I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

by Laurie Notaro

  Now that her call-waiting no longer posed a threat to anyone, you could call Nana at any point in the day, ask her how she was, and she’d say, “Oh, me, I’m fine, but that poor Lynda Carter went to the doctor and guess what he did to her? A bad thing. A very bad thing. Oh God. No one believes her. But it’s true, and now she’s going to have a baby. From the bad doctor. I don’t know what she’s going to do. What a mess!”

  “That’s too bad,” I’d reply. “Where did you see this?”

  “On the television. Crimes of Passion: She Woke Up Pregnant,” Nana says. “It’s a very appropriate title.”

  Or you could be at lunch with Nana, and all of a sudden she’d feel compelled to tell you, “Oh God. Listen to what I found out. Remember that girl from The Partridge Family? The one who played the piano and then when she grew up she became a lawyer? You’ll never believe what happened to her. She was a cocaine addict and then she was foolin’ around with this fellow, and bing! she gets pregnant. Not married, not married. To make matters worse, the little bastard baby was born early and was a drug addict, too! Can you believe that? You would think she would know better, she was a lawyer, but no. I wonder what Shirley Jones said about that, I wonder.”

  “What a shame,” I’d be forced to respond. “And you know this because . . .”

  “Because of the television. Love, Lies, and Lullabies,” Nana would say, shaking her head. “That says it all, doesn’t it?”

  Or I’d be talking to my mother or one of my sisters about a friend who, for example, was having trouble at work, and you could count on Nana to pipe in, “That reminds me of a lady up in Canada who was a truck driver who fought the mob because all of the men in her union were afraid to, but you know, how hard could that have been? Not to take away anything from her story, Mother Trucker, but you know, what kind of mobster lives in Canada? It’s a very polite country and most of the people speak French. I could go and be a mobster there, that’s how nice they are. I bet the ‘mobsters’ up there don’t even kill anybody that gets in their way, they just crank-call them. Besides, how can you eat macaroni with a croissant? That’s just disgusting.”

  Or you could arrive at Nana’s house to pick her up for a family function and get roped into seeing the final, climactic moments of whichever movie she was watching.

  “But you’ve seen Baby Brokers a hundred times,” I once tried to argue.

  “What, are you stupid?” Nana quickly shot back. “Baby Brokers is a show about Cybill Shepherd getting conned when she adopts a baby from a shady, unwed couple! This is Baby Snatcher, that is Nancy McKeon, and she pretended to be pregnant and then stole a baby! They are completely different stories! Cybill Shepherd would never steal a baby!”

  “Maybe Lynda Carter could give Nancy McKeon her doctor’s number,” I suggested. “And then we could get to Mom’s birthday dinner on time.”

  But it was no use arguing, and that, exactly, is how I ended up watching, almost in its entirety, a movie starring Tori Spelling and her croquet-ball boobs about a nave girl whose two-faced boyfriend is a credit card thief, a liar, and, of course, a murderer. When her crafty, nosy mother discovers this and tries to break up the relationship instead of simply telling her daughter, her plan backfires and the boyfriend kidnaps Tori Spelling and takes her to a cabin in the woods in the cinematic magnum opus Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?

  Forty-five minutes later, I was still sitting on the couch and had watched Tori spiral into a dangerous, blind sinkhole of denial, I was still watching as her boyfriend chopped down a log door with an ax to get to his beloved, and I was still watching as she then engineered her brilliant escape by hopping into a curiously and advantageously placed canoe and paddled down a river like Lewis and Clark, although Tori’s river looked suspiciously like it was located in an amusement park in Anaheim.

  It is worth noting that Tori Spelling completes the physical equivalent of a triathlon in this movie, although her boobs have about as much movement as a set of gravestones.

  “God,” even my Nana commented. “Her lentils look like they’re bolted to her rib cage. No wonder she was paddling so fast. She’s not afraid of tipping over. She’ll never drown with those lifeboats under her chin!”

  “I don’t know how you can watch this stuff,” I said blankly. “There must be something better on TV than this. You have almost a thousand stations!”

  “This story wasn’t too good, I agree,” Nana relented. “Tori Spelling was much better in Coed Call Girl, even though she was a real slut then. She’d go with anybody, she wasn’t picky. She should get together with that Partridge Family girl. Slut, meet slut!”

  “I mean this station, Lifetime,” I said, getting a little frustrated. “It’s like the Wounded Woman’s Channel. Everyone gets chased, stalked, hit, becomes pregnant mysteriously, chased with an ax, or gets lured into a ring of prostitution. This isn’t real. Just how many prostitutes have you known?”

  “Um,” Nana thought. “One.”

  “You have not,” I replied. “You’re talking about that one girl who dated your brother Frank before World War Two. She wasn’t a hooker, she just wore red lipstick!”

  “He met her in a bar,” Nana said adamantly. “Pop Pop didn’t meet me in a bar!”

  “She was a singer with the band,” I said. “That didn’t make her a midnight cowgirl! What I’m trying to tell you is that this channel is crap. Can’t you watch something else, like on the History Channel or Discovery?”

  “Listen,” Nana said sharply. “I’m eighty-six years old. I am the History Channel, and if there’s anything on the Discovery Channel that I haven’t already found out, I’ve been doing just fine without it. Believe me. Lifetime is television for women. They say it’s empowering!”

  “You’re watching Tori Spelling paddling down a river with traffic pylons for knockers in Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, Nana,” I had no choice but to say. “If these women were empowered, they’d be making better movies!”

  But really, there was no talking to Nana about upgrading her viewing choices to something palatable, or at least something that didn’t have a “Chinese menu title,” one choice from Group A (Deadly, Dangerous, or Betrayed) teamed with one choice from Group B (Lies, Kisses, or Love), for a name. I simply could not change her mind.

  And now, as I stood in Nana’s living room after getting her panicked message, I listened when she explained that her channel was gone.

  “I tried to turn the TV on after the electricity came back, but all I get is this fuzzy stuff,” she said as she pushed random buttons on her remote control as the screen went from one color of fuzzy to the next. “It’s gone! It’s gone! All of it is gone! Now I’ll never know what happened to Marty Graw’s party or if the mayor told James Garner he’s sorry!”

  “Oh,” I said, understanding what happened. “Your cable has to be reprogrammed. I think all we need to do is turn your actual television to channel four and it should be fine.”

  Miraculously, the picture returned to Nana’s TV, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do! I thought if my TV didn’t come back on I might have to go to your mother’s but that wouldn’t work because she doesn’t watch anything but QVC. And frankly, I can’t stand that show. If I want to buy a blender, no one’s going to force me to do it by putting a stopwatch next to it and yelling every five seconds that my time is running out! And the people that call in, oh my God, to talk about things they’ve bought. I think to myself, how boring does your life have to be before you want to have a conversation about a blender? ‘You know,’ I want to tell them, ‘you know how stupid you look calling a stranger and talking about your pants on TV? “Oh, Kathy, I love my Bob Mackie stretch pants, they’re so nice, they stretch when I sit down, and they dry so fast! I bought a pair in every color!”’ What would make someone do that, I ask you?!”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Maybe her Lifetime TV went out,
too.”

  “And your mother,” my Nana went on, “You know, sometimes when I’m over there and she’s watching that stupid show, I’ll glance over at her and I can tell. She wants to call in. She has that certain look in her eye. She wants to call in and talk about her pants or her blender, too!”

  Nana looked at me and shook her head.

  “And last week, I asked her to lunch on Tuesday, and do you know what she said? She said, ‘I can’t go on Tuesday at noon. Kathy is having a show on Diamonique, the world’s finest simulated gemstone.’ I wanted to tell her, ‘simulated’ and ‘gemstone’ in the same sentence kind of cancel each other out. It’s fake diamonds! Can you believe that? Can you believe that I raised a daughter who spends most of her time in front of the idiot box watching idiots and believing in fake stuff?”

  “Who would have thought?” I simply answered. “Who would have thought?”

  It’s an Idiot Girl!!!

  When I called my parents to tell them that after seven years of trying, I had sold my book to a publishing house, my mother reacted like I had just told her I had saved fifteen dollars off my grocery bill by using double coupons and a Fresh Value card.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s very nice.”

  But really, I shouldn’t have expected anything more or anything less. In my family, nobody wants to know anything unless you’re fine, and if you’re fine, then we don’t need to talk about it any further. We’re devout, practicing, sixth-generation Avoiders, so if you have any problems, you keep them to yourself because everything else is fine. So don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

  “After seven years, Mom!” I cried, trying to push it.

  “I know,” she replied. “That’s what you said! I heard you!”

  “Seven years, Mom!” I repeated, really trying to force the point.

  “ARE YOU ON A CELL PHONE?” she yelled into her receiver. “ARE YOU IN A BAR? WHY CAN’T YOU HEAR ME? HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING THE POT?”

  It didn’t matter, anyway. I knew my mom was happy. For the better part of a decade, she’d borne witness, as all of my family had, to my efforts to get my little book out into the world. Admittedly, I was a nave columnist at my college newspaper when I had collected enough pieces to be considered a book. My book. A finished book. I thought that naturally, I had written a book, now I’ll send it off to the publishing world and get this little book published. After all, why not? I’d gone through all the trouble of writing it! I sat down and printed out my sample chapters, letters of introduction, and contact information on very expensive paper, gently slid the packets into envelopes, addressed them to the seventy book publishing companies across the country, and mailed them off.

  Soon, I was sure, I’d be hanging with Susan Sontag and Fran Leibowitz by the pool, chiding my new pals, “Another margarita for you, Miss Skunk? And you can go ahead and put your hand down, Frannie, you’re not getting another gin and tonic until I see you in a skirt, you cuckoo!”

  James Lipton’s people would leave a message saying that although it’s not standard protocol, they’d love to have me featured on Inside the Actors Studio. I’d start practicing my dramatic looks on cue whenever I heard tragic-sounding music and scribbling a short list of my most adored swear words, accompanied by a coy, shy giggle when I uttered them. In a shocking surprise that reveals just how much in-depth research goes into one of James’s shows, he would demand a serious moment in which he would cock his head slightly to one side and say, “QVC? The first thing you bought with the money from your first bestseller was not a meat preserver, not Bobbi Brown makeup, not a trove of Diamonique, but QVC. All of QVC. And then you gave it to your mother. Tell us.”

  “Well, James,” I’d say bashfully, “she just dreamed of having her own show on QVC, but the network said no. I mean, the woman just wanted to talk about her pants—and she’s given me so much. She’s a giver, you know. She gives and gives and gives. And I” interrupted by a swell of emotion—“excuse me, please. Just one moment, one . . .”—lengthy pause during which I look up and blink several times to regain composure—“and I just wanted to give something back to her. She’s a religious pilgrim, you know. A giver.”

  And then, just when I had narrowed down my favorite profanities to twenty-four in preparation for James’s show, I got to use every last one when I opened a thin envelope and read the letter from a renowned publishing house, one by one.

  Each said I sucked.

  Each said I was “not right for their needs.”

  Each wished me “good luck” in my pursuit to get my book published. And they meant it, the same way my mom meant it when I told her I had finally found a boy that liked me back.

  “What does that mean, I ‘don’t fit their needs’?” I yelled into the air at no one. “The boy who likes me back once said the same thing, but a couple of drinks can change all that!”

  Then, months later, I got a thick envelope in the mail. I clutched it to my chest, my heart churning, smiled, and raced inside my house to open it. I was ready to be redeemed, ready to tell James Lipton my whole painful story, which I had no doubt would bring him to his feet in a rage never before seen on Bravo. Inside, there was no rejection form letter, only a copy of my sample chapters on expensive paper that now had food stains and what looked like the remnants of a bloody nose covering the first page.

  Then, because being a poor, chunky girl with bad skin and Arlo Guthrie hair wasn’t a steep enough incline for a quick slip down my self-esteem slide, I repeated this ritual year after year after year.

  And year after year after year, I still wasn’t meeting anybody’s needs except Hostess’s and Marlboro’s.

  Finally, after seven years of trying to get my own book, I probably should have given up and adopted someone else’s by changing my name legally to Anne Heche or Rosie O’Donnell, because they didn’t seem to have any problem getting a book deal. All Anne Heche had to do was invent her own crazy-person language, run around a cornfield wearing only her bra, and try to talk people into getting on her spaceship. But then I had an idea. I decided to try my own brand of in vitro—I mean, after all, if no one else was willing to give me a chance, maybe I should just do a Wendy Wasserstein and go it alone.

  So I published my own book, sold some copies, and then about nine months later, I got an e-mail from a girl named Jenny. She was a literary agent, had found my DIY book on her own, and was pretty sure she could sell it. I laughed and said I had been trying to do that very thing for seven years. If she wanted to give it a shot, I wasn’t going to stop her, but I issued a supersized helping of “good luck” and didn’t hold my breath.

  Several days after Jenny sent out the book proposal, she called me and said that I had, indeed, finally fit someone’s needs.

  I was going to have a book.

  So I called my family and told them the news, not even believing it myself. After my mother contributed her slightly less than stunning reaction, my dad got on the phone.

  “Can you ask the fellow who said he’d print your book if he can put it in a spot near the Auto Trader at the bookstore?” he asked. “Because if it’s next to the Auto Trader, that’s the place to be. If I was a book, I’d demand to be next to the Auto Trader. Absolutely. That’s when you know you’ve MADE IT.”

  “You know,” I really wanted to tell my father, “retirement-aged men looking for a 1973 Ranchero GT with original paint, no rust, gold with orange/black stripes, 351C 2v, magnum 500’s, AT, AC, PS, PB, new brakes and shocks probably aren’t the typical readers for a book called Idiot Girls,” but I refrained when I heard my mom screeching in the background that she just realized something and that she needed to talk to me again.

  “Is your book going to be like Rosie’s book?” she questioned. “My God, that woman is such a giver. Gives and gives and gives. Just like me. I’m a giver, you know. If it came up for a vote at our church, I’d make her a saint. I told all of my friends to buy that book and look at how good it did. Very good. I also want to know if yo
ur book will contain the F word, because you’d better not use F. ”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t, Mom,” I tried to reassure her.

  “No F, you hear me?” she warned. “Because if you do, I will not tell any of my friends to buy your dirty porno book. And then where will you be? You’ll be F’ed! How do you like that? Rosie didn’t need F in her book! That woman is a giver, you know!”

  “I know, Mom,” I agreed. “Just like you.”

  Prude vs. Nude:

  Why I Hate Kate Winslet

  I don’t believe it, but I think I just might actually hate something more on the face of the earth than Kate Winslet.

  See, my husband has a big thing for Kate Winslet, so big that I have been forced to watch Titanic an unnatural number of times, despite the fact that I have repeatedly suggested that we just fast-forward to the part where she gets naked. Oh, sorry, honey. I meant, “nude.”

  Anyway. I’ve seen every Kate Winslet movie ever made, and let me tell you, that was no picnic. Harvey Keitel is in some of them, you know, and he starts losing clothes, too. I had to eventually revoke my husband’s Blockbuster privileges. I mean, you imagine yourself sitting on the couch in your elastic waistband pants while she’s taking off her top AGAIN. I can’t compete with that. There’s only so much tummy sucking you can do before gravity wants its rightful place back. I thought we had found a happy compromise when Iris came out; after all, it’s about an old writer dealing with Alzheimer’s. There’s no room for nudity with that plot, I thought, but believe it or not, the title wasn’t even on the screen yet before a pair of nipples made an appearance swimming underwater, and guess who they belonged to? I’ll give you a hint: the smile on my husband’s face could not have been bigger if he had just inhaled an entire tank of nitrous oxide.