(I can’t say for sure if all this stuff was really in the note L.T. found on his fridge; it doesn’t seem entirely likely, I must admit, but the men listening to his story would be rolling in the aisles by this point—or around on the loading dock, at least—and it did sound like Lulubelle, that I can testify to.)
“ ‘Please do not try to follow me, L.T., and although I’ll be at my mother’s and I know you have that number, I would appreciate you not calling but waiting for me to call you. In time I will, but in the meanwhile I have a lot of thinking to do, and although I have gotten on a fair way with it, I’m not “out of the fog” yet. I suppose I will be asking you for a divorce eventually, and think it is only fair to tell you so. I have never been one to hold out false hope, believing it better to
“tell the truth and smoke out the Devil.” Please remember that what I do I do in love, not in hatred and resentment. And please remember what was told to me and what I now tell to you: a broken spoon may be a fork in disguise. All my love, Lulubelle Simms.’ ”
L.T. would pause there, letting them digest the fact that she had 269
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gone back to her maiden name, and giving his eyes a few of those patented L. T. DeWitt rolls. Then he’d tell them the P.S. she’d tacked on the note.
“‘I have taken Frank with me and left Screwlucy for you. I thought this would probably be the way you’d want it. Love, Lulu.’ ”
If the DeWitt family was a fork, Screwlucy and Frank were the other two tines on it. If there wasn’t a fork (and speaking for myself, I’ve always felt marriage was more like a knife—the dangerous kind with two sharp edges), Screwlucy and Frank could still be said to sum up everything that went wrong in the marriage of L.T. and Lulubelle.
Because, think of it—although Lulubelle bought Frank for L.T. (first wedding anniversary) and L.T. bought Lucy, soon to be Screwlucy, for Lulubelle (second wedding anniversary), they each wound up with the other one’s pets when Lulu walked out on the marriage.
“She got me that dog because I liked the one on Frasier, ” L.T. would say. “That kind of dog’s a terrier, but I don’t remember now what they call that kind. A Jack something. Jack Sprat? Jack Robinson? Jack Shit? You know how a thing like that gets on the tip of your tongue?”
Somebody would tell him that the dog on Frasier was a Jack Russell terrier and L.T. would nod emphatically.
“That’s right!” he’d exclaim. “Sure! Exactly! That’s what Frank was, all right, a Jack Russell terrier. But you want to know the cold hard truth? An hour from now, that will have slipped away from me again—it’ll be there in my brain, but like something behind a rock.
An hour from now, I’ll be going to myself, ‘ What did that guy say Frank was? A Jack Handle terrier? A Jack Rabbit terrier? That’s close, I know that’s close . . .’ And so on. Why? I think because I just hated that little fuck so much. That barking rat. That fur-covered shit machine. I hated it from the first time I laid eyes on it. There. It’s out and I’m glad. And do you know what? Frank felt the same about me.
It was hate at first sight.
“You know how some men train their dog to bring them their slippers? Frank wouldn’t bring me my slippers, but he’d puke in them.
Yes. The first time he did it, I stuck my right foot right into it. It was like sticking your foot into warm tapioca with extra-big lumps in it.
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Although I didn’t see him, my theory is that he waited outside the bedroom door until he saw me coming—fucking lurked outside the bedroom door—then went in, unloaded in my right slipper, then hid under the bed to watch the fun. I deduce that on the basis of how it was still warm. Fucking dog. Man’s best friend my ass. I wanted to take it to the pound after that, had the leash out and everything, but Lulu threw an absolute shit fit. You would have thought she’d come into the kitchen and caught me trying to give the dog a drain-cleaner enema.
“‘If you take Frank to the pound, you might as well take me to the pound,’ she says, starting to cry. ‘That’s all you think of him, and that’s all you think of me. Honey, all we are to you is nuisances you’d like to be rid of. That’s the cold hard truth.’ I mean, oh my bleeding piles, on and on.
“ ‘He puked in my slipper,’ I says.
“ ‘The dog puked in his slipper so off with his head,’ she says. ‘Oh sugarpie, if only you could hear yourself!’
“‘Hey,’ I say, ‘you try sticking your bare foot into a slipper filled with dog-puke and see how you like it.’ Getting mad by then, you know.
“Except getting mad at Lulu never did any good. Most times, if you had the king, she had the ace. If you had the ace, she had a trump.
Also, the woman would fucking escalate. If something happened and I got irritated, she’d get pissed. If I got pissed, she’d get mad. If I got mad, she’d go fucking Red Alert Defcon I and empty the missile silos.
I’m talking scorched fucking earth. Mostly it wasn’t worth it. Except almost every time we’d get into a fight, I’d forget that.
“She goes, ‘Oh dear. Maple duff stuck his wittle footie in a wittle spit-up.’ I tried to get in there, tell her that wasn’t right, spit-up is like drool, spit-up doesn’t have these big fucking chunks in it, but she won’t let me get a word out. By then she’s over in the passing lane and cruising, all pumped up and ready to teach school.
“‘Let me tell you something, honey,’ she goes, ‘a little drool in your slipper is very minor stuff. You men slay me. Try being a woman sometimes, okay? Try always being the one that ends up laying with the small of your back in that come-spot, or the one that goes to the toi-271
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let in the middle of the night and the guy’s left the goddam ring up and you splash your can right down into this cold water. Little midnight skindiving. The toilet probably hasn’t been flushed, either, men think the Urine Fairy comes by around two A.M. and takes care of that, and there you are, sitting crack-deep in piss, and all at once you realize your feet’re in it, too, you’re paddling around in Lemon Squirt because, although guys think they’re dead-eye Dick with that thing, most can’t shoot for shit; drunk or sober they gotta wash the goddam floor all around the toilet before they can even start the main event.
All my life I’ve been living with this, honey—a father, four brothers, one ex-husband, plus a few roommates that are none of your business at this late date—and you’re ready to send poor Frank off to the gas factory because just one time he happened to reflux a little drool into your slipper.’
“‘My fur-lined slipper,’ I tell her, but it’s just a little shot back over my shoulder. One thing about living with Lulu, and maybe to my credit, I always knew when I was beat. When I lost, it was fucking decisive. One thing I certainly wasn’t going to tell her even though I knew it for a fact was that the dog puked in my slipper on purpose, the same way that he peed on my underwear on purpose if I forgot to put it in the hamper before I went off to work. She could leave her bras and pants scattered around from hell to Harvard—and did—
but if I left so much as a pair of athletic socks in the corner, I’d come home and find that fucking Jack Shit terrier had given it a lemonade shower. But tell her that? She would have been booking me time with a psychiatrist. She would have been doing that even though she knew it was true. Because then she might have had to take the stuff I was saying seriously, and she didn’t want to. She loved Frank, you see, and Frank loved her. They were like Romeo and Juliet or Rocky and Adrian.
“Frank would come to her chair while we were watching TV, lie down on the floor beside her, and put his muzzle on her shoe. Just lie there like that all night, looking up at her, all soulful and loving, and with his butt pointed in my direction so if he should have to blow a little gas, I’d get the full benefit of it. He loved her and she loved him.