Mud
Nonfiction
Julia Ghazi
I am seven years old, still struggling to understand my new existence on earth. Dad introduces me to his new friend, who is much blonder and taller and more Irish than him. She’s got two chocolate labs, and every time one of them dies she buys a new one so she’s always got two labs on the ready. She’s got a big house right on the intracoastal and a pool with rainbow LED lights that I am always dying to jump into but have to restrain myself because if I jump in then the chocolate labs are gonna jump in too and paddle towards me very quickly and scratch me with their long untrimmed nails.
I do not question where dad met this lady. At Christ Fellowship, he said. That was the big church that felt more like a convention center that served you fries and chicken tenders after every mass, which consisted of a live band that played music akin to Florence and the Machine that sang on topics such as Christ, the lord, as well as various bodies of water. I didn’t mind going there too much. Dad had me go to these weekly meetings they had for kids whose parents were divorced, where they talked about how God came between mommy and dad. Afterwards I got to play at the church’s huge indoor playground. I loved the slide.
The blonde lady is the CEO and founder and sole employee for a dog beauty company where she makes mud face masks for dogs. Tea tree mud, flea mud, invigorating mud. The mud was meant to be lathered all over the dog as something between a medical treatment and a cosmetic procedure. She packaged the mud in these squeezy plastic pouches that resembled an IV bag and smelled of nauseating peppermint essential oil.
On my dad’s days to pick me up from school I would ask him where we were going, because it never ended up being his home. “It’s a surprise,” he’d say. More often than not the surprise would be a garage storage unit with two industrial-sized stainless-steel mixers full of scented mud and an assembly line of half-full pouches. As I sat on the cement ground with my plastic folder working on a sheet of math problems, my dad would be loudly whirring the mixers of brown sopping goo in a deafening brrrr. Most of my homework went unfinished. When my teachers sent home letters to meet with my dad after class about my poor performance, he’d say, “Tell your teacher that your father’s a CEO.”
When I was eight or nine my dad and this blonde lady brought me to a dog supply trade show in Virginia. I didn’t know where we were until I was sitting criss-crossed on the carpeted floor of the convention center as my father propped up a six-foot-tall laminated poster of a dog doing yoga. I spent the trip rolling around on the ground as my dad and the blonde lady berated passerby buyers to lather themselves with their dixie cups of “samples.”
Despite the product being marketed for dogs, the only animal I ever saw using the mud mask was my father, who would lather his brown hairy legs with it in the shower. Everything in his apartment eventually smelled like mud and peppermint oil. I never saw a single bar of soap in the bathroom.
Sometimes after school or on the weekends the blonde lady would bring me to pet supply stores to try to convince the similarly blonde saleworkers to buy a case of mud for their stores. Most times they said no. I had never seen anyone buy the mud, actually. Yet the blonde lady had a big mansion and a pool with LED lights and neverending funds to keep buying and feeding these chocolate labs. Neither her nor my dad ever said that they had to “go to work” like my mom did. I thought that was the way you made money. The blonde lady said if I worked as hard as she did then one day I could be successful like her.
The blonde lady continues to make a questionable living off her business. “No mud, no lotus,” her website says below a watermarked stock image of a greyhound in tree pose.