“Twenty-nine, twenty-nine, twenty-nine . . .”
Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw something suspicious, something miraculous. A man in a craft-store apron was moving slowly behind another register, and with his hairy hand, he reached over and flipped on his “open” light.
I don’t think you could have gotten a bunch of women to move more quickly if someone had announced, “Oprah is giving away free cars on the glitter aisle, and she’s paying for the tax this time!” Before I could even begin to move toward that line, however, the women behind me executed a cutoff and changed lanes without signaling.
The rat-haired woman and I gasped together.
“That’s not fair!” she shouted. “Nine people behind us just got in that line! We were here first! He didn’t take the next person in line!”
“The cashiers don’t care,” I said drolly. “The same thing happened the last time I was here.”
“Really?” the rat-haired woman said as I nodded. Then she raised her little rat head above the crowd, shot the new cashier a dirty look, and yelled, “Hey, YOU! Cashier man! We were here first! You didn’t even ask who was next in line!”
“What do you want me to do?” the cashier asked harshly. “Do you want me to stop helping this lady and help you instead?”
The rat woman thought for a moment and then looked him straight in the eye. “YES,” she hissed. “YES I DO.”
“Twenty-ni—”
A hush fell over the whole store and everyone just stared as the rat-haired woman made her way through the congestion to the front of the new line and plopped her stuff on the counter, never once dropping her head, never once unlocking her little red eyes from those of the cashier.
Sally Field couldn’t have done it better. I felt like clapping and throwing long-stemmed roses at her.
“Forty dollars and sixty cents is NOT right!” the silk-flower lady yelled to her cashier, her shaky finger pointing. “I had it all figured out on paper this morning! You’re trying to cheat me!”
The couple arguing with the cashier marched out of the store, the line moved forward, and the woman in front of me took her place at the checkout. Since she was purchasing only several boxes of string lights, the transaction was smooth, easy, and almost over.
“I will not be cheated!” the old silk-flower woman yelled. “We’re going to count these together, and then you’ll see what a cheat you are!”
The lady at the other checkout was signing her name to her check. It was almost over. Almost over if I could just hang on, although I could feel an attack of Mall Malice—Road Rage’s bitter little sister—coming on, and I very badly wanted to pinch somebody.
“And here’s your receipt,” the cashier said, smiling pleasantly to the light lady in front of me. I took a step forward, anxious, waiting. I was drunk with anticipation.
“I want you to plug in these lights to see if they work,” the lady said as she took the receipt.
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her right, but then she opened the package of lights and started fishing around for the cord.
I believe it was at this moment that I fell off the teeter-totter, that I lost whatever grasp I had on what was left of my patience, and my pinching fingers began twitching.
Naughty, naughty.
“NO WAY!” I heard myself freak out. “No way. NO. You are not plugging in those lights. You DO NOT get to do that.” And then to the cashier, “She is not plugging in those lights.” And to the crowd of angry women behind me, “She wants to plug in the lights!!”
“I don’t have an outlet,” the cashier offered.
“But I want to see if they work,” the light woman insisted.
“I don’t get to test out this stamp before I buy it!” I bellowed as I held up my item, then pointed to the woman behind me. “She doesn’t get to try out her paint. Those are the rules.”
The light woman just looked at me, holding the cord in her hand.
I stood there, holding my stamp in mine.
Naughty or nice.
I turned around, put the stamp down on the closest shelf, and walked out of the store.
Then I drove to another craft store clear across town.
As I was standing eighth in the checkout line with another stamp in my hand, the cashier one register over flicked on her light and a thousand women guided by glue guns descended upon her like she was a naked grapevine wreath.
“That’s not fair!” the woman behind me said. “She didn’t take the next person in line!”
“The cashiers don’t care,” I said. “The same thing happened the last time I was at one of these stores.”
O Holy Night, or The Year I Ruined Christmas
When I saw my mother’s new Christmas tree, I have to admit I didn’t know what to say.
“Nice, huh?” my mother said, beaming and nodding toward her new holiday finery. “It’s nice, right? I bet you’ve never seen another tree like it! It is a beautiful tree.”
“It’s something,” I finally offered, wincing a little to protect my eyes from the shining glare of it. “It sure is bright.”
“It’s not bright,” my mother clarified. “It’s festive. There’s a difference.”
I didn’t say anything.
“There is a difference,” she tossed out before she walked away.
If that’s the case, then my mother’s new tree had more festivity than the searchlight from the police helicopter that hovers over my neighborhood on any given Friday or Saturday night and can turn night into day faster than God or science. Gone was our old, blinking-colored-lights tree, the fake tree that took hours to assemble and boasted branches with needles so realistic they drew as much blood as hypodermic ones. Gone were the yarn, macaroni, and pipe-cleaner ornaments my sisters and I had made as kids, coldly replaced by new decorations made by craftspeople—complete strangers—from colored clay and yarn, which served as evidence of my mother’s recent trip to the Holy Trinity Craft Bazaar at her church (I knew Jesus was good with the water/wine thing, but you should see what that Savior can do with some Fimo clay and a garlic press). And that was not all. The new, fancy tree itself was not so much a tree as it was a miracle of fiber optics, for the tip of each “needle” on each branch glowed, turning from red to pink to purple to blue to green to yellow and then back to red again, the whole spectrum of the rainbow in a hearty luminescence.
“You bought a Gay Pride tree?” I asked my mother. “I am so impressed by your social progress, Mom! The next thing you know, we’ll have you believing in evolution!”
“Call it what you want,” my mother said, pretending to be nonplussed. “But I was just lucky to get it. In the last minute before the QVC clock ran out, all of those filthy vultures swooped in and this tree sold out with four seconds to spare. I have never seen anything like it, and I’m just lucky that I knew a good tree when I saw it and acted quickly!”
“Well, I guess the good news is that Chernobyl has found a new industry in selling glowing foliage that’s been exposed to massive doses of radiation,” I said. “Does it come with a lead suit of armor, or do you have to purchase that separately on QVC?”
My mother sneered. “Whatever,” she replied. “I don’t care if you like the tree or not. I LOVE the tree. I LOVE THIS TREE. I’ve just learned my lesson that if I want to touch the tree, it’s best to unplug it and let it cool down first. I don’t think my hand is blistered, but it’s still stinging.”
“Where’s the gingerbread-house ornament I made in first grade?” I asked sternly as my squinted eyes searched through the branches. “And where are all of the candy canes Lisa made from pipe cleaners when she was in kindergarten?”
“Now that you’re old enough to be a grandmother, I thought it was time that we moved on and had a Nice Tree without all of that crap on it,” my mother said simply.
I blanched at her frostiness.
“Okay, yes, it’s true,” I snapped, “women my age are grandmothers, but only in countries where people ar
e swallowed whole on a regular basis by boa constrictors and a home invasion means there’s a tiger on your kitchen table. In that same country, you’d be considered a witch for living longer than an elephant. And what do you mean by crap? Gingerbread houses and candy canes made by the hands of your little children are now crap?”
“I’ll tell you what,” my mother replied. “I’ll give you the crumbling, disgusting, bug-infested gingerbread house and torn paper chains and bent-up pipe-cleaner candy canes you made, and you hang it on your tree.”
“Hey!” I snipped. “You signed up for the motherhood cruise, my friend, not me. Hanging on to my childhood memories and all the stuff I don’t want in my own house is part of that deal, you know! Now, why would I want my house to be covered in caveman paintings and have a tree that looks like it was decorated by little monkeys? I don’t have kids for a variety of reasons, including not ever wanting to hear my name on CNN’s Headline News, but certainly having a Nice Tree is a top contender. Nice Trees are a luxury reserved for childless people; we don’t get the tax deduction and we’ll spend our twilight years alone and getting our diapers changed by a high school dropout named Kenny in a nursing home, but while we’re still able-bodied and selfish, we get prettier decorations and furniture with not as many stains. I’m a clear-lights person now, and the colored lights and the construction-paper ornaments are your responsibility. That’s the balance. You’re on my turf, MOM.”
“I have wanted clear lights for a long time,” my mother hissed. “I’ve always been a clear-lights person inside. It was you kids that wanted the mishmash of every color! I don’t even have clear lights on this tree because of you! And balance? Do you really want to talk about balance? Because if you do, let’s not forget The Year You Ruined Christmas. Let’s talk about that, when the scale of motherhood was tipped so heavily it got knocked off the balance beam like a little hungry gymnast hit by a sandbag. I should have killed you that night myself!”
My mother loves to tell this story, because I think in her mind it really nails the point home to her audience that she has nothing less than Squeaky Fromme for a daughter and that I should have been incarcerated as a child.
Every Christmas Eve while I was still living at my parents’ house, my friends and I would get together at a restaurant for a late-night dinner. The Year I Ruined Christmas was no different; my friend Doug picked me up, we went to another friend’s apartment to have some drinks, and because I wasn’t driving (see how responsible that is?), I may have had more than my fair share. Before I knew it, we were in the parking lot of the apartment complex, and everyone was splitting up and jumping in cars to form something of a caravan to go to the restaurant. I put my purse on top of the car and rifled through it to find a lighter for Doug, and then we were off.
We had a great time at dinner; we ate, laughed, drank some more, and had a wonderful Christmas Eve until the restaurant closed at midnight. When we went to pay the bill, I reached for my wallet, but it was difficult to find, being that my entire purse was gone. Although Doug, who had consumed enough alcohol to both kill and embalm him, accused me of being cheap and conveniently “losing my wallet,” I knew well enough what had happened; I had left it on the roof of the car after looking for a lighter for him.
I wasn’t really upset about losing my purse. I was a little loaded and I only had ten bucks to my name in there anyway. As soon as we paid the bill, we drove back to the apartment complex to try and find my purse, but it was no use, it was gone. What I was worried about, however, was that along with the purse I had lost my keys, and that meant that when I got home I was going to have to wake my parents up to let me in.
This was bad, particularly since it was very reminiscent of an occasion a couple of years before when I was a senior in high school and went to a party and I saw the guy I liked with another girl. Instead of getting revenge the way a normal girl would by forcing myself on his brother or best friend, I drank a half gallon of amateur screwdrivers, or whatever you call orange juice and gin. A whole Tupperware pitcherful. Didn’t even get a glass. One minute I, a girl who had never even kissed a boy, remember saying to a friend, “He doesn’t know what he is missing, because I am good! I am totally good! And I’m not just saying that because I’m drunk. ’Cause I’m not. God, you’re blurry! Ha ha ha ha!” And the next thing I knew, I was being swept out like Scarlett O’Hara in the arms of my gay Rhett Butler, Doug, who carried me to his car, which I threw up in, took me to his house, and put me into a bed, which I threw up in, and waited for me to sober up before my curfew, being that it was only 8 P.M. and the sky still showed streaks of sunlight.
Needless to say, by midnight, I was still more hammered than a nail, which was unfortunate because I needed to go home. Doug, who somehow summoned up more courage than Joan or Melissa Rivers’s plastic surgeon, threw me back into the car and drove me to my house. He then carried me to the side door and stood there, helpless, as I unfortunately regained consciousness and then, as any crazy drunk high school senior would do, decided to employ a bit of whimsy and kick the door repeatedly instead of finding my keys and simply unlocking it. That was when my mother appeared like a phantom out of the dark, sucked me into the house, and accused me of being on LSD, although anyone with a nose could smell that gin was the culprit, thanks to the vomit shampoo that was still in my hair. Therefore, every time I couldn’t fit a key into a lock after dark, my mother, convinced she could sniff out drug use like she was a K-9 cop and I was the Go Ask Alice girl, would insist that I was under the influence of LSD, angel dust, PCP, speed, opium, peyote, or the reigning drug of terror she had seen a story about on 20/20 that week.
So on the Christmas Eve night I had lost my purse, I knew knocking on the door and waking my parents up would have no different results than it did when I was a kicky high school senior, except that I was being dropped off by a particularly friendly prelaw student who I just happened to be smitten with who had helped me in the unsuccessful hunt for my purse in the apartment-complex parking lot. I was really hoping my mother would cool her McGruff the Crime Dog bit long enough for me to seal the deal and get something more than a “Please stop driving past my house, you’re scaring my mom” demand when he delivered me home, but when he walked me up to the side door, there was something I had hardly expected: a note from my mother.
“Laurie,” it read. “We know that you don’t have your keys, so knock when you get home. If you’re still sober enough to read this, do NOT do your drunk dance on the door, and if you’re on angel dust, the front window is not a liquid pane of glass as it may appear in your druggie state, so do not crash through it. You will be grounded.”
I couldn’t figure out how my mother knew that I had lost my keys, but as soon as the door opened, my best, glorious, magnificent, and totally bitchin’ dreams came true. So much so that I didn’t even care that my almost-suitor had bolted to his car and sped away after learning that I was apparently peaking on angel dust and may have been about to take a stroll through a plate-glass window, thinking it was a beautiful paradise waterfall.
Because inside my house was another sort of paradise just waiting to be revealed when my father opened the door.
Swinging from my mother’s fingertips was my purse, the same purse that had slid off a car roof and landed in the parking lot of my friend’s apartment complex. On that cold Christmas Eve night, after it fell off the car, it sat there for a while until a uniformed security guard making his rounds spotted the purse on the asphalt, saw the imprint of Doug’s tire tracks over its belly, picked it up, opened it, and found my wallet and my driver’s license with my address on it.
Ten minutes later, at my house, my mother had just sat down in the living room with a pack of Winstons and an ashtray and was watching the opening moments of Cagney & Lacey when the doorbell rang. She steadfastly ignored it, devoutly hoping that someone else had heard it, such as my father, who was watching The Fall Guy in the family room, or my sister Lisa, who was watching Miami Vice in her room,
or my other sister, who was watching Dynasty in her room, and would rise to the obligation.
The happiness and solace of a family on the eve of the biggest family holiday was about to be shattered even more than if their oldest daughter was tripping the light fantastic on some illicit substance and then completely ruined Christmas by attempting to pass through an architectural feature of the house.
That was because, despite three doorbell rings with significant pauses in between, my mother finally ground out her cigarette and answered the door. There, to her annoyance and displeasure but certainly not to her surprise, my mother saw a police officer. A uniformed police officer, and in his hand was my driver’s license. That, I’m sure, did not surprise her, either. I’m sure she thought I had been arrested for crashing through various windows around the neighborhood, trying desperately to find my real house while lost in the crazed, psychedelic fog of an After-School Special.
No, the shock came when my mother realized I was not handcuffed in the backseat of a cop car parked outside our house, glittering like a diamond covered in shattered glass and blowing air farts with my mouth on the window; rather, she saw a cop hold up a flattened purse with tire tracks imprinted on it, and she heard him say, “Laurie Notaro . . . run over . . .”
“. . . run over . . .”
And in a flash, in a glorious, golden moment, I had suddenly died in a truly tragic incident on Christmas Eve, which was far more dramatic, sad, and utterly spectacular than any Death Fantasy I could have ever dreamt up. It was an incredibly impressive and breathtaking death, I had to admit, and I imagined my mother as she crumpled to the ground as if falling through a trapdoor and sobbed heavily as she took on her new role of “Grieving, Heartbroken Mother Who, She Realizes Now, Should Have Been Nicer and Kinder and Should Be Regretful About Being Thrifty and Making Sainted Daughter Buy Her Clothes at Kmart During Junior High School. Laurie Deserved Better, Namely, Casual Corner.”
It was the gift that every girl dreams of, to be dead long enough for your parents to realize how meaningless their lives were without you, how they were suddenly and at once deeply sorrowed at all of the horrible injustices they caused you, how they had truly never appreciated your natural gifts of beauty and grace, and that they really should have bought you a nicer car, being that their beautiful angel would have such a short time on earth and should have spent that time driving the restored 1965 convertible Mustang she had openly AND PUBLICLY desired. But nope, she spent her last, short, fleeting moments driving a 1980 Chevy Citation, ever so clearly a GRANDMA car, with fake red-velvet upholstery, a hatchback, and an interior that smelled like spoiled milk and sometimes meat. Being temporarily run over by a car was the best present I had ever received, and I didn’t even have to do anything dramatic to get it, like write a note or buy some rope.