Free Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott

relationship. I didn’t invite him to graduation and didn’t tell him about grad school. That would have felt like milking it.
    The ringing is endless. I hang up.
    One of the dogs trots in. I can’t tell which one. Who gets custody of the dogs if neither of us can tell them apart? The dog stares at me, head cocked, reminding me of hosting foreign exchange students who were sometimes frustrated by an insurmountable language barrier.
    Ron walks through the room then, into the bathroom, where he starts moussing his hair. “Found my cell!” he says. “It almost took a spin in the washer.”
    A rare memory of my father pops into my mind. “My dad got us a Lab from the pound. It ate its own poops after they’d been left in the yard to harden.” He fed the dog fat rinds from the table, which Eleanor took as a comment on her cooking. The dog would be flatulent for the rest of the night.
    “Eating your own poop—that’s the height of vanity, if you ask me,” he says, which is hard to take from a man who is moussing his hair. Ron’s hair shifts unnaturally in wind, as if it’s a single unit.
    I hit redial and hope that Tilton picks up. She has a birdlike voice. She’s a chirper. Not surprising, as she’s spent more time listening to birds in the garden than to actual human beings—aside from our mother. Still no answer. I hang up again.
    “Who do you keep calling?” Ron asks from the bathroom.
    “Tilty.” My Tilt-a-Whirl! How many times did I say those words as a kid?
    “Just leave a goddamn message,” he says. He’s always been slightly jealous of Tilton even though he’s never met her. He wanted to visit the house—home of Harriet Wolf—and pouted when I refused to reach out beyond the wedding invitation. I’ve admitted to myself that perhaps I’ve started calling Tilton, as my marriage is crumbling, out of a desire to reunite with my family, but the prospect scares me as much as it draws me in. I want to flirt with it, perhaps—the way one might flirt with, say, Melody Roth, if one were, say, on her PhD committee. “Why do people hate leaving messages nowadays?” Ron says.
    “Eleanor Tarkington is stuck in 1974,” I say. “There’s no answering machine. I wonder if the phone is the color of avocado and has one of those ringlet cords.”
    “I’m making a pot of coffee before I leave. Do you want a cup?” He doesn’t usually make the coffee. He struggles to negotiate the heaping-spoonful-to-cup-of-water ratio. His smile says, “I’m trying! Look at me trying!” He still thinks he might get his way—an open marriage that includes dating Melody Roth. I’d get his benefits, his pension, house privileges? It’s very retro of him, vaguely prostitution.
    But I do want coffee. “Yes, I’ll take a cup.”
    As he jogs downstairs, I call home again, and this time Tilton answers. “Ruthie? Is this you?”
    “Why haven’t you been answering? Are you okay?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Sure I’m sure.” With this phrase, I’m reminded of how stunted Tilton is. At what age do you stop saying “Sure I’m sure”? “I didn’t answer because I was watching TV. I watched TV all night.”
    “You did what? ” Eleanor Tarkington despises television. When I was a teenager, she blamed television for my insubordination as well as the general collapse of society.
    “I watched large women in bras and underwear wearing huge wide wings walk down this flat ramp over and over. And a man poured blue liquid into a pad. This morning there were people on couches, drinking coffee, trying on wigs. They had guests and a studio audience.”
    “Eleanor let you watch TV?”
    “It’s okay. I won’t get the big call. The house tried to eat her. Then she had a heart attack. There was an ambulance. She peed her pantsuit. I touched her face. I took a bath in my nightgown, which had blood on it.”
    “Slow down! Wait,” I say. The Pomeranians have started yapping downstairs. I can’t be sure I’ve