I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (6 page)

Not in My Lifetime

O
h, thank God!” Nana cried as I opened her front door and walked into her living room. “I didn’t think that anyone was going to come and help me! Oh, thank God, Laurie, thank God! I was so worried! I didn’t know what to do!”

Honestly, my Nana didn’t know the meaning of the word “worried.” No, she did not. I, unfortunately, knew it perfectly well. Approximately thirteen minutes earlier, I had come home from shopping and played back my messages on the answering machine, only to find a harrowing recording of my Nana, who was apparently in some sort of agony.

It was evident that something was wrong immediately, since Nana’s typical messages go something like this:

“Laurie? [insert silent pause that stretches out for four seconds, as if she’s waiting for my answering machine to develop the intelligence necessary to reply: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four] It’s Nana. I don’t want to bother you. [one thousand one, one thousand two] Am I bothering you? Laurie? It’s NA-NA. Are you there? I don’t know if you’re there or not. Laurie? Maybe you’re not there. Are you there? [one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three] I wonder when you will be home. Are you home? Huh. [one thousand one, one thousand two] Huh. Well, that’s weird.
Click.
”

The message I had just received was a different animal altogether, completely and entirely.

“Laurie!! It’s Nana. NA-NA!! Are you there? Laurie? It’s NANA!!! Oh no, oh no! Laurie, I need help! Help! [one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four] Oh God!
Click.
”

Naturally, I was a little unnerved. Actually, that’s an understatement. I was completely freaked out and as I tried to dial Nana’s number, my hands were shaking so badly that I missed several digits and had to redial, only to get a busy signal, which is what happens in the movies when the loved one you’re trying to call back is just about to be attacked with a weed whacker by a serial killer.

Beep beep beep.

And of course Nana doesn’t have call-waiting, because if she can’t even remotely handle talking into a telephone accessory belonging to someone else, you can image the amount of damage she inflicted when she tried to operate one of her own.

For the three torturous, tense weeks that Nana had call-waiting, it was like Telephone Olympics in my family. The endurance required of all of us was simply inhuman, because she could absolutely not grasp the concept of a “beep in” or a “click over.” She believes that beep to mean that her phone time has run out, her limit has been reached. Despite repeated efforts in Call-Waiting Counseling by my sisters and myself, if you were talking to Nana and she heard the beep, real or imagined, the next thing you’d hear is a click. She would simply vanish, believing if she heard a beep, and this was any beep, it didn’t necessarily have to be coming from the phone (car alarms and the signal from the Emergency Broadcast System also fell into the General Beep category), she understood the conversation was over. This didn’t mean, however, that she had successfully reached the other caller. If you were the one unknowingly beeping in on a preexisting phone call, you would immediately hear various numbers being pushed and a voice, roughly at least eighteen inches away from the phone mouthpiece, say, “—damn stupid thing, I don’t know how the hell they talked me into this, how do you work it, is this the button you push?
BEEP.
Is this the button?
BEEP BEEP.
I’m pushing the button, is this working, hello?
BEEP.
THIS IS NA-NA!” and then hear the tones of a 7, maybe a 2, being pushed before she flatly hung up on you.

So we had to relinquish Nana’s call-waiting rights. I mean, it had to be done. What choice did we have? Our nerves were shot. It was either kill Nana or kill the call-waiting, but something had to go. Then, my younger sister has the genius brain bubble to get Nana caller ID, and that didn’t last long after we found out that Nana had been calling the phone company to complain that “Una Vailable” had been calling her incessantly and Nana had absolutely no idea just who that lady was. In fact, it was such a violation of Notaro Family Code that we nearly took away my sister’s phone as punishment and a lesson to us all.

Beep beep beep.

With Nana’s phone line busy for a consecutive seven minutes, I decided that there was no time to waste and I grabbed my car keys and headed out to the freeway.

I panicked the whole way there as several grisly scenarios shot through my head, but nothing could prepare me for the horror I found when Nana met me at the door. Not the thought of Nana being overcome by Clorox fumes as she vigorously scrubbed away on an already pristine bathtub; not the thought of one of her body parts or, if curiosity got the better of her, possibly an eyeball, getting sucked up by her Electrolux as she vacuumed her already unsullied carpet; not the thought of her getting nearly decapitated by the massive, plastic hinged lid of the community Dumpster after she tossed in her weekly contribution of “Who Needs This Crap?” which could very easily consist of valuable World War Two memorabilia, newspaper headlines documenting the last six decades’ worth of historical events that my grandfather had spent years collecting, or even her wedding dress.

Nothing.

Because when I walked through that door, there stood my Nana, pale, clammy, and shaking, clutching the remote control in her hand.

“Oh God,” Nana cried as she put her free hand to her head. “You have no idea what I have been through. No idea. I was just sitting here, watching the television about how New Orleans just had a big earthquake and now it’s sinking when all of a sudden I heard a big noise outside! At first, I thought it was part of the story about New Orleans, because I tell you, was that a mess? That was a mess! People running, screaming, crying, bloody, all over the place! What a nightmare. Big crashes, like the one I heard outside, and Laurie, I tell you, no one was doing anything! The only one doing anything was James Garner, because he warned the mayor of New Orleans about this, way in advance, I guess he had a feeling about it, you know? But did anyone listen? No! And now, it was all up to James Garner to save the city and he was dragging a pregnant lady out of a burning building when I heard that big noise outside! He was at his friend Marty’s party, too, when all of this happened but he left to save people’s lives. But his friend Marty Graw’s get-together was a disaster, just a disaster. Imagine having a party and all of a sudden everyone is bleeding and has broken legs? Poor Marty Graw! After I heard the noise outside, I went to the TV to see if James Garner had saved the pregnant lady, but my television was off and my electricity had gone out!”

Upon first hearing about the sad, tragic, and apparently avoidable destruction of New Orleans, my blood pressure shot up, but then I remembered who I was talking to.

“Okay, now when New Orleans had the earthquake on TV,” I said slowly, “did you see Tom Brokaw, or did you just see James Garner?”

Nana paused for a moment. “What the hell would Tom Brokaw be doing in New Orleans?” she said, looking very puzzled. “Now how could he be there? I’m sure he had to be on the news that night, he can’t be running around the country every time the ground shakes a little!”

“And you weren’t watching CNN or anything?” I questioned.

“See An End?” Nana replied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was watching television, I told you!”

“Lifetime Television,” I added.

“It’s Television for
Women,
” Nana added proudly. “And I can’t get it anymore! When the lights went out after the boom, the screen went dark. And now, the lights are back on, but my Lifetime is gone. It’s gone and I don’t know what to do! Help me get it back! Help me! The TV has been out for almost fifteen minutes and who knows what’s going on in New Orleans by now! It may have sunk into the ocean, because James Garner said that was a possibility, you know!”

Honestly, I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew I had a mammoth problem on my hands because after we revoked Nana’s phone accessory rights, we all kind of felt bad, so we got her cable TV. It made sense that if all she had to work was a remote control, the disasters that resulted would be containable, hardly anyone, family members and strangers alike, could get offended, and it would occupy her at the same time.

And boy, oh boy, did it. Once Nana found Lifetime Television, hardly anything else existed. One-time staple favorites such as
Golden Girls
and
Touched by an Angel
(although the official Nana version of those shows are, respectively,
Old and Girls
and
An Angel Is Touching Me
) took a backseat to any movie starring the reigning HRH of melodrama, Susan Lucci, and also applied to court attendees Lindsay Wagner, Melissa Gilbert, Harry Hamlin, and Corbin Bernsen. If a baby-stealing ring was involved, even
JAG
(
Jack
) was in danger.

Now that her call-waiting no longer posed a threat to anyone, you could call Nana at any point in the day, ask her how she was, and she’d say, “Oh, me, I’m fine, but that poor Lynda Carter went to the doctor and guess what he did to her? A bad thing.
A very bad thing.
Oh God. No one believes her. But it’s true, and now she’s going to have a baby.
From the bad doctor.
I don’t know what she’s going to do. What a mess!”

“That’s too bad,” I’d reply. “Where did you see this?”

“On the television.
Crimes of Passion: She Woke Up Pregnant,
” Nana says. “It’s a
very
appropriate title.”

Or you could be at lunch with Nana, and all of a sudden she’d feel compelled to tell you, “Oh God. Listen to what I found out. Remember that girl from
The Partridge Family
? The one who played the piano and then when she grew up she became a lawyer? You’ll never believe what happened to her. She was a cocaine addict and then she was foolin’ around with this fellow, and
bing!
she gets pregnant. Not married, not married. To make matters worse, the little bastard baby was born early and was a drug addict, too! Can you believe that? You would think she would know better, she was a lawyer, but no. I wonder what Shirley Jones said about that, I wonder.”

“What a shame,” I’d be forced to respond. “And you know this because . . .”

“Because of the television.
Love, Lies, and Lullabies,
” Nana would say, shaking her head. “That says it all, doesn’t it?”

Or I’d be talking to my mother or one of my sisters about a friend who, for example, was having trouble at work, and you could count on Nana to pipe in, “That reminds me of a lady up in Canada who was a truck driver who fought the mob because all of the men in her union were afraid to, but you know, how hard could that have been? Not to take away anything from her story,
Mother Trucker,
but you know, what kind of mobster lives in Canada? It’s a very polite country and most of the people speak French. I could go and be a mobster there, that’s how nice they are. I bet the ‘mobsters’ up there don’t even kill anybody that gets in their way, they just crank-call them. Besides, how can you eat macaroni with a croissant? That’s just disgusting.”

Or you could arrive at Nana’s house to pick her up for a family function and get roped into seeing the final, climactic moments of whichever movie she was watching.

“But you’ve seen
Baby Brokers
a hundred times,” I once tried to argue.

“What, are you stupid?” Nana quickly shot back. “
Baby Brokers
is a show about Cybill Shepherd getting conned when she adopts a baby from a shady, unwed couple!
This
is
Baby Snatcher, that
is Nancy McKeon, and she pretended to be pregnant and then stole a baby! They are completely different stories! Cybill Shepherd would
never
steal a baby!”

“Maybe Lynda Carter could give Nancy McKeon her doctor’s number,” I suggested. “And then we could get to Mom’s birthday dinner on time.”

But it was no use arguing, and that, exactly, is how I ended up watching, almost in its entirety, a movie starring Tori Spelling and her croquet-ball boobs about a nave girl whose two-faced boyfriend is a credit card thief, a liar, and, of course, a murderer. When her crafty, nosy mother discovers this and tries to break up the relationship instead of simply telling her daughter, her plan backfires and the boyfriend kidnaps Tori Spelling and takes her to a cabin in the woods in the cinematic magnum opus
Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?

Forty-five minutes later, I was still sitting on the couch and had watched Tori spiral into a dangerous, blind sinkhole of denial, I was still watching as her boyfriend chopped down a log door with an ax to get to his beloved, and I was still watching as she then engineered her brilliant escape by hopping into a curiously and advantageously placed canoe and paddled down a river like Lewis and Clark, although Tori’s river looked suspiciously like it was located in an amusement park in Anaheim.

It is worth noting that Tori Spelling completes the physical equivalent of a triathlon in this movie, although her boobs have about as much movement as a set of gravestones.