I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

  “A pilgrimage, huh?” I had asked. “You might want to buy Dramamine at Costco this time. You threw up for the whole three weeks of that Princess cruise, so sailing on the Mayflower should be a very enjoyable trip for you.”

  “That’s not funny,” she responded. “It’s a religious mission and I’m going with people from church because your father got a little aggravated about my nausea on the last cruise and said the only trip he would ever take with me again would be out to dinner.”

  “Make sure to pack your buckle shoes.” I giggled. “And a big white collar.”

  “This is nothing to joke about,” she continued quite seriously. “We’re staying at Father John’s house and it’s supposed to be clean, but I’ll tell you right now, if I so much as spot a fly, I’m booking myself into the first Super Otto I find. The last thing I need is a big, filthy foreign Italian bug crawling into my head!”

  “Hey, bring some beads to trade with,” I added. “And don’t forget your wampum!”

  “I’m not laughing, Laurie,” she informed me. “And Saint Francis isn’t cracking a smile, either!”

  So when my mother called when she came back, I was kind of shocked but very intrigued.

  “Did you have fun on your pilgrimage?” I asked coyly. “Did you eat a lot of turkey?”

  “I,” my mother said slowly, “had a wonderful time. I had a wonderful time. For the most part. As long as I knew where I was, I had a wonderful time.”

  “What do you mean?” I prodded.

  “Well, I got a little lost,” she added quietly.

  “You got lost in Italy?” I questioned, trying not to laugh.

  “It’s not that big a deal, it’s just that when you suddenly find yourself on a dirt road in the middle of an Italian nowhere, dragging a heavy saint behind you and it starts to get dark, it’s a little frightening, that’s all,” she replied.

  “Do me a favor,” I insisted, “and start from the beginning. I want the biggest laugh potential possible.”

  Apparently, during some time off from being a pilgrim, my mother and her friends decided to walk around Assisi, get a bite to eat, and then I’m sure secretly try to find a TV that had QVC on it. After lunch, they came upon a little shop in which my mother spied a statue of Saint Francis that she absolutely had to have. Because my mother hadn’t purchased anything aside from a meal in approximately thirty-six hours, compulsion overtook her starved shopping-addict self. She suddenly found herself paying for Saint Francis, despite the fact that he was no ordinary little statue. No, no, no. How could he be? In his three-foot-tall glory, Saint Francis was a cast-stone, twenty-five-pound reminder of my mother’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land and inability to access a twenty-four-hour shopping network.

  When she and her friends left the shop with my mother’s purchase in tow, they discovered that they had wandered into unfamiliar territory and had no idea of how to get back to Father John’s place. One friend voted to try and retrace their steps, but my mother suggested getting on a bus since the town wasn’t really that big and every other bus they had been on had stopped right in front of Father John’s house. I’m sure that hauling around a religious relic as heavy as a couple of barbells had absolutely no influence on her desire to avoid hiking it back to their accommodations. Not at all.

  So they got on a bus, happy to have someone take them to their destination. It was never really clear to me at what point my mother’s blood pressure started to rise, but I would assume that it was somewhere around the time the bus had not only not stopped at Father John’s house but had ventured out of town and my mother hadn’t seen a house, a building, or a man-made structure for about fifteen minutes.

  I think that’s a pretty fair assumption of when she freaked out.

  “I did not freak out!” she told me stubbornly. “I simply stood up and told the man he was going the wrong way. That is not freaking out!”

  I was trying too hard not to laugh to answer.

  “But he wasn’t listening to me, either he couldn’t hear me or he didn’t speak English, so I figured it out in Italian,” she told me.

  Considering that the only thing my mother could actually decipher in Italian would be a menu at the Olive Garden and an assortment of unsavory phrases she learned when my relatives got drunk on holidays, I was eager to hear her translation.

  “So I said to him, ‘Papa Giovanni’s casa THAT WAY,’ and pointed back toward the town,” she said. “Any idiot could have understood that. Right? Am I right? But he just kept on driving, so I said it a couple more times, and finally I went up to him and showed him. ‘Papa Giovanni’s casa THAT WAY!! Papa Giovanni’s casa THAT WAY!’ and I mean, it couldn’t have been any more clearer than that. Honestly. I was pointing and everything.”

  Now, from what I understand, it was at precisely that point that the bus driver stopped the bus and, as my mother put it, “let us off.”

  “You got kicked off the bus?” I replied, unable to contain my laughter. “The bus driver kicked you off the bus?”

  “I did not say that,” my mother was careful to point out. “That is not what I said. I said he let us off. He stopped the bus, opened the door and . . . let us off.”

  “Oh, okay, sure, Mom,” I replied sarcastically. “Where did this happen? Where did he ‘let you off’?”

  “Well, I don’t think it was a regular stop,” my mother said slowly. “There was no sign or anything. It was in the middle of some sort of field.”

  “A field? What kind of field?” I pushed. “A cornfield, or a field of poppies like in The Wizard of Oz?”

  “How the hell do I know?” my mother snapped. “I’m from New York. A field is a field. I don’t know what the hell kind of field it was! There were just a lot of leaves and things!”

  “I suspect that this is where the dirt road comes in,” I ventured.

  “Yes!” she said excitedly. “He let us off on a dirt road. So we got off and started to walk, and after a little while—”

  “You met a talking scarecrow and were attacked by flying monkeys?” I interjected.

  “Anyway,” my mother continued, “Saint Francis started to get heavy, and I couldn’t drag him anymore, so we had to take turns. Finally, we came upon a caf, but they were all watching a soccer game and nobody gave two shits that we were lost. So we went back out onto the dirt road and walked the rest of the way into the town, dragging that poor Saint Francis the whole way behind us, getting filthy from the dirt. I’m sure we looked like refugees.”

  “Well, naturally. If I was being run out of my home,” I admitted, “the first thing I’d pack would be a midget-size concrete statue of a man in sandals and a hood cradling a deer.”

  “That’s when I saw an American-looking man, and I thought, ‘Thank God, finally, someone who will know where he is,’ ” she continued, ignoring me. “But when I talked to him, it turned out he was English!”

  “You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “A European in . . . Europe?”

  “You know what I mean,” she hissed. “He pointed us right to Father John’s house. And you’ll never guess what.”

  “He was Prince Charles!” I guessed.

  “Father John’s place was just right around the corner from the shop where I bought Saint Francis, we just made one wrong turn,” she said. “We were only a block away. Can you believe that?”

  “I believe that vomiting isn’t the only reason Dad won’t go on vacation with you anymore,” I said.

  “But that’s not the end of the story,” she continued, and went on to explain that she put Saint Francis in her big suitcase, and indeed, he fit, since my mother travels like it’s the turn of the century, with the modern equivalent of steamer trunks and a season’s worth of clothes. She packed him carefully, with her softest clothes all around him to make sure he’d be safe for the trip home.

  “But when I opened that suitcase when I got home,” my mother related, “that Saint Francis had lost his damned head! Came right off and I found it rolling aroun
d in my underwear! Can you believe it? After I carried him on the bus and then dragged him all over that dirt road, he gets decapitated in my luggage! God help me. It’s okay, though. Daddy fixed it with some superglue and you can’t even tell.”

  So, after I signed the credit card slip to pay for my mother’s Christmas present, you see, I couldn’t help but laugh as the clerk looked round and finally came up with the biggest bag she had. After she deposited the gift into it, I nearly had to drag it to the car and then pulled a groin muscle so violently that I swear I heard it rip as I lifted the bag into the backseat.

  It was all worth it, however, the moment my mom opened the big box I had wrapped for her. She fumbled around in the tissue paper and Styrofoam peanuts I had packed into it, and she smiled as she saw the foot of a sandaled man and realized the statue was holding a deer.

  “It’s Saint Francis!” she said. “Oh my God, it’s a whole Saint Francis! Just like the other one, but whole!”

  Then she leaned in closer to the box as she struggled to lift up the statue. “What’s that?” she said, motioning to the tag that was tied around Saint Francis’ neck.

  She lifted it and read it: If I have lost my head again, check in your panties, but don’t worry. Daddy can fix me with some superglue and you won’t even be able to tell.

  Not in My Lifetime

  Oh, thank God!” Nana cried as I opened her front door and walked into her living room. “I didn’t think that anyone was going to come and help me! Oh, thank God, Laurie, thank God! I was so worried! I didn’t know what to do!”

  Honestly, my Nana didn’t know the meaning of the word “worried.” No, she did not. I, unfortunately, knew it perfectly well. Approximately thirteen minutes earlier, I had come home from shopping and played back my messages on the answering machine, only to find a harrowing recording of my Nana, who was apparently in some sort of agony.

  It was evident that something was wrong immediately, since Nana’s typical messages go something like this:

  “Laurie? [insert silent pause that stretches out for four seconds, as if she’s waiting for my answering machine to develop the intelligence necessary to reply: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four] It’s Nana. I don’t want to bother you. [one thousand one, one thousand two] Am I bothering you? Laurie? It’s NA-NA. Are you there? I don’t know if you’re there or not. Laurie? Maybe you’re not there. Are you there? [one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three] I wonder when you will be home. Are you home? Huh. [one thousand one, one thousand two] Huh. Well, that’s weird. Click.”

  The message I had just received was a different animal altogether, completely and entirely.

  “Laurie!! It’s Nana. NA-NA!! Are you there? Laurie? It’s NANA!!! Oh no, oh no! Laurie, I need help! Help! [one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four] Oh God! Click.”

  Naturally, I was a little unnerved. Actually, that’s an understatement. I was completely freaked out and as I tried to dial Nana’s number, my hands were shaking so badly that I missed several digits and had to redial, only to get a busy signal, which is what happens in the movies when the loved one you’re trying to call back is just about to be attacked with a weed whacker by a serial killer.

  Beep beep beep.

  And of course Nana doesn’t have call-waiting, because if she can’t even remotely handle talking into a telephone accessory belonging to someone else, you can image the amount of damage she inflicted when she tried to operate one of her own.

  For the three torturous, tense weeks that Nana had call-waiting, it was like Telephone Olympics in my family. The endurance required of all of us was simply inhuman, because she could absolutely not grasp the concept of a “beep in” or a “click over.” She believes that beep to mean that her phone time has run out, her limit has been reached. Despite repeated efforts in Call-Waiting Counseling by my sisters and myself, if you were talking to Nana and she heard the beep, real or imagined, the next thing you’d hear is a click. She would simply vanish, believing if she heard a beep, and this was any beep, it didn’t necessarily have to be coming from the phone (car alarms and the signal from the Emergency Broadcast System also fell into the General Beep category), she understood the conversation was over. This didn’t mean, however, that she had successfully reached the other caller. If you were the one unknowingly beeping in on a preexisting phone call, you would immediately hear various numbers being pushed and a voice, roughly at least eighteen inches away from the phone mouthpiece, say, “—damn stupid thing, I don’t know how the hell they talked me into this, how do you work it, is this the button you push? BEEP. Is this the button? BEEP BEEP. I’m pushing the button, is this working, hello? BEEP. THIS IS NA-NA!” and then hear the tones of a 7, maybe a 2, being pushed before she flatly hung up on you.

  So we had to relinquish Nana’s call-waiting rights. I mean, it had to be done. What choice did we have? Our nerves were shot. It was either kill Nana or kill the call-waiting, but something had to go. Then, my younger sister has the genius brain bubble to get Nana caller ID, and that didn’t last long after we found out that Nana had been calling the phone company to complain that “Una Vailable” had been calling her incessantly and Nana had absolutely no idea just who that lady was. In fact, it was such a violation of Notaro Family Code that we nearly took away my sister’s phone as punishment and a lesson to us all.

  Beep beep beep.

  With Nana’s phone line busy for a consecutive seven minutes, I decided that there was no time to waste and I grabbed my car keys and headed out to the freeway.

  I panicked the whole way there as several grisly scenarios shot through my head, but nothing could prepare me for the horror I found when Nana met me at the door. Not the thought of Nana being overcome by Clorox fumes as she vigorously scrubbed away on an already pristine bathtub; not the thought of one of her body parts or, if curiosity got the better of her, possibly an eyeball, getting sucked up by her Electrolux as she vacuumed her already unsullied carpet; not the thought of her getting nearly decapitated by the massive, plastic hinged lid of the community Dumpster after she tossed in her weekly contribution of “Who Needs This Crap?” which could very easily consist of valuable World War Two memorabilia, newspaper headlines documenting the last six decades’ worth of historical events that my grandfather had spent years collecting, or even her wedding dress.

  Nothing.

  Because when I walked through that door, there stood my Nana, pale, clammy, and shaking, clutching the remote control in her hand.

  “Oh God,” Nana cried as she put her free hand to her head. “You have no idea what I have been through. No idea. I was just sitting here, watching the television about how New Orleans just had a big earthquake and now it’s sinking when all of a sudden I heard a big noise outside! At first, I thought it was part of the story about New Orleans, because I tell you, was that a mess? That was a mess! People running, screaming, crying, bloody, all over the place! What a nightmare. Big crashes, like the one I heard outside, and Laurie, I tell you, no one was doing anything! The only one doing anything was James Garner, because he warned the mayor of New Orleans about this, way in advance, I guess he had a feeling about it, you know? But did anyone listen? No! And now, it was all up to James Garner to save the city and he was dragging a pregnant lady out of a burning building when I heard that big noise outside! He was at his friend Marty’s party, too, when all of this happened but he left to save people’s lives. But his friend Marty Graw’s get-together was a disaster, just a disaster. Imagine having a party and all of a sudden everyone is bleeding and has broken legs? Poor Marty Graw! After I heard the noise outside, I went to the TV to see if James Garner had saved the pregnant lady, but my television was off and my electricity had gone out!”

  Upon first hearing about the sad, tragic, and apparently avoidable destruction of New Orleans, my blood pressure shot up, but then I remembered who I was talking to.

  “Okay, now when New Orle
ans had the earthquake on TV,” I said slowly, “did you see Tom Brokaw, or did you just see James Garner?”

  Nana paused for a moment. “What the hell would Tom Brokaw be doing in New Orleans?” she said, looking very puzzled. “Now how could he be there? I’m sure he had to be on the news that night, he can’t be running around the country every time the ground shakes a little!”

  “And you weren’t watching CNN or anything?” I questioned.

  “See An End?” Nana replied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was watching television, I told you!”

  “Lifetime Television,” I added.

  “It’s Television for Women,” Nana added proudly. “And I can’t get it anymore! When the lights went out after the boom, the screen went dark. And now, the lights are back on, but my Lifetime is gone. It’s gone and I don’t know what to do! Help me get it back! Help me! The TV has been out for almost fifteen minutes and who knows what’s going on in New Orleans by now! It may have sunk into the ocean, because James Garner said that was a possibility, you know!”

  Honestly, I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew I had a mammoth problem on my hands because after we revoked Nana’s phone accessory rights, we all kind of felt bad, so we got her cable TV. It made sense that if all she had to work was a remote control, the disasters that resulted would be containable, hardly anyone, family members and strangers alike, could get offended, and it would occupy her at the same time.

  And boy, oh boy, did it. Once Nana found Lifetime Television, hardly anything else existed. One-time staple favorites such as Golden Girls and Touched by an Angel (although the official Nana version of those shows are, respectively, Old and Girls and An Angel Is Touching Me) took a backseat to any movie starring the reigning HRH of melodrama, Susan Lucci, and also applied to court attendees Lindsay Wagner, Melissa Gilbert, Harry Hamlin, and Corbin Bernsen. If a baby-stealing ring was involved, even JAG (Jack) was in danger.