She raises her black eyebrows at me. “Don’t make this my fault.”
“Secure the perimeter, that’s what Officer Cordova said.”
“I’m trying to tell you a story.”
“Didn’t I give you Manuel’s number?”
Betti scowls. “I’m going to get mad if you don’t stop busting my balls.”
A wave of happiness rushes over me. Here I am, fussing at Betti Pérez, and here she is, fussing back at me. I want to reach through time and squeeze the arm of my thirteen-year-old self: awake at one in the morning, sucking on Altoids, studying the captions in PAPER magazine …
Betti doesn’t know that I liked her back when she was an underground queen of New York. She probably thinks I’ve seen her on the HBO show, or remember her from that recurring role on the one about the lawyers. The fact is, I don’t watch too much TV, but there’s no way I can say that around here without sounding ungracious.
“I wasn’t wearing any panties,” she says, suddenly thoughtful. “It made me feel sort of frozen in place. Like one of those bad dreams where you can’t move your legs and you open your mouth but no words come out. The only thing I could do was grab my phone off the counter and shake it at him.”
I tell her that the next time she should grab her phone and call Officer Cordova.
“The point is, they’re not waiting for trash day anymore,” Betti says. “The point is, they’re encroaching.”
On cue, my dog starts barking crazily from behind the picture window, as if he knows exactly what encroaching means. He’s a big dog and his bark is loud, fast, and desperate. Though I’ve been living with him for over a year, his thinking remains mostly mysterious to me. I apologize to Betti and we look at my dog making a steady stream of sound, the wetness from his mouth spraying onto the glass. “Quiet, Hank,” I say, but he ignores me, which isn’t unusual for us. Betti says she has to leave. She’s informed me before that when he barks, it’s clearly audible at her house, even with her music on.
“Tell Amy I’m still waiting to hear from her,” she says, leveling the tweezers at me, then she pivots on her soft silver shoes and walks away.
When I go back inside, my dog is lying attentively on the carpet, cheerful and calm, as if he truly has no idea who that maniac was, barking his head off.
I should say our dog, not my dog, because Amy and I adopted him together. We biked to the farmers’ market one morning to buy some strawberries and salt and eggs and came home instead with a dog; they told us he was a shepherd mix but I suspect he’s more mix than shepherd. The various rescue organizations are clever and set up shop all along the sidewalks on Sundays, so you can’t buy a muffin or pick up your prescription without encountering at least a dozen beautiful animals needing homes. It’s like running the gauntlet except instead of being pummeled with sticks you’re pierced by the sad eyes of kittens and stray dogs, and the less expressive eyes of rabbits. There are always a couple of weeping children too, who want the animals but can’t have them.
I wanted a child but couldn’t have one, which is partly why we got the dog. Or maybe the dog is our warm-up to having a child—this is how Amy, who is plucky about nearly everything, looks at it. I’m the defeatist. I think the game’s already over. I think of Hank as a consolation prize, a loud and needy consolation prize who sheds huge amounts of hair, but that could just be the hCG. Now that we’ve started on injectable cycles I’ve been feeling blue. “Get out,” Amy tells me. “Take Hank for a hike.” Which always seems like a reasonable idea until I try to execute it. Amy says that the problem is my car; if I had a bigger car it wouldn’t be such a major production. She’s been researching hybrid SUVs and threatening to take me on a test drive.
As for me, I don’t want a bigger car. I miss the days when we didn’t even own a car. I mean before we came to California, when we were still working crummy day jobs and living in New York. It used to take me twelve minutes to walk to the C/E station from our apartment on DeKalb. I used to bury my nose in my scarf and finger the smooth, flimsy MetroCard in my coat pocket and think about the magazine I would read once I got a seat on the train. Usually I would read for only a few minutes before I fell asleep, lulled by the shaking train and the warmth of other people around me reading and sleeping. If I had to get to work early, I would walk the extra distance and take the D/Q line from Flatbush Avenue, just because I looked forward to the moment when the train emerged from the darkness to make its slow, rattling way across the bridge and the morning light would pour slantwise through the girders and spill over all of us sleeping inside the subway car, our hands folded and our heads nodding, me cracking my eyes open for only a second to see this and love this and then go back to dreaming.
The next time Betti appears on my porch she is holding a blue ice pack on top of her head. The rest of her is perfect: jersey wrap dress in navy, big gold hoops, long gold chains looped around her neck. She says that she needs me to see if she is bleeding.
“Should I take you to the hospital?” I ask, trying to keep Hank from wriggling past me and out the door. With all my blood tests I go to the hospital like a regular. “I know a great place to park.”
“It’s
