My Brief Bartending Career

In the early 1990s, I left a husband, a house, and a job because none of it was turning out as I had hoped. I could live off the proceeds from selling my house for one year, so I had one year to get on my feet. My plan was to work at night in the lucrative field of bartending while writing by day.

It seemed like a plan. I’d work at night in an atmosphere of noise, hubbub and congeniality, which would take the loneliness out of being single again and make me forget all my romantic and career failures while I lived in this netherworld. There would be the added bonus of big tips for mixing magical potions. I would be a wizard before Harry Potter was ever invented.

This was also pre-Internet and pre-blogging. If blogs had existed back then, and I had blogged my bartending adventures just as Diablo Cody would one day blog her adventures as a stripper, which got a book deal, then a movie, and an Oscar, where would I be now? Alas, I was ahead of the curve, and my bartending life didn’t last that long anyway.

I took a course at J. Sargeant Reynolds in bartending. There was such a thing then. We met once a week at Extra Billy’s for a couple of months, learning recipes, mixing tips, equipment, customer service, and listening to fascinating and hilarious bartending stories from our young, attractive male teacher. All my classmates were younger than me, but back then I could pass. I received my diploma, which no one ever asked to see, and a folder full of drink recipes, which I converted to index cards.

Getting a job as a bartender was just as impossible as getting a job as a journalist. There were seldom ads for the position. Cold-calling bars produced no results. No one wanted to let me start behind the bar. I would have to waitress first, with no promises of advancement. Even at the least trendy places, like Piggy's Attaché Lounge, I was told I had to waitress first. Men did not have to waitress first. They went straight behind the bar, either as a bar back (carrying ice and supplies from the back) or actual bartending. It was discrimination.

I don’t remember now why I didn’t agree to that. Maybe I thought it would be too degrading. With my shiny new diploma, I didn’t want to be out on the floor carrying a tray. I was ready to mix!

So I signed up with a temp agency that supplied bartending and catering services. I said I was a bartender, not a waitress. I didn’t want to do gigs where I carried food trays. I was very clear about that, so I worked less than girls willing to do it all. Still, I got a few jobs.

On the surface, it was glamorous. The uniform was a white tux shirt with a black bowtie, a black cummerbund, a black skirt, and black flats. I still had the legs for the skirt. I’d see older, exhausted women who had transitioned to black pants, but I wasn’t there yet. And my stomach was still flat enough then to rock a cummerbund. A bowtie and a tux shirt is a good look for anyone. I would see how the other half lived, and in Richmond there was definitely another half where life was sophisticated and elegant.

Under the surface, it was not so glamorous. It was a sticky job. You started the evening cutting up dozens of oranges and limes for your station, the juice splashing all over you. Since you had to report to work in your uniform, you were stuck wearing that sticky outfit for the rest of the night. During the course of an evening, you’d be making dozens of basic highballs with club soda, ginger ale, tonic water, orange, grapefruit or cranberry juice, mixed with vodka, gin, whiskey or rum, and garnished with fruit. You’d be rapidly cracking open the soda bottles and getting sprayed by them. By the end of the night, you were as sticky as a pest strip from head to toe, standing in a big wet spot -- and not the good kind either.

Four jobs stand out in my memory, and in the end, I didn’t work much more than those four because they sealed my fate as a bartender.

I’ve never been good at memorizing anything, a flaw that kept me from being an accountant (multiplication tables) and an actress (lines), both careers I wanted to do. So I was very nervous about a special afternoon event at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens where we would do more than the basic highballs. We were equipped to make a few fancier drinks, like whiskey sours, Manhattans, martinis, and others. I had some of my index cards in my skirt pocket and would peek at them. One of my table customers thought this was charming and would cheerfully talk me through his drink orders.

But at the end of the evening, the temp agency booker, who had also worked the event, chewed me out for using cards. It was unprofessional, he said. I was never going to make it in the bartending biz at that rate. Shame on me.

I felt humiliated. Here I was with a college degree, and yet I’m being made to feel like dirt because I peeked at the instructions for a whiskey sour. I would have cried all the way home -- and I did shed a few tears -- except for the fact I had a $20 tip in my pocket from my most helpful customer. There was a certain advantage to being a damsel in bartending distress that my boss did not fully appreciate as far as making money. As long as you looked like you were trying, there was always a mercy tip. But that turned out to be the exception, not the rule.

I didn’t think I’d be called again, but two big events were coming up and they needed everyone they could get. So I got a station at the Bal du Bois ball at the Country Club of Virginia, the only time I’ll ever see the inside of that temple of privilege. Here were Richmond’s most elegant young people and their very rich parents, dancing, eating and drinking in their very fine clothes. But despite all the good breeding, drunk guys are still drunk guys and there’s nothing elegant about being a sloppy drunk.

At the end of the night, as I was closing my station, one of those drunk boys came up to me and blubbered, “I jus wanda you to know you made me feel baaaad all night. Ever’ time I came to you for a drink, you looked at me that way.”

I knew what "way" had cut him to the quick -- a look of disapproval that despite his fine tuxedo and jazzy, multi-colored cummerbund, and his Porsche parked outside, and his future career as a corporate lawyer, he was still one sorry, sloppy drunk tonight and I felt for at least that moment that I was better than him.

I was going to have a serious problem as a bartender if I made my clients feel like crap every time they ordered a drink.

The downward spiral continued at New Year’s Eve at the Tredegar Ironworks, another expensive ticket for the rich kids. It was a BYOB affair. The catering service supplied the mixers and fruit. The guests brought their own liquor, which was name tagged and kept at the multi-staffed stations and poured on demand by We the Bartenders. The evening went okay until the end of the night when a very drunk young man came to retrieve what was left of his bottle from my station and I couldn’t find it. He accused me of stealing it, but his party convinced him to forget about it and leave.

Shaken, I ran to the ladies’ room, which was a disaster area. Every toilet was full and overflowing, a couple of inches of water on the floor. Sanitary napkins, tampons and wads of toilet tissue were floating in the bowls and puddling on the floor in white and pink heaps. Faucets were left running. Every sink was full of plates of leftover Swedish meatballs and chicken wing bones. Lipstick smeared the mirrors. Garbage was everywhere. There’d be no peeing here tonight. Girls who came from well-to-do families had trashed this bathroom. Had no one ever told them not to flush tampons and sanitary napkins in all their private school years? Had no one ever told them to put their leftovers in the trashcan, not the sink?

Out in the parking lot, my drunken nemesis spotted me heading to my car and tried to attack me again for supposedly stealing his liquor bottle. His friends had to tackle him as I ran for my car just as the police pulled up. There was yelling, accusations, and a disgusted police officer who clearly saw a very drunk boy and a pathetic older woman in her sticky tux shirt and bowtie with no liquor bottle concealed on her body. I'm just glad I wasn't strip searched.

You would think that would finish bartending for me, but I took one more job at a reception at VCU President Trani’s home in Windsor Farms. His house is like the White House, with a series of reception rooms for entertaining on the spacious ground floor. The kitchen was huge and impersonal, built for caterers as a staging area. The actual private quarters were upstairs and unseen by the public.

I dutifully cut up oranges and limes, only to learn I would not have a bartending station at this gig. Despite my request to only be booked as a bartender, I was assigned to pick up glasses. Only guys could bartend. The girls walked through the grounds and the reception rooms, picking up abandoned glasses and returning them to the kitchen. I remember being disgusted by a big fish with its face still on being used as a serving plate. It had been split open and its insides were filled with some mushy stuff people were scooping up with crackers. I feel your pain, fish. This is a humiliating way to end up.

When it was over, we were supposed to hang around to load up the caterer’s truck, but the truck was late coming back and when it did, it was parked at the end of the long, curving, downhill driveway. Let the guys carry the trays and stuff down to the truck. They hadn't been walking all night, picking up glasses. I physically could not carry trays of plates down a cobblestone driveway. I had not signed on for that duty anyway, so I left. I left without asking permission if I could leave. I left before the gig was officially declared over. I left confused about my career as a bartender, reduced to picking up glasses from the lawn of the president of the college where I had attended and graduated with hope and promise.

I never got paid for that job and I never called the agency to report that I did not get paid because I figured they’d just yell at me for leaving before the truck was loaded. I never got a call to work again either. And thus ended my brief career as a bartender.

Virtual College

When my son was in college a few years ago, it was like I was back in college, and it was just as dumb as it was the first time. Once he called for help with his English class. They had watched "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," and he was supposed to write two paragraphs on how satire was used in the movie.

To submit his paper, he had to post his thoughts on an electronic discussion board, which was a lot different from when I was in college and we actually wrote on paper and handed it in. At the time, he didn't own a computer or know how to type, so he would call me on his cell phone from the computer lab, I would log into the same discussion board from home and I'd type in what he dictated.

On this particular evening, before he could think of something profound to say about the use of satire in "Dr. Strangelove," a campus policeman flashed a card in front of his face which said the use of cell phones in the computer lab was forbidden. So he logged out and walked home, dictating his two paragraphs to me as he walked. I typed it into the discussion board.

This may not be the college I remember, but thinking about "Dr. Strangelove" is. College is a lot of information you will never use again. Dr. Strangelove had nothing to do with his major either, a technical trade that requires no philosophical thought. There were 200 people in his class in an auditorium setting. At the first session, the professor taught relaxation and meditation technique to prepare for the semester. In preschool, this was called nap time.

Before I logged out of the discussion board, I read what the other students were writing and was appalled to find even in an English class, they were submitting their "papers" in email style writing -- all caps or no caps at all, minimal punctuation if any, and no paragraph breaks. They were not learning to write, spell, or punctuate in this class, although there was an advisory to utilize the spellcheck.

The next week my son called again because he needed to analyze three poems and didn't know how to think about poetry. The poems were vaguely related to "Dr. Strangelove," being anti-war and satirical. For each, the professor's online instructions were to "tell how the poem deepens your contact with its content." And, the instructions prodded, "don't forget to say why this poem is good, and what you wonder about."

What if I wonder why the professor presupposes I think the poem is good? What if my contact doesn't deepen? What if the poem is stupid? What if I think most poetry is a fraud, especially the stuff that doesn't rhyme or have any iambic in its pentameters?

My son got angry with me. "We have to take this seriously. It's a grade."

Well, okay, but it's difficult to discuss poetry and what it means and how our contact is deepening when one of us is making an illegal cell phone call with a dying battery from the computer lab and the other is reading the poem for the first time. I read the poem that begins with the line "McNamara Rusk Bundy." Then it vaguely talks about children in a school yard. Do college sophomores today know what McNamara Rusk Bundy means? That's from the '60s.

"They were poets in the '60s?" my son asks. No. They were government guys involved in the Vietnam War. How old is your teacher that he's going back to the '60s for war protest poems? My son points out that "Dr. Strangelove" is pre-Vietnam War. He has a point. Our contact with the content is actually deepening after all.

My own English professor many years ago was a young man who was teaching to avoid the draft and ending up in Vietnam himself. He wore sandals and sat on top of his desk, cross-legged. His favorite book, from which he obtained his philosophy of life, and from which he taught, was "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

To put this in historical context, before there was "Gilligan's Island," there was a show called "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" based on this book about a frustrated college boy. Bob Denver, who would go on to play Gilligan, played Dobie's beatnick friend, Maynard G. Krebbs. His catch phrase was "You rang?" To put beatnicks into historical context, before stoners, there were surfer dudes, and before surfer dudes, there were hippies, and before hippies, there were beatniks. Hey, I should be teaching college.

All this I remember, yet I can't think of much I actually learned in college that was useful when I went to work. I learned all the work stuff on the job, or by teaching myself things I needed to know to get a certain job.

Still, everyone will tell you that you need a college degree in life. All a college degree means, though, is you went through a lot of crazy hoops and ordeals over a period of time. Maybe that in itself is some kind of preparation for life -- except now we don't get graded.

Elegy for a Printer

I just returned from Colonial Heights where I donated my HP Laserjet 2100M to the Swift Creek Mill Playhouse office. A young man carried it out of my car, up the stairs and left it on a table in the hallway. I said a few final words to it, hoping it would have a nice life and stay busy in the theater world.

Yes, I felt bad about leaving my printer. We had been through a lot together.

I think I bought it in 1997 for $800 from CompUSA. It was a huge purchase for me because I didn't have a job at the time. My hobby, a monthly newspaper I pasted up in my dining room, was almost as time-consuming as a real job and had expenses that were barely covered by the advertising money I raised. Everyone running a website as a job these days knows what that's like.

I originally created the newspaper on a Apple Classic II and a Stylewriter II printer, printing out columns of justified type, headlines and cutlines, cutting them out with a razor blade and a ruler, coating the backs with a glue stick and pasting them onto blue-lined sheets of card stock in a newspaper page design. This was the same way the daily newspaper was created between the eras of hot type and computers. I had been a paste-up girl for about a decade at the daily, assembling pages like a puzzle while old, cranky newspapermen acted inappropriately. When a story was too long to fit its diagrammed space and needed a part cut out, you had to call out, "I need a bite!" to get an editor's attention to come tell you which part you could cut out.

Papers took preplanning back then. You had to diagram them out as precisely as you could because once you had your photos screened, you were stuck. I had to have all my art and photography together in advance, crops marked with a grease pencil, and take them downtown to a very small business that did photo screens. I had to know what size I wanted the photo to be in advance. The screen guy would rephotograph the cropped part of my photos and blow them up or shrink them to the requested size, and give the screened photos back to me in big sheets called veloxes. If you looked at the velox with a magnifying glass, you could see each photo was actually a series of dots. Those dots were your resolution and what made your black and white photos have all the necessary shades of gray; otherwise, without a screen all dark areas of a photo reproduced as black.

Doing color photos was even more complicated, involving color separations, and was something I never learned and couldn't afford to do anyway.

I was paying the screen guy anywhere from $75 to $200 a month, depending on how many photos I had to use, so between the screen guy and the print shop that actually printed the whole newspaper, my profit margin was very small.

Enter the HP Laserjet 2100M. This printer not only produced sharper text than the Stylewriter, it could do 1200 resolution. If I printed out a grayscale photo on it, it would have enough dots in it to look like the photo. All I had to do was cut it out and paste it down, just like I was doing with the text. I could pay for it in four to six months if I stopped using the screen guy downtown. It was my first big business decision, after the decision to start the paper itself.

I still feel bad about the screen guy because I think the Free Press and I were his last regular clients and he was on the brink of being an unnecessary business and had not planned for anything else.

So for the next couple of years, I continued to roll along with the cut and paste, and then doing the paper on QuarkXPress and printing it out in two big chunks, the top of the page and the bottom. But by 2002 or so, my printer in Ashland was telling me, after I did the whole paper in QuarkXPress, to just convert the whole thing to a .pdf and bring it to him on a disc. No more glue sticks or razor blades, and no more need for the printer. It wasn't long after that when I didn't even have to bring the disc anymore. I just uploaded the file. And it wasn't long after that before I decided why bother to pay the printer all the money anyway, just upload the file to a website and let people look at it that way. And it wasn't long after that before the website itself became the paper.

So for the past decade, the big old printer has just been grinding out copies of emails and manuals. It became more and more difficult to connect it to newer computers. I had to buy a converter box to run an ethernet cable through it when USB became all the style. With the latest Apple operating system, Snow Leopard, there was no longer any support for printers requiring AppleTalk, and I had to network it to an older Mac to use it.

I'm not sure if Swift Creek will be able to figure out how to get it to work with PCs, but I wish them well. That printer was a partner and a companion as I taught myself everything I know today about publishing and print production. I'm sorry to see it go, but there's seven other printers in the house right now and it's just crazy to have so many.

That printer is also the star of my second most popular video on YouTube with almost 17,000 views. Good bye printer. I loved you. I'll miss you. I think I finally paid for you, although I'm not sure. Have a nice life at the historic theater and I hope you don't end up in a recycling drive anytime soon.



This Old T-Shirt

My husband has never worn a suit to work. He has never had to interpret "office casual." His entire working life has been spent in uniforms, sometimes with his name embroidered in italics on a breast pocket patch.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Jobs requiring uniforms are just as honorable as suiting up. Toilets gotta flush; cars gotta run; product gotta ship. My husband has never spent money putting together a work wardrobe.

He has a funeral/wedding suit and a button-down collar shirt to go with it. He has a pair of dress shoes, and up until recently when I converted him to Skechers, he always had three pairs of Reboks: lawn-mowing Reboks, work Reboks (when he wasn't required to wear steel toe boots), and dress Reboks. They were all the same shoe, just in different states of wear.

Instead of office casual, his non-work wardrobe is life casual. He has a week's worth of jeans in two sizes, fat jeans and thin jeans. He used to have several pairs of Dockers, but after 10 years with the tags still on them, I gave them to charity.

He has never bought a T-shirt, and yet the last time I counted, he had 75. T-shirts are accumulated free so often, it'd be foolish to buy one. His T-shirts are a lifelong habit. His siblings are dressed up in their school photos. He's in sci-fi movie T-shirts. For a pricey Olan Mills studio portrait, he shows up in a Close Encounters T-shirt.

When I first met him, he wore shirts that advertised his state of mind. He often showed up for our dates in a shirt that said, "Ask Me If I Care." It was more nihilistic than romantic. Another favorite shirt presented a quandary: what do you call a bear with deer antlers?

A beer.

Another was philosophical, outlining the "four stages of tequila: I'm rich. I'm good looking. I'm bullet-proof. I'm invisible."

After we married, the shirts disappeared. Must have been some kind of laundry accident, I would say. But I can't make his entire wardrobe disappear. He wears shirts that advertise music festivals and events long past. Twenty-two, in fact. Whenever someone in his family goes on vacation, they bring him back a souvenir T-shirt, so there's all these shirts from places we've never been. Some of them have disappeared, like the one from the Outer Banks that says, "Got crabs?" I just don't want to go out to dinner with someone wearing that shirt. Some advertise colleges he's never attended. Several are tie-dyed. A couple of dozen advertise products he has sold, shipped, or purchased at one time or another.

Four are Redskins shirts that are only worn on game days because it helps the team. That's what I hear.

Sixteen shirts promote bands he's played with or roadied for and some of his favorites in that category are so thin, you can see your hand through them, but they can't be thrown out because of the "memories." They can't be worn anymore either to protect the fabric that's left. I can't think of any clothes I have that gets the museum artifact treatment. Okay, maybe my wedding dress. I still have that. But he still has his Stiff Richard band t-shirt from 1992 with a cartoon of a bare-assed boy holding his penis. Somehow it's not the same.

He spends his life as a walking billboard for bands, products, businesses, schools, and resorts, and for no more compensation than the shirt on his back, literally. Like the side of a bus, he travels around town emblazoned with a message.

Things Bosses Have Made Me Do

I once had a boss who wanted me to print all the photos on his boss' camera. I open the camera card and see an assortment of vacation and party photos, and then photos of the boss' boss sitting around the house wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a tight pair of red underpants.

My eyes, my eyes.

I went back to my boss and told him this was inappropriate for me to view since his boss was not fully dressed in some of the photos. He told me to burn a CD of the photos and make an extra copy for him.

***

Everyone in my office was required to email the boss when we arrived and when we left, keep a timesheet, and sign out on a dry erase board. He would schedule staff meetings and then he wouldn't show up for them or let us know they were canceled.

***

When a Presidential candidate came to town, he sent me out to buy two of the man's books at a Shockoe Slip bookstore, saying I had to get them and get back in 10 minutes. (Our office was not in Shockoe Slip.) I said it wasn't possible to get there, find a parking space, get the books and get back that quickly. He said to doublepark in the street. Since I thought the books were for the Big Boss, who was going to see the candidate that night, and I was currently in line for a promotion, I somehow managed to do it. It turned out the books were just for him. He wanted to get them autographed.

***
He emailed me at 8:55 on a Friday night -- even though I didn't have a Blackberry or a pager -- to tell me to come in Monday even though it was my day off and clean out the storage room. I found out later he wanted to use the storage room for his things while he was having new carpet installed in his office.

***
He took the spaceheater I had in my office for the past two years and moved it into his.

***
He asked me to get him a bowl of chili from the cafeteria because he was busy waiting for the phone to ring. I declined. He said he could change my job description so I would have to run personal errands for him. I went to HR. They said, no, he can't.

***
He brought an old draft of the annual report to a staff meeting. We told him that version had been updated already and we all had the new versions, but he wouldn't admit he had the wrong version. For the next three hours, he discussed changes to the report that we had already made. We tried to suggest we should all use the same version of the report for the meeting, but he said we had a "fixation" about versions and to stop bringing it up.

***
One winter, the staff took old candy dishes and vases from the supply closet to fill with water and put on the windowsills to add some moisture to the overheated office air. He said we were monopolizing all the vases. When a coworker went to lunch, he went into the coworker's office and moved one of the bowls of water to his own office. The next day, he continued to comment about how we were hogging all the water bowls until the coworker who had suffered from the dry heat the most felt so guilty, he put his vases and bowls back in the supply closet so he wouldn't have to hear about it anymore.

***

One day I called in sick and after cross-examining everyone in the office about when I called in, he told them I was probably out "shopping at Dillard's because they're having a sale." This is funny because I am the least fashionable person on earth.

***
I selected a photo to use for an employee promotion story. The employee liked it, but boss said to use another one. He said the employee didn't like it. I said, "She just told me she did." He said, "it doesn't matter what you think; it matters what I think."

***
Our building was closed because of a water pipe break for two days. On the second day, he called me into work to send a notice to employees that our offices were closed for the day. When I arrive, I find there is no electricity. My computer cannot be turned on. He makes arrangements for my computer to be carried down three flights of stairs to a floor being powered by an emergency generator. By this time, it's 2:30 in the afternoon. I don't know who read the message anyway because everyone was at home.

***
One day he told me the company's money, which happened to be taxpayer money, wasn't real money, it was "play money."

****

He changed my spelling of Landmark Theater to Landmark Theatre. When I sent him documentation showing it is spelled "theater" on its website and on its logo, he said, "do as I say." When I asked him if he wanted me to change every instance of it on our website where it was already spelled "theater," he said he would take care of that. He never did.

***
He sent me an email at 2:57 a.m. (yes, as in middle of the night) to do a typing project he had already told me to do the day before.

***
He neglects to approve a logo in time for me to present it at a meeting, even though he told the people conducting the meeting that we had an approved logo. He tells me I am not to talk to anyone about anything at the meeting, just take notes and report back to him. He says I also cannot tell anyone I was told not to talk at the meeting.

***

He gets a request for a speech 13 days before it is due and tells me to write it the day before it is due.

***

He yells at me for letting seven of his phone calls go to voicemail. It turns out they were old saved messages. When the admin assistant is away from her desk, he expects me to hear and answer his phone, even though I am three offices down the hall from him. Male co-workers are in closer offices, so of course they are not expected to answer his phone.

***
He says he doesn't have time to look at my emails requesting him to sign off on work I need to send out. I have to tell him verbally that I have sent him an email.

***

At 11:40 a.m., he assigns me to write a speech for his boss to deliver at a function at 12:45 p.m., that same day.

Large

This explains so much, and is what I've always suspected. Glad to see science confirms it.

From Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant book, Blink:

Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and the stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.

...An inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary...a tall person enjoys literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage...

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It's because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rationed than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon.




Different Grieving

The night our cat was dying, my husband had band practice and he didn't cancel it. During the cat’s frightening first seizure, I could hear the music and laughter downstairs.

He can compartmentalize his emotions. I suspect most men can. The fact that they can turn it on or off doesn’t subtract from the sincerity of the emotion. That’s something women don’t understand about men. We tend to marinate for long periods in our emotions. I can be unhappy, depressed, bitter, angry, or revengeful for a long time. I can wear it like a floppy hat obscuring my face. I can manifest positive emotions as well, but their shelf life is much shorter.

All through the month that the cat was slowly melting away of whatever killed her (cancer, pancreatitis, FIP, does it matter?) he could sit with her and look profoundly sad, and then he could go downstairs and watch television…or sleep at night. He could talk about other things. Do other things. I could only huddle around the cat, frantically trying to figure out a way out of this for both of us. At the end, I couldn’t even go to work. I stayed huddled with the cat for the last three days, day and night. I didn’t sleep. Sometimes she would look at me like, “Please go away so I can die. You know I can’t do it with you staring at me.”

Last night, after sitting silently over bowls of soup at Panera, I finally asked him the question that had been irritating me like a bug bite since the incident happened. “After you saw her have the seizure, why didn’t you say let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

When band practice had ended and his friends had gone home, he came back upstairs where I was sitting with the cat on the sofa. The seizure had been over for about an hour, but she was trying to push her head under the sofa cushion and was gently paddling her feet. I told him what had happened, and he immediately folded into sadness and sat next to her, petting her. After awhile, he said, “I think she’s trying to climb off the sofa.”

So I picked her up and put her on the floor, arranging her body like the Egyptian Sphinx. She briefly held her head up, then started wobbling, and then horribly, the second seizure started. “Don’t touch her,” my husband said alarmed, but we both moved to the floor and hovered over her, our palms open as if we were trying to catch the seizure as it bounced over her body and toss it away. After it ended, she was again limp and exhausted, and didn’t seem to notice us anymore, or care. I thought for sure my husband would say, “Grab your purse and keys, we have to go to the vet now. It’s time.”

Instead, he said he was going to bed. And he did. And he slept.

I picked up the cat and went downstairs to the futon where we had been restlessly sleeping for the last five nights, but every morning when the sun came up, the cat would lift her head up for another day. The seizures were not a good sign, but so many other nights when she had gotten so still that I thought she was gone, I had been wrong. Maybe I’d be wrong again. So we bundled up together on the futon and waited.

There would be eight more seizures that night before the dawn. You could set your watch by their regularity. Sometimes I thought I should jump in the car and drive to the emergency vet by myself and be done with it. I knew he would be upset when he found out, but if he couldn’t make the decision, someone had to. But then I couldn’t either. The seizure would end and she’d be peaceful again, asleep and breathing quietly. I would think, okay, that’s the last one. I didn't want her to die in the car en route to the vet because she hated riding in the car.

But it wouldn’t be the last one. By 3 a.m., the craziness set in. Maybe it’s not a tumor, but a cyst and it's breaking open. Once it drains, she’ll be all better! She’ll wake up her old self! This is just the poison leaving her body! All is well!

That mental trickery lasted a couple of seizures. Then I went into negotiations. God, end this. End this or cure this. I want a dead cat or a well cat right now. Work a miracle. You can do it! You are God! Do it. What good is being God if you don’t do stuff like this? Now, now, do it, now!

That didn’t work either, although the seizures from 4 a.m. on were less violent. Her head didn’t shake. Her mouth didn’t open. Only her legs would paddle furiously, like she was running. Then less furiously, slowing down to a trot, like she was arriving somewhere.

The sun came up. I could hear my husband upstairs waking up. Another day had started. The cat was still breathing, although asleep. Her body was strangely warm in places, cool in others. I kept checking her. If I rubbed an ear, it would twitch. If I rubbed a paw, it would flinch. My husband came downstairs.

“How is she?” he said, ready to be sad. I dully, bitterly reported the eight seizures, the night of no sleep. He just said, “oh, man.” He petted her for a while, and then he was able to switch it off again, go upstairs and start the coffee. I hoped all the normal morning noises would provoke a response in the cat. It’s morning! Breakfast time! Lift your head again like you do every morning when you hear his voice! Like you did yesterday!

Nothing.

I wrapped her in the blanket and moved her upstairs to my bed. Now that she had survived another night, it was my turn to get some sleep. My husband could watch over her. Her body felt limper than usual, but it was still warm and she was still breathing. I put her head on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to her chin. I went in the kitchen to get a donut and went back to my bed. That’s when I noticed the look.

I had two cats die on me years ago, one at age 18 and one at 17, both at home, and I knew right away when I saw them it was a dead cat, not a sleeping cat. Their mouth opens just a little. This look was different than the one she had when I went for the donut. I tried rubbing the ears, the paws, nothing moved now. She was still warm in parts, cool in others. I couldn’t see breathing anymore. The vet had said to watch the eyes at the end. I shined a flashlight in her dilated pupils and they didn’t contract. They didn’t move. My insides starting folding in on me like a collapsing house of cards.

I went to the front door and opened it. My husband had just finished watering the bushes and was talking to the neighbors. I let him be happy until the neighbors drove away. He turned around and saw me in the doorway. I couldn’t find the words, but I guess my flailing hands and collapsing face said them for me. He ran into the house.

I did my crazy act. “Maybe it’s a coma. You think it’s a coma?” And he was realistic. “She’s gone. She’s gone.” And we cried, again hovering our hands over her like we could catch her spirit leaving and stuff it back in. For the rest of the day, we solemnly went through the ritual. Finding a box. Deciding where to bury her. Getting the shovels and picks together. Picking up favorite items to put in the box with her. Looking at photos of her and printing them to put inside the box, photos of us with her so she wouldn’t forget us.

He was able to turn the ritual off long enough to go to McDonald’s and get us food, food I couldn’t taste although I tried to eat it. Then we went to the woods on his mother's property for the burial, a story in itself for another day, and it was over. I haven’t seen him cry since and he’s been fine, like it was something that happened a long time ago to someone else. That is, until I asked him the question at Panera’s.

“After you saw her have a seizure, why didn’t you say, let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

The muscles in his face started moving like there was an earthquake under his skin. His facial features sucked themselves inward as if I had literally punched him. It all happened in a fleeting half a second and I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking right at him. The emotion exploded and was contained that quickly. He put his head down so I couldn’t see anymore and mumbled something that sounded like, “I couldn’t…”

I quickly changed the subject because that had been answer enough. That’s how men deal with strong emotion. They compartmentalize it; they turn it off. It's the instinct of war where you can't mourn a fallen comrade for even a second because the battle continues all around you and you have to continue. They’re able to, in the face of a painful decision, just not make it and go to bed. And sleep. He had left that hard decision to me, knowing with my high threshold for pain and drama, even if I couldn’t make it either, I could endure the consequences of our not making it. I’d take care of it. I’d absorb it all and suck the pain right out of the air for him.

I’ve read about couples that lose young children. It is very difficult to keep the marriage together after that. The divorce rate is high, as if the only way to escape the memory is to escape the relationship that created the child that died. I had a friend whose marriage collapsed after their son died. I look at the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards and know they were damaged irrevocably when their son died, and nothing they’ve done since has fixed it for them, not having more children or running for President, or even having an affair.

I have to accept that we mourn differently. He can put his pain away in a box and be happy again. If I keep poking at the box and force it open, he’ll hurt and cry for me, but as soon as he can, he’ll shut that box and move on. He’s gone away for the weekend now with friends to play music and swim in the sun. No one will talk about the cat there. If he had stayed here with me, we would talk about the cat, because I’m wearing the pain like a big floppy hat that gets in the way of everything else I might need to do. Even if I said nothing, he can tell by looking at me that I’m thinking about it.

If I keep wearing this misery hat, eventually he’s going to forget that it’s about the cat and think I’m just a miserable person in general. Someone else will come along who is happy and laughing for the moment, and she will seem like a much better person to be with, and he will be right. She’ll be able to taste and enjoy food, laugh at bad jokes, want to go out with his friends, and embrace him without thinking that the last time they hugged, it was over the cat. Never in her life will it ever cross her mind to blame him for making her sit alone through the night through eight seizures because that will not be in their history.

Maybe it’s women in general; maybe it’s just me. Maybe realizing how we’re different and accepting it is half the battle. He’s going to be all right. I need to take off this hat and put it in a box.