Desire blinds me. I get down on the floor and tug on her collar. And just like that, as her reluctant paws slide along the floor like a Tom and Jerry cartoon sequence, everything changes.
* * *
At first, I only wear the dog inside the house, when no one else is home. It seems harmless enough. An improvised self-care remedy that instantly works better than any psycho-pharmaceutical or baked good ever has. When school starts again right after Labor Day, I drive Teddy in the morning, then come home and pace, avoiding the stacks of bills and my work. But I can’t ignore the dog. I eye her, asleep peacefully on the floor—and try to resist—really, I do—I have a second cup of coffee, check my email and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram accounts twenty more times, knock out a few rounds of Words with Friends, try to block out the awful things the government is now doing daily. But I always give in, defeated. There is no fighting the need to take comfort in whatever form is available. I walk slowly across the house to the bedroom, kneel down in front of the white IKEA bureau that had caused Gary and me to fight so bitterly years earlier while putting it together—Gary had actually accused me of “withholding directions” to its assembly, as if I wouldn’t have done anything to cut our agony by even a nanosecond if I could have, not prolong it—and open the drawer that had once been just for sweaters I never wear anymore. The mere act of reaching blindly for the sling behind all my moth-eaten cashmere always brings instant relief.
Sure, I feel like a perv when I slip the sling over my head and stalk the dog around the room—catching her in a position where she can be picked up quickly and smoothly, like a weight lifter’s clean-and-jerk lift, before rolling over on her back, thinking it’s some kind of bonus playtime, is always a challenge. Especially when it takes three or four times before I can grab her in a surprise attack and maneuver her inside, always getting dog hair in my mouth and enduring a moment when I fear I might drop her or fall over before finding the sweet spot of the heavy sling on my lower stomach and hip.
Charlotte isn’t light—twenty pounds on a good day—and she is unwieldy sometimes, like when she wants to get out for no reason other than the fact that she’s a normal dog who just wants to be free and her paws scratch against the fabric, even though I always make sure she can see and breathe just fine in there. I usually throw in one of those disgusting dried bull penises sold in pet stores as a chew snack—a bully stick—as a bribe. I know it’s not fair for the dog to endure my obsession without there being something in it for her, too, so I always have plenty of treats on hand to get her in the sling and keep things fun.
It doesn’t take long for the dog to like it. To look forward to it. I know that might sound like wishful thinking or projection on my part, but who’s to say that even if I am projecting that the dog doesn’t actually like it in there? The two ideas aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I might be floridly demented in thinking the dog likes being carried around in a giant diaper, but the dog might really like it in there. Because seriously, what’s not to like? It’s warm, there are snacks, and for a few hours every day she doesn’t have to walk or sniff or chase or make any decisions of her own. It’s like a vacation, a stress-free state of suspended animation that I sometimes wish I could replicate for myself.
Those hours when the dog is in the sling are restorative for me. Like a new drug, it’s helping me taper off an old one, overlapping and masking the side effects of withdrawal. By which I mean, wearing Charlotte is helping me get through the end of Teddy’s childhood. By which I mean, instead of turning to my husband with that overwhelming sadness and longing, I’ve turned to our dog.
No wonder we’re separated.
Well/er
I wear the dog around the house while I do my “content-generating” work, writing short engagingly shallow online posts for Well/er, a health and happiness website run by a small local startup with national aspirations whose management team has a median dude-age of twenty-four. Well/er believes in tiny incremental gains in physical and emotional wellness (hence Well/er, not Well), instead of big ambitious ones: DOING JUST ENOUGH IS ENOUGH TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE is the website’s actual tagline. As a fundamentally lazy person myself, I can’t say I disagree: sometimes less is more.
There’s a bank of article ideas and suggested due dates on the content-management system (CMS), as well as an updated list of timely topics that I can pick from every morning—maintained and sent out by Eden, the content manager who is based in Atlanta and whose avatar is a blue female Avatar from the movie Avatar, even though people refer to Eden with male pronouns in email chains. Whatever. We’re occasionally supposed to “meet” via Google Chat or Skype, depending on which platform has working sound or video, but since I started a year ago our team Skype calls have mostly been without video. Which is fine with me—I’d rather not remind people of how old I am if I don’t have to, which is the unfortunate effect that staring at my turkey neck on a Skype or Google Chat call—and the occasional and deeply humiliating interruption of my AOL “You’ve got mail!” alert—has on people. I’m certain that the second the call is over all the twenty-year-olds whisper sweetly among themselves about how I remind them of their moms. I’m certain because that actually happened once before we all got disconnected.
As a contractor paid by the piece, I’m expected to submit three to four “articles” a day, each one no more than three hundred to four hundred words, written in short paragraphs and in a snappy style, nothing too taxing for our attention-span-challenged readers, but always including links to “scientific” “studies” that back up whatever dubious point I’m supposed to be making, even if the research sounds made up to me. People love neuroscience now, how it can support almost every single bad habit and instinct we have, whether it’s for spending too much money (money buys happiness if you spend it on experiences instead of things) or earning less money than you need to (income has a positive impact on happiness, but anything over $75,000 is only mood gravy), or inherent laziness (tiny changes in habits are better and easier to maintain than big changes). I’m not sure any of this is true. In the years when I earned a fair amount of money, it made me quite happy actually, no matter what I spent it on.
But that was a long time ago, when a picture book I wrote, There’s a Bird on Your Head, an embrace-your-weirdness manifesto, became a surprise cult classic and then an animated PBS television series. I’d never imagined, as an art history major in college and then in the early part of my career when I was working for Black Bear Books, the children’s book division of a big New York publisher, that I would ever earn that much. During those good years, everyone told me I would go from success to success, that money and opportunity would keep rolling in. But they didn’t. Life is like that. It’s a series of advancements and regressions, the same tide, coming and going, giving and taking away. A secret part of me still believes the current will come back in after all these dry years. But the bigger part wakes up in the middle of the night wondering what will become of the four of us—Gary, Teddy, Charlotte, and me—if it doesn’t.
“Content-generation,” the work I do now, feels like another regression, another failure, but Gary and I aren’t getting any younger and there are bills to pay, so I pursue it with nothing short of desperation. Doing just enough is enough, I tell myself when I pick a topic, knock out a few glib paragraphs, search for the perfect gauzy stock photo of a piece of avocado toast or the silhouette of a silver-haired forty-year-old doing yoga on a wood deck at sunset, then pause to come up with a suggested click-bait headline before hitting “send” and starting another. Magic is everywhere, even in content-generation, like when fabric clogs on a foot model make the perfect visual point for your “Does working at home make you less attractive?” post. Maybe this new career will magically lead me somewhere, to the next step in my proverbial journey, to a pot of gold at the end of a nonexistent rainbow. It’s the fantasy of being saved that keeps me going.