After all, can a girl who has 750 photos of her little dog—who you may notice is sometimes wearing accessories, such as glasses and hats—on her phone be all that bad? She certainly can’t be as bad as someone who doesn’t deserve to have their phone returned and loses it to someone who instead does something nefarious with it, right? But, no, you probably won’t see any pictures on that phone of me building houses with Habitat for Humanity or volunteering in Central America, holding open the mouths of tykes while aiding Doctors Without Borders as they fix the cleft palates of little children. Probably not on that phone, but I did give them twenty-five dollars once, I just didn’t think to take a picture of me donating online. I’m sure it was used to fix a palate. Or at least part of one.
But if you wonder whether I took the picture of the girl sitting on the curb with her butt crack hanging out while her boyfriend was breaking up with her, no, I did not take that. My friend thought that was funny, and in a way it was. She really needed a belt. But even if I tried to tell her, I doubt she could have heard me over her racking sobs.
All right, I took the picture, but listen, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, you know? I saw the crack rising up and I just snapped, I didn’t even think. It was during the 24 percent of the time when I’m maybe not so nice. It was like seeing the Loch Ness monster or something similar, no one will believe you unless you offer proof. Now I have proof. So when I tell the story, I can offer a visual, and people believe me. That a girl who is very busy having her life destroyed by someone she loved can be too distracted to know that she is slipping out of her clothes.
Oh, God. I just had a horrible thought! You don’t know anyone in China, do you?
Checking my email again!
Boy. How late do you usually sleep?
If you will get out of bed, we can go have your REWARD breakfast right now, if you will just get up and go on Craigslist. Get up get up get up.
Please don’t call China. You better not have called China. If I have to end up paying for calls to China and/or any other far-off lands, your reward will reflect it, and I’m only being honest. Fair is fair.
ALL RIGHT. Fine. How about a REWARD BREAKFAST and one call to China. A short call. I will do a small call, a brief call, a “Hello, Ma, I am calling you on a stolen phone. I know, I laughed, too!” Okay, I’m sorry, sorry, not a “stolen” phone, let’s say a “phone that does not belong to me and instead of flipping through the contacts list and hitting the entry that said ‘home’ I called China instead” phone. How about that?
Are you awake?
You’re awake, aren’t you? You know, I get the feeling that maybe you really are already awake and, instead of spending efforts to find the listing for a lost iPhone on Craigslist, you just might be laughing with your ma about my unhealthy relationship with my dog, not to mention the abundance of pictures of food, and sometimes alcoholic beverages. And about the Russian dancers and the slugs having sex on my patio.
The Russian dancer is not a Cossack or Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. He is my husband. It was very cold that day, so he bundled up. And wore the Diplomat, a style of hat he has. Left over from when he was Hamid Karzai for Halloween. It is quite fetching on him. Anyway, to cheer me up, he did a couple of Russian dance moves one day and then fell over, evidenced by the photos on my iPhone and the blurry image of an ass, but with a belt. My husband always wears a belt. And, yes, you were right, those were slugs having coitus on my patio. I had only seen that once before, and, again, I cite proof. You should really laugh at those photos. I did. It took them forever.
Dude, GET OUT OF BED.
Please get out of bed.
Why won’t you get out of bed?
Never mind. I already know.
You’re not going to give me my phone, are you? You’re going to keep it, aren’t you, or sell it on eBay, or take it to some pawnshop across the river, and there are a ton of pawnshops across the river. You know I’ll never find my iPhone. For the next month I’m going to stare at everyone I see talking on a phone to see if it’s you, talking on my iPhone. At Safeway, at the mall, at every restaurant, everywhere I go, I’ll be looking. But I’ll never know for sure what you did with it, why you simply couldn’t give it back, or why you thought you deserved to keep it.
You suck.
You’re an asshole, and I know it’s just a phone, but, really, what did you think when you found it? Could you have possibly thought that someone abandoned it on purpose, maybe someone who was too young to handle the responsibility of the iPhone and thought that by leaving it in a wet, shiny place with lots of traffic that it might have a better chance at life with a different family? If I wanted to abandon my iPhone, I would have left it in a safe place. Like a fire station.
It’s not your iPhone.
It’s not your iPhone.
I’m still paying for it as I write this to you.
You know, my dog is holding my Visa bill between her paws at this very moment, and I want to take a picture of it and make a joke about her reading the fine print and saying, “You know, if you pay this one day late …” but I CAN’T.
I’m going back to using a Sharpie to scrawl “This was stolen from Laurie Notaro” on everything I own.
You better not have called China.
But if you did, guess what?
Your ma is going to get another phone call, one from me, on my new iPhone. And I’m going to tell her everything.
Sincerely,
Laurie Notaro
P.S. I hope I see you sitting on a curb one day while someone is breaking your heart.
Forecasting World Destruction
“Did you get Mom’s email?” my sister asked me the moment I picked up the phone. “Because this is a good one. All I’m going to say is: Beware of anyone named Karen. They are bad, bad people. You know a Karen, don’t you? Wasn’t she one of your bridesmaids? Well, I’d sever those ties if I were you, or you’ll live to regret it.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I agreed. “An email from Mom is a lesson in terror.”
My mother chose to prepare all three of her girls for a life outside the nest by scaring the shit out of us at every opportunity. For other little children, a visit to the grocery store might have just been a boring trip to pick up ingredients for dinner, but for the Notaro girls, it was an exercise in human nature.
In the produce department, it might have looked like we were picking out a head of lettuce, but my mother was actually homeschooling us in the subject of “Don’t Be a Tramp” when she looked at the woman sorting through the green beans two feet away, whose halter top wasn’t keeping all that it should under wraps.
“Lentils stay covered,” my mother warned us under her breath. “When even a little pops out, that’s the same thing as being naked. And what is being naked?”
“Dirty,” we all replied.
“And that means you’re not normal,” my mother added, tossing a head of iceberg into the cart. “And now I can’t buy green beans. She touched every single one with those hands.”
In the candy aisle, we passed by a friend of mine from school, who had a permanent rumbling cough, and her mother, who was wearing a housecoat and had her hair in curlers.
We exchanged smiles and I waved quickly.
“Don’t you dare ever go to that girl’s house and put your mouth on anything, and I mean a glass, a soda can, or a Popsicle,” my mother warned me. “Why do you think she has a cough like that?”
“They’re dirty?” we all replied.
“No!” my mother shot back. “They’re filthy! I can’t imagine what the inside of that house looks like. I heard that they have cats. God. I don’t know why we can’t smoke in here.”
On the way out to the parking lot, my mother pointed to an Econoline three spaces away from our station wagon.
“Don’t ever walk next to a van, unless being kidnapped is your goal for the day,” she said, as she dragged my sister by her arm beyond a fifteen-foot radius of the vehicle. “Only weirdos drive v
ans. It’s not normal.
“See that door?” she continued, pointing to the large sliding panel on the side of the van as she loaded the groceries into our car. “Takes two seconds to slide that thing open, grab you, and slide it back. No one would see a thing. You wanna be kidnapped, take your time walking past it. You wanna stay alive, you better friggin’ run.”
I took my mother’s advice to heart. To this day, I don’t even drink out of the same glass as my husband, and he will be the first to admit that he couldn’t pick my cleavage, if it does indeed exist, out of a boobie lineup. Additionally, as a result of my mother’s parenting, I spent my formative years sprinting past any van I saw in a parking lot like lions were chasing me, fueled by my mother’s warning that eventually, someday, if I didn’t pick up the pace and remained the slowest girl in any parking lot, tragedy would befall me and I’d end up begging for change, wearing a sister-wife dress of calico, somewhere in Utah. When I was twenty, however, she upped the ante and amended the warning to include the fact that Van People were now working in tandem, or as independent contractors, and that I should circumvent any two large vehicles parked next to each other or with an empty spot in between.
“Two against one,” she warned. “And they don’t care how stupid your hair looks dyed that way. I wouldn’t kidnap you, but Van People aren’t very picky.”
Those words haunted me. To this day, if the only parking spot left in the grocery store is between two vans, chances are we’ll be having Pizza Hut for dinner and I’ll just come back the next day to get the milk.
Now, in my mother’s defense, she is the cleanest person I know and kept an absolutely spotless house, so everyone is dirty to her. I’ve seen her look at the baseboards in hospitals and cringe in disgust. During my entire childhood, I never once saw a speck of dust on anything or so much as a crumb on the floor, a streak on the window or on the floor-to-ceiling mirrors we had in the hall. I, unfortunately, did not get the green light on that chromosome and received the signal for toe hair instead.
She also grew up in Brooklyn and saw weird people doing weird things every day, and by the time we left in the 1970s, New York’s weirdness was at a fever pitch; I’m sure that left an imprint on her somewhere. This is just a theory that has taken me the better part of a lifetime to form, but I believe it. My mother believes in “normal.” But my mother is also a no-nonsense sort of person, and when she identifies whatever it is she considers dangerous, or “abnormal,” she reacts swiftly and without hesitation to cut it off at the source.
For example, yesterday my five-year-old nephew saw a pregnant lady and asked my very unprepared sister, the same one who was willing to wander into the fifteen-foot snatching radius of the van, “Where does the baby come out?”
“At the hospital” was my mother’s response, without so much as a second’s pause.
This is not to say that she is a master of strategy, because there are times when her instincts have led her astray. Some impulses aren’t always positive—as in having an argument with your fourteen-year-old daughter about setting the table one night and then spreading that dirty laundry to a priest. The next thing you know, you’ve booked the both of you for a mother–daughter weekend retreat at your church to repair the fractured relationship caused by your rebellious and unruly teen.
Now, while I don’t think I was tricked into going, I’m pretty sure I never agreed to spending two days with my mother in a nun’s room and eating the cuisine of the food bank. I know I wouldn’t have agreed to canned green beans at five meals out of six. But at fourteen, if your parents say, “You’re going to spend the weekend at church with your mother to learn how to be a normal teenager,” you go. There was no choice to be had. My mother, however, was pretty excited about the retreat; she expected to immediately get down to business and solve the problem of my unruliness now that I was wearing a bra and had an onslaught of hormones comparable to angry Mongols surging through my body.
Once she explained our problems to the priest—my un-cleanliness, my snotty attitude, and the fact that I was still not running fast enough by vans (clear indications that I was destined for a life of abnormality and certain dust)—everyone at Bad Daughter Camp was bound to bestow upon her unparalleled amounts of sympathy and, if conditions were right, pity. She knew this. She was ready for it. She expected nothing less.
An hour after we checked in and dragged our suitcases to the nun’s block, we found ourselves sitting on metal folding chairs in a half circle in “group.” While she didn’t show it, I imagine it was a bit of a surprise to my mom, who was sitting next to me, that every other girl enrolled in Bad Daughter Camp was either dabbling in heroin, a runaway who had lived in a tunnel, had stabbed someone with a mechanical pencil during a robbery at Circle K, or was forced to attend by the conditions of their release from juvenile detention, according to their “testimony” as we each took turns telling our “Harried Mother/Bad Daughter Tale of Woe.”
When our turn came, things might have ended differently had we been given warning or even a syllabus. We might have been able to huddle and been more prepared, but we were nothing short of a disaster. I don’t know about my mother, but I certainly felt the energy of the room drop and disappointment abound when she dramatically confessed that, instead of truly cleaning my room, including the baseboards, I just shoved everything in a closet or under my bed and “that wasn’t normal.” I do believe the other mothers actively rolled their eyes, and one crossed her arms in defiance. Even the mention that my mother had attended the notorious high school depicted in Welcome Back, Kotter didn’t earn us any street cred. My mother tried to bring it back by suggesting that I may have smoked on one suspicious occasion or that I purchased a Devo album with my babysitting money, but by then it was too late. Our only hope for redemption was if she had suddenly gone for the gold and inserted the word “pimp” into our sordid tale of nothing, but in the presence of a priest, the consequences were too vast, although even he looked bored. Sure, I would have been a firecracker at band camp, but at Bad Daughter Camp turned into Felony Camp, I couldn’t even catch a spark. I found myself almost wishing I had taken a shard of glass to someone’s kidney or had set fire to something flammable, even just to my Kmart monkey pajamas, so I would have fit in and had something to talk about with the other girls on break instead of “Yeah … I talk back. I’ve done it several times now.”
To add insult to injury, Felony Camp also called for us to hug after every “breakthrough,” which to other mother–daughter duos meant a concession to try methadone (although the decision about cocaine was still iffy); a compromise to take the alarm off the window if the daughter would stop crawling through it; a deal to meet with another’s parole officer when she was scheduled if her boyfriend was allowed to stay the night. But for my mother and me, progress was measured in reckless promises to hang up the towel instead of throwing it on the floor after a shower or to stop listening to “Whip It” so loud in my room. If there was an option of skipping the “Hug Bug,” we would have certainly chosen it and volunteered to spend the weekend opening cans of greens beans manually instead.
But that option wasn’t offered, and the first time we were forced to embrace was awkward at best. It was like trying to push two magnets together, each repelled by the force of the other. It would have been merciful if someone had stepped in to stop the carnage, but no one did, and the attempt continued with the approach of different angles and loss of eye contact, until we accidentally touched chins in the agonizing dance of trying to entwine and avoid each other and we both simultaneously called that contact.
We’re simply not a huggy/touchy family, we’re just not. Previous to the chin brush, I don’t believe my mother and I had had any deliberate touching since I was about seven, and even up to that point it was merely concerning the matter of tying my shoes or washing my hair. If you wanted a hug, that’s what stuffed animals and kindergarten teachers were for. My mother had dusting, vacuuming, and mopping to do. Life wasn’t o
ne big lovefest, is what I think she was trying to tell us, and the sooner you figured that out, the better off you were. Wanna be hugged a lot? Walk slow past vans.
I’ve never asked my mother why we were not a hugging family, because I already knew the answer. “Well, did you want to be hugged or did you want to live?” she would have said. “I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?”
To my mother’s great distress, we left Felony Camp as the most unpopular people, both our heads hanging low, neither of us being the fractured badasses she believed us to be.
“None,” my mother pointed out as we waited for my dad and sisters to pick us up, “of those people in there are normal. And I’m betting you if your daughter lives in a tunnel, your house is probably filthy and your floor hasn’t been waxed in years.”
Recognizing a foul move when she saw it, my mother never tried to enroll me in another behavior-modification camp, nor did we ever again intrude within two feet of each other’s personal space, lest our chins accidentally graze.
But that never meant that she was done throwing thoughts of perennial terrors at me or my sisters; quite to the contrary. It was my mother’s job to steel us against harmful influences in the world; it was essential that we knew that not everyone had good intentions and that immediate trust was for people who did not grow up in New York City. If someone was nice to you for no reason, they were lying and they wanted something from you; if someone asked you for directions, they really wanted to steal your kidney; if you gave a hobo a dollar, they were going to spend it on something illegal, although to be truthful, I have failed my mother horribly in that subject. In full disclosure, I have a regular hobo that I sometimes subsidize on a corner not far from my house. He’s got one eye that looks at you and another eye that rolls around like a marble in an empty mayonnaise jar, so, really, I don’t care if he takes the two bucks I just handed him and he puts it toward a pint of the cheapest vodka made on Earth. If I had a roller in my eye socket, I’d want to catch a buzz, and if some stupid lady in a Prius handed me her spare change and said, “Now, don’t get drunk with this!” I can tell you that the stink eye shooting in her direction would be revolving at a full 360 degrees.