It Looked Different on the Model

by Laurie Notaro

  And then I returned the next day.

  I boldly stood in line and waited my turn patiently, and when the time had come, I stepped up to the counter and said nicely, “I’d like two hundred two-cent stamps, please.”

  I could actually see the anger in her face rolling to a boil.

  I had her. She had to sell me the stamps. We both knew she had them. She knew I had her.

  Her eyes narrowed, and her brow lowered.

  “One hundred,” she said in a low voice, knowing very well that I did not have her. At all. To the contrary.

  Then she pointed her finger at me and said, “Don’t you come back. Never come back!”

  I was shocked. I couldn’t say anything. After closing my mouth, I gathered up my paltry one hundred stamps, turned around, and walked away.

  Was I just banned from the post office? I asked myself in disbelief. Did she just ban me from the post office? She just banned me from the post office!

  This is ridiculous, I thought, as I stopped myself in the aisle where all the candy that has lost its soul and turned white is kept. How can you ban me from a post office? I’m a taxpayer. I’m her boss! And I was going to march right back there and tell her that, but I immediately thought better of making a taxpayer proclamation and pulling a line from the Bill of Rights and distorting it like it was from the Bible or I was Rand Paul. I remembered the numerous times I had passed by this particular drugstore and seen police cars parked outside, making it clear that no one here hesitates to pick up that receiver and call 911. In fact, I think they have someone on the payroll whose job description is solely to “alert the authorities.” The store is right next to a bottle-and-can return center, meaning it’s a hobo and tweaker destination, full of savory smells and nonsensical muttering, and there’s always someone on the pay phone shouting some sort of obscenity to a dealer or a loved one. Not only had I seen cop cars haphazardly parked there, but I’d also had the vast misfortune of being in the drugstore’s checkout line when a scuffle erupted from the lotion department. Apparently, according to the person in question, some bath salts had “tumbled into his pocket.” The policemen, however, weren’t buying it, and instead of cooperating, the accused decided to struggle like he was a wild mustang being lassoed, which is never a good idea in a spot so tiny that bath salts could actually fall into an available opening in your clothing.

  As I watched the cops question him, I immediately checked my own coat and pants for tubs of errant body butters.

  After the first crash, the man began to scream for help, but I’ll be honest and admit I was not about to be the one who volunteered my services. The scuffle moved and ate up more space as the bath-salts plucker thrashed about and screamed louder.

  “Call the police!” he demanded. “Somebody call the police!”

  “We are the police,” one of the officers informed him, to which Mr. Salty replied, “I want my own police!”

  But unfortunately, he was out of luck. Eugene doesn’t have that service.

  Yet.

  Within moments, the altercation had moved in front of the main and only entrance, which I guess was the objective, but it didn’t solve any problems for me. It was clear that the situation had the capacity to morph easily from someone who just forgot to take their meds to the headline on the next day’s paper that touted a body count. Who knew if Mr. Salty had just come from a knife store, where switchblades may have dropped into his socks, or the bow-and-arrow store, where some may have landed behind his ears; who knew where he had been and what had dropped on him. Bullets. Chain saws. Rope and train tracks. God forbid he had been at the fireworks stand at some point, because any single measure of friction would be enough set that place aglow, and I do not doubt that between the Yankee Candle display and the body-sized sheets of gauze, bottles of gasoline and/or oxygen are fully stocked.

  I quickly abandoned my position in line and scurried to the party-plates aisle, in case the thrashing began to spread even farther, because, frankly, I’d rather be crushed by a party-hat tower than gored by a curio or a Department 56 North Pole candy cane.

  So, with the memory in my head that when the police cross the store threshold they no longer work for me and the paltry hundred two-cent stamps in my purse, I left the store, mumbling, “Oh yeah? You’re not the only post office in town, you know!” and then set out to discover if that was true.

  Turns out it was, in fact, true, and I acted smug and felt like I had beaten the Mean Lady at her own game while standing in line at the post office downtown, despite the fact that it had taken me a half hour to snag one of the jumble of metered street spaces. Because this post office doesn’t have a parking lot. At all. And because the nineteen people in front of me in line, who had all probably been banned from the satellite station, had gotten there first.

  Unlike at the drugstore post office, there is nothing to look at while you wait in line—no fake poo, no pirate condoms, no crime-scene action, nothing to distract you from the other Eugene residents and fellow post-office patrons and their packages. It was then that I saw some amazing things.

  For example, I witnessed a lady trying to cram a pound of pistachios and a pound of corn nuts into one regular, letter-sized Priority Mail envelope. I couldn’t figure out where that lady could possibly be sending corn nuts where there aren’t corn nuts ALREADY, unless there was a corn-nut-less province that I was unaware of. And at two pounds in a Priority envelope, it was going to cost her more money to send corn nuts someplace than the corn nuts cost in the first place (unless she was sending them to a prison, but even then, I’ll bet corn nuts are a staple in the vending machines). She ripped through three Priority envelopes before the man behind her pointed out that a box would be a better fit and there were several options eight inches away from her right foot at the center counter, which she was leaning on. She tossed the envelope aside and went in for a box, which easily fit her snack foods, but her delight soon turned to unbridled horror when she attempted to close it. Immediately, she began to complain that the box, which was free, courtesy of the post office, was not equipped with “automatic tape,” which I think meant “adhesive strip” to those people who don’t buy corn nuts by the pound. I then saw two different women with the same unique bear-claw tattoo and a middle-aged woman with bangs cut from the middle of one ear to the middle of the next, who never closed her mouth the entire time she stood in line, which, by the way, was long enough to hatch an egg. From any species.

  In addition to the automatic-tape debacle, almost everyone in line had some sort of mail disaster to contend with, whether it was trying to ship vast amounts of liquids and perishable items (how long does it take for a corn nut to perish, anyway? Is it even within the realm of possibilities? I bet corn nuts have been found in the tombs of Egyptian royalty and still taste exactly the same when unearthed), sealing a box up with Scotch tape, or arguing that a customs form was not needed for her package, “because it’s just going to Italy.”*

  The next time I had to go to the post office, I went to the branch rumored to have a parking lot, hoping to avoid the downtown contingent and tattoo museum. And I did and was confronted with people who had been unemployed for a long, long time, so long that they had lost perspective of the phrase “time frame” in any conceivable meaning, even though I could easily measure the duration of their life span left on Earth with my fingers. For example, at this post office, I waited in line behind patrons who liked to round out every money-exchanging transaction with a nice, pointless conversation about a) are Disney stamps more expensive than regular stamps; b) what is the difference between a book of stamps and a sheet of stamps; and c) if they write a check, can they write it over the amount and get seven dollars and forty-two cents back?

  It was then that I realized it completely wasn’t fair for anyone to say ever again that post office employees are slightly askew, because if you were dealing with morons demanding automatic tape for their corn-nut packages day in and day out, things might get a little sketchy
for you, too.

  I didn’t go back to the post office—any of them—for over a year. If I had to mail a package, I’d go to other shipping places that were way more expensive and farther away, and I bought my stamps online. But as I was taping up the box of unders for my nephew, I realized that I really didn’t want to pay twelve dollars to ship them to Phoenix. Down the street, I could do it for several bucks. It was time, I knew, to try the satellite post office again. Especially if I could save two dollars.

  As I stood in line, getting closer to the counter, my heart raced, my mouth got dry, and suddenly I was next.

  When she looked up and saw me, she knew. There was no mistaking it. She knew exactly who I was and that I was the Two-Cent-Stamp Bandit. I knew she was the Mean Lady. Her mouth pursed, she looked at me with disdain.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. On her wrist. Bright, colorful, and unmistakably new. An Achilles’ heel.

  “That,” I said, pointing to her hand and the flashy and enormous red, orange, and black outlined dragon on it, “is a lovely tattoo.”

  Frankly, I have to say that I was shocked. I don’t see too many middle-aged Korean post office ladies getting themselves all inked up with medieval symbols and legends, but here we were.

  She looked down and knew there was no way out.

  She smiled a teeny tiny little bit.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Those are very pretty colors.”

  “I think so, too,” she added. And looked at the box. “First-class or Priority?”

  “Priority,” I said. I wanted to show her that I took the post office seriously.

  “Any contents that are perishable, liquid, or prohibited?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I said cheerfully. “Just little-boy’s underwear.”

  Excellent! I realized. By the time I got home, the FBI would be carrying my computer out of the house. But she didn’t bat an eye.

  “Have a great day!” I said before I left.

  We ended that day on decent terms, but when I got home I tracked the package to make sure it had been mailed in the first place, because our trust was new, delicate, and most likely still raw in the middle. I hadn’t spent twenty-five minutes looking through irregular underwear in a store that sells matching mommy-and-baby outfits just so the lady at the post office—who I’m sure was certain that I was sending a pound of corn nuts to my husband, who gets very snacky after spending his days working on a Louisiana chain gang—could sit on my package for a week in a slippery act of revenge. Listen. She was a middle-aged Korean woman with a flaming dragon tattoo who’d kicked me out of the post office when I asked for eight dollars worth of stamps. In my book, that’s a lunatic. Who knew what she was capable of?

  But I went back again, and this time I brought two packages. Both Priority. With tracking numbers. I wasn’t fooling around.

  As she was getting ready to slap the post office label on the second package, someone shouted out to her from the photo department and told her she had a phone call. I watched her face drop as the person informed the Mean Lady that the call was about her daughter.

  “Can you wait a minute?” she asked me, her skin tone suddenly ashen.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She went over to the photo department and took the phone call, then returned to the counter a couple of minutes later.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I was so worried when they said it was about my daughter. But everything’s fine; she just wanted to stay at her friend’s house longer, so her friend’s mom called. I was so scared!”

  “I know,” I replied. “I saw the look on your face. I’m glad everything is okay.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “Thank you for being so nice about it. You’re nice. A lot of people wouldn’t have been so nice.”

  I stopped for a moment.

  “I know you must have to put up with a lot working at the post office,” I told her, to which she nodded vigorously.

  “Some people are crazy,” she semi-whispered.

  “I know. I’ve seen it. I saw a lady freak out about ‘automatic tape,’ ” I informed her, after which I shrugged, furrowed my brow, and mock-laughed loudly.

  The Mean Lady nodded. “I know her!” she hissed, lightly pounding her fist on the counter.

  “And I think you’re nice, too,” I finished, to which she smiled, nodded, and smoothed the postage label on one of my packages.

  “Hey,” I said quickly, noticing something very, very odd about her wrist. “Where’s your tattoo?”

  It was gone. The fiery, tempestuous dragon had vanished.

  “Oh,” the nice lady said as she laughed and pointed behind her, where on the wall was an entire display of vibrantly colored tattoo decals, including the legendary dragon.

  And right then, at that second, we were cooked in the middle.

  *The corn-nut lady, by the way, sent her package to some P.O. box in rural Louisiana, where I am positive that not only are corn nuts available, but they’re a staple of the diet, along with Karo syrup and obscure pig parts. It’s a main protein source. I bet Corn Nut Stew, Corn Nuts and Dumplings, Corn Nut Salad, and Chicken-Fried Corn Nuts are served at every funeral or parole party.

  Butcha Are, Blanche! Ch’are in That Chair!

  Oliver Twist looked at me with more horror in his eyes than I had ever seen on any street urchin, his bowl limply dangling from his hand in shock. Next to him, the Jewish bubbie from Scottsdale was speechless, her missile-sized ta-ta’s resting on her belly just above her waist. The Vampire Queen by her side looked on in silence as I lifted my arm up and went in as hard as I could, hitting Jamie, my best friend, in the middle of the back and nearly shooting her out of the wheelchair she was sitting in.

  This was not exactly the way I had envisioned my birthday celebration to unfold. I happen to have a Halloween birthday; I am here to tell you that it is not as exciting as it may seem to non-Halloween-birthday people, for the following reasons:

  1. There will always be little children interrupting your personal holiday, wanting something from you, and in Oregon you may very well get the gender of the child wrong 100 percent of the time, even when the child in question is wearing a tutu, ballet shoes, and a tiara.

  2. There will always be someone you know who is throwing another party on the same night. Sometimes that can get a little political and can even arrive at a point where people begin Big Talking if they are graduate students, saying things like “But I’m grad-fathered in to throw the Halloweeen party! I’ve been in grad school longer than anybody else!” when they believe that throwing a birthday party is a call to battle. We discovered that some people with little to focus on tend to lose sight that they’re talking about a Halloween party in a crumbling basement apartment that smells like Tinactin and has the filthiest toilet in the county and not something as crucial as Mideast water rights.

  And

  3. If that trick-or-treat nonsense wasn’t enough to cast a pall over my Halloween birthday, I wasn’t all that thrilled with rounding my age up yet again, since my age can no longer be mistaken for a football score and has more in common with a high-blood-pressure reading. This was especially true after a well-known person in my town—startlingly close to my age—dropped dead of natural causes and no one seemed particularly shocked but me.

  Well, what do you know, I thought, as most people nodded their heads and noted that he would be missed. I was no longer a “tragedy.” The rings on this tree were now old growth. In fact, I bet no one would blink an eye if I dropped dead immediately. Instead of muttering “Such a shame, so young” at my funeral, or the preferred “Promising life cut so short,” people were more apt to whisper something apart from quick, sad clichés. “Well, of course she’s dead! Did you see what that girl ate?” would be the more common thing heard at my funeral, followed by “Between you and me, miracle she lived to this point. The only regular workout she had involved nothing but her teeth,” or “Well, s
he had a decent run. She lived longer than a caveman,” or even “Hey, I just won fifteen dollars! She was top of the list in my Friends and Family Death Pool. Let’s celebrate!”

  Now continually aware that an ungrievous death was right at my fingertips closest to the saltshaker, I had one hope for my birthday party, and that was simply that I wouldn’t be found heaped over the hors d’oeuvres station with guests lifting my limbs and skull for easier access to the onion dip. As long as I survived the celebration, or even if I died and one person cried, I was going to consider it a success.

  But so far, everything was going according to plan as the 31st drew nearer. I wasn’t hospitalized, needing an organ transplant or atrophying in a coma due to age-related age. Instead, I was elated when Jamie mentioned several weeks before that she would drive the hundred miles from Portland to attend, and it was then that I got a brilliant idea. I presented my plan to her and she agreed, saying, “The only thing better than a party is a party where I never have to get up.”

  And thus it was sealed.

  When she arrived at my house on Halloween morning, she had her little suitcase and a satchel with her, and in the suitcase was everything she needed to complete my plan and become her Blanche Hudson to my Baby Jane from the classic camp horror movie.

  Jamie and I first watched What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in high school, absolutely glued to the screen as the former vaudeville child star Baby Jane, played by Bette Davis, tormented her sister and former movie star, Blanche, played by Joan Crawford. Ever since then, I had tried to talk Jamie into using the sisters as Halloween characters but had never had much luck. Confined to a wheelchair due to an accident blamed on her drunk and jealous sister, Jane, Blanche—and her pets—are helpless as Jane dives deeper and deeper into boozy rages and insane, delirious tantrums. Honestly, if there’s anything more hilarious than an aged drunk with smeared makeup, it’s an aged drunk dressed up like a Little Miss pageant contestant reliving her youth in delusions and liquor-fueled hallucinations. True, that’s how I plan on spending my retirement, but as soon as you add a witness to a sullied, addled existence, it quickly loses its playful charm. Which sheds some light on why I could never talk a sixteen-year-old Jamie into dressing up on Halloween to flirt with boys at parties in which every single teen male was dressed as Bo or Luke Duke and wanted to spend the end of the night making out with Daisy, not a fifty-year-old malnourished paraplegic.