Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (12 page)

Okay, so my brother has escaped back to Miami, and my mother is extending her visit with me and daughter Francesca. One afternoon we were all in front of the TV, comatose before the
Everybody Loves Raymond
marathon, having finished the
Law & Order
marathon. For the past two weeks, my mother wouldn’t go anywhere else but the kitchen. Driven to distraction, I offhandedly suggested we go see the King Tut exhibit.

“King Tut?” my mother asked, suddenly perking up. Her eyes widened behind her round glasses like an octogenarian Harry Potter. “Let’s go!”

I blinked, astounded. “But, Ma, it’s In Town.”

“So what? I love King Tut!”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was,
More than Telly Savalas?

“Only thing is, he’s not there,” my mother said.

“That’s because he’s dead,” I told her, then ordered the tickets online before she remembered she didn’t like having fun.

The next day, we were at the King Tut exhibit—Mother Mary, daughter Francesca, and me—three generations of Scot-toline women, freshly showered and dressed up, giddy to be out of the house. My mother wore her best perfume, smelling great
because she stopped smoking a few years ago, when she got throat cancer. She’s in complete remission now, which doesn’t surprise me. It’ll take more than a deadly disease to kill Mother Mary. I’m betting on a meteor.

I picked up our tickets, bought the audio tour, and slipped the headphones over my mother’s hearing aid, then turned on her audiotape, which was narrated by Omar Sharif. She broke into a sly smile and said, “Omar Sharif can park his slippers next to mine anytime.”

“Who’s Omar Sharif?” Francesca asked.

“Doctor Zhivago,” my mother answered.

“Nicky Arnstein,” I added.

“
Who?
” Francesca asked again, and we let it go. I cannot explain Omar Sharif to a generation who has not swooned over him. For Omar Sharif, I would have learned to play bridge.

But back to the story.

We waited in a line that zigzagged for an hour, which was a lot of standing for Mother Mary, especially after she’d come three blocks from the parking garage. She’d walked only slowly, but she hadn’t complained at all. Her vision is poor from glaucoma and macular degeneration, but she was gamely squinting at the museum map. We entered the exhibit, which began with a short movie about King Tut. In the dark, my mother said to me, “Watch your purse.”

In the first room of the exhibit, we were a field trip of underachievers. We couldn’t pronounce Tutankhamen or figure out his genealogy, and we didn’t know what canopic meant. I kept pressing the wrong numbers on my mother’s gadget for the audio tour, so the tape would play the spiel about liver embalming when she was looking at the mask of Nefertiti.

But we found our stride as the exhibit continued. The lights were low and dramatic; the rooms modeled after the King’s own tomb. I held onto my mother’s elbow as she wobbled along, and my daughter read aloud for her the plaques she couldn’t read herself.

We saw lovely calcite jars, so luminous that they glowed. Delicate statues called
shabti,
glazed a vibrant blue. A gilded chest covered with carved hieroglyphs. The artifacts, all over three thousand years old, had been placed in King Tut’s tomb to keep him company in the afterlife. In the Egyptian culture’s reverence for the dead, I could see its reverence for the living. Looking at the amazing artifacts, holding onto my mother and my daughter, I realized that this moment might never come again. Cancer kills mothers every day, and death comes for all, boy kings and perfumed women.

Then I tried to understand why it took a glimpse of the afterlife to make me appreciate this life.

It was an afterlife lesson.

We passed into the last room of the exhibit, which was darker than all the others. I had expected to see the grand finale, King Tut’s famous golden sarcophagus. But where it should have been, instead was a stand the approximate size and shape of a sarcophagus. On it was projected a ghostly photo of King Tut, which morphed from a picture of his mummified remains to a picture of his sarcophagus.

“What’s this?” I asked, mystified. “Where’s King Tut?”

Mother Mary said, “Told you. He’s not here. I read it in the paper.”

“
That’s
what you meant?”

“Yes.”

I felt terrible, for my mother. “Sorry about that.”

But she waved me off. “Makes no difference.”

Francesca looked over at me. “Bummed, Mom?”

“No,” I answered, without hesitation.

“Me, neither,” she said, with a smile

And we both took Mother Mary by the arm.

It’s fun to do something dumb. Not something really dumb, like my second marriage. That was really
really
dumb.

I mean, it’s fun to perform a mindless task. I realized this today, when I clipped my pony. Yes, even though I’m a grown-up, I have a pony named Buddy. I bought him from a little girl who thought he was too old, too small, and too slow.

Bingo!

Buddy is a brown-and-white paint with a wavy black mane and eyes round as Ping-Pong balls. He’s barely taller than a golden retriever, and when I ride him, my heels practically drag on the ground. And he’s shaggier than a mastodon. He needs to be clipped twice a summer, which is where our adventure begins.

I was supposed to be working on a novel at the time, but I couldn’t figure out the plot, the character, or the dialogue. That’s about all there is to one of my books, except for the sex scene, but we’ll leave that for another day. I was in first draft, and even though I tell myself first draft doesn’t have to be perfect, I feel as if it does. By the time my book goes out the door, it has to be as perfect as I can make it, which still isn’t perfect. It’s perfect, for me.

But today I couldn’t do perfect; I couldn’t even do good. I lost my mojo, it was hot outside, and I knew a pony who was sweating his ass off. So I went to the barn, turned on the Rolling Stones, tied that little furball up in the aisle, and grabbed the electric clippers.

Start me up.

I shaved strips into Buddy’s thick, curly hair, and the Stones got me rocking. My mind wandered, and I became Mick Jagger. I sang. I played air guitar. I looked awesome in really tight pants.

Two hours later, my little Beast of Burden looked as if he’d been sheared by Keith Richards. Mental patients get better haircuts, and a close second are condemned prisoners. My clipping method wasn’t perfect. Buddy’s coat had been matted in places, but I cut it off rather than untangle it. Nor had I decided in advance which type of clip job to give him, and there are three types: full body clip (self-explanatory), trace clip (top-half only), and Scottoline clip (until pony looks schizophrenic).

And the worst part was that I had started the job wearing my prescription sunglasses instead of my regular glasses, but that had made it too dark to see what I was doing. So I took the sunglasses off, but then I couldn’t see the pony at all. Still I clipped him anyway. I got the job done, which is good enough for a rock star.

The other mindless task I love is mowing the lawn. I mow on an ancient diesel tractor and I pretend it’s a new John Deere riding mower. Or a Corvette, a Maserati, or a horse that’s taller, faster, and younger than Buddy. I’m in the ring at a horse show. In my mind.

A girl can dream, can’t she?

And I don’t do a perfect job on the lawn, either. I ride my
tractor/Olympic steed around the backyard, plowing strips wherever I please, spewing chopped sticks and broken glass. I breathe in random scents of mint, onion grass, and diesel smoke. Bugs fly up my nose, and I wear orange earphones for maximum hotness.

I aim only to get the job done. I swerve to avoid frogs, which creates crop circles worthy of M. Night Shyamalan. I drive around rocks that have been there forever, and my backyard looks like it has hairy moles. So what? My Aunt Rachel had hairy moles, and she was my favorite.

And if a hose is on the ground, I drive around that, too. I never get off the tractor, move the hose, and mow underneath it. I leave my hose and grass to their own devices. Not everything on my property is my business.

And, as you may have guessed, I never decide in advance what type of mowing method to use. As you know, there are three types: up and down (self-explanatory), around and around (dizzying), or Scottoline (surprise me!)

But here is the point. What I do during these mindless tasks is dream. Some people call them chores, but to me, they’re dream jobs. This isn’t just marketing or reverse psychology; we all need time to dream. I take a break from the real job to do the dream job. And unlike the real job, the dream job doesn’t have it be perfect. It just has to get done in a dreamy way.