And then locked it.
I went back to my seat, and when I looked over at 1C and 1D, they were still staring at me.
“I am not a stripper. I was a Catholic,” I whispered to them, thinking inside my head that they should just mind their own business. After all, the guy who was supposed to be flying the plane was busy attending to his own needs, not the aircraft’s. And, should some shit go down, it would be wise to have the Helper Girl on your side, lest she not find it in her wicked little inebriated heart to be vengeful enough to show you to the door without a slide.
Snakes
It was my husband who saw it first. “Hey,” he said, leaning toward the TV, “isn’t that your old boyfriend?”
It’s a question he asks me a lot, especially if he’s watching COPS or America’s Most Wanted.
“I told you, just because some guy on the news walks out of a trailer without a shirt on, has a beer in his hand, and is being questioned by the police doesn’t mean I’ve dated him,” I shouted from the kitchen.
“I think this is the guy who had the snake,” he yelled back.
A thin shiver coiled up my spine. The snake. I even pretended that I liked the snake, named (I’m embarrassed to say this part) Sid Vicious, a thirteen-foot reticulated python that lived in a glass cage the size of a single-wide home, minus the do-it-yourself add-on.
Quickly, I learned to hate Sid, even though this was during the mid-eighties and boyfriends with snakes were just part of the deal. I understand the food chain and the order of nature, but actually witnessing a fat, sluggish reptile attack an ordinary field mouse was more than I could stomach. It very easily could be equated with the terrifying vision of Vogue and the former cast members of Friends joining together to declare a “Day Off from Anorexia” as models around the world descend upon their local Waffle Houses for the All-You-Can-Eat-and-Actually-Digest special.
I was especially horrified when Mary, a small white mouse I had named after the blind, pretty sister on Little House on the Prairie, was in the process of being digested. She had bravely managed to survive for nearly two weeks, hiding in a hollow knot of the tree branch that rested in Sid’s cage. I really thought she was going to make it; she was very quick, and managed to roam freely about the cage without catching the snake’s attention. I was devastated when she was eaten, my black, liquid eyeliner running down my cheeks.
“She went down in two bites,” the boyfriend said as softly as he could. “Will you help me shave my head now?”
“This is just so totally sad,” I persisted, sobbing.
“Man, I told you, you gotta quit naming them, dude,” he said, nodding.
“I am so not a dude,” I said, reminding him.
He kept nodding.
In the middle of summer, the boyfriend came home with thirteen rats in a box. “I’m gonna breed ’em,” he insisted, and I just turned away as he placed all of them in an aquarium in the bedroom closet. That night, I had a nightmare that my mom was scratching at the window, and when I woke up, I realized that it was only the sound of the closet rats tearing up the newspaper in the aquarium, and made the boyfriend move them to the laundry room.
The next morning, I entered the kitchen just as the boyfriend was on his fifth trip to the trash can, holding a limp rat by the tail. “There’s no vent in here!” he said, standing in front of the dryer and the steamed-up aquarium. “Six of them are dead!”
I looked at the remaining seven rats. “Ma and Pa are gone,” I cried hysterically. “So are Carrie, Almanzo, and Mary II!” The boyfriend put the rats outside in the carport to give them some air, but then forgot about them after a meeting with his bong. By the time he remembered, the sun had shifted and had raised completely overhead, causing a magnifying-glass-and-ant type of scenario within the aquarium. I couldn’t bring myself to look as Laura, Nellie, and Miss Beadle met the fate of their previously expired friends.
My hate was sealed and delivered one night as I was walking down the dark hall and something batted me in the head and I saw something waving in midair, like the trunk of a circus elephant. I immediately flipped the light switch, and that’s when I saw the first six feet of Sid, whipping around like a fire hose, mysteriously four feet off the ground. The snake had managed to escape from the cage, had squeezed through a tiny space in between the doorjamb and a bedroom door, and was now stuck. The boyfriend solved the problem by taking an ax and a crowbar to the doorjamb, trashing the dream of getting our security deposit back.
My aversion to reptiles of all sorts was duly confirmed several years later when a hippie suddenly put a four-foot iguana on my head one night at Long Wong’s. My head quickly bowed under the seven-pound weight of the lizard, but when the hippie tried to remove his scaly pal, the iguana dug its claws into my scalp and refused to budge. For forty-five minutes, the hippie and three of my friends each took a leg and worked nonstop to get the lizard off, creating a slight commotion as thirty onlookers watched, including my then current boyfriend (the snake boyfriend and I broke up when he got married). Finally the animal pooped on my head and relaxed enough to release its claws, but I couldn’t move my neck for a week and was forced to wash my hair repeatedly with liquid Tide.
I was thinking about that when my husband called again from the living room. “Hurry!” he shouted. “This guy on TV has a snake tattoo on his neck, too! It’s got to be him!”
“What did he do?” I asked, coming into the living room just before the news segment ended.
“He won the Powerball,” my husband said. “Are you going to leave me?”
“Even though I’m sure he’s bought a triple-wide mobile home, a hydroponics system, and a big-screen TV by now,” I assured him, “that thing on his neck wasn’t a tattoo. It was moving all on its own.”
“The front door to their trailer looked like someone had attacked it with an ax,” my husband added.
“I bet it did,” I answered, nearly hearing the sounds of another security deposit being kissed good-bye.
Babyless
Nicholas,” my sister said to my nephew over dinner several nights ago, “tell Aunt Laurie what you decided you wanted for your birthday.”
“I can’t,” my five-year-old nephew replied as he sadly shook his head. “Grandma told me that Aunt Laurie doesn’t love me enough to get me what I want.”
“What?” I interjected. “What does Grandma know? She thinks that I was wearing white at my wedding! You just go on and tell me, you know I’ll get you whatever you want.”
“Really?” Nicholas said, suddenly perking up. “Well, then I want a first cousin!”
“Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually about to say what I’m about to say,” I said, completely stunned. “But Grandma’s right.”
I am, unfortunately, at that age.
I’m at the age when I meet girls I went to college with at the mall and they’re pushing baby strollers while I’m pushing my credit card limit. At the age when my peers are planning for maternity leave and I’m planning to fake a pregnancy and a birth so I can have four months off. At the age when I run into friends in the checkout line at toy stores who are buying toys for their children and I’m buying Planet of the Apes action figures for myself. At the age when people—particularly family members—have no shame in asking, “When are you going to have kids? You guys better get busy!”
Frankly, that’s a visual that I could really do without. I mean, the last thing that I want popping into my head when I’m sitting next to my Aunt Rita at a family picnic is a Technicolor picture of myself “getting busy.” You try eating a hot dog after that. Besides, my title in our family is not “child bearer”; that’s my youngest sister’s role, which she has performed magnificently by producing two sons. My other sister is the “do-gooder,” as she meets the challenges every day of educating children, and I am the “black sheep,” a duty I have embraced enthusiastically; I have $3,789 of psychotherapy under my belt and a tragic credit rating to prove it.
Considering the
above, I’m rather comfortable with my childless situation, but it apparently bothers other people. I can tell this as they wonder aloud about why I’m not burning up with baby fever, asking in whispers, “Doesn’t your stuff work?,” “Maybe if you ate less sugar,” and my favorite, “There is a starving baby in China crying for its mommy, and that’s YOU!” My mother is the one driving this bandwagon, despite the fact that it was her name that was signed on the bottom of the checks to both the psychotherapist and the collection agents.
I’m guessing that’s the debt I’m expected to repay in the form of an episiotomy and Lamaze classes.
“It sure would be nice to have a granddaughter,” I’ve heard her mumble as she cast a look in my direction.
“Write me a check for forty thousand dollars and I’ll go to China and get one,” I snapped.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied. “You couldn’t even pass a Spanish class in college, let alone talk to a baby in a language that doesn’t have any letters!”
My mother will never understand why I joined the Babyless Club, checking my ovaries at the door and settling on a life without ever knowing what a belly button with an eight-inch circumference looks like.
The truth is that it was suggested at an early age and backed up with a second opinion during the psychotherapy years that perhaps my genes were not the best possible stock from which to spring progeny and carry forth the family lineage. It’s a well-known fact that black sheep should never have lambs. You know what you get when you take a black sheep and give it a lamb? You get a thing called “supervised visitation,” that’s what.
I mean really, I’m just trying to be honest with myself. I’ve received several signs that I am not the sort of person who should be rearing young, feral or otherwise domesticated. The other day after I came home from the grocery store, I stood before my front door for several minutes straight, repeatedly pushing the car alarm device on my key chain, completely puzzled that my door wasn’t opening while my car horn was blaring thirty feet from me.
The week before that, I felt the need to go number one, so I pulled down my pants and sat down, apparently unaware that I was sitting in my office chair. In my office. Thankfully, good sense shook me awake before I let the river run without the benefit of indoor plumbing beneath me, but for the rest of the day, I was frightened of my own special-ed potential, and kept myself in the house lest my bladder sound the alarm while I was gassing up the car, in the dressing room at Banana Republic, or making a deposit at the bank while simultaneously making a deposit on the floor.
And not too long before that, I was making dinner and searching in the pantry for tostada shells. Then, in a moment of brilliance, I said to myself, “I know! I’ll do a search on Google for ‘tostada shells’ and that will tell me exactly where they are in the pantry!”
What would I do if I lost my baby at a Super Wal-Mart? Run to the computer department, pull up a Google screen, and type in “Where is the black sheep’s lamb, and please don’t anyone call CPS”?
And if that story still doesn’t convince you, here’s an honest-to-God true tale to try on for size: I was a little short of money a while back, and I will be perfectly up front and confess that I was getting ready to write Safeway a hot check. Sometimes, those things cannot be helped, especially if the Kenneth Cole Mary Jane shoes you have had a crush on for four months suddenly, and without warning, are marked off 30 percent. Which means if you buy three pairs, you almost get the third pair free, and I know this for a fact because I made sure to check in with my best friend Jamie, who uses math every day at her job as a microbiologist, so she has to be good at it.
I couldn’t have been happier with my new pair of favorite Mary Janes in black, brown, and another backup emergency pair in black (listen, catastrophe happens—the next time you’re wearing your favorite shoes and a sheet of vomit comes toward you, you’ll wish you had an emergency backup pair, too) until I realized that my breakfast, lunch, dinner, and chocolate allowances for the next fourteen days were metaphorically sitting in my bedroom closet in three identical boxes. So yes, I spent our food money on shoes, but maybe if Safeway had a “buy two get one almost free” sale going on, the story might have ended a little differently.
So, needless to say, I was in a hurry to write my bad check to them and get out of there as fast as possible before someone noticed that I was wearing two weeks’ worth of sustenance on my feet and had nothing in my checking account. The cashier told me the total, and I was fishing around in my purse, hoping to find a pen. This task, though simple, is not easy. My purse, as you might have suspected, is a bit of a black hole. I have always carried large purses, I have never been a tidy-small-purse gal who can only fit a lipstick tube and a house key into hers. Oh, no.
Not me. I have to have a purse large enough so that if Nazis were advancing into my village, I’d have enough room to shove half of my household belongings in there and a bunch of snacks for the trip. It’s that big. I have a thing about being prepared, or at least having the accessories that make you look prepared. Not in the prepared sense that I have enough left over in my budget to buy food every week, but enough that if I were about to be taken prisoner, I would have no trouble finding ample room on my person to bring three pairs of Kenneth Cole shoes, a twelve-pack of Nutty HoHo’s, and perhaps a toothbrush with me.
And in addition to being large, my purse has a lot of stuff in it already, so it therefore acts like a filthy washing machine, in a sense, with objects churning against other objects, which leaves everything with a brown, aged, and somewhat germy patina. My husband, in fact, will not stick his hand in my purse, not to get the car keys or even cipher money because he claims that his hand comes away with tobaccolike flakes under his fingernails and adhered to his cuticles, despite the fact that I quit smoking three years ago and have changed purses six times since then. He calls the residue Insta-Grime; I just call it “urban purse compost.”
All of these factors were now complicating my search for the one writing instrument I knew I had in my purse. But finally, somehow, my fingers felt it—a ballpoint pen with the cap still attached, so I grabbed it and whipped it out of my purse with the ferocity of victory.
Now, unfortunately for me, the pen did not come out alone. In fact, it had a friend with it. A friend named Tampax Deodorant Extra-Extra-Extra Super Size, a friend who had, due to the washing machine effect in my purse, come free of its confines, had escaped from its pink plastic applicator prison, had busted through the plastic wrapper, and had its tail, or rather its string, caught neatly in between the body of the pen and the pen cap.
And, as I whipped the pen out of my purse, the companion tampon came with it. Since its escape it had grown, had fully blossomed to the size of a badminton birdie, its once white and cottony surface now dirty, brown, and mottled with Insta-Grime. The simple, generic, and unlikely action of whipping the pen out of my purse gave the tampon enough of a G-force, gave it a shot of condensed momentum, administered a punch of concentrated energy so forceful that it launched out of my purse in an upward arc on a heartier and faster trip than light or sound has ever taken. Now, given the gift of flight, my dirty, nasty tampon vaulted up and over the ATM terminal of the checkout counter, high and proud, slicing through the air, Matrix-like, WHOOMP WHOOMP WHOOMP, end over end as its little gray cotton tail whipped wildly about behind it.
Six eyes watched the spectacle unfolding before them—the pair that belonged to me, the pair that belonged to the cashier, and the pair that belonged to the bag boy who I had, for quite some time, suspected took the short bus to school or was just a really nice kid, or, as I have established previously, possibly Canadian. Transfixed, horrified, oddly drawn to the liberation of rocket tampon, we were simply unable to tear any of those six eyes away. They trailed the dirty cotton comet as it continued to sail over the counter, hit the wall behind it without a sound, and then dropped to the floor, where it bounced a couple of times before it finally rolled to a stop.
As the other four eyes looked at my two, nobody said a word.
Not a word.
Oh Jesus, I thought to myself as I wrote out that bad check in record time, please don’t let the Canadian delayed kid start playing with my visually revolting feminine hygiene product while I’m still standing here, please God.
I grabbed my groceries and ran out of that store like I had shoplifted a big hunk of expensive cheese or something, leaving my cotton stopper behind like the deserter it was.
I never looked back.
And that is why I should never have kids. That is why. Because my mom never lobbed a sullied Tampax grenade over the checkout stand at the A&P, and I’ll make a fair bet that your mom never did, either. People who cannot control tampons can’t possibly control children. If my mom had ever performed a magic tampon trick like that in my presence when I was a child, I would have turned out a whole lot weirder than I am already, so that’s a lot. I mean, who knows, it could have led to something as drastic in my adult life as listing my occupation as “bead artist,” making my own spirulina pills, or burning incense on a regular, perhaps even daily, basis. Not good.
And I wasn’t alone, either. Most of my closest friends had also committed to a childless existence, and a good percentage of them weren’t even forced to by a judge in a court mandate. We took our cue from my courageous friend Meg, who had decided even before she finished grad school that kids were not for her and her equally revolutionary husband, Bill.
“I want to go on vacation when I want to, I want nice furniture, and I like sleeping for longer than two-hour intervals,” she said. “Babies are not for us. Don’t get us wrong, we love babies, babies are wonderful. We just prefer them at a distance.” Meg, I thought, had a point; so thought a bunch of our other friends. The rest of our lives were gonna be great; my friends and I would be able to vacation together for the rest of eternity, talk on the phone for as long as we wanted without tiny voices interrupting, and we could encourage one another to blow half a month’s worth of food money on shoes because we would never have to look into the hungry eyes of our kids.