Pet Peeves

“I had a dream last night that someone told me eighty percent of lesbians have five-letter names,” says my sister Shannon on the phone. “And I think it’s true. Ellen, Rosie, Jodie, my friend Marcy… I know a lesbian named Heather, but I think she’s part of the other twenty percent.”
“Maybe it’s just eighty percent of the lesbians you know,” I say.
“That’s why I’m telling you. You can test it out better than I can, since you’ve got a bigger lesbian pool.”
“I can already report that you’re wrong.”
“Even still, I know you’ll be counting letters in names all day.”
Damn it, she’s right. I already am. Cindy, Laura, Katie… Hmm…
“SIMON!” Shannon screams into the phone.
“Jesus,” I say. “Warn me before you do that.”
“If I don’t find this damn dog before five o’ clock, my husband’s gonna kill me. I don’t understand how he got out.”
My sister is wandering through the woods behind her house, once again searching for one of her giant, unmanageable dogs. Their great escapes are a fairly common occurrence at her house, sometimes stretching well into the next day, before she or her husband will find their pony-sized canine rolling in a ditch somewhere, covered in mud, delighted by his freedom.
She brought this on herself.

They acquired each of their three dogs when they were tiny little puppies- adorable fuzzy little things who would gnaw on your finger and make cute puppy sounds. Then they grew into the hulking monsters they are today, but apparently nobody clued them in on the fact that they aren’t tiny little puppies anymore. They’re not stupid, really, they just lack self-awareness.
I grew up with a series of malcontented cats- fuzzy, angry lumps of fur that only seemed to bond with my father. One survives to this day. Chloe is nearly eighteen, arthritic and wicked. She hates my nephew, but is shrewd enough to recognize she cannot eliminate him without upsetting my parents, so she avoids him altogether. Cats don’t really DO anything, a feature my friend Slutty Mandy considers a fine selling point. She has two of them, and apparently they enjoy companionable silence. That idea bores me to tears, which is why I wanted a dog: An action pet. I would name him Benjamin. We could go for walks, and he’d greet me at the door, and do that thing where he sits beside me and puts his paw on my leg, saying, “Hey, Topher. I love you, man.” My dog-ownership fantasies stretch all the way back to childhood and are incredibly elaborate. I knew I’d have one eventually, but whenever I reported that to my boyfriend Preppy, he’d give me a funny look and say, “Okay… sure.”
Now I understand why. While we’re in the holding pattern of purchasing a house, Preppy and I have been living at his former home in Smyrna with his old roommates… and their dogs. Brutus is a Great Dane, with a powerful tail that always manages to whack one’s testicles as soon as one’s guard is down, rendering one breathless for about ninety seconds. Kaiser is a “Standard Poodle”, which confuses me because I thought the standard for poodles was small and yippy, with little bows on their ears. Kaiser defies this logic, standing nearly as tall as Brutus, though thankfully without a ball-busting tail.
They wrestle. They bark. They knock me over in the kitchen. They growl at the walls and bark at the pizza guy. They drop chew toys on my clean sheets.

And they slobber, leaving doorknobs dripping and lakes of saliva on the floor, awaiting unsuspecting bare feet.
This, I am now told, is the stark reality of being the parent of a dog. This isn’t to say the animals aren’t loveable. They’re really well-behaved, you know, for dogs. But it never occurred to me that in living with a canine, I would be sharing space with something that is messier and requires more attention than I do.
That simply cannot happen.
So my childhood fantasy of walks, rawhide bones, and the paw on the knee is tucked away, replaced by a new fantasy: one of clean floors, quiet nights, and being able to move freely about the house without one hand in front of my nuts. And as I listen to my sister crunching through the leaves, cursing her four-legged nemesis, I revel in the fact that this is not my future. That leaves me plenty of time for more important pursuits. Like counting lesbians.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

When Preppy agreed to go on a weeklong vacation to a Smoky Mountain cabin with his family, we didn’t know we were going to be homeless. So now, in the midst of us living out of boxes and negotiating the rugged terrain of buying our first house, he has to leave. Since we’ve been crashing in Smyrna, and I don’t drive, that means I’ll be sleeping on the sofa at my pal Slutty Mandy’s until Preppy’s return. Now we’re both packing suitcases, which lately we’ve pretty much elevated to hobby status.
My family rarely took trips when I was a kid, for which I am eternally grateful.

That sort of forced togetherness in confined spaces is really just pulling the pin out of the grenade and waiting. Eventually, there’s gonna be an explosion. When I picture Preppy in a four-door truck with his father, mother, grandmother, two nieces, and a small dog, I feel whatever the opposite of envy is.
But Preppy is a peacemaker, one of those people who can diffuse a potentially bloodcurdling situation and get everybody laughing, which is probably why his mother was so insistent upon his coming along.
“They’ll be here to pick me up tomorrow morning at seven,” says Preppy. “And I hate to ask you to get up, but… Mama said they had to stop like every ten feet to let Granny or the dog or the girls go to the bathroom, so they’ll probably need to come in. I’ll need to straighten up.”
“The house looks fine.”
“No. I have to straighten up. My sister hasn’t told her kids about me. Or about you.”
He gestures to the photographs of us together throughout the room. We’d put them out so it would feel more like home.
“Well,” I say. “You do what you need to do.”
Preppy studies my expression, but says nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I continue. “It’s your family, not mine. It’s not my place to give an opinion here.”
“Thank you,” he says, and we resume packing and a new subject.
The nieces in question are a couple of pre-teens, who are unfortunately falling victim to the common parental misconception that children are incapable of evaluating and forming opinions about the people in their lives. I’m certain they’ve noticed Uncle Preppy isn’t married, has never had a girlfriend, and isn’t the hunt-and-fish type of man they know back in Mississippi. If they don’t know right now, they will soon, and all this secrecy is accomplishing is cementing the idea in their minds that something is wrong with him, which deserves to be hidden. Those girls aren’t being protected from anything. They’re just being given something to be very confused about later.
But Preppy is a peacemaker.

He wants this trip to go as smoothly as possible, and this is one concession he’s willing to make in the pursuit of his goal. I am not a peacemaker. I am usually referred to as a troublemaker. The anti-peacemaker. I tend to have very strong opinions about what is right, and what is wrong, and if it makes people happy, so much the better. But if it makes them unhappy, that is their cross to bear, because it’s still what’s right.
When I wake up the next morning, Preppy is already showered and dressed. The pictures of us are all missing. I could say something. I could say, “This hurts,” or, “This is the first time I feel like you’re not taking my side.” But I’ve got twenty minutes left with my man before we spend a week apart, and that’s not how I want to spend it.
I report on all of this to Slutty Mandy as I’m putting sheets on her sofa that night.
“It’s hard for me,” I say. “I want the people who love me to pick sides, and I want that side to be mine.”
“It’s not about sides,” she replies. “It could be an issue of timing. If his sister’s got some homophobic issues, he might have determined the best time to address it wasn’t with her daughters while she’s not even there. Picture if all you wanted was five minutes to take a pee and instead you find out your uncle’s a queer.”
“But you agree it should be addressed.”
“Of course. Later. And I’m very proud of you for not choosing to make it an issue at that precise moment. You’re showing progress, my love.”
So, I might not be a peacemaker, but I live with one, and I’m learning. Slowly.