An Idiot Girl's Christmas

by Laurie Notaro

  And I really believed my oath, I truly did. Until Christmas Eve, when my nephews were opening their presents and suddenly I understood that I was also in the presence of an unseen visitor. I had an unscheduled, unannounced guest, one for whom I had no present but who had a present for me. It was My Special Friend, weeks ahead of schedule. It was nothing short of a Menstrual Ambush.

  I did the only thing a girl in my position could do: I went to my mother for help.

  “Oh, please,” she scoffed with a huff. “I haven’t slept in fourteen months, and when I wake up every morning, there are little piles of dust at the end of the bed that used to be my bones. I don’t have hot flashes, I have slow burns. I spend all of my spare time in the freezer aisle at Safeway hovering over frozen vegetables. What the hell would make you think I would have a tampon in this house? And grab a place mat from the kitchen before you plop yourself down on anything; I just bought this furniture.”

  Unwrapping your presents while standing up can be a challenge, but it was easier than lying to two hysterical little boys who might have looked at a suspicious place mat and needed to be told that Aunt Laurie was not dying, she had only been shot in the ass earlier that day. After the festivities were over, I headed straight for Safeway to pick up some necessary supplies because there was no way I was going to carry around a place mat in my purse until December 26.

  But as you’ve probably already guessed, Safeway was closed.

  As was Fred Meyer.

  As was Fry’s.

  As was Albertsons.

  All dark and empty, their parking lots filled with nothing but painted stripes and speed bumps.

  Now, I thought about stopping at a convenience mart, but frankly, I’m a little picky about where I get my toxic shock from, and if all they have in stock is some generic off-brand “Flo-tex” box, I’ll stick with the place mat, thank you very much. Maybe I’m choosier than most, but I didn’t know what situation was waiting for me tomorrow—the pendulum could swing from a “Gee, I’m as light as air and I am so comfortable that I could slap on an Olympic-issue leotard and do a cartwheel in front of sixty million viewers” or “I have an anvil for a uterus, and a maxi pad with the absorption rate of a feather bed wouldn’t even do the job right now.”

  I knew where I had to go: that red-and-blue terrible beacon in the night. I had no other reasonable choice. If I had, I certainly would have taken it.

  But there I was, crossing the threshold to everything that I hold unholy, Super Kmart. I understood as I moved from the darkness of the parking lot to the gaping, cavernous entrance—the gateway to the other side—that everything contained inside was indeed super. It was super big, super filthy, and had a more concentrated Super Kmart smell, which is a combination of equal parts popcorn, brand-new plastic, and baby poop.

  Now, in the history of mankind, a store has never been as crowded as Super Kmart was on that night. Almost every aisle was simply a river of people, as the wandering, mulling, drifting, roaming, itinerant mob of Super Kmarters swept the store. The only other time I’ve seen movement en masse like that is on the news when a country gets invaded. I was definitely the Grace Kelly in this store, but that’s not saying a whole lot when people in prison looked like candidates for political office next to what was roaming around near midnight at Super Kmart.

  In addition, chances were good to excellent that I was the only person in the whole joint who hadn’t given birth earlier that day to the newborn slung over her shoulder, who actually had hair grown from her own scalp, who didn’t have a lesion or open wound of some sort on or about the mouth area, and who was wearing shoes. It was like a whole different plane of existence. I wasn’t even sure if most of the people in there were MAMMALS.

  Somehow, I bodysurfed over to the feminine-hygiene department, caught several diseases, and ended up staring at a wall full of maxi pads. I needed variety, sure, but with this much to choose from, the selection process itself took on the proportions of a calculus problem. I had more trouble choosing a panty liner that night than I did a 401(k). The plain truth was I didn’t know what I needed, and looking at all of the options just made me more confused. There was even a maxi pad shaped like a stealth bomber in case I was wearing a thong. Was the deodorant factor necessary, or was I willing to take the risk of a sudden breeze shooting toward my crotch? Just how many people would notice I had gone the extra-deodorant-tampon mile for them, anyway? “Wow, what a fresh breeze! Hey is that—Playtex Deodorized Tampons. Certainly. Thank you, Laurie, thank you, for your consideration and compassion toward others even in your time of suffering.” Did I feel that my little friend had the desire to up the ante and push me into nighttime-protection territory? Did I need to fly on faith or buy the Leak Lock patented-technology maxi pad? Should I just scrap this whole expedition and simply get training pants? Did I think there might be a real chance for the expanded wing potential here? Not only were there wings, but then I spied Kotex Long Super Maxi with Wings and thought immediately, LONG? Another variable? How do I know if I’m long? I panicked. I had never even had the prerequisite curious moment in a bathroom and just happened to have a tape measure nearby to even come close to owning that nugget of knowledge. How does one suspect that one has a long cookie? Where is the chart? I’ve never seen a chart, not even in the nurse’s office. What are you doing in your everyday life that would cause you to think, “Oh my God. I must have a long one. Nothing else makes sense.” Excess back fat, wide ass, rubbing inner thighs, there are clues to those challenges, but long ones? Since, however, I’d never had a problem and never had to tuck anything under on a bike seat, I came to the conclusion that I had a regular short, Italian cookie just like I had a regular short, Italian body, considering genetics and all.

  That was not the only revelation that reared its ugly head in the tampon aisle at Super Kmart, however. It was during this scrutiny that I noticed something odd: Every box of a Kotex-brand product bore a bright red dot at the tip of the X, nearly the size of a nickel.

  Needless to say, I am not a barometer of sensitivity, but even I was shocked. That can’t be what I think it is, I said to myself; maybe it’s a printing error, or everyone at Kotex has toxic shock so they didn’t notice the little red period on all of their boxes. Then I saw a small display flag with the words “Kotex fits. Period.” punctuated by none other than the little red dot, and I knew it wasn’t a mistake or a joke enacted by a stoner at the printing plant after his toke break. It was for real. I shook my head. Now, maybe I was making too much out of it but I thought it was quite odd. In fact, I think that whatever copywriter cooked this up had a skull packed full of deodorized cotton instead of gray matter—I mean, who wrote this ad, Beavis and Butt-Head? Or me? I mean, honestly, how much do you think Kimberly-Clark paid an ad agency to come up with something clever, only to have “Kotex fits. Period.” pop up on an easel in a meeting? Somebody should have fired the bozo who was holding the pointer, or at least picked up a bagel from the snack platter on the conference table and pelted him in the head with it.

  I mean, if “Kotex fits. Period.” with little red dot floating through it made the cut what didn’t?

  “Kotex fits. Suck it up!”

  “Kotex fits. Bloody well right!”

  “Kotex fits. PMS (Pretty Messy Stuff).”

  “Kotex fits. When you keep flowing, and flowing, and flowing . . .”

  Or how about “Kotex fits. For those days when saying that mean birds pecked at your ass will psychologically scar your eight-year-old nephew and feed his already unnatural fear of winged creatures.”

  Frankly, I could not bring myself to encourage that sort of lazy nonsense, so I moved over to the Playtex section, which had no red period, no crimson tide, no erupting volcano printed across the front of its boxes, grabbed a variety box of tampons and a couple of packages of maxi pads (one long, just in case). I headed out to the main aisle, which only minutes before was full of people but was now mysteriously empty of human cargo. I took advantage of th
is sudden spaciousness and dipped down the candy aisle to grab a bag of Milky Way dark bars, then headed to the checkout lanes. Then I understood why the store aisles were so empty—it was because all fifty of the lanes were open and loaded with customers three and four deep. It had taken me so long to pick out tampons that Super Kmart was near closing time. I decided that the smart thing to do was wait it out, so out of mere curiosity, I wandered into the food section to see if Super Kmart was super enough to carry my favorite chocolate sorbet, which I always have a hard time finding. But there it was, so I grabbed three pints, just to stock up, and as I rounded the corner, I saw my mother’s favorite cookies, Mallomars, created deliciously from marshmallows and chocolate, which are also very hard to find, so I stocked up on those as well.

  Luck was with me, because as I approached the checkout lanes, I spotted one that only had two people in line, compared with the other lanes, which were now four and five people deep. I slid behind the second guy, who seemed a little jumpy, and released a giant tampon-and-chocolate mountain onto the conveyor belt.

  The first lady in line was buying a Norelco razor. Just one Norelco razor. When the cashier asked her if she wanted to purchase the extended warranty, the lady paused for a moment and said, “I don’t know. Tell me about it.” This, apparently, was bad news for the man ahead of me, who balled his fist and punched the wall behind him. I wasn’t exactly sure why he was mad, if he was in a hurry and didn’t feel like standing there for eight minutes during the question-and-answer segment of the Norelco warranty spiel, or if the massive herpes sore that was eating away his upper lip was beginning to pain him. Either way, it was a delight to watch until he began kicking the wall of the checkout lane and uttering phrases in his native tongue that I didn’t understand but wished I did, because I realized that I was in a Super Kmart, where anything can happen. If I had been at Target, my level of alarm wouldn’t have risen nearly as rapidly, but at Super Kmart, you’ve got a careful, delicate balance, with a fingertip barely grazing the pulse of civilization, which can dip the wrong, volatile way at any moment. That happens when you’ve got a bunch of lunatics roaming around your store trying to buy vast quantities of Sudafed and acetone. In Target, you don’t have to worry so much; Target sells cotton. Kmart sells gun cabinets. Recognizing this potential danger and the fact that apparently no one seemed to notice or care that the wall had been assaulted, much less stepped forward to do anything about it, I decided to get out of the way and took a couple of steps back, lest the Tasmanian Devil whip himself into a fury that somehow involved me and my skull. This, however, caused me to step on the foot of the teenage asshole waiting behind me with a cluster of his gangster homies.

  It was just the sort of thing that I needed in order to call his attention toward me, as he and his friends began jousting back and forth in quieter tones, but what really got them going was when one of them called me “Peppermint Fatty.” Which was nice. I always enjoy being judged from behind. Even though I apologized for stepping on his foot with my gargantuan Peppermint Fatty hoof, I had become worthy of receiving not only his full wrath but the wrath of his hooligan friends as well. I’m guessing that they noticed what was heaped on the conveyor belt, because one of them asked another what time it was, to which the other replied (in a groan), “I don’t have a watch, but it feels like my time of the month, man.”

  And with that green light, it all began.

  “Hey man, how you feelin’?” one homie said to another.

  “Oh, not so fresh, man, not so fresh!” a second homie answered, to which they all chortled.

  “What stays in the dark, has wings, and sucks blood?” a third homie said.

  They all snickered, but no one replied.

  “A tampon!” answered the third homie, giving his own joke the wrong punch line, which was idiotic, because the correct answer was right there in plain sight on the conveyor belt, in long and unlong form.

  “What do you do when a Kotex is on fire?” another one asked his stumped audience. “Tampon it!”

  I stood there, frozen in an ice block of horror, hate, and bare naked humiliation. There was no way out, there was nowhere to go, I was in a realm of unimaginable mortification, and I actually looked down hopefully to see if I was naked and this was nothing but a bad dream brought on by deep-running insecurities and too much cheap wine.

  Now, this exchange of period jokes continued for quite a while, and these are only the ones I can remember. After a while, the jokes weren’t even about me anymore but had evolved into an odd adolescent-male ritual of trying to outgross one another, though I doubt that, in the history of mankind, a group of six fourteen- to seventeen-year-old boys had spent this much time talking about girls’ periods and the collection of tools they employed. It was amazing to me to think that a battery of menstrual puns had been using quite a bit of storage space in each of the respective homies’ brains, yet I had a feeling if you asked them what they learned in school that afternoon, their responses wouldn’t be . . . well, quite so fresh.

  Finally, when the lady who was buying the razor had heard all about the extended warranty and had all of her questions answered to her satisfaction and then decided she wasn’t interested, the aggressive man in front of me stopped kicking the wall, mutilating every candy bar within his reach, finally got to pay for his Sudafed and valu-pack of generic batteries, and was on his way to celebrate what was, I’m sure, a very merry Crystalmethmas.

  I, in turn, got to listen to several more treasured seconds of teenage boys telling each other how unfresh they were feeling, and after I paid for a year’s supply of period products, I grabbed my bags and turned and faced the Menstrual Gang.

  “I got my period for Christmas,” I said proudly to them. “And I’m glad you think it’s so funny, but if I were you, I’d be hoping against hope that all of your little girlfriends got the very same thing.”

  Mashed Potatoes, Yams, and a Urine Sample

  “Are you sure this is the one you want?” my husband asked, holding the trunk of a pine tree in a fenced-in portion of the Safeway parking lot.

  Honestly, I wasn’t. The tree looked quite lopsided, was bare on one side, and had the branches crushed in on the other. But I’m not a fool; I knew what I was up against. I had learned from Christmases past that if I didn’t pick out a tree in forty-five seconds flat, my husband would start getting nervous and aggravated and would interrupt my tree picking to announce that we had to go home right away because he needed to use the bathroom.

  I looked at him, his hands covered in yellow sap, his right leg beginning to twitch.

  “My God, I love this tree!” I shouted. “We could look for a whole three minutes and not find a tree as good as this one! I’ve never seen such a beautiful tree!”

  “Pay the man,” my husband said, dragging it toward the car. That he had already started to get worked up was not a good sign. We still had to get the tree home and put it up.

  Sprawled like a corpse on our front porch, the tree patiently waited as my husband approached it with a buzzing circular saw to cut off several inches from the trunk. This was also not a good sign. I was pretty sure that I had broken the saw over the summer when I ignored the safety tips in the user’s manual and used my concrete front steps as a makeshift sawhorse, leaving so many teeth in the concrete that it looked like a shark had attacked my house.

  Before I could say anything, my husband moved in and sank the blade into the tree. The tree twitched and bobbed as the saw began to scream and the blade stuck. He held on tight, his teeth clenched. The tree shook violently until my husband stepped on it and tried to pull the saw out. After that, everything happened very quickly.

  The next thing I saw was my husband covering one eye and screaming and the saw, now emitting plumes of smoke, tiredly spinning to a halt at his feet with a slow, grinding wheeze.

  “That’s it!” he yelled as he marched into the house to flush out the chunk of wood that had smacked him in the eye. “I hate Christmas! I hate
Christmas! I hate Christmas!”

  I didn’t say anything. It’s always best for me, in these situations, to cower on the floor, roll over on my back, and offer myself for sacrifice, whimpering slightly. But personally, as I rested my head against the dusty floorboards and noticed my best bra (only one underwire missing) beneath the couch, I thought to myself, How can you hate Christmas?

  I’ve grown to enjoy our family holidays and even look forward to them, despite the fact that they now include medical procedures, as was demonstrated at Thanksgiving when my mother hauled a blood-pressure monitor to the dining room table and made all of us roll up our sleeves. “What do you want me to bring for Christmas?” I asked her then as she tightened the cuff hard enough around my arm that I lost feeling in my hand. “Mashed potatoes, yams, or just a urine sample?”

  Still, I look forward to sitting around the dining room table with my family, reminiscing about holidays when we were kids. We talk about how we remember Christmas as cold and exciting, as my grandfather, Pop Pop, walked my sisters and me around the block on Christmas Eve so Santa could deliver our presents early, because, Pop Pop said, “My girls are special.” We held his hand as we pointed to an airplane in the sky, and he would agree that it was Rudolph, coming to make the special stop at our house. Even after a traumatic fourth-grade episode when someone spilled the beans to me about Santa Claus, I still went on our walk with Pop Pop and didn’t say a word when he spotted a 747 and said that it was almost time to go back to the house. The best part of Christmas was that walk, watching our breath turn cold on a chilly desert night, smelling Pop’s tobacco as smoke drifted back from his pipe, and hearing him say as he nudged me with a wink, “I saw your mother filling up your stocking with underwear again. My daughter never listens to you.”