I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places (17 page)

But okay.

I get that.

So I went back to the bank with her death certificate, and they told me I had to fill out a “Letter of Instruction,” get it notarized, and mail it to the address they provided.

By the way, the instruction in the letter is to mail me a check because I am POD, even though that is exactly what POD means.

But okay, I get that, too. We have rules and regulations, and this is America.

The bank told me that I would receive a check in ten days.

Three months later, I still hadn't gotten the check, so I went back to the bank, where they told me they don't know what happened to the Letter of Instruction I'd sent, so I had to fill out another one, get it notarized again, and resend it to the same address.

Which I did.

But three months after that, I still hadn't gotten the check.

So I called the bank, and the woman told me that they didn't know what happened to the second Letter of Instruction I sent, either. She told me to come back a third time, get a third Letter of Instruction, get it notarized a third time, and send it to the same address.

In other words, I'm POD but it's been over a year since Mother Mary passed. Put simply, there has been D, but there is still no P.

So I told the bank lady what I thought of that, in creatively profane terms.

Because I am my mother's daughter.

And I have no reason to believe that the fourth time I do the same thing will lead to success.

In fact, it was Albert Einstein who said, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Guy was a genius.

I wish I knew where he banks.

I know where he doesn't.

Bank of Insanity.

Anyway, you don't have to be Einstein to know that I will have to do what the bank says, all over again, for the fourth time. The bank has the money, and they've had it for over a year, and they're keeping it, even though it's not theirs anymore.

If they do this to enough people, they'll have free use of lots of money.

And they'll get away with it, because banks run America.

And the federal banking laws are basically, what's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine.

If you don't think so, try to be even a week late on your credit-card payment, mortgage, or car loan. You'll be charged late fees and interest, and you'll get threatening phone calls from the Mafia.

I mean, the banks.

I'm writing about it because I know I'm not the only person to lose a beloved parent, which is bad enough, but banks make it all worse by their pointless rules, red tape, and general incompetence, which only serve to remind you that YOUR MOM DIED.

You know what Mother Mary would say, don't you?

I do, too.

And that's why she will never really D.

 

A Thing of Beauty

Francesca

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Keats, one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era.

I once wrote an entire term paper on those lines, and I still didn't understand them.

Aesthetic pleasure isn't completely lost on me; I've always dated attractive people. But I've mostly found my level. I don't think my looks are my best trait, which I'm perfectly fine with, so I've never prioritized that in my romantic partners.

But if you look at the great literature of the past, so much ink has been spilled for beauty. Such artistic depth for such a superficial subject. I didn't get it.

Until I dated someone super hot.

Remember that guy I met at the bachelorette party? His dance moves won me over that night, and it was a little too dark to get a great look at him. Then it took two months of playful texting before we could get our schedules to sync up. So when we finally made plans for a first date, I'd practically forgotten what he looked like.

We were meeting at a Lower East Side speakeasy, one of those kitschy bars with a hidden entrance. He texted me that he would wait outside and added, “I'm the one in orange.”

I remember thinking he had to be pretty bold to pull off orange on a first date.

Then I spotted him.

He was gorgeous by every superficial metric possible. He was taller than I'd remembered, at least six-foot-three, and perfectly proportioned with broad shoulders tapering to a trim waist. Da Vinci's
Vitruvian Man
would look awkward beside him.

He wore a pumpkin-colored, fine-knit sweater that draped over his pectoral muscles and strained at his biceps.

I would've undressed him with my eyes, but I'd never seen someone that fit naked in real life.

I had to use my imagination.

Then he saw me and flashed a dazzling smile.

And I wanted to throw up.

I plunged into an abyss of insecurity. As we hugged hello, a million thoughts ran through my head: Was my dress flattering? I should suck in. I had rushed my eyeliner, was it uneven? I forgot leg moisturizer. I should've worn less perfume. Am I wearing deodorant? Yes, but not enough.

“You found me,” he said. “My buddy said I look like a traffic cone.”

He could certainly stop traffic.

“You look … great.”

Where's poetry when you need it?

We went inside and sat at the bar. As we talked, my eyes traced the outlines of his face by candlelight. His bone structure made the Parthenon look amateurish, he had the cheekbones of a god, a jawline cut from marble, and these full, pillowy lips made for, well …

Where was that drink?

I tried to focus on the words coming out of his mouth, but my mind was busy comparing myself to the type of girl he typically dates.

He was saying, “Well, I have four brothers…”

The girl he dates styles her hair every morning, and she knows how to do that soft-wave thing with a curling iron. I don't even own a curling iron. My stupid hair is already curly.

“One year we were on the football team at the same time…”

She probably loves running, she runs on vacation. She used to be a gymnast. Or a ballerina. Or play collegiate beach volleyball—is that a thing?

“… new job, it's not the usual finance…”

She has never had a pimple, but she heard of them, and they sound awful.

“… What year were you?”

Shit. Focus—what was he saying? You two went to the same college so …

“I was class of '08,” I said. A lucky guess.

“That's why we never met, I was 2011.” He paused. “But, I've always dated older women.”

Twenty-nine years old and already I was the older woman. This did not boost my confidence.

I told myself that now that he has seen me in the light of day, he would recognize that we're different categories of human and return to dating the girls Derek Jeter or Leonardo DiCaprio had just dumped. Reassured that this ordeal was our first and last date, I started to relax and enjoy it.

I learned that he played football in college and was an avid Patriots fan. He deduced from my hometown that I might be an angry Eagles fan.

“I plead the Fifth,” I said. “I'm trying to get you to like me.”

“You don't have to worry about that. I like you.”

He put his hand on my leg. I stared at it.

The audio of him saying, “I like you,” echoed in my mind in slow motion.

I floated home.

But dating someone so good-looking was a roller coaster for my self-esteem. The first few times, I still believed he was out of my league. I got ready for dates like I was getting ready for prom, deploying all my makeup tricks until I was basically wearing an Instagram filter on my face.

Although I will say, I gained a new understanding of taking artistic inspiration in beauty. Over the next few weeks, I caught myself sketching his perfect face. In one drawing, I captured him quite well. I briefly considered texting him a picture of it.

Thankfully, I thought better of it.

In the modern dating world where speaking on the phone is too intimate, sending someone a portrait you drew of him is equivalent to sending a bloody ear.

But when a few more dates proved the “I like you” comment wasn't a hallucination sent by the Muses, it started to go to my head.

Was I secretly stunning? Maybe I had a rare beauty that had not been properly appreciated until this moment. I'd been selling myself short all this time. I was a ten in six's clothing.

The next time we went out, I wore a crop top.

I was drunk with power.

He'd suggested we go dancing to reprise our first meeting. That Studly Do Right wanted to do something so sentimental had me convinced we were fated to be together. I was already imagining our genetic-lottery-winning children scampering around together.

And we had a great time. We chatted over rosé before going downstairs where a DJ was spinning nineties hip-hop, and we danced the night away. People were looking at us, we were such a hot couple.

See how quickly I'd transitioned to “we”?

At around 1
A.M.
, we went back upstairs to get some air. It was the first date with him that I hadn't felt like a total mess. I thought I had played it perfectly.

“Oh, my friend just texted me,” he said. “They're in Meatpacking. Want to meet them at a club?”

A club in the Meatpacking District? A friend? This was all wrong. I was ready to go home. With him.

But I couldn't cop to being tired. Exhaustion is for old, ugly people.

We arrived at 1 Oak, the clubbiest of clubs. The next three hours were a blur of strobe lighting, smoke machines, and very, very overpriced bottles of Grey Goose.

I gave it the old college try. I drank vodka–Red Bulls, a disgusting cocktail that tastes like Mountain Dew concentrate. I tried to dance without choking from the smoke machine. And I made friends with a group of drag queens, because they struck me as the most authentic women in the room.

One thing was clear: hot or not, I was too old for this.

At five in the morning, I got my wish and went home with the hottest guy in the room.

Where we slept on top of my covers, fully clothed.

He woke up at eight thirty, bright-eyed and handsome as ever. I woke up with a hangover that felt like the afterlife.

Still, waking up with a deadly hangover next to him was better than alone.

Emily Dickinson, another Romantic poet and fellow spinster writer, put it well: “If I expire, let it be in sight of thee.”

We went out a few more times, but in the end, we fizzled out. I can't say a bad thing about him, but we were missing some secret ingredient to make us fall in love.

It turns out looks aren't everything.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet who'd been married twice by my age, got it: “Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds depart.”

Finding someone incredibly attractive doesn't guarantee a connection between two souls.

But it does give you something to write about.

 

Over Troubled Waters

Lisa

I just got back from book tour with Daughter Francesca, which was wonderful except for one thing:

Bridges.

As in, I'm newly scared of driving over them.

Please tell me I'm not alone.

We were touring for our book titled
Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?
, so our publisher scheduled us for a book tour of bookstores in beach resorts, and I'm not complaining. But I knew I was in trouble on day one, as I drove toward Rehoboth, encountering my first bridge. It rose ahead of me like a concrete tsunami, and all of a sudden, I felt weak in the knees.

And not good weak-in-the-knees, like Bradley Cooper weak-in-the-knees.

More like squeeze your sphincter weak-in-the-knees.

In other words, the wrong kind of puckering up.

The bridge was the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Bridge, and even though it was new, it looked unfinished. It didn't have a top or any structure to hold it up, but only weird spikes that rose in the center, attached to things that looked like strings.

I own bras with more support.

The other problem was that the bridge didn't have any sides. As we got closer, I imagined sliding right off into the water, which I admit might have been irrational, or a big tractor-trailer behind me pushing me off, which seemed completely likely.

Francesca looked over, worried. “Mom, are you okay?”

“Of course I'm okay,” I lied, because I'm a good mother.

A good mother doesn't communicate her irrational fears to her child.

A good mother lets her child develop her own irrational fears.

But as we drove onto the bridge, the more nervous I got, and Francesca could tell. “Mom, why are your knees shaking? Are you thinking about Bradley Cooper again?”

So I confessed that I was afraid of the bridge, and being the great daughter that she is, she didn't tease me, but turned into my cheerleader/therapist.

“Mom, just keep your foot on the gas and follow the car ahead of you, and we'll be fine.”

We got over the bridge without lethal event, but my heart was thumping. I cursed the bridge, its architects, and my hormones in general, because I remember reading somewhere that fear of bridges can be correlated to estrogen levels.

Unfortunately, I'm fresh out.

The only liquid I have in great supply is Diet Coke.

Our book tour took us to independent bookstores in Avalon, Westhampton, Mystic, and Westerly, Rhode Island, which meant we crossed about three thousand bridges, or maybe it just felt that way. I was a wreck, and Francesca took over the driving, which only made me more nervous.

What mother isn't nervous when her kid drives?

I braced myself in the passenger seat, and Francesca said I looked like a starfish.

Plus I still had to close my eyes when we went over a bridge, whether I was driving or not, and by the end of book tour, I had become a full-fledged Nervous Driver. All around me, traffic moved way too fast. Speed limits have increased from fifty-five to sixty-five, which means that everybody goes seventy to seventy-five. Cars changed lanes willy-nilly, passed on the right, and even drove on the shoulder.