We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

  “I did!” Jamie shot back. “I can’t get that one up, either!”

  “Then get the next size up,” I replied, as I pulled the zipper on my pair of boots, which worked absolutely, perfectly, fabulously fine until it reached the middle of my leg.

  “It’s not my foot that doesn’t fit,” Jamie whispered harshly. “It’s . . . my . . . calf!”

  “You mean it’s our calves,” I informed her while my fingers were turning purple with bruises and blood clots trying to force the boot zipper over the state fair–winning watermelon that had apparently seeded and grown in between my knee and ankle.

  I turned to look at Jamie, who was staring at me with her mouth hanging open all the way to the top of her unzipped boots.

  “Fatty calves,” we whispered to each other. “Calf bloat!”

  We couldn’t believe it. When had this happened? How had it happened? How do you just wake up one day and find your last flattering feature has deserted you like a guy who freaks out the first time you bring a stick of your deodorant to his house? I suppose, however, that there were signs. Signs such as the time I was trying to tie my shoe and my very own fat tube bucked backward with a reverse roll into my abdomen and completely bit me; signs such as the instant that I looked in the mirror and saw Tipper Gore’s neck underneath my head; signs such as our only party motto was “If you lose me, look for the cheese platter”; or the sign of how I pledged my loyalty to the Awesome Blossom despite the fact that I received, and read, the mass e-mail that said it contained 300 grams of fat. Looking back, I suppose it was only a matter of time before the trickle-down theory was applied to the excess of my paunch and began to distribute itself evenly to my few remaining skinny parts, like my knuckles, earlobes, and now, apparently, my calves.

  Indeed, the realization that fatty calves had assumed resident status on our legs was a chilling moment and in hindsight ranked in third place in my list of Horrifying Moments of Truth in my life, preceded only by:

  The Second Most Horrifying Moment of Truth, 11:53 P.M., October 5, 1999: Previously, I could have sworn that every kernel of the Dripping with Butter at the Movies Microwave Popcorn that I was addicted to had been individually kissed by butter angels had I not once accidentally opened a prepopped packet of butter-marinated popcorn and seen the horror inside for myself. There, lying quietly inside the bag, was an orange gelatinous puddle the color of sinister toxic waste and the consistency of a bar of Irish Spring. It looked as if someone had melted, then solidified, Ronald McDonald and squirted him into bags of kernels. It was vile. It was unnatural. It was definitely cancer. Don’t get me wrong, it tasted great when the popping was all said and done, but it was kind of like unexpectedly seeing your mom naked. It was the brand of truth you shouldn’t even attempt to handle yourself without the aid of a skilled professional, and I firmly believe that stuff should be renamed “At the Movies in Chernobyl” Microwave Popcorn.

  and

  The First and Most Paramount Horrifying Moment of Truth, 10:47 A.M., May 2, 1978: I permitted Kay, a stoner chick and the only person who would talk to me in Beginning Choir at Shea Middle School, to look into my eighth-grade clutch purse for a stick of gum because her breath reeked of the joint she had just consumed by herself. I watched helplessly as her hand emerged from my purse, not with a stick of gum, but with the toothbrush that I had to carry because of my braces, which now had the exposed strip of a maxi pad stuck to it. With the handle of the toothbrush in her hand, she raised it up above her head and proceeded to run around the classroom like it was an American flag as she chanted, “Whorie Laurie! Whorie Laurie!”

  And now, a new, amazing prolific achievement of my life rolled in as Fatty Calf Syndrome, possibly bumping the Chernobyl popcorn incident.

  “What can we do about our enormous bulging calves?” I asked Jamie in a panic. “A calf-reduction procedure? Deaugmentation? Leg liposuction? Little rubber fat suits from the knee down? How do I put my calves on a diet? What do we do? What do we do?!!!”

  “What we’re going to do,” Jamie said, leaning in and furrowing her brow in a definite badge of determination, “is find boots to fit our freakishly large Laura Bush legs. We’re in San Francisco, the capital of the world for men, with big men legs, who live to shop for and wear ladies’ clothing. There’s bound to be a transvestite store somewhere within five square miles that sells boots that our basketball calves can fit into!”

  So we embarked on our hunt for the entire rest of the day, scouting out any store windows displaying rubber dresses, clothing with an inordinate amount of sequins, and any Wonder Woman outfits or memorabilia whatsoever. But after we hit eight shoe stores with not one pair that would fit us and one she-male boutique that only carried slippers that were the size of pontoon boats alluringly adorned with pink feathers, we still came up empty-calved, with the exception of a pair of very firm and perky attachable breast forms in case I ever have to start dating again.

  I was about to give up when a man named Destiny who had thinner legs and nicer cheekbones than we did overheard our plight at Uncanny Tranny and directed us to a place he said could probably help us.

  “I don’t know if I can withstand the humiliation of another store,” I whined. “Frankly, I think I’d rather play with generic whiskey and a bunch of knives.”

  “One last store,” Jamie gasped as we tried to make it up another steep San Francisco hill. “If we don’t succeed this time, I promise we can go back to the hotel room and lie down until our calves atrophy and our bodies eventually absorb them.”

  “How can I help you?” the cordial shoe man said as soon as we entered the store.

  “Someone took half my ass and stuck it under my knee,” Jamie said, breathing heavily and pointing to her stout, engorged calf. “And I am not going back out there until I can fit a boot around them.”

  “And I apparently have Christina Ricci’s blow-pop head emerging from behind either of my shins,” I added, pointing to my leg loaves. “Oh my God. Either those are cellulite potholes or they’re forming sockets for eyes!”

  “This happens a lot,” the jolly shoe man said as he emitted a deep, heavy sigh and shook his head. “Active ladies like yourselves often pay a price for their athletic lifestyles, and I’m afraid this is one of the tolls. Boot manufacturers make boots sized for models—but models don’t walk, they have drivers! They’re lazy skinny people! It’s a horrible side effect of having such a finely sculptured calf, as opposed to a flat, flappy supermodel one.”

  “You are so right!” Jamie gushed. “Who wants a pancake for a calf when you can have a Cinnabon? This calf shows the dedication to my sport, even if I really haven’t considered taking one up yet!”

  “I have a hobby,” I volunteered meekly. “It’s chicken fried steak.”

  “I have just the boots for you!” he said as he snapped his fingers and disappeared into the back room.

  Now, true, he was using the term “athletic” as loosely as the skin that’s gathered like drapes around Elizabeth Taylor’s head, but frankly, I didn’t care. If he wanted to pretend that our calves were well developed rather than identify them as the lumps of cellulite and homes to a lifetime of Hostess Ding Dong toxic waste deposits that they really were, I was totally into it. He had earned his commission from me, and if there was any way he was willing to point out the firmness of my rock-in-a-sock boobs, I’d kick in another five bucks as well.

  Honestly, I don’t know what I expected from a man who would lie straight to my double chin and John Goodman neck and tell me that I looked “athletic,” but I did expect something more than what I saw when he opened the two boxes of boots and presented us with his fat-calf bounty.

  Jamie was the first to speak. “Wow,” she said slowly and quietly. “Are those . . . pirate boots?”

  “Well, let’s just say they have a swarthy influence to them,” the exuberant shoe man glowed. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

  “Sure, if I had some pieces of eight and a hook hand to go with the
m,” I said, staring at the big silver buckle and the way they folded over the top.

  “And perhaps a parrot and a peg leg,” Jamie added as she picked up one of the boots from her box and began to try it on.

  “These are the only boots you have?” I asked.

  The friendly shoe man nodded. “And these are the last two pairs in your size,” he added.

  “I’ll take them,” Jamie said as she walked around the store with them, looking as if she was about to pillage a schooner.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll take them, too,” I said, but only after I was sure they could swallow and digest my bulbous leg mushrooms. “At least if I know that when I’m short on money, I can either get hooked up at the Pirates of the Caribbean or a community theater production of Peter Pan.”

  As the friendly shoe man was swiping our Visas and thanking God Almighty that he had finally unloaded inventory that had sat on his shelf since Adam Ant still had a career, I turned to my friend, Captain Ahab.

  “We’re going to look like assholes, you know,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered. “But at least we’ll look like native assholes. Ahoy, matey.”

  Web M.D.

  “Oh, look at those fat little sausage ankles,” my Nana said to me last week. “Those look like clown feet! I’ve only seen ankles like that one time before, and that was on your Aunt Judy. Two days later she was lying in a casket and wearing green eye shadow that made her swollen head look like a Granny Smith apple.”

  I looked down and gasped in horror. My ankles suddenly had the circumference of a Goodyear tire that hadn’t exploded yet, and were as round and full as a python that had just finished eating a native. Holy shit, first the cantaloupe calves and now this, I thought mournfully as I sighed. They were the last segments of my body where I could actually still see my bones.

  My sisters recoiled in disgust.

  “Whoa,” my sister said. “Did your husband leave you yet?”

  “Wow, there goes your last flattering feature,” my other sister said.

  “Your aunt’s heart failed and then exploded so hard it nearly shot out of her nose,” Nana continued. “You should go to the doctor.”

  I didn’t want to go to the doctor. Everyone there knows how much I weigh, they won’t take my checks, but they do take secret notes about me that I’m not allowed to see and then read them into a tape recorder. I wouldn’t tolerate that on any other social occasion, particularly one when I’m wearing nothing but a paper-towel poncho, so in my book, those experiences are ones that need to be regulated and limited, much like court appearances.

  So instead, when I got home I turned to my trusty computer. A search on “swollen ankles” pointed me to several Web medical sites that were only too anxious to tell folks how grave their disease was and, comparatively speaking, how long you had before a head of broccoli would outlive you.

  The first indication that the situation warranted some concern was that a list of possible swollen ankle–related illnesses took longer to download than it did for me to meet my husband for the first time and get him drunk enough to think I was pretty.

  It was not good news.

  Like a disease buffet, it offered me a variety of misfortunes to choose from. The first on the list was congestive heart failure, along with a variety of symptoms.

  “Weight gain (unintentional),” the first one read, and I nodded.

  “That has my name written on it,” I said aloud. “I certainly didn’t put ‘ass the size of a sleeper sofa’ on my Christmas list last year, but I sure got it anyway.”

  “Shortness of breath, especially with activity and cough,” the list continued.

  “SEE?” I sighed. “I knew it wasn’t because I smoked!”

  “Decreased concentration, addiction to chocolate Twizzlers, and swelling of feet and ankles,” the list concluded.

  Check, check, check, I tallied. When I compiled my score and read the results, the Web doctor informed me that I had approximately twelve minutes to shave my most embarrassing spots and then put on clean underwear, because did I really want paramedics to see me that way? Contrary to popular opinion, they are horrified by the grotesque and will make fun of you when you slip into unconsciousness.

  And that wasn’t all. My soggy, deformed heart was the smallest of my problems, at least for my last seven minutes of life. Odds were also good to excellent that I was host to diabetes, lupus, tuberculosis, liver failure, circulatory distress, kidney failure, and also that my brain was being eaten away in large bites by gonorrhea.

  I quickly called my regular doctor, who said to come to his office immediately.

  “Hurry,” I said to him as I jumped up on his examination table and my paper dress twirled about me like the blades of a windmill. “My heart is going to shoot out my nose any minute now. That is, unless my liver turns to dust, I suffocate in my own fluids, or the very last bit of my brain is smeared on a cracker and gobbled up by VD.”

  “Let’s take a look,” he said, holding my feet.

  “You’re going to amputate because of the diabetes, aren’t you?” I said, shaking my head. “Oh God. Maybe it won’t be so bad, you know? I’d always have a seat at the movie theater, I’d save a ton on shoes, and maybe I could even win an Olympic medal in the 75-meter roll. Instead of a Wheaties box, they could put my face on a box of syringes.”

  “Did someone give you a medical encyclopedia?” he asked curiously. “How did you come up with all of these diseases?”

  “The www.diseaseroulette.com and www.maladyexpress.net,” I said simply. “I have the symptoms of all of them.”

  He sighed. “What you have is the Village Idiot Home Diagnosis Syndrome. Don’t ever look up stuff on medical sites again! It’s the heat of the summer that’s made your feet freak-show size.”

  “So I’m just FAT,” I said blankly.

  “There’s really no happy answer to that,” he said, although I was nearly positive from his hand motions that he wrote “F-A-T” on my chart, in addition to the words “last flattering feature.”

  Terror and Death at the Black House

  The screaming started the moment I walked into my mother’s house to bring Easter baskets for my nephews.

  It was the familiar chorus of all the sounds regularly heard when opening the door to my mother’s house: my eight-year-old nephew, Nicholas, crying; my four-year-old nephew, David, screaming; the TV blaring; and somewhere, in the background, my mother yelling for everyone to knock it off.

  As soon as Nicholas was born, my mother swore she’d rather see her daughters become Jehovah’s Witnesses or pole dancers before she saw her first grandchild in daycare when my sister went back to work. I don’t think it was orignally the idea of daycare that didn’t sit well with her but the fact that there, in a bassinet, was a fresh slate, a lump of clay that could be worked on and molded into the perfect child who had eluded her the first time around with her own daughters. A kid whom she could take to church, a kid who would give up something for Lent and eagerly abide by it, a kid who couldn’t wait to eat fish on Fridays and who would actually keep the smudge on his forehead on Ash Wednesday and not pretend to have a sweaty forehead and “accidentally” wipe it off when she returned them to school, unlike her own kids.

  “That’s Jesus on your head!” she would bellow from the driver’s seat of the station wagon as we got out and went back to school as all the kids on the playground stopped and stared as three girls with filthy faces got out of the screaming lady’s car. “God will see it if you wipe it off! If you wipe it off, the Devil wins! Don’t you dare wipe it off, I wrote all of you excuses for PE today. And no running at recess! No sweating!”

  “If that kid needs even one DAY of psychotherapy,” I told my mother when it was decided that the baby would stay with her, “I’m going to sue you, Mom.”

  The mother of my childhood was not the kind of mother who was prone to messing around, particularly when it came to discipline. If you didn’t listen to her commands and
obey the first time around, chances were good to excellent that you were going to quickly be acquainted with her shoe, which did double duty, serving not only as inexpensive footwear but as a flyswatter, battering ram, and paddle, or with her fingers, which could substitute for a vise grip and should have been patented by Black & Decker. Her favorite phrase was not “Wait till your father comes home” but “When your father comes home this will be a quiet house, because if you don’t behave, right now, I’m calling The Lady and taking you to the orphanage!”

  I was already a nervous kid to begin with, I really didn’t need any assistance in the drama department, such as hearing threats that I would be a free agent at four years old. One day in kindergarten, I forgot my lunch and threw up on my teacher’s shoes. The same year, our bus was in a minor fender bender, and, being the spaz that I am, I was the only one who got hurt: I ended up with a black eye and believed I had swallowed a tooth. So I threw up. As I got off the bus that day, I ran to my pregnant mother and wrapped my arms around her legs in search of comfort. My mother, however, despite my sobs and throw-up-splattered dress, wrenched me off of her with those Black & Decker claws and pushed me away harshly. That’s when I discovered that not only wasn’t she my mother, just some random pregnant lady, but it wasn’t even my stop. After eating flounder every Friday as every good Catholic toddler does to prevent my Downy-fresh soul from spinning in purgatory, I finally asked my mother if I could eat something else, and when she refused, I staged a Vomit Revolution, and the battlefield where I attacked was the dining room table. That, I am proud to say, is a war I won.

  Now, though I doubt she got the “orphanage” behavior-modification technique out of Dr. Spock’s Baby Basics, it pretty much did the trick most of the time, especially after she took me to see the film version of Oliver Twist and I spent the next significant portion of my life terrified that I would wake up one day and my Count Chocula would be replaced with gruel, my clothes would begin to unravel and turn brown, and I’d have to share a bed with a girl who smelled, although singing and dancing in a synchronized group looked like fun and might give me a chance to show off my talents at leaping and acting plucky.