Let's Pretend This Never Happened (30 page)

ME
: Dude, it’s
totally
funny. You know? Because people always say, “They only hate me because they’re jealous.” But then it’s Hitler, and everyone really
does
hate him and isn’t jealous at all?

VICTOR
: Not funny.

ME
: I think I just need drawing lessons. It took me, like, two hours just to work out how to put a scarf on a stick figure. And
that’s
why I didn’t have time to clean all the soup I spilled in the microwave. By the way, don’t look in the microwave.

VICTOR
: I’m going to lie down until the urge to kill you passes.

Then he left and never came back. And I had to clean the microwave, because
I’m
the responsible one in this relationship, and also because it started to smell like clam chowder even in the bathrooms. This is why it sucks to be me. Also, I’m pretty sure that my husband is anti-Semitic.

P.S. Victor says that not laughing at a joke making fun of Hitler doesn’t make you anti-Semitic, but I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what an anti-Semite would say. They have
terrible
senses of humor. He also says this is a conversation about “why I can’t act like a grown-up,” but I’m pretty sure it’s really about why he loves Hitler so damn much.

P.P.S. I just want to point out that I actually
am
a fairly good housewife and that the only reason that I set the oven on fire in the first place was because we were trying to sell our house and I’d read that you should bake cookies before the open house because it makes your house smell homier. So I threw one of those frozen cookie logs on a plate and put it in the oven, and then ten minutes later there was a terrible smell and I raced to the oven to find out that if you don’t cut those cookie logs into cookie shapes they explode all over the plate. And also that when people install
an oven they put the paperwork inside of it, because apparently they want you to die painfully when you catch the house on fire from the burning instructions you just tried to bake. Also, they put the instructions in a plastic sheet, which smells terrible when it melts, and it makes it very hard to sell a house when you have to tell prospective buyers that the oven was used only once but that it was used to cook a bunch of plastic and that’s why it smells so terrible at the open house. Also, Victor was surprisingly critical of the whole event, considering that I was only trying to help, and he told me that our insurance company was making us install a halon fire extinguisher system in the new house unless I promised to avoid the kitchen from then on. I did not think that was funny at all and was really pissed off, until the next day, when I tried to heat up the oven again in an attempt to scrape off all the melted plastic still in there, and I accidentally shut a tea towel in the oven and caught it all on fire again. I’m really glad we sold that house, because, honestly,
that oven was a goddamn death trap
.

P.P.P.S. In my defense I just want to point out that I
can
actually cook a meal, although possibly not a meal by anyone else’s standard definition. For instance, I have never in my life intentionally made a dinner salad for my family and I don’t intend to. Using that many ingredients and utensils to prepare a dish that’s just served raw anyway seems like a waste, and I’ve never seen a family look at a salad as anything other than something you have to survive and drench in dressing just to finish so that you can get on to “the real food.” I’m not falling for it. Instead I jump straight to the real food. I recently made microwave macaroni and cheese, and when my family didn’t seem properly appreciative, I pointed out that it had taken me a half-hour to make it. Victor refused to believe it until he opened the trash can and found ten single-serving just-add-water macaroni cups. He stared at me in disbelief, as I patted myself on the back for taking out the other trash sack from earlier, which had included an
additional
ten single-serving macaroni dishes, which had sort of fused together into a single, melty pile. Apparently if you want to cook ten plastic serving bowls for
three minutes each you shouldn’t just shove them all in the microwave all together for thirty minutes and then leave to take a shower. This is my advice to you, and is something Julia Child never covered.

P.P.P.P.S. Also, if you try to make a shrimp boil but the bag of spices bursts and so you just toss it all in along with whatever spices you can find in the pantry, you can make homemade pepper spray. Unintentionally. And everyone at your dinner party will run outside for the next hour, coughing and tearing up as if they’ve been Maced. Because technically they kind of have been. Because mace was one of the spices I found in the pantry. I blame whoever makes spice out of Mace, and I reminded my gasping dinner guests that even if I did Mace them, I did it in an old-fashioned, homemade, Martha Stewart sort of way.
With love.

1.
After I read this chapter to my editor she pointed out that I’ve been using the phrase “whip-its” incorrectly for my entire life, as it really refers to getting high from nitrous oxide and can totally kill you. Which explains why people look at me so strangely when I tell them that some of my most cherished childhood memories include doing whip-its with my grandmother. My editor consoled me with the fact that maybe people thought I was talking about the dog (whippet), but then admitted that didn’t make it much better.

The Psychopath on the Other Side of the Bathroom Door

A few weeks ago my friend Lotta told me that her doctor told her that her antidepressants weren’t working because she had too many toxins in her body, and that she needed to use a “colon cleanse” to flush everything out of her system. It sounded completely insane and I told her that, but then she mentioned that when she took the colon cleanse she lost three pounds that very day—I was immediately in. I convinced myself that I owed it to my family to have my crazy pills work properly, but really I just wanted to lose three pounds without working out. And that whole last sentence kind of proves why I need to be on crazy pills.
Awesome
.

So I went to the grocery store but I couldn’t find the colon cleanse. I considered asking the pharmacist, but as I was waiting in line I had a conversation in my head that went like this:

ME
: Yes, I’d like some colon cleanse.

PHARMACIST
: I’ve never heard of that. Sounds like something deviants use.

ME
: It’s something that cleans out your colon so your antidepressants work better.

PHARMACIST
: I think you’re using your antidepressants wrong. They go in your mouth.

ME
: You are surprisingly unhelpful for a health care worker.

PHARMACIST
: I’m calling the police, deviant.

I’m not sure why I jumped right to the pharmacist calling the police, but once the thought was in my head it was stuck there, and so I panicked a little when the pharmacist asked what I needed. I paused awkwardly and then asked where the reading glasses were, and then he said they didn’t carry reading glasses, which is weird because most pharmacies do, and I always like to try them on and pretend that I’m a naughty librarian. So instead of the
colon cleanse I decided I would just take a bunch of ex-lax, because I figured,
next-best thing, right?
I bought the extra-strength stuff because it was the same price as regular strength, and so technically it was like I was
saving
money, and I thought that would help my argument when Victor demanded to know why I bought twenty dollars’ worth of “unnecessary” laxatives (although it turns out he didn’t really care about cost-effectiveness because he hates being economically feasible, or wants me to be fat or something). I already knew he’d be all judgy about the whole thing, because he was also very unsupportive when I wanted to buy those Chinese foot-pad things that suck all the toxins out of your feet while you sleep. He claimed the whole Chinese foot-pad thing was a scam, but I think it’s just because he wants me to suffer, or maybe that he’s racist. Then when I called him racist he got all mad and screamy, and I was like, “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING! THOSE ARE THE TOXINS TALKING,” but he still wouldn’t let me buy them. And this is exactly why I waited until the week he left for a business trip to New York to actually do the cleanse.

I took two chocolate squares of ex-lax that night, but then I noticed that the directions said it would bring “gentle results,” and it seemed like a good colon cleansing shouldn’t be “gentle” at all, so I took three more tabs. And they were chocolaty and delicious and I was kind of hungry, so I ate another one. And then
nothing happened at all.
So then next morning I took two more (because at this point I thought maybe there was something wrong with me, and that I had some kind of freakishly high laxative tolerance), and then I went to Starbucks and picked up a giant Frappuccino. This might have been a mistake, because apparently coffee is kind of a laxative too, although sadly I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, because I was too busy thinking about the phone conversation I’d had with Victor last week about Frappuccinos when he called me at work:

[Ring]

ME
: This is Jenny.

VICTOR
: So why don’t they make chocolate Slurpees?

ME
: Um . . . what?

VICTOR
: Chocolate Slurpees. Why don’t they exist?

ME
: They do. They’re called
mocha Frappuccinos.

VICTOR
: Nope. Not the same thing. Frappuccinos don’t have that little spoon on the end of the straw like Slurpees do.

ME
: Those are Icees. Not Slurpees.

VICTOR
: Next time I go into Starbucks I’m going to be all,
“I want a spoon on my straw, a-hole!”
How else are you gonna get that little last bit in the bottom, huh? Spoon straw!

ME
: ?

VICTOR
: They need to join forces, 7-Eleven and Starbucks.

ME
: Mochaslurpeeccino?

VICTOR
: Or maybe a slurpeemacchiato. Now,
that
would be an unholy union.

ME
: So did you actually
need
something from me or . . . ?

VICTOR
:
Doo-doo, wa-wa.

ME
: Huh. What was that?

VICTOR
: That’s my Antichrist music.

Please note that he doesn’t even start the conversation with a “Hello,” which is kind of more upsetting to me than the Antichrist stuff, because a greeting is a basic building block of polite society, and is one of the only things that separates us from bears.

So I drove back to my home, drinking my Frappuccino and making a mental note that I should let all of Victor’s calls go through to my voice mail, and then
my intestines exploded
. I mean, they didn’t
literally
explode, but it totally felt that way. And at first I was all, “Okay, pain is good, feel the burn,” but then I realized that this was not like yoga and that I had, in fact, made a
horrible, horrible mistake
. I’m not going to get graphic, but it basically felt like my legs melted and an elephant crawled inside my stomach and was clawing his way out. And the elephant had claws, apparently. And his nose was made of snakes.

Since Victor was in New York, and Hailey was in school, I had the house to myself, which was good, because honestly there would have been no
way to maintain the sensual mystery of womanhood if anyone had heard the noises coming from that bathroom. At a certain point I started worrying that I might be OD’ing. I wasn’t sure what OD’ing on laxatives looked like, but I was fairly certain it would be messy and that you’d probably shit out your entire colon. I’m not sure if this is actually medically possible, and I thought about calling Lotta to ask her whether she felt like she was shitting out her colon when she was doing her cleanse, but I wasn’t sure I could talk without screaming, and also I didn’t have her phone number. And so I sat there, thinking that this would be a horrible way to die, because basically no matter what I’d accomplished in my life it would always be overshadowed by “And she died on the toilet from pooping out her own lower intestine.” Like, if it had happened to Thomas Edison that would totally be the very first thing it would say in his Wikipedia entry. It’d be all, “Thomas Edison,
who pooped out his own colon
, made a variety of inventions and changed the way we live today. Did we mention
he pooped out his colon
? Because he totally did.
Thomas Edison pooped out his colon.
Honestly, we can’t stress this enough.”

It was about this time that I decided I needed to take action, so I found some Pepto-Bismol and took a full dose. I considered taking more, but at this point I was concerned that I might have to call 911 for help and I didn’t want to have to explain why I’d taken three times the recommended amount of laxatives
and
three times the recommended amount of antidiarrhea medicine, because even to me that sounded like some sort of poorly planned suicide attempt. Taking just
one
dose of the antidiarrheal seemed somewhat rational, comparatively.
“Surely,”
I thought,
“this will make me seem much more credible and less likely to be put on suicide watch.”