Best Friends, Occasional Enemies

by Lisa Scottoline; Francesca Serritella

  “Just pick a name you like,” they answered, so I told them:

  “Microsoft.”

  They didn’t think it was funny. Or maybe they hear it 300 times a day. They asked, “How about Lisa Scottoline, LLC?”

  It had a familiar ring, but it wasn’t much fun. I thought about it. I always notice the company names at the end of TV shows and movies, and a lot of them are fun. I needed to think of a fun corporate name. After all, I envisioned myself as a fun company president, like the corporate version of the Cool Mom.

  Also I realized that was failing the first test of President Me, in asking them what to name the company instead of making an Executive Decision, all by my presidential self. So I told them I’d think about it, which meant I went home and asked Daughter Francesca.

  She said, “How about Smart Blonde?”

  I loved it immediately, and I decided to become Smart Blonde, LLC. Instead of Dumb Blonde, get it? Changing the world, one stereotype at a time.

  Very presidential.

  I’m the change candidate.

  By the way, don’t ask me what LLC means. I know that LL Cool J means Ladies Love Cool J. So maybe LLC means Ladies Love C something.

  I know.

  Ladies Love Chocolate Cake!

  I should have named my corporation LLC, LLC, then only those of us in the know would get it. Everybody else would think I was drunk.

  Back to the story. After I had the corporate name, the lawyers said they’d draw up the papers, but oddly, I found myself lying awake at night, anxious about my life change. I didn’t know if I was ready to be President. I feel more comfy being Class Clown.

  And I’d never had a woman president, much less been one.

  Then I realized.

  Like many women, I run a household. All moms have.

  We’re all presidents of our homes. We plan and run everybody’s schedules, we coordinate the pick-ups and the deliveries. We authorize certain expenditures and disallow others. We make sure there’s heat, clean clothes, packed lunches. We make sure there’s something other than pizza for dinner.

  So it’s not as if we’ve never had a woman president.

  In fact, we always have.

  She’s us.

  Now all we need is a raise.

  The Hardest Job in the World

  By Francesca

  I’ve always known what it’s like to have a great mother, but I had no idea what it’s like to be a great mother. Having one dog can’t really approximate what it’s like to be a mom.

  That takes at least three dogs.

  My mother was recently traveling on tour with her latest book, and it was a grueling schedule; a different city every other day, high-energy signings, meetings with booksellers, and greasy airport food. She loves it, but it’s a tough job.

  Still, it ain’t nothin’ compared with being a stay-at-home-mom.

  I should know, I was taking care of our three dogs while she was away.

  In addition to my own dog, Pip, I had two of my mother’s dogs, Little Tony, and the new baby, six-month-old Peach. I’m happy to help my mom whenever I can, so I told her it wouldn’t be a problem. But it was much harder than I anticipated. It was like caring for human children.

  Maybe it was the diapers.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I grew up as an only child, but I’d heard the clichés about sibling dynamics—the oldest golden child, the attention-loving baby, the overlooked middle child. I never knew they were true:

  Peach is tiny, adorable, and accident-prone. I carried her wherever I went and otherwise kept her on my lap so I could make sure she didn’t get into stuff, put anything in her mouth, or pee on the floor.

  Pip, my oldest, is the best behaved and my first love, so he was on his own with occasional praise for being a very good boy.

  As for Little Tony, the middle child, I forgot he existed until he did something bad.

  They have therapists for dogs, right?

  While I struggled to divide my time and love equally, I nearly missed a major milestone in my little girl’s life—Peach’s first period.

  I know, I couldn’t believe it either. But call it a mother’s intuition, or call it a red spot on my couch, I just knew.

  But what do you do when a dog becomes a woman?

  Are you there, God? It’s me, Francesca, and I have this dog …

  The first problem is that Peach is tiny. The puppy weighs less than ten pounds, so I had to try a slew of pet stores to find doggie diapers small enough to fit.

  Not that she allowed them to stay on her body. Peach tried to pull, squirm, and chew herself free from her diaper.

  Babies are so fussy.

  During the brief moments when Peach tired and left the diaper alone, Tony bothered it for her.

  Mother’s little helper.

  On top of it all, I got sick as a dog, no pun. The unpredictable spring weather left me with an awful head cold. But as every parent knows, moms can’t get sick. Rather, if they do, it doesn’t count.

  I needed Sudafed but I didn’t want to leave the little ones at home, so I found myself standing in the pharmacy line, holding the puppy on my hip, with the two others wrapped around my legs.

  People were staring, but I didn’t care. All I could think about was how much time I had before Tony needed to go to the bathroom, how many diapers we had left at home, and whether Pip ate a wad of gum that I could’ve sworn was on the floor a minute ago.

  I had crossed a threshold. The dogs had become my priority.

  Although dogs, even three of them, aren’t the same as children, the priority shift is the same as every mother’s. My mom changed her career, her entire life, to stay home with me. She has put me first in every decision she’s ever made. And as a result, she is the first person I turn to in every one of mine.

  I want to thank the mothers who do the difficult, tiring, messy, comical, selfless work of putting us first. You’re number one to us.

  Until we have kids of our own.

  Just like you taught us.

  This Land Is My Land

  By Lisa

  I’m still on book tour, which means that by the time you read this, I’ll be eating my 307th airport burrito.

  That’s not the bad news.

  I’m in love with airport food. I’m on a different plane every day, sometimes two, so I usually eat in the airport, and my book tour is an excuse to have Auntie Annie’s pretzels, TCBY vanilla fro-yo with jimmies, and Sbarro pepperoni pizza. It’s America on 5000 Carbs a Day, only literary.

  By Day Eight, I thought I should try to eat healthy, so I settled for an apple with a barcode sticker. You haven’t lived until you’ve eaten fruit you can scan. I tried to take off the sticker, but it was affixed with Krazy Glue, because God forbid it falls off and some unfortunate cashier has to hit a key. Or worse, God forbid there’s no sticker but the cashier has to memorize the price of the apple, which is like twenty dollars.

  In the end, I eat around the sticker, after I take the apple to the women’s restroom in Terminal B, where washing it only makes it dirtier.

  Airport food is just one part of the fun of travel.

  I find myself standing behind a very old man in line at airport security, and he has never flown before, so he has never done the drill of shoes off, jacket in bin, spare change in plastic bowl.

  He turns to me and says: “A thousand bucks for a ticket and I gotta take my sneakers off. Sheesh!”

  “I know, right?” I say, which is an all-purpose response that indicates agreement, commiseration, or affability in general.

  Still, he asks, “Why I gotta do that?”

  I blink. “It’s because of the terrorists.”

  “What terrorists?” he asks, raising a gray eyebrow.

  Obviously, I’m in line behind Rip Van Winkle, but I take pity on him. I could be him when I get older, under the testy stares of the TSA types and the undisguised grousing of the travelers behind us. He keeps going through the me
tal detector, but it beeps every time, sending him back to the line.

  He turns bewildered to me, his hooded eyes shining unhappily. “What do I do?”

  “Let me help.” So I ease him out of his shoes, then his jacket, then his clunky ancient watch. Still the metal detector beeps, and he comes back. Like a child, he lifts up his shirt, revealing a fake-silver belt buckle the size of Texas.

  Which is where I draw the line.

  I tell him, “You have to take off your own belt, sir.”

  He looks disappointed, but I stand firm. I don’t take off a man’s belt unless he buys me an airport enchilada.

  Call me old-fashioned.

  But my favorite part of travel is the gift shop. If you’ve ever wondered who’s the idiot that buys all that dumb junk, she would be me.

  Bottom line is that I love airport gift shops. There’re the only places in the country that are still regional. Think about it. If you go out for a drive, everywhere you look, you’ll pass a Chili’s, a Gap, and a McDonald’s, so that the whole nation looks the same, one state to the next.

  Real America awaits you in the airport gift shop.

  There you can find T-shirts from the hometown baseball/basketball/hockey team, or all-cotton T-shirts bearing the city’s name, with sexual innuendos in local motifs. For example, the New York T-shirts have apples over the breasts, the Detroit T-shirts have tires over the breasts, and the L.A. shirts have Hollywood sunglasses over the breasts.

  See? Regional.

  Plus the gift shops sell other local items. The gift shop in the Houston airport sells bottles of five-alarm barbecue sauce, the gift shop in the Chicago airport sells the four-pack of bratwurst, the gift shop in Dallas sells the straw cowgirl hat, and the gift shop in the Phoenix airport sells the plant-it-yourself cactus kit. I buy the cactus kit for Daughter Francesca, who’s delighted. She pours the fake-orange sand into its adobe-hued pot and plants the miniature bulb of prickly cactus. The cactus kit even comes with a tiny wooden sign that reads ARIZONA, in burnt brown letters like an Old-West brand.

  “You don’t have to use the sign,” I tell her.

  “But I like the sign.” Francesca smiles. “The sign is the best part.”

  Secretly, I agree.

  And I’m proud.

  What a kid.

  And what a country.

  The Four Seasons

  By Lisa

  I’ve joked about hot flashes and gray chin hairs, but I’ve never really talked about aging, straight-up.

  Though I’ve been thinking about it, like most women, and I have opinions. Like most women.

  God bless us.

  So here’s what I think.

  We begin not with winter, but with spring.

  I walked the dogs today and saw my first crocus. Soon, lawns will be growing grass, tender and weak enough to be flattened by the cat’s paw. Trees will be budding with tiny specks of green, their color oddly bright, like Andes mint wrappers. Rosebushes, tight-fisted, will withhold their flowers until later, unfurling only after water, sunshine, and time give them life.

  Everybody loves spring. You know why?

  It’s young.

  And people say they love the seasons.

  Really? Do they love winter? I don’t mean winter when it’s easy to love. I don’t mean first-snow winter, with its homey blanket of confectioner’s sugar. Or snow-globe winter, with its oversized flakes filling the air, swirling around on picturesque gusts.

  I’m talking freezing, wet, snowblower winter, with endless storms, plowing, and salting. Snow that clumps ugly on the shady side of the house. Snow days until even the kids want to go back to school. Until nobody wants to bake another chocolate chip cookie. At some point, every winter becomes the winter of our discontent.

  Nasolabial-fold winter, if you follow.

  What got me thinking about this was the umpteenth skin product that advertised itself as “age-defying.” They want to sell us creams, lotions, and magic potions to “defy” our age. They tell us that the way to be beautiful is to “erase our fine lines and wrinkles” and “Defy Father Time!”

  Huh?

  Who started the war?

  Who said we have to fight?

  Why do we have to take up arms against our flabby arms?

  What’s up with all the age-defying handbooks and age-defying secrets?

  And it’s not only the cosmetic companies. Certain foods are touted as “anti-aging,” drafting even avocados and broccoli into the war on aging.

  But vegetables aren’t anti-aging. They’re not anti-anything.

  And finally, neither am I.

  Here’s my credo in life: Fight only the battles that matter, and after that, only the ones you can win.

  And defying your age is a losing battle.

  In other words:

  Peace.

  Acceptance. Tolerance. Appreciation. If you love the spring, you have to love the winter, and it’s all part of the same whole, no matter what Revlon says.

  We can’t be young women forever.

  We can’t even look like young women forever.

  And we have to stop fighting.

  Give peace a chance.

  Now, don’t get all literal on me. To be clear, I have no problem with anybody who Botoxes and fills. To each her own. I fake my hair color and wear contacts. But ultimately, there’s a difference between wanting to look your best and denying who you are.

  And that’s a question that each of us answers for herself. And answers only to herself.

  I’m talking about the woman in the mirror.

  I know that aging isn’t always easy to accept. It takes strength of character to look age in the face, to see all of its wrinkles and not-so-fine lines. It takes decades to build the kind of fortitude you need to get older.

  Aging is not for the young.

  If you follow.

  For example, I used to eat everything and never gained weight. Now I eat nothing and gain weight. I gain weight when I even look at food. Inhaling Cinnabons puts on five pounds.

  But now, I don’t worry so much about how I look. Because the truth is, fewer people are looking.

  And you can see that as bad news, or good. For me, I’ll choose the good. It’s freeing. I worry less, and women are so good at worrying that we do it second nature, not realizing what a heavy burden it is until we set it down.

  And now that I’m not so worried about how I look, I do more things in the time I have, and at the end of my life, I’d rather have done more, looking worse, than done less, looking better.

  In fact, I want my tombstone to read: SHE DID A TON. AND SHE DIDN’T BOTHER TO CHANGE OUT OF HER SWEATS.

  Every woman writes her own story, and it’s the story of her own life.

  And everything that happens to us, like the birth of a child or a grandchild, is a sentence.

  A line, if you will.

  And our job, as the author of our life story, is to live so that each one of our lines is fine. Beautiful, even.

  So throw away your eraser.

  And write well.

  Better yet, write beautifully.

  The Best Friends Part

  By Lisa

  A great thing about having a daughter is that she can introduce you to aspects of the “youth culture,” like hip and cool books, TV, and music. And you can teach her ancient history, like Steely Dan, Nancy Drew, and Ozzie & Harriet.

  A band from the fifties, right?

  For example, Daughter Francesca has introduced me to a lot of new music, like Rufus Wainright, who’s so hip he wrote a song entitled, “My Phone Is on Vibrate for You.”

  It’s a love song. To a person, not a BlackBerry.

  It’s not the kind of song that my generation could have had, since in those days, our phones had wires, and we didn’t have anything that vibrated. At least not that I remember. I myself haven’t vibrated in some time, but I’m straying from my point.

  It’s cool to share stuff you love with your daughter, and somet
imes you love the same thing, which is striking generational gold. Of course, this isn’t confined to mothers and daughters. I remember playing the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds for my father, and he loved it. In return, he played a Nina Simone record for me.

  You may have to look up these arcane references, like “album” and “record.”

  Lisa and Francesca, best friends

  There are many TV shows, movies, and books that Francesca and I both love, but there is nothing we love quite as much as one TV show in particular. I’m talking, of course, about Sex and the City.

  OMG!!!!!

  We became fangirls at the very mention of the title, and we love every episode, which we have memorized. We love the movies, too, and we hope they make more sequels, so we can have more Sex and the City to see, talk about, cry and laugh over. We love the actresses who play the girls, especially Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie and Cynthia Nixon as Miranda, and we love the friendship between the girls, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.

  So it’s easy to understand why, when I heard that Cynthia Nixon occasionally records audiobooks, I asked my publisher if we could get her to record the audiobook of my next novel, entitled Save Me. The planets aligned, and so it came to pass that Francesca and I were in a recording studio in New York, and sitting on the other side of the room, behind the glass like some rare and beautiful jewel, was Cynthia Nixon.

  Cue angels.

  We listened, rapt, as she performed my novel, and she made even my writing sound good.

  Now that’s talent!

  Francesca and I had recorded the audiobooks for these books, and how difficult it was, and all I had to do was be me. It took my total concentration and three days to read every word of a book aloud, not counting the effort to downplay my Philadelphia accent.

  Yo!

  But the recording of a novel is something different altogether. Save Me has an array of characters, female and male, and its co-star is an eight-year-old girl. With a sore throat.

  No joke.

  And Cynthia Nixon had to do all of these voices, including the sore throat, acting out not only everybody in the novel, but characterizing them more deeply, using only the nuances of voice, inflection, and intonation. She was amazing, and more than that, I was reminded of how great an audiobook is, probably the closest we get, in our technological age, to being told a story around a fire.