An Idiot Girl's Christmas

by Laurie Notaro

  I really miss that. Although he fought hard to try to live long enough to see his great-grandchild and namesake, Pop Pop died two days before Nicholas was born. As a family, we’ve tried to focus on what we’ve gained rather than what we’ve lost, evident by the mountains of wrapped toys under the tree with Nicholas’s name on them. Without saying anything, we’ll all know it should be Pop Pop who hands Nicholas his presents, helps him tear apart a stubbornly wrapped package, takes him on Christmas Eve walks. And we know that the ever present sense of loss really can’t be filled with any number of gifts.

  After our traditional dinner of antipasto this Christmas Eve, we’ll bundle Nicholas and his brother, David, in their coats and little gloves, and before we head out the door for his first walk, I’ll have to say, “Wait. Take everything off. Grandma says we all have to wee-wee first so her test will be ready when we get back.”

  Then we’ll head out again, in what has become a new tradition in our family, except for the submission of body fluids. I’m hoping that I’ll get to hold one of the boys’ pudgy little hands, and that an airplane will pass low enough that my sisters and I can point to the sky and tell him that Rudolph comes early for special little boys.

  I’m going to keep a pipe in my pocket, just in case.

  Deck the Mall

  Every family has forbidden words, words that with just a mention can evoke a wretched event, a terrible memory, or may do nothing more than conjure the thought of something simply so horrible that it’s better to ignore it and never think about it at all. Every family has forbidden words or phrases that take on a “That of Which We Do Not Speak” eminence, for fear that a metaphorical monster will leap out of the woods and skin our goats alive if we, well, had any. Although the rules are well understood by all members of the family, every now and then someone lets one of these awful words sneak out, or uses it as a fraudulent distraction to get out of trouble at the dinner table.

  For example, should my father boast once again for no apparent reason at the dinner table that he received a Christmas card from George and Laura Bush, to avoid a rather unpleasant retort from the Democrats sitting across from him and the positioning of a fork in a threatening manner, someone might just venture forth and say, “That is almost as appalling as HAM AND ORANGE SAUCE, Dad,” which would make the conversation sputter and then fall into a sudden and just coma. Silence would reign as we all recount, one by one, the occasion on which my mother served ham for dinner in a delightful orange sauce with what looked like currants or raisins in it. It was dee-li-SHUS, and we gobbled it down like little piggies. When my mother finally sat down, we complimented her on the magnificent meal and added that raisins in the sauce were a great, inventive touch.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, there are no raisins in that sauce,” she replied, then looked at the gravy boat full of floating raisinlike things in it.

  “Oh, God,” she said as she jumped up with the boat in her hands and ran to the kitchen, where she dumped the sauce—apparently a Fear Factor–style concoction, complete with a wide assortment of larvae—into the garbage disposal, then screamed, “How old is that cornstarch?”

  Another That of Which We Do Not Speak expression comes courtesy of my younger sister, Lisa, who at the age of seven let past her lips one of the filthiest things any human on this earth has ever uttered, and which is known in the Notaro circle as “BARN DOOR.” One night, as we were all sitting down to dinner, my father walked into the kitchen and we all saw that he had neglected to, shall we say, batten down his hatch. An easy mistake, one we’ve all made at one time or another—I happen to prefer making mine directly preceding a job interview. Sensing an opportunity to be a courteous and helpful daughter, my sister aggressively pointed to his open fly and squealed, “Daaad! Your barn door’s open,” an expression she had no doubt picked up in the unsavory world of the monkey-bar area of the school playground, then added, “And I can see your cow!”

  This, of course, rendered my father helpless, reeling in the numb spiral of protective shock, as would any Catholic father who had a daughter who was openly talking about his cow, even if she was simply mimicking things she had heard dirty children who lived in the mobile-home park say, even if she hadn’t the slightest idea of what a cow was, or even if his fly was only halfway down and you couldn’t even see beyond the barn door, let alone the animals and their stables beyond it.

  “Uhhhhhhh,” my father stammered until my mother ran in front of him to block the unseen horror from our eyes as she shrilly shrieked at us, “No one can see your cow! No one can see your cow! Keep eating your hot dogs! Keep your eyes on the hot dog! No one is looking at any cows!”

  But the most ominous That of Which We Do Not Speak goes far beyond my mother feeding her children bugs or my sister allegedly seeing our dad’s livestock play peekaboo; this phrase will not only stun the family into unreserved silence, entirely aghast with implication, but it is enough to make people simply get up and go home.

  It is so menacing that it doesn’t even have a nickname; it just is. No one will dare bring it up, even if my dad were to announce that he had invited the Bushes over for Christmas dinner and the squinty one was taking my chair. Once it is uttered, typically by my unassuming Nana, it seems to take on physical dimensions and hangs in the air, and hangs and hangs and hangs like a storm cloud threatening to ruin a wedding. It looms heartily, unperturbed, until finally either the bravest soul or the one who owes my dad the most money will venture forth and sacrifice themselves to the terror known as “Nana Needs to Go Shopping.”

  If you know anything about taking an octogenarian anywhere outside of a familiar (and secured) environment, you know that it’s one of the most challenging experiences you can have. Forget about sitting on a tropical island for thirty-nine days forging alliances and trying to kill your own food; dismiss on-the-air face-lifts, liposuction, and jaw implants. If television producers really want to put something bloodcurdling on the air, all they need to do is take an elderly person, hand them a shopping cart, and boom, “Where Is the FiberCon? I Haven’t Had a Bowel Movement in One, Two, Three, Four, Five Days, Young Man!”: Old People Shopping—the scariest reality show in television history—would be born.

  Now, it’s not that I don’t love my Nana, because I do, I love her very, very, very much. But upon crossing the threshold of a retail establishment, my beloved Nana takes on a form I don’t even know. She instantaneously transforms into Chucky in Easy Spirit pumps, only much slower. Despite the fact that she occasionally loses her balance, she stoutly refuses to give up those pumps and fancies the shopping cart as a steadying device, as if it’s bolted to the ground like a bike rack instead of being a precarious plastic basket perched on top of four wheels shooting off in different directions, but then again, how crazy can things get when you’re going at such a pace that only a time-elapse camera can detect that you’ve even moved at all? I am not allowed to help steer or command the cart in any way; in fact, I am not allowed to even touch the cart. I have never been sure why. I initially thought it interfered with the fine tunings of Nana’s inner compass, or that she feared I would suddenly push her to the ground and stage a coup, but recent events have brought me to a far different conclusion.

  That’s because, despite her supposed lack of physical agility, Nana gets “lost” on 90 percent of all shopping trips and tries her best to evade capture, like a zoo gorilla tasting her first moments of joyous freedom. The probability of finding her in the same spot where you dropped her off before you parked the car is a guaranteed zero, and once she is finally located in the store, your chances of keeping track of her aren’t much better. Nana is nothing short of, politely speaking, a handful. She’s like a toddler, but one who won’t respond to the store PA system calling her name unless the loudspeaker is approximately two inches from her left, good ear. One moment she’s right next to you, studying a Roma tomato with more concentration than it requires to defuse a bomb, and the next thing you know
, there she is in the bakery aisle, verbally attacking a sixteen-year-old stockboy: “Remember when you stopped carrying my bread in 1998? It was the best bread ever made. You ruined my life, you know! Ruined my life. BRING IT BACK.”

  Then you must contend with The List, which no one in my family has ever actually set eyes on, despite the fact that it sets the agenda for a major chunk of our lives. Nana keeps it firmly folded in the palm of her hand, bringing it out only to see what obscure item we will spend the next forty-five minutes hunting for. You have to have a special security clearance to view The List, and so far Nana hasn’t granted it to anyone, not even my nephews, who are bribed with dollars and chocolate and sent on special missions to secure it.

  Taking Nana shopping is a duty that no one in my family is eager to claim. Several weeks ago, when it was my turn to dissipate the black cloud, I have to admit that I was a little resentful because Nana and I were alone in her living room when the phrase was uttered, and usually you’d at least get some sad looks and pity from cowardly family members and condolence calls afterward. I got nothing. Just a cold, hard stare from Nana, her hands crossed in front of her as she looked and looked and looked at me for a long, long time. That old woman didn’t flicker. She stood her ground like a Ukrainian demanding an election recount. “Sure,” I heard myself remit weakly, “we can go shopping. If you need to. I didn’t realize you were that hungry. Do you have any yarn? I’d like to tie our wrists together, or you can just make a list and I’ll go get whatever you need . . .”

  The gravity of the situation then deepened a bit, when Nana added a clause to the phrase and she shook her head: “Oh, no, I don’t need to go to the store. I need to go to the mall.” Then she tacked on—without a shred of mercy—“I need to do my Christmas shopping.”

  Now, if there’s a thought more frightening than that of Nana in a store, it’s Nana in a building full of them. This is in addition to the well-known fact that if you take Nana to the mall once, you’ll be taking her to the mall again in a round-trip, because Nana returns everything. I swallowed hard and prayed for a sudden emergence of a stone in my kidney so that I could pass the shopping torch on to another relative while I suffered a softer, much quieter pain.

  “I have a list,” she added quietly, sliding a folded-up piece of white paper from her blouse cuff, showing only enough of it for proof, then carefully sliding it back again.

  “How many names are on that list?” I dared to ask.

  “Everybody,” Nana whispered.

  “Give me the list and we’ll order everything on the Internet,” I begged. “You won’t even have to leave the house. Please. Just give me The List.”

  Nana wore a look of disgust on her face, as if I was trying to get to second base.

  “Save yourself the trouble and buy yourself some chocolate with your dirty dollar,” she snapped. “No one touches The List.”

  There were, unbelievably, some good aspects to taking Nana to the mall, particularly the nonexistence of shopping carts, her number-one tool for a clean escape. Even if she does manage to flee without a getaway cart, we always know where to find her, although sometimes we take our time and make a few pit stops before getting to the Easy Spirit store just to make her sweat a little.

  Once we got inside the mall, since I had no access to The List, I asked Nana where she wanted to go first. She pulled out the folded paper from her sleeve cuff.

  “The List says Aveda,” Nana informed me, barely unfolding the piece of paper she held tightly to her body. “It’s for your sister, and she wants some hair tonics.”

  I’m sure I visibly gasped. Aveda had been the scene of one of Nana’s most infamous public outrages several years prior, when the poor unsuspecting salesgirl who had greeted Nana at the door only minutes before with a paper cup of soothing, aromatic complimentary tea, suddenly wanted to charge Nana twenty-four dollars for a tube of hand lotion and Nana, honestly speaking, nearly challenged her to a rumble.

  “That’s not my order,” Nana snapped. “I only had one thing of lotion.”

  “And it’s twenty-four dollars,” the girl informed her.

  “You are out of your MIND,” Nana said, then slapped her open palm on the counter loudly. “Lotion that costs twenty-four dollars! At least do me a favor and show me the gun if you’re going to rob me. Elizabeth Taylor’s lotion isn’t that much, and she’s a real name brand! She’s Elizabeth Taylor! I don’t even know who Aveda is! I never even heard of her! Name a movie she was in. Your free tea was stupid, too. Elizabeth Taylor’s lotion is a very nice scent. Free tea! I knew you were up to something!”

  I learned a lesson that day, and so did my sister, who had to usher her children outside so they wouldn’t have to witness their great-grandmother transform into Shannen Doherty girl-slapping the chick who’d boinked her husband in front of a video camera. That lesson was that at the grocery store, hardly anything is over five bucks, but at the mall, the only thing that’s within Nana’s price range is a stale pretzel with a side of processed cheese. Now, I know Nana was around during the 1970s because I saw her every day, but either she wasn’t paying attention to the rate of inflation or she thought there was a lot of unwarranted chatter on the news about tires or rafts. Somehow, my Nana got frozen in a price ice cube, mainly because my Pop Pop did all of the shopping. Since the fabric of Nana’s life is polyester, her clothes can’t disintegrate and she never needs new ones, so mall shopping was never a real priority. Thus she kind of lost touch with, for example, the price of lotion. I really believe that Nana didn’t yell at the salesgirl to be mean; I think she blew a gasket because she’s put up with annoyances and irritations for eighty-seven years, which is a long time, was nice about it for almost a century, and reached a point where her niceness reserve ran dry. Then the high-priced lotion just pushed a button, you might say, and ever since then, Nana has not hesitated to speak her mind, which is good but can be considered a freak-out by onlookers and store managers. If Nana thinks you’re trying to scam her, she’ll tell you, and if she thinks you ruined her life by discontinuing Arnold’s Thin bread, she’ll let you know that, too. I guess when you spend eighty-seven years swallowing other people’s bullshit, there comes a time when you gotta spit some back. So that can take us on one of two routes: either we can spend a lot of time at the mall fighting with high-school-senior sales associates about why Sears is trying to con Nana over a pair of overpriced Dearfoams terrycloth slippers for forty dollars, or we can make our shopping experience relatively calm and security-guard-free by performing some preemptive measures.

  Upon entering the store, we were approached by the salesgirl with the tray of paper cups, whom Nana brushed aside with her hand and the words “Save the tea, you’re not sucking me into your lotion scam. I found out who Aveda was, and she wasn’t an actress! She was just some bimbo who married the king of Argentina and they made a movie about her that she wasn’t even in.”

  Knowing that the chances of getting my hands on The List were nil, I asked Nana to read what she needed to get for my sister so I could help her find it. After she rattled off three items and we found them, I set my plan into action, grabbing some other things off the shelf and essentially throwing my credit card at the salesgirl.

  “What are you doing?” Nana yelled. “Those are my things!”

  “It’s easier to put it all on one bill,” I said, using the trust my Nana so devoutly put into me and twisting it like a dirty pair of undies in the wash. “When we get home, we’ll figure it all out.”

  With that success under our belt, we, as dictated by The List, moved on to Eddie Bauer, where I tossed the two sweaters Nana had picked out for my husband and brother-in-law onto the counter with my Visa and signed away while she protested.

  “Don’t worry,” I lied to the last person on earth who thought I had a hint of good in me. “You can just write me one check and we’ll be even. How easy is that?”

  We did this for the remainder of the morning, even at Banana Republic when I p
icked out a pretty sweater for myself that wasn’t even on the sale rack. Shopping with Nana had never been easier. There was no haggling, no open-hand slapping, and no movie trivia involved.

  It was absolutely amazing how simple it was, and I cursed myself for not thinking of such an obvious plan sooner. When we got to Nana’s house, I took all of the receipts from my wallet and held them tightly in my hand.

  “Now,” I said to Nana, who had a pen in her hand and her checkbook open, “let’s make this fun! I’m going to name a store that we were at today, and you guess how much that stuff was, okay?”

  “Like The Price Is Right?” Nana asked.

  “Exactly,” I answered. “The first store is Aveda. How much do you think the stuff for Lisa cost?”

  “Thirty dollars,” Nana said firmly.

  “That’s incredible! You’re exactly right!” I exclaimed, thinking that taking a forty-dollar hit was way cheaper than bailing Nana out of jail on an assault-and-battery charge. “Our next store is Eddie Bauer.”

  “Um, let me think,” Nana said as she pondered. “For two sweaters? Hmmm. I say thirty dollars!”

  “You must be psychic!” I squealed, thinking that I really didn’t mind contributing an additional ten bucks per garment to be able to shop at Eddie Bauer again. “Now we’re up to Banana Republic. Nana, give it your best shot!”

  “THIRTY DOLLARS!” she yelled with a little jump.

  “No, not quite,” I smiled, reminding myself that this little ditty had come from the full-price table, and well, after all, it was for me. “Try again!”