Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [24]
Jill and I are as close as any siblings can be; we understand each other and our family in a way no one else will ever be able to approach. She’s the one I call when matters fall apart, the one I’d conquer Sparta to keep safe. In the interest of our respective sanities, however, it’s best that we to live on opposite sides of the country. We chat on the phone, e-mail regularly, comment on each other’s Facebook updates. Nice and careful. Nice and easy. Enough to keep my order out of her chaos and vice versa. Until we hit water.
At the age of thirty-four, I have been engaged three times. (I’m currently in my third.) The reasons the first two ended were wildly divergent (the first was when I was twenty-one, and the decision was hers; the second was when I was thirty, and the decision was mine), but they both ended. I’m engaged now to a wonderful woman, whom my family and my friends adore, and yet I know what they’re all thinking: We’ll believe it when we see it. I live in New York City, one of the few places left in America where being single at thirty-four is the rule rather than the exception. My father flew to New York to attend a party for the release of my last book, and he marveled at the range of ages of my friends. Some were twenty-one. Some were fifty-eight. And they were all in the same social circle. In New York, you can be twenty-eight forever. You have to grow up…but you don’t have to grow up that much. Twenty-eight: That’s where you can stay. Where there’s not much risk of trouble.
As for Jill, until recently she’d been dating the same man for six years out in Oakland. It’d be safe to call them the Sid and Nancy of suburban Oakland arugula homeowners. Their relationship had always been passionate and tumultuous, and mostly terrifying to the rest of the family—especially me. He was a tall, attractive fella, successful, charming when he needed to be. He could have chosen to be with all kinds of dull yes-women who would have blandly devoted their lives to being ideal perfect wives, as long as there was a walk-in shoe closet, but he didn’t: he chose the whirlwind Tasmanian devil that is my sister. (That he would make this decision, this leap, this risk, was my favorite thing about him.) They broke up six or seven times, usually just for a few hours, and there were affairs and drama and shattered china and red welts and angry text messages and public affection and all things I couldn’t fathom. They would fight constantly, and fervently, in a way that baffled me: my relationships had always been placid, refined affairs. I didn’t like to so much as publicly disagree with the women I dated. That kind of thing was to be dealt with later, at home, in a controlled environment. Not Jill and her Sid. They’d scream at each other at dinner and then be making out in the corner by the end of the night. They were bad with money, terrible at keeping to a schedule, completely unrealistic with their expectations for the real world, and totally, awesomely in love.
It worked for them. I couldn’t imagine it. But it worked.
And then, suddenly, it didn’t.
The leader of the Dog Psychology Center is Daddy. Daddy is a fourteen-year-old pit bull with arthritis, cancer, and the rather awesome circumstance of having once been owned by the rapper Redman. Daddy rules everything. Daddy is in charge. Daddy is so important to the Dog Psychology Center that he’ll make house calls with Cesar, when a dog is flying unusually far out of control.
Daddy is calm, sedate, and measured. He was one of Cesar’s more difficult projects, but once Cesar whispered to him, their silent dance of back-and-forth alpha male tango, he became the leader of the pack. I don’t mean