We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

  “Oh Jesus,” my husband said. “I mean Buddha.”

  “Look at it,” I said, completely in shock. “Just look at it!”

  “I know, I know,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. I don’t even know what to say.”

  “It’s so cute!” I cried. “It’s so goddamned cute!”

  “I guess that’s what I was going to say,” my husband said, still shaking his head. “It is awful cute.”

  And it was. Our rat was absolutely adorable. Looking up at us with big brown eyes, the barely two-inch, chocolate-colored, velvet-furred “rat” was no menace. Just a tiny little field mouse probably on his way into the big city to find its long-lost family, and maybe even thought we were it.

  “Shit,” my husband cursed. “It’s Stuart Little.”

  “No, I think it looks more like a girl,” I remarked. “In fact, I think she looks like a—”

  “DON’T!!” he bellowed. “DON’T NAME IT!!”

  “—Molly,” I finished.

  He just looked at me while Molly looked at us.

  I looked at him. I blinked. I looked at him some more.

  “No,” my husband said sternly. “We can’t keep her. She’s on a glue trap. Do you know what that means? That means she’d have to be on this glue trap forever or we’d have to get her a little mousie wheelchair after her legs got ripped off.”

  “You’re going to kill Molly, aren’t you?” I asked, my eyes lowering.

  “SHUT UP!!” he said. “How do you think I feel? I have a multitude of conflicting emotions about this! Several months ago I couldn’t kill a spider, and now I feel like I should be wearing an Auschwitz employee badge! This is against everything I believe in. I may need counseling. I’ll try to take care of Molly as fast and humanely as possible. Or we can OD her on one of your Vicodins and Wal-Mart peanut butter.”

  “Those dolls are for special occasions,” I snapped. “And I just met that rat!”

  Before the Buddhist became a murderer, he stopped at the door with Molly on the glue trap in his hands and said simply, “Next time, we’re moving.”

  Let Me In

  The temperature on the thermometer outside the back door of my house read 110 degrees.

  It felt hotter.

  Especially when I went to turn the door handle and I discovered it was locked.

  And I was on the wrong side of it.

  This was not good. My husband, the only other person in the world who had a key to the house, and who was undoubtedly responsible for locking the door after he came out to say good-bye before he left, was working late and wouldn’t be home until well after nightfall. He was working a double shift since a majority of his co-workers were taking vacation days after the news of a Hershey’s promotion tore through his department like wildfire. In some parts of the country the lottery isn’t the only key to wealth, retiring from your job at Jack in the Box, and finally being able to buy new clothes at Target. There’s the lure of promotions as well, and that bug had spread faster at my husband’s place of employment than the flu when people use their shirts for tissues. Apparently, “spotters” at randomly selected supermarkets, drugstores, and convenience stores were giving away Jeeps to anyone they saw holding a Hershey’s product. Subsequently, the people my husband worked with (minimally comprising college students like himself; the majority consisted of recent recipients of GEDs, role-playing enthusiasts, an entire club of Dungeons & Dragons devotees, select parolees, and a cluster of people who my husband says look “ridden hard and put away wet”) had taken to clutching a candy bar during their entire shift.

  “So now,” my husband told me, “there are a bunch of people running around work with filthy brown hands. They won’t eat the candy; they just hold the candy. Then it melts, and there’s chocolate EVERYWHERE. It’s as if the M&M characters were beaten with bats in there.”

  As a result, people started taking vacation time left and right to spend time loitering in Super Wal-Mart with 400 calories and 15 fat grams of pure disappointment clutched in their hot, smudgy hands because since it was a pharmacy and a grocery store combined, they believed it would double their chances.

  Now, everybody else knew that NONE of those people was going to win a Jeep—that was a constant in that equation. The thing was, you didn’t know who the Hershey Spotter was. I mean, it wasn’t like he was dressed up as a big, silver kiss. You didn’t spot him, he spotted you. And believe me, contest people have learned their lesson from the lottery-winning homeless guy who got seventeen seconds with Katie Couric on the Today show, then beat his girlfriend up, was sent to the pokey, and made headlines on CNN. After that, no one’s taking the under-the-bridge underdog route anymore. That game has been played and the plebeians are out. It was cute once and it turned into a felony.

  Hershey wants soccer games, birthday parties, ballet lessons, not “I’m glad I won this Jeep because now I don’t have to take the bus to see my probation officer anymore.”

  Still, they kept clutching that candy and taking time off. There was, however, one shining moment in this.

  “At least,” my husband offered, “I now know who washes their hands after a trip to the restroom.”

  But in my backyard, I was horribly on my own. Well, not exactly. I had two whining dogs circling my feet, scratching at the door to let them back into the air-conditioning.

  Chigger, the old one, impatiently shifted her sea-lion-like body from paw to paw, lest she be mistaken for a corpse and entice the hungry jaws of the younger dog, Bella. She, in turn, was circling the yard, waiting patiently for both Chigger and me to succumb to a heat-induced coma so she could start eating our bodies, and was snacking on her own leg as an appetizer.

  It was so hot.

  No tragedy is complete without the series of mistakes that leads up to it; if only I had let the dogs pee on the floor instead of letting them out; if only I hadn’t left the garden hose in a place where Chigger wouldn’t have pooped on the drinking end of it; if only I had worn a pair of bike shorts underneath my dress, which would have eliminated profuse sweating, the chafing of my inner thighs, and the painful Chub Rub rash that was now developing.

  This wasn’t the first time I had been locked out of my house. One sunny morning a year ago, my husband waved to me as I pulled weeds in the front yard, and got in his car after he locked the front door and happily drove away. I was forced to use the phone of my neighbor Marcie, who was home and sadly belting out Melissa Etheridge tunes when I knocked on her door. Her girlfriend had just broken up with her to pursue a life with the Lord and was traveling from state to state on the lesbian gospel circuit, handing out little books entitled The Only Man You’ll Ever Need to Know: Jesus Christ. Fresh on the rebound, Marcie eagerly showed me all of her tattoos and piercings, even the ones in delicate areas that required some disrobing.

  When I finally got my husband on the phone, all I had to say was “Honey, I’m at Marcie’s house and she’s showing me her body art,” and he came right home. Obviously, another trip to Marcie’s House of Rings and Things was out of the question, and, besides, there was no way I could catapult my body over the very high backyard wall, anyway. I thought of dropping Bella over with a note around her collar saying “HELP!!! We’re locked out and there’s poop on the hose!” but then quickly realized that Bella would take that opportunity to claim her freedom, and if the ship was going down, we were all going to be on it.

  The sun had barely begun to set. I sprayed the dogs down with the hose, sat on the back steps with Chigger, and thought about our fate. I imagined my husband coming home to a darkened house, a wide grin spreading across his face as he thought, Got the whole place to MYSELF! Then he’d plop himself down on the couch, dig into a jar of peanut butter for dinner and start surfing the cable channels for Kate Winslet’s boobs, which he would undoubtedly find. I, however, would be found about a week later, my body heaped at the back door as my husband said to a detective, “Wow. I just thought she was still at Big Lots.”
/>
  The detective would say, “Looks like that little mutt made a meal out of her. Went for the tenderloin first,” to which my husband would shake his head and reply, “No, that’s Chub Rub. Should have worn bike shorts, honey!”

  When darkness fell, I started listening for the sound of my husband’s car. We had been locked out for hours now, and I was tired, thirsty, and hot. I thought about wringing out my bra for a drink, just to keep me going for the next couple of minutes or until I heard a car pull up. As I was unhooking the back, I heard the phone inside the house ring four times, and then the answering machine pick up.

  “Hi, it’s me,” my husband’s voice said. “Another candy clutcher called in. Apparently one of the Civil War reenactors brought his RV down there so they can sleep in the Wal-Mart parking lot and go back in as soon as it opens. It’s going to be a long night.”

  I sat there for a moment, defeated, and I would have cried except that there was no moisture left in my body, and for the first time ever in my life, the thought of chocolate made me furious. I left my bra hooked, and then slowly moved toward the garden hose with my mouth wide open.

  Living Urban Legend

  “You will never believe what crawled into me at three o’clock in the morning last night,” my mother said to me. “I’ll give you a hint: It’s the last thing you would ever expect!”

  “Oh God, Mom,” I said, throwing my hands up. “You know, there are some things mothers and daughters should never share. Just because I’m back in therapy doesn’t mean I’m now a blank slate on which you now can feel free to inflict a whole other lifetime’s worth of damage on. Maybe if you were paying for it, but this time it’s on my Visa, so let’s pay some attention to that ‘boundary’ talk we had, all right?”

  “Your brain must just be a dustrag, it’s so filthy,” my mother responded as she looked at me with a cold, blank stare, much like a pigeon’s. “No wonder your doctor charges you so much, she has to listen to all of your dirty pervert thoughts. I bet if you cleaned up your act in there, she’d charge you half as much. Now, what I was about to say was this.”

  I really don’t think I would have believed it if I had not seen it for myself. My mother pulled a big, white, folded-up napkin from inside her purse and placed it on the kitchen table.

  “THIS,” my mother said as she then shook the napkin at me, “CAME FROM MY HEAD! RIGHT IN MY EAR!”

  I shook my head. “If you’re going to pull out a ball of wax big enough to double as a Glade Solid, count me out! I’ve pulled things out of myself before that were both frightening and amazing, especially when I have allergies, and sometimes the magnitude of them is so scary I have tried to put them back, but for the benefit for everyone around me I’ve kept all of that to myself. To myself. Let’s play the same game here, please.”

  She gave me the dirty pigeon look and shook the napkin again. “Well,” my mom started, “last night I suddenly woke up at three in the morning and heard what sounded like a very loud ocean in my ear. It was so loud, all of this noise! Then I felt something move, and I realized it was in my head.”

  “My therapist only charges a little bit extra for that,” I said as she shot me a look.

  She went on to explain that as she was clutching the side of her head and screaming in pain my father told her to go back to sleep, that he was very tired. Insisting that there was something in her ear making noise and moving around, my mom ran into the hallway and stood under the light so my dad could get a better view into her ear.

  “It was so loud I kept thinking, Now, I’m a patient person, but even I can’t live like this for the rest of my life,” she continued, and knowing my mom, she actually probably believed it. “And your father kept saying he couldn’t see anything.

  “He didn’t even bother to put on his right glasses. But who am I to say, you know? There’s only what felt like a rat running around in my skull trying to eat my brain like a free wheel of cheese, so, you know, why should he be worried?”

  My mother shook the napkin at me again.

  “Well, I knew I was dying, I knew I was facing death, and after five minutes, I just thought, All right, all right, God, enough already, where’s the friggin’ white light?” she went on. “And your father said he couldn’t see anything in my ear, and then suddenly, he said he heard a scratching sound.”

  It was at that point that he suggested very gingerly that they go to the emergency room, which probably wasn’t a very good idea on his part. He would have met less resistance had he clubbed her over the head with a dry sausage and then dragged her to the car by her hair, Italian style.

  Now, to set the stage, I have to explain a few things. My mother’s not a big fan of doctors, although she had no problem dragging her children to them without any warning; one minute I was defending myself against the lobsterlike pinches of my sister in the backseat of the station wagon, and the next, I was in the waiting room, flipping through a year-old issue of Us Weekly, thinking I was about to get an allergy shot from our family doctor, Dr. Goldman. Who just happened to be the father of a boy I went to high school with. A boy I had a tremendous crush on, and who I had, merely two weekends before, danced behind at the Devil House on Teen Night when “What I Like About You” was played, pointing manically and aggressively at the back of his head during the “youuuuuuu” part of the chorus. I didn’t particularly mind going to Dr. Goldman’s, figuring that as long as I didn’t have some sort of skeevy disease or an assortment of open sores, he would see me for the nice, polite, homely girl that I was and pass on a nugget of encouragement to his son, as in “Sure, she’s not much to look at, and sure, her overbite looks like a canopy for her chin, but she’s a nice girl and you could do a lot worse. By the way, I bet she’s a terrific dancer!”

  Unfortunately for me, however, I was not at Dr. Goldman’s for an allergy shot; I was actually mere moments away from unknowingly about to get my first Pap smear. Unknowingly sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, there I was, about to have my romantic teenage hope not simply dashed but severed by a reckless mother who never stopped once to think that a cute Jewish boy just might have enough trouble liking an oily, donkey-toothed Catholic shiksa like me, but bringing home a girl his dad had already seen without her pants on was not exactly fitting into anybody’s plan. Had I known I was not getting an allergy shot but was about to live through my own installment of The Vagina Monologues and in addition never again be able to tolerate hearing “What I Like About You” without feeling the hot rush of deep, unforgiving humiliation and uncontrollable rocking back and forth while shaking my head for the duration of the tune twenty-plus years later, maybe I would have been able to say something, run away, or at least fake a seizure. My mother always felt that our medical experiences were on a “need to know” basis, and frankly, she felt that she was the only one who really ever needed to know.

  She, however, avoids doctors at all costs, because the last time she went to Dr. Goldman to check out an old-lady vein in her leg, he noticed her conspicuous absence of about a decade and sent her for a complete workup.

  And that’s when they found cancer in what we like to call her “bra area.”

  “How can they have cancer?” she said as she pointed to her shirt after she got the news. “That’s ridiculous! I’ve never even used them!”

  The night before her bra area surgery, she motioned to me to follow her up the stairs, and I prepared myself for a tender mother-and-daughter talk and some Terms of Endearment–caliber tears, maybe even sobbing, which could be exciting. I readied myself to be strong, not only for myself but for her, and I took a deep breath before I entered her bedroom. She was sitting on the bed and motioned for me to sit down next to her. She took a deep breath.

  Finally, I thought to myself, what I have been waiting almost my whole life to hear: my apology for Dr. Goldman’s Pap smear and the love tragedy it cost me. Oh, there were going to be tears, all right.

  My mother started. She cleared her throat.

  “Li
sten. If I die under the knife, bury me in the blue beaded gown with these earrings and the matching shoes. My Death Outfit is together right here in this bag. This was my runner-up outfit to wear to your wedding in case I lost a little weight with all of the aggravation you caused me insisting that you had to have a WOMAN marry you, but I never lost an ounce, although I’ll bet you every gift you got that you aren’t married after all and that woman was just after a free meal, a couple of beers, and some dancing. Which she got—did you see how much cheese she ate? I did. I was watching. I saw. I bet it was her first week on Atkins, I do. It doesn’t matter that I’m still too fat to wear this gown, I’ll be dead and laying down, so just don’t zip up the back and it will look fine, and most of my bulk is air, anyway.

  “Now, when you bring all of the relatives back to the house after my funeral, you’d better serve Boar’s Head cold cuts. If you get the cheap meat and serve that to people who have just cried over my limp, lifeless body, I swear to God I will come back and haunt the living shit out of you. And if you feel like being a funny ass and burying me without panties, I’m not coming back alone. I’ll bring some dead clowns with me.”

  “You sure can put the ‘fun’ in funeral, Mom,” I replied.

  The next day, when my mom checked into the hospital, the nurse pointed to the garment bag and said, “What’s this? Our dinners aren’t that formal. Most patients don’t even wear pants.”

  “Well, after you people kill me,” my mother responded, “I figured I ought to look a little nice in case I meet someone I know in the morgue after you suck the blood out of my veins and replace it with antifreeze. And make sure you suck all the air out, and I mean all. Jump on me if you have to. There’s a dress I have to fit into.”

  I never got my apology, and my mother beat cancer like it was a prepubescent daughter with a fresh mouth, but with this story about the roar in my mother’s ear I was finally getting some satisfaction from the fact that for the first time in a long time my mother had been dragged to the doctor against her will.