Victor glared at me. “I’m not kidding. We’re going to get kicked off the plane. Put it away.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I said. The man sitting across the aisle was staring at Jean Louise, so I swung him toward his face. “Votre chemise est mooey bueno,” Jean Louise said confidently. The man stared at Jean Louise with a slightly open mouth.
“He says he likes your shirt,” I explained matter-of-factly.
Victor put his head in his hands. “If I lose my SkyMiles because of this I will murder you.”
Just then the flight attendant walked by, a businesslike woman who looked as if she needed a cocktail. I gestured at her and smiled widely as she walked near me, Jean Louise on my lap. “Excuse me, my son would like to see the cockpit.”
She hesitated for a moment as she looked at Jean Louise, and then said, “Oh. We don’t do that anymore,” before briskly walking off.
“These people are racist,” I said to Victor, who was pretending to be engrossed in the SkyMall catalog.
“Mmm,” he said, noncommittally.
“When we get home I’m going to buy Jean Louise a tiny ruffled pirate shirt. And a hook for his missing hand. And a saucy little ponytail.”
Victor put down his magazine and glowered at the dead alligator, whom he seemed to be viewing as a veritable money pit. “That’s it,” he said. “You’ve done it. You’ve managed to become your father.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said flippantly, as I contemplated how many Barbies I’d have to scalp to make a serviceable alligator wig. “My father has no taste at all when it comes to alligator pirate attire. I’m nothing like my father. Honestly, when it comes right down to it, I’m not really like anyone.”
Victor looked at me and Jean Louise, and slowly his gaze softened. “You know what? You have no idea how true that is.”
I stared back at Victor, and then rested my head on his shoulder as I moved Jean Louis to the empty seat beside us. And, as I wasn’t quite sure whether I should say thank-you or be insulted, I simply closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep while wondering whether anyone made tiny pocket watches for alligators anymore.
1. I’d planned on naming her “Pocahontas Wikipedia,” but Victor said that the cats would chew the hands off, but then I pointed out that even if that happened I’d love her even more, because then she couldn’t paddle and she’d be up a creek without hands, which seemed more and more like a metaphor for my life.
You Can’t Go Home Again (Unless You Want to Get Mauled by Wild Dogs)
So,” my sister says, as she leans back in the wooden chair on our parents’ front porch, “Victor told me you were mauled by a pack of wild dogs last time you were here.” She says it pleasantly, more like a statement than a question, in the same impassive way someone might say, “So, you decided to let your hair grow out again.”
“Mmm . . . sort of. It’s a long story.” I drowsily sit back in the matching chair and put my feet up on the authentic child-size chuck wagon my dad had built. In the Christmas months my dad hitches it to a taxidermied pygmy deer with a giant elk horn tied with a red bow to its head, in a strange homage to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, but the rest of the year it stands ownerless, as if abandoned after a 1970s dog food commercial.
“And I have somewhere to go?” Lisa asks.
She has a point. We were both in town to visit our parents for the week. Lisa now lives in California with her husband and a beautiful litter of children, but each year she’ll drive down to spend a few weeks in Texas, and I’ll bring my family, and we’ll have a disorganized family reunion. One where our kids gleefully ride the family goats, where our husbands complain that they are slowly suffocating from the heat and the lack of Wi-Fi access, and where my sister and I shake our heads in disbelief at their soft, sheltered ways, remembering days of bread-sack shoes and of pulling our mattresses out onto the porch so the whole family could sleep there on the hottest summer nights.
“So was it really an all-out mauling, or did the dogs just lick you violently?” she asks.
“It was less of an all-out maul and more of a prelude to a maul,” I answer. “Like when Julia Roberts got molested by George Costanza in Pretty Woman.” She looked at me expectantly, and so I told her the story.