It’s true. I hate that car.
Haaaaaaaaate it.
When I’m driving that car, I feel as if danger is all around me, ready to give me a big hug. I feel like I’m a target for every driver who didn’t make their last insurance payment. I feel like there is no safe place to park it, that as soon as I walk away, the battered door of a 1975 Plymouth will rip through the body of my mother’s car like a can of tuna. Every time I pull into my driveway, I pray that my foot correctly hits the brakes and not the gas, because I feel like I’m going to drive the Z right through my kitchen. I feel like a midget because it’s so low to the ground, and I basically have to roll out of it. And, worst of all, when I’m driving it, I feel like Stevie Nicks. I constantly find the words “Stand back, stand back,” “Chain, keep us together,” and “TUSK!” running through my head, and on more than one occasion, I’ve had to look into the rearview mirror to convince myself that I’m not wearing a gauze dress, or have something tied around my head or silver sprinkly things on my face.
I’m living the horror of the eighties all over again. The car is telling me to get my hair frosted, slap a snake bracelet around my bicep, do some speed, and date a guy with a bilevel.
I feel like that car makes me seventeen again, which is the exact age I was when my mother traded in her Country Squire station wagon and brought the Z home. My boyfriends would drop me off at home after a date, gasp, “Wow, dude, is that your car? The 300? Um, I’ve changed my mind and you are prettier than Andrea Zakalovas, after all. She only has a 280Z.”
I hate the Z.
My car, my little Honda Accord, is broken, and has been in the shop now, as of today, for ten days. When I realized I wasn’t getting it back, my parents offered to let me use the Z, and though I protested, though I told them that they’d probably get it back damaged, they gave me the key anyway.
I was distraught on the way home that day, so upset, I had to stop and get a Cherry Limeade at Sonic. I paid the girl with $1.29 in assorted change, and began to count it for her when she stopped me.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I trust you.”
Who? I thought as she towered five feet above me as I looked up at her basically from the curb. You mean ME?
Then I stopped myself from laughing. Take a good look, a voice inside my head mentioned.
I’m a midget driving a 1984 300ZX, it’s got 58,000 miles on it, and K-EZ is the only station the radio will get.
What’s not to trust?
What’s not to trust. My finger, from which the key to the Z had been hanging, is still empty. I’m mere seconds away from a full-fledged panic. I can’t find the key. It’s not in my purse, not in either of my pockets, not in my hand.
I’ve lost it.
I’m going to have to call my dad, call my dad and tell him I’ve lost the key to the car. I am in so much trouble.
I’m going to get yelled at.
Then I’ll get the silent treatment.
Then, I’ll get grounded.
I bet he’ll ground my husband, too.
Wait!! I have a husband. My dad can’t ground me, I have a husband! I don’t live at home anymore, and he’s too scared of my neighborhood to drive down there and make sure I stay in the house!
Thank God I’m too old to get smacked. I became old enough last year that it ceased being discipline and is now considered felony assault.
“Ma’am! Ma’am!” I hear a small voice cry from behind me, and then I see it. Looped around the cashier’s forefinger is a yellow neon-colored number one, the key to the Z hanging limply from it.
I gasp with relief. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I repeat over and over to her, as I pull out my own set of keys and hook the one to the Z onto them.
“This chain,” I say to her, almost out of breath, “this chain will keep us together!”
Marathon Man
It didn’t hit me that he was serious until he brought the box home.
“Look,” my husband said, lifting the lid and exposing two matched bright and shiny shoes. “They’re new!”
“Those look like running shoes!” I balked.
He took a deep breath and shot me a look. “They are running shoes,” he said, shaking his head. “I told you I’m going to run that marathon with some people at work. We’re a team!”
I never believed him. How could I? We’re not running people. We’re not even people who walk very fast. We’re shufflers. Look at our shoes. It’s always the outside rim that gets worn out first. That’s more of a mark of Quasimodo than Jesse Owens.
“We’re not built for that sort of thing. The most athletic activity we engage ourselves in is chewing,” I said, shocked at how much I really did sound like my mother. “Bringing those things into this house is sacrilege!”
The thought of my husband jogging secretly scared me. One of the big reasons I married him was because he wasn’t a jock. That was on my list of things to avoid when choosing a spouse. Don’t marry anyone who weighs less than you. Don’t marry anyone who refers to you as “my old lady,” “the Warden,” or “babe.” Don’t marry a guy who drives a Camaro, has cropped hair in front though the back is long, savage, and free, and who ever in his lifetime wore a Warrant T-shirt. Don’t marry a guy who would rather burn calories than sit on the couch with me, eating chips and dip. Even the first time my husband watched a basketball game I was horrified and felt betrayed but figured, well, at least he’s sitting down. Our relationship is still solid.
“Did you want to borrow a bra?” I said. “Those things hurt when they bounce up and down, you know.”
“I’m going to pretend to ignore that last comment because hatred is better than carbohydrates when it comes to fueling an athletic body,” he said, lifting his leg up to the arm of the couch and leaning over toward it. “I’m going to take it out on the track!”
“Okay, Marathon Man,” I shot. “But you just remember what happened last time you did something sporty!”
I didn’t really need to remind him. We’re still paying the bills for the ambulance ride and the months of physical therapy he had to endure after hitting a sandbank on a dirt bike last year and dislocating his shoulder. While his brother went for help, my husband lay in the desert for a couple of hours like a pork chop as big, filthy birds started to circle from above. When he finally got to the hospital, they shot him up with morphine, after which he burst into a monologue of Elizabethan verse and scared a couple of nurses who were dressing his arm in a sling. Fortunately, the accident happened in October, so for Halloween, we put a ballpoint pen in my husband’s hand and he went as Bob Dole.
I had visions of this marathon ending the same way. I was convinced that he would finish this race on a stretcher after he ran into a light pole or a parked car. I, in turn, would be forced to spend the remainder of the day listening to a soliloquy from Macbeth in some emergency room, repeatedly telling him that the damn spot was nothing more than the crust of the Ding Dong I’d dropped in my lap at breakfast.
For a month, my husband trained, stopped indulging in bad habits, and started eating dried fruit. He had become determined, dedicated to his dream. He had become a runner.
The night before the race, I had a horrible nightmare. I was at the race, watching the runners, and all of a sudden, loud peals of laughter broke out from the crowd. As I looked to see what was causing the commotion, I saw my husband pass, and I gasped. He was running like a girl. His little arms twirled in circles as they flailed from his body, and people started to point, calling out, “Look at the girlie guy! Hey, Pansy Man, are you running or making meringue?”
I was just waking up from this dream when I smelled something foul, and noticed my husband sitting on the edge of the bed. Next to him was a little jar of Icy Hot, and he was generously smearing it on every part of his body that bends.
“You smell like a rest home,” I said. “If you insist on putting that in your hair, there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
“Take it out on the
track!” I heard him say to himself as he walked out of the room. “Take it out on the track!”
“When you run, Forrest, run,” I called out after him, “do me a favor and keep your hands down at your sides! Think of manly things, like chopping down trees or building fires, and don’t even picture a lemon meringue pie!”
When the rest of his team arrived at our house, they pinned their numbers on and did some last-minute stretching.
I saw him as he pointed to two overflowing ashtrays on the coffee table and showed them to the team. “This is Laurie’s, and this is the Warden’s, too,” he continued, picking up my inhaler. I scurried back into the hallway before I was forced to listen to the healthy people giggle.
An hour later, I was at the ballpark, standing with the rest of the people watching the runners cross the finish line. I was afraid that I had gotten there late, but after I saw that the runners who were finishing were still in fairly good physical condition, I was sure I hadn’t missed my husband. I stood for a while as the crowd cheered them on, and suddenly, I smelled old people and then I saw him.
He jogged right past me, thin streams of sweat running down his face, his eyes staring straight ahead. He wasn’t even bleeding, though there were little bits of grass and a candy wrapper stuck to one of the Icy Hot spots. No one was laughing, his arms were bent at the proper angles, and by some divine miracle, his shorts hadn’t risen up between his thighs.
He had done it.
I jumped and waved and heard myself scream, “Yea, honey!” and inside my heart, I felt a little flutter, but I don’t think it was a heart attack from physically exerting myself.
I think that, maybe, it was pride.
My Poor Sister
My sister and her husband decided one day that they wanted a baby.
“Are you sure?” I asked her. “They’re a lot of work and your nipples will get as big as hubcaps.”
“They will not,” she answered. “We’re going to start trying right away.”
Six days later, she called me again.
“Guess what?” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Maybe you just ate something that was dead too long.”
“No, it’s true,” she assured me. “The pink dot says so.”
“It’s impossible,” I said. “Take another test.”
“I’ve taken seven,” she asserted. “Seven pink dots say you’re going to be an aunt.”
“What did you do?” I asked her. “Put your ovaries underneath your pillow last night and wait for a visit from the Fertility Fairy?”
This was weird. How could my baby sister have a baby? And how was she going to tell my parents? I knew damn well that it didn’t matter that she had been married for over a year; they were still going to try and ground her.
But I guess they took it okay, despite the fact that my mother wanted a signed and notarized note from the doctor to prove it, and my dad didn’t get violent or anything. He just looked my brother-in-law in the eye starkly and said, “I wasn’t aware that you did that sort of thing.”
They were going to be grandparents. I was going to be an aunt.
My sister and her husband were excited. They started looking at cribs and strollers and decided which room would be the nursery. They bought the baby its first toy, a teddy bear that played “You Are My Sunshine” when you wound it up.
I caught my sister lying on the couch in her house one day with the wound-up bear on her stomach.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m playing the song so the baby can hear it,” she said with a smile.
“I hate to be the buzzkill,” I said honestly, “but the baby still has a tail. It could still be a fish. It doesn’t have ears, and it’s got the thought process of a ballpoint pen.”
She didn’t listen to me, and kept the bear right in its place on her stomach.
She started to get big. And got bigger. And bigger. And BIGGER. By her seventh month, I was ecstatic because I wasn’t the fattest person in my wedding party anymore. She lost her belly button and instead got a big, brown circle on her stomach and her breasts each weighed as much as a four-door Lexus.
If you looked closely at her midsection, you could see the baby—which by now had become a mammal and was in the shape of a boy—squirming around like an alien. Her feet were so swollen that she couldn’t wear regular shoes, so she took to wearing foot apparel from Kmart that looked like a lace-up cast.
“Just so you know, you’re wrong,” my sister informed me. “My nipples are not the size of hubcaps. They more proportionately resemble dinner plates.”
My poor sister. I was starting to feel really, really sorry for her, especially when she started that swayback waddling thing because if she stood up straight, she’d topple right over.
“What if he’s ugly and we don’t know it?” she said to me one day. “What if we think he’s the most beautiful baby and he really looks like Ernest Borgnine? How will we know?”
“Pictures,” I said after I thought for a while. “That’s how. Pictures can’t lie. And if I detect ugliness, I will tell you, I swear. I won’t let you have an ugly baby without knowing it.”
That night, I had a dream in which the baby was born with teeth growing out of his nose and my sister kept insisting that it was normal.
“It’s totally okay,” she said repeatedly. “You’ve never had a baby, so how would you know? We just have to use a different kind of toothbrush.”
From that night on, the vision of nose teeth haunted me, and I hoped with everything I had that the baby would not be born a javelina.
The morning that my sister’s water broke it was early and her husband asked her if she had wet the bed. She called me right away, and I told her I’d meet her at the hospital, and I rushed as fast as I could. When I got there, she was hooked up to some monitor thing that measured her pain as the contractions gripped her belly. She was starting to go off the chart.
It looked awful. We weren’t allowed to talk when the numbers on the monitor were rising, and if we did, she would get a look on her face like a wild animal ready to bite your leg off. After she was forced by her pain to mutter the F word a couple of times, she made us leave, and after several hours, his head popped out, then his shoulders, and we all had a brand-new baby.
He was fat, he was purple, and he had two black eyes, but he was perfect. He stuck his hand in his mouth right away and that’s when we knew he was a genius baby.
He was Prince Nicholas, and after I checked for any signs of dental work in his nostrils, he was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen.
Following Instructions
The bead of sweat ran down the length of my nose, paused silently on the very, very, very tip before it rolled suddenly forward, leapt, and careened toward the floor, flattening when it hit.
“I CAN follow directions! I built THAT!” I yelled, pointing to a bookcase on the far side of the room.
“I refinished and reassembled THOSE!” I bellowed, pointing to the mantel of my fireplace and the two flanking glass-fronted cabinets.
“I GOT AN ELECTRIC MITER SAW FOR MY BIRTHDAY,” I roared at the ceiling, my arms open wide, “AND A CHAIN SAW FOR CHRISTMAS!”
Surely, I was indeed qualified for the task at hand. It shouldn’t have been any trouble at all for me to assemble the two-shelf cabinet that I had just hauled into my living room from the home improvement store. My troubles began after I poised the seventy-pound box against the wall and sliced it open with a utility knife, only to discover that both the instructions and the hardware were MIA. To remedy the problem, I called the store to inform them of the situation, and to inquire if they could locate another set for me.
The first fellow I talked to listened patiently, then put me on hold to conduct a reconnaissance hardware mission. Moments later, another fellow, Daniel, picked up the line and asked if he could help me.
“Thank you, but I’m already being helped,” I replied.
&n
bsp; “Obviously NOT,” he snapped at me. “If you were, they’d be on the phone RIGHT NOW.”
Who am I to judge the wisdom and expertise of a warehouse worker? Clearly, I knew not of which I spoke, being a mere amateur in the world of home improvement customer service. So I repeated my story again.
“We don’t have any of those cabinets left,” Daniel informed me simply.
“Can you . . . check?” I brazenly ventured.
“I don’t need to CHECK,” he said. “I KNOW.”
“Well, there was a whole stack of them there two hours ago.”
Daniel took a deep breath. “YOU KNOW,” he said in his best spouse-abuser voice, “I’m standing IN FRONT of the cabinets right now and they’re all gone, but I guess you know best. They must all be invisible to ME!”
What could I do now? I bit my nail, and looked at the box in my living room filled with useless wooden planks. Then I got my keys.
When I got to the home improvement store, I slipped down the cabinet aisle, found the box I needed, and, well, helped myself to the parts that were missing from my box and wrote, “This Box is Incomplete and Invisible: See Daniel,” on the top. Then I ran out of the store as fast as I could without further aggravating the inner-thigh burn I had acquired the week before at the gym.
Back at home, I got my screwdriver and went to work. With the illustration-only instructions in hand, I assembled the frame of the cabinet according to the pictures, even though I was missing the part that looked like a gumdrop and used the part that looked like a Chiclet instead.
I stepped away from the cabinet and looked at it. Then I did a bad thing. With the brush of one fingertip, it was reduced to a pile of laminated chipboard that scared my little dog so badly she tinkled on the floor.
I noticed the first bead of sweat streaming down my forehead when I saw the toll-free number at the bottom of the booklet, and the words FOR HELP CALL next to it.
Autobiography of a Fat Bride Page 9