One Tenth the Woman

One Tenth the Woman

Ted talked about his boa incessantly. He named her “Isabelle”, which sounded ridiculous to me but then my naming skills generally extend to calling snakes “Snaky”. I’m not a fan of snakes in general. I’m not afraid of them, I used to be but then I ‘scared straight’ myself out of that when I was in high school. My boyfriend Mark and I used to go to the Zoo in L.A. several times a week. The reptile house there is really impressive, twisty, warm and dark.

 I’m leaving out an important part of this self-designed therapy: We used to go to the reptile house all the time because a) My parents bought me a Zoo pass for my 17^th birthday, so it was free; and b) We were always lit when we went there. Mark had a Volkswagen bug that we parked at the edges of the parking lot, near the entrance and rolled a joint and smoked it in its entirety before going into the Zoo. We always stopped to look at the flamingoes, they’re the first thing you pass, on the left, and they are so beautiful. Then we made a stop at the other end of the universe to see the Koalas, also the Camels and sometimes the Land Tortoises which were so huge and old that I sometimes suspected the Zoo had been constructed around them. These were circuitous wanderings so by the time we made it back to the Reptile House we had to stop for limp French fries, hot churros and Pepsi, the Zoo didn’t serve Coke. Later they didn’t serve straws either, not because of climate change but because straws ended up being blown into the animal cages and that’s apparently not a good thing.

Nothing could blow into the Reptile House. It was entirely self enclosed. Each enclosure had an opening in the back wall where food was put in and maybe the snakes were removed once in a while, you know, for fun.

I don’t know if you’ve spent much time around reptile enclosures but if you have you probably know that they have a weird smell, unlike anything else and, well, I don’t know how to describe it – musty? Sour? It’s pretty faint but if you know it, its impossible not to recognize. Isabella’s huge glass cage probably also smelled of it but I tried not to smell it, I was content to just look at and touch her once she was out and around Ted’s neck.

Isabella wasn’t as big as the boas in the L.A. Zoo, she wasn’t as old. I’m not sure she was even a “she” because Boa males sometimes suck in what would be an anus on a human so that they look like females, I don’t know why but that’s a thing. However, Ted was convinced that Isabella was a female. I’m not sure he understood the whole snake thing. For instance, he talked to her all the time, not just the sort of infantilizing cooing that humans do with cats and dogs, he did that too, but he also sought to reason with her, giving her way too detailed of an explanation for why she couldn’t come with us to, say, the restaurant or the movies. He couldn’t seem to grasp that snakes are deaf. That’s one of the coolest things about them. They can feel vibrations, probably even music, but they can’t decipher speech. What an opportunity! You could use them as therapy snakes and cuss at them, accuse them of stuff, whine, cry. Sadly, Ted missed all those opportunities preferring, as it turns out, to verbally abuse humans, some of whom can hear, and murmur sweet boa-love to Izzy. Which he never allowed me to call her.

On our first date he asked me how I felt about snakes and I told him my aversion therapy tale from high school. What I didn’t tell him, he didn’t ask, was that there is a big chasm between not being afraid of snakes and not wanting to cozy up with them in bed. Yes, that happened. More than once. Ted claimed that Izzy was a genius because she could escape her cage and find warmth at the foot of our bed. ‘Genius’ I asked myself? Or just parasitical reptile? 

Ted asked me once if he could bring Isabella with him when he came to my house. I said no. I had an excuse, my flatmate had a cat. It wasn’t a predatory cat, which Ted feared, but I don’t think Lisa wanted it to be lunch, either.

So on the nights Ted slept at my house, there was no boa. He never spent the entire night because, you know, Izzy. I think he actually convinced himself that she missed him when he stayed away too long.

Ted’s apartment had once been the back rooms of an elegant house in Echo Park, on a hill. He had a great view and lots of plants on the back deck. I caught myself wondering if Izzy suffered because she could see and sense all the lush nature around her, but she was never allowed to roam free, away from Ted’s neck and arms.

Except that one time when Ted and I were out drinking margaritas and watching the long, spectacularly smog-tinted sunset, just chilling, when Izzy very smoothly slid off his neck, off the balcony and down the pillars to the yard below where she promptly ate two of the chickens his next door neighbor kept, they must have been enjoying the sunset as well.

She ate so many dead furry things that I was surprised she was still hungry but it’s like if you’re a human and you eat many slices of pizza and then a friend says, “But what about the brownies I brought?” I mean, its ungracious not to at least taste one, right?

Obviously, the neighbors were horrified and also really mad and Ted and I spent many hours looking for Izzy. Ted, still not getting it, called for her, yelled and hollered until he went hoarse but we saw no sign of her.

Ted’s house was in between freeways and I honestly didn’t think even Izzy was stupid enough to get onto one, but he was in a frenzy. We got in his car and started to scour the streets, now darkening with that solid bank of dank that forms on a summer night in that part of L.A. Everywhere she might be (which was, in my opinion, EVERYWHERE), we stopped and looked, using our phones as flashlights.

By eleven o’clock I was exhausted and hungry and the buzz from the margaritas had long worn off. I convinced Ted that we should hang it up for the night and start again at first light the next day.

That night we had the worst, and final fight of our months’ long relationship. Ted accused me of never really liking Isabella (true, all too true) and not understanding the bond he had with her (guilty as charged) and then he said that I was not nor would I ever be one tenth of the woman that Isabella was.

That was a stopper.

Like anyone else I have my short falls, character defects, snarky moments but I had really tried to like, even love Izzy. I had petted her and even, I admit, sang to her. I fed her dead pinky mice. I helped, not very much but a little, clean out and replace her litter. I brought her scraps from my refrigerator. I even looked her in the eyes as I had the snakes at the Zoo so many years before, daring myself not to flinch. Sometimes the weight of her on my lap was actually comforting, like a weighted blanket with a somewhat faint, weird smell.

I told Ted how unfair that was. He burst into tears and literally fell all over me, I almost fell down but managed to get a corner of one butt cheek onto the bed. He wailed that he didn’t know how he could go on without Isabella, that he had waited all his life to have a boa, that even the death of his father the previous year hadn’t hurt as much as this did. And then he fell asleep, crumpled and damp and I took what I thought would be the best opportunity to make my exit. I asked myself, “What would Izzy do?” and I heard her say in her silent, sexually ambivalent nonvoice: “Follow me”, which I did by slithering down to the ground, grabbing my phone and slinking towards the front door which I closed silently behind me.