Have a Nice Guilt Trip

by Lisa Scottoline

Bottom line, it’s a big garden, so I got a great handyman, Dale, to help me, which is what you do when you’re divorced.

  You hire a husband.

  Anyway the first thing Dale said was, “there’s a machine that takes off sod.”

  Oh.

  So we found out the machine was called a sod cutter, and we rented one right away and started cutting the sod, which is the garden equivalent of scalping your grass.

  It took all day, cutting and hauling the sod, then raking the bed so no grass seeds were left. Then we started putting in plants, with Dale doing the manly work of digging and me doing the girly work of putting in the potting soil and covering the hole.

  I was a cover girl.

  Yay!

  Next mistake, we used up all the plants I had bought on sale, and still had two-thirds of the garden left. The online plants still weren’t here, so I went back to the garden center and bought more plants.

  Hard labor but worth it.

  Three times.

  I no longer consulted the books.

  I bought any perennial that wasn’t nailed down.

  I would have planted a file cabinet if they’d let me.

  But now I’m finished, and it looks beautiful, and it was worth all the trouble, like a brand-new baby.

  Who remembers their labor anyway?

  Okay, I do.

  Mother Nature Is a Bad Mom

  By Lisa

  I started gardening to get closer to Mother Nature, but now I hate her.

  Perhaps hate is too strong a word.

  Let’s just say that we’re frenemies.

  Because it turns out that Mother Nature is the ultimate mean girl.

  Let me explain.

  A few weeks ago, I planted and mulched a large perennial garden, which took five days of hard labor and was worth every minute. I had no idea how much I would love this garden, which was lush, fragrant, and colorful, blooming with purple hyssop, blue plumbago, pink roses, yellow and pink coneflower, black-eyed Susans, lavender, and daises.

  You get the idea. It’s pretty.

  I watered it with sprinklers, probably too often, and I took tons of photos of it, probably too many.

  It was like I had a new baby. I did everything but breast-feed it.

  Because of the bees.

  Ouchie.

  At night, I went out and watched the butterflies flutter to and fro. Bluebirds and wrens visited, and even two baby foxes came and tumbled around, adorably. I even took the time to smell the roses.

  Literally.

  They smelled great, and because the garden was right in front of my front door, its gentle fragrance wafted through the screen door.

  In other words, it was all rainbows and sunshine, like My Little Pony but without the Pony.

  I emailed one of my friends a garden photo, and she replied, “What about the deer?”

  But I wasn’t worried. I figured the deer were too busy eating the apples from my apple tree, so I figured they wouldn’t bother my garden. Also, I always felt as if I had an understanding with the deer, since I like them and don’t allow hunting at all.

  I even saved a fawn once, whom I named Fawn Hall.

  And I love Bambi.

  So you know where this is going.

  I woke up one morning, and my garden was green.

  But only green.

  No more rainbow, no more colors, no more sweetness and light. There were almost no flowers at all. I went outside in disbelief, and the garden consisted of leafy sticks. Deer had eaten most of the flowers.

  Okay, I should have known.

  But I didn’t. When people complained about deer, I thought they were exaggerating.

  And my first impulse was to kill deer, as many as possible.

  Just kidding.

  Mother Nature 1, Scottoline 0.

  I calmed myself down, went to the store, and got a bottle of deer repellant made by a company called I Must Garden. I sprayed it on the stalks not because I Must Garden, but because I Must Win.

  Or because I Am Smarter Than Deer.

  Or because I Worked Too Hard on This Stupid Garden to Stop Now.

  I never knew how deer repellent works and figured it was some mysterious alchemical mixture.

  Wrong again, rookie.

  I read the label and learned that it was “all natural,” made of: “Putrescent whole egg solids, garlic, clove oil, and white pepper.”

  In other words, now I have a garden of green stalks that smells like garbage, topped with Caesar dressing.

  No more lovely floral fragrance wafting into the house. I closed the door and dead-bolted it, to keep out the stench.

  I may duct-tape the windows.

  Mother Nature 2, Scottoline 0.

  Enter more Nature, in the form of weeds.

  By the way, deer don’t eat weeds.

  Thanks, Bambi.

  And when I say weeds, I mean weeds, and tons of them. They sprouted everywhere through the mulch allegedly purposed to keep them down.

  So now I get to go outside and weed like crazy. I can’t tell the weeds from the plants, except that there are way more weeds than plants, and everything in the garden smells like puke.

  Game, set, and match to Mother Nature.

  Make It Twerk

  By Francesca

  The word “twerking” was just added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

  Does that mean I have to acknowledge it’s a real thing?

  I hate twerking. I hate the word. I hate the motion. I hate the craze.

  I’d like to claim, and often do, that this is some sort of feminist stance. But I fear the real reason I hate twerking is more petty:

  I can’t do it.

  I secretly consider myself a pretty great dancer. That’s a risky thing to put in print, because I have zero training or recognizable dance skills to back it up. I’m sure there are small children on TLC who could put me to shame. My sole qualifications are that I fully commit, have a blast, and I think I can throw down. For most dancing scenarios, that’s really all you need.

  If you approach a dance move with the attitude, “mm-hm, watch this!” I guarantee you will execute it well enough to delight those around you. Dancing is simply the result of too much positive energy to remain standing, so don’t let anything kill the buzz.

  I’ve never been a shrinking violet on the dance floor. In college, I didn’t do a single drug, and I never once blacked out or vomited from alcohol. Instead, I danced on tables with little to no prodding. I could do it completely sober. During my freshman year, if you turned up the music, no elevated surface was safe.

  I had somehow missed the slut-shaming memo that this was a “bad” thing to do. To me it seemed perfectly reasonable, even prudent. I could dance and have fun while staying safely out of reach of drunk guys and their grabby hands.

  I took playing hard to get literally and made myself hard to reach.

  How was I supposed to know this was the international symbol of train-wreck party girls the world over?

  Eventually, I succumbed to societal pressure/gravity and put my table-dancing days behind me, but I’m not ashamed.

  As Rizzo said, there are worse things I could do.

  So I can’t blame my morals for keeping me from twerking. Nor could anyone accuse me of lacking twerk-ethic. Believe me, I’ve spent some time in front of my bedroom mirror trying to get it. But my booty doesn’t achieve that independent, lava-lamp jiggle. Instead, my butt does some sort of mechanical up-down motion, as if Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride took you through the Red Light district.

  Plus, I get tired.

  And I’m bummed!

  I want to be able to twerk and then reject it on principle, not the other way around. Twerking challenges my self-view, so it’s only logical that I hate it.

  This isn’t the first time my dance-star illusions have been dispelled. I remember the night my new boyfriend casually mentioned that his ex-girlfriend was a dancer.

  Modern dancing, that
is, so you can’t even snark it.

  Normally I’m a paragon of well adjustment when it comes to my significant others’ ex-flames; the past is past, and I don’t let it get to me. But something about her being a professional dancer brought up more insecurity for me than usual.

  My best friend completely understood. “A dancer? Ugh, that’s the worst! I’d rather she was in MENSA.”

  I’m fit, but I don’t have a hard body by any definition. And I am comically inflexible; I worked up to touching my toes last year. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to feel bad about these deficiencies. Sex is best done lying down for a reason, folks.

  But if my boyfriend dated a dancer, I feared he might be into freaky, Cirque du Soleil stuff in bed—spins and tumbling and French people in funny hats and … clowns.

  Thankfully, we agree on saving the clowns for special occasions.

  Right around this time, a girlfriend of mine got me a gift certificate to attend a dance class for my birthday. She said the class was beginner-friendly and the instructor was great. I was excited—I thought it would be a fun workout and a great way to get my groove back. I picked out a Flashdance-inspired outfit to wear, and we headed up to the dance studio in Midtown.

  Well, guess what?

  I sucked.

  Like, unbelievably bad. My friend struggled, too, but not like I did. Everything the teacher demonstrated was too fast for me. My feet were not cooperating. I confused my left and my right. I turned around a beat too soon and faced everyone’s back. I was so much worse than I thought. It was humiliating.

  Choreographed dancing is nothing like shaking it on the dance floor. It’s all counting and memorization; it felt more like math than like fun. I hated it. And I hated being bad at it.

  But I stuck it out, huffing and puffing, trying my best. I had given up on attempting to follow the teacher and was mainly watching a tall brunette behind me in the mirror as she expertly executed every move.

  During one of the teacher’s all-too-rare breaks, I turned around to the girl and said, between my heaving breaths, “I just want to apologize that you have to stand near me, because I know I am terrible. It’s super helpful for me to watch you, but I’m probably messing you up. You’re really amazing.”

  She laughed and shook her head, even tossing her hair with rhythm. “No, you’re fine. It’s a hard routine. We’ve been working on it all month.”

  “Huh?”

  Are you twerking kidding me?

  I looked around at the other girls with new eyes. I wasn’t defective; they just knew the routine already! This truth didn’t make me any better of a dancer, but it did make me a little kinder to myself.

  A few weeks later my boyfriend and I went to a wedding together for the first time. When dinner had been cleared and the DJ got going, he asked me if I wanted to dance. The thought did cross my mind—this is a guy who can call your bluff.

  But then I figured, ah, twerk it.

  We danced to every song the DJ played. I shimmied, I twirled, I snapped, I shook, we slow-danced, we swing-danced, we salsa-ed, we jumped, we bumped, we grinded, we electric-slided. After they played that last song, I all but collapsed into a dining chair, sweaty, exhausted, and happy beyond measure.

  My boyfriend crashed next to me. “You,” he said, catching his breath, “are a great dancer.”

  I shook my head. “Not really. I just try to have fun.”

  Without twerking.

  Gangrene Thumb

  By Lisa

  You may recall I mentioned earlier that I water my garden too much.

  That problem is now solved.

  Because I’m out of water.

  Our story begins when I noticed that the water pressure in my house is low.

  Hmm.

  By the way, I have well water. We live like pioneers in our township, which has no police, fire, or garbage removal, though I don’t have to sew the American flag.

  Thanks, township!

  Anyway, the water level in my well generally goes down when there’s no rain, but it was getting worse and worse until I realized that something must be wrong in the springhouse.

  If you don’t know what a springhouse is, welcome to the club.

  All I know is that it’s a picturesque little shed that houses where the water comes up from the well. More than that I can’t explain, because I have no understanding of how my springhouse works. I never go in there because it’s damp, dark, and scary, like a basement on steroids.

  I called the plumbers who specialize in wells and they wanted me to show them the springhouse, so I was shamed into going in. Inside were strange black gauges, weird blue tanks, and two body-size open trays of water, which is the water I drink, evidently lying around all day and night, so that bugs, snakes, paramecium, and God-knows-what-else can swim around in it before it finds its way into the glass that I put to my parched lips.

  Delicious.

  The plumbers inspect the well and say that it’s fine, so we all leave the springhouse and troop around the lawn to solve the mystery of why I have no water. You don’t have to be Nancy Drew to notice that the grass in my front yard, near the garden, is surprisingly soggy.

  Uh-oh.

  So we go find the faucet for the garden hose, which is in the garage, and the plumbers guess that the pipe must be leaking under the garage, since it was never used until I put in this stupid garden. They say it must have been corroding, but the corrosion was holding it together.

  Like me.

  Anyway, we trace the leak backwards to the basement under the garage, which is another place I never go because it’s damp, dark, and scary, like a springhouse on steroids.

  As soon as we open the door, we see that the basement brims with water. Pieces of wood, broken glass, and kreplach float by.

  Long story short, we call in the plumbers who specialize in flood damage and they use three pumps to pump the water out of the basement. They figure out where the leak is in the pipe, but also surmise it can’t possibly be causing the soggy grass. In other words, I have two leaks in two pipes, caused by watering the garden!

  Yay!

  We call in a third set of plumbers who specialize in second leaks, and these are the guys who put on their booties before going to work.

  Lisa’s gardening requires heavy machinery.

  For a middle-aged woman, a plumber is a booty call.

  They find the leak under the soggy lawn but are not sure exactly where. They explain that they will need to dig trenches and lay new water lines, and that an estimator will come out on Saturday to tell me how much my gardening hobby is going to cost me.

  Obviously, I have a green thumb.

  Dollar green.

  So by Sunday night, as I write, my entire front lawn is a swamp.

  The only dry spot is the garden, where the flowers left by the deer are dying of thirst.

  Reply Hazy, Try Again

  By Francesca

  We associate age with wisdom. “Heed the lessons of those who have come before” is common advice, and the word “sage” has never been used for someone below the age of seventy. My grandmother is one of the smartest women I know, and she has lived through quite a lot in her time, so I’ll gladly take any advice she has to give me.

  If I could only understand it.

  I know oracles are supposed to be cryptic, but help me out here.

  First off, she loves to ask about my boyfriend. Every time she and I speak on the phone, her first questions are about him. How is he doing? Where is he right now? Where is he performing next?

  I’m her only grandchild, not having me as her favorite person is a breach of contract.

  And it took me by surprise. My grandmother hasn’t always shown such an interest in men that I’ve dated, just this one, and they’ve never even met. But my boyfriend is a musician and composer, and my grandmother was a songwriter in her youth, so I guess that’s the connection for her.

  Also, I wondered if she secretly wants to see me settl
ed and married. She’s ninety years old now, and I worry she won’t get to see my wedding if I don’t hurry up. But I can’t rush things—not with my family history.

  My mother and father have each been divorced twice. Even my grandmother has been divorced twice!

  I come from a long line of indecision.

  I intend to break the curse. If the Red Sox could do it, so can I.

  So every time my grandmother asked about my boyfriend, I tried to indulge her. I went out of my way to tell her how happy I was, to enumerate my boyfriend’s wonderful qualities, to talk up his career—anything I could say to make myself sound as content and secure as possible and ease her mind. Then, out of the blue, she had a new declaration:

  “You need to shop around.”

  Excuse me? “Well, I’m not rushing into anything yet, but we are exclusive.”

  “So don’t tell him.”

  “Muggy!” And here I thought she loved him.

  “Be free. You don’t need a man. You have a lot to offer.”

  Ah, I started to put it together; maybe I went overboard with the boy-talk. My grandmother has always been very independent, she was a career woman when very few were, and she probably wants to instill that same self-reliance in me. I thanked her and told her not to worry.

  And I stopped mentioning him when we talked on the phone.

  But it wasn’t long until my grandmother had a new reading on my relationship:

  “Where is your boyfriend? He’s never with you!”

  “Wait, what? No, he is, I just…” I thought you didn’t want to hear about him anymore.

  You know, the problem might be the medium, I thought. My grandmother has a hard time hearing me over the phone, and I have a hard time understanding her, so some things had to be getting lost in translation.

  But then, last month, my grandmother was visiting at my mom’s house, so I went down, too, to spend time with her. One night, we were all hanging out in the living room, watching Raymond and discussing dinner plans when, without any prompting, my boyfriend popped into her mind again. And this time, she didn’t have any trouble making herself crystal clear.

  “How much does he earn?” she said.

  I laughed out of shock. “I wouldn’t know. I’m his girlfriend, not his accountant.”

  “You don’t know?” Her eyebrows bounced atop her peach-framed glasses.