(34 weeks)
WEDNESDAY.
I’m walking over to Howard’s with my newly adopted toy poodle, Boosh. My father had to give her up after my mother developed an allergy—though less a reaction to dogs, it would seem, than to the loss of my father’s attention. Boosh, she claimed, reminded her of another drain on my father’s attention: Judge Judy.
“How can a dog remind you of Judge Judy?” I asked.
“She gives me a judgy look,” my mother said.
At a red light, one of those outlaw motorcycles pulls up alongside us. The rider revs his engine and I feel my testes inch their way into my throat. I’m sure the sound stirs something primordial, something akin to what our caveman ancestors must have felt while being chased by mastodons.
I flash the motorcyclist one of the most withering looks in my arsenal, the one I deploy only in extreme situations, like when confronting teenagers jumping the line.That he does not get off his hog and imprint the “Life Is a Gamble” belt buckle into the back of my calves attests to the power of walking around with a toy poodle. A toy poodle is like wearing spectacles in the 1940s, or being rolled through the city in an iron lung: it is a declaration of your powerlessness.Which can be powerful.
I arrive at Howard’s.
“What’s that thing around Boosh’s neck?” he asks.
“A cape,” I say.
“Are you going to teach her how to bark in a Romanian accent?” he asks.
Howard is being sarcastic, though not as hurtfully so as Gregor, who yesterday suggested I get rid of the cape because it was making my poodle’s ass look fat.
Howard pulls out his grocery bag of takeout menus. He decides on what we’ll be having for lunch by sloshing his arm around in it and withdrawing a lucky winner.
“Looks like it’s chops,” he says. “Lamb or pork?”
In my old high school, girls who were turning sixteen had a choice between two gifts for their “sweet”: a nose job or a trip to Europe. I find myself sympathetic to what those poor girls had to go through. There are certain things no person should ever have to choose between, and so I urge Howard to order both.
I’m out for dinner with my family. My father proposed the meal so that he could be updated on Boosh’s doings. I fill him in on all the whitefish she’s been eating and garbage she’s been destroying, and when that’s out of the way, we move on to my father’s second favourite topic of conversation.
“Did you watch Judge Judy today?” he asks. “Boy, a mouth on her!”
“Here we go,” my mother says. “Judge Judy is his girlfriend.”
“She is not,” my father says, reddening.
“He’s always had a crush on Judy,” my sister says. She is pregnant and her amusement makes her seem Buddha-like.
“I hope you know she’s had a lot of work done,” my mother says. “If you think that’s her real face, you’re sadly mistaken.”
“The name of this restaurant sounds familiar,” I say, turning to my mother. “Is this the place where they called the police on you?”
“That was over a month ago,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “And they didn’t call the police. They threatened to call the police. I refuse to pay for salmon steak when having distinctly ordered salmon fillet.”
“And you don’t feel uncomfortable coming back?”
“They gave me a ten-dollar coupon for the confusion.
How else can I use it?”
In his sixteenth-century epic Monkey, Wu Ch’êng-ên writes, “He who fails to avenge the wrongs done to a parent is unworthy of the name of man.”
When my salmon fillet arrives I eat it, not feeling like a man so much as a giant salmon-eating porpoise. But then suddenly, the spirit of avenging justice descends. It is empowering and emphatic.
“If my father says he doesn’t have the hots for Judge Judy,” I say, “then that’s it. End of story.”
I finish the remaining bites of my meal, a man once more.