I raced past the kennels each time. So many noses pressed against the chain link. Others cast their pink, brown, black noses downward, their beautiful tails curling inward or twitching a sad little wag as they turned away. I was always running late. It seemed a little unfair to all of us to put us through that, dogs included. That was my way of dealing with it.
We would meet in a standalone structure at the end of a tidy path. A couple of long tables pushed together and fold-out chairs under a drop-down ceiling, like any other conference room, except this one was in an animal shelter. The Toastmasters group met once every other week, and I guess because it was specifically a vegan group, they figured it was the right kind of place to convene, but actually it was pretty demented. The chapter president told me one night over beers that it was because the shelter let us meet there for free, and that’s when it all made sense.
Almost immediately, I hated that I had agreed to this. My therapist had skillfully led me to this conclusion: if I was so scared of everything, and I hated myself so much, then wouldn’t I expose myself to terrifying things, because don’t you torture the people you hate? Those are my words. Really, she did feel that exposing myself to stimuli that made me feel alive would remind me that there were things to look forward to, that life wasn’t predetermined nor a mind-numbingly meaningless freefall toward an agonizing death. If one could induce adrenaline, even in minor spurts, then the will to survive should take over the reins of the lizard-brain, and perhaps over time the survival mechanism could begin to look like a person flourishing. Those are also my words, but she’d agree that’s pretty much what she was saying.
My therapist insisted that joining something like a local Toastmasters chapter was a good way for me to interrupt myself.
The only group I could consistently attend was the vegan chapter. My work and family obligations pulled me too often, erratically, away from being my least-toxic self. Eventually, I emailed ahead to ask if I had to be vegan in order to join and the president said no, as long as everyone was respectful. I was vegetarian in high school, I told him. I understood more than most. I just wanted to master the art of public speaking.
Right away, newcomers were welcomed with one hundred pages of self-helpese and trademarked business speak, but there were some gems. One exercise involved body-awareness, and my therapist and I both agreed it could be useful to check in with yourself to see how you were feeling, to pay attention to the body’s many cues, things like that. I was grateful for the level of detail in the manual’s assignments and the degree of specificity regarding the various roles we were each expected to take turns undergoing; for example, counting the number of times anyone said ‘um’ or using red and green lights for cuing during important speeches. Eventually, the best speeches would be up for competition against other Toastmasters groups. In theory.
In reality, old-timers argued over animal rights activism and environmentalist politics. For that reason, any valuable work transpired when we separated into groups, and that’s how I met Gina.
In our first session in the same group, she was seated on the fold-out chair, legs crossed, and she had a way of speaking that seemed like she was smiling, but she wasn’t really. It was all in her eyes, which held peoples’ gazes the way you might hold a hummingbird egg. She had the most beautiful chin, I noticed that right away, and long highlighted hair that bounced when she moved. The energy she emitted that day was like a cozy blanket or a thick sweater on a chilly evening. I found out later, it was the drugs.
“Gina. Hi. I live in the Palisades with my mom,” she said. “I’m her caretaker. I’m here to meet other vegans.”
“I’m Merrie,” I said. “I’m here for self-improvement. I am a personal assistant and part-time event planner.” In fact, I had only helped one aunt with my cousin’s quinceañera, on the side, while working my 9-5 as assistant to an event planner with a bad reputation. But my aunt had paid me the entire amount for my solo work, so it still counted. It counted so much.
The others in that day’s group were a retired nurse who was there to get out of the house and back into activism and a couple of college students who had dropped out of an environmentalism course that would have culminated in a presentation comprising thirty percent of their grade. One could argue that we all wanted the same thing.
After about two months, I had waved to countless shelter volunteers operating the front desk, walked past hundreds of dogs I pretended not to see, and sat through dozens of niche speeches. I became very familiar with topics such as how to deal with protein recommendations by laypeople, the many reasons why real vegans should exclusively frequent vegan-only restaurants, and why it was crucial to support the many existing people of color in the vegan communities across the globe due to popular misconceptions about access. My first speech was about why Paula Abdul was a necessary feminist icon.
The only person who seemed to listen to every word was Gina. So, when she invited me over for drinks one night, I accepted. Eventually, we were hanging out every day after work. We liked to meet halfway in Marina Del Rey or Venice Beach.
“What is it about Gina that you find so fascinating?” my therapist asked.
“She just seems really nice,” I said. “Not fake. Which is so rare.”
“How is she not fake, and why is that so rare?”
I didn’t really know how to answer that intelligently.
My many sessions with my therapist uncovered that, due to inferiorities stemming from being ESL or growing up poor, and later developing tendencies that indicated an Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder—which, I was told, was nothing like OCD—I had wasted my life striving for a specific kind of perfection. One needed to be interesting but inoffensive, gorgeous but humble, kind but selective, and most important of all, carefree. A person in pursuit of this specific perfection should spend hours analyzing the volume of a great blowout and that volume’s relationship to hairspray; should devise myriad ways to hide the body’s many bulges; should practice genuinely laughing without annoying men. Speaking intelligently and discovering ideas worth quoting were skills that I stopped developing after college because who needs ideas to whittle, refine, and share aloud when no one is grading you? Who has time to read literature when you’re watching people onscreen enact the illusion of life’s vagaries, especially because you know those people had to sit in the makeup artist’s trailer for hours beforehand and you need to know exactly what decisions were made in that trailer?
At some point, Gina had told me, “I’m not vegan one hundred percent of the time. I try my best. But it’s so hard.” The most zealous members of the group made her suspicious, and she agreed that probably the loudest people committed the most egregious hypocrisy when no one was looking.
“The vegans doth protest too much,” she said.
“I bet they eat meat-lovers pizza late at night,” I said. “They should just sit back and leave everyone alone.”
“Why do you think they don’t?” my therapist asked.
“Because,” I said, “they are so judgmental. If only you had to sit through those speeches.” I shook my head, letting my face complete my sentence.
My therapist reminded me that people were allowed to be flawed and have values, to make mistakes while aspiring to live according to their ideals. “It’s part of the human condition. No one can be perfect, remember?”
But Gina, who always smelled of marshmallows and never wore the same thing twice, felt that mediocrity was a noxious mold that could spread into corners you didn’t know about if you weren’t careful. Every moment was an opportunity for playing offense against death, or the death of pleasure which was worse.
“How does your therapist feel about Christians?” Gina asked one evening over beers and karaoke at a bar near the 405.
“Now that you mention it,” I said, “she did ask me if I also feel angry when religious people behave in a manner not according to their beliefs, too.”
“And do you?” she asked. The karaoke lineup lulled, and all around the bar was the din of drinking.
“Obviously,” I said. “You can’t act self-righteous and then be surprised when everybody hates you.”
“You should go up and sing,” Gina said, poking a French fry in the direction of the karaoke corner.
“I would sooner die,” I said, watching a woman walk up to the microphone.
Another question that my therapist once asked me was whether I thought it would be better if people only made mistakes in private. She said, “Would it be better if they never said anything at all and held in their mistakes and trespasses quietly?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I think if you’re going to condemn people to hell, you should also not do things that will send you to hell, even in private. Especially in private.”
My therapist said, “You’re a Catholic, right?”
I hated it when she did that.
It was Gina’s suggestion that I stop going to therapy.
I admitted then I had some personal issues which, according to my therapist, would get worse if I didn’t mitigate them with cognitive behavioral techniques.
“So what?” said Gina. “Take your health into your own hands. I’m allegedly bipolar, but I’m also allegedly borderline, and borderline isn’t even real. It’s something sexist, lazy doctors made up so they could quit on difficult and highly intelligent women in excruciating emotional pain. I mean, really, I stopped going to the psychiatrist when I realized I probably just have ADHD, and those assholes never caught it. You know. Because of sexism.”
Insights like that would have been worth mentioning to my therapist, but I stopped my sessions. I wanted more time to focus on the things I had always wanted to do.
Gina was there to help with that focus. For example, when I wanted to camp out in Joshua Tree, she packed a tent to share, along with some sleeping bags borrowed from a fellow Toastmaster, loads of water bottles, and granola bars. She got her neighbor to check in on her mother while she was gone. When I wanted to eat at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, Gina drove me and defended me from laughter when I tripped on a random step in the middle of the restaurant. “Who puts a step like that there, without a sign or handrails?” she said, loudly, lifting me up. “What if she’d gotten really hurt?!”
Gina joined me in my quest to find the perfect bowl of menudo on Sundays, replacing her boozy brunches at upscale patioed places on the Westside with my fifty-minute jaunts inland and southward, venturing into places she had never, despite being born and raised within a similar area code, known existed: El Monte, City Terrace, Bell Gardens, Commerce. We often ended up at the types of places with daily specials scribbled on a whiteboard and oil stains on the to-go menus.
Unfailingly, her orders consisted of a plate full of rice and beans and guacamole with French fries while, across the table, I attacked a bowl of menudo big enough to swim in. The tripe stew smell was a specific one. Some recipes called for cow tongue. Some ditched the hominy element and focused primarily on the broth. By the end of the meal, remaining pieces of cow hoof with hair still attached, cut by rapid-fire butchers, floated in any broth I was unable to finish.
Gina was willing to sit through that for me.
During those meals, our conversations gravitated toward work and business.
“You ever think about those dogs we walk past at the shelter?” she asked me.
“Like how depressing they are?”
“No, how ingenious it is to let people with a soft spot for animals see them on a regular basis. It’s a great marketing ploy. You could learn from them. For your business.”
“How?”
She barreled past my question. “Like, I want one, so bad. I would take any of them. All of them. But my mom is allergic. You think you’d make a good dog mom?”
I said, “Don’t say that. It’s disrespectful to real mothers.”
“I think you’d make a great dog mom. You’re so on top of everything all the time.”
“They really are the cutest,” I said.
Even our drives were fruitful because Gina liked to spitball ideas on how to spread word of my business: a website with testimonials, a Facebook page with scheduling tools, a flashy reel edited from footage by videographers of events I’d helped on.
“That last place we went to?” she told me on one of these drives. “I snuck in a stack of your business cards on the hostess’ stand by the cash register.”
One Sunday, after an agonizing wait for the kitchen to dispatch our meals, Gina sent her plate back because there was sour cream on her beans.
Gina said, “You know, in some cultures, it’s considered good manners to wait to eat before everyone is served. But I guess some people aren’t very cultured.”
My spoon had been halfway in my mouth for my third bite, and my hand froze midway. I blinked, again and again, because her words felt like hot soup flicked onto my eyes. I set my spoon down, and I did as she did, which was to look toward the kitchen doors, the way my abuelita’s chihuahuas would stare at the back doorknob, willing it to do anything but remain as it were.
When I wanted to go see the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, we ditched a Toastmasters meeting and drove all night.
“I have a friend who lives in Berkeley,” she said, downing an energy drink, even though I was the one driving. Her meds, she explained, prevented her from driving long distances in the dark. “He’ll let us crash there for as long as we need to.”
The pier was dirtier than expected and difficult to traverse, but this was mainly because it was trammeled by a never-ending influx of tourists. The seals, flopping around aggressively, and the gloomy weather made the trip worth it.
The drive into Berkeley over the bridge was not worth it. Upon arriving at her friend’s home, we discovered it was a former frat house that had recently become entirely infested with bed bugs. All boys except the nastiest ones had gone elsewhere.
Eventually, I said, “I guess I know someone on the outskirts of the city,” but I only said this after it was becoming clear Gina was considering booking a five-star hotel, split two ways with money I didn’t have.
I made a call, and before I knew it, my ex-boyfriend was ushering us into his matte-black BMW. Stephen took the scenic route to a sushi dinner overlooking the bluffs, then drove us back to his place and showed us his guest room.
“You take it,” Gina said to me.
“We can share,” I said. There was a full-size bed, and there was also room on the floor. “I don’t mind. Bed’s big enough.”
“I’m good on the couch,” she said.
From the guest room, I could hear them in the living room—her moaning and his furtive whispers—until 4 a.m.
On the drive back, she said, “You do have to work on your ESL, you know. You still say things like ‘essscuse me’ instead of ‘excuse me’ and ‘expresso’ instead of ‘espresso.’ And, you mess up common sayings like Ricky Ricardo does in I Love Lucy. Things like ‘for all intensive purposes,’ but it’s ‘for all intents and purposes. Don’t pronounce the ‘l’ in salmon. Also, you say things like ‘theatre concessions’ and ‘yahoos,’ and it cracks me up. Like, where did you pick that up? Aren’t you from the barrio?”
“Oh,” I said.
“I just mean this to help you, you know. On your speeches.”
By mid-summer, I was hired to plan two quinceañeras and three baby showers, while still working my assistant job. My days were weighed down by phone calls, emails, and invoices. My days were buoyed by others’ anticipation. The future held so much. For my young clients, the number fifteen was a symbol to arrive at, a permission to steer toward. Until then, there were dance steps to memorize, photography sessions to plan, and speeches to write, all carried by an undercurrent of possibility.
The mothers-to-be were my favorite clients. In pregnant bodies, futures contained infinity. From far away, it felt like the least a person could do was to have a baby. How boring, how claustrophobic, how completely predictable of a species with an evolutionary drive. But up close, having to think deeply about what these women wanted, what they expected, and how to celebrate their answers, I started thinking thoughts like, if the future belongs to everybody, and pregnant bodies were the only way to produce more bodies, then everybody is invested in pregnant peoples’ futures, whether they know it or not. As the planner of these moms-to-be, I needed their baby showers to reflect a particular yearning, an acute hope. I tried to explain this to Gina, but she only said, “Can I come?”
“To the baby showers? I mean, I don’t think—”
“Just say I’m your assistant.”
My therapist probably would have explained that these moments were for boundaries.
“Come on, it’ll be fun. I can follow you like a little puppy holding your clipboard and you can boss me around.”
And she did follow me around, at first. She helped me organize the cupcakes and tape up the balloon archway for the photos. But after sampling the mimosas I had set out for the ladies who were done having children, Gina disappeared for hours. I found her in a bathroom stall, mascara smudged from crying. She sniffed and sniffed through her words, “I don’t want to talk about it. He’s an asshole.”
“Well, yeah, Gina,” I said. “I told you how he broke my heart last year.”
She looked up at me as if seeing me for the first time, but the moment was fleeting and she said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s not like that. It’s more than that. You just won’t get it.”
Late every night, after flurries of exhausting thoughts kept me pinned to my pillow for hours, relentless in their pursuit of me, I would curl up and wish for a drug, an earplug, the deepest hug. From my therapist, from my ex-boyfriend, from one of the cuter puppies at the shelter. Eventually, I would give up and shuffle toward my laptop for the distraction of work.
And then there were the rest of the Toastmasters meetings. My attempts to weasel out of post-meeting group hangs fell apart when Gina would make a big show of my excuses in front of everybody, and I would be too tired to argue, so I would inevitably have to hear about the plans she was making with Stephen to meet up in places I’d always wanted to visit: Carmel-by-the-Sea and Palo Alto and wineries near San Luis Obispo. A seed was growing under the soil of dread I was fertilizing with delayed responses to her texts and claims that I was too busy to go menudo-hunting, even though I still went on my own. I avoided the places where she had pinned up my business cards. I would go with my thick planner to avoid overthinking, making lists upon lists, bullet point by bullet point, reorganizing my calendars and call lists, and deleting completed tasks, because they took up too much space.
I don't know why Gina wanted to go to the next quinceañera on my docket. I thought about giving her the wrong address. In the end, she showed up hours before I did and yelled at me for telling her the wrong time.
We went to the grand ballroom, where the venue was setting up the tables. Ribbon bows dangled off the back of the cloth covers. Rosario, the quinceañera, was a neighbor I used to babysit when I was younger, and she had sought my advice on the brindis during our weekly meetings. I had told her I was becoming adept in the art of public speaking so I could help her with every element of her speech if she wanted me to. I was shrewd during practice. Don’t say um, I commanded. Chin up. Take a deep breath if you feel like throwing up.
On her big day, Rosario needed reinforcement. Her kohl-rimmed eyes and lashes, weighed down by extravagant falsies, were wide with terror.
Rosario said, “But Merrie, I’m so nervous. His parents are here.”
Gina said, “Don’t take her advice, she always messes up her speeches in the club.” A silence stretched between the three of us, until finally she added, “I’m just messing, she’s all right.”
“Rosario,” I said, “If I was you, I would take a deep breath.”
“If I were you,” Gina said.
I thought then about how I’d once heard that certain therapists take phone sessions if you need them badly enough; I wondered about it for the rest of the day.
The night I quit Toastmasters, Gina had insisted on carpooling, even though I had choreography to oversee with one a client and my client’s chambelanes and damas in my parent’s backyard. The choreographer preferred speaking Spanish, so Gina waited inside.
It was the type of summer evening that makes you feel hopeful, the orangey-blue haze of the sunset cooling the air. I watched the quince as her chambelan twirled her around, and her friends giggled with her. With my clipboard, I crossed out every run-through that went perfectly. I wrote down every mistake. When it was over, I walked everyone out through the side gate, and I entered my parent’s house from the front door. Before I even closed the door behind me to get her, Gina was saying, laughingly, as if she’d been waiting for me to come in just so she could say: “Oh my god, Merrie. Look. If this doesn’t sum you up.”
She pointed at the mess on my parent’s kitchen table, a cacophony of fruit bowls full of overly-ripe fruit, bags of potatoes, and stacked dishes. Perhaps waiting for someone to organize them or throw them away, I wasn’t sure what. Eventually, I realized she was pointing at a curious sight, an inadvertent sculpture: someone had stacked my grandmother’s queso de cincho, a three-quarter hunk of the most pungent stink bomb of raw cheese smuggled from Mexico by my abuelita, placed atop my dad’s $540 bottle of Dom Perignon housed in a fancy blue box, a tenth anniversary gift from his employer at the industrial warehouse where he had been recently promoted.
The box was upside down, but the cheese was right-side up. It made the entire house smell like vinegared, diseased feet.
I smiled through the night’s speeches and clapped at the endings, and I thought about the cheese. I nodded in support as Gina pointed out the newest additions to the kennels and stopped to pet her favorites on our way out, all the while thinking about the upside-down box housing the Perignon. I drove Gina home, hugging her on the sidewalk at the edge of the elegant slate footpath leading up to her mother’s front door, and I was still thinking about the way she gleefully pointed at my parent’s kitchen table. When she said, “I’ll see you later,” I had my hands in my pockets to keep from floating away.
“Yeah, definitely,” I lied.
The kind of thing that sticks with you is how you mean one thing but, fatefully, it becomes something else entirely. It would be months of avoiding Toastmasters meetings and Gina’s phone calls and texts and emails before Gina’s mom would call me to say Gina had overdosed on her pills. It had been Gina who had needed caretaking, not her mother. Gina was at Toastmasters meetings to sell a lie her mother was only too eager to believe: that Gina was on a novel wellness plan, a triad of structured socialization, a strict sleep regimen, and clean eating. What she had failed to mention to her mother is that it was of her own design and precluded doctors.
Gina’s downward spiral was unlike anything her mother had ever seen her daughter go through, deciding to go off her meds—her mother said Gina once called it raw-dogging life—until one day she decided to take them all at once. She left no note.
Before we ended the call, Gina’s mother told me that she was able to find my number because of the business cards stacked right by Gina laptop on her desk. “I would really love it if you spoke at the funeral. She talked about you constantly, you know. She said you were her best friend and her favorite at the Toastmasters. That would mean so much, if you could say a few words.” I wrote my thoughts for a eulogy out on legal pads, iPhone notes, emails to myself, everything I thought I could say that would be beautiful and honest. Eventually, I checked the iMessage dates against what her mother had told me, and realized it had been barely thirteen hours between when she sent her last text to me, and when she left us. Then I stopped writing and lay in my bed and talked to my therapist in my head.
But remember, people are allowed to be imperfect.
Imperfect people are not just tolerable or mediocre, they are all of us.
Now is it, in fact, better to hold it all in?
Was it really better, Merrie, that she never said anything at all?
And why do you spell your name like that? It’s Maria. M-A-R-I-A. Not M-E-R-R-I-E.
On the drive to the funeral, I thought about my speech. While writing it, I had kept coming back to a certain memory, that time at the bar by the 405 on Karaoke Night. Gina had suggested repeatedly that I put my name down and brave the stage; three drinks in, I finally said, fuck it. I’ll go.
I had always wanted to do karaoke. The stage had been poorly lit and small, but they called my name, and I stood there, shoulders back. Ahead of the countdown on the karaoke screen, I checked in with my body. I made eye contact with everyone whose gaze was in my direction. Then, just as quickly, once I started to sing, nobody was looking in my direction, and I discovered my song was a mood-killer, a crowd-displeaser. Dear lord, why hadn’t I chosen Paula Abdul? But I remained committed. I projected from my diaphragm and kept my eyes open, while my friend was looking away, like she didn’t know me.
I didn’t put that part in my speech, because it wasn’t important. The other part was. The part where I was holding the microphone pressed to my palm, and I was looking back at the crowd, even though I had minutes earlier wanted to disappear and had loudly said I preferred to die. My friend had encouraged me to be brave, to act upon intent, do what I’d always wanted, and everything turned out alright.
This was where my speech would fall apart every time I ran through it. And I ran through it relentlessly; silently, loudly when I was driving around town, in whispers; I recorded it, and listened to it as I cried myself to sleep.
I was listening to it on the way to the funeral.
Then, at an intersection, where I was supposed to turn left for the freeway, I turned right instead. I crawled up the spine of the 405 on Sepulveda, away from where I had been driving toward.
Eventually, I parked the car in that lot as I had done numerous times before.
In my black dress and black flats, I said, “No, no, I’m not here for that today. I’m here for one of the dogs in the back this time. This time, I’m taking one home.”