Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  The first half of the week was spent finding opportunities for me and my two older nephews, ages thirteen and sixteen, to sneak out of the house to swim in caves or jump off of cliffs, where their mother couldn’t find us. Advance work was necessary to introduce the boys to fun. If Olga sees anything adjacent to danger—which in her mind could be an open body of water, a lap pool, or a can opener—she will insert herself and cancel the fun. One must always be one step ahead of her. In the beginning of the trip, I held high hopes for the adventures I would take the boys on. By the end of the week, I was beaten down, having given up on the hope of a meaningful relationship with my nephews until they graduated from high school and became legal.

  “Can you believe how annoying Olga and Glen are with the kids?” I asked Gaby.

  “It’s pretty unreasonable,” she agreed.

  “I mean, how much sunblock can you put on someone before it stops working?”

  “I’m surprised she doesn’t put it in their mouths,” Gaby said, handing me a plate of jamón to put on the table. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  My aunt doesn’t say a lot, and it’s a nice quality in a person, but “nice” isn’t the word anyone would use to describe Gaby. Every time she sees me, she shakes her head, almost as if she can’t believe what I’ve gotten away with in life. When I moved to Los Angeles at nineteen and lived on her sofa, she told me if I wanted to be in the entertainment industry, I had better drop some weight.

  I have retold this story for years to friends and family alike, while Gaby has consistently denied it ever happened, ridiculing my flair for the dramatic and propensity for exaggeration. I was finally vindicated when Molly found some old home videos from that time in which you can actually hear Gaby saying on camera that if I wanted to make it in Hollywood I had better drop some weight. Molly knows my memory has a solid track record, and when she found the evidence to support what I had been claiming for twenty years, she made sure the whole family watched the footage together in order to clear my good name. In the video, you can see my face turn bright red. Even I felt bad for me. Gaby must have felt like Hitler in that moment, but ever since then we’ve had a better understanding of each other.

  Gaby is Molly’s mother, and my mother’s sister, and in exchange for the living accommodations I was provided at nineteen, I was required to drive Molly and her eight brothers and sisters to school each morning at seven o’clock. This is when I discovered that I never wanted children. I wasn’t upset by the realization that I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. I was only upset that I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the end of our family vacation week in Spain, I stopped going to meals with my brother and his family. If I woke up and heard anyone speaking Russian, I’d go downstairs for my medication.

  “I can’t take any more kids or any more Russians,” I told Gaby, popping a doggy Xanax. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  “You just woke up,” she told me.

  “Who’s that person?” I asked Molly, gesturing to the front balcony, where a woman and my sister-in-law were sitting.

  “That’s Olga’s Russian friend who stopped by last night when you came down from your bedroom in your bra and underwear to get another Xanax.”

  “So, I’ve already met her?”

  “Well, she met you, but I wouldn’t say that you met her.”

  That’s how I felt about my trip to Formentera—it met me, but I didn’t meet it.

  * * *

  • • •

  On our return flight, Chunk and I had the two seats next to each other with the option of putting the partition up or down. We chose down.

  Once Chunk and I were both comfortably settled in and each watching our respective movies, I popped a Xanax and then realized there was none left for Chunk. I didn’t want to knock myself out with Chunk awake, so I took one of my weaker sleeping pills I had brought and tried to get him to swallow it. After failing to get it down his throat for the third time, I opened the capsule and emptied it into about two ounces of water and Chunk drank it down.

  I had been using Sonata ever since I learned how terrible Xanax was for your brain: the memory loss, the irritability the next day, the fact that it makes you dumb. I justified abusing it that week because of the Russian interference in my summer vacation. Right before I passed out, I wrapped Chunk’s leash around my waist and tucked it into the back of my jeans.

  Hours later, a flight attendant shook me awake and told me that my dog was loose and running around the first-class cabin. The simple task of standing up suddenly became incredibly difficult to accomplish, as I was lying on my side and had one leg swung over Chunk’s seat, where his body had been. My body was confusing me, as was the situation. I could hear Chunk’s panting, which sounded almost maniacal. I stumbled through the first-class cabin in a fugue state, scared by the heavy throat-clearing, coughing sounds I was hearing—and at one point during all the confusion, I called out Brandon’s name.

  When I found Chunk, he was licking the bathroom door with no leash in sight. I grabbed him by the collar and ushered him back to our double pod, where I had to force him to get back up on the seat. His tongue was almost touching the floor and there was foam on either side of his mouth. He looked like he had just snorted an eight ball.

  I had never seen Chunk in that state before. I grabbed one of those miniature bottles of room temperature water they give you on planes, but thought Chunk would appreciate something more refreshing—like a Fresca—and then bounced back to reality and recognized I was talking about a dog who was on the verge of swallowing his own tongue. I started by pouring the water into the tiny plastic lid, but after Chunk almost swallowed that, I made a cup out of my hand and started pouring the water in there. When that didn’t suffice, I gave up and just started pouring the water directly into his mouth. He wouldn’t sit still and kept yanking his head around to get out, but I held him down, trying to get a handle on the situation. The shame that enveloped my double pod took the shape of two blankets I converted into a fort covering the tops of our seats in an effort to prevent the two of us from causing any more of a scene.

  “Can I get some more water bottles and a bowl?” I whispered, peeking out from under the covers.

  “I don’t work here,” the passenger across the aisle said, as she sat back down in her assigned seat. The procuring of water became a tricky endeavor, as I couldn’t leave Chunk to his own devices and I couldn’t find his leash. I looked around for the call button, which I generally try to avoid using because of how rude it seems. I also made a mental note of possibly installing that option when I got home to Bel-Air. Brandon would love a bell.

  When I stood up to press the button above my head, Chunk made a run for it. I dove over my seat, grabbing his tail. I hit the floor face-first and felt a sharp burn around my stomach. I discovered that Chunk’s leash was wrapped around my waist, under my shirt. In my delirium, instead of fastening the clip of the leash to Chunk’s collar, I had clipped it to one of the belt loops on my jeans.

  “Can we please get him an entrée?” I asked the flight attendant from the floor, when she headed over to me with three large bottles of water.

  When the flight attendant looked at me sideways, I told her I was pregnant. Once I got Chunk nicely settled with his second gallon of water and a bowl, I looked at the map in front of my seat, which told me there were six hours left of our flight to Los Angeles.

  When the flight attendant arrived with a Salisbury steak and some other gross side dishes, I took out my tray table to play the part of being the passenger who would be eating it. To cement my credibility, I asked her for a glass of red wine and some bread options. I went through the motions of taking out the silverware and cutting off a piece of the steak on the tray, and once the flight attendant was far enough away, I handed it to Chunk. By the time she ret