Not that I could blame her; my mother, much like every other mother of the time, was under thirty with three kids, which even I consider an unfortunate situation that should require some sort of reparations for a stolen youth. Frankly, if at twenty-five, I was driving a station wagon, boiling hot dogs for dinner three nights out of the week, changing diapers and helping people with their homework instead of hanging out with my friends until four A.M., sleeping until noon, and taking off for an impromptu road trip on occasion, I’d be hitting people with my shoes and pinching them at random, too.
But the grandmother of my nephews was different from the mother I knew.
My nephews’ grandmother bought them McDonald’s for a snack when they came home from school, read them books, and played with them. She took them to their gymnastics lessons, their T-ball games, their soccer matches. She bought them toys when they went shopping and let them invite their friends over to swim. I really don’t think she had grown more patient, just a whole lot more tired, but her shoes stayed on her feet, mainly because it hurt to bend over and untie them and she had begun to have her Carmela Soprano nails professionally done, so pinching in any situation except for self-defense was nothing short of throwing good money right out the window.
My mother, it turned out, was the cool grandma.
That is, until the day I opened the door and the screams erupted as the kids started fighting over a toy car. I heard my mother yell from an upstairs bedroom, “Boys! You’d better behave or I’m calling The Lady!”
A chill went up my spine, and I suddenly had the urge to grab a wooden bowl and spin around the living room, singing the chorus of “Food, Glorious Food.”
And then I remembered the day my mother made good on her threats and took me to the Black House.
I am four.
It’s a cold February day in New York. My mother has me all bundled up outside, and my whole family gets into the car, even my Nana and Pop Pop. I wonder where we are all going, but no one is saying anything.
Now, this is where the story gets weird. My dad parks the car, we all get out and walk up to a house I swear was painted black. I wasn’t really on my guard at this point, it was far too early. There were no signs, I like to tell myself, there was no way to know what lay just a couple of minutes ahead for me; I probably had just had a snack, my black eye was almost healed, and I was forever excused from seafood of all types. Things were looking up.
Until we go into the Black House and sit on a wooden bench at the bottom of the stairs. I can’t figure out what’s going on until I realize my sister is not with us. And then it hits me.
I am at The Orphanage. My mother was not bullshitting me. I am being put up for adoption because I am the Throw-Up Girl. No one wants a kid who throws up on a teacher. No one wants a kid who throws up on a bus and then can’t even recognize her own mother. No one wants a kid who throws up all over Friday’s Catholic Family Fun Fish Fry.
No one.
Panic shoots ice through my veins and I am one scared little kid. I want to throw up but I pretty much figure I should probably not move on that need until later, considering the circumstances. I decide to go for the softest, easiest target in the group, my Nana.
“Nana, I’ll be good, please, I promise,” I beg. “I promise I’ll be good, I don’t want to go.”
My poor, kind Nana smiles and pats me on the head. “That’s nice, sweetheart,” she says. “Now just sit here like a good girl.”
Sure, strategy isn’t a well-honed skill at the age of four unless you live in Thailand and you and your twin brother are heading your very own guerrilla insurgency, but I’m doing my best. I hit my Pop Pop up next with pleas of behaving and sharing toys and being really, really good. He looks at me with a sad smile and says, “Oh, Laurie, you’ll be all right. Everything will be fine.”
Before I can move on to my parents and change their minds about surrendering me to a life of brown muslin dresses, bunk beds with dirty sheets, and selling matches to earn a living, something unspeakable happens. From the top of the stairs, a Nightmare on Elm Street–caliber scream is emitted, forceful, shrill, obviously from a child—and with my luck the person I’m going to be sleeping under for the next fourteen years.
I listen to the scream in its entirety as everything goes silent around it, my eyes trained on the dark, shadowy top of the stairs. When the sharp, long, horrible, terrified scream finally ends, there is no movement, there is no sound but the fresh memory of it repeating in my head as if on a loop.
Despite the chances, things have just gotten worse.
I am not at the children’s orphanage, I slowly understand.
But I am at the children’s slaughterhouse.
Before I know it, a nurse has me by the arm and is attempting to lead me up the stairs, and I know enough to fight, despite the confusion that is swallowing me in big gulps. This must be The Lady my mom’s always talking about, I think. I don’t get a chance to see my family for the last time, and I don’t get a chance to say good-bye, I don’t even get the opportunity to offer up eating flounder as a bargaining chip, or at least cleaning up my own vomit. It’s just over. I am going to die.
Before I know it, I’m on a table somewhere in the death chamber, there are huge machines all around me and big lights. When the nurse turns around, she’s got a mask in her hand, she’s coming at me with the mask pointed toward my mouth, saying, “Now breathe deep, Laurie,” and she’s coming closer and closer and closer and closer, and when she’s just inches from me, when she’s just this far away, I yell as loud as I can in a battle cry and then punch her right in the neck with all the force I’ve got. I balled up my little fist and coldcocked her. From there, it took two other nurses and a doctor to hold me down—I was swingin’ like a monkey—and then, suddenly, everything went black.
When I wake up, hours later, there is a brand-new Dawn Beauty Pageant doll box at the end of my bed and I can’t talk. It takes me a while to figure out that I am back home, and that I must have put up one hell of a fight because I’m not dead. In fact, I was such a good fighter that I even got a present out of the deal.
I try to talk, but nothing comes out and my throat hurts. Those bastards tried to strangle me, I figure, or punched me right back in the neck. But I fought back, and by the looks of it, I beat them!
“DON’T TALK, LAURIE,” my mother says, loudly, as if my parents didn’t try to have me murdered, just rendered deaf and mute just so I would be a quiet fish eater. “WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU WANT.”
She then hands me a pad of paper and a pen, but I just look at her, as if to say, “The only thing I can write is my name and my address in case I am kidnapped, and you know that,” so I try to draw a glass of Pepsi, kind of just a square with a line across it, because I want something to drink.
“What is that?” my mother says quizzically. “Huh. I don’t know what the hell that is. Is that a cracker? Are you hungry? Why would you want a cracker? We don’t even have that kind of cracker. I don’t buy that kind of cracker. That’s not our brand. What about a sandwich? A nice sandwich? Well, why not? It’s the same shape!”
Eventually, I have to resort to charades to express that I’m thirsty, and after drinking out of a pretend glass like a mime, my mother finally understands.
“Oh, a drink? You’re thirsty?” my mother finally guesses. “Because of your throat? It hurts? Because you had your tonsils out?”
As I’ve said before, my mother always believed that medical procedures were on a need-to-know basis, though that juicy little nugget of news might better have been delivered before I began fighting evil child-slayers in a desperate attempt to save my life.
“What’s the big deal?” my mother said twenty years later when I questioned her about why she didn’t tell me I was about to have a routine surgical procedure and not executed. “I don’t know. What the hell difference does it make now?”
“Well, let’s see what the effects something like that could have on a little girl who thought
her parents took her to be killed?” I asked. “Tell me if any of this rings a bell: low self-esteem, paranoia, cynicism, not to mention an intense, otherwise unexplainable loathing of charades and Pictionary.”
“It’s not my fault you have a vivid imagination!” my mother said defensively. “Why would I tell a little girl, ‘Get in the car, we’re going to have things cut out of your neck with a knife’?”
I don’t know, maybe she had a point, but as I gave the Easter baskets to my nephews over thirty years later, I couldn’t help but shake my head.
“Nicholas,” I said as I presented my older nephew with the basket. “Want some chocolate?”
“Nah,” he said, looking up at me with his huge brown eyes. “I gave it up for Lent. Grandma said I was getting chubby.”
“I want chocolate,” David chimed in.
“Okay, here’s your basket,” I said, handing it over. “But who is the lady Grandma says she’s going to call if you don’t behave?”
“The daycare lady,” Nicholas said. “But I don’t want to go to daycare.”
“I don’t want to go to daycare,” David agreed. “Grandma says there’s no pool or McDonald’s at daycare.”
“Well, guess what?” I said. “Grandma is never going to call The Lady. The Lady is never going to come.”
“How do you know?” Nicholas asked.
“Because,” I explained. “The Lady doesn’t exist. There is no lady. The Lady is just in Grandma’s head. She has a very vivid imagination.”
“Are you sure?” Nicholas said.
“I don’t want to go to daycare,” David added.
“I’m positive you are never going to daycare,” I told them firmly. “And I am positive there’s no Lady. There never was and there never will be. But let’s practice drawing a glass of Pepsi, just in case.”
It’s Fun to Stay at the YMCA
I couldn’t believe that it had ever come to this.
There I was, standing in the middle of the sports equipment department at Sears about to make a hefty purchase and I was having a little trouble dealing with what I was seeing.
“So this treadmill is eight hundred dollars,” I said.
“Plus the two-hundred-dollar warranty,” the sales guy, who didn’t look old enough to drive a car, let alone make commission, reminded me.
“Plus that,” I repeated.
“Plus the delivery charge,” the sales guy reminded me again.
“Plus that,” I repeated.
“And plus tax,” he concluded.
“And plus that,” I repeated.
“Brings the total to about thirteen hundred, ballpark,” he concluded, nodding his head.
“Toss on another thousand or two and I could just get this fat sucked out of my ass in an afternoon!” I said with a tired laugh.
“I know, that’s what you said fifteen minutes ago,” the sales guy also reminded me.
“It’s just a lot,” I informed him. “You know.”
“I do know,” he replied. “You said that fifteen minutes ago, too.”
“That treadmill is a trip to Europe,” I informed him.
“Then maybe you should go to Europe and join the Y for twenty bucks a month,” the sales guy replied.
I turned around and looked at him. “For someone who doesn’t even have hair on his legs yet, that is just cruel,” I said, at which he turned to me and shrugged. “I trusted you!”
You see, I had a choice to make after my doctor took a look at my water-balloon ankles and let it slip about how much I weighed, like I hadn’t already heard it in the hallway after “the weigh-in.” Now, in this case, if my IQ and my weight were the same, I’d be thrilled, but, frankly, I would have preferred he said something like “Goodness, your husband is a good kisser,” or “You know, in high school my son always said you danced like an epileptic. You know that song ‘What I Like About You’? He knew you would dance behind him and point at the ‘youuuuuu’ part. That’s why he never turned around.” But he didn’t. He told me the number, the full number. Unedited, blatant, and nearly pornographic, it had the shock value of a snuff film. That’s something I really think I need to take issue with. I mean, guess what? I know what I am. I know. There isn’t any “XS” dripping off the labels of my clothes, I’m all XL’s and L’s, although I do have a tendency to employ a defense mechanism and pretend that L is for “Laurie.” I’m not buying size fourteen and scratching out the one, convincing only myself that it was mismarked.
In a doctor’s office, isn’t your care their utmost concern? Isn’t your health, both physical and mental, their primary goal? Then, Dear God, by all means, what the hell is a SCALE doing there? The enemy. That’s akin to placing Patty Scevaro, the biggest whore and the meanest girl in high school, right in the hallway to call out as you pass by, “Your ass is a waterbed, Notaro. California King. And you also danced like you were standing in a puddle with a live wire in your hand. We mocked you. Mercilessly.” I don’t need that kind of pressure at the doctor’s office. I know I’m flawed, that’s why I’m there already. I’ve thought about running for some sort of political office, my only platform being the abolition of scales in doctor’s offices. You wanna get on one at home, fine, but don’t force me in front of other people and then announce the results out loud. This is not bingo! This is not the lottery! Nobody wins, there is no reason to shout. I believe the very least doctor’s offices could do is to give you the option of a blindfold or a dose of Twilite Sleep, just to be kind, or perhaps have a “fun house” scale where it would read a wildly different result depending on where you were standing on it.
Anyway, I had a choice after my doctor busted out with exactly to the ounce how much I weighed. I couldn’t just go on a diet; diets plain don’t work for me; and, sure, you’ve heard that before, but in my case it’s true. Every time I go on a diet, KFC brings back that popcorn chicken. Every single time. I mean, you can even chart it—my going on a diet is to popcorn chicken what the moon is to tides. I’ll go as far as to guarantee it, because this has been happening for years. I’ll decide to make the plunge, buy all the special food, adapt to the diet of a badger, stifle hunger spasms with rice cakes and grapes, I’ll finally lose a pound or two, lay the first brick in the reconstruction of my self-esteem, and POW!!!
Popcorn chicken.
It never fails.
I’m starting to believe that I’m under surveillance, or at least am being tracked like big game. I don’t know if KFC franchisees are required to make an official report to the home office of my last visit each time they submit an order for cole slaw and sporks, but someone knows. Someone is paying attention. There’s an intelligence operative out there who sounds the alarm when I haven’t been spotted singing to myself in the drive-thru for several weeks. Then the command is given over the loudspeaker at every KFC in the country.
“Red alert! Red alert! All hands report to their frying stations at once!! NOTARO IS M.I.A.!!! BRING BACK THE POPCORN CHICKEN!”
Who can resist popcorn chicken? WHO? I can’t! It’s POPCORN CHICKEN! Little pieces of chicken dipped in batter and fried to a delicate crisp, little pieces of chicken so tiny they essentially disintegrate in the bubbling oil. All that’s left is fried, crunchy bits. A whole box full of fried, crunchy bits. I mean, it’s the perfect food.
What I fear most is that KFC hasn’t kept this info to themselves. My nutrition information got more mileage than my e-mail address did when it was sold to a pimp with a dirty mouth and relatives in the Internet porn industry. Word is getting out. People start to panic. As if popcorn chicken didn’t pose enough of a threat to my inner-thigh Chub Rub, a whole gang of offenders started popping up. You know, it’s not like I’m a bastion of willpower or endurance; when I was born, God gave me eight ounces of patience, and by the second day of my life it was gone. As a result, if I’m more than a step away from a grape or rice cake when I hear my stomach cry out for help, within seconds I can expect to catch a glimpse of my reflection on the microwave doo
r, gnawing on an empty taco shell or a brick of cheese that I’m holding poised between my two paws like a bear at a campsite.
It’s obvious to me that KFC sold my personal information to a bunch of companies that apparently relied on me quite heavily to meet their projected quarterly earnings. Nabisco, for one, immediately stocked store shelves with the new chocolate Oreos a mere fifteen minutes after I was spotted purchasing a bag of carrots one day. It’s as if my diet has threatened Nabisco’s place in the cookie world, and without my sugar and carbohydrate addiction to count on, they’re terrified that Keebler elves may stage a coup and seize the cookie throne.
But that’s not all. Once, as I walked out of the grocery store with a week’s worth of light yogurt, a massive Kellogg’s truck screeched to a halt and started unloading crates of the latest Pop-Tart flavor, chocolate chip, in an attempt to trap me. I also believe that Dreyer’s has paid a spy to rewire my cable so that on any channel, I have no other programming choices but Dreamery ice cream commercials.
What choice did I have? I always have to give in. If I stand my ground, soon every magazine that I pick up will be 150 pages of nothing but Milky Way and Twinkie ads. I’m terrified Sonic will send a whole team of waitresses to roller-skate around my front yard until I place an order for a chili cheese dog, a basket of onion rings, and a coconut cream pie shake. I would be pummeled with more temptation than a priest in a USA Network movie. So considering my fat inner-tube ankles, my choices were limited: Dieting was out, and either I could be happy with my new ankles or I could do something about it aside from sticking them with a pin and draining them, risking flood damage in my home. So I did.
We Thought You Would Be Prettier Page 13