Gizelle's Bucket List Read online

  Conner was out of town for work a lot. I was definitely in a relationship with him, but I couldn’t quite seem to admit that to myself. Once I even quickly broke up with him, feeling trapped into something that was starting to look like a commitment, but I called him back and apologized, unable to figure out why I would end things in the first place. I was twenty-four and questioning everything. Why did I move to New York? Is Conner a reason to stick around? Will I ever get a promotion at the Gap? Do I even want a promotion at the Gap? What am I doing with my life again?

  * * *

  One evening I called my mother around nine, hoping she might convince me everything was fine and I was doing great in life, like she usually did. But that night she didn’t pick up when I called. She didn’t call me back.

  A couple days later I called again. It rang and rang and when she picked up, she sounded as though she had just woken up. I asked her what she was doing. “I’m on my way to an eleven a.m. meeting.”

  “But it’s eight p.m. your time.” I pointed out. The phone went silent for a minute and then she guffawed.

  “It’s not eight p.m.!”

  I paused for a second, looking at the clock on the microwave. It was definitely eight p.m. in Nashville. Then she carried on about a meeting with her friends Wendy and Craig and being sober and “better than ever,” but as her words slurred into one another, it became increasingly difficult to make any sense out of them.

  “Whatever, Mom. You sound drunk. I gotta run; I need to walk Gizelle.” And just as she was trying to convince me she was only talking funny because she had Crest Whitestrips on, I hung up the phone.

  Next came the bizarre texts. “Good morning!!! Baking fresh swirl and eggs today! Meeting at 3pm ddddddjjkkkkkkk.” followed by rows and rows of colorful (yet inexplicable) emojis that I knew were not the result of bad iPhone skills.

  Mom had lots of ups along with her downs, and it was impossible to keep track. Sometimes I’d call and she’d sound great. She was alert and she’d casually ask me questions about my day and if there was anything she could do to help me out in New York. I never knew which version of her I was going to get and each version tugged on my emotions differently. The sober (sounding) version gave me hope she’d be okay, and the drunk version crushed that hope. So my hopes were lifted and then let down over and over and over again. I didn’t know how much more I could take. She would not even acknowledge she had a problem.

  Sometimes I called my dad, hoping he’d provide words of sympathy when it came to dealing with Mom, but he didn’t always say tons about her. Often he said things like, “Well. Fernie. Ya taking care of yourself there, buddy? How’s the job going?” And that was it. Then I’d get so mad that he wouldn’t say the words I wanted to hear, which were: “I’m so sorry. She’ll be okay. You’ll be okay. This will all be okay! Let’s fix her! I’ll fix her!” that I’d hang up the phone on him, too.

  Yet even on the most stagnant summer days in Hell’s Kitchen, I could find a breeze on Rio’s rooftop after the sunset. So I climbed to my rooftop with Gizelle. The lights of Times Square flickered around us. Gizelle sat at my feet, and I sat down in front of her with my legs crossed. Our eyes locked. We stared at each other, and I always marveled at the way she would hold my gaze. Peering out of the dark-black mask of her face, those curious, concerned, downturned eyes were always comforting. I thought about the inside of Gizelle’s brain, how my sister once told me it was probably filled with nothing but a vast field of green with a single tulip growing in the middle. Then I thought about the inside of mine, which felt a lot like Times Square. Loud. Congested. Too many messages flashing at once.

  All I wanted was to exist in the moment, on my rooftop with Gizelle. But I couldn’t stop my mind from worrying. I worried about losing my mom and wondered how to fix her. I worried if Conner was the right person for me. I worried I was working the wrong job, how I would ever find the right job, and about not having friends in New York. Kimmy and I were slowly drifting apart, being pulled in different directions, and I could feel it happening but I didn’t know what to do about it. When I’d first moved to New York City, I’d promised myself I would live a life of adventure, but now I was feeling stuck in an expensive city working a nine-to-five job and not having much of an adventure at all. I thought about leaving and where I might go. I could pack up with my trusty four-legged best friend, tape my insecurities into a box, and not have to unpack them again for months.

  I threw my arms around Gizelle. She propped her big head over my shoulder, letting me lean all of my weight into her as the lights of midtown flashed around us. She was always my support whenever growing up became too confusing.

  As the heat and summer wore on, I started dreaming more and more about our escape plan. And just as I started writing lists about where we would go next, I received a Facebook message from an old friend.

  “Do you live in the city now? I just moved here on 46th and 11th! I want to meet Gizelle!” Rebecca wrote.

  I knew Rebecca from College of Charleston freshman year. Rebecca was the girl who would drive to Folly Beach and jump in the ocean with me, no matter how cold the water was. She was from Boston, and her speech was occasionally scattered with the word “wicked.” She loved poetry, healthy organic food and Nina Simone.

  She was also a lists girl, like me. One of the first times we spoke was in her dorm on the fourth floor of the McConnell Residence Hall talking about how to stay focused in the requirement classes we had no interest in. She laughed.

  “Want to hear something I wrote in statistics today?”

  I nodded. “Sure.” She pulled a ripped-up green spiral notebook from her desk and flipped past some notes until she landed on a page. Then she cleared her throat, jokingly. She went on to read me a weird and wonderful list of things she loved: sharing a planet with the octopuses, the way roses look after rain, black holes. Rebecca kept silly journals the way I did, writing everything down so life didn’t get away without her documenting it. When I left Charleston, we’d promised we’d keep in touch, but didn’t. We’d actually hardly spoken until one night in July, when she wrote me out of the blue about how she’d moved to Hell’s Kitchen, coincidentally a couple of blocks away.

  Gizelle and I met up with Rebecca on the corner of Forty-Third and Eighth. Rebecca was wearing old, beat-up brown boots and a white flowy dress. “Oh my god,” she laughed, “Gizelle! You are beautiful, girl!” She clapped her hands and bent down as Gizelle walked right into her arms for a hug (Rebecca totally ignored the slobber Gizelle left on her dress). We jumped up and down and hugged each other. “I can’t believe you live here!” Rebecca cheered. “I can’t believe you live here!” I cheered right back. We hugged again on the sidewalk. Then she took Gizelle’s leash like they were old pals. As we walked to Rebecca’s apartment, the same old rude comments about the mastiff from passersby continued, but we didn’t pay much attention. “Don’t listen to them, Gizelle!” Rebecca assured. “You are not a big f’in’ dog. You are a curvy, voluptuous, beautiful queen!”

  Rebecca’s apartment was a dusty, old, furnished sublet above a taxi repair shop and a pet spa. The place had cardboard walls, stacks and stacks of old books and instruments, an antique dentist’s chair in the living room, plants hanging from the ceiling, and a beat-up Steinway right in the middle of it all. Her home was also no stranger to cockroaches. “I do ballet in the living room!” She beamed as she did a little twirl on her way to the kitchen to get Gizelle water.

  And just like that, I knew we had another friend in the city.

  * * *

  Rebecca and I did everything together. We took Gizelle thrift shopping and bought matching floppy hats. (Yes, we bought Gizelle a hat, too. This was how we justified buying the third hat in blue.) We colored our lips dark red and set off to talk our way up to the Boom Boom Room, a glamorous, 007-type, gold-colored lounge with a 360-view of Manhattan. Undaunted by the line, Rebecca declared, “I got this,” strutted to the front, and talked with the bounce
r, asking him about his day, until we skipped right through the door. Did I mention she was drop-dead gorgeous? Curvy with golden-brown eyes and perfect skin and boobs. At any one time she had a multitude of guys swooning over her.

  The more time we spent together, the more I saw something in Rebecca that reminded me of my mom from way back when: If I was uncertain, she built me up. When I worried, she soothed me and turned me around. Soon I realized I was calling Rebecca with a lot of the worries I used to call my mom with, and I tried not to pay attention to the fact that my actual mom hadn’t called me in a few weeks. Rebecca would listen to me ramble about my problems until the end of the world if I needed. She always made me feel like everything was going to be okay, because somehow Rebecca had a way of always making everything okay.

  Rebecca worked at a world-renowned ad agency as an account executive. “I have no idea how I got this job. I totally tricked someone,” she smiled. She spent time working on side projects, writing a play or TV pilot. Later she would run a hot-sauce company called Itso Hot Sauce. Together we decided Gizelle should really start pulling her weight with her expenses, so we did what all the other pet owners of that time were doing: we made Gizelle an Instagram account. She’s going to be famous! we hoped as we took over the username @GizelleNYC and the hashtag #BigDogBigCity. We journaled photo ideas, and even set up a photo shoot with balloons in the park. We planned to take her to every borough all over New York City and take pictures of her and that would eventually launch our next careers. But we only made it to four posts.

  With Rebecca, New York began to look different to me. On my own, I felt like I was watching New York City go by from Rio’s rooftop, but now I began feeling like I was a part of the city. I wasn’t just surviving in it anymore.

  The inevitable let’s-take-this-to-the-next-level conversation came one night toward the end of August, at a table on the sidewalk of a tiny French bistro called Tartine in the West Village. The restaurant was tucked between brownstones and skinny streets with pretty names like Waverly and Charles and Perry. Streetlights lit the table. We were sharing mussels, fries, and a bottle of wine we’d brought. It came up that both of our leases were ending soon. I was telling Rebecca how I wasn’t sure about staying in New York City, that it was so expensive and I missed my siblings. I confessed that I didn’t know where I belonged or what I was doing, but I didn’t want to be stuck in Times Scare for another year.

  “Well. We could look for a place together?” Rebecca said slowly, opening up a mussel, the hesitation at the end of the sentence signaling that she knew I was unsure about it too.

  “But do you want to live together?” I asked.

  Rebecca looked at me curiously.

  “Because you know that means living with Gizelle . . .”

  “And Gizelle is a great roommate. But she can be a tad smelly. She slobbers, but I clean that right up. She also sheds, like, a lot. Sometimes I wonder how she actually still has fur on her. But it’s fine because I have a big lint roller.”

  Rebecca smiled and nodded as I continued to ramble.

  “And I mean, you’ve seen her poos. They are . . . well . . . you’ve seen them! But that’s easy to get used to, just need extra gloves and bags and to always be prepared. And sometimes boys are kind of scared of her; she barks at them if she doesn’t like them, but it’s a great way to filter out the guys you probably shouldn’t have around, anyway. Oh, and I definitely need help walking her, never would have made it this past year without Kimmy . . .” My voice trailed off as I reached for a mussel. I loved Kimmy, and she’d done so much for me and Gizelle, but something about moving in with someone new, getting a fresh start, felt right. Kimmy had even mentioned moving in with new friends in Brooklyn.

  “Girl. I love Gizelle.” Rebecca smiled.

  “I’ll totally help you.”

  Then she held up her glass of Cabernet (that according to Conner did not pair well with mussels, but we didn’t care).

  “Roommates?”

  “Roommates.”

  * * *

  One month later it was nearing the end of September and I packed up my room. Gizelle watched with the most concerned where are you going? face. I don’t think she blinked once all day, following me eagerly from the living room to my bedroom as I packed up our life in midtown. “You’re coming, too,” I assured her over and over as her toenails clicked behind me. I stuffed Gap clothes in trash bags and laundry hampers, rolled up my big map of the world, and hauled Swamp Thang onto the sidewalk and left a sign on him that said FREE TO GOOD HOME.

  Rebecca and I rented a U-haul pickup. I tossed my final trash bag into the bed of the truck and squished Gizelle’s dog bed into the last bit of space. I turned around and took one final look at Rio. Good-bye, Rio, I thought, dropping my shoulders and letting out a sigh. I shut the tailgate of the truck, climbed over Gizelle (who’d apparently called shotgun) to take my spot in the middle seat. Rebecca put one hand on the wheel, stepped on the gas, and I gazed out at what would soon be my old neighborhood disappearing before my eyes. “So long, Times Square!” Rebecca yelled, turning up Whitney Houston on the radio.

  Gizelle stuck her giant head out of the window, taking whatever last sights the sporadically moving truck could showcase in stop-and-go traffic, ducking her head back in the car whenever a bus roared by. And with Rebecca on my left and Gizelle on my right, I left the lights of midtown, Rio, the Times Scare, and my first year in Manhattan behind me, ready to begin another chapter in the really big city with my really big dog.

  * * *

  Our new home was on Seventh Street between Avenues A and B, and I could see the Tompkins Square Dog Run from the window. I couldn’t wait to show Gizelle our new neighborhood. We sprinted down the stairs onto the sidewalk. The East Village air felt cool and new, and the sidewalks weren’t swollen with people. There were kids laughing in the park on Ninth Street and birds chirping in the elm trees above the dog run. Church bells rang in the distance.

  As we strolled up Avenue A, a woman in a black leather jacket approached. When she got closer, her mouth opened without making a sound. For a second I thought here we go again, expecting the pointing, the swearing, the photo ops, to all continue. But instead, she squinted her eyes, stuck her finger out at Gizelle, and said:

  “Biscuit?”

  That was one I hadn’t heard before. Did she know we were from the south?

  “Biscuit?” I questioned.

  “Yeah, Biscuit. Isn’t that Biscuit?” she asked, leaning her head toward Gizelle. “Oh, wait!” She smacked her palm to her head before I could say anything. “That’s not Biscuit! I’m so sorry . . . it looks just like her.” She laughed and told Gizelle she was beautiful and walked away.

  A couple of minutes later a guy in a Jets T-shirt approached, studying Gizelle. I braced, waiting for it. I was ready for my response (No you may not put a saddle on her!). Instead, he stopped, looked at Gizelle, and said:

  “Summer?”

  This scenario with Summer and Biscuit kept happening. Then people kept telling me about this guy named Louie whom I just had to meet. “You will know him when you see him,” they promised. “He has dogs just like Gizelle.”

  “He has like seven of them!” one lady called out.

  Dogs like Gizelle? In New York City? Was this some urban legend?

  Then one day I turned a corner to walk into Tompkins Square Park with Gizelle, and coming at us was none other than Louie and his two colossal, wrinkly, lion-headed mastiffs. One was fawn and one was brindle and the three of them together almost moved in slow motion, as though they were one creature. He had long, curly, scraggly hair, a Santa belly, and he wore a shirt that said “Drool is Cool.” I found myself wanting to bow down to his greatness.

  “This must be Gizelle,” Louie cackled, as the three mastiffs met in the center of the park.

  “It is!” I smiled, feeling honored he knew Gizelle’s name. I looked down at Gizelle, who was touching noses with the other brindle girl, Biscuit, as t
heir thick tails slowly swung behind them.

  “They’re the best dogs in the world, aren’t they? Like humans.” Louie beamed, patting Summer on the head. Her eyes closed contentedly with each pat just as Gizelle’s always did. He told me he used to have five of them in his apartment on Ninth. I wasn’t about to ask him how he fit five English mastiffs in his apartment, but I did agree with him on one thing: Gizelle was like a human.

  * * *

  It was clear just how human Gizelle was when we ventured into the Tompkins Square Dog Run for the first time. It was a Saturday, and just like everywhere else on weekends in Manhattan, there were crowds. This place seemed to be home to every breed imaginable—Pit bulls and Vizslas, toy poodles and corgis, mutts, Labs, Dalmatians, pugs, Great Danes, puppies, and now, beautiful brindle mastiffs. “Ready, girl?” I asked, sliding open the black gate and unhooking her leash.

  A clique of three Labs bounded over to meet my girl. They scampered around her in circles, barking and taking turns attempting to shove their noses toward Gizelle’s behind as she backed her rear away from them, ears pushed back on her head, tail tucked, almost offended. She scooted toward me, attempting to barge her rump between my legs, but the moment the dogs lost interest and ran to greet the next arrival, her tail untucked and she followed behind them curiously, as though she wanted to be friends but wasn’t quite sure how.

  She circled back to me. “I know, girl. There are a lot of dogs here; it’s okay to be nervous,” I assured her. I walked over to sit on a bench in a patch of sun and Gizelle followed behind, taking her place at my feet or, more precisely, on my feet. And this became her usual dog-park routine: me sitting on the bench in the sun watching the dogs, and Gizelle sitting devotedly with me, also watching the dogs.