Me Talk Pretty One Day (14 page)

At the restaurant she insisted that the waitress had overcharged her for her milk shake, even though the price was right there
on the menu. When I suggested we leave and maybe see a movie, Bonnie pushed herself back from the table and proceeded to sulk.
“I wanted to go to a Broadway show, and here you’re talking about a movie I could see back home for three dollars and fifty
cents. I flew five hundred miles to see New York, and all I got was a chocolate milk shake and a plate of hash browns. Some
damn trip this turned out to be.”

We should have beaten her to death. It was clearly the best solution to the problem, but instead we went to the half-price
ticket booth. Alisha took her monster to a Broadway show, and I met up with them afterward. We hoped the play might satisfy
Bonnie, but once she’d gotten a taste of her itinerary, there was no stopping her. The following morning she woke Alisha at
seven
A.M.
so they could get a head start on the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. They visited the UN and the South
Street Seaport and returned to the apartment at four in the afternoon. Alisha was ready to throw in the towel, but Bonnie
wanted to go for high tea at the Plaza Hotel. High tea is fine if you like that sort of thing, but she became angry when I
suggested that she might first want to change into something more appropriate. The woman was wearing what people in the South
refer to as “hog washers,” the sort of denim overalls favored by farmers. The crowd at the Plaza would most likely be dressed
up, and I worried that she might feel out of place in an outfit most people associate with hard manual labor. I was only trying
to help, but Bonnie didn’t see it that way.

“Let me tell you something, Mr. New York City. I am very comfortable with the way I look, and if the Plaza Hotel doesn’t like
what I’m wearing, then that’s their problem, not mine.”

I’d done my best to warn her but was actually thrilled when she rejected my advice. The scarecrow look was fine by me. I’d
never been to the Plaza but felt certain she’d be eaten alive by troops of wealthy, overcaffeinated society women with high
standards and excellent aim. Service would be denied, voices would be raised, and she’d wind up drinking her tea at some pancake
restaurant in midtown. Alisha changed into a dress, and I dropped them off at the hotel, returning an hour later to find Bonnie
wandering the tearoom with her disposable camera. “Would y’all mind taking a picture of me standing next to the waiter? I’d
have my friend do it, but she’s got a bug up her butt.”

I expected her to be physically removed from the building and was horrified to realize that the Plaza Hotel was essentially
Bonnie Central. Dressed for comfort in sweatshirts and tracksuits, her fellow scarecrows were more than happy to accommodate
her. The flashbulbs were blinding.

“Now those were some nice New Yorkers,” she said, waving good-bye to the crowd in the tearoom. I tried to explain that they
weren’t real New Yorkers, but at that point she’d stopped listening to anything I had to say. She dragged Alisha off for a
carriage ride through Central Park, and then it was time for a visit to what she called “Fay-o Schwartz.” The toy store was
followed by brutal pilgrimages to Radio City Music Hall, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza.
The crowds were such that you could pick your feet off the ground and be carried for blocks in either direction. I was mortified,
but Bonnie was in a state of almost narcotic bliss, overjoyed to have discovered a New York without the New Yorkers. Here
were out-of-town visitors from Omaha and Chattanooga, outraged over the price of their hot roasted chestnuts. They apologized
when stepping on someone’s foot and never thought to complain when some nitwit with a video camera stupidly blocked their
path. The crowd was relentlessly, pathologically friendly, and their enthusiasm was deafening. Looking around her, Bonnie
saw a glittering paradise filled with decent, like-minded people, sent by God to give the world a howdy. Encircled by her
army of angels, she drifted across the avenue to photograph a juggler, while I hobbled off toward home, a clear outsider in
a city I’d foolishly thought to call my own.

I
’
D BEEN LIVING IN MANHATTAN
for eight years when my father called, excited by the news that my sister Amy was scheduled to appear in a magazine article
devoted to the subject of interesting New York women.

“Can you imagine?” he asked. “My God, put a camera in front of that girl, and she’ll shine like a diamond! Between the single
men and the job opportunities, her phone is going to be ringing right off the hook!” He paused for a moment, perhaps imagining
the life of a young New York woman whose phone rings off the hook. “We just have to make sure that none of the wrong people
call her. You’ll take care of that, right?”

“I’m putting it on my to-do list as we speak.”

“Good boy,” he said. “The trouble is that she’s just so darn pretty. That’s the danger right there. Plus, you know, she’s
a girl.”

My father has always placed a great deal of importance on his daughters’ physical beauty. It is, to him, their greatest asset,
and he monitors their appearance with the intensity of a pimp. What can I say? He was born a long time ago and is convinced
that marriage is a woman’s only real shot at happiness. Because it was always assumed that we would lead professional lives,
my brother and I were free to grow as plump and ugly as we liked. Our bodies were viewed as mere vehicles, pasty, potbellied
machines designed to transport our thoughts from one place to another. I might wander freely through the house drinking pancake
batter from a plastic bucket, but the moment one of my sisters overspilled her bikini, my father was right there to mix his
metaphors. “Jesus, Flossie, what are we running here, a dairy farm? Look at you, you’re the size of a house. Two more pounds,
and you won’t be able to cross state lines without a trucking license.”

“Oh, Lou,” my mother would moan, “for Christ’s sake, give it a rest.”

“Aw, baloney. They’ll thank me for this later.” He honestly thought he was doing his girls a favor, and it confused him when
the thanks never came.

In response to his vigilance and pressure, my sisters grew increasingly defensive and self-conscious. The sole exception turned
out to be Amy, who is capable of getting even without first getting mad. Nothing seems to stick to her, partly because she’s
so rarely herself. Her fondness for transformation began at an early age and has developed into something closely resembling
a multiple personality disorder. She’s Sybil with a better sense of humor, Eve without the crying jags. “And who are we today?”
my mother used to ask, leading to Amy’s “Who don’t you want me to be?”

At the age of ten Amy was caught taking a fistful of twenties from an unguarded till at the grocery store. I was with her
and marveled at my sister’s deftness and complete lack of fear. When the manager was called, she calmly explained that she
wasn’t stealing, she was simply pretending to be a thief. “And thieves steal,” she said. “So that’s what I was doing.” It
all made perfect sense to her.

She failed first grade by pretending to be stupid, but the setback didn’t seem to bother her. For Amy school was devoted solely
to the study of her teachers. She meticulously charted the repetition of their shoes and earrings and was quick to pinpoint
their mannerisms. After school, alone in her simulated classroom, she would talk like them, dress like them, and assign herself
homework she would never complete.

She became a Girl Scout only to become her Girl Scout leader. For Christmases and birthdays she requested wigs and makeup,
hospital gowns and uniforms. Amy became my mother, and then my mother’s friends. She was great as Sooze Grossman and Eleanor
Kelliher, but her best impersonation was of Penny Midland, a stylish fifty-year-old woman who worked part-time at an art gallery
my parents visited on a regular basis. Penny’s voice was deep and roughly textured. She wasn’t shy, but when she spoke, certain
words tended to leave her mouth reluctantly, as if they’d been forced out against their will.

Dressed in a caftan and an appropriate white pageboy wig, Amy began phoning my father at the office. “Lou Sedaris! Penny Midland
here. How the… hell are you?”

Surprised that this woman would be calling him at work, our father feigned enthusiasm as best he could. “Penny! Well, what
do you know. Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice.”

The first few times she called, Amy discussed gallery business but, little by little, began complaining about her husband,
a Westinghouse executive named Van. There were problems at home. Her marriage, it seemed, was on the rocks.

Our father offered comfort with his standard noncommittal phrases, reminding Penny that there were two sides to every coin
and that it’s always darkest before the dawn.

“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to… talk to someone who really… understands.”

I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and came upon my twelve-year-old sister propositioning our father with lines
she’d collected from Guiding Light. “I think we’ve both seen this coming for a long… time. The only question left is… what
are we going to do about it? Oh, baby, let’s run wild.”

This is what my mother meant when she accused people of playing a dangerous game. Were our father to accept Penny’s offer,
Amy would have known him as a philanderer and wondered who else he might have slept with. Everything he’d ever said would
be shaded by doubt and called into question. Was that really a business trip, or had he snuck off to Myrtle Beach with one
of the Strivides twins? Who was this man?

Amy studied her reflection in the oven door, arranging her white bangs and liking what she saw. “All I’m saying is that I
find you to be a very attractive… man. Is that such… a crime?”

It is to his credit that our father was such a gentleman. Stammering that he was very flattered to be asked, he let Penny
down as gently as possible. After offering to set her up with some available bachelors from his office and country club, he
told my sister to take care of herself, adding that she was a very special woman who deserved to be happy.

It was years before Amy finally admitted what she had done. They were relatively uneventful years for our family but, I imagine,
a very confusing period of time for poor Penny Midland, who was frequently visited at the art gallery by my father and any
number of his divorced associates. “Here’s the gal I was telling you about,” he’d say. “Why don’t I just take a look around
and give you two a chance to talk.”

The passage of time has not altered my father’s obsessive attention to my sisters’ weight and appearance. He wonders why the
girls don’t drop by more often, and then when they do, he opens the door asking, “Is it just my imagination, or have you put
on a few pounds?”

Because she has maintained her beautiful skin and enviable figure, Amy remains my father’s greatest treasure. She is by far
the most attractive member of the family, yet she spends most of her time and money disguising herself beneath prosthetic
humps and appliquéd skin diseases. She’s got more neck braces and false teeth than she knows what to do with, and her drawers
and closets overflow with human hair. Having dreamt of one for years, she finally broke down and bought half of a padded,
custom-made “fatty suit,” which she enjoys wearing beneath dirty sweatpants as tight and uninviting as sausage casings. Unable
to afford the suit’s matching top, she’s been reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort
of cruel experiment. From the waist up she’s slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by
a wide, dimpled bottom so thick that she could sit on a knitting needle and never feel a thing.

She wore the fatty suit home one Christmas, and our father met us at the Raleigh airport. Visibly shaken, he managed to say
nothing on the short ride to the house, but the moment Amy stepped into the bathroom he turned to me, shouting, “What the
hell happened to her? Christ almighty, this is killing me! I’m in real pain here.”

“What?”

“Your sister, that’s what. I just saw her six months ago, and now the girl’s the size of a tank! I thought you were supposed
to be keeping an eye on her.”

I begged him to lower his voice. “Please, Dad, don’t mention it in front of her. Amy’s very sensitive about her… you know.”

“Her what? Go ahead and say it: her big, fat ass. That’s what she’s ashamed of, and she should be! You could land a chopper
on an ass like that.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Don’t try to defend her, wiseguy. She’s a single woman, and the clock is ticking away. Who’s going to love her, who’s going
to marry her with an ass like that?”

“Well,” I said, “from what I’ve been told, a lot of men prefer rear ends like that.”

He looked at me with great pity, his heart breaking for the second time that day. “Man, what you don’t know could fill a book.”

My father composed himself when Amy reentered the room, but when she turned to open the refrigerator door, he acted as though
she were tossing a lit match into the gas tank of his Porsche. “What in God’s name are you doing? Look at you — you’re killing
yourself.”

Amy stuck a tablespoon into an economy-size vat of mayonnaise.

“Your problem is that you’re bored,” my father said. “You’re bored and lonely and you’re eating garbage to fill the void.
I know what you’re going through, but believe me, you can beat this.”

Amy denied that she was bored and lonely. The problem, she said, was that she was hungry. “All I had on the plane were a couple
of Danish. Can we go out for pancakes?”

She kept it up until our father, his voice cracking with pain, offered to find her some professional help. He mentioned camps
and personal trainers, offering to loan — no, give — her the money, “And on top of that, I’ll pay you for every pound you
take off.”