It Looked Different on the Model

by Laurie Notaro

  “What’s going on here?” I asked the first time I saw my then to-be husband and his mother say goodbye, a hug that lasted longer than some sitcoms. “It was like you were going off to war.”

  My husband shrugged. “The lady likes to hug” was all he said, and I had no choice but to wonder what made his family skin-friendly and mine skin-averse.

  Then one night when I was on the treadmill watching Nova, thrilled that it was an episode I could understand, and my husband was in the living room watching the same thing. It was about scientists in Montreal who were studying the epigenome and how it was built to respond to experiences around us. Not only does the epigenome respond, but experience itself, it turns out, actually changes it by turning genes on and off. The scientists tested their theory out with two types of rats: mothers who licked and groomed their offspring after birth, and mothers who didn’t. The results showed that the offspring of the licking mothers were good at mazes, had calm demeanors, and didn’t eat all of the candy in the bowl. The mothers who drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and talked on the phone all the time had offspring who were anxious, blew at puzzles, and got chunky because they couldn’t leave the jelly beans alone.

  I can’t even tell you if I turned the treadmill off, because the next thing I knew, I was in the hallway, where I almost crashed into my husband.

  “I had a non-licking mother!” I cried.

  “You had a non-licking mother!” he yelled.

  Suddenly it all made sense. The hand-yanking. The anxiety. The Pooh shirt. The aversion to tall walls and sharp corners. The challenges to parking-lot kicking fights. All of the symptoms now came together. I had a non-licking mother, my genes had been turned off as a result, and I was nothing more than an anxiety-filled, jelly-bean-eating lab rat who couldn’t stand to be touched, even for free.

  So it made sense to me that if my environment had turned my genes off, maybe I could get them to go back on. I decided to take it slow at first and try out some hugging. I hugged my neighbor Louise, after her dog died, and that went really well. I hugged my friend Jim after I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years and we met for dinner during Christmas vacation. Now, I want to make it clear that I was still very much at a beginning-hugger level; I was taking it slow and trying not to move too fast. I was not embracing, by any means. Hugs that had time parameters, like One-Mississippi Hugs. I gave out a couple more, although I couldn’t actually say they were changing my life and making me more of a licked rat. I was keeping it safe, keeping it in the family, so to speak, until one day when I got a little hug-cocky.

  I was visiting Seattle for a couple of days and met a friend for coffee while I was there. We had both attended a creative-writing conference a year earlier; I got to know her and her husband and thought both were very cool, very nice people. We had a great time talking and drinking wine and I really enjoyed their company.

  So I was thrilled when she said she had the afternoon free during my visit. We met and walked to a little café. As we were taking the last bites of our chocolate chip cookies a couple of hours later, it began to rain heavily, and just then my friend’s phone rang. It was her husband, who offered, very nicely, to come and pick us up so I wouldn’t have to walk back to my hotel in a downpour.

  Now, that’s sweet, right? Isn’t that thoughtful and kind? That’s exactly what I was thinking, because even though I didn’t have that long of a walk, maybe a mile, I would have gotten soaked. As we pulled up to the front of the hotel, all of this was running through my mind, and certainly this met the parameters of a One-Mississippi Hug. No, I decided, just go for the handshake. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re not ready.

  You’re not ready!

  And I was firmly comfortable with my decision about the handshake or the wave as the car pulled to a stop. But the next thing I knew, I was reaching across the front of the car with my arms open toward the driver’s seat—although my momentum came to a sudden and jarring halt because I had neglected to take off my seat belt. Once I had been jerked back to reality, like I was in a log on Splash Mountain and someone quickly applied the brakes, I knew this had been a terrible choice, but I was in it now. There was no getting out; there was no abandoning the mission. You just can’t open your arms to someone, change your mind, and high-five them instead. Once freed from my restraints, I had no choice but to go back in and deliver a second attempt, but I hadn’t come close to mastering the art of positioning. Going in from the side angle, and basically lying over the console, I got my right arm around him but my left arm got all squished up against the side of the driver’s seat like a flipper, which I realized was moving wildly, as if I was patting him on the back with both hands, all while my friend watched the whole thing from the middle of the backseat. When I eventually retreated, it was clear that not only had he gotten a face-full of my slightly damp hair but that I had administered a Five-Mississippi Hug, and it was probably one of the Most Inappropriate Hugs on record (that was not given at a funeral to the person in the casket).

  I’m not the only one in my family to breach the touching protocol, either, by the way. My father staged a coup around 2000 and started to kiss people hello and goodbye on the cheek, a move that I could only assume was generated on a trip to Italy. We all just tried to take it very lightly and not get too worked up about it, since they were basically air kisses; he also put up a red, white, and green sign in his garage that said, PARKING FOR ITALIANS ONLY. He was clearly feeling the Motherland. We sort of brushed it off when he started incorporating the Psych Hug, which was putting his hand on our shoulder right before leaning in for the kiss. Not a full hug, but just enough of a wrestling move that you couldn’t easily get away without collapsing or igniting a jet pack.

  Then, in 2003, when my soon-to-be-brother-in-law, Greg, started hanging around, my father introduced The Double, which took the foundation of the kiss and the Psych Hug and added another kiss—that’s right, twins—to the mix. For a short time, he only gave Greg The Double. Being new, Greg had no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary in this culture, thinking we just hadn’t assimilated completely yet, since it was clear that his kind wasn’t allowed to park in the garage. Sensing no opposition, my dad then started working it in among the rest of us without a briefing or warning, and on one occasion my husband thought he had fulfilled his departing requirement with the single kiss, only to be caught off guard when my dad went in for The Double and kissed my husband square on the lips.

  Everyone saw it; everyone looked away.

  The silence in the car on the way home was disturbing.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally said weakly. “I thought I told you he had revised the kiss and was now making double contact. I thought you knew. He’s been doing it to Greg for a while.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” my husband answered staunchly. “I have never kissed your dad on the lips.”

  And no one has talked of it since.

  After the Five-Mississippi Hug, I stopped. But, you know, I’m a little glad that hugging didn’t really work out for me. As a family of non-lickers, we are decidedly fine the way we are. We are very happy. So what if we can’t get a massage without feeling dirty and shameful? I never had one before the anxious-hand incident, and it turns out I’m not missing out on anything I can’t live without. I know Brandie is clean, but my sister didn’t know where those Yugoslavian hands had been. Who knew what unclean body she was rubbing lotion on just an hour before?

  And so what if I was the offspring of a non-licking mother? With one lick, who knew where I would have ended up? I might have been the one coming at someone’s thigh with two hands full of lotion.

  Seeing Nova actually reinforced what I had suspected: I’d have a boring, nicely balanced life and have a boring, nicely balanced job, and I wouldn’t see any of the things I see on a daily basis that licked people can’t see. The licking mothers, I think, were boring mothers who never wanted to shave their grandsons’ armpits when they hit puberty or
emailed their daughters warnings that wearing ponytails was basically putting a handle on your head and nearly guaranteeing an abduction. Their boring offspring would never get banned from the post office because she got snotty about stamps, or banned from a party because she mouthed the words to a song, or became trapped in a shirt in a fancy store because the jelly beans made her arms enormous (not because she’s strong).

  I’ll bet we laugh harder at family gatherings, once we determine who the scapegoat is going to be. We have a lot more stuff to talk about than how calm we were that day and how it didn’t even annoy us when the lady in front of us in line at FedEx/Kinko’s picked up her copies and then asked the clerk if they knew someplace close by where she could ship them. I am delighted that no one has ever opened a family dinner at my mother’s house with the phrase “I solved the most fantastic maze today!” Not to mention that I like getting checks and impersonal gift cards for birthdays and Christmas, not subscriptions to the Fig of the Month Club or a book of Sudoku puzzles.

  I know I wouldn’t have ended up being me, and my sisters wouldn’t have ended up being them. Could you imagine if I just smeared my face with Mexican-smuggled Retin-A that expired four years ago, and my mother looked across the kitchen table to tell me how great my skin looked, instead of telling me that I just gave myself face-wide melanoma? I would have no choice but to burst into tears immediately and cry, “Why are you so boring? Jesus! Stop licking me!”

  I like my family just the way it is, and if I had to pick a Licked Laurie or a Non-Licked Laurie, I’d go with the latter, of course (with the option to have fewer moles and fill in the bald spot). My mother taught me never to buy green beans after a lady with too much boob showing has touched them. That’s valuable advice not all nine-year-olds get. I still use it to this day, only now it applies to hippies and the food they bring to potlucks.

  My husband concurs, because a licked person would never agree to crabwalk around the backyard as a form of marital exercise; test the old wives’ tale that earlobes are in exact alignment with your nipples (not on me, over shirt, and ruled completely false); follow an email from him to meet him in the living room in five minutes for a balancing contest (only then to have him make fun of my choice of balancing position, which he said was “too American” and that it “didn’t even mean anything” because I had my leg up, toe pointed forward, my arms up at about forty-five-degree angles, and my fingers were apparently pointing, too. WTF ever. I won); or agree that you should change the name of your canine companion to Doggy McPushy because she believes I am the guest in the bed at night.

  “When you say ‘Doggy McPushy’ with a cough drop in your mouth,” my husband just informed me, “it takes on an entirely different meaning.”

  “A licker would never get that joke,” I replied.

  “I like you just the way you are, but it would be nice if you could leave some jelly beans for someone else,” he said, coming in for a hug, to which I felt forced to immediately throw my hands up and cry,

  “Blueberry!!”

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the readers out there for your great letters, your hilarious posts, and your crazy comments, and for keeping in touch with me, but most of all for reading: I can’t do what I do unless you do what you do. Even Steven. You guys never fail to make my day, every day.

  Thank you to Jenny Bent, who let me tell the tale of the French dog after many, many years; Pamela Cannon, who expertly poked at this manuscript like a coroner, polished it, and got it ready to take to market; Beth Pearson, who rightfully questioned every suspicious comma; and Brian McLendon and Diana Franco who pushed it like good drugs.

  As always, mountains of gratitude to the guy I married, who can make me laugh faster than anybody on the planet and will let me dork out in strange and unpredictable ways without calling a doctor to Frances Farmer me. Who knew I was capable of making a good choice? And thanks to my family and friends: keep doing what you’re doing. I’m still collecting material for the next book, you know.

  Additionally, I have copious amounts of humble gratitude for Jody Lucas, who unwittingly shared the story of her friend, Lucy Fisher, with me, which set the stage for Spooky Little Girl. I’d also like to thank her for not scolding me as loudly as she could for my resistance to flossing, and for handing over enough free toothpaste, toothbrushes, and teeth picks to make a girl with bleeding gums smile. I hope I did her friend Lucy justice, especially since when we meet, Jody is armed with pointy, sharp metal objects headed for my mouth.

  And finally, many thanks to Kelly Kulchak and Kathy White for their support, notes, and for driving me around when it’s 113 degrees in L.A.

  Many, many thanks,

  Laurie

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LAURIE NOTARO has disproportionately chubby arms, which once helped her save the life of her best friend, who was trapped in a wheelchair and choking on a quiche. She has fought a size M shirt in a dressing room (she lost), has been banned from the local post office for wanting too many stamps, and has burned her neck on several occasions by trying to get out of a car too quickly without releasing the seat belt first. In third grade, she sucked a fly up her nostril. It died and several classmates screamed. She now lives with her husband and dog in a small house, and when something tickles her nose, she has learned to breathe out instead of in.