R No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch

Her breath smelled like the dog's. I hated the dog. Well, alright, I disliked dogs in general and we only got the dog because she had grown up in a house full of dogs and had reasoned that I wanted a baby. It had seemed like a fair trade off at the time. I, unfortunately, had been wrong about that, and now I hated hated hated the dog with a burning passion because it had led to this situation in some strange, warped way.

"Why," I asked slowly, carefully, as she brushed her teeth feverishly and muttered synonyms for "stinky" through blue toothpaste lather, "Are you eating dog food, exacttly?"

"There is no replacement for the real thing." She declared steadfastly, though muffled. She hummed thoughtfully and spat. "Nope, nothing quite describes it like stinky. Smelly? Disgusting for sure..." Obviously she was ignoring me and thinking about her self-assigned project.

The problem with my wife was that she wholeheartedly threw herself in everything. She was completely absorbed into the piece she was writing and everything related to it. She was so focused that she made things be related, even when they clearly were not. Case in point, three seconds ago: when I asked her a question, her answer had nothing to do with me; it had been used as an opportunity to contemplate word choice and usage in her essay. I lived with this walking, talking, writing-crazed beast. Her eating dog food and seriously considering every detail about it like it was a normal assignment for a food column, like it was fine dining, like she wasn't eating dog food, proved that something was wrong with this woman.

She smiled experimentally in the mirror, rinsed and spat. I watched in a mix of awe and horror as she crossed from the joined bathroom to into our bedroom, the transition marked by her feet smacking against the tile and then suddenly changing to noiselessly on the carpet. She plopped heavily onto the bed, notebook in hand. This was the part that drove home the point that she was deadly serious about what she was doing. She immediately began to scribble furiously acrosss the page, noting on taste, visual appearance, texture, and all other imaginable descriptions about food. My wife, I found, was always approaching things with an intensity I normally envied. Now, however, not so much. Not when that approached thing was exploring the world of dog cuisine.

The next day, when I came home to her choking down something from a shiny foiled package, I suddenly was not entirely sure if I would be able to handle this intensity that was pushing her to eat dog food after horrid can of dog food for what was going on a week.

"Ann," I said cautiously treading on thin ice with every passing second I was distracting her from her Oh So Important Focus on her dog food, "Maybe you shouldn't keep doing this. I'm pretty sure dog food isn't meant for human consumption."

She only smiled, eyes slightly watery, "Hi honney, what no kiss?"

This was a joke. After I had unsuspectingly kissed her a few days ago and commented offhandedly on the vaguely meatball taste on her lips, she had snapped her fingers and announced, "You're right, that's a much better description!" And while writing said description in her notes hurriedly she had told me, completely and utterly distracted, exactly which kind of dog food I had inadvertently tasted that had produce the meatball taste.

I, learning a dear dear lesson, don't kiss her now unless I've seen her brush her teeth first.

I, who married this stubbornly sarcastic and driven woman, can be equally as stubborn and sarcastic and driven when need be. "If your eyes are watering, then that probably means you shouldn't be eating it. Not that it's of any importance to you. Just, you know, saying."

She waved her hand dismissively and smoothed the foil out expertly. "I've eaten people food that makes your eyes water, it's not like a natural defensive mechanism that means you're not suppoed to eat something."

The dog weaved itself between my legs and the baby clumsily picked at Cheerios from his high chair as my wife stabbed an unidentifiable piece of meat and assured us, "It actually has a very calm taste, it's more the appearance that's eye watering," and the dog and I both whined as she chewed on her forkful.

Figuring she was just going to keep at this experiment brought on by what I could only define as morbid curiosity, I tried to stay out of her way. When I caught her stirring a bowl of unnaturally colored gruel, the counter splatter with dark brown liquid, hesitantly sniffing it, I tried to ignore it. I took the baby upstairs for a bath and pajamas, let out the dog in the backyard, made Easy Mac for dinner like a normal person. When I came back twenty minutes later, baby put to bed, she was less than halfway through her bowl of brown liquid, a grimace firmly planted on her face.

"Okay, it's hilarious that you're a food critic and are eating crap." I told her, my sympathy of the earlier days of the week gone. "Your parents would be so proud of you."

"Hey, this is all part of the learning experience. I've got a good thing going with the piece, so you shut up," she countered evenly, "And anyway, I'm using my skills as a food critic to answer the questions on the differences of dog foods. She took a dainty and sophisticated sip of the liquid in her spoon and nearly gagged on it and the choked out, "Bitter," that followed.

In the end, when she brought home a can of cat food in accompaniment with bone treats for "comparison", I decided that I had no choice but to leave her alone and hope the article would turn out amazing.