“Maria Elena is walking around out there just fine, and he hasn’t gotten her yet,” my husband noted. “Maybe you could go out to the car and kind of…see what happens.”
I got the hint completely and finally ventured back outside into the heat, but I felt much better when I had the “in case of fire, use to smash windows and attempt to bend the iron security bars until you peacefully succumb to smoke inhalation” crowbar in my hand that I kept beside my bed that had been left at our house by the burglar who used his Journey T-shirt for, I was sure, the rough kind of Charmin.
I guess I’ll never really know if it was the crowbar, the quality of my posterior view, or the fact that maybe our neighborhood scared even Kenny Ray, but I never came into contact with my neighborhood rapist; in fact, I never saw him, not once. As far as I know, he never left his house. I never saw him in the front yard practicing pouncing or springing from bushes, but maybe he simply hated 110 degrees as much as I did. Or maybe he was just as terrified of showing his mug to the thousands of people who must have gotten that letter as we were afraid of seeing it.
Eventually, over the next several months, I began leaving the crowbar at home more often simply because I would forget it and things started to level out, little by little, almost to the point that most days I even sort of forgot I had a class-three sex offender, kidnapper, man attacker, and abuser living 150 feet away from me. I know this was mainly because I wanted things to return to normal more than they had reason to, but it was an easy con. It became something that hung in the background like the warnings on cigarette packages; the danger was always present, always there, and always a second away, but with each day that passed without us coughing up blood, the farther away that warning seemed and the less it had an impact on our lives. Every day, it drifted farther away, and eventually, the goldenrod-colored letter from the police department with Kenny Ray’s thin-lipped mug shot on it became simply another piece of the puzzle on our refrigerator door, next to the pictures of our nieces and nephews, above and below recipes, coupons, and reminders. In a very odd way, we got used to living nearly next door to a violent, dangerous, but invisible rapist.
I don’t know what happened to him, and for that matter, I don’t know if he ever really lived there. I have a feeling that he did, because whoever lived there put a 1978 burlap sleeper sofa, a tree stump, and the obligatory broken dryer out in their front yard crowned by a FOR SALE sign, and four weeks later, the neighborhood pack of wild dogs had torn the stuffing out of the back of the sofa and peed all over the stump, the door to the dryer had fallen off, and the sign had changed to FREE, so my vote says “yes,” although I can’t prove it. But I still have that letter.
I did know, however, that the next time I got an envelope from the Phoenix Police Department with my address on it, I was going to jump for joy if it was a notification of a $150 fine for another false alarm.
Happy Birthday and the Element of Surprise
It wasn’t my idea to go to the store.
It wasn’t my idea to be standing in line with the cashier and everyone in the general vicinity scrutinizing me, but there I was. It had all begun fifteen minutes earlier when I had perched myself in front of the bathroom mirror, unable to move.
“My nose is getting bigger,” I said aloud, studying it as closely as I possibly could.
“I’m going to unscrew the lightbulb in the bathroom if you don’t come out of there soon,” my husband said as he sat on the living room couch, trying to read a book.
“Did you hear what I said?” I complained louder. “I said my nose is getting bigger, and that’s not all. So are the pores on it. One of them on the tip of my nose has gotten so large I swear I saw a hand come out. Apparently, a small child from Texas mistook it for a well and fell into it.”
“Stop it,” he insisted.
“I can’t,” I said as I shook my head. “I just found a trio of hairs that are trying to colonize one of my necks. If I don’t stop them now, it’s just a matter of time before their relatives from New Jersey arrive to homestead a nostril or plant sideburn crops.”
“This is no way to spend your birthday,” he said, finally putting the book down and getting up. “Come on. Let’s go to the store, grab a nice bottle of wine, and sit out on the deck. It’s seventy-five degrees outside and the sun will be setting in about an hour. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
To be honest, anything sounded better than scouring my chest for a follicular Jamestown, and we still had several hours until our dinner reservation, so I made the better choice of catching a tiny little birthday buzz over scouring my body for age spots. To put it lightly, it was not an ordinary birthday, it was one of those Milestone Years in which you do not only investigate every visible inch of yourself (and would fully attempt, if possible, to search your own cavities to see how those areas were holding up as well), but go to the secret, bad place and open the Dusty Vault of Youth. That’s where you keep the photos of yourself taken in the precipice of your vitality that you hold next to your current hag face to tally up how much damage has been incurred. It’s also the place where you keep the last bra you owned that required no lowered tone when telling a Victoria’s Secret salesperson the size, the last thing you owned that bore horizontal stripes, and an ashtray that you, while inebriated, pried out of a cab with a butter knife when it was still cute and “unpredictable” to do those sorts of things. Should I attempt that same act of taxi unpredictability at my current age, I’d be shot in the ass with a heavy dose of lithium by county health services and then either get dropped off by the train tracks or given a free bowl of soup and a bed at the Mission if I agreed to let someone ramble some gospel at me from the good book. While the trauma of discovering three-inch-long stealth hairs that had been flourishing long enough that I could have knit a hat out of them was enough to push me to the brink of considering skin grafts from a Norwegian, I was in need of something now.
So vino it was.
“You know, the only benefit to being this old,” I told my husband as we got into the car, “is that the likelihood of a barren psychopath mistaking my girth for a ripe pregnancy, following me home, forcing me inside at gunpoint, and slicing open my belly only to discover that the baby is actually a ham-and-cheese sandwich with a side of potato salad has just dropped dramatically.”
“See?” my husband said as he backed out of the driveway. “Now, that’s the kind of birthday spirit I wanna hear!”
At the grocery store, we picked out a decent wine and then presented it to the cashier, who looked at the bottle, then looked back at us. Then she cleared her throat and made history as the Person Who Took Bumper Sticker Wisdom Far Too Literally.
“I need to see your IDs,” she said quietly, practicing a random act of kindness.
I choked on my own spit.
Now, true, since we live in a university town, I am sure the manager at Safeway insists that all of his cashiers are diligent about carding, but I suspected a different motivation altogether.
In my head, I assembled the options quickly:
a. She’d just taken her last hit of Ecstasy before her shift, sniffed some paint, or had a tooth pulled and is high on some top-quality pharmaceuticals.
b. She believes my husband to not be my partner for life but my underaged offspring.
c. She’s a barren psychopath who is trying to determine if I’m still of childbearing age and if my paunch is an indication of a yawning fetus or simply decades of bad living and poor choices.
d. Bribing the cashier is my birthday present from my spouse and we’re not going to dinner after all. And nothing makes me angrier than hunger.
But my husband, on the other hand, thought nothing of it, mainly because he doesn’t hold a photo of himself at twenty up to his reflection every five years to assess road wear, and he can still fit into the pants he wore when we were dating, although he, too, keeps an old 34C bra of mine in his sock drawer to remind himself why he married a woman who now has black yarn growing out of
her neck. He pulled his wallet from his pocket without a second thought and handed his driver’s license over. The cashier nodded, handed it back, and looked at me.
I pointed to myself and raised my eyebrows. “Me, too?” I asked.
“Yep, you, too,” the young woman, who looked to be slightly past the drinking age herself, said politely, and then I suddenly understood that this might be for real.
She might really want to see my ID, I think to myself as I feel a tingle dance up my spine. I might really be getting carded.
I might really be getting carded!
And all of a sudden, I realized I was glad. Happy. Thrilled. Flattered. Delighted. It was more than that, it was wonderful, and made me realize how foolish and masochistic I had been, holding up a picture taken in my twenties and chastising myself because I had aged a little since then! In that mirror at home, I had just hit an ugly Milestone Birthday and was decaying minute by minute, but in Safeway, I was possibly under twenty-one. UNDER TWENTY-ONE. Holy shit, I thought, the light in here must be great. I love Safeway light, I love it! I am never leaving. I am moving to Safeway. I felt my ass tighten, I felt my stomach get flat, I felt my pores shrink to the size of pudding cups. I was young again, and my birthday didn’t matter. I’m not old, I said to myself. I am not middle-aged. I look like a Rolling Stones song. I rock. If you took a picture of me in the Safeway light, I bet it would have looked pretty darn close to the glamour shot in my Dusty Vault of Youth.
I felt so good.
So naturally, I couldn’t leave it at that and enjoy it. Of course I had to poke at it until it burst.
As I handed over my driver’s license, I humbly, almost bashfully, added, “Oh, I bet I’m old enough to be your mom!”
To which the cashier promptly noted as she handed my ID back to me, completely innocently and without malice, “Actually, my mom is younger than you are.”
Instantly and without hesitation, my ass made a plopping sound as it hit the floor, the seams on my jeans popped like gunfire as my stomach returned to its regular size, the hair on my neck sprouted to a length that made Rapunzel’s look butch, and my spine lurched forward as I suddenly lost 70 percent of my bone mass.
Apparently, the look on my face embodied all of these physical atrocities, and if that wasn’t bad enough, I even saw my husband wince. It was not lost on the cashier, who quickly tried to remedy the situation before I needed the assistance of a Hoveround to leave the store.
“But my dad is older than you,” she offered. “By a lot.”
I smiled weakly and wrestled with the urge to reply, “Who the hell is your mother, Loretta Lynn?”
“It’s all gooooood,” she cooed at me as she handed my husband the receipt and we left the store.
“Boy,” I said to my husband as we got into the car. “That was more fun than the birthday you took me to the pound to get a dog and pointed out which ones were going to be put down next.”
The minute we returned home, I raced for the phone, picked it up, and dialed my best friend, Jamie, who lived in Marina del Rey, not only because she’s my best friend but because her birthday was exactly one week earlier. If there was anyone who would understand, it was Jamie.
But it was Jamie’s husband who answered the phone, and he had some news of his own. “Guess what I did this weekend,” he said.
“Took your wife out for dinner for her birthday?” I asked.
“Oh no, better,” he informed me. “I threw her a surprise birthday party!”
“You did not!” I said, gasping, completely unbelieving. As a man, he did simply not possess the skills of organizing a sandwich let alone something as complex as a social gathering with a purpose and that also involved advanced levels of trickery.
“I DID!” he boasted.
“You’re lying!” I replied.
“I’m not,” he insisted. “I really threw her a surprise party!”
“Were there other people there besides the two of you?” I questioned suspiciously.
“Yeah, like twenty,” he replied.
“And they were there on purpose?” I asked. “People passing by or people you can see through a window and who might be able to see you back don’t count, you know.”
“No, no, they were invited,” he said.
I was stumped. “Put her on the phone,” I demanded.
“Hi!” my best friend said.
“He threw you a surprise birthday party?” I asked immediately.
“No,” she said.
“He said he did,” I informed her.
“Oh, I know,” she answered. “He’s very proud of himself.”
“But you didn’t get a surprise birthday party?” I said.
“No,” she confirmed. “I did not.”
“So you found out about it?” I asked.
“Oh God no,” she said, gasping. “He kept that little nugget to himself.”
“Do not spare one detail,” I demanded.
Apparently, several days before the event, it came to her husband’s attention that Jamie’s birthday was exceedingly close, and like many men who go to Target in search of a gift for their wives but come out empty-handed aside from the Xbox they have purchased for themselves, he was at a loss.
And then he had a brilliant idea. Gazing at his Xbox and realizing how happy he had made himself, he remembered that it was his friend Oscar’s birthday, too. Maybe Oscar would also get an Xbox. Maybe they could have an Xbox war! And then he remembered that Oscar’s wife, Maria, had sent out invitations to Oscar’s party for that very weekend.
For Oscar’s surprise birthday party.
Jamie’s husband made a phone call to Maria, and like any nice, young wife trying to do something special for her husband’s birthday who was suddenly backed into a corner by his friend, she agreed politely to make a trade.
Jamie’s husband would buy the decorations, put them up, and pay for half the cake if Maria would pick up the cake, then have the party at her house as she had originally planned.
And it was all set.
Jamie and her husband arrived at the party, hid with everyone else when Oscar was close to coming home, and shouted “SURPRISE!!!!” when he finally walked through the door. They mingled with all of Oscar’s friends, drank some wine, and Jamie’s husband pointed out the pretty decorations. Then it was time for the cake.
As Maria brought out the cake dotted with tiny, festive candles, everyone began to sing the familiar song, “Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Oscar…”
And then one little, tiny, but proud male voice rang out suddenly, “and Jamie!”
“Happy Birthday to you!”
Jamie, thinking her husband a bit of a jokester, most likely grinned at his little insertion, but it wasn’t until her husband brought her over to the cake that she realized the magnitude of what was happening.
“Because there, Laurie,” my best friend recounted, “in all fancy, big red letters, was ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY OSCAR!’ on the top of the cake, and then on the bottom, in teeny-weeny, little tiny, last-minute ‘Hey, could you stick this on there, too?’ letters was ‘AND JAMIE!’”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“And that’s when he turned to me and said, ‘Surprise!’”
“When did you punch him out?” I wanted to know. “Because you’d better tell me you punched him out!”
Jamie wisely abstained, because at that moment, knocking her well-meaning husband to the ground took a backseat to what she saw displayed on the dining room table with candles sticking out of it. At first sight, Jamie believed it to be a mountain range covered in snow with a red rose topping each of the peaks, but as she continued to stare at the cake, she realized that what she believed to be Kilimanjaro was, in stark and triple-X reality, a gigantic pair of enormous cake boobies.
I gasped. “You mean to tell me that not only did he hijack another guy’s birthday party,” I said slowly, “but you got a titty cake for your birthday?”
??
?I got a titty cake. I guess the left and larger breast was Oscar’s,” Jamie told me. “And mine was the right one. I believe I ate an areola. That was surprising.”
I started to laugh, and Jamie started to laugh, and soon I couldn’t even make any sound at all except a clicking in the back of my throat that resembled dolphin talk. I even tinkled in my pants a little, but honestly, I was surprised that didn’t happen without provocation when I was standing in line waiting to get my ID back.
Because as crappy as my birthday had been thus far, no matter how badly I thought it sucked, one thing was true: I highly doubted that at the end of the night anyone, let alone a room full of strangers, was going to see me put an areola, familiar or otherwise, into my mouth.
And that, certainly, was something to celebrate.
Leaving, but Not on a Jet Plane
The first thing that popped into my head when I saw the FOR SALE sign in my front yard was, What the hell is that doing there?
I gasped and felt my head spin a bit. Don, our Realtor, must have sent his guy over in the morning to put it up, I realized. I just hadn’t expected it so soon.
We were leaving.
We had known we were going for some time now, but up until this point it had all been talk. Talk, talk, talk. I got the distinct impression that no one believed us, and to be honest, we barely believed it ourselves.
Almost a year earlier, my husband had decided that he had not run up a significant enough amount of student-loan debt, and that if you’re going to borrow money from the government, you might as well borrow enough so that they put a lien against your house, otherwise you’re just going through the motions. He filled out the applications to numerous graduate schools and sent them off, and we barely talked about it again until he got a big envelope in the mail six months later, read it, then looked up at me and said, “Hey, um, could we move to Chicago?”