The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

by Laurie Notaro

  “An hour is great!” she replied, then took Maeby off to play with the other party dogs.

  Apparently, however, Lola Chanel needed more than sixty minutes to get her party hoppin’, the presents opened, and the kiddies on their way, because when we arrived to pick Mae up, they weren’t even done with the game portion of the show yet.

  “Come in, come in,” Mandie said when she spied us at the door and waved us in. “You got here just in time! It’s the best part!”

  I can assure you that you’ve never lived until you have stood in a circle with ten other childless adults in their thirties and forties, clapping hands and singing “Happy Birthday” to Lola Chanel, who sits in the center, basking in all of the glory with a sensational pink feather boa twirled around her neck.

  And P.S., should you, at any point, find yourself clapping hands and warbling a birthday tune to an indulged, comely only dog, don’t get your hopes up. The cake on the table isn’t for you.

  Still, I giggled a little as Maeby ate her piece, a swash of yellow frosting smeared on her nose.

  Oh boy, I thought to myself. This is fantastic! I can’t wait to call Grandma when we get home.

  The Bad Ass Badlands Showdown

  After living in Phoenix for more than thirty years, I wanted some rain.

  I figured I was owed some rain.

  So when my husband was accepted into the graduate program at an Oregon university, I almost ran there. I fantasized about summers, beautiful, magical summers in which I could actually go outside for thirty seconds without tasting my own sweat, looking at a freckle on my exposed arm, and wondering aloud, “Hmmm, does that look more like a basal or squamous cell carcinoma?” or having an earring brand and subsequently scar my neck should a gentle, though unlikely, desert breeze suddenly kick up. Summers like the ones you see on television, in which little children can play soccer in daylight without losing consciousness, or elderly people with Alzheimer’s wander off into the desert on a weekly basis, never to be seen again.

  On our first scouting mission, our flight was about to land at the Eugene airport when I saw that my vision was true. Green, green, green. As we drove through the small town, I saw vibrant lawn after lush lawn after emerald lawn, and I mistook it for pride of ownership until my husband reminded me that water in Oregon was something you couldn’t opt out of; here it came from the sky and not a hose. Outside the room at the inn, a tree with a ten-foot circumference shaded nearly the entire building, and I was so mesmerized I called people in Phoenix and told them of the miracle I had seen. Shade. I love shade. And the shade in Eugene had no end.

  “Look over there,” I said to my husband as we checked out the downtown area and I pointed to a parking lot that was almost overrun by Douglas fir, oak, and maple trees. “Those are spots worth shooting over in Phoenix!” To someone who didn’t know how to open an umbrella until she was thirty-three (and I only learned because I was caught in a nor’easter in New York City), I became obsessed with a new, loving climate, rushed home, and started buying rain gear. After all, a hobby is only as good as its accessories, and the same can be said for locales. With rain boots, waterproof jacket, gloves, and a Liza Minnelli assemblage of hats, I moved to Oregon.

  And when I got here, I noticed that people looked at me funny, particularly the guy who installed my air conditioner in our new house (upon rolling out of Phoenix, I vowed never to be hot again, and I meant it), the hippie who fixed the sprinkler system, the man who refinished the wood floors, and the girl who colors my hair.

  “Really?” they said, looking at me with skepticism, as if I was trying to pass myself off as a Hilton sister. “You moved here from Arizona? Why would you move here from Arizona? Everyone is moving from here to Arizona.”

  Every single one of them had a brother, sister, father, or close friend simply pack up and head to the land from which I just ran away. I returned their look of skepticism.

  “Why? Because it’s hot in Arizona,” I’d reply. “And I am ready for a cool summer!”

  “Well, in Arizona, it’s a dry heat,” they’d explain to me. “And it rains a lot here.”

  “It’s not a dry heat when your thighs produce more liquid than a cow or a Slurpee machine, and that’s just when you’re sitting down,” I’d retort. “I love it here. No one perspires and it’s all green.”

  “But in Arizona, you can golf almost every day because the sun is shining,” they’d respond. “And it’s green here because it’s always raining.”

  “Sure, you can golf every day if you drag a saline drip behind you and have your golf cart air-conditioned like the pope,” I scoffed. “But it’s so beautiful and shady here. Everything grows!”

  “You can’t golf in mud,” they’d protest. “Everything turns to goop after the second day of rain, and then it goes on for six more months! It never ends!”

  “Let me tell you about never ending,” I cautioned. “114, 115, 116, 118, then it’s 122 degrees, and that lasts for half the year! Has the Eugene airport ever shut down because the runway melted?”

  “Wanna be on a plane that’s landing on a runway covered in a sheet of ice?” they’d counter. “You don’t know what the rain can do! People have to have special lamps to keep them from spiraling into a bottomless pit of depression and despair!”

  “People have run out of burning houses unharmed only to get third-degree burns on their feet once they hit the sidewalks because they were barefoot,” I’d volley.

  “Houses sink here,” they’d tell me firmly and quietly.

  “People…combust there,” I’d whisper.

  “Yeah?” they’d conclude. “Just don’t go outside without a jacket, or they might find you in five thousand years, frozen in a block of ice.”

  “Yeah? Well, you tell your friends that if they walk to their car from their house, bring two bottles of Aquafina!” I’d yell. “’Cause they’ll need ’em!”

  And then I’d add, “I found kitty mummies under my house!”

  So, in the Badlands Showdown that I inevitably had time after time with my new fellow townspeople, I was never sure who won, or, for that matter, who lost: Arizona with its life-sucking heat or Oregon with its soul-drowning rain.

  I do know, now that I’ve resided in Oregon for a while, that yeah, it takes my towels three days to dry and four months out of the year there’s running water in my basement that isn’t coming out of a faucet, and I was a much more successful gardener in Phoenix than I am in Eugene because I simply can’t let go of the idea that plants need to be watered every day during our short summer, sometimes twice, and not once a week as my neighbors insist. And in the winter, everything, and I mean everything, squishes.

  I also know that Arizona’s Mexican food can’t be beat, that the thirty-year expiration date on Arizona driver’s licenses should be adopted as a national policy, and that sometimes, yeah, a little sun on my face feels really good.

  But right now, spring just kicked the ass of winter in my wet little town and the canopy of leaves forming over my street is almost complete, leaving a cool, shady roof of green, green, and green. My neighbor Gail’s peonies will be opening in a couple of weeks, and they are as big as my head. And as I look out over Eugene from my backyard deck, I can see all the way to the university, curled up at the base of a respectable-sized mountain slathered with tall Douglas firs, redwoods, and cedars, some of their trunks ten feet wide. During the rainy season, the fog curls and creeps over that mountain, and most of the time when I walk out there and see the deep-green spikes poking up out of the mist, I need to catch my breath.

  It may sprinkle almost every day from November to May, but to me, it’s a dry rain.

  In the Basement

  Before I could even get my key in the lock, the front door flew wide open and there he stood, with that look on his face.

  It wasn’t a good look, as I’ve seen that look before. It’s the look that has said on various occasions, “You were right, my insurance isn’t going to cover the fort
y-mile ambulance ride from Saguaro Lake to the hospital,” “I think I just ate the last of what you wanted for lunch,” “We got another letter from the IRS,” or “Put a bra on. My mom is here.”

  “Oh boy,” I said anxiously as I stepped inside, trying to figure out the disaster level of the impending scenario. “This doesn’t look good. Did you read another chapter out of your Dalai Lama book, then offer a hot meal to the homeless man who does push-ups on the street without a shirt on, and he’s now holed up in our bathroom because he thinks it’s his cave and refuses to leave?”

  “No, not after last time,” he replied.

  “Okay. Did you send out an e-mail to several close friends inviting them to a potluck this weekend at our house, but ended up sending it to your entire Listserv and also mistakenly forgot to include the word ‘potluck’?”

  “I told you, I’m very careful with the ‘cc:’ option in e-mail now,” he insisted.

  “That’s good, because if any of your little college friends show up in halter tops and ask me if I’m the mom again, you’re going into Laurie-imposed exile like Emily Dickinson,” I added. “Well, then, I give up, unless you’re tattling on Maeby because she’s in your favorite reading spot and won’t get up, move, or respond to you.”

  “She’s been there all day,” my husband informed me. “And she won’t get up. I even tried to lure her with the leftover Chinese food, and nothing. She wouldn’t even look at it!”

  “Good, because I was going to have that for lunch,” I said.

  My husband looked away and shuffled his weight from one foot to the other.

  “You didn’t,” I said, giving him my best “I am hungry and now I am mad, too,” look.

  “There’s a problem in the basement,” the love of my life said.

  “If there’s a shirtless man who looks like Dirty Jesus doing push-ups in my basement,” I warned, “you are going out and buying new Chinese food!”

  Let me say right now that I am a little timid of basements. I am not used to basements. In Phoenix, there is no soil, just the bare exposure of the earth’s rocky crust, and unless you want to explode your way to middle earth and the creatures who live there, a shovel isn’t going to do it. Almost no one has a basement in Phoenix except my sister-in-law, who bought her house from Mormons who procreated abundantly and needed to put seven bedrooms and a canning room bigger than half my house somewhere. While I embrace the idea of having another whole level of house, albeit subterranean, to store my stuff in, I know now there are dangers. If you leave stuff down there for longer than a day, you face a great risk of it getting erased from your memory altogether, and should you recall a faint memory of an object, whatever it is will emerge slightly limp, smell like my Aunt Bert’s house, and have become a host to whatever it is that is growing on it.

  Needless to say, I don’t spend too much time down there, although that is where we keep our bikes, which is the mode of transportation my husband takes to school. He had arrived home earlier in the day and was putting his bike away when he spotted something that looked wrong.

  “There was water all over the floor,” he explained as we opened the door to the basement and started down the creaky wooden stairs. “It was all pooled around the drain.”

  And sure enough, there was a body of water in my basement, shimmering around a round hole in the floor with the top of the drain sitting off to the side of it.

  “All right, stay calm, but I think something has pushed its way up from our pipes and is now hiding in the basement, and this is Oregon, land of the wet and dark, so it could be anything,” I said cautiously.

  “No, I did that,” my husband replied, explaining that when he saw the puddle on the floor, he lifted up the top to the drain with his finger in order to investigate.

  Then, he told me, he did what any man monkey would do and began poking around with said finger, trying to find the problem. Suddenly, he found mud.

  Mud?

  Hmmm, he thought to himself as he then poked around with a broom handle he found. How did mud get down here? And why is it shaped like that? There is mud in our basement drain? What are those white, tiny little snowflakes all around it? I must get them out, these croquette-shaped mud cakes, and I must do it with my hands. I must not wait for a second opinion. These mud balls look urgent. Because if I move them, that will clearly enable me to poke around some more.

  So, honestly, I guess I will never know whose poo it was that he picked up, laid gently in the utility sink, and then noticed that it smelled like feces, but I hoped it was one of ours. Of course, my first question was “Well, did it look like a soft banana?” because then I could have ID’d it, but he said he wasn’t really sure.

  Naturally, after he realized he had fondled excrement, he scrubbed his hands until they were raw, then went to the computer to Google “Shit Diseases,” which he was sure he was on the verge of getting.

  “See?” he said as he held up his hands, the skin on which was merely one good rub away from sloughing off his skeletal frame.

  I called my plumber, John, right away, but since it was almost sundown, he said he couldn’t make it out until the next morning. In the meantime, he told me, I shouldn’t flush anything unless I wanted a bigger mess, and I should be careful about even running the kitchen faucet.

  My husband suggested we go out for Mexican food, and I thought that was a good idea, but as we got closer to the restaurant, I suddenly became alarmed.

  “Listen,” I told him. “No messing around with those tortilla chips. I don’t want you handling all of them. Whatever you touch, you take. I’m not eating feces chips.” And then, in a retaliatory maneuver fueled by hatred, loathing, and a decade’s worth of resentment, he took his poop-fondling hand and wiped it all over my face. Since I was steering the car, there was little I could do; biting was out of the question, that would simply play into his evil hepatitis plan, so I could either careen into a KFC full of chunky middle-Americans almost exclusively dressed in tank tops or let my husband assault my head with his formerly soiled digits.

  “There,” he said when he was done. “Now we’re both contaminated and I can touch any chip I want. And I will.”

  “You are a dirty man,” I hissed as I parked the car in front of the restaurant.

  “And you are a dirty lady,” he reminded me.

  “You know, I just don’t understand how you ended up not only touching poop but holding on to it for so long,” I finally admitted. “Why do men need to touch everything? Why can’t you just look and keep your hands in your pockets? That’s what they’re there for, you know, so men don’t go around fiddling in toilets and stroking dead things. What about a little round poop ball compelled you to reach out and feel it?”

  “Oh, come on,” my husband argued back, as if what I was asking was completely outrageous. “Who expects to see poop in a basement? Who expects to take the drain off a pipe and just have pieces of poop hanging out? I never expected that!”

  “Do you really go to school?” I asked. “Or do you just huff spray paint and glue behind the 7-Eleven all day? The drain led to a sewer pipe. What did you think it led to, the Evian spring? It’s the potty pipe!”

  “Whatever,” he said, getting out of the car. “You’ll never understand. I thought it was mud. I thought they were mud patties. It was an easy mistake!”

  “HA!” I bellowed, still mad about my cootie face. “I’m sorry, but I think it’s safe to say I know doody when I see it!”

  “So you’d think!” my husband rebutted as he opened the door to the restaurant.

  The next day, I was barely out of bed when John was at the front door, ready to investigate. I showed him the pond in the basement and told him to be careful.

  “It’s a shit hole,” I explained, hoping to get a laugh.

  “What?” John said, squinting, not even remotely entertaining me.

  “There’s poop down there,” I explained. “I know because my husband touched it.”

  “Why’d he
do that?” he replied, visibly recoiling.

  I shrugged. “He thought it was mud,” I said kindly.

  “That’s not mud!” he replied. “What would make mud look like that, in a little patty?”

  “Believe me, I’m thinking the same thing,” I agreed. “But if you find any red mice in the drain, they are not mine. I know better!”

  John responded by giving me a look that said, “I am not coming here anymore.”

  Upon examination and with the use of a heavy-duty plumber’s snake, he determined that the clog was not a gigantic poop ball, or a colony of mysterious red mice, but roots. Nothing but tree roots that the snake had now thrashed away, leaving a clear, unobstructed path from my toilet to the great unknown.

  “Here. These are for your husband,” John said as he handed me a pair of floppy, white latex gloves on his way out. “In case he feels the urge again.”

  All of the hubbub about the basement made me a little more aware that it was something I needed to pay attention to, so several weeks later when I heard some loud splashing coming from that direction as I was doing the laundry, I ran down there immediately. Sure enough, while a lake hadn’t formed on the floor of the basement, one was getting ready to as the utility sink was about to spill over with water drained from the washer. I almost reached for a bottle of Drano on the shelf when I spied the broom handle and sort of poked around the drain of the sink. Quickly, I heard the water begin to rush through the pipes. I sighed a breath of relief, stood back, and watched the water flush down.

  That’s so weird, I thought to myself. What could have been covering the drain—a piece of paper, maybe some cardboard or packing materials that had fallen into the sink? I wouldn’t doubt it at all with all of the stuff we have down here. I watched as the last of the water trickled down, crisis averted, and there I saw a form emerge, almost like a golf ball. A golf ball? I thought to myself. Could it be one of Maeby’s balls, totally encrusted with dirt? Why would one of Maeby’s balls be in the utility sink? Plus, I don’t remember her having toys that small, she should never have toys that small, Oprah’s dog choked on a ball that small and died, I kept thinking as my hands moved toward it to pick it up, closer, closer, closer, and then I saw a second golf ball, closer, closer, it almost looks like a chocolate truffle, or a croque—