I looked her straight in the eye. She looked straight back.
There was going to be a battle.
Because I’m serious about my ham.
I had three kids to feed, plus my husband, myself, and our rafting guide, so I knew precisely what I needed and how much. Besides, it had been an exhausting twenty minutes just trying to navigate my way through the store over to the deli section. And this was at the fancy grocery store, where things like this weren’t supposed to happen.
I don’t know how to better demonstrate the devolution of the human species than by tracking grocery store etiquette.
There’s always been a problem at Costco. It was our first indication that our thumbs were de-opposing back into the forms of monkey hands. Costco, however, creates most of its own problems; when you hand out, for free, teaspoons of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and quarters of a chicken nugget, you have to expect mayhem. People will do anything for free food, no matter how minuscule.
I’ve done it myself. I will wholly admit that I have stood in line there waiting for a piece of pizza half the size of a business card, and when an eight-year-old cut in front of me and grabbed two slices, saying, “One is for my dad,” I mumbled, “I bet you don’t even have a dad.”
I thought shopping in the fancy grocery store would be safer; I was recently run out of our closest Safeway when the nearby university enrolled ten thousand more students than the previous year. I should have seen it coming. Countless baby birds, their mouths agape and on their own for the first time in their lives, wandered up and down the aisles with a grown-up cart (no Playskool car attached) like zombies, unsure what to say, do, or reach for. It was as if they had been transferred here from another planet in which the dirty secrets of domestic requirements to ensure the duration of one’s life were carefully hidden from them by well-meaning but utterly failing parents.
Mothers and fathers: If you want to do one thing that will prepare your child for his first time away from home at college, don’t buy him matching sheet sets, and don’t supply him with sweatshirts with his college logo; take him to the goddamned grocery store. I know your child thinks that food just appears, comes through the mail, or is delivered by a grocery Santa, but take a moment to show him the basics. This way I won’t have to nearly gore your kid with my cart and a strategically placed baguette when he’s blocking the part of the freezer section I need to get my Tater Tots from because he’s on the phone with you, asking how to make Eggo waffles.
I couldn’t take Safeway anymore. Between navigating the jammed aisles of feckless teenaged shufflers and waiting in the pharmacy line to get my Ativan Rx behind seventeen college students trying to get meningitis shots, I had had it. The parking lot had been reduced to a game of duck-duck-goose, and I’m simply too old to stand behind a frat guy in the express lane who is buying enough frozen pizza and cheap beer to bring at least three pledges relatively close to death. I can’t wait for him to learn how to count beyond nine when I need to tear open the package of Poise Roll-On Cooling Gel that is in my hands and apply it NOW.
I thought things would be better at the fancy grocery store a mile up the road. But do you know who shops there? The parents who have sent their kids away to colleges in other states to infiltrate and destroy the neighborhood grocery stores there. There are times when I have had to talk myself down in that store, aloud. I know that sounds crazy, but I want to spend as little time in that madness as possible. I don’t want to compare yogurts. I don’t need to hover over the cheese section like a UFO. I would actually pay a premium to shop there at an allocated time reserved for people who can pass a certain level of efficiency. You’d have to take a test. I would pass it. Questions would include: “Draw the shortest path between eggs, milk, and bread”; “What is the difference between fat-free, one percent, two percent, and whole milk without looking at the label?”; “Which of these tomatoes is a Roma?”; and “The Doritos are on the right side of the snack aisle. Do you leave your cart a) on the left side, b) at the end of the aisle, c) on the right side, hugging as close to that side as possible without knocking things off the shelf, or d) Why is there a wrong side?”
It never fails. Every time I go to the grocery store, even the fancy one, I see adults wandering about in a cloud of stupor, not sure where they are going, confused as to where they’ve been, abandoning their carts and leaping in front of mine to get a half-inch free sample of domestic Swiss cheese.
It makes me think, Who feeds you? Who dresses you in the morning? Because those are surely more complex activities than picking up a dozen eggs without difficulty, yet you don’t seem to be able to conquer that feat. Do you know who the kid who called his mom about Eggo waffles grows up to be? The dad with two unruly children who, again, stands in front of the freezer section I need, reading the ingredients on every box of meatless burger on the shelves. Want to know what’s in a Gardenburger? Google it. They have a website, I promise. Try to do your legwork at home, and fill up on tiny squares of shitty cheese before you get to the store. Make a ninety-nine-cent crappy pizza, cut it into fifty pieces, and have a friggin’ sample fest yourself.
I had dealt with all of this inertia for twenty minutes already at the fancy grocery store, buying chips, soda, and snacks for our river-rafting trip the next day. My nieces and nephew were visiting from Arizona, I knew exactly what I needed, and I didn’t want to take an ounce or slice less than what was required for everyone to get the sandwich they desired.
I finally got to the deli counter, and ordered a quarter pound of ham sliced thin from the girl working there. And this is what I want to say to her:
Dear little teenager working in the deli at Market of Choice who just cut my ham: When I ask you for a quarter pound, and I can see from the scale that you only gave me twenty-two percent and now are attempting to wrap it up, I am going to mention this. The right answer is not to tell me that twenty-two percent is a quarter pound, because it’s not. Your next move should not be insisting that twenty-two percent IS a quarter pound, because although I went to college a long time ago and was drunk for most of it, I remember that a quarter pound is twenty-five percent because my boyfriend used to sell drugs. And I know that if you sell someone a quarter pound of pot and only give them twenty-two percent, the biker who just gave you cash is going to come back and set your house on fire. And I feel the same way about ham.
“It’s not a quarter pound,” I said, staring her right in the eye.
“So you want more than a quarter?” she asked.
“I do not,” I replied. “I want what I asked for. A quarter pound.”
“Fine,” she snapped, grabbed the ham off the scale, and returned to the slicer.
Then she came back with three quarters of a pound, ham sliced so thick I could have laid it as tile.
“How is that?” she asked with a smirk.
“That is perfect,” I smirked back, and she wrapped it up, then took off her little chef’s hat, slapped it down on the back table, and walked out of view.
Her co-worker stepped up and asked if I needed anything else.
“Actually, I do,” I informed her. “I need you to tell me that you know that twenty-five percent is a quarter pound, right? You know that, I know you do. You look like you do. So please, please tell me that you know that a quarter pound is not twenty-two percent.”
“If you will permit me to speak,” she said with an attitude I did not particularly care for, “it’s within our Market of Choice guidelines that twenty-two percent is a quarter pound.”
“Twenty-two percent of a pound is not a quarter,” I repeated. “Just like if I asked you for change for a twenty-dollar bill and a five, you couldn’t give me two tens and two ones. Even I know that, and the left side of my brain is basically an empty walnut shell.”
She pinched her furry little mouth together in a twisted knot and was barely able to get out “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
And I stood there, and stood there, and stood th
ere, and instead of retracting my opposable thumb and going apeshit on her, I reached into my cart and slapped the ham tiles back onto her counter and said, “Yeah. You can have your twenty-two percent back.”
Then, because I was tired, because I was angry, and because I know what twenty-five percent is, I found the manager and informed him that poor math skills were poisoning his deli.
“And here’s a hint,” I said before I left. “If your employees are so bad at math that they are goading your customers into a ham-off, the least you could do is put some free cheese cubes up there.”
With a gasp, I realized that I was never going to be able to wear a tube top again.
The birth of my second head was slow; it never announced itself with a pinch of pain, an ache, or the pull of a contraction. Instead, it slowly began to appear, unnoticeable at first, building itself in secrecy until it produced a slight, extra curve that I proudly identified as muscle.
Lookit that, I thought. The image in the mirror didn’t lie—my trapezius muscle (while I had failed biology in both high school and college, I never failed Google) was blooming; it had a nice delicate arc to it, representative of domestic weight training, or what I call lifting grocery bags and putting dishes back on the shelf. It made complete sense to me that it was limited to my right side; Twizzlers may not weigh much individually, but when you’re lifting them up in tiny increments to your mouth in a repeated motion for most of the afternoon, that’s basically equivalent to lying in a smelly basement, curling a five-pounder a couple of times.
It is.
Plus, I stir coffee with that hand, put on makeup with that hand, and butter bread with that hand. It all adds up, I thought logically; I’ll butter anything. What did I expect? I asked myself. I’m an active person. Of course I’m going to see results from that!
I was contemplating using my left hand for chips and dip to even out my muscular progression when I put my purse strap over my right shoulder, where it had always gone, and I felt something odd. It felt weird. Un-right.
It felt like something in my neck had moved. Alarmed, I reached back to investigate and, to my horror, realized it was true, as I pressed my neck with my fingers and felt them slip an inch downward.
Which was not good. I already have too many parts of my body that barely fit together. When you’re trying on boots in a snotty department store, in front of a salesman who already doubts your shoe size just by your gait, it does not help if your kneecap switches sides like it’s a red square on a Rubik’s Cube. When you’ve dodged out of a crowded performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to use the potty, and snuck back in past the sentries who stop you and insist you wait until halftime, it’s preferable that your right hip doesn’t click noticeably with every step like the snapping fingers of the Jets getting ready to rumble with the Sharks as you try to steal back to your seat.
I prefer my body parts to remain in the area to which they have been assigned. I understand it must be boring to repeat the same function over and over again, but I have no idea where my trapezius muscle thought it was going to escape to when it started sliding down my back. The last thing I needed was for it to cross the border into Assland, where it was already overcrowded. Assland is accepting no more transfers, I decided. We have reached our quota in those hills. So I brought it up on my next appointment with my knee doctor after I cried pain tears in Nordstrom’s shoe department when my kneecap revolved like the moon around the Earth.
“I think one of my muscles got dislocated,” I mentioned as he was about to wrap up my exam. “It’s kind of sliding off the bone. Like meat in a slow cooker.”
He looked at me as if I had just thrown a handful of glitter into the air and exclaimed that I could grow beans in my nose.
“I think you need a different kind of doctor,” he said before he left.
I translated that professional medical opinion into meaning that I was perfectly fine and need not worry about sections of my body succumbing to gravity, even if that gravity was acting more like a black hole. But despite the fact that the muscle in my neck was headed for a free fall, it kept getting bigger and more pronounced. I decided to bring it up to the physical therapist who was treating my knee.
“It’s probably because you carry such a heavy purse,” she said after squeezing the crook between my neck and my shoulder. “You have a lot of snacks in there. You’re just super strong on that side. Nothing to worry about. Probably.”
“But don’t you feel how it’s kind of moving?” I asked. “It’s a little like a water weenie.”
As if she had psychic abilities and could tell where I had been, she immediately shot away from me like I was a power outlet and she was a butter knife.
“It is a little like a jelly doughnut. I would try carrying your purse on the other side,” she said quietly. “Or take out one of those Pepsi bottles.”
I winced and slightly shook my head. “You never know when you’re going to get lost on a logging road and have to lick the condensation off your windshield five days in,” I replied. “Birds shit on that thing. I’ll just put my purse on the other side.”
So I did, but three weeks later, my other side hadn’t gotten any bigger. It was still just flat, and I mentioned that to my friend Mary when I was at her house for a barbecue.
“What do you mean by ‘water weenie’?” she asked.
“Some people prefer ‘jelly doughnut,’ ” I tried to explain.
Before I knew it, Mary’s hand was on my shoulder, pushing down.
“That’s a lipoma,” she said as she went back to opening the pack of hot dogs. “So now you can stop saying ‘like meat in a slow cooker.’ ”
I just looked at her, not really understanding. Mary is a doctor, and not of poetry. She was the valedictorian of her graduating class and accidentally tripped and knocked down an elderly Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule and the keynote speaker at the ceremony, in the process. I just forget Mary is smart and a medical professional. She wears Converse a lot.
“It’s a tumor,” she explained. “I doubt it’s cancer, though.”
“Lipoma means ‘second head’ in Latin, doesn’t it?” I said, suddenly feeling not so strong. “I always had a feeling I ate my twin. Another stomach would explain everything.”
“If you ate your twin, it’s probably because it was an asshole,” Mary said. “It’s just a fatty tumor, people get them in middle age. Nothing to be worried about. Unless it gets bigger.”
I know that I’m middle-aged; I know that. I was not shocked to hear it. I am pleased that I defied nature this long to grow old enough to have a middle-age-appropriate tumor. When I was twenty-seven and woke up one morning after hitting my head on the railroad tracks but was more upset about spilling my Jack and Coke, no one would have predicted that I would outlive Amy Winehouse. But I did outlive her. I’m old enough for gray hair, arthritis, and, apparently, second heads that I was sure had a genome comprised of Twinkie fluff and whatever toxic waste makes Funyuns so alluringly crunchy.
It was the “unless it gets bigger” amendment that shocked me. I was too busy concentrating on conjuring up another matching tumor for my left side to contemplate that the one I already had would get even bigger.
How much bigger would it get? I wondered. So big it would act like a built-in neck pillow for airplanes? What exactly were the parameters on this? Was I going to have to start wearing a scarf? Did I need to start introducing it? Should I name it?
Oh god. I didn’t want to be that person. The goiter lady. I am already too frighteningly close to any character Pixar has put into cat-eye glasses. I’ve called a truce with my rapidly rippling skin and the white goat hairs on my chin. But a hump? I can be eccentric. Eccentric is fine because eventually, people just expect you to eat all the cheese at parties and then fall asleep in an armchair with your legs open. But there was no way I was going to star in my own sideshow. Yes, I need a Plan B to see me through until retirement age, but riding th
at wave on a mountain range rumbling out of my neck was not what I had envisioned. Now my choices had bubbled down to the circus or working in an elementary school as a lunch lady.
It might not be so bad, I tried to tell myself. Everything has its bright side, right? After all, I could live in a Gypsy wagon and start telling fortunes to stupid people, or I could move into a gingerbread house and be legitimately expected to steal candy from children. I might enjoy life as a forest witch. You never know. The hump would make me terrifying, especially if I put a hat on it and gave it some lipstick. Those kids would drop those Milky Way bars before I even had to shriek or put them in an oven.
Or I could hit the stand-up circuit, invite Louis C.K. and Ira Glass, and open my act with “My name is Laurie Notaro. I don’t have cancer. But I do have this tumor! Sorry to have gotten your hopes up.”
“Don’t worry,” Mary said when she noticed I didn’t ask for seconds of dessert. “I know a good surgeon.”
Dr. Henderson was a nice lady, mainly because she didn’t recoil in horror when I revealed the second head.
“No problem,” she said, as if she touched disgusting things on people all day. “It’s about five centimeters big.”
“I’m an American,” I reminded her.
“As big as an apricot,” she clarified.
I shuddered, but then became instantly hopeful.
“How much do you think it weighs?” I said excitedly, thinking that the tumor might have the density and weight of plutonium or a particle from a neutron star. “That could answer a lot of questions for me.”
“Weighs as much as an apricot,” she said without looking up. “Let’s get you in next week!”
Hoping it was in the ninety-ninth percentile for apricots and I might effortlessly lose a pound, I agreed.
“If this second head starts talking when I’m on the table,” I said earnestly to my doctor, “just pull the plug. Do the merciful thing. That’s not the kind of life I want to live. And if it calls you an asshole for sticking a knife in it, it’s not my responsibility. It didn’t come from my mouth.”