“I want everyone to know that dinner is on me tonight, because I’m about to come into an inheritance. I’m paying for everyone.”
“Absolutely not,” Six chimed in. “Not one of us here is going to let you pay for your own birthday dinner. It’s simply unheard of!”
“Yeah,” I said under my breath, as I poured some more vodka into my glass under the table.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Aubrey,” Ivory jumped in. “It’s your birthday.”
“You’re right,” she said as she sat back down. “This whole inheritance thing is really turning into a drag. I mean, you’d think an inheritance would be something to celebrate…” She obviously wanted someone to ask about her inheritance, and that someone was going to be me.
“Tell us everything; what is it? What is going on?” I said with complete zeal.
“Well,” she started, “my parents are millionaires,”—the first of many loud coughs from Lydia was heard at this point—“and as you all know, my brothers and sisters have been fighting over the estate for years.” This was the first I had ever heard of this and knew there was no way Ivory or Jen had heard any of this either. I also knew that there was no way her parents were millionaires, because anyone whose parents are millionaires doesn’t go around advertising it. I was zooming in on each of my friends with a hard glare, but none of the girls would look in my direction.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Your parents are still alive, right?”
“Yes, they are, but it’s all very com-pli-cated,” she said slowly, as if the whole concept of an estate would be way too much overload for a brain as small as mine.
“But if they’re still alive, can’t they decide which children get what?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Ivory matter-of-factly. “You shouldn’t be arguing about this with your brothers or sisters.” Then she tried to change the subject. “Do you girls all want to split stuff for dinner?”
“Yes!” Lydia jumped in. I was enjoying this and I wanted to hear more. I wanted to know if Aubrey suffered from full-blown hallucinations or if she consciously made these tall tales up in order to get attention. I’ve been known to lie compulsively too, but only when I’m so intoxicated that I have trouble remembering the difference between fact and fiction.
“My brothers and sisters are all really jealous of me because my parents have left me the most out of everyone,” she said, loudly enough to quell Jen and Ivory, who were discussing the menu. She upped the volume another couple of decibels and said, “My brothers and sisters think I don’t need the money because of my screenplay, but the fact of the matter is (long, dramatic pause)…I probably won’t see that money for months.”
I couldn’t wait to see who was going to bite the bullet and ask her about that one. Everyone except for Six pretended like they were looking at their menus. Ivory is very good at tuning things out and was doing just that. Lydia was coughing into her lap, and I was smiling so hard my cheeks started to shake.
“I know, I know, it’s all so dramatic,” Aubrey said with a wave of her hand in response to no one.
“I can’t believe you wrote a screenplay,” Six exclaimed. “I’m an actress!”
“Really?” I asked. “Do you have, like, a monologue or anything we could see?” Ivory works in television. Ivory pretended not to hear me and continued looking at the menu. “Ivory,” I said loudly, “Six is an actress.”
“Anyway!” Aubrey was now screaming, for fear the topic of conversation would move on to someone else. “It’s the difference between like three million and ten million dollars, so I want to make sure I get my fair share!”
“Let’s open presents!” Ivory exclaimed.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Aubrey responded grudgingly, as if we had been begging her to open presents for the past three hours.
The waitress walked over and we all ordered. “Let’s not forget a piece of cake at the end for the birthday girl,” I told her. Ivory looked in my direction with an unsettlingly calm gaze on her face. “Open mine first,” she said to Aubrey, still staring at me pointedly while handing Aubrey a small box.
“Seriously, you guys, you did not have to get me anything.”
“Oh, bollocks!” Six interjected.
“I’m sorry, are you British?” Ivory asked her.
“No, but I just got back from England and I love, love, loved it!”
Aubrey finished unwrapping Ivory’s present to discover the very same cross that Ivory had gotten from our friend Morgan months earlier.
“Oh my God, this is beautiful! I absolutely love it,” Aubrey said as she leaned forward so that Ivory could help her clasp it in the back. Ivory looked at me with a huge smile on her face, and Jen was wiping her mouth with a napkin—before we had been served any food.
Lydia was slurping down her third glass of wine and was too preoccupied with Six’s ponytail to realize what was happening. It was amusing to me that Ivory thought she had pulled one over on Aubrey and that we were all pawns in her little game of re-gifting. Little did she know who would be getting the last laugh tonight.
Six took her present off the pile next. Aubrey opened it to find a basket of lotion and bath oils. Lotion and bath oils are the most impersonal gift you can buy someone, which is why it’s perfect that when she opened Jen’s present next, it was another basket of lotion and bath oils. This was getting good. “Oh, how funny!” Six exclaimed, clapping her hands together.
She reached for my present, but I knew patience was a virtue and that soon I was going to have my moment in the sun. “Open Lydia’s first,” I told Aubrey as I watched Ivory continue to ride her wave.
“What are you laughing at?” Aubrey asked Lydia, who was now starting to laugh more and more uncontrollably. This was all too much for her. When Lydia laughs hysterically, it’s infectious. It is also not long before she starts snorting. I was trying to avoid losing it completely and kept averting my eyes from Lydia to Ivory, who had assumed Lydia was still laughing at Ivory’s clever gift to Aubrey. Ivory was looking at me proudly, like she had given us all a night to remember.
“Let’s take a picture!” shouted Aubrey, as she pulled out her camera.
I took this opportunity to walk over behind Ivory’s chair and whisper, “You are hilarious, so funny!” and then leaned in, put one arm around Ivory and the other around Aubrey, and smiled like I had just gotten a B12 shot.
I sat back down on my side of the table and Aubrey opened Lydia’s gift from the Gap.
“That’s sweet,” Aubrey said condescendingly to Lydia. “I know you’re on a budget.”
This was the only time of the night Lydia stopped laughing. I could see her mind scrambling to say something, but surprisingly, she was able to stop herself. The last present was mine. Ivory leaned in with Aubrey, who was squinting to read my writing on the gift.
“Oh, how dear,” Aubrey said with a grimace on her face. “I haven’t seen newspaper wrapping since the sixties.”
“How do you know about the sixties if you’re only turning thirty?” I asked her inquisitively.
“Ha, ha, ha, somebody is paying attention,” she said with a wink in my direction.
Did this mean she was lying about her age? Aubrey was exactly the type of person who would lie about her age.
She was unwrapping my gift with her head cocked to the side when Ivory’s head also cocked to the side. It brought back memories of the synchronized swimming team I had never been part of.
Aubrey pulled the Rehab game out and held it up. Ivory was still unsure of what was taking place and looking at the game the same way you would look at someone you met ten years ago.
“Wait a second! That’s the same game I bought you for your birthday,” she said, perfectly oblivious.
“Yes,” I said, with my teeth closed and eyes wide. “The exact same.”
“But where did you get it?” she asked, genuinely perplexed. “I found it at some store in the Valley.”
My expression remained the same as I
responded, “In my apartment!”
Aubrey was too horrified by her gift to be paying attention to all the commotion at the table. Lydia’s composure had long since vanished and she was now vacillating between snorting and violently shaking. Jen has a quieter laugh but had her head in her hands with her shoulders bouncing up and down. I had my drink in between my legs and was trying to redirect the urine that was seeping its way out of my vagina. Six had no idea what was going on, and it was taking Ivory even longer to connect the dots.
“Did somebody already play this?” Aubrey asked as she emptied the mismatched pieces in their little plastic bags that were no longer sealed. That’s when Ivory’s mouth opened.
I tasted blood in my mouth from biting my lip so hard, but had to retain composure. What if blood just starts spilling out of my mouth? I thought. I thought of the scene in Million Dollar Baby where Hilary Swank chews up her own tongue trying to kill herself and envisioned Clint Eastwood coming over to my table and telling me I was his “Baklava” or whatever the hell he called her in that movie.
“What is so funny?” Aubrey asked, looking at Lydia, who was face-to-face with the wall next to her, slapping her hands against it.
Any normal person at this point would be completely disgusted by our behavior. Not Aubrey. She was so wrapped up in her own bubble of delusion that the next thing out of her mouth after seeing each one of us laughing hysterically was, “Who wants to make a toast?” Before anyone responded, Aubrey interrupted herself and stood up.
“I just want to say (long, dramatic pause)…that without any blood relatives at the table, I want everyone here to know that this has been the single most meaningful birthday of my life. I am the type of person that will remember this for the rest of my life (another long, dramatic pause, this time with tears)…I want you to know that when I get my inheritance, and my family, who have caused me nothing but pain…”
“We’re your family now,” Ivory interrupted, and got up to give Aubrey a hug.
I stood up. “Oh, Chelsea, that’s sweet, you want to go next?” Aubrey asked.
“No, I just need to use the bathroom.” I grabbed my things and went to the bathroom. After I was done, I headed straight out the back door, around the front of the restaurant, got in my car, and drove home.
The next morning around 9 a.m. I was checking my e-mail when Lydia walked through the door looking haggard. “Thanks a lot for leaving last night, asshole. I had to sleep over at Aubrey’s house with that girl Six. Aubrey ended up crying all night long and telling us it wasn’t even her birthday. And then she tried to get us all to take a bath together.”
“What?”
“Yeah, Ivory and Jen were so pissed. They both got up and made toasts. Then three hours later we ended up at Formosa, where she reveals that she’s actually thirty-six and has no brothers and sisters. They both said they were going to the bathroom and left me there. Ivory took the game back. She said she’d rather give it away to an orphan.”
“I can’t believe that, what a lunatic!” I said.
“I know. Can you imagine lying about having brothers and sisters? She’s a sociopath who—”
“No,” I interrupted. “I can’t believe Ivory thinks Rehab is an appropriate game for an orphan.”
“I’m going to bed,” she said, and walked into her room.
I sat at my computer, elated. It turned out that there was someone out there who was even more mentally unstable than me. And that special someone’s name was Aubrey.
CHAPTER TEN
Jumped
It was a Friday morning and I was on MySpace exchanging messages with a guy who had asked me to go to dinner. My immediate response was, “How big is your penis?” His return message was, “I’ve never had any formal complaints.”
This made me laugh out loud. As if when women encounter a small penis, we wake up first thing the next morning and lodge a formal grievance with the LAPD. I consider myself to be a very obnoxious person, but even I would never tell a guy that he has a small penis.
Men don’t seem to understand that, under no circumstances, will we confront them on this issue. That would be on par with telling a girl she has a smelly vagina, which, by the way, is something I have once been told by a woman, but only during a particularly disturbing massage. Most men would never tell a girl her Pikachu smells like a crab cake. It’s just not done. But they would have no qualms telling their guy friends. Similarly, if you’re a guy and you pull your pants down, and the girl you’re with immediately starts text messaging her friends, you have a small penis.
After I decided to never meet this person in public, I looked down at my gut. My body had really taken a turn for the worse, and the surprise party I was throwing for my thirtieth birthday was three weeks away. I knew I wasn’t out-and-out fat, and I don’t think anyone would have described me as a heifer, but there was definitely some toning up needed. It had gotten to the point that the only body parts I felt comfortable exposing in public were my forearms.
Everything else seemed to be in some state of disrepair, especially my abdomen, which somehow managed to divide itself into three sections when I was sitting cross-legged. Something had to be done, so I closed MySpace and Googled the word “fatass.”
While looking at a website for liposuction, I learned that it was a six-to eight-week recovery period, the clincher being that, during that time, I would under no circumstances be able to use street drugs. Obviously I had to think of a more realistic approach.
I decided to call a nutritionist my friend Lydia had used, and set up an appointment for Monday. He asked me to keep a food journal of everything I ate over the weekend. I decided once and for all to commit to eating healthy. I have always worked out, but my diet has never been the best, and I knew things were only going to go downhill after thirty. This was my chance to make a change, and I made a commitment to be completely honest about what I was eating. Unfortunately, that Sunday I had to go to a good friend’s baby shower, where there was an abundance of unhealthy food. When I met with Matt, the nutritionist, on Monday morning, I handed him the following list:
FRIDAY
Breakfast
scrambled egg whites with spinach and jack cheese
Lunch
chicken Caesar salad
Dinner
2 crab enchiladas and 2 margaritas
SATURDAY
Breakfast
Zone bar
Lunch
turkey sandwich with cheddar and mayo
Dinner
filet mignon with mashed potatoes, 3 Ketel One and cranberries
SUNDAY
Friend’s baby shower
17 jalapeño poppers
1 brick of cheddar cheese/12 whole wheat crackers
14 chicken wings/no bleu cheese dressing
1 bagel with low-fat cream cheese
34 strawberries
8 Bloody Marys
14 pigs in blankets
I thought I had made some healthy choices on Friday and Saturday. Obviously Sunday was a complete disaster, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a little proud of the will power I demonstrated when opting for the whole-wheat crackers to go with my brick of cheddar cheese.
I must have repeated that I had been at my friend’s baby shower seven times, and the phrase “I don’t normally eat like that” at least four times. I could tell the nutritionist was repulsed, but I explained to him emphatically that I was ready to commit to being a healthy eater, and that jalapeño poppers were a thing of the past. “I wanted to go out with a bang,” I told him, staring at my stomach with my head hanging down.
He explained to me what clean eating was and had a whole diagram with charts, percentages, a pointer, and a blackboard. The whole presentation was no different than what you’d see on an episode of CSI: Miami.
Then Mark weighed me and measured my body fat with a body-fat clipper. I was 131 pounds and 25.2 percent body fat. “Is that good?” I asked him.
“No.”
Mark was about six-two with blond hair on his head, but no hair anywhere else. Not my favorite quality in a man, but I guess when you get down to 1 percent body fat, you’re also required to wax yourself.
We talked for an hour about what I had to do to get lean, and he put together a meal and exercise program for me and showed me how to log on to a website where I would type in every morsel of food that entered my body. I would also have to change up my exercise routine. He explained that since I had been jogging for so many years, I’d plateaued. He suggested that any martial arts or kickboxing would be just the kind of jump start my body needed.
I explained to Mark that I had been kicked out of three separate aerobics classes due to severe motor challenges when moving my arms and legs in different directions.
He seemed suspicious of me and I didn’t want him to think I was making up excuses. I told him about the first time I took a step class, when I hit my neighbor after I had somehow managed in my confusion to step my way over to her step. The first time I backhanded her, the instructor let it slide. The second time, my victim had fallen to the floor and was covering one side of her face when the music came to a screeching halt. I would have been an idiot not to figure out that I had made a major step faux pas.
The last incident was during a class called the Bar Method, which uses ballet bars and poses that focus on concentrated areas. This was the only class I hadn’t been kicked out of due to my spastic hand-eye coordination. But I did get kicked out for giving the instructor the finger.
Mark recommended I try boxing.
“Done,” I told him. “What’s next?”