But that’s not all, because Paula was bearing another accessory; her small, meek, and socially paralyzed sister, Wendy.
That’s right. TWO new people.
From a distance, Wendy looked reasonably regular, and she wasn’t dressed as if she were moments away from casting a spell. But the expression on her face was something quite different, as if her sister were taking her to meet a coven of witches, something I’d bet cold, hard cash had happened before. And I’d double those odds that they were all wearing pointy, sparkly shoes.
As soon as we sat down at the restaurant, Paula flagged down the waitress and ordered a Vanilla Stoli, Diet Coke, and cherry concoction, while the rest of us ordered iced tea. That’s not very New Age, I thought, cringing, that’s just gross. Shouldn’t there be some chai or tabouli in that drink? But whatever. I’m not here to judge, I reminded myself, I’m just here to witness the freak show that’s minutes away from starting.
“Paula, you look a little stressed for a girl who’s in love,” Maxie mentioned with a sly smile. “Tell us about this new guy you’ve been seeing.”
Ooooo, goody! I cooed to myself, New Age amore! I bet she reeled him in with the smoke of patchouli, incantations to the Earth Mother, and a sprinkle of fairy dust! I scooted my chair closer, anxious to find out if her beau was a bead artist, bamboo flute player, or better yet, a space traveler!
“Well,” Paula started, her facial expression shooting off sparks of anger, “maybe we weren’t so right for each other after all.”
Maxie reached for Paula’s hand in sympathy.
“He said we were moving too fast,” Paula said and heavily sighed as the waitress placed the Vanilla Stoli/Diet Coke aberration before her. “You know, my heart didn’t come with a speedometer, I told him! When you’re flying on the wings of love, is there really a speed limit? And he even once agreed that our sexual energy had elements of art in it.”
“Boy,” I was aching to say, “during the cleanup, I bet the paint thinner was brutal.”
“I’m so sorry—” Maxie started.
“You know, I really don’t want to talk about him,” Paula suddenly snapped before she took several gulps from her cocktail and the table grew quiet.
“I had a stroke,” Wendy offered.
“You mean you had four,” her sister Paula finished as the ice in her glass clinked together. “Waitress! I need another Vanilla Stoli and Diet Coke with a cherry!”
“I had four strokes,” Wendy said with a smile.
“Maxie, I’m going to this new church, and I LOVE it!” Paula exclaimed. “Only women are allowed in the temple, and you can go there to bathe in this communal bath, it’s an incredible sharing experience. So I’m glad only women are permitted because I can’t stand the sight of a man right now.”
“I’m so sorry—” Maxie tried.
“You know, I really don’t want to talk about him,” Paula said sharply, taking a healthy chug from her new drink. “I’m seeing a new hypnotherapist, and she is so wise and warm, she’s very celestial. She has golden hair that flows around her head like a halo. And honestly, I don’t think”— Paula paused for dramatic effect before delivering what rolled in as my favorite proclamation of the evening—“she’s human! Waitress! I need another drink! With a cherry!”
I’ll take “Goddess” for two hundred, Alex, my mind screamed.
“She’s just a goddess, either that or an ET,” Paula went on. “Extraterrestrial. She has that quality that so many of them have, so light and airy.”
Could she be Flaky, goddess of croissants? I silently questioned myself.
“My husband left me,” Wendy chirped.
“She’s working me through regression to try and survive the abandonment of my lover,” Paula finished.
“I’m so sorry—” Maxie said.
“You know, I really don’t want to talk about him,” Paula spit out, going to work on her fresh beverage. “It was at this very table that he looked into my eyes and told me we had traveled together before in past lives.”
“I lost my job when one side of my mouth froze,” Wendy said.
“And over there, at that table,” Paula warbled as she pointed, “was where he said he could see my soul through my eyes. And over there,” Paula said as she pointed toward the entrance, “is the door he opened for me on our first date. Our first date, only a short, two weeks ago. It seems like a life . . . time.”
Well, it is, for a housefly! my brain sang, but I didn’t say it. Instead, I looked at Michelle across the table and mouthed, “I can’t believe we didn’t have to pay for this show!”
“Are you ready to order?” the waitress asked.
“Vanilla Coke and Diet Stoli!” Paula cried out with a slur. “And the sherry! I need the sherry!”
“We’ll just take the check—er, the bar tab, please,” I said. “And the biggest barf bag you have.”
Walking back to the hotel, Paula pointed out all the areas of interest. To her.
“See that sidewalk? We stepped on that on the way to his car.
“See that parking meter? That’s where we parked.
“See this air? I bet some of it was in his lungs!”
Paula was pointing to a flattened piece of gum on the street that she was pretty sure was once in her ex-boyfriend’s mouth when suddenly, four hundred topless lesbians and their eight hundred bobbing, flopping, and swinging tatas turned the corner and marched our way in the beginning of a Gay Pride parade. We watched the girls pass as they shouted, cheered, and walked along. I, for one, was not going to pass up a sight like that; it was like a National Geographic photo had sprung to life. I stood and gawked like the tourist I was, noticing at the same time that most of those knockers hadn’t seen a bra since middle school. A little support goes a long way, I noted to myself, because once your chi-chis fall, man, they’re down for the count. There’s no rebounding when your opponent is gravity.
Paula, for the first time that evening, did not say a word. She stood slack-jawed as the parade passed, and due to her blood alcohol level, I’m sure she probably saw twice as many naked sisters as we did.
“I wonder if Paula sees any faces she recognizes?” I said to Michelle. “I’m sure she’s shared dirty bathwater with at least a handful of those goddesses!”
“Who’s looking at faces?” Michelle replied. “All I know is that I’m never taking my bra off again.”
When the parade had passed and the shouts were starting to fade, it was Wendy who spoke first.
“Thank you so much for such a wonderful night!” she said with a wide smile, shaking our hands. “It was so nice to meet you. You are so kind to listen to someone else’s problems like that. You know, I haven’t spoken that much to anyone in months! It felt so good to get it all off my chest!”
“Well, it was our pleasure,” I said, and then leaned forward. “But the next time your sister starts on her Anna Nicole Smith impression, make her eat a piece of bread first. That way, she can postpone prying used gum off the sidewalk for a couple of drinks.”
“Well,” Wendy giggled. “I’m hoping for a quiet drive home!”
“Your sister is so loaded that an aspirin would put her under. It was nice to meet you,” I said to her, and I really meant it. “Here’s my last Tylenol, and keep that bag handy!”
“Wow,” Paula said, shaking her head. “I think I just channeled a vision of ancient Amazon women warriors marching into battle! I think they transcended time and space to send me a message!”
“Best of luck deciphering that message, because,” I said, then paused for dramatic effect, “I don’t think they were human!”
I Love Everybody
I was about to do a bad, bad thing. I knew it. I just couldn’t help it. As soon as I saw that big fat hand reach up and grab the last two chocolate chip cookie nuggets from the sample tray, I knew it was my signal. I was going in for the kill.
I’m a bad girl.
And I can prove it.
Earlier that morn
ing, I had seen that very thing posted on a website.
“With undistinguished prose, leaden humor, insistent self-deprecation, almost zero detail about anything other than the state of her immediate surroundings,” the review from Kirkus—an organization dedicated solely to publishing anonymous book reviews that mostly serve to expose books’ endings—said, “the author succeeds in making herself and her circle appear purely unappealing.”
Wow, I thought. That’s bad. That is one bad review. That’s the worst review I’ve ever read of any book.
“Well . . .” my husband said to me, breaking the thirty-second silence since I had begun reading. He raised his eyebrows.
“Um, I guess this next sentence sums it up nicely,” I replied, clearing my throat and turning back toward the review. “ ‘Gives the impression of being scrawled during lunch hour for publication in a free local listings guide.’ ”
I looked at my husband. He looked back at me.
“That is one sucky review,” he finally said.
“You’re telling me,” I agreed. “It’s of my book. It’s the Kirkus review of my book. And my book is about my life! My life got a bad review!”
“Listen, humor is completely subjective. If it wasn’t, Carrot Top would be sleeping on the top bunk of a homeless shelter right now and selling plasma next to Andrew Dice Clay,” my husband said kindly.
“Easy for you to say,” I replied. “Your life isn’t ‘purely unappealing.’ What does that even mean? It’s like I’m now on a Purely Unappealing Lives list with Hitler, Pontius Pilate, Dr. Laura, and all of the other Purely Unappealing People. You know, I always thought that someone would have to see me completely naked and bending over before arriving at a conclusion like that.”
My husband nodded in agreement. “It’s not the best look for you,” he said.
“Who hates me that much?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, someone really has to hate you to say things like that. Maybe it’s Jerry. The last time he came by asking for Mountain Dew I told him that the Mountain Dew people were trying to change their image and in order to be allowed to drink it, you had to wear shoes and live in a house that wasn’t towed to its present location.”
“Oh, honey,” my husband said sweetly. “What a beautiful world you live in! You little optimist, you! Jerry has about five brains cells left after all of the crystal meth he has sucked up his nose, and none of them resides in the literary section of his head. Jerry’s brain is a ghost town. The saloon doors only swing when the wind blows. He has both the hate and anger required to write that review, I’ll give you that, but I’m afraid his ability to hold a pencil was killed when he consumed an eight ball by himself in or around 1998.”
“You’ve got a point,” I agreed. “He’d kill me before he panned my book.”
“You know, it doesn’t matter who wrote that book review,” my husband said. “It’s only one person’s opinion. It only matters what you think about it.”
Now, deep, deep, deep in my black little rotten heart, I knew my husband was right. Sure, there were parts of the book that could have been better, funnier, tighter. Was it the best book in the world? No. But was this anonymous person going to make me believe that my book, the book that I spent almost a decade of my life trying to get published, was leaden and belonged in a local listings guide? Absolutely not, especially since there was not one single ad for a topless bar or phone sex in my whole entire book.
Besides, I was used to getting hate mail. I got it on a daily basis. This wasn’t any different, I told myself, except that those people actually signed those letters. However, I had the very strong suspicion that I was going to be losing my job soon since I’d clogged the editor of the newspaper’s e-mail box with a thousand letters in one night. I had already lost my weekly newspaper column and feared the death of my daily web column wasn’t far behind. I had a small amount in savings and no idea what I was going to do if the book tanked, of which the chances were extraordinarily good to begin with and had now just gotten better.
Don’t freak out, I told myself as I took a deep breath, you can handle it. I could find another job, embark on a new craft. I was once an optician for several years, fitting eyeglasses and contact lenses, except that while I was employed as a health care worker, I believe that I seriously maimed people. I fit one old lady named Loretta so badly with those invisible bifocals that a couple of days later she fell down a flight of stairs and got a black eye. I told her she needed to “adjust to them” because I could have lost my job for giving her a refund. The next week Loretta sideswiped a grapefruit truck and crumpled the left side of her car into a tinfoil ball. She came back and cried at the counter, to no avail. The next time I saw Loretta at the optical shop, she was armed with a surly friend who was built like a redwood. As soon as I went out to the counter, Loretta’s Human Log acquaintance poked me in the chest with the arm of her BluBlocker wraparound sunglasses and then demanded Loretta’s money back. Which I promptly retrieved from the cash drawer without any questions, especially when I realized the Log had only stopped poking me with her BluBlockers to raise her walking cane and hold it like a baseball bat.
Then I briefly considered joining the Peace Corps, but then again, I wasn’t sure. I kept having this vision of myself sitting on some frozen mountain in a goatskin cape, the only person within a three-hundred-mile radius that had any semblance of teeth, digging through the mud with a stick to gather enough grub worms to feed an entire village for dinner.
“Oh, you should go, it sounds like a very relaxing job,” my mother commented. “Just being on a foreign, tropical island and being peaceful. I hope they send you someplace good in Europe, because I want to come visit if they do. If they send you to any place like Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Finland, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and whatever that mess Yugoslavia is today, forget it, because that’s not Europe to me, you know. I mean the real Europe, like France, Italy, and Switzerland. Those other ones are like the runner-up Europe countries, the ones that kind of ended up there by mistake, like, you know, the boss of the United Nations said, ‘Okay, Europe, if you get Sweden, you have to take the Ukraine, too, just to make it even. Otherwise, we’re giving Monaco to Africa.’ ”
My other immediate options were to man a hot dog cart in downtown Phoenix, because I figured that was easy enough; I’d only have to work the lunch shift, and I like hot dogs. Then my big-mouth husband added his two cents after I told him my idea by laughing, “You, running a hot dog cart? You’d have to call it Exact Change Only Hot Dogs because you’re so bad at math that you’d end up cheating yourself and losing everything. Besides, you’re not exactly a people person.”
And he was right.
I am not exactly a people person. Not exactly. You see, when I was born, God gave me an ounce of patience that was supposed to last me a lifetime, but it turns out I used all of it up during the first week.
I even have proof.
When I was six months old, my mother had my portrait taken. The photographer apparently sensed my disgust with the whole procedure and decided to invent his own brand of hilarity by placing a small, oval plaque underneath my folded arms, droopy jowls, bored eyes, and the repugnant expression on my mean little baby face.
The little sign proclaimed boldly, I LOVE EVERYBODY.
The look on my face says, “You know, if I had even one tooth, I would sink it into your fat little arm for trying to make me look like an asshole baby. Shithead.”
Now, I really need to point out that I am not indiscriminately mean; I am not mean to people whenever the mean mood strikes me. I feel that I must be provoked first, although my husband disagrees. In all honesty, I really wouldn’t even identify myself as a mean person; rather, I would classify myself as a Pointer-Outer of Extraordinary Acts of Incredible Foolishness and, on Occasion, Rudeness. Some people, including my husband, would call these experiences meltdowns, but I would rather consider them Opportunities to Enlighten.
For example:
• If you are sitting behind me in a movie and you feel the need to converse as freely as if you are in your living room, I will “Shhhh!” you and then I will ask you for ten dollars. I cannot grasp the need to talk in a movie theater. If I’m going to talk to somebody, I’d rather not do it in the dark (unless I’m naked and really holding my stomach in), and if it costs me ten bucks for an hour and a half, it had better be to someone in a different state, or they’d better be telling me how hot I am. I figure if you have to talk, if you’re so full of interesting and fascinating information that it is simply impossible to hold it in, THAT’S WHAT BARS ARE MADE FOR.
• If you cut me off in traffic in a Dukes of Hazzard move or like you’ve got someone in the passenger seat whose severed limb is floating in an Igloo cooler on his lap, then suddenly and inexplicably slam on your brakes for no apparent reason, I will scream, maniacally, and point my finger at you. This reaction developed due to the fact that a moment after I bought my new car, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rated it as one of the suckiest automobiles ever made. If so much as a bug hits my windshield, the entire front cabin of the car will implode and it is likely that I will either be decapitated by a visor or disemboweled by the gearshift as a tragic result, now that I am driving what essentially cracks up to be a motorized casket on wheels.