It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [79]
With all of our breakfast leftovers boxed up, the four of us headed out of the restaurant and over to the apartment building on Bleecker. But once we got there, much to Joe’s unrestrained glee, the dog was gone.
“It was right here,” I said, pointing to the spot by the door, as if I was explaining to a news crew where I claimed to have seen Bigfoot selling knockoff purses out of a garbage bag. There was, again, no trace of the dog. I looked around the corner, then looked for the poop the dog had produced during our parting shot, and that was gone, too. Probably buried in the snow, I figured, and I sure wasn’t going to go digging for it just to prove I had seen a mythical stray pooch that could appear and vanish at will.
Before I knew it, Joe was hailing a cab and we were waving goodbye, and then they drove away for Brooklyn, their whole day—the one I came within inches of detouring with matted fur—now before them.
With the exception of the fight I was pretty sure they were having in the taxi at that very moment.
On the day we left, we packed up our things, threw the leftovers away, and headed downstairs to hail a cab to the airport. We were alone in the elevator when it made a stop on a lower floor, and the doors opened to an older man with a very thin mustache.
“Can you make room for an old lady?” he said in a thick French accent, and smiled as he shuffled in to the elevator.
Oh, boy, I thought. What do you know? Dementia can give you a sex change even though you’re the only one who feels it.
Then from behind him waddled a black-and-white tube of matted fur—part collie, part shepherd, I didn’t know. But what I did know was what that dog looked like with its snout stuffed into a can of refried beans.
We rode the elevator the rest of the way in polite silence, mainly because if I opened my big mouth again about the hysterically funny story of a decrepit, dirty dog that we kept seeing around the building and that my friend tried to save, I was most likely going to be riding to the airport alone.
The man walked to the vestibule of the lobby, opened the door, and the old lady sauntered out of the building as we followed behind.
The man smiled at us as we walked past, and we smiled back.
“She takes too long for me to stand out in that cold,” he explained, and then laughed.
We laughed, too, and kept laughing all the way into the cab, especially when I turned to take one more look at the dog as we pulled away and, in a pile of leftover snow, she was making her signature move on the side of the building.
Where Everyone Can Hear You Scream
I will do anything to prevent you from ringing my doorbell.
Honestly. I’m not fooling around.
If I see you heading toward my front door with your finger aimed at the doorbell, I’ll fly off the couch like there’s a promise of a Mormon standing on my porch that I get to yell at; I will open the door to my home dressed as a jiggly Jell-O burrito, with a towel on my head and another one wrapped around my girth; I will open the door after launching off the elliptical, dripping with sweat and sporting a yoga-pant cameltoe that reaches upward of my waistband.
What I really should do is disconnect it, but I’m too afraid I would hit a live wire and shoot across the street into the yard of the neighbors that hate me. It doesn’t make my situation any better that I’m married to a guy who believes that turning off the disposal and walking away from it when it makes a weird, bone-crushing noise is the best option because, he believes, it has the capacity to heal itself, given enough time. But that’s only if you don’t watch it and, more important, don’t interfere with the order of the sink disposal by sticking your hand in it to find the