Dog Crazy (3 page)

“Hi, girls,” I say, heading toward the table.

“Mags!” Gabby squeals. She's three and recently had her first haircut; her round, angelic face is newly framed by the jet-black bowl cut favored by serial killers.

“Hi, Maggie!” says Portia, who is seven.

Lourdes opens a bottle of wine and fills two glasses. In the decade since college—despite marriage and children and years of running her own landscape design business—it seems to me that Lourdes hasn't changed a bit. Her wardrobe is still a study of efficiency—a rotation of button-down shirts, usually in a bright check print, and dark jeans that now have knees rubbed threadbare from gardening. She still wears her shiny black hair tucked behind her ears and puts on thick black glasses every day because she can't be bothered with contacts. On someone else, those glasses might seem severe, but Lourdes has one of those faces that can never appear anything but affable. Even when she's unleashing a torrent of sarcasm, cursing up a blue streak, my friend's dark eyes never lose their velvety warmth.

She finishes pouring the wine and holds out one of the glasses. “Good day at work?”

I nod, taking a long sip of wine. “I just had the final session with one of the first patients I saw when I moved here.”

“Therapy,” Lourdes responds, shaking her head. She's flicking through the pages of one of the supermarket coupon books she loves, stopping occasionally to rip something out or circle a deal with a green crayon. “It's a horrible business model. If you're good at what you do, you lose clients.”

“Patients,” I correct.

“Is a virtue I don't have.” She looks up and releases a catlike grin.

“Add it to the list,” I say. “How's the garden project?”

Lourdes had put her landscape design business on hold after Gabby was born, but she recently became involved with Portia's elementary school's efforts to plant a vegetable garden in a corner of the school yard. Accustomed to designing elaborate gardens with only a homeowner as a guide, she's grown increasingly frustrated by the slow decision-making pace of the large committee of parents assigned to the project.

By way of answer, she lofts her eyebrows and takes a gulp of wine. We sometimes communicate in sips of alcohol, a little trick we established in college.

Gabby runs belly-first over to me and clambers onto my lap. She's not, generally speaking, a calm child—I once caught her crouching beside Giselle's bowl, squirreling dog food in her cheeks with a sheen of manic glee in her eyes—but she seems to enjoy sitting on my lap and staring at my face. Her whole body stills as she studies me. The experience is both comforting and unnerving. She is so full of trust, so fearless. It makes my throat tighten.

“Hello, Gabby,” I say.

“Hi, Mags,” she lisps. And then, with a casual motion that reminds me of the time a guy on a bus in Philadelphia opened his blazer to show me rows of stolen iPhones, Gabby lifts her shirt to reveal that her entire belly is covered with Trader Joe's stickers. She pulls one off and hands it to me. She doesn't even wince when she rips that sticker off her skin, that's what a wonderful little bruiser she is.

“Oh, thank you. I've always felt I was missing something riiiight”—I press the sticker to the tip of my nose—“here.”

Gabby laughs. Lourdes watches as her daughter lowers herself off my lap and begins dancing around the table. There's classical music playing, something so mild and soothing I'd hardly noticed it before, but Gabby is jerking her shoulders and shaking her hips.

“She dances like her father,” Lourdes says ruefully, causing me to snort into my wineglass. “All right,
chiquitas
. Time for pajamas.” Portia and Gabby groan, but scamper out of sight. We hear their feet stomping up the staircase and then the sound of drawers opening and shutting.

Giselle trots over and sets her head on my lap. She's an affectionate dog, easy to love. When Toby and I first arrived at Lourdes's house after three days of cross-country driving in a cramped rental car, Toby and Giselle had immediately begun racing around the small yard together. Well, “racing” is a bit of a stretch—Toby wasn't doing much racing by then. But the dogs had bowed to each other and wagged their tails and batted each other with their paws, teeth merrily exposed. I've always believed there is something infectious about dogs at play, and, sure enough, Toby and Giselle's happy energy cast a spell over our
arrival. By the time Lourdes led me down the stepping-stone path to the bright blue apartment door tucked away at the back of their lovely home, the seeds of doubt that had sprouted in my mind as I'd driven across the country were gone.

I'm still petting Giselle, but I must lose track of where I am for a moment because next thing I know I'm reaching into my pocket and scooping out a handful of my evening vitamins. I toss them into my mouth and wash them down with a gulp of wine.

“What was that?” Lourdes asks.

“What?”

“Nobody told me we'd reached the pill-popping portion of the evening.”

“Sometimes a girl needs a little pick-me-up.”

“Maggie.”

My laugh has a tinny ring. “It's just vitamin C.”

“That's a lot of vitamin C.”

Upstairs, someone shrieks. I watch Lourdes as she holds her breath, head tilted, debating if she has to go up and intervene. When the sound doesn't escalate, she sighs audibly and sinks deeper into her seat. We clink our glasses together and I think maybe she's forgotten about the vitamins but then she says:

“When Leo gets home we should take this party on the road. Head down to Kezar's for a dirty martini.”

I sip my wine, hoping it will do for an answer. She raises an eyebrow.

“Moment of truth,” she says. “What's the tally?”

I take a deep breath. “In today's performance of
The Agoraphobic Therapist,
” I say, “the title role will be played by Maggie Brennan.” Then, to the tune of “Seasons of Love” from the musical
Rent,
I begin to sing.
“How do you measure / three months at home? In Netflix—In Amazon / In Google—In cups of coffee . . .”

Lourdes laughs. “Really, Maggie. How many days?”

“Ninety-eight.”

She's my best friend, and I've told her everything. Well, not everything. I haven't told her that I'm worried about my practice, that if there isn't a serious uptick in the number of patients I see, I'll need to dip into my savings to pay rent. Worse, that I'm afraid I might be a fraud—after all, a therapist who doesn't have her shit together is like a hairstylist with a bad perm. Or that I seem to be having trouble saying good-bye to my patients, even the ones that I know I've helped, and it's not just that I'm concerned about the loss of income. Some things are too hard to say out loud, even to Lourdes. It would be all too easy for the stickiness of our dual relationship—landlady/renter and best friends—to become like tacky floor between us; I fear that we would eventually keep our distance from each other, not wanting to get stuck.

But she does know that I haven't left the property in months, and she knows about my family history. She knows that I've recently graduated from neat freak to germaphobe, that I worry about the illnesses my patients might introduce into my little haven, that I've been steadily working my way through a stockpile of vitamins and medicinal teas and antibacterial soap. Really, what choice do I have but to be vigilant? What would I do if I caught something? Even my good friend Google would have trouble locating a doctor willing to make a house call for less than a small fortune. Still, I normally remember to keep my vitamin intake to a minimum around Lourdes; I try to exercise restraint.

“Ninety-eight days,” Lourdes says. Despite her casual tone, I can tell she is troubled. “That's too long.”

I know that it's not fair that Lourdes and Leo are the only ones who know that I haven't left the property in three months. Every once in a while she threatens to call my parents and fill them in, but she won't follow through. She feels responsible—she thinks she's the one who convinced me to move across the country, to leave my job and my old life behind. She worries that the stress of so many changes at once hit me hard, and she's not wrong. Her guilt works to my advantage. I hate that she feels accountable, but my parents can't know what is going on. The news would crush my father—my mother, maybe worse.

I lift the wine bottle and pretend to read the description on the label. “Have you ever noticed that they never describe wine as tasting like grapes? Leather . . . nutmeg . . . but grapes? Never.” I turn the bottle in my hand and address it sternly. “What, you're too good for the fruit that made you?”

Lourdes holds up her hands. “Fine, fine, I get it. We can change the subject right after you tell me you'll try to go outside. I'll go with you. Let me help you. Please, Maggie.”

Even though we joke easily about it, I don't want Lourdes to see me in the grip of a panic attack. It's too embarrassing. As a mental health professional, I know mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of; as a woman, I have my pride.

Ninety-eight days ago, just a week before opening my practice, I sat in a veterinarian's office and watched my beloved Toby die. Afterward, I walked home through Golden Gate Park, heartbroken. It was dusk, the park a web of unfamiliar, darkening paths. The panic didn't descend gradually. I felt the very moment it took
hold of me, plunging me into an icy black sea that I'd heard patients describe, but into which I myself had never dipped more than a toe. My heart felt grotesquely swollen, shuddering and pounding in the space of my suddenly too-tight chest. Inky holes, opaque as oil slicks, traveled across my vision. I gasped for breath, and when I swallowed, my saliva tasted sour, toxic. All around me, the trees moved, bending toward me, shadows closing in on me, and then I was running, stumbling, terrified, desperate to be safely home. I felt as though I were running for my life.

It was only much later, after hours of sobbing in my horribly empty, Toby-less apartment, that my breathing slowly returned to normal and I was able to put on my Mental Health Professional cap. I knew that what I'd experienced in the park was not a heart attack, but a panic attack; despite how it had felt, my life—even my sanity—had never been in true danger. And then, the next day, when I finally tried to push open the sidewalk gate and walk to the market for coffee, I realized how little my years of education and training and counseling helped. Being armed with knowledge was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Immediately, my heart began to pound. My throat tightened and then I was shaking, crumpling in half, gasping for air. My fear morphed into an enormous, hungry beast that gripped my chest in its claws, stealing my oxygen, blocking the sun.

And so even though I know better—even though everything I have ever studied has stated otherwise—I'm convinced the panic is not something that can be controlled, only avoided. This is what I had never fully comprehended when I heard my patients describe the panic they felt, what I am not sure is possible to understand unless you experience it firsthand: the panic is so
terrifying that the decision to change your entire life so that you might avoid feeling it again seems reasonable, even rational.

But I can't go on like this. I know I can't. I can't let my life crumble because I'm unable to follow the very advice I've doled out to my patients for years. And chatting comfortably with my best friend here in her home, it's easy to pretend I'm the same person I've always been; someone with a few quirks, perhaps—a bit of an allergy to change, a slight fear of heights, something of a neat freak—but nothing that can't be controlled with a good tug on my own bootstraps. It's easy to sit here and analyze and dissect the enormous panic I have recently felt and, in so doing, contain it. After all, I know it's just a big physiological misunderstanding; my anxiety makes my heart race, which makes my brain think I'm in physical danger, under attack, and it kicks my body into fight-or-flight mode, pumping out adrenaline, making my pulse soar, my hands shake, my vision narrow. It's a chain reaction of misguided and misinterpreted signals. Nerve cells. Chemicals. From a distance, it all fits into a neat equation. And for the moment, rational thought and the warm buzz of wine and friendship and the sweet sound of Giselle's sleepy breathing below the table all join forces to quiet the hulking beast that is my fear.

“Okay,” I promise Lourdes. “I'll try.” I take a sip of wine, my throat excruciatingly dry all of a sudden.

Lourdes beams, clearly relieved.

I'm eager to change the subject—I've always felt more comfortable listening to others' problems than discussing my own—so I ask Lourdes again about the vegetable garden project at Portia's school. Now that the wine has loosened her up a bit, I know she won't be able to resist airing her grievances.

“Oh, Maggie, these parents.” She groans. “They can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that the vegetables will
grow
. They want to pack the veggies in an inch apart, and mix them all up without any plan. They think it will provide teachable moments about
diversity
. Those plants are going to choke the life out of each other. It will be gruesome. Little kids watering dying plants day after day. It will be a teachable moment, all right. A teachable moment about death. A teachable moment about assholes.”

“Mama.”

We both jump in our seats. Gabby stands nearby in her pajamas, a naked baby doll dangling from one of her hands. She'd somehow come back downstairs without us hearing her.

“Did you brush your teeth, pumpkin?” Lourdes asks. Gabby shakes her head. “Go back upstairs and ask your sister to help you. I'll be up for books in a minute.” As Gabby pads silently away, Lourdes turns to me and whispers, “How is there not a horror movie about toddlers in footed pajamas? They're so fucking stealthy!”