This post is not, as some people might suspect, actually about our building’s gardienne. She and I are on the outs, actually, although she doesn’t know it, because I’m not good at being coldly sarcastic in French, and Jolie always barrels at her like a tiny tricolored tornado, so I have to say something. But ever since she asked Nick to find someone else to take care of the dog after one day and put rodent poison in our apartment without telling him (“But I always make sure Jolie doesn’t go near it,” she protested), I feel lucky to have someone else looking out for me.
That someone is the puppy.
Okay: I get that she’s all of a foot tall, and spends most of her time licking people. But she’s also shaping up into a first-rate guard dog. She’s taken to growling viciously at voices outside of the windows, but the best was when we were out on the deserted street in the middle of the night. Something upset her at the corner, and it seemed best to bring her back closer to the door. Of course, after just a few minutes there, she suddenly turned to face the corner again and began this growl that literally gave me chills. It made her leash vibrate. It got louder and louder until she actually started barking, at which point I scooped her up and backed into the building.
I never actually saw whatever it was that set her off like that; I suspect that it must have been a rat. The nice thing, though, was that through all of this, she planted herself firmly between me and it.
I’m not saying that I would let my five-month-old puppy fight anything, or anyone, to protect me. It’s just nice that she offered, is all.
You know what else is nice? Boxed soup. I don’t know the brand name, but I like the stuff in the green boxes. I started with their potage parmentier, but when that was gone, I noticed that Nick had a box of broccoli and potato in the fridge, and now I have a wild mushroom velouté on deck. There are about a hundred different combinations of creamy vegetable-based soups, and I plan to try every last one that does not involve lentils, because eww. I may never cook another soup myself.
I got so enthusiastic, in fact, that I may have kind of insulted the wedding caterer. See, she put vichyssoise on the menu proposal, and in the course of making sure that she meant warm rather then cold (vichyssoise is usually cold), I may have mentioned that I’ve been guzzling the stuff by the box…when I don’t want to take the time to mix up a batch myself. “I feel really lucky to live in a place where you can just get it in the grocery store,” I tried to backpedal. “It always strikes me as really…gourmet.”
Now, it’s possible that I’m worrying too much–it’s happened–but I think that her voice may have sounded a bit strained when she said, “Yes. Well. It is.”
I just meant that she happened to have selected one of my very favorite things. Is all. It was nice.
Oh, and one more nice thing: when my mother and I were looking at wedding dresses, I started to say that I liked one of them on the hanger, but not on me, when I realized that I didn’t know the word for “hanger.” So I asked the saleswoman, and it’s just as well that we saw her again the next day to buy a (different) dress, because by then I had forgotten and had to ask her again. She found this amusing…kind of like it’s amusing when Jolie races around and around and around the couch: you know it’s funny, but you have no idea why the hell it’s happening or even, really, what it is.
And, therefore, yesterday when I went to our new dry cleaner with a bunch of Nick’s shirts and she asked, “Folded or on a hanger?” I had the irresistible urge to call up my dress saleswoman and tell her that, as weird as she may have found it, her language lesson had just paid off.