It Looked Different on the Model (14 page)

If my mother had hind legs, she would have reared up on them and then kicked me in the face with a front hoof.

“I,” she quickly informed me with a pointed finger, “am not an animal.
You
are an animal!
I
read the Bible!
I am not an animal
!”

And with that, her chair left tire tracks on the tile as she pushed away from the table and stood up.

“By the way,” she said as she walked away and gave me one
last look, “your shirt is too small. You look like friggin’ Pooh Bear.”

I looked down, and it was pretty much true. My mom had probably used a vast amount of restraint not to voice that observation as a breakfast opener.

But, to be honest, even
that
revelation couldn’t prepare me for what I saw one afternoon a few days later when I walked through my parents’ front door after parking my rental car in the wrong direction on the cop-free street. I don’t know how my mom and dad didn’t know I was there—I had to unlock the door, so I know I made noise. I was making noise, I tell you! But as I came around the corner from the foyer, I saw my mother sitting on the chair with her leg extended, and my father kneeling on the floor, a shoe in his hand. There they were, my parents—who, to my knowledge, had never even made eye contact, let alone touched—and here he was, slipping a shoe on her foot. What was going on here? They both turned and looked at me in the same second, their eyes wide with unexpected horror and shame. I’m sure the look on my face was no different.

No one said a word. The silence actually echoed.

I’m so glad this didn’t happen when I was six, I thought as I turned and fled up the stairs, not stopping until I closed the guest-bedroom door behind me.

“—and he was putting on her shoe! They both turned to look at me. Their eyes.
Their eyes
!” I cried quietly into the phone to my sister.

“Oh. My. God,” my sister replied in a horrified whisper. “You should really come and stay over here.”

“She was on the couch,” I said again. “With her bad-hip leg sticking out—”

“SHUT UP,” my sister demanded firmly. “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!”

“How am I going to go back downstairs?” I asked. “How am I going to face them, after seeing what I’ve seen?”

“Stay upstairs!” my sister warned. “Don’t leave that room. Do you have enough snacks to get you through until morning?”

“Oh,” I said, on the verge of a full-fledged panic attack. “I have a bag of chocolate Twizzlers and two protein bars in my suitcase from my book tour in 2008. I won’t make it until sundown. Wait—”

I suddenly spied a red bag that was on a chair and could be one of two things: Godiva chocolates from my friend Lucy, or handcrafted, beautifully scented bath bombs from my friend Kathy Monkman. I held out hope for the chocolates as I crossed the room. I knew that Lucy had not only included truffles in her bag but also dark-chocolate-covered almonds, which feasibly could be enough protein to keep me in the guest bedroom until my flight left in two days.

But as I got close enough to the bag to touch it, I smelled the wonderful aroma of flowers, and, though heavenly, that doesn’t smell like Godiva. Still, just to be sure, I looked into the bag, and that’s when I definitely saw the two delicately packed boxes with the rounded spheres of bath bombs covered in white powder, each resting in a white paper cup. There was no mistaking them.

Bath bombs.

“Never mind, I accept it. I’m going to die,” I told my sister. “I left the chocolate downstairs. Please remember me as forty pounds lighter. But if I toss the keys out the window, will you come over and put my car in the right direction? I’m afraid Dad is going to write me a ‘citizen’s arrest’ ticket for aggravated parking. And if I never see you again, check Nick’s armpits for stubble.”

As soon as I hung up with my sister, however, I heard my Mom yell from downstairs.

“Laurie?” she called.

“I only want to talk about it with my therapist!” I called back.

“We’re going to dinner at Outback! Do you want to come?” she replied.

I actually thought about it for a second, because who passes up a free steak and baked potato? But then the reality of spending the next hour and a half attempting to avoid the “Sometimes Mommy Can’t Get Her Shoes on By Herself and That’s Perfectly Normal Only Because She Has a Bad Hip” talk would cost me more in trying to cure the residual twitching and spontaneous sobbing than a free baked potato was worth, even with all the fixin’s.

“No thanks,” I shouted back. “You know it’s only two forty-five.”

“Your father likes to order off the day menu,” my mother yelled. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? We gotta hurry. The lunch special is only good for fifteen more minutes. After that, everything goes up two dollars.”

“Nah, I’m good,” I called back, sighing with relief when I heard the front door close.

When my father sat down at the kitchen table the next morning after I had just taken my first sip of coffee and announced, “You know, Anderson Cooper is waging a war against Christmas,” I knew that I was most likely in the safe zone and that the jarring “touching incident” from yesterday would not be discussed, just like every other traumatizing family event. Which is exactly how we like it. Everything was back to normal and completely ignored, no matter what the residual effects. Nobody touched nobody.

Until an hour later, when I was ironing the dress I had planned to wear that day and there were two quick knocks at the door.

I was about to say, “Hang on a second,” and grab a robe, a shirt, a towel, or anything that would have covered me up, since I was only wearing a vintage full slip—which is legally considered underclothes—when the door swung open and there stood my father.

“He—” He stopped abruptly in mid-word when he saw the look on my face, which I’m sure was the same face I use when people walk in on me when I’m using the toilet (I have now used that face exactly three times in my life: The first was at SXSW, when a girl burst into the stall I was occupying and demanded that I get up because she needed to pee “real quick,” and I would have punched her had my underwear not been wrapped around my ankles. And the other time, when my nephew was a toddler and every room was free range for him. Between seeing me in a compromised situation and my mother wanting to Nair the Y chromosome off him, that child has had plenty of deep-rooted RuPaul-level damage).

There I was, wearing basically a long bra dress with my fat old-lady arms naked and exposed, my bra straps visible, and I didn’t even have tights on at this point. I looked like every little old Italian widow, except I didn’t have food stains on me yet. The only thing that stopped me from slipping into a psychotic break was that, in the event of my developing an alter personality, it would take my father longer to close the door.

“—eeyyyyyyyy,” he resumed, in the same amount of time it has taken for comets to crash into the Earth, species to go extinct, established civilizations to collapse, and the world to completely forget that the Romans invented indoor plumbing.

“Good job with the parking,” he said. “I can see you’re making an effort.”

“Okay,” I forced out. “I do have a bra on, but I would prefer to talk about this when I’m actually wearing clothes.”

“You should really come and stay over here,” my sister reiterated over the phone three minutes late.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “I might as well stay here. I have a feeling Dad’s been working hard on a lecture about the Lie of Global Warming, which he plans to present tomorrow at seven-thirty
A.M
. at our Breakfast Assault. I think he has diagrams, and earlier today someone was printing out pictures of polar bears dancing on a beach and nuzzling with seals. I guess the world isn’t perfect. If it was, Milky Ways would only have one gram of fat and Tim Burton never would have made a musical.”

The imperfection of the world proved itself a minute later when I walked into the bathroom to dry my hair.

“Mom!” I cried. “Where is the salon chair? The salon chair is gone! I can walk straight through to the toilet!
Where is the salon chair
?”

“I had to move it; it’s Thursday,” she called back from downstairs. “Patricia and the cleaning ladies come today.”

You have got to be kidding me, I thought angrily as I plugged in the hair dryer. Now I have to stand up while I blow-dry my hair? I don’t want to stand up while I blow-dry my hair. The thought of it is just exhausting. Standing up is ridiculous! Who does that? Who does that!

“What are you doing up there?” my mother called again.

“I’m drying my hair,” I replied indignantly. “And I have to do it upright because
it’s Thursday
!”

“Don’t make a mess! Patricia will be here in ten minutes!”
she replied. “I know you’re up there making a mess with all of that goddamned hair!”

“I am not!” I shouted back. “I am not making a mess! I am rolling up a big ball from all the hair that fell out of my head this week, and I’m putting it on your toothbrush like an ornament on a Christmas tree that Anderson Cooper doesn’t want you to have, right at this moment!”

It had only taken a week, even without sitting on my mom’s Time Traveler Toilet, for me reset the clock and become twelve years old.

The following Sunday, after I’d returned home, my mother didn’t even say hello when my father asked if I wanted to talk to her and then handed her the phone.

“What the hell was in that goddamned red bag?” she demanded immediately.

“Mom,” I said. “I’m fifteen hundred miles away. Did you buy a Joan Rivers webcam on QVC and think I can see you? Because I can’t see you through any of the holes in the ear portion of the handset.”

“The red bag you left here,” she explained. “You left it upstairs with all of that other stuff.”

“Oh,” I said simply, trying to remember. Point is that I never fully embraced the fact that my suitcase does not possess the magical powers of a Lion, a Witch, or a Wardrobe, and cannot carry the contents of a magical, mysterious land within it. Add to this the fact that I live in a land where Soysage is available in convenience stores on any corner, but if you try to buy the only kind of ricotta legally allowed by your mother for lasagna or tortillas that don’t “expire” for half a year, you’re out of luck, as well as room in the suitcase. As a result of filling it up with cheese and starches, a couple of things got unknowingly left behind.

“Oh,” I said slowly. “I’m sorry, I forgot to ask you to mail it to me.”

“Mail it to you?” she said sharply. “
Mail it to you
? Why don’t you tell me what the hell it was?”

“In the red bag?” I asked. “The one with the ribbons on it and—”

“
I don’t know if it had friggin’ ribbons on it or not
,” she snapped. “But I do know that when I bit into one of those goddamned little balls, it disintegrated like sand all over my tongue and started fizzing up like acid! I tried to spit it out and it wouldn’t come off, and when I drank water it started foaming more!”

“Kathy Monkman’s bath bombs?” I asked, even though my jaw was hanging open. “You ate Kathy Monkman’s bath bombs?”

“
What the hell is a bath bomb
?” she shot back. “I opened up the bag and there were these two little boxes with balls of candy! They smelled sweet! I thought it was marzipan!”

“Marzipan?” I asked. “Marzipan? Where would you even find marzipan after 1910?”

“There was powdered sugar on top!” she insisted.

“That was baking soda!” I cackled. “I can’t believe you ate Kathy Monkman’s bath bombs!”

“I didn’t
eat
them!” she denied staunchly. “I took a bite! Then it melted, the bubbles started, and I had to lean over the sink and let the froth build-up drain from my mouth. While your father watched. I’ll never forget that taste. Never! It was disgusting!”

“Well, I’ve never seen anyone on
Top Chef
make anything out of borax, Epsom salts, and baking soda,” I agreed. “You were approximately one chemical compound away from eating
crystal meth. But maybe throw in some tuna and cream of chicken soup and it would be excellent.”

“I can’t believe your mother ate bath bombs,” my husband said from the other end of the couch as he shook his head. “This is better than the time your sister ate the dog cookie.”

And that was true, it was better than the time my middle sister found a bag of treats I had just bought my dog, Maeby, from the gourmet pet store. My sister dug into them, uninvited. After she ate the whole thing, I walked into the kitchen and she took that opportunity to tell me that “Those cookies weren’t very sweet!”

“You mean the ones shaped like a dog bone?” I replied, noticing the open bag, which was cellophane with little dog bones printed on it; and it was tied with a ribbon decorated with paw prints.

“They had frosting on them,” she argued, as if I was somehow wrong and I had mistaken a Mrs. Fields for a pet-supply store with leashes, pet-odor remover, and puppy pads.

“The frosting provided even more detail that it was a dog bone,” I informed her, looking into the bag. “You ate the one that had
Woof
! written on it.”

Yet my mother had beaten my sister in consuming the unthinkable, because she had identified as delectable edibles not even objects digestible by
any
species, but bathroom cleaners and ant killer.

“Wow, Mom,” I said to my mother over the phone. “Tell me what you
wouldn’t
eat if you thought there was sugar on top of it.”

“They were in candy cups! In candy boxes!” she protested. “All fingers pointed to candy!”

“Oh, no,” I corrected her. “No. All fingers were pointing to your mouth. I’m going to leave all kinds of stuff around your
house now to see if you will eat it. It will be like an Easter egg hunt, but sometimes foamy. Sometimes not.”

“You’re so funny,” my mother responded sharply. “For a ten-year-old.”

“Oh,” I replied. “You got that right.”