The Potty Mouth at the Table

by Laurie Notaro

  19. Drinking soda is not the same as drinking water. Your pee should not be the same color as a Ticonderoga pencil.

  20. I lied. Lambskin is from lambs.

  21. When your cousin’s kids send you a graduation announcement, no, it isn’t “just to let you know.”

  22. Despite the fact that it could feasibly work with the right positioning, thou shalt not ever clean the fireplace with a leaf blower.

  23. If you discover your date is sneaking a bottle of water into the movie theater, do not put your hands on your hips and demand to know her plan “for when you get caught. In fact, show me the plan!”

  24. Ovaries are not jazz hands. They cannot flutter and block unwanted things on demand, no matter what the frat boys say.

  25. If you want a lady to love you, call Angelina Jolie’s arms “pipe cleaners” again.

  26. If you can toss the word “diaspora” into a conversation, back that smartness up by remembering to take out the trash (and remembering to bring it back in before you have to bring it back out again, despite the fact that you walk inches from it every time you leave the house).

  27. You should not laugh when your next wife accidentally takes a dog pill and you are chortling so hard when you call poison control that the operator thinks it’s a prank call.

  28. So how did this work out? “I don’t care. That’s fine. That’s fine. My next wife will think my story of reciting Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Mountain Song’ in my high school drama class is cool. Even if I didn’t get to use the element of fire like I asked. She’ll still think it’s cool. Even though she will be way too young to know who Jane’s Addiction is.”

  29. Remember when you said that if you ever got a chance to send a message from beyond it would be: “Frank Burns eats worms”? I’m going to try that, too. You will know that I’m watching you every time you hear someone behind a cash register say “Can I take your order?”

  In closing, my dear husband, if you are still alive now, you’ve already beaten the odds, which means you only have 10,950 brushes with death to go, an average of one a day for roughly thirty years or so. I have tried to train you well, Grasshopper, and with this manual to guide you, I believe that you can live long enough to experience heart disease. I have faith in you. And remember, if anything tastes like it has bubbles in it when it shouldn’t have bubbles in it, like cheese, you should probably stop eating it before you get sick and throw up in a soup bowl you grabbed instead of the trash can.

  Love,

  Your Dead but Still Concerned Wife

  IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN

  Although I played with the idea of reading a book this summer, I just don’t think it’s going to work out.

  I know that’s what all of my friends are doing; I bet every one of them is out there right now scanning the new-release tables at brightly lit bookstores, measuring one brightly colored clever cover against the one next to it, searching for books that look interesting: e.g., anything related to food or booze, any book with Tim Gunn on the cover, and discreetly jacketed, socially acceptable porn.

  But when I thought about it, I realized all I really wanted to do this summer was sit outside and eat chips and dip. That’s my idea of a good time, frankly, and it requires a great deal of focus. The last time I lost my concentration while feeding, I walked around with a chunk of refried beans on my boob until it was jammie time because people apparently thought it was an ugly, awkwardly placed brooch or, more likely, a snack for later.

  Chips and dip require all hands on deck, and if I have one of those hands holding a book, chances are good to excellent that I will lose my focus and grow a bean nipple or at the very least wind up looking a little homeless by the end of the chapter. This is especially true if the book happens to be Wicked because that’s the book I was reading that time when nobody told me about the turd on my shirt. I had just bought tickets to the show, so I decided to read the book first. It was all going well until I got to the munchkin/animal orgy where a little guy goes all cellie on a lion and my mug of hot hot hot coffee completely missed my mouth and hit my neck instead. And I am here to tell you that there is nothing quite like the experience of being over thirty years old and having cashiers look at you, with a blend of confusion and disgust as soon as they spot the hickey on your neck. It’s the same face people make when they can’t tell what smells so bad in the fridge but this experience comes with a visual when they picture which mug shot from Match.com it was who was sucking on your neck.

  So, no. Reading is out for me this summer. Snacking takes precedence.

  Besides, reading can make you blind if you do it too much. It’s totally true. Last summer I was outside reading Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis (yes, the Auntie Mame of the 1950s Rosalind Russell movie fame and it’s hilarious) when I looked up, and all of a sudden, everything went white. Initially I thought: I knew I put too much salt on my lunch! Sandwiches don’t even need salt! What the hell was I thinking? But then, after I cried “Help!” several times and no one answered, even though the windows were open, my sight gradually returned and I saw my husband framed in the kitchen window, regarding me with a thoughtful expression—as if wondering whether or not I came with a return policy. I checked to make sure I had a pulse and then looked out the window to give my husband the thumbs-up even though he’d already walked away, when the blindness struck again.

  “Damn it!” I said. “How many strokes can one person have in a day? It was just a little salt! It’s not like I ate a Lean Cuisine! Plus, I had a vegetable yesterday!”

  As soon as my vision cleared, I looked down at my book again and that’s when it hit me: I was book blind. Scientifically, I don’t know the specifics of the condition or what the medical term for it is, but I am pretty sure I saw a Nova episode about it. And what happens is: the rays from the sun streaming through the window reflect off the book page and char your retinas like a well-done steak, imprinting a photonegative of the page you were reading on the backs of your lids.

  And I don’t want that. I mean, I enjoyed the book very much, but the last thing I want to do is read the same page of Auntie Mame every night before I go to sleep, while “Hurry with my tray, darling. Auntie needs fuel,” repeats on a loop in my mind. Maybe I’d be better off with an iPad, but truthfully, I see what a grease trap my iPhone is and I hate myself each time my french fry of a cheek leaves a rainbow effect on the screen. There’s no way I can deal with an oil spill of that size. I’d have to keep a bottle of Dawn in my purse at all times.

  These were all things I was telling my friend Sebastiane on the afternoon we had just returned from seeing Wicked and she asked me what I was planning on reading this summer.

  “Nothing,” I answered briskly. “I told you: I’m sticking to chips and dip. Reading almost made me blind. Do you know people thought I had a bean nipple?”

  “So you’re not reading anything?” my friend questioned suspiciously. “At all?”

  “No, not one book,” I confirmed, pulling Auntie Mame off the shelf. “But here is the one I was telling you about.”

  “Isn’t that the one that blinded you?” Sebastiane asked.

  “Yes, and I know page eighty-six by heart. I read it every night while I’m waiting for my Ambien high to kick in, and it makes me cry with laughter.”

  Sebastiane squinted. “Were you on Ambien when you read the little-person sex scene in Wicked? Because, you know, that wasn’t in the play. I kept waiting for the pygmy nudity, but even the flying monkeys kept their clothes on.”

  “I’m so glad that wasn’t the page I was reading when I was book-blinded!” I informed her.

  “So what books are you not reading this summer?” she asked.

  “I just got a copy of Stella Gibbons’s Nightingale Wood,” I advised. “It was out of print for fifty years. You should read that and let me know how it is. And I just got a biography of the writer Jean Rhys called The Blue Hour. She goes to prison, abandons her babies, and then turns into a crazy, drunken landlady who attac
ks her tenants! That sounds so good. I think you should read that, too.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh! Americans in Paris about expats who were caught in Hitler’s invasion during World War Two and couldn’t get out. Did you know that Sylvia Beach, the woman who owned Shakespeare and Company—the bookstore where every famous author hung out—was arrested and sent to live in the monkey house of the Paris Zoo during the occupation?

  “Will you promise to read all of those books this summer and then tell me all about them?”

  Sebastiane sighed. “I’ll try,” she agreed. “But I think you should just skip the chips and dip, stay inside, and read them yourself. You love reading! And you love central air, so really it’s a win-win.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. I have a book due in September.”

  “Oh,” my friend said. “I see. So the stuff about snacks, the fear about book blindness, the grease on the iPad—those were all lies? I know the iPhone part is true—why is your skin always so shiny?”

  “I don’t know but I have more creams and soaps and face scrub under that sink than the cosmetics aisle of CVS—that’s not the point,” I countered. “Did you hear anything I just said? Abandoned babies? Drunk landladies? The monkey house? You know if I start reading any of them, I won’t be able to stop myself. And then I won’t make my deadline. And then I’ll have to get a job. And I don’t like jobs.”

  “Right,” Sebastiane conceded, and thought for a moment and then perked up. “I have an idea. Let’s get a bib, some chips and dip, go sit outside, and make your reading list for September. And I’ll bring all of the books home with me to remove the temptation.”

  “Deal,” I said. “I’ll make the margaritas.”

  Sebastiane looked at me disapprovingly, though I know she secretly wanted one, too.

  “What? I’m thirsty,” I explained. “I’ll start writing tomorrow . . .”

  WHO SAID IT WAS DONUT TIME?

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  I hadn’t seen anything like it since my little dog Maeby trotted into my friend Kartz’s house, stopped, squatted, and deposited a compact, medium-size log in the middle of a giant white wool flokati rug. She was very officious about it, as if it were standard protocol for a dignitary visiting a small, primitive land that suddenly tapped a relentless supply of oil and knew it.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. First and foremost, let it be said that I’ve thrown a lot of parties. As a result, I’ve had experience with all sorts of party guests: the one who stays long after everyone who could have possibly offered him a ride home has left; the one who knocks a full beer all over your living room rug and simply watches—still standing in the spill, still wearing her Halloween pig mask—as you hunker down on all fours and try to sop it up; or the ones who help themselves to several bottles on the wine rack that weren’t meant to be imbibed by already drunk people, especially those you’ve never met before.

  As a hostess, I’ve learned that when you invite others—both strange and familiar—into your home, be as prepared as you would be for a Mongol invasion. Some people automatically assume that everybody rents her home, and that whatever you destroy, pee on, or set on fire at someone’s house will be covered by a mythical security deposit.

  I’ve also learned that a good offense is only as effective as the locks on your bedroom door, the level of childproof difficulty on the tops of your prescription bottles, and your ability to head off a situation before you’re kneeling at Pig Girl’s feet with a yellow dish towel in a scene plucked right out of a David Lynch movie.

  However, I always thought that the act of hiding the after-dinner course was something that only happens on Intervention after the girl who gets hysterical when she sees a refrigerator counts out the six peas and four salt flakes she allows herself for dinner. Of course, you need to hide the good liquor and the Dilaudid that was the prize from your last kidney infection—of course you do, but donuts? Who the hell hides donuts? What kind of nut hides donuts?

  Well, apparently, I do. Apparently I am the kind of nut who will put in the effort to camouflage the donut boxes with a stack of empty Tostitos and Lay’s Potato Chip bags. I am that nut. Because I’ve learned from past mistakes that if you don’t hide the three dozen donuts you bought from the best donut place on Earth, you never know what will happen.

  You never know when you’re going to walk into your kitchen with the last of the dinner plates cleared and see the last bite of a donut slide down the gullet of a forager who sniffed out the irresistible scent of a bacon maple bar with more precision than a cadaver dog, hours before you planned on serving them, despite an excessive amount of trash on top of the boxes because you had a feeling. You had a feeling that a certain somebody was going to wait until the kitchen emptied and the coast was clear to embark on a search-and-destroy mission to pick out the very best donut underneath all the fake trash and try to devour it like a crocodile inhales a wildebeest in the seconds you’ve been gone.

  Legs and all. A crispy fried hoof shaped like a bacon strip still sticking out her mouth.

  At least when I caught my dog acting like she was in a barnyard, she had the decency to look away when I pointed and gasped.

  Now, before I describe how quickly the situation disintegrated, I think I need to explain that I was the one who called and placed the donut order; I was the one who selected the perfect combination out of forty-two possible flavors; I was the one who made the executive decision to end the night on a sugar high in perfect party harmony; I was the one who went downtown to pick them up, circling the block five times before I found a parking spot; I was the one who paid for them and then carried fifteen pounds of party harmony back to the car; I was the one who pushed them all the way to the darkest corner of the breakfast nook and placed every piece of detritus with excruciating precision and a subtle eye for disorder so as not to attract attention, much in the way a bear caches a camper with a flimsy tent. And on top of all that, I was the one who was called a “Stingy Pregnant Cow” when I didn’t give the homeless ruffian on the corner a dollar for his trouble of getting enough face tattoos to render him unable to work at anything but creating a cardboard sign that says “I’ll be honest: I’m gonna buy vodka with it.”

  All of that being said, I don’t think that my stopping dead in my tracks and demanding “Who told you it was Donut Time?” was a particularly outrageous thing to do, although it did not prevent the offender from swallowing, then marching back to the other party guests and declaring that I had just yelled at her.

  That was not yelling. It was not yelling. Everyone knows the Act of Yelling must include a hand movement in order for it truly to be classified as Yelling, which would be impossible, since both of my hands were firmly planted on my hips.

  In the future, I have decided that party-goods camouflage is not a strong enough security system if Dog the Donut Hunter is prowling around your kitchen armed with a search warrant and a pair of handcuffs from the Spy Store. Clearly, a layer of garbage is not enough of a deterrent to stop some people from clawing through it, particularly if a pork product is somehow involved. I mean, hey, I smelled them, too, in the private quarters of my car. They were strapped into the passenger seat; they couldn’t escape, but I stopped myself from digging in by envisioning party guests recoiling at the sight of donuts with thumbprints fossilized in the icing like the footsteps of early man stamped across a mud plain, or teeth marks scraped into the frosting like a beaver to a log. So I compromised and took the one on top without messing up anything to the side or below, but I paid for them and I didn’t even particularly like the one I took.

  In order to prevent another dessert attack from recurring, I realized I needed to draw up alternate plans. I thought about stashing the dessert items in a secure area, like my underwear drawer or the bathtub; although, truth be told, the bathtub has not proven to be such a sacred, restricted area in the past. The truth of the matter is, if someone’s going to crawl into a dark corner and paw at trash in order
to be the first (or second) one to snag a donut, only a surge of electrical current will stop them, and the clause in my homeowner’s umbrella policy is a little vague for my comfort level.

  I honestly don’t know whether there’s a solution to this problem, other than reverting to animal instinct and marking my territory with a litter box or a spray of coyote urine to discourage predators. But then the donuts would be ruined for pretty much everybody (believe me: there would still be at least one taker) and all that effort you put into attaining perfect party harmony through donut consumption will have been for nothing. But the next time someone discovers a donut box buried under trash in my Intentionally Dark Breakfast Nook, that person better look before fingering.

  There just might be a fragment of a used flokati rug that I purchased from a friend with a little brown item deep inside the box that isn’t exactly maple glazed.

  YELP ME

  All I really wanted to do was order a pizza.

  That’s all I wanted to do.

  I didn’t want to get into a sparring match with anonymous assholes on the Internet, I didn’t want to argue about libel laws, and I certainly didn’t want to enter a metaphysical debate concerning my entire existence with people who actually take time out of their lives to write a review of Olive Garden for fun and post it online.

  Then again, that’s what happens when you enter the arena of Roman-inspired public games on Yelp: before you know it, shut-ins who only venture outside to eat and then race right home to post their reviews are calling for your head on a flagpole.

  Like I said, I was only planning to order a pizza from a new Italian restaurant near our house. We had been there once before and the pizza was great—chewy crust, perfect sauce, mozzarella made by the owner every day. It was the closest thing to New York–style pizza in our neighborhood. And who doesn’t like a great new pizza place? It’s like discovering gold in your basement, or finding out that in the time it takes to pull on your Spanx, you will actually lose thirty pounds with a couple of deep breaths, some friction burns, and a sprained thumb—nothing but pure awesome as far as the eye can see—and no one has the right to mess with that.