The day before my surgery, I realized I had broken Notaro family law by not milking every second of attention possible out of my tumor. I hadn’t told anybody. What was I thinking? I laughed as I got out my phone and texted my sisters and my mom. Maybe someone might send me a gift card! I upgraded the fruit of my tumor just in case.
“I’m having surgery tomorrow,” I tapped away. “It’s no big deal. I have a tumor (size of a large plum!!!) growing out of my neck like an unborn twin. They are almost 100 percent sure it’s not malignant. So it’s nothing to worry about. Day surgery, in and out. I am terrified each morning when I get up that it’s sprouted an eye or, worse, a mouth. But if I die, my husband gets the life insurance policy, but if for some reason he dies at the same time tomorrow, split it between the kids. Don’t get any ideas. Talk soon.”
Ready to answer a barrage of panicked texts, I stretched and warmed up my fingers and got ready for the long haul.
And then, an hour later, my sister replied with a single word.
“Shit,” she said.
“No, it’s fine,” I pecked hungrily, eager to quell her unignorable thoughts of tragedy and her angry threats to God to make this right. “I promise. It’s not cancer. I am pretty sure that I got it from carrying that heavy purse.”
Send.
I sat for fifteen minutes before I realized her answer had another meaning.
“Or is it ‘Shit, I thought I was getting the money’?” I wrote.
Send.
When she apparently got back from lunch, she took a moment out of her obviously packed schedule to text back to her sister, who very well may have had cancer, to say, “Shit, you have an evil twin growing on your neck.”
This time, I waited for a while before I answered.
“What did you expect?” I furiously jabbed precisely forty-five seconds later. “Mom smoked and ate a lot of Chinese food. We all have an Emily somewhere.”
Send.
“Damnit. Evil twin, not Emily. Evil twin! HATE autocorrect.”
Send.
My mother and my other sister, I was sure, were someplace together, eating Chinese food and laughing about Emily as their phones emitted “Wind Beneath My Wings” and the sounds of crashing waves in tandem.
“Like she didn’t smoke herself!” I could hear my mother say as she slurped from her wonton soup. “Sure, blame it all on me. Maybe it’s all the LSD pills she took. See? I was right. I knew she wasn’t just drunk all those times!”
“I put this curse on her in 1978 when she ate the last brownie you made for her birthday,” my sister Linda added as she bit into an egg roll, a drip of sweet-and-sour sauce hitting her plate with a splash. “I even wrote my initials on it. She ate it anyway. Been waiting for this day for a long time.”
The next day, I checked in for surgery, and I had to answer some questions from the nurse beforehand.
“Have you ever had surgery before?” she asked, her pen and notepad poised.
“Yes,” I answered.
“How many times and for what?” she asked.
“Wisdom teeth, gallbladder removed, and another time,” I said quickly.
“What was the last one for?” she queried.
“Well, I’m, well—it was something to do with my, um, my…” I trailed off, hoping the nurse would give up.
She just looked at me.
“My lady parts,” I said, looking away.
“Hysterectomy?” she asked.
“No, no, just a cervical thing,” I replied.
“What kind of thing?” she continued.
“I’m not sure, I wasn’t awake, but it involved irregular cells,” I offered.
“HPV?” she asked.
I drew a breath and then stopped.
“I came ‘of age’ in the nineties,” I explained. “I’m not sure.”
“HPV.” She nodded and scribbled something down on the pad.
Great. Now it’s down on paper somewhere. Laurie N. possibly had a dirty disease. I finally and truly understood the meaning of the word “apeshit.” As my stomach suddenly curled, cramped, and threatened, I wanted nothing more than to start knocking things over with frantic arms and scream while I swung the pants that I had just crapped in over my head like a monkey helicopter.
“Are you Laurie Notaro, the writer?” she asked.
I just went numb. Had I known, I thought to myself, had I known this moment would arrive, I would have named the hump Emily and lived happily ever after in a hut in the forest with my oven always on broil.
“You know,” I said as calmly as possible, “maybe you should have switched the order of those last two questions.”
In an hour I was unconscious and in a vulnerable position not wearing underwear in front of people I didn’t know who were told not to let their hands dip below my navel on one side or my crack on the other.
“She was a nineties girl,” I’m sure they snickered. “Even alcohol won’t kill that. Only fire is sufficient.”
When I slogged to the surface hours later, the first thing I saw was my husband standing next to the bed.
“…were two sets of hands in your body,” I thought I heard him say, to which I thought, I hope they wore gloves. I hope they wore gloves. No one wore gloves in the nineties but Michael Jackson.
As it turned out, they did, but the location of the invasion was slightly different than I had envisioned. Apparently, my second head was sneaky, and like the Loch Ness monster, had carefully hidden the bulk of its size beneath the darkness. Emily, it turned out, was not an apricot; she was not a plum, she was not an orange, she was a grapefruit.
A grapefruit that was beginning to wrap herself around my lung.
“I got in there with both hands,” Dr. Henderson recounted excitedly for me during my follow-up visit, my neck purple and stapled. “And I pulled and I pulled, but it was enormous! I had to call another doctor in, and we both had our hands in there, pulling as hard as we could!”
“That is so gross” was all I could say.
“But I got it!” she said with the smile of victory. “And when I got it all out, I couldn’t believe the size. I had never seen one that big before.”
“I thought I had been getting pretty strong,” I tried to explain.
“I took a picture of it!” she said, beaming. “And I put it in the book!”
“What book?” I asked. Please, I thought to myself. Don’t say it. Don’t say it.
“The book I show my students of medical oddities,” she exclaimed.
She had said it.
I had made the circus after all.
“The scar will be longer than I told you,” she added. “We had to make it bigger.”
“For both sets of hands,” I finished.
“For both sets of hands,” she agreed. “That’s never happened before! Four hands! I thought the incision would be six inches, but it’s about nine. I’m sorry.”
No more tube tops for this girl.
“It’s all right,” I said as I felt the row of staples with my fingers like they were piano keys. “When people see it and ask me what happened, I’m going to tell them I got it when I got caught in a civil war in Africa.”
She looked at me curiously.
“Think of the children I can scare,” I added, and already felt my stomach growling.
I was setting the table for dinner at Nana’s house when I heard a small voice call out from deep in the hallway.
“Aunt Laurie?” eight-year-old Nicholas called out. “Would you help me?”
“Sure, Bub,” I replied, and headed down the hall to the bathroom, where he sat on the potty, swinging his legs.
“I need help,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, seeing nothing amiss. “Are you out of toilet paper?”
He looked at me and seemed puzzled. “No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Then what’s wrong?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was stupid. His expression contained a
hint of disgust, but was comprised mainly of confusion and wonder that I had grown to be this tall and was so oblivious to the issue.
“Wipe me,” he said starkly, scrunching his eyebrows with annoyance that he actually had to provide me with the answer.
Now, I had a choice here. Either I could express my utter revulsion and shock at his request, or I could act my height and do the adult thing and be understanding. Be his aunt. Be his caregiver.
I waited for a moment, unable to decide what to do.
“No way I’m wiping your ass, Nick,” Bad Aunt Laurie said.
His mouth fell open and I could see the panic crossing his face at being stuck on the toilet until his mother showed up in an hour.
“But what I will do,” I said, as I stepped forward and created a mound of toilet paper as tall as a Costco-sized creampuff, “is teach you how to do it.”
And with a brief but complete demonstration on my part, I showed him a couple of techniques, went over the basics of “Over vs. Under,” reached the takeaway of “How You Know You Are Done,” and handed him the creampuff.
“You try,” I said. “Don’t be scared. Nature will tell you in fifteen minutes if you haven’t done a good job.”
“How?” he asked.
“You’ll get a monkey butt,” I said, scrunching my eyebrows back at him.
“What’s that?” he queried.
“An itchy crack,” I replied. “Now let’s see what you can do. You’re still skinny enough to do Under, but if you ever reach linebacker size, know that there’s another route.”
He gave it a shot, opting for Under.
“Give it one more pass,” I suggested. “Try an Over this time.”
He nodded in approval. “I’m an Over,” he agreed.
“Now, look at that!” I said, swinging the flusher knob with my finger. “No one has an open invitation to look at your butt anymore. How does that feel?”
“It feels like I don’t have to hold it at school anymore,” he replied with glee. “I hate going to the nurse so Grandma can come and pick me up early!”
The boy had reached a milestone—no more cramps at recess—but when my sister, his mother, came home, I ushered her into the living room to talk privately.
“Nicholas asked me something today,” I began.
“I did not tell him about Dinosaur Mountain, I swear!” she said, holding her hands up.
“You better not have,” I replied. “It took me five months of searching and a bidding war with someone named Freaky Pete on eBay to win that thing. If you breathe a word of it before his birthday, I will tell that kid that I am his real mother.”
“I can keep a secret,” she insisted. “And he already knows you can’t have kids. That you drank so much in college your organs are like pickles.”
“Anyway, he called me into the bathroom an hour ago and asked me to wipe his butt,” I told her.
“He’s eight!” we both said in unison, but in very different tones.
We looked at each other.
“Mom has him in the daytime, and you have him at night and on weekends,” I began. “And neither one of you thought it was time that he learned this?”
“He’s a little boy,” my sister argued. “He doesn’t have the coordination yet.”
I kept looking at her.
“He’s not disarming a bomb,” I reminded her.
“What if he doesn’t do a good job? What if he leaves some behind?” she added.
I continued to look at her.
“Then he’ll be more careful next time,” I informed her.
“I just don’t think he’s ready,” she finally said. “What kind of mother would I be if I pushed something like that on him and he wasn’t mature enough?”
“When is he going to be mature enough?” I asked. “When he has to ask his college roommate to come and wipe him? He doesn’t need to understand physics to understand what a white creampuff looks like! And guess what? He’s ready!”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because he did it,” I said. “I even inspected. Your son is now a wiper.”
“You mean he asked you to wipe him and you didn’t do it?” she balked.
“Yes,” I replied. “And now he can finish playing Red Rover at recess instead of being curled up into a little shit ball waiting for Mom to pick him up so he can poop at her house. Don’t you dare wipe him! Don’t you undo the work I’ve done!”
It was then that I realized my role in the lives of my nieces and nephews. If my nephew had been so protected for eight years that the kid didn’t know the basics of personal hygiene, what else didn’t he know about? What other parts of the world were a mystery to him? I could just imagine the shock on his face when he began encountering real life, and how Nick would have gone through a battery of roommates in college had I not intervened.
When he experienced his first tragedy, I knew the day would come in which I would be called upon to guide him with a gentle hand into the world of imperfection and reality.
Several years before, when he entered preschool, the child became consumed and could talk about nothing else. “We have a store at preschool, and I get to be the cash register lady,” he told me when I presented him with a new Mickey Mouse game. “This toy is a little boring for me now.”
“We get good snacks at preschool,” he told me after I made him his favorite, brownies. “They know how to make more than one thing there.”
“I don’t want to marry you anymore,” he told me. “My teacher at preschool is prettier and not so old.”
The pinnacle of his experience in preschool came the day he was chosen to be line leader. Handed a red flag for “STOP” and a green flag for “GO,” he basked in the glory of heading the expedition of his class from recess back to the classroom without incident.
“You know,” he said as he sought out his younger, apparently more attractive teacher afterward, “I’ve waited my whole life for that.”
Then he stopped talking about school, and when prodded would respond simply, “I’m a little busy with the alphabet right now. Can we talk about this some other time?”
Something was wrong. He was hiding something. Then, one Sunday night, he could take it no longer and it all came tumbling out.
Nicholas had made a friend, a culprit whom we’ll call “Jim,” because that’s the name of the bully who bounced a basketball off my head when I was a freshman in high school and left a welt the size of a honeydew melon. Anyway, Nicholas and Jim had spent the entire recess playing together, and when Snack Time arrived, Nicholas asked Jim to sit next to him.
“No,” Jim replied cold-bloodedly. “I’m sitting with this boy and NOT YOU.”
“My feelings were so hurt,” Nicholas revealed to my sister on that Sunday night, after keeping the torment bottled up in his little body. And then he started to cry. This made my sister cry, and when she called me, I started to cry.
It all came back to me. The ringing in my ears for three weeks after my neck snapped back when my head met the basketball. The torture of my entire kindergarten class finding out about my first love, Jay Goldblum, and chanting “Laurie loves Jay!” so relentlessly that I had no choice but to throw up on my desk. The horror of watching my only friend in chorus, a stoner chick named Kay, looking for a piece of gum in my clutch purse after I passed it to her in a motion of trust and faith in our friendship. When her hand emerged, however, it was holding my toothbrush for my newly acquired braces, and she then ran around the crowded choir room with it high above her head, singing, “Guess who has her period? Guess who has her period?” as a renegade maxi pad with an exposed sticky strip flapped around behind it like a flag.
Carrie, despite the pig’s blood, had more fun in school than I did. At least she got to be prom queen.
“Who does Jim think he is?” I relayed to my husband later, whose eyes also began to well up after hearing of my nephew’s catastrophe. “Nicholas was the LINE LEADER! Do you know what kind of honor that is?
He held the lives of his class in his little hands with those red and green flags! Where is this preschool, anyway, in Attica? Who IS this kid, JIM? I’m going to get his address and JIM and I are going to have a little talk!”
My sister, however, handled it differently. She told Nicholas that this experience gave him a good chance to show people how to be nice, and that if he was nice to everybody, the other kids, including JIM, would learn to be nice to each other. It was a blatant lie, but at least it’s better than telling the kid the truth, which is, “Little dude, it only gets worse from here.”
In fact, I think that children sent out into the jungle by their tribes to survive on their own, armed only with a rock and a loincloth, have a better chance of making it to adulthood than children who live through the terror of middle school.
Things seemed to have smoothed over by the time Nicholas’s preschool visiting day rolled around, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Now, make sure you show me who your friend Jim is,” I said to Nicholas as we walked up to the school. “Where does he usually sit? Does he have asthma or any peanut allergies that you know of?”
“Don’t listen to Aunt Laurie!” my sister barked as she grabbed my elbow and pulled me back. “Leave the basketball and Reese’s Pieces in the car!”
The week after our wiping tutorial, I took Nick to a movie and then I decided that it was time for some life lessons courtesy of Aunt Laurie. I would be damned if he grew up with an abbreviated horizon. There are things eight-year-old boys need to know, because soon they’re eleven-year-old boys who think the school nurse just told them they have fallopian tubes, and then they’re sixteen-year-old kids who believe that eating chicken and waffles makes them “street,” and then they’re eighteen-year-old douches pledging a fraternity. And that was not going to happen if I could help it.
“We’re going to try a new place for lunch today,” I said as I fastened his seatbelt.
“Not Chick-fil-A?” he asked.
“This place is even better than Chick-fil-A,” I said as I started the car. “Ever heard of a place called Waffle House?”