“Bingo!” I said gleefully.
“Did you choke on a portion of the hot dog and lose consciousness at any point?” he added, looking above his glasses.
“No, because of that stupid stranger who beat on my back until that hot dog shot out of me like a baby!” I said sorrowfully.
“Then you only qualify for a partial deduction,” he answered.
“How much do I owe?” I asked, wincing.
“Are you sure you didn’t cast any spells in all of last year?” he asked. “Because if you did, I can get you to break even.”
I thought for a moment. “Voodoo?” I asked. “I made a little doll of the president of our neighborhood association and sewed his lips shut!”
“We’ve got a winner,” he said as he winked.
“Double, double, toil and trouble.” I winked back.
Home Sweat Home
A bubble of sweat rolled down from my forehead, past the arch of my eyebrow, over the bridge of my nose, and parachuted into the inner corner of my left eye.
“It is so hot,” I moaned as I lay motionless on my couch, then wiped the remaining drops of perspiration from my forehead.
“You’ve said that seventy-two times already today,” my husband said slowly as he sat still in a chair. “I know it’s hot. I’m three feet away from you.”
“Why is it so hot?” I whined as I felt my insides slowly cooking.
“Because it’s July and we live in the desert,” he replied, turning to look at me with as little effort as possible. “And we don’t have air-conditioning. Why is the front of your shirt all wet?”
“I have ice in my bra,” I replied, closing my eyes as I felt another droplet speeding toward the right one.
“Do you think you have one that would fit me?” he asked.
My husband and I will be the first ones to admit that it was our fault. Who, in their right mind, buys a house in Phoenix without the necessity of air-conditioning?
We did. Chalk it up to ignorance, stupidity, or even love. We adored the little seventy-year-old bungalow so deeply that we bought it, despite the slow, unpredictable creak of the aging, corroded swamp cooler that rested on the roof.
Honestly, we weren’t so idiotic that we actually thought we could live without air-conditioning; we had saved enough money to provide for a unit as well as some repairs that the house needed. But quickly, oh so quickly, the money slipped away as the plumbing needed replacing, the wiring needed updating, and a burglary forced us to install a security system and enough wrought iron around every door and window to build our own Eiffel Tower.
In April, I had kissed the last of the money good-bye in my accountant’s office when he gently told me that my dog and cat could not be counted as dependents, and therefore the government was very, very angry with me.
“What’s the matter?” I said to him as I wrote out the check. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone cry before?”
“Yes,” he replied quietly. “But no one’s ever gotten sick in my wastebasket.”
As the temperature outside started to rise, my husband and I got anxious. Our fears were confirmed when, on a 95-degree day, we turned on the decrepit swamp cooler and waited.
It hummed a little, spat, and fought with itself, and finally, a small little jet of air leaked from the vents enough to rustle some threads of dust that looked strangely like petrified farts hanging from the ceiling. We spent our food money for the next month on the services of a repairman who billed us $400 for a lot of imaginary work, but who did manage to get the cooler to shoot out enough hot air to cover us in the dust threads and what looked like asbestos.
“This is great,” my husband, who is normally a very nice person, snapped. “Maybe the heat inside this house will work like radiation and kill the cancer we just got.”
In what I thought was a valiant effort, my husband started working a tremendous amount of overtime so that we could buy an air conditioner.
“You are so wonderful,” I said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “With all of that overtime, how soon do you think we can get a new cooler?”
“I don’t get overtime pay,” he said, looking at me quizzically. “I just stay late and read magazines because it’s seventy-two degrees in the office.”
On a good day, the temperature inside our home was an even 100. With no sanctuary, I took to the couch, and wondered aloud how the people who built this house managed to stay alive during the summer. We already slept with wet sheets, wet hair, and wet clothes.
“Maybe we should have a séance and invite them back,” my husband said from his chair. “If there were a couple of ghosts roaming around, at least we’d have some cold spots.”
“Good idea, Sarah Winchester,” I said. “I’ll wait here while you get the Ouija board. In the meantime, you’re hogging the fan.”
“I am not. It’s blowing more on you than it is on me. It’s barely touching me!” my husband shot back.
“Liar!” I yelled. “There!! I just saw your hair move! It’s totally blowing all over you! Selfish!”
“My hair!” he said, then pointed at me. “You hair is totally moving! It looks like you’re in a hurricane over there!”
“You know what I think?” I asked. “I think you’ve had a heat stroke and are passive-aggressive! I never would have married you had I known you were a Fan Hogger!”
So there you have it. Our lives had literally boiled down to an argument over which one of us was sweating less. As a result, my husband received a blessing from the Pope, a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize in the marital harmony division, and a gift certificate from World of Fans for not killing me with a handheld Vornado.
I, on the other hand, was very careful about how many dependents I claimed on my tax forms the next year, and with our refund money, we had a new cooler installed two weeks ago.
“Did you want to keep the old one and try to sell it?” the air-conditioning man asked me as he was about to pitch it from the roof.
“I couldn’t do that to another human being,” I said. “That thing is worth about as much as Mary Kay Letourneau’s word.”
“Actually, it would have worked a little better if there hadn’t been that hole in your vent system,” he informed me. “ ‘Bout as big as a man’s head. You sure?”
I nodded as he began to push the old swamp cooler off.
“I’ve been to hell once,” I said as it crashed to the ground and splintered into a hundred broken pieces. “It’s just too damn hot to go there again.”
Spooky Little Girl Like You
I AM TELLING YOU FOR THE LAST TIME,” my mother yelled from the living room, “there are NO SUCH things as ghosts. Now go back to bed before I take all of your friends home!”
I shuffled back to my bedroom, where my friends were waiting, and knew it was my own fault. We should have known better than to have a séance on Halloween, even if it was my birthday and I was having a slumber party.
Lots of people think it would be cool to have a birthday on Halloween, but it really isn’t. Who would want to come to my house to play “Pin the Grin on the Pumpkin” when there were blocks of houses giving away free candy? Who was going to come to my house for a lousy piece of cake from Safeway when Milky Ways and Hershey bars were literally floating down the street?
As a result, only two of my fifth-grade classmates showed up at my house in costume on that Saturday night, out of the seven I had invited. My mom bought us pizza, then got all of us—my friends and my two younger sisters—ready for the annual trek down the street for the trick-or-treating bonanza. Since there were five of us, I had secretly hoped that we could all don white polyester gowns and go as Sister Sledge, belting out the chorus to “WE ARE FAMI-LEEE!” whenever anyone opened his door, but my mother shot me a look and put her hands on her hips.
“No, we are not doing that,” she said sternly. “If you think I have time to stand here and braid all of your heads into cornfields, you’ve got another think coming!”
My frien
d Jamie came to my party as a witch anyway, and my other friend, Kassie, came in a rhinestone-cowboy outfit, mainly because her father owned horses and she rode in competitions. Since I had bet all of my options on the Sister Sledge theme, I had to come up with something quick, or my mom would throw a Hefty bag over my head and make me go as trash.
“What am I going to be?” I whined, going through my closet.
My mother grabbed a pencil and a spiral notebook and handed it to me. “Just be Anne Frank again,” she said as I sulked.
“I was Anne Frank last year!” I whined.
“It’s Anne Frank or the trash bag,” my mother offered. “That little girl stayed in the attic for a long time; you can be her for two years in a row!”
My mom stood close by us as we went trick-or-treating from house to house, smoking a cigarette near the curb as we knocked on each door.
“Let me see your candy,” she demanded after every treat. “That woman’s a nutjob. Did she try to give you an apple? Did her house smell funny?”
When we returned to our own house, my mother cut the cake and I opened presents. I got a can of Love’s Baby Soft, a bottle of Charlie, and a forty-five of “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” which we took into my room immediately because we heard there was a dirty word sung on it.
Jamie, Kassie, and I were listening to the record over and over again, but since we had no idea what the word might be, we got bored pretty quickly.
“Let’s have a séance!” I said suddenly, and Jamie turned off the lights.
“What do we say?” Kassie said, her rhinestone hat still shining in the dark.
“How about, ‘Oh spirits, come down and have some of Laurie’s birthday cake,’” Jamie replied.
“That’s good,” I agreed. “Have some of my birthday cake and tell us what the dirty word in the song is. . . .” I trailed off, trying to be spooky.
“Come to the slumber party, spirits,” Kassie said, laughing. “We’ll give you candy!”
We were all giggling when suddenly, the closed door to my bedroom swung open, hitting the wall behind it, slammed shut, swung open, shut, open . . . shut.
We were quiet for a moment, and then we screamed. We had all seen it, we had all seen the same thing. The door swinging open by itself, shutting by itself, and each time it swung open again, we could see the brightly lit hallway and the fact that it was empty. There was no one there.
It was Jamie who ran to the light switch and turned it on. “Oh my God” was all she said.
“Mom!” I yelled, getting up and running into the living room, where my parents were. “Mom! My door opened!”
“Go back to bed,” she instructed. “We’re watching Sonny and Cher!”
“It opened by itself,” I insisted. “It opened and slammed shut by itself!”
“I told you she was getting weirder,” my mother said to my father, then pointed to me. “If you keep acting this way, no one will want to marry you when you grow up! No one marries a nutjob! And you’re not living here for the rest of your life!”
“We all saw it, Mrs. Notaro,” Jamie said from the hallway.
My mother looked at my father. “All right,” she complied. “Go get your trick-or-treat bags, and empty them on the floor.”
We did what she said, and my mom started looking at every piece of candy, even the cheap saltwater taffy pieces, which we never would have eaten.
“What are you doing?” my father asked her.
“Remember Art Linkletter’s daughter?” she whispered, even though we could hear her. “Look for anything with the letters L, S, and D on it. That nutjob down the street probably slipped them a chocolate mickey! You girls stay off of the roof, you hear me?”
She didn’t find anything, and I knew she wouldn’t. When I insisted one last time that there really was a ghost in my room, she threatened to take my friends home.
“She has a very vivid imagination,” I heard her say to my father as I shuffled back to my bedroom. “Remember when we went camping last year and that cow bumped into the trailer and she started screaming that it was Bigfoot? Yes, you do so remember!”
When I got back to my bedroom, Jamie and Kassie had already started pulling my desk across the carpet. We closed the door again, very gently, pushed the desk against it, and then tried very, very hard to go to sleep.
The Little King
The very second that the automatic door swung open at the mega-super-plus toy store, my eardrums exploded from the high-pitched screaming that came from within it. I was scared. I braced myself, took a deep breath, and then a step.
Inside, the air was thick and muggy with the perspiration of hyperactive children. They ran from one aisle to the other discharging sound barrier–breaking squeals as they climbed over little gyms, rode bicycles, and toppled displays with the same ferocity the Nazis used when they destroyed France. Parents, clearly the innocent civilians in the scenario, hid in dark corners, plastic playhouses, tents, and on the book aisle. They huddled closely together, their eyes wide, collectively pushing terrified newcomer parents out of their sanctuaries with the words, “There’s no more room! We’ll be discovered! We heard there’s an empty box on aisle nine with an open spot!”
I had to go into the store; I had no choice. I had upset the Little King on Thanksgiving, and I only had one way to get back into his Royal Highness’s good graces.
A Little King’s ransom in Christmas presents.
You have to appease the Little King.
As soon as he struts through the door, the atmosphere changes. Every member of my family becomes a servant, footman, lady-in-waiting, all eager to serve our thirty-three-pound master.
“Would an audience with Elmo please Your Highness?”
“You require someone to fetch your chocolate milk, sir? Pick me! Pick me!”
“Absolutely, we must destroy the talking Barney doll that Grandpa paid a hundred and twenty dollars for by kicking it repeatedly. It frightens me, too, sire. Shall we employ this metal lamp base to crush its skull?”
He’ll tell us where to sit, mutely pointing at a couch, a chair, or, if you’ve angered the Little King, the floor. You can be banished for simply sitting in the wrong place, talking to him without being addressed first, or merely suggesting that it isn’t particularly a good idea to rub purple Play-Doh into my mother’s beige carpeting.
We all try to please the Little King, known to the outside world as my two-year-old nephew, Nicholas. He makes his demands in the language of the Little King, a dialect we have been forced to become as fluent in as we are our native tongue.
“Num-num gigee peepah me!” is easily understood to us as “It is none other than a necessity to have the presence of my giraffe and my pacifier while I dine on pizza. And I mean NOW.”
“Woo-woo rah eebah tub help!” means simply, “I must have my dog, lion, and zebra in my bath, and I demand you to assist me in gathering them. And I mean NOW.”
The Little King gets his way, and will not hesitate to vomit if he doesn’t, emitting two distinct warning gags before the retch is complete. He also won’t hesitate to humiliate you if his demands are not met. A few weeks ago at Thanksgiving, I went to the bathroom after dinner, and while I was conducting business (number one), the door suddenly swung open and there he stood.
I immediately pointed to the door and said, “See-see toonoo Orie bubbo nah! [You are not supposed to see Aunt Laurie on the potty!]”
“Num-num rah Orie Nick pay peese ow [Jester Laurie, you must return to court at this moment and engage me in the game of lion and giraffe, when I will continually chase you until that herniated disk in your lower back pops out and shatters a window like a baseball],” the Little King said.
“Pe fo fo [Not now],” I said, attempting to cover my hindquarters. “Orie um . . . tee-tee [I’m, um . . . tinkling].”
He looked at me slightly out of the corner of his eye, opened the door, and left.
“What is Aunt Laurie doing in there?” my mother asked
when he returned to the dining room.
He scrunched up his face so hard it turned red and said simply “GRRR!” in a hearty grunt.
“You did a doody in front of the baby?” my mother screamed when I returned to the table. “What kind of weirdo, sicko thing is that? Is that how you get your kicks?! ANIMAL!”
Because my family tended to believe a toddler’s word over my own, as punishment I was called to the head of the table by the Little King, where I was commanded to perform a sullen little jig in front of my entire family as he shouted, “Da! Da! [Dance, you silly half-wit, dance!]”
Apparently, it wasn’t enough. If I dare speak to him or say his name aloud, he will look at me sternly, shout “No, bad Orie!” and point to the floor, where my proper place is.
Sitting between a haggled mother of four with a stress-related skin condition and a weeping single dad inside the empty box on aisle nine, I wondered which was worse: being torn limb from limb by ravenous children who had mistaken me for a life-size Teletubby or trying to shovel mashed potatoes between a little metal slit after I’ve been pronounced “the Aunt in the Iron Mask.”
With only one of my feet outside the box, an angry mob of children charged, misidentified me as a parent, and began screaming, “Buy this for me!” I dashed down the aisle, and in a mad haste grabbed the first box I could get my arms around and rushed toward the checkout.
It was only when I reached my car that I realized how lucky I was. Looking at the package, I saw the words “Ball Pit Jungle Gym Carnival,” and realized that this, indeed, was the only toy in the entire universe that the Little King did not already count among his possessions.
As I lifted the massive box out of the cart and into the backseat of my car, the herniated disk popped out of my back, but I continued to struggle until I was able to close the car door.
I got in the driver’s seat and wiped my brow. I had done it. The Little King would be pleased, and I, in return, wouldn’t have to eat Christmas dinner in the garage next to a space heater.
Autobiography of a Fat Bride Page 12