M.E. Breen

Not, for once, about the dog. Well, sort of about the dog. When I first adopted Truckstop I made a big fussy deal in my head about how the inevitable cute-ification of her name should be spelled. Truckstop’s original name, now her middle name, is Arizona Courage, for the truck stop at Fort Courage where Amy and Rosanna (much blessed, much envied) picked her up.  I have never been to Fort Courage, but I picture a baking Martian tundra with terrifying extras from Road Warrior wandering around in metal studs and leather boots.

We have a long history in my family of naming our pets after the places we find them: Canterbury, Balboa, the kittens Nineteenth and Holloway, plucked from the traffic island at the intersection of two busy roads. But I didn’t find Truckstop, and she struck me right away as a creature who carries her past in her teeth, something to drop or pick up as she sees fit. She needed a name both specific and general, fixed and placeless, rough and dear. But I also wanted a name that would tie us together, so I decided her nickname would honor a place from my own past: Truckee, CA.

Of course it didn’t work. Anyone who takes the trouble to inquire after my dog’s welfare can spell her name however they damn well please: Trucki, Trucky, Truckie, Truckstopie, Truckstoppy, Truckstanky, Trucknugget . . . I love them all. But this weekend, we took Truckee to Truckee for the first time. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid.

My mom used to take me and my sister to Truckee once or twice each winter to ski. I remembered a scruffy little town with train tracks running through it. We always stayed at the same moth-smelling hotel, the kind of place with mismatched cotton bedspreads where you shared a bathroom (this was where I first encountered the mystery of the initials “W.C.”) and kept your milk and cereal in a communal kitchen. Most mornings my mom hustled us up and out, but at least once each trip we got to have breakfast at the Squeeze In, across the tracks on the main street of town.

The Squeeze In was so small it felt like a secret. You sat in your ski bib and long underwear top, too hot but not minding, the windows all steamed up, everything smelling of syrup. The waitress brought orange juice in a tiny glass and a big plate of pancakes. Mom had coffee and eggs.

The restaurant is still open 25 years later. We had breakfast there on Monday morning, after a long weekend of hammock-swinging and mystery-reading and dog-rambling and swimming in Donner Lake. Needless to say, Truckee was not as I remembered it. It looked like the set designer for The Gates had been put in charge of property development, that queer combination of bloat and uniformity that makes a place look unlike itself without quite managing the transition into something else. It’s as though Truckee asked Park City over for dinner and Park City set up a squat in the living room and never left. The main street is now the downtown historic district, and there is a dog treats bakery and a skin spa and an antiques shop.

The Squeeze In has not turned twee, but its funkiness is self-conscious now. There are lines out the door on the weekend. The omelettes have names. Instead of being smaller than I remembered, like an old house or classroom, it seemed bigger. It made me think of the fuschia I over-fertilized, all blossoms and no leaves.

Of course I have no idea if the Squeeze In has actually changed. I’m the one who is bigger than she was, more self-conscious, more artificial. I asked my mom what she remembered about it and she didn’t remember it at all. She did remember the hotel, and a wedding that took place while we were staying there, and how excited we were as little girls. I don’t know. The past seems so fragile. If you poke it, if you so much as open the door and admit the light, it breaks apart. A memory is really just a thing, an object:  it has certain dimensions and a certain weight. It’s subject to tarnish and decay. Is this a trailer full of things I’m towing behind me? Will they all break? What will happen if they do?

And then there is Truckee the dog. Since arriving from Arizona this was her first trip out of the city. Everything is new to her. She anticipates nothing, expects everything. She has no idea if she will go home again, or if this is the new place, the new home. She had the time of her life.

I have a confession to make. It’s a TV confession, and it’s serious: I like to watch this show called The Gates. It’s a bad show. I mean, it’s a bad, bad, bad, bad show. It’s about all these people who live in a gated community in some weird place where there is never any weather. The air is always warm enough to permit sleeveless dresses and plenty of daytime decolletage but cool enough that no one ever breaks a sweat. Or an expression. It’s supposed to be a show full of grimaces and gasps: there are wampyres! and werewolves! succubi and witches! But the actors, men, women, even, I fear, the children, have all gone in for such an incredible combination of injectables, of lip plumpification and brow-freezeration, that no one can move any part except their eyeballs, and their eyeballs mostly roll around in confusion. One time this one lady who plays a British vampire was supposed to register outrage that she quickly has to mask with a look of warm welcome, and it was the same face both times.

Everyone on the show drives an SUV the size of my house and the wives all run bake sales and the husbands run rabdillion dollar multinational blood labs, or maybe synthetic wolf-fur manufacturing emporiums, I’m not sure. They don’t work very hard, in any case, because they are always cruising around the Gates in their giant black cars or staring blankly at each other across California King-size marble kitchen islands. It’s like Nero designed the sets, I swear.

I worry sometimes that the show thinks it’s revealing new things about the suburbs: sometimes a perfect lawn does not indicate a perfect character. Sometimes it indicates. . . creepy bones and stuff are buried under there! And then I worry that the show is just a cynical mishmash of money-making tropes. Maybe those things are true, but most of all I think the show is out of its mind. Characters appear and disappear willy nilly. Someone shows up at the start of what you think is going to be a major arc and then, wham! Dead due to wampyre! It sort of wants to be True Blood, but because it’s on network TV, it’s all ridiculously constrained and full of the dorky innuendo I remember from my pre-teen days watching Dynasty and The Colbys and Falcon Crest. Lorenzo Lamas, I loved you.

And I think that’s why I like it. Sometimes I get tired of seeing everything, either because the sex or blood or misery is over the top and gratuitous, or because it isn’t. The Gates is so randomly cut and pieced together but so uniformly shot and acted you feel you could watch any scene from any episode in any order and it would make the same amount of sense. It’s like one of those kids’ puzzles where all the pieces are perfect squares and the point is to make the picture whole of, say, a parrot or a giraffe, but even if you put the piece with the giraffe’s face where his foot should go, you still know it’s a giraffe’s face. The other shows I watch are more like one of those puzzles made out of a Seurat or a Turner painting, a piece of blue shadow with a brown blur on one prong that might be the sky or might be the water or might be the ship’s sails or the fabric of the lady’s dress or the bank of flowers, and anyway even when you have the whole puzzle done the scene will never make sense or stop breaking your heart.

So I guess sometimes I want my TV like a giraffe puzzle, especially when I am a little sick or a little blue, or just worn out in the ways it feels like only painless TV can fix. TV and rice pudding I overcooked myself, and dog and cat and the old WindChaser oscillating heater, and, to end with a confession as bad as I began, The Cure. The album? Disintegration.