The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus

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The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus Page 5

by Sonya Sones


  not buying any of it,

  then retreats

  into her bedroom.

  And when she closes the door,

  the sound of it

  echoes through the house

  like the sharp crack of a gavel.

  OUR BABY’S BEEN IN THERE FOR TEN MINUTES

  Alone

  with her computer.

  Michael and I

  have been out here

  for

  ten eons.

  Alone

  with each other.

  WHEN SAM FINALLY EMERGES

  Her face is as blank

  as an un-carved pumpkin’s.

  My heart

  stops.

  But then she beams

  a thousand-watt grin

  and says she got in

  to the school of her dreams.

  We hug! We scream!

  We dance! We cheer!

  We shout hoorah

  for our darlingest dear!

  But when she’s not looking,

  I dab at a tear—

  she’ll be

  three thousand miles away

  from here.

  MY FLOODGATES ARE GETTING READY TO BURST

  But the last thing I want to do

  is rain on Samantha’s parade.

  So I slip out into the backyard

  to compose myself.

  I close my eyes,

  take a few deep breaths,

  and when I open them again,

  my gaze falls upon our pepper tree…

  When Samantha was a toddler,

  Michael and I

  read picture books to her for hours,

  cuddling in the shade of that tree.

  We promised her

  we’d build her a tree house someday,

  when the branches grew strong enough

  to hold it…

  The three of us

  whiled away summer afternoons

  chasing each other

  around the tree’s thickening trunk,

  weaving wreaths

  from its feathery leaves,

  watching the doves

  build their nests…

  When the tree

  was tall enough,

  Michael made a hand-painted swing

  for Samantha.

  He hung it

  from a sturdy branch

  and we took turns pushing her on it

  till she learned how to pump…

  When Sam was six, we taught her

  how to climb into the tree’s lap.

  She often brought Monkey there with her

  and sang him little songs she made up.

  But on Samantha’s seventh birthday,

  when we told her that the tree was finally

  big enough for a tree house, she began to cry

  and begged us not to build it.

  She’d gotten it into her head somehow

  that the tree would be in agony

  when the nails were hammered into it.

  And no one could convince her otherwise.

  So we never did build

  that tree house for Samantha.

  But, together, the three of us

  built something better.

  WRITUS INTERRUPTUS

  I can’t seem to write

  for more than five minutes at a stretch

  without someone phoning

  from the Firemen’s Association

  to ask me for a donation.

  Or someone will ring the bell

  and say they’re sorry to bother me

  but they saw the FOR SALE sign next door

  and were wondering

  what the asking price is.

  Or my mother, who’s been

  in the hospital for two weeks already,

  will call to tell me I’d better

  get over there right now

  to spring her from “this hellhole.”

  I’ll explain that I can’t come over,

  because I’m at home—in California.

  But she’ll just hiss,

  “Don’t give me that stupidity…”

  and continue on with her steroid-induced rant.

  Even if I somehow manage to calm her down,

  then field a call from her pissed-off nurse,

  and succeed in convincing her

  that my mother couldn’t possibly

  have bitten her on purpose,

  something else will inevitably happen—

  Alice will stop by

  to ask me if I can snap

  a new photo of her for Match.com;

  maybe something a tad more glam.

  Or Samantha will call me from school,

  begging me to rush over there

  with the Great Gatsby essay

  she somehow managed

  to forget at home.

  Or Roxie will text me

  from her freaking iPhone,

  or her iPad,

  or whatever the hell she’s using these days,

  to ask, “WHEN CAN I C UR BUK? ”

  Honestly.

  I don’t know how I will ever

  finish this manuscript

  if I keep on getting

  interup—”

  I MEAN, FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD

  Even while

  I was writing that last poem

  (about why I can never

  get any writing done)

  Michael strolled past my office window

  and paused to press his face to the glass,

  cupping his paint-spattered hands

  around his eyes.

  He stood there staring into my office,

  his eyes fixed on me

  like a puppy begging scraps

  from the table.

  (Michael’s always doing this—to try to see

  if I’m writing or not—because I guess he figures

  if I’m not writing, then he can ask me whatever

  pressing question it is that he wants to ask.

  He does this, even though I’ve told him

  that when he does this, it’s just as distracting—

  more distracting, even—than if he had

  knocked on my door in the first place.)

  I forced myself not to glance over at him,

  trying to look engrossed in my work,

  but he peered and peered and peered at me

  till I finally turned and barked, “What is it?”

  At which point, he barged into my office

  like a bull charging a matador’s cape,

  to inquire if there was anything

  in the house for lunch.

  As if he couldn’t have

  walked into the kitchen,

  pulled open the fridge door,

  and found out that answer

  all by himself.

  THEN, OF COURSE, THINGS SPIRALED OUT OF CONTROL

  With me asking him

  why he just did that staring-at-me-

  through-the-window thing again,

  even though he knows how much I hate it?

  And him saying he wasn’t staring at me,

  he was only trying to see

  if I was writing or not,

  so he could ask me about lunch.

  And me saying

  I’ll never get any work

  done if he keeps on bugging me

  about every little thing.

  And him clearing his throat

  and saying do I really think it’s fair

  to get so pissed at him when his only crime

  was that he was trying not to disturb me?

  And me saying

  I really don’t have the time

  to keep fighting with him about this

  because I have to get back to work.

  And him saying,

  “Of course you want to stop now.

  I’ve just said something you know is true

  and you don’t want to concede the point.”


  And me saying—

  Well, you don’t want

  to know

  what I said then.

  AFTER AN ARGUMENT WITH HUBBY

  Which of

  us hasn’t passed

  a vengeful hour thinking

  of ways to spend the insurance

  money?

  IS IT A BAD SIGN?

  Is it a bad sign if instead of working

  on your manuscript

  (the one you were supposed to turn in

  nearly a year ago)

  you find yourself

  spending the entire afternoon

  looking up all your old boyfriends

  on Facebook?

  WHEN I FINALLY RUN OUT OF OLD BOYFRIENDS

  And I’m just about

  to start writing (honest!),

  my eyes happen to drift over to my bookcase

  and land on a photo of Sam—

  blowing out the candles

  on her seventh birthday.

  She was unbelievably cute at that age.

  And unbelievably exhausting…

  I’d be sitting at my computer,

  in the middle of writing a poem

  so ununderstandable that The New Yorker

  would surely beg to publish it,

  when my seven-year-old would burst in

  like an adorable tornado.

  “Look at me, Mommy!

  See how good I can cross my eyes?”

  I’d be watching it dawn on Cary Grant

  why Deborah Kerr had stood him up,

  when my seven-year-old,

  resplendent in a pink chiffon tutu,

  would prance in

  and position herself

  between me and the TV.

  “Look, Mommy! Watch me do the hula!”

  I’d be trying to snatch a quick conversation

  with one of the other frazzled mothers in the park,

  but my darling sugar-buzzed seven-year-old

  had other plans for me:

  “Mommy! Look at me go down the slide!”

  “Mommy! Watch me do a cartwheel!”

  “Mommy! See how high I can go on the swing?”

  “Look, Mommy! Look at me!”

  Now…my seven-year-old is seventeen.

  I pass by her bedroom door and pause

  to watch her in the soft lamplight,

  murmuring into her cell phone.

  Sensing my presence, she looks over

  at me sharply and snarls, “Could you be

  any more annoying if you possibly tried?

  Why are you always looking at me?”

  I DON’T ANSWER MY DAUGHTER’S RHETORICAL QUESTION

  I just stand there,

  well…looking at her.

  And then, feeling strangely giddy,

  I decide to try something:

  “Achoo!” I say.

  “Ah…choo!

  Ahh…choooo!

  Ahhh…CHOOOOO!”

  But,

  apparently,

  the spell has lost

  its magic.

  SHIFT HAPPENS

  On what day,

  at what hour,

  at which tell-me-it-ain’t-so moment

  did you finally come

  to the blow-to-the-solar-plexus realization

  that your daughter had switched over

  from being so proud of you

  that she actually wanted to bring you in

  for show-and-tell,

  to being so humiliated

  by everything you say or do

  or even think about doing

  that she is

  no longer willing

  to be seen in public with you?

  (Unless,

  of course,

  you offer to take her shopping.)

  THE LEANING TOWER OF ME

  Samantha and I are cruising

  the Neiman Marcus Last Call Sale—

  because who can afford

  to shop at Neiman’s

  when it’s not having a sale?

  I’m admiring my daughter

  as she glides through the racks—

  her back so straight

  she looks as if she’s balancing

  a rare book on her head.

  I glance in a mirror at my own posture

  and am appalled at how

  my head’s jutting forward,

  as if it’s trying to win a race

  with the rest of my body.

  I’m stunned by the gorilla-esque curve

  my spine seems to have taken on,

  as though determined to prove

  once and for all

  that evolution really did happen.

  I snap my shoulders back

  and pull myself up,

  arrow straight, like a child being measured

  against a wall.

  Then, a few minutes later,

  while we’re browsing through

  a mountain range of marked-down panties,

  I see an old woman sifting through

  the thongs on the other side of the table—

  the hump

  on her back

  so enormous

  she resembles

  a camel.

  She looks up suddenly

  and catches me staring.

  I avert my eyes

  and am confronted with my reflection

  in yet another mirror—

  which is when

  I notice that my

  frighteningly King-Kongish posture

  has snuck right back up

  on me…

  Oh no!

  Is this how

  it all began for her?

  Twenty years from now, am I going to be

  the hunchback of Neiman Marcus?

  CHAMBER OF HORRORS

  Samantha won’t allow me

  into dressing rooms with her anymore.

  So, as usual, it’s my fate to wait

  in an empty one across the hall.

  She tries on a long-sleeved

  form-fitting chocolate-brown T-shirt,

  and models it for me—

  she looks gorgeous.

  Then she retreats

  back into her dressing room

  and tosses the shirt over the top of the door

  for me to put into the “maybe” pile.

  As I reach out to catch it,

  I find myself musing

  that brown’s a good color for me,

  and that I wear a size medium, too,

  and that those nice long sleeves

  would go a long way

  toward hiding

  my flabby upper arms…

  On impulse, I slip off my baggy tee

  and pull the brown shirt on over my head.

  But when I catch sight of myself in the mirror,

  I gasp—

  how is it possible

  that the very same shirt

  that made my daughter look

  so curvy, smooth, and sexy,

  makes me

  look like two scoops

  of half-melted

  Rocky Road?

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY BOOBS

  They came out.

  They stood up.

  They fell

  ON THE WAY OUT OF NEIMAN’S

  Samantha and I run into Tess

  and her mother, Brandy.

  The girls squeal and hug each other,

  then dash off to sample lipsticks,

  leaving me to chat with Brandy

  about the animal shelter she runs.

  Brandy is a total sweetheart.

  Really. She is.

  But she’s one of those moms

  who looks so young

  that you think she must have given birth

  when she was twelve…

  one of those moms whose butt is so tight

  and arms are so toned

  and legs are so long

  and hair is
so sleek

  and waist is so slim

  and clothes are so chic

  that when I’m around her

  I feel like a freak—

  like I should put on a burka

  and never take it off.

  Brandy is one of those moms,

  who will never, ever

  look like two scoops

  of half-melted Rocky Road.

  COUSIN ALICE CALLS

  She says she’s worried about my mother.

  She says that she just got off the phone with her

  and she sounded nuttier than a jar of Skippy

  (that’s Alice’s simile, not mine).

  So I hang up

  and call my mother,

  who does, indeed, sound nuttier

  than a jar of Skippy.

  She also sounds really pissed off—

  pissed off at the nurses for trying to poison her,

  pissed off at me for not calling the police,

  pissed off at the planet for spinning.

  So I hang up

  and call Dr. Hack.

 

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