New Thing #1: ¿Cómo se dice?

For Said Guy’s Christmas present, I hired a housekeeper to come once a month. Said Guy works a lot of weekends, so it sucks to have to clean during our rare concurrent days off .

There are actually three housekeepers. It’s a family business. The Reyeses are from Nicaragua originally, and while they all know English, they speak Spanish among themselves.

I studied Spanish, but I never spoke very well. I deliberately kept my American accent in class because speaking with a “Spanish” accent (i.e. correct pronunciation) felt like speaking English with a fake British accent — like I was putting on some kind of a show. Pronunciation is critical to listening comprehension, so I couldn’t understand anything either.

The only ground I gained was when I went to Spain for 3 weeks during my junior year in England. I had no choice but to use what Spanish I had. But I didn’t seek out opportunities to practice. It was immediately clear that the embarrassments and frustrations would far outnumber any gratifying successes. If someone knew English, that’s what we spoke.

Then I moved to China, and Mandarin crowded all the Spanish out of that part of my brain.

The good thing was that I was not as shy about abandoning English. With a language as hard as Chinese, you simply have to accept that you suck. Any words uttered or understood are bonus points. It’s still frustrating, but you can’t be embarrassed. You just try, try, try.

So yesterday, when the Reyeses came over and the house filled with Spanish, some Spanish words slipped out of my mouth. I totally forgot that starting a conversation in Spanish would be like driving my car into the wrong lane of traffic. Spanish was the language being spoken, so that’s what came out — even though a wreck was inevitable and could be avoided by swerving back to English.

We talked about our dead pets. They had a dog in Nicaragua, but it died when they went on vacation to El Salvador, and the loss was more heartbreaking than they ever anticipated. They didn’t get another dog after that.

“I had more cat, but in summer she kills,” I said. “There was biede (Chinese for “other”) cat, lives not in this house. They have  reeow, reeow (clawing motion with hand). My cat was very small. Then she kills.”

I stuck my tongue out and crossed my eyes so as to indicate death.

“I was much sad.”

The Reyes were very sorry.

Anyway, I have them to thank for yesterday’s new thing.

It was the first conversation I’ve ever had in Spanish just for fun.

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Erin’s New Things

Kill ‘em dead

It turns out my cat learned something while I was on vacation last week.

He killed two mice.

This is an important coming-of-age moment for any cat. And I missed it.

The pet sitter called while I was on Interstate 80 in Nebraska. Atticus displayed his first mouse on the entryway floor. The second he put in his food bowl.

“In his food bowl!” I exclaimed. Ohh, my big boy got tidy, too! Usually he trashes his eating area. Little bits of food end up all over the laundry room.

I was so excited about my baby’s new skills.

Then I got home and realized dead mice might now appear anywhere in the house.

On the dead animal tolerance scale, I hover around Dislikes But Can Cope (except for dead fish, which push me down to Weeps When In The Same Room Or Even Sees Them On TV). But that’s when I know the dead animal is probably there and I can brace myself — like, on rural roads and Chinese meat markets and Cabela’s. I actually started petting Said Guy’s stepdad’s elk head in the garage the last time we visited them in Wisconsin.

HOWEVER.

Should I open the shower curtain to find a motionless pile of fur near the drain, my tolerance will certainly drop to Bloodcurdling Scream And Refuses To Enter Room For The Foreseeable Future.

There is no tolerance category for when I open the shower curtain to find a slightly-moving, throes-of-death pile of fur.

At least kill ‘em dead for me, Atticus.

The saving reprieve of Mohawk Lady

So you all know yesterday was awful.

After leaving Betta to be cremated and throwing up a couple of times, I had to move on with life. Some things can’t wait.

Like deadline.

I ran to Costco to develop some photos I needed for an article (which now isn’t going to run this week, just one more Fuck This). I could barely form sentences or look the clerk in the eye. My hands shook over the photo order form. The deafening rattle of giant carts under a metal roof closed in around me while  Conan O’Brien quacked away in the display model TVs. My knees began to wobble in sensory claustrophobia, and I dropped my head onto the exclamation-pointed counter ads for photo print deals.

Fuck This.

I had a half hour to wait, so I stumbled over to a row of electric massage chairs. When you want to abandon your existence in Costco, this is your best hope.

Then Mohawk Lady walked by.

Mohawk Lady goes to lots of concerts in SLC and dances next to the stage. Her head is shaved except for the greying mohawk and a thin, meter-long braid wrapped in embroidery thread. She wears garish colors, has leather-tan skin and is impossible not to notice.

Celebrity sighting at Costco! It was my first non-traumatic moment of the day.

“Oh, how about these!” she exclaimed at the chairs. She was with a man, who said something to her and went on his way.

“El gusto es mio!” she called after him and settled into the chair next to me. “‘El gusto es mio.’ I just love that. Do you know what it means?”

I was in awe.

“‘The pleasure is mine,’” she said. “I think it’s just beautiful. It’s Spanish. Oooh, this chair!”

I summoned my powers of conversation for the first time that day. We sat in the massage chairs and talked a little bit about studying foreign languages, and I told her about teaching English in China. We oohed and ahhed at the various massage settings. Mohawk Lady goes by Rainy.

Then I told Rainy about Betta. When I welled up, she grabbed my hand.

“She discarded the physical. That’s the only thing we know for sure.”

I described the trip to the vet, the bloody sinus, the freakish, terrified honking noises that little Betta made when she came in the pet door yesterday morning with her eye poked out. Anytime I said the word “died,” Rainy corrected me: “Discarded the physical.”

“That’s the only thing we know,” she kept repeating. She assured me that Betta would have good company with Rainy’s discarded physicals: little Mecca and Hodgie and Kikipoo. Then she told me about the three human modes of action: creator, scientist and monkey.

I figured it out right away.

Then my film was ready and I had to return to Fuck This. It just kept getting worse. The pictures sucked, I calloused my throat trying not to cry through night shift, my dinner was ruined when the takeout box fell apart, and then I had to stay an hour late at work because of a shooting and stabbing on deadline. When I got home after midnight, my boyfriend and I sat at the kitchen table for an hour while tears dripped off our chins and into our glasses of whiskey. Then I woke up with the squirts.

But for a half hour in the motorized recliners at Costco, goodwill showed up under a mohawk and held my hand.

Thanks for the breather, Rainy.

Goodbye, Kitty

Betta died this morning.

She came inside with a punctured eye. I do not know how it was punctured. The vet believes it was another cat. Atticus has no blood on his claws or fur, but that does not rule him out.

The wound caused a lot of blood to enter her sinus, and she inhaled too much. She died at the pet hospital.

I don’t have much more to say about it right now. I’m in disbelief.

Betta was a good cat. I loved her.

Disgraced

My world is falling apart.

See, I used to have standards. There were limits as to what was OK and what was not OK.

Now all of my principles lie shattered at my feet.

That’s right. I’ve become one of those people.

I don’t know what happened to my life.