A Pee and a Poop at Midnight

At midnight, Teddy began pawing the side of the bed. Then the brown and white shih tzu grunted, hiccupped, cut a diabolically smelly fart before letting loose with not so much a bark as a snarl capable of waking zombies from the grave. "Dear God!" Tracy moaned. "Your dog is an abomination!"

"Go back to bed," Calvin grunted at Teddy, whose pushed-in snout with the pronounced overbite was less than an inch from his nose, "or go pee in the living room."

The dog yipped and yammered. He ran off frenetically only to return a minute later even more insistent. "Okay! Okay!" Calvin crawled out of bed, reaching for his bathrobe and a leash draped over the bedroom doorknob.

"It's raining," Tracy muttered. "You'll catch terminal pneumonia, then I'll inherit the schizoid beast!"

"Let's make this a quick one, Teddy." He led the dog through the kitchen and out the slider into the back yard.

Five minutes later Calvin trudged back to the bedroom. "How'd you make out?"

"A pee and a poop… we're done for the night."

"What about all the other nights to follow for eternity?"

"A pee and a poop," Calvin repeated, climbing back under the covers. Five minutes passed in silence. The dog had a weak bladder and irritable bowel syndrome. Worse yet, not even the most skilled dog trainer could teach Teddy to behave. Calvin brought the diminutive pooch to obedience classes, where he learned nothing. Teddy wouldn't sit or stay or heel or roll over or much of anything except snap at the other well-behaved canines and exasperate the instructor. Teddy suffered from attention deficit disorder; he couldn't think and chew gum at the same time. The misanthropic pooch had a strong tendency to color outside the lines. Almost from the outset, Calvin wondered about inbreeding. Some kennels were notorious for keeping animals from the same litter together well into adolescence even when the females were in heat.

Turning the bedside lamp on, Calvin climbed out of bed and fished a small object from the dresser drawer. "I was gonna take you out to a fancy restaurant this weekend but why wait." Laying an emerald-flocked box on the covers next to her chest, he dropped down on one knee just as Teddy, with no sense of class, rolled over on his back and noisily farted. "I love you to distraction. Marry me."

Tracey pried open the box and stared at the diamond for a solid minute before slipping the ring over the third finger of her left hand and holding it up to the amber light. The tiny facets sparkled weakly as she splayed the fingers and rolled her wrist.

"Well?"

"We're visiting my folks this weekend," she deflected the conversation elsewhere. "Did you forget?"

There was an uncomfortable pause. "No, of course not."

"You forgot." Tracey blew her cheeks out in despair. "My parents are bigots; they don't especially like Jews."

"I'll renounce my faith… have a cosmetic surgeon recreate the foreskin."

There was no immediate reply. Tracey draped a forearm over her eyes, directing her words at the ceiling above where her head lay on the goose down pillow. "You got a heart of gold, Calvin. You're kind, intelligent and full of fun but, just like that last bit of sacrilege, you say any fool thing that pops into your noggin." Balling her fingers in a fist, she tapped him on the forehead. "You got no filter upstairs."

Early on, Tracey sensed Calvin's brain was slightly out of kilter and only agreed to date him because the dark-haired boy with the goofy smile was so infuriatingly kind. She hadn't anticipated an enduring passion, the hundred-and-one miniscule acts of devotion. She cherished Calvin, sufficiently so to marry him and raise his children. But there was a palpable difference: she loved him well enough; Calvin loved her inordinately, much as he breathed without parameters or conscious intent.

"I'll turn over a new leaf," Calvin begged. "I won't say anything out of the ordinary at your folks… no tasteless repartee or circumcision jokes."

"If you did that," Tracy noted, "I wouldn't want to have your babies or make a life together. No, it's okay. You just can't let on to anyone else that you straddle two mutually exclusive, parallel universes."

"So will you marry me?"

“I dunno,” she hedged. “Living together is one thing, but marriage...” She let the sentence die a painless death.

*****

"Just so you know what to expect," Tracey cautioned Saturday morning on the drive south, "my father will act totally constipated, pained and distant. Or maybe he'll butter you up and, when your guard is down, tweak your Semitic nose with a gratuitous comment that could be interpreted in a hundred unflattering ways and leaves you feeling lower than that squishy brown stuff Teddy deposited on the wet lawn Tuesday night. Then later in the week, my dad will contact me on the sly and insist that I break things off."

"And your mother?" They had reached Buzzards Bay and passed over the Cape Cod Canal. At the rotary winding further south all the way to Hyannis and Provincetown, traffic was so congested that Calvin had to circle three times before safely exiting onto route six.

"Mother's even more priggish than father. Once she learns your family worships a false god and hasn't a thimbleful of social standing in the community, she will be mortified."

"There's always Teddy." In the back seat the demented dog had hunkered down on a throw pillow munching a pork-flavored, rawhide chew.

Tracey leaned over and kissed Calvin on the cheek. "I couldn't muster the courage to tell them about the dog."

Money, money, money, money, money…

As far as the Winthrops were concerned, if people didn't have it, preferably in large denominations, they didn't measure up. Dating back to their Puritan ancestors, the aristocratic family wanted for nothing. Pedigree and social standing trumped all considerations. Tracey had grown up with dark-skinned maids to clear the table after each meal, polish the pewter and silverware. Her grandfather retained a butler. Somewhere sandwiched between the fifth and eighth generations, snaking backward a hundred and sixty years to a plantation on the west fork of the Stones River in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Winthrops owned slaves.

In life you bartered one thing away in order to obtain something of equal worth. So be it! Tracey wanted out of her Waspish straightjacket. Calvin loved her undemonstratively, without fanfare. In his surreptitious, low-keyed manner he made her giggle and nurtured her soul. He walked the deranged dog at midnight in a drenching, late-summer downpour. He matriculated out as something of equal worth.

*****

After crossing the Cape Cod Canal, the road abruptly drifted further inland away from the ocean. On either side tall, matchstick pines rose fifty feet in the air. "Once we arrive, don't say anything crazy," Tracey counseled.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. You have no filter... never edit what you say in mixed company. My father's a Boston Brahmin… existentially challenged. The man's got impeccable lineage but no sense of humor. He's not used to people who question authority or what he defines as proper etiquette. Calvin pulled the car over to the side of the road and killed the engine. A few hundred yards off through the woods a lake was visible. "What's the matter now?"

"If you're so goddamn worried that the schmuck with the yarmulke is going to disgrace himself at the hoity-toity Winthrop barbecue, then maybe I should cut my losses and go home." Climbing from the car, Calvin cracked the rear door and let the dog out. Ignoring Tracey altogether, he set off down a raggedy, rock-strewn path littered with acorns and thorny bushes until he reached the water. Unfamiliar with the wooded landscape, Teddy ran a short distance ahead but, quickly loosing resolve, doubled back.

The Winthrops had a Siamese cat. According to Paige, the couple was slavishly devoted to the cat and took him everywhere. Bringing Teddy was a colossal blunder. The dog seldom became vicious around other animals but did tend to roughhouse and, on occasion, go berserk. In a worst case scenario, Teddy might use the Siamese cat as a furry punching bag eventually chasing the horrified feline up one of the fifty-foot pines from where the Mashpee Volunteer Fire Department, with the aid of a ladder truck, would have to finesse the pet from an upper branch.

"Did you notice the signs back there?" Tracey was standing next to a chokeberry bush. Metal signs posted at regular intervals along the roadside read:

Mashpee Town Reservoir
No Swimming, Fishing, Hunting or Camping
$500 fines!

Off to their right, two, shirtless teenagers wearing cutoff jeans had waded up to their waists in the placid water. One youth crouched down, drenching his entire body. Surfacing, he rolled over on his back and paddled about squirting water through his puckered lips in a low arc. "What a jerk!" Tracey fumed.

"The law doesn't apply to them," Calvin replied.

"That's ridiculous! Towns don't enforce rules selectively." She pawed at the clayey earth with the toe of a sneaker. "That hooligan is probably peeing in the town drinking water even as we speak."

The air smelled of acrid pine pitch and wildflowers. Calvin, who was sitting on a lichen-stained rock, glanced at her momentarily and turned his attention back to the youths. "The taller boy has feathers braided into his ponytail. They're Mashpees, Native Americans. They can drop their drawers and defecate in the water for all they care."

"Oh, I hadn't notice." Tracey's tone turned more contrite.

These Mashpee were the descendents of the legendary Indians who greeted the Pilgrims when the first settlers arrived in Massachusetts in the early sixteen hundreds. The Wampanoag Tribe presently numbered about fifteen hundred on the Cape. Each fourth of July they joined with other tribes from across the country to celebrate their traditional customs, folklore and dance.

Tracey and her family attended Mashpee Wampanoag Powwows when she was a young girl. They feasted on fried dough, corn succotash and clam cakes, listened to the tribal drumming and chants. The highlight of the three-day event was the fireball contest held at dusk on Saturday night where a flaming, kerosene-soaked rag ball was kicked and tossed about in an attempt to score points. The game resembled soccer but with a decidedly homicidal flair.

"This barbecue," Tracey said flatly, "won't go well."

"That's for sure." One of the Indians waved and Calvin waved back. Teddy trotted down to the water's edge and took a drink. Paige came and joined him on the rock.

The Winthrops had planned a Get-Acquainted-Barbecue - that's how they phrased it. Not an inquisition but a friendly, informal gathering. They were already late but Tracey didn't care. There was sure to be ugliness. Calvin would never measure up. The kind-hearted soul who loved her to distraction would fall far, far, far short of her parents' expectations.

The young Mashpees emerged from the water and were now lying under a pine tree passing a sweet smelling, freshly-rolled cigarette back and forth between them. Teddy, who had discovered a new calling in life, was chasing gray squirrels. "Maybe we could tether the dog, when we get to my folks."

"I have a length of nylon rope in the trunk."

They made their way back to the car and edged onto the highway. “We’re studying George Elliot... Silas Marner in September.” Calvin taught freshman and sophomore English at the local high school.

“That’s nice,” Tracey replied distractedly. She was still trying to brace herself for the inevitable.

"When Charles Dickens died, the London newspapers proclaimed, 'Britain's greatest storyteller is passed away. Long live George Elliot!'"

"The heir apparent?"

"Toward the end of her life,” Calvin continued, “she wrote a thousand-page manuscript, Daniel Deronda. It was really two books in one - the first half being a traditional English romance, the second a treatise on Cabala, Jewish mysticism."

"Which doesn't make much sense."

"No it doesn't, given the fact that Victorian England was rabidly anti-Semitic, and later, bootlegged printings of the manuscript sometimes edited out the entire Jewish section altogether."

"There must be a reason you're telling me this," Tracey pressed.

"In one of the subplots, Lord Arrowpoint, the wealthiest landowner in the region, hires a penniless Jew, Herr Klesmer, to teach his daughter, Catherine, piano, and the unlikely twosome promptly fall in love. Then, when Lord Arrowpoint threatens to dispossess his only child and leave her destitute if she doesn't renounce the piano teacher, Catherine promptly runs off and marries him."

"And how does that work out?"

"Rather well. The star-crossed lovers live modestly in a tiny cottage and are sublimely happy together with their many children. Eventually, the estranged in-laws came around."

"Curious about the grandchildren," Tracey ventured. "Please, I beg you; don't tell the story of Herr Klesmer and Catherine Arrowpoint at the barbecue!"

"No, I won't."

Tracey blew out her cheeks. "This is just the sort of thing - "

"The British Jews,” Calvin cut her off in mid-sentence, “didn't like the first half of Daniel Deronda any better than their Christian counterparts the latter."

"And so?" They were five minutes away from the Winthrops' cabin.

"Zionists published their own, bastardized version of the book conveniently eliminating the first five hundred pages. It proved a huge hit, not just in England but throughout the Western European Jewish community."

Up ahead a carrion crow was feasting on the entrails of a road-kill possum, whose guts were smeared all over the side of the highway. "Needless to say, you won’t be mentioning that either at the barbecue."

"No, of course not!" In the rear, Teddy had dozed off and was alternately whimpering and snuffling in his sleep.

After a moment, Tracey held her left hand up to the light. "I've decided to wear your ring this afternoon and all the rest of the days of my life, Herr Klesmer."

Calvin studied the engagement ring. It wasn't much of a stone. The ring itself was pitifully non-descript, but it was all he could realistically afford on an untenured teacher’s salary. Mr. Winthrop was sure to let slip a vinegary snide remark. His wife would positively retch. "Yes, sweet Catherine. I would be honored."