned to leave, I heard a faint ting by our feet. The lipstick pepper spray had fallen out of my pocket and rolled back and forth between the grimy moats of tile caulk. Emma picked it up. Already trained in the lipstick arts, she immediately took the cap off. I lunged for it, but Emma retreated beneath the sinks, giggling between the corroded pipes. I crouched down.

  “It’s not a big deal.” Zooey laughed, and as she did a piece of the old her emerged. The piece that would gleefully make you lap up water like a dog and stick plastic on your face and leave grammatically self-defeating ransom notes in your locker. And still any offense you took would be just that: something you chose to take, a fault buried deep within, a crack that began with the insecurity in your gut and ran straight up to your tear ducts. How uptight and lame I was, squatting on the bathroom floor!

  “Yeah, that’s pepper spray.”

  Zooey’s eyes widened.

  “Give me that, Emma,” she gasped, not squatting but getting on her hands and knees like a dog on a grimy bathroom floor, grasping at this miniature version of herself.

  “That’s not a toy.”

  An Abbreviated Catalog of Tongues

  Name something.”

  These are the two words that invariably leave my mouth when the subject of house pets arises. Which it does, and quite often, and not without a twinge of competition. I’ll see your gerbil and raise you a hamster. I’ll see your bunny and raise you a ferret. I’ll see your Burmese python and run. To what end this conversation is aiming, I have no idea. It would seem the winner is just one can of Resolve and a “Hang in there!” poster away from Grey Gardens. But I feel compelled to participate in the game anyway. So long as I don’t play with people who grew up on ostrich farms. I can’t compete with an ostrich. Nothing beats an ostrich.

  From the day I arrived on this earth to the day I left for college, my parents lived by the philosophy that it was better to have pooped and scooped than never to have pooped at all. They acted as both host and executioner to just about every animal they could squeeze through the front door.

  In junior high, when my sister began to question the long-term viability of her first steady boyfriend, she noted that he lived in a house with six siblings and no pets.

  “Not even a sea monkey?”

  “Not even,” she said, as if his parents were sending him to school shoeless, crack cocaine in the lunchbox.

  “But how does that work?”

  “I guess their family just forms attachments to each other.”

  “Sounds awful.”

  How could she trust a man with no pets? How else does one learn about love and sympathy, about death and biology? Pets were such an integral part of our childhoods. Even those who had come and gone before I was alive were immortalized in my sister’s scrapbook, a dog skull and crossbones on the cover. They were as legendary to me as historical figures.

  To say our family had a lot of pets when I was growing up is an understatement. A lot of the people had a lot of pets a lot of the time. But to say that our answering machine informed callers they had reached “the family zoo,” that the bottles of animal medications outnumbered the bottles of human medications, that the local vet dedicated a collage of Polaroids to our brood, is accurate. We were not an Eau de Cat Piss house, but we were not messing around: Yes to the cat, to the dog, to the rabbit, to the guinea pig. Yes to the frog, to the spider, to the crab, to the bird. Yes to the iguana, to the turtle, to the lizard. No to the giraffe. Where the fuck would we get a giraffe?

  Whatever the reason, giraffes are the universal extreme. If you claim you’re packing half an ark’s worth, the average person will spit back “giraffe” at the same rate they pick 7 when presented with a range of 1 through 10. No one knows why. You would think a Siberian tiger or one really pissedoff monkey could do more damage to a living room. I can only assume it has something to do with potential chandelier entanglements or the cartoonish idea of a head shooting up through the attic, munching on grandma’s wedding dress. Moths again? Nope, that’s just Spotty, the thousand-pound ruminant we keep in the basement. Or else it’s the British colonial fantasy of wildlife. A Vanity Fair giraffe that ambled about on our “grounds.” But our lives were never quite that exotic. We were just one small family. And to say that we loved our animals is not wrong, but to say that we attempted to love them is more right.

  FIRST, THE FISH

  A rational parental response to a nine- and a fourteen-year-old’s tears shed over a dead goldfish is to stop buying goldfish. My parents decided to up the ante. They installed a four-by-four-foot saltwater fish tank in the middle of our living room.

  It should be noted that although this was the 1980s, we did not live in a particularly 1980s house. The fish tank, unaccompanied by leather sofas or miniature Zen sand gardens, was severely out of place. We had no fiber-optic sculptures or splatter paint of any kind. The only neon in sight would come years later, and was actually outside the house. As a joke, my sister’s friend installed a pink neon frame around the license plate of my sister’s car, which lit up along with the headlights. The car was tan. It was never meant to be in such close proximity to anything so aggressively pink. But my sister developed a Fluorescent Nightingale complex toward the device. I had no such affection for the number-obscuring glow, which brought me both ridicule and a vehicle violation ticket. I was a child of the ‘80s but a teenager of the ’90s. I spoke flannel, not glitter. When I asked my father to cut the wiring, I was met with an Aww, but look how happy it makes her! This identical tone would later be used in response to our house cat vigorously licking her anus on my lap.

  The fish tank, however, I didn’t mind. It was our one tribute to the decade, our sole acknowledgment of that impulse to capture the exotic corners of the world, shrink them down, and sell them. Instead of having vials of ash from Mount St. Helens and chunks of the Berlin Wall, we had clown fish, sea anemones, starfish, tiger fish, tangs, and that disc-shaped yellow fish I can never remember the name of. Oh, and sea horses. The mortality rate amo
ng sea horses is not to be believed. Because the difference between a dead sea horse and a living sea horse is imperceptible, selling dead sea horses would make a very good pet store scam.

  Certainly it would have been better than what our local pet store was actually doing. Which was putting chemical drops into the tanks of transparent fish to knock them out and painting hot-pink and -blue stripes on their unconscious bodies. Unless you are Assyrian, which I doubt you are, you are not allowed to tattoo, paint, or pierce your animals. This includes people who dress their pets up for Halloween. Stuffed reindeer antlers are a gateway drug. Before you know it, you’ll be roofie-ing your rabbits just to glue extra cotton to their butts, watching the confusion unfold once they regain consciousness. You are a sick, sick person.

  “We can do your initials if you want,” the pet store guy offered.

  We had just gotten the tank, and I was still learning about fish. It was an educational tool and a time-suck in one. I grimaced at the engraving proposition. They didn’t have to anesthetize the roses in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to paint them. That’s because they were plants. And fictional. And plants.

  My father was across the tank showroom with the owner, enmeshed in a conversation about the hazards of introducing a blowfish to a narrow tank.

  “No, thank you,” I said, turning to face the dye-smeared fish. They were clear from gill to gill except for their bold artificial stripes. If you blurred your eyes, the effect was a tank full of floating computer cursors.

  The pet store guy shrugged, mildly offended.

  “My middle name starts with a G,” I explained.

  I could barely write a cursive G on paper. It seemed an especially cruel letter to inflict on a fish.