Belle Weather

by Celia Rivenbark

  My hubby isn’t alone in this. Like most women, my heart automatically sinks when I discover that I’m in line behind a dad with children at the fast-food drive-through.

  The other day, I bat-turned my way into the drive-through at Crack-fil-a for what I hoped would be something quick and greasy. Just ahead of me in line was the sight that you never want to see if you’re running late: a man, late thirties to early forties, driving his wife’s Pacifica with one of those obnoxious rear window decals where the whole family, including the dog, cat, and bird are pictured in happy little white outlines like they were drawn by some chalk-wielding psychopath.

  “Ha!” the smug decal seems to be saying. “Our family is happy and smiling and our life together is just one big, funny, happy cartoon of merriment! Even our animals are smiling, as you can see, because we are so frikkin’ happy.”

  I think it would be funny to have one of those family decals showing a really skinny teenage girl barfing into a little chalk-outline bag (the bulimic in the family) or the dad figure dressed in the women’s underwear that he truly enjoys slipping into when no one’s looking. Or the wife figure smiling with her exaggerated curly hair and tennis skirt, clutching a racket in one hand and a bottle of Stoli’ in the other.

  Or the family cat, big smile on the face as usual, with just the lower third of the family parakeet’s body protruding from his jaws. Now that’s one big happy family!

  All that forced family happiness just annoys the shit out of me but I was even more worried because I knew that this doofus dad would never get the order right. He would try, and it would break my heart to hear him, but he would never get it right.

  (This is why, if there is a woman in the car, she will end up lying halfway across her duh-hubby’s lap and screeching the correct order into the speaker herself.)

  Men only speak one side and it is “fries.” Do not confuse them with mandarin oranges or yogurt with live cultures unless they can be fried.

  The drive-through was especially slow on this day, leading me to think that everyone ahead was a dad with children, no mom on board. As we inched forward, a sign with a smiling chicken on it informed me that, between 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. the day before, that very drive-through had served something like 2,362 people. And this is supposed to make me feel better because?…

  Finally, Pacifica pulled up to order.

  Here we go.

  Men scream at drive-throughs so there was zero chance that I’d miss a second of the inevitable screw up.

  “Uh, yeah. Gimme six number threes with Sprite.”

  Yeah, that’s all he said.

  There were kids in the car so it wasn’t possible that the order could be that simple.

  There was no mention of subbing the whole milk for Sprite for the youngest little chalk drawing or that all the kids required precisely eighteen different tubs of the four available sauces for their nuggets.

  As if on cue, the chalk children began to bob up and down and howl and I watched the formerly confident dad sink into his seat and cover his ears.

  “I said honey mustard SAUCE, not honey mustard! I don’t want honey mustard. They’re completely different. You don’t even know who I am!”

  One of the smaller chalk drawings flung a hissy fit for a nugget upgrade from the six-piece to the nine-piece because “I am physically going to starve to death.” The dad grabbed what appeared to be a paper sack and breathed into it.

  Four agonizing minutes later, Pacifica Dad lurched forward but I knew this was far from over.

  As he passed drinks back to the kids, I heard one of the chalk drawings scream: “There’s blood in my lemonade!” Of course, moms know that it is, in fact, maraschino cherry juice because they use the same tongs for lemons as they do for the milk shake cherries. I toyed with the notion of getting out of my car and telling this to the hapless dad but it was more fun to sit and watch.

  Lemonade “blood” was explained away by the drive-through lady to everyone’s satisfaction and Pacifica Dad slowly pulled away. I was sure he forgot to order anything for himself so I gave him time. Sure enough, there were his back-up lights.

  With a mix of contempt and pity, I watched him retrieve something for himself. He started ahead again but I still didn’t pull up. Back-up lights again, as expected. He forgot the napkins. He finally pulled into an empty space, car engine running, and sprinted into the store, returning with straws, sporks, and a bag of brownies.

  As the Pacifica finally pulled away for good, I heard the squeal I had been expecting. Another rookie mistake. “Oooooh, ick! These have nuts on them!”

  Maybe because they’re so traumatized by trying to order fast food for their children, men head for the hills when it’s time to buy school supplies. This is also a task that involves a multitude of choices and the great possibility that you will get a royal ass-chewing from someone if you get it wrong.

  At Open House at the Princess’ elementary school this year, I couldn’t help but notice the dads looked much more relaxed than the moms. They were having a rousing discussion about who had what brand of high-def TV and how many pixels it would take for the best viewing of Sunrise Earth. (Have you seen this? Our friends have practically quit their jobs to watch the sun rise in real time in high-def. One couple I know spent two hours transfixed by the sight of a moose emerging from a river and shaking dewy, high-def droplets off his, er, moose parts. What is with that?)

  While the menfolk gathered to discuss how they spent three hours watching a hot-air balloon flight over New Zealand, I decided to pop into the girls’ rest room to check my makeup.

  But I had to bend down really low to see myself because apparently they put mirrors low enough for the kids to see themselves because it’s all about them. Grown-ups just get a highly depressing reflection of their hips and thighs that can be very unsettling if you’re not prepared for it. It’s like how when you check into a hotel and you go to your room and the first thing you do is sit on the potty and you realize, to your horror, that the mirror is on the back of the door and now you have to watch yourself take a dump…. So you read a magazine but, every time you look up, there you are. In high-def.

  Back in the girls’ room, I stooped way down to check out my complexion. I looked tired, that much was true. Who could blame me? I’d spent the previous day school-shopping with the Princess. I’m not saying that men never do this; I’m just saying that they do this about as frequently as they TiVo the Paris runway shows on Bravo.

  Shopping for school supplies always sounds like such a fun thing to do until you actually do it. You plan lunch around it, you get the Official Sanctioned Supply List from the school and you plan a fabulous day of mother-daughter bonding, Orange Juliuses and perhaps a sale trinket from the rounder at Limited Too.

  The day starts well enough but fast-forward an hour or two and you’re standing in the seventh circle of hell or, as I like to call it, Target, clutching a now-sweaty list that says you must have a one-inch binder, four non-college-ruled composition books, and plastic—not paper—homework folders.

  The problem with this is twofold: kittens and Gwen Stefani. Those cute and cool looks are only on the wrong kind of paper or the wrong size binder. The ones that are on the approved list from the school look like something they’d let Scott Peterson write home on.

  So we had a big ol’ mother-daughter meltdown right there in the aisles of Target that ended with me screeching: “If you put that college-ruled 120 page composition book with the horsey on it in our cart, I swear I’m going to put back the Crayolas and we’re going to Dollar Tree and buy the crappy crayons that leave oil stains all over your paper and have colors like ‘phlegm.’”

  We finally agreed to compromise. The Princess would get the Hannah Montana tissues for the class, but I was buying the generic hand sanitizer instead of Purell.

  “That stuff probably doesn’t work as well,” she moaned. “I’ll bet it doesn’t even kill that many germs. There was a girl in my class last year who licked
her arms all the way down from her elbows to her fingertips every day and the teacher made her use Purell.”

  Whoa. I didn’t know Courtney Love was in my kid’s class.

  Of course, the real kicker is that none of it was necessary. Except perhaps the Orange Julius, on account of I believe that when it comes right down to it fluffy drinks made from imitation orange-flavored powder are one of the few things that separates us from the savages.

  On the first day of school, we were handed a completely different list from the classroom teacher.

  “But this says college-ruled, we thought it had to be non-college-ruled paper,” I whined.

  “It really doesn’t matter, whatever you like,” said the teacher, who was wearing some gauzy hippified dress made of hemp.

  “Whatever I like? What about the one-inch binder? We went to six stores and couldn’t find one.”

  “So get a two-inch one,” she said smiling. “Or three or even four! Sometimes you just have to go with the flow!”

  Had she been smoking her dress? What kind of public school teacher was this? Besides, the last thing I was in the mood for was some childless twenty-five-year-old telling me to go with the flow. Why did I know with utter certainty that she would have happy chalk outline drawings of her family on the back of her van in a few years?

  “And plain red or blue? That was really hard to find,” I kept on.

  “Oh, I know!” she said. “But some of the students found these really cute notebooks with cats and even one with Gwen Stefani on it. Those are fine. Sometimes, you just have to…”

  “Yes, I know, go with the flow.”

  “That’s right!”

  After Open House, we came home and duh-hubby got happily engrossed in watching a barely moving herd of buffalo wander tediously across the screen.

  I realized that I could really go for a buffalo burger, but it didn’t seem like the right time.

  But then something strange happened. The scene switched to a waterfall and I was the one who couldn’t look away. Gone was the frustration of school-shopping and waiting in line for idiot dads to order food at a drive-through. The picture seemed oddly familiar and then it hit me: It was just like watching those pictures they have on the walls of the nation’s finer mediocre Chinese restaurants where one little part of the picture is moving, usually a waterfall or rushing river, and at first you’re sure it’s the off-brand sake you drank but then you realize the picture is honest-to-God moving. Like those eyes in the portraits on the wall when Scooby Doo is helping solve a mystery.

  “It’s so relaxing,” said hubby, wrapped in his favorite pink blanket. “You can just feel the weight of the world lifted.”

  Looking at the beautiful waterfall and the peaceful face of my duh-hubby, I felt a strange tug of sentimentality. Maybe those sappy family outlines weren’t so bad. Maybe I was just being harsh and judgmental. The peaceful feeling seemed to pervade all my senses and I could feel old knots relaxing in my neck and back. I felt as if I could sit here and watch this waterfall forever. And smoke that teacher’s dress.

  Why couldn’t I be more like my husband, unruffled by life’s daily annoyances? Why couldn’t I be more like my daughter’s teacher, with her soothing voice and uplifting attitude, even though it’s beyond me how anybody can spend nearly seven hours a day with kids who start every sentence with “Guess what?” I mean every damn sentence out of their mouths.

  “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I went to the zoo with my friend Mona and, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “We saw these weird little sheep and guess what?”

  “What?”

  You get the idea.

  We watched the waterfall and it was so vivid, it was practically forming puddles on the floor below the TV screen.

  I was liquid, completely calm, incapable of being upset by anything at all. Well, almost anything.

  “Hey,” said hubby, still staring at the waterfall. “Don’t forget my sister’s birthday’s tomorrow. Better get something in the mail, OK?”

  The knots returned immediately. Why can’t a man buy his own sister a birthday present?

  “Oh, just get her some lotion,” he said, sensing that I was losing my waterfall calm and turning more into a boiling cauldron.

  Lotion is the idiot-man’s solution to every gift-giving dilemma.

  Ask any woman. We’ve all got enough lotion in various drawers and cabinets to lubricate the entire membership of the Red Hat Society.

  Of course some lotions are nice to receive: the kind that are sealed up really well so you can easily get the cash for them when you take them back to the store and get something useful.

  And men, bless their hearts, don’t know how to buy lotion. I don’t want to smell like brownies or spice cookies or a rum toddy. Trust me; I’d rather have the real thing.

  Giving lotion as the easy gift has managed to accomplish the impossible: It makes the Hickory Farms Beef Stick look good.

  “Buy it yourself,” I snapped. “She’s your sister.”

  “Can’t,” he said simply, pulling the blanket tighter under his chin, never taking his eyes off the screen. “Tomorrow there’s going to be a twelve-hour marathon on the purple martin migration. They’re practically an endangered species, you know.”

  Yeah, I know. Not unlike a man who can order fast food, buy school supplies, and buy his own sister a birthday gift.

  24

  Latest Technology’s All Geek to Me

  When you work from home, you tend to talk to the furniture. No, no. What I meant to say was that you tend to obsess over things that you wouldn’t have time to worry about at the office.

  Like how my Internet Service Provider (SOB) has started sticking stupid little advertisements at the bottom of every e-mail I send.

  Let’s just say that it’s monumentally annoying to write a heartfelt e-mail to a friend in crisis only to realize that Big Dumb Brother has added, “Want to learn how to send mail for free AND get videos from across the Web?”

  Pretty soon, they’ll be selling the space to that creepy widow in the unpronounceable country who wants to split her dead husband’s vast oil well fortune with me just because.

  Just yesterday, I was telling filing cabinet that I’m going to fight back. After all, they could put anything at the end of my e-mail (“Republicans Rock!”) and I would have no control.

  I decided to be Polly Proactive about the situation and I e-mailed my SOB to tell them I found this nasty little free advertising postscript extremely intrusive and to kindly stop doing this.

  Now of course I realize how truly idiotic that was because, four auto-replies later, we’re still nowhere, and I could swear lamp just giggled.

  The company’s response was obviously computerized because it had nothing to do with anything I wrote: “There is no problem with your computer or account! This is our way of sharing with our customers exciting new offers and services!”

  Oh! Well then! Bite me!

  Fortunately, they added, my input was valued and “very beneficial.”

  Oh, well, that’s nice. No! That’s not nice at all. They’re just manipulating me into thinking they’re nice.

  The response continued, “Customer input is the best way we know to provide such great service.”

  Such great service? But this was a complaint! My brain hurt.

  Finally, it got to the point: There is no possible way to delete the nasty little postscripts from my e-mail and their response for now and all time would be, essentially, tough toenails.

  My second, third, and fourth e-mails ranged from simply shrill to potentially libelous. I figured that tougher language would ensure that I’d get a human to respond instead of the ever-more-annoying computer-generated mail. I even went so far as to warn that I should not be messed with because it just so happened that I was a famous book writer and a nationally syndicated columnist and they most certainly wouldn’t like me to write about their abysmal
customer “service” because tens or perhaps even dozens of people would possibly read it.

  This, apparently, didn’t exactly leave them shaking in their cyber boots.

  The very next day, I got a generic e-mail from “Dallas” thanking me for “voicing concerns.”

  That was it.

  I hate “Dallas” and the rest of the computerized response team. And, boy, if you think I’m mad about it, you should see desk calendar.

  Despite our fight, my ISP, the SOB, continues to send me little reminders of how hard they’re working to keep spam out of my life.

  Before the Internet, there was only one kind of spam, that lumpy, gelatinous pink stuff that came in a can with a key. Which, now that I think about it, is just about the coolest thing imaginable: food that must be opened with a key. And the key would break off sometimes and you’d lose it and then you’d just have to settle for the Vienna sausages, which were neither sausage nor from Vienna, so go figure.

  I figure spam—the Internet kind—must be a huge problem because I’ve been getting more of those messages that require me to fill out a form before the recipient will condescend to read the e-mail I’ve sent.

  The message usually goes something like this: “I apologize for this automatic reply to your e-mail. To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand. If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please complete the request form below. Once I approve you, I will receive your message in my inbox.”

  Oh, screw it. You’re not worth all that trouble.

  Once you approve it? Oh lah-dee-dah-dee-dah.

  I don’t know why this bugs me unless it’s because I don’t like being lumped into the category of potential spammers such as the long-winded pity-partying rich widow who so desperately wants to divide her immense fortune with me even though we’ve never met.