Ten Times Sadie
The night I start being a dog for Mom, the two of us eat McDonald’s on the porch. Mom stares at the ceramic dog bowl near the sliding door, empty except for a copper ribbon of wandering ants. I swallow a bite of burger, get down on my hands and knees next to her chair, and begin panting.
Oh, Goob, she says. She puts her hand under my chin and scratches gently. I let out a small yip, testing her commitment, and roll my eyes up at the waxy wrappers on the table.
You hungry, boy? I don’t mind being a boy for her. I whimper a reply. She holds a soggy, bent french fry in front of my nose and commands me to sit. I nibble it from her fingers, but then her face sharpens, and she swats my nose. Bad boy, Goob.
Daddy got Harvey in the split. He said, It’s the kid or the dog, Margaret. I’m not leaving here alone again. Mom’s eyes had lingered a moment on Harvey hunched in the foyer; an idiot spaniel with rows of sticktights caught up in his greasy ear fur, toenails like tarantulas, and a hot pink cyst in the corner of his left eye that made it look like his face was blowing a bubble. I stood in the kitchen with a soda can halfway to my lips. Why had it taken so long for her to answer?
An hour later, Daddy peeled out of the driveway, kicking up a spray of gravel—Harvey’s dumb head hanging out the passenger window of the little blue pickup truck—leaving me and Mom for the last time.
For many nights, I pretend not to hear things—not the gears moving in the grandfather clock standing sentry in the hall, not the dull tapping of moths against my bedroom window. All the little night irritations I normally use as an excuse to crawl between them in their big bed have become easier to brave now that I am a dog, though it is impossible to ignore the whimpers coming from the bathroom where Mom lies in her Jacuzzi tub, staring at the ceiling, whispering smoke secrets into the steam. When it seems like the night crying will never end, I crawl to the side of the tub squeaking an old rubber bone in my mouth and drop it in the water.
It makes Mom happy to have a dog again. She washes the ants out of Harvey’s dish and pours my cereal and milk into it. She empties cans of rainbow-hued fruit cocktail into it. If I whine while she talks on the phone, she points to items in the room for me to fetch. A sock. A Reader’s Digest. Her hot pink lighter. The nights get softer. I curl next to her on the sofa watching women on Dynasty slap their husbands’ faces and then slap the faces of each other’s husbands while her fingers stroke soft lines down my nose.
After two weeks without Harvey, she buys me a purple collar and has a tag made with my dog name etched on it. Goob. Mom has stopped crying at night in the Jacuzzi tub. She lets me be a dog outside, in front of the neighbors even, and she only swats my nose with a rolled-up newspaper when I growl. But when Nelson moves in across the street, she stops letting me sleep in her bed and starts referring to Daddy as Your Father.
She’s pulling weeds in the flower bed when she first sees Nelson spraying his Corvette with the hose. I am digging myself a dirt hole to lie in when I hear her make a soft noise in the back of her throat. I shield my eyes with my hand to look at what she is so distracted by. The sun is a peeled tangerine in the sky glazing everything it touches, including Nelson’s chest as he peels off his shirt in slow-motion. Mom smooths a curl of dark hair behind her ears with her forearm, then shoos me into the house to wash my paws. I leave the soap dirty and the sink dirty, and the towel crumpled up on the rod. I circle around, around, around, around before I lie down on the cool linoleum by the glass door to watch her, watching Nelson washing his car.
It’s July now. We’re padding across the street to Nelson’s lanai—barefoot, beach towels slung over our shoulders. Mom is wearing perfume and lipstick the same shade of pink as her bikini. Mom says if we’re polite guests, Nelson might invite us to ride on the sailboat he keeps under that tarp one day. Nelson looks a little like My Father, but taller and with a gold rope chain around his neck like some guy on a billboard for cigarettes. He’s on a lounge chair by the pool when we open the screen door and let ourselves in. Nelson has his tawny arms folded perfectly so his muscles show, his fingers laced together under a jet-black slick of hair. My Father’s hair is also black, but more like a soft cloud on top of his head. My Father wears shirts with pearly snaps down the front, jeans worn white at the knees, and boots that zip up the side. Nelson hardly wears shirts or shoes at all.
I am not allowed to Goob at Nelson’s. No barking or panting or begging. Scratching fleas is off-limits. We make a plate of cream cheese and olive sandwiches with cellophane squeezing the white bread down shiny on top. Eat like a girl, Mom says, licking cream cheese off her fingers in our kitchen. Talk like a girl. She won’t let me wear my purple collar.
Mom puts her hand on Nelson’s elbow. Their bodies glisten with oils. Rows of tanned back fat squeeze between the woven vinyl of long, mildewed chairs. Mom adjusts herself so that the undersides of her thighs are smooth. She swipes at a pearly drop of sweaty makeup while Nelson’s eyes are closed. I am bored already, dog-paddling back and forth from the shallow-end steps to the deep-end ladder. I emerge from the pool and shake, starting with my head, then my shoulders and arms and hips. My long yellow hair lashes across my face and sticks in slices. I am a menace.
Nelson scrapes his chair closer to Mom’s, and a serrated rumble starts in my chest. I want to kick over the potted ficus and toss the full ashtray in this sailboat guy’s face. I cannon-ball a big splash over them instead.
She wears me out, Mom says. They aren’t looking at each other anymore. Just facing up, water droplets shimmering on their skin, both smiling with their eyes closed. I face down in the water, spread my limbs out like a starfish. I play dead while the Mandrell Sisters harmonize on the stereo, but nobody calls an ambulance or jumps in after me or even bats an eye until I am standing over them whining for directions to the toilet.
Nelson’s bathroom looks as if an old woman decorated it, instead of a grown man who sells used boats for a living. My bathing suit is dripping on a darling peach bath mat. Oil paintings of flowers hang on the peach walls. I open the top drawer of the cabinet to discover a single, brown mouse turd sleeping on top of a stack of folded washcloths. Above the seashell soaps and flecks of dried toothpaste, I startle at a girl looking back at me from the mirror. The whites of her eyes are pink. I lay a cheek to the wall, listening for a mouse heartbeat. I lean close, so close to the mirror that I feel cool glass on my nose and see the fine down of hair above the corners of my lips. Hello, Goob. The girl and I lick each other’s tongues. I unleash a forbidden howl while letting a bladder’s worth of pee run down my leg onto the floor.
Back by the pool I ignore the fresh shimmer of oil coating Mom’s skin and climb on top of her. She is sun-hot and smells like a pineapple. When I lie with my feet between hers, my head fits just under her chin. She is listening to Nelson talk about a speeding ticket. She says, I didn’t realize you can get pulled over in the Gulf. I sync my breathing with hers, close my eyes, and concentrate on matching the beats of our hearts.
The ticket story takes forever, but finally Nelson says it’s beer time and goes inside. Mom wants to get up from the lounger, but I stiffen on top of her, compelling a new heaviness into my body. I am a Saint Bernard. I am a Great Dane. When Nelson returns with drinks, he hands me a red can and then presses a silver one against Mom’s neck. She shrieks and her body thrashes under me. The shriek turns into a wide-open laugh, but it’s too late. My mouth is already clamped around the hairy meat of his hand. He curses and jumps away. This is the best thing that has ever happened.
Mom is all apologies as she wraps her towel around me too tightly. She’s still having a hard time, she says to Nelson in a voice that is not her voice. A crescent of marks turns from red to purple where my teeth had been. Suntan oil coats my tongue. We leave the sandwiches and Mom carries me home on her back so I don’t step on any sand spurs. No, this is the best thing that has ever happened.
I’m not invited to swim anymore. From now on, only Mom is invited to Nelson’s house. And only very late at night. She pretends to be asleep and pretends she believes I am asleep on Harvey’s old cushion next to the bed. The mattress twangs, the bedspread whispers away from her body. The sliding door grinds open and shut on its sandy track. I sneak to watch as she spirits across the gravel road and disappears into the amber glow of Nelson’s stupid, old lady house.
While Mom is gone I am a coyote skulking around our dim rooms—eating snack cakes, hiding the wrappers underneath wet coffee filters in the trash can. I dial zero on the phone to hear the operator say the precise time. Eleven Twenty-two Pee Em. I do math homework in the bathroom. Eleven Forty-one Pee Em. I use Mom’s eyelash curler and spray all of the perfumes on top of her dresser. Eleven Fifty-six Pee Em. I shred stacks of mail with my teeth. Eleven Fifty-eight Pee Em. Gather all of the spit in my mouth and let it drool into her favorite patent leather pumps. Twelve Oh-six Ay Em.
Sometimes she is gone for an hour and sometimes I get so tired waiting for her to return I fall asleep for real. My bad-dog messes are already cleaned up when I wake in the morning.
The night I decide to wait outside for her to come home, there is a strange car next to Nelson’s Corvette. I sit on a square of concrete in the dark, shivering in the new season’s chill. The sago palm makes dry clapping sounds in the breeze. I fold myself up and squeeze my legs together, stretching my T-shirt over them. The soft jersey snags against the yellow calluses that have formed on my knees since I became a dog.
She hasn’t gone inside this time. Instead, she’s just looking in the windows of the strange car and then cupping her hands around her face to see in the long pane of glass by the front door. I wonder if anyone else on the street is watching her sneak. Our porch light is off. The moths are lost somewhere in the dark too.
Shit, Goob. She nearly trips over me on her way back inside.
I stand quickly, aware of a dull ache in my legs as they stretch to their length. I’ve forgotten. For a second, I am a girl again. A soft, high noise comes from my throat. Almost a whistle. But my mouth won’t let it out. Moonlight glistens off the wetness in her eyes, and I think maybe she is going to cry or tell me she’s sorry for leaving me alone again. Maybe she is going to take me inside and put her hands around my cold feet or run me a hot bath. Maybe she is going to do something else, but she slaps me instead. Once—hard across my face—like I am one of the husbands on Dynasty. My hand flies to the place on my burning cheek.
Go to your room. Her voice is her voice. Your own room.
When she slides open the door, the wooden handle catches the vertical blinds and the plastic slats sway together as she waits for me to go in ahead of her.
Tomorrow she will pick me up from school and there will be a greasy bag of McDonald’s waiting and a fuzzy white puppy snoozing in the back seat. Mom will tell me this dog is going to be the dog now. We’ll eat cheeseburgers and watch made-up women with stiff hairdos on TV, and Mom will feed the puppy french fries while she makes a list of all the names she thinks the puppy will like. Candy. Lady. Sunshine. Rosie. She’ll tear a slice of paper off the yellow pad and tell me to write names too, but the only one I’ll be able to think of is my own. I’ll write it ten times down the page.
Stephanie Meade Gresham is an ex-Floridian living with her family in Portland, Oregon. Her essays and fiction have been published in Entropy Magazine, New South, X-R-A-Y, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Pigeon Pages NYC. She is an MFA candidate at Portland State University.