We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

  “Oh, no,” she replied, jerking herself back into the moment. “No, not really. Well, actually yes, now that you ask, yes. There were nine ducklings this afternoon, then there were eight, and now there are only seven.”

  “Oh, that’s horrible,” Nana replied. “Do you think people took them?”

  “If only,” the waitress sighed. “There are turtles in the pond, too, and I think they . . . I, well, I think they got two ducklings.”

  The forkful of chicken chimichanga I just put in my mouth sank there like dead duckling as I struggled with the thought of chewing it. Then the three of us slowly turned toward the pond, and that’s when I saw it.

  “Oh, no,” I cried. “There. Look there! Yep, you’re right, that spot on the pond right there looks like a little collection of feathers. Tiny little feathers, because I’m sure turtles don’t eat feathers or they came loose in the attack, because from the looks of things it was rather violent. Oh. That’s so sad. It’s just a watery, floating little grave. Poor little duckling.”

  I turned back to see three faces staring at me, each frozen in true, explicit, naked horror.

  No one said anything. They just stared.

  “Didn’t you see it?” I asked. “It’s right there, where those baby duckling feathers are floating. In a clump. Right . . . there.”

  And that’s when I felt something sharp—and around size thirteen—kick my shin hard and fast and rather painfully under the table and saw my husband motion to the waitress, who now had both of her hands covering her mouth, which, though hidden, was obviously in the shape of a soundless scream. She looked something like the Edvard Munch painting, but with permed blond hair and fake sparkly gems imbedded in her fingernails.

  Her eyes gleamed like huge diamonds with all of the tears that had gathered in them.

  It was then that I realized what I had done.

  “Oh, wait!” I said, pointing toward the ducklings’ watery grave again. “Look at that! Clearly, I am a moron! Those are leaves! THOSE ARE LEAVES! And twigs and . . . puffy, fuzzy . . . pieces of a . . . a . . . feather pillow . . . maybe . . . probably . . . that’s not in any way the grisly remains of a baby duckling, it simply is not. It is not. I can assure you of that. It’s just a big collection of stuff that looks like bones and feathers, that’s all. Now that the sun has moved and I see it clearly, that can’t be a duckling carcass. It simply cannot. I must be drunk.”

  I turned back around just in time to see our waitress run from our table to places unknown.

  “You are an idiot,” my husband said frankly. “You are an idiot.”

  “I need more iced tea,” Nana notified me. “And that one is never coming back. Can I have your water?”

  “Why did you say that?” my husband asked me. “What the hell made you say that?”

  The truth was, I had no idea. I really didn’t. I saw what I saw and I reported it, simple as that, without straining it through the sensitivity-appropriateness filter at all. It all just came gushing out at once.

  “Maybe I just had a stroke,” I offered up. “I don’t know! It just came out, I couldn’t help it. I mean, I saw those feathers and I just . . . said it. I mean, she was wondering where they went, and, well . . . there it is.”

  “Those ARE leaves, you jackass,” my husband said. “But now that you told the waitress it’s a ‘watery grave,’ she’ll never believe you.”

  “Oh, whatever,” I said, and then pointed to the clump of whatever it was floating on top of the skeevy pond. “That’s a dead baby duck body and you know it!”

  “There’s a dead duck in the pond?” I heard an older man sitting at the next table ask his waiter.

  “Iced tea,” Nana called to anyone, holding up her glass.

  Well, I really was hoping that the dead-duckling event was an isolated incident, but as it turns out, it was merely a foreshadowing of events yet to occur. I had apparently, or at least temporarily, lost control of my mouth, and it was running rampant, attacking innocent people all over the countryside. Even though I have an evil little goblin named “Shut the Shit Up, You Asshole” that lives inside my head and makes me yell at people in traffic and when they park like shit, I am, believe it or not, typically able to stop myself before I say something horribly wrong. Suddenly, I was unable to stop what was coming out of my mouth or push the edit button. It was completely unsettling, especially because I had recently been on the receiving end of a similar situation myself. The weekend before, I had been in Oregon to try and find a house. Naturally, I arrived on the hottest day of the year, a very ripe 103 degrees and 90 percent humidity. It was ghastly. My innards had been steamed so effectively I was nothing short of a walking pot sticker, and since I couldn’t check into the bed and breakfast I was staying at until four P.M., I got off the plane, drove around for several hours, and looked at houses until the magic hour arrived. By the time I rolled in the front door of the cutest, most perfect Victorian house that was oozing with deliberate charm, my shirt was pleated so extensively that my torso looked like an accordion as I breathed in and out. My ring around the armpits was nothing short of mortifying and hadn’t been seen in civilized parts since pioneer times, unless you count chain gangs, and my makeup had long since vanished into the folds of my neck as a constant stream of unrelenting sweat diluted whatever attractiveness factor I may have started out with that morning. I was a sweaty, messy, nasty, smelly wreck of a girl, and my thighs were sticking together. Whatever portions of my hair that weren’t soaking wet flew wildly about like live snakes, as I had neglected to weigh them down with pennies or anchors. When the delightful, impeccably groomed innkeeper, who was absolutely, undoubtedly not perspiring in the least, saw me standing in her perfect House Beautiful–caliber foyer, which typically received only House Beautiful–caliber guests, I believe her initial beauty queen reaction was to point me toward the nearest soup kitchen, but I cut her off at the pass to avoid making the situation any more therapy-worthy than it already was.

  “I’m Laurie,” I said too cheerfully. “We spoke on the phone last week. I’m staying here for two nights.”

  “Oh,” she finally said, obviously taken aback, her hand at her throat. “We . . . I . . . I thought . . . you would be . . .”

  She didn’t need to say it. It was written all over her dry, matte face.

  “I know,” I finished for her. “You thought I would be prettier.”

  So you see, I knew the danger that verbal shrapnel caused, and I knew it was not something to be taken lightly. Within a matter of days after the duckling incident, however, it had happened again.

  Now, I must explain that across the street from my house is, to put it nicely, a friggin’ cat farm. A filthy, disgusting, smelly, reeking, repulsive, feral cat farm, manned by none other than the Cat Lady, as the entire neighborhood knows her. There are so many cats it actually is more appropriate to call them a herd, and, in polite terms, we’ve begun to reference them not as the diseased, flea-infested pathetically neglected animals living in squalor that they are, but as “free-range kitties.”

  We have so many cats, in fact, that when I heard that scientists had picked cats as the next animals to clone, I had to take a Tylenol PM and drain the nearly crystallized remains of a mudslide bottle from our 2002 Christmas party, the only liquor we had in the house.

  I mean, WHY?

  Cats? Why are we cloning cats? Who picked cats? Is there anyone out there who thinks the world is running a little short on cats? Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that I hate cats, because I don’t, I even have one, but I have to be honest and say that the reason I even have him is because there’s too many of them OUT THERE.

  You know, I have to wonder how this happened in the first place. At the cloning place, do all the cloners gather around and throw scraps of paper with their favorite animal in the hat and whatever is written on the piece that the boss draws is what science is going to clone next? I can just see the faces of the genetic engineers who wrote down things like “Wooly
mammoth,” “Albino tiger,” or even “Sasquatch,” on their slips of paper, only to have the big boss pull his hand out of the hat, unfold the scrap, stare for a moment, and then quietly utter, “Cats.”

  There would be an uproar.

  “Cats?” the other scientists would yell. “Why are we doing cats? You know, after we pulled out ‘mice’ the last time, I TOLD you we shouldn’t let Sheila vote anymore!”

  And then, slowly, all eyes would turn to the corner of the room, where Sheila, the fifty-two-year-old, graying single mother of Mr. Mustache, Mai Tai, EddyPuss, Banjo, Jessica Fletcher, and a sassy Siamese named Earl Grey, presses a bunched-up tissue to her nostril and pulls her balled, acrylic cardigan lab coat tightly around her as the room is overtaken by a sharp kitty chill.

  I mean, really, there is no need to make more cats, especially on purpose, and I kept mumbling that as I was chewing on my last crystal rocks of mudslide mix. Some of the things I’ve personally witnessed are so wrong that I’m amazed her yard isn’t enveloped by fire and brimstone. You want cats, I’ll give you cats. I’ve got one-of-a-kind collector’s-edition cats with one eye, three ears, one nostril, one leg longer than the other, half a tail, no tail, stump for a tail, you want it, I can get it for you. My block has the market cornered on free-range cats. And we get a whole new crop several times a year, too. When they’re not eating, they’re pooping in my yard and peeing under my house, which is the same place they go when they feel like dying.

  So no, I don’t think we need to be constructing, assembling, building, fabricating, or Xeroxing any more damn cats. WE HAVE ENOUGH CATS. REALLY. We don’t need copy cats.

  My new neighbor, Meghan, also decided that we had enough producers at our local cat-cloning factory, and since she still had the energy of a new neighborhood resident and had not yet experienced the brutal disillusionment that I had, she took action. She located an organization that would come and trap the cats, take them to a clinic to get them fixed, then drop them back off at the Cat Farm once everything was all over.

  Cat Lady agreed that it was all right with her as long as it didn’t cost her anything, and one evening, the cat-nappers came, set up traps all night long, and took the kitties away. Suddenly, it was like a real neighborhood, well, except for the picnic table in the Cat Lady’s front yard that served as a pyramid-like perch for those vermin-ridden cats all day long, and now that it was unoccupied, the Cat Lady invited her family over for a barbecue, and then they sat around the unwashed Cat Table and gobbled up everything on their plates, aware or unaware, I don’t know, that they were essentially eating on kitty ass.

  I licked out what was left in the mudslide bottle, and I swear everything I ate that day tasted like cat turd.

  The day after that, the cats came back, one by one, and one by one they sobered up and climbed back onto the Cat Pyramid, minus their reproductive organs, which, personally, I found absolutely delightful, realizing I would never again be kept awake by the wanton wails of thirty cats in heat demanding to be serviced. I also delighted in knowing that although the Cat Lady fed the cats, which enabled them to live in their diseased states longer, she really didn’t believe in caring for them, so with the death rate at typically one or two a month, I figured that within a year, our block would be free-range kitty FREE.

  Meghan was curious about how many cats the cat-nappers had nabbed, and, to be honest, so was I, because I wanted to work out my Free-Range Kitty Mortality Rate Sheet in more precise figures. When the Cat Lady came out for that evening’s feeding, we went over to the gate to talk to her.

  The Cat Lady shook her head. “Well, they didn’t get all of them,” she told us with a sigh, as if she was bothered by errant cats peeing and laying turds in her yard as much as we were. “A couple of them stuck around, and then I found one of them dead in the neighbor’s yard, right there. It was horrible!”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Meghan said, to which I nodded. “What happened?”

  “Well, I’m not real sure,” the Cat Lady started with another sigh and went on to explain that when she went over to pick it up with a shovel and a piece of cardboard, it was lying with all four legs and the tail sticking straight out from its body.

  I do believe I visibly cringed. Disgust, I have found, has no manners.

  “But then,” the Cat Lady said with yet another sigh, “I remembered that sometimes, dogs will chase down a cat and try to kill it by sitting on it and suffocating it. That must be what happened. A dog sat on it and pushed the air right out.”

  Now, although I was wrestling with both the visual of a Corgi holding down the claws of a crazed rabid cat with its paws and attempting to sit on it, in addition to the overwhelming temptation to step forward, slap her on the side of the head and scream, “You are insane!” then step forward, hit her again, and scream, “God, you are completely insane!” I somehow did not.

  Instead, I shook my head and said, “Oh, I don’t think that’s the way it happened, but then again, you really don’t want to know what I think happened to that cat.”

  “Oh, what?” the Cat Lady implored, looking mildly concerned.

  “Well,” I began, and then took a deep breath. “What I think happened to that cat is that a tweaker was walking by here on the way to the park up the street to go buy some crystal, picked up your cat by the tail, twirled it around his head a couple times, then threw it.”

  The Cat Lady didn’t say anything, but, déjà vu, I had seen that face merely days before on a teary, weepy waitress who never did come back to fill up our iced teas.

  “Oh, you really don’t think so!” the Cat Lady cried from behind the hands that were covering her mouth as her voice cracked. “You really don’t think that’s what happened!”

  I looked blankly at her, because even though I sure as shit did—but considering the damage I had done at the restaurant (I mean, really, we were thirsty throughout most of our meal)—I needed to fix what I had done.

  “No,” I said flatly. “A dog totally sat on your cat.”

  I was confessing all of this to my therapist when she abruptly choked on a sip of coffee.

  “Wait—” she said as she held her hand out and coughed, then burst into a gunfire of uncontrollable, full-throated laughter. “Wait a minute. She thought a dog sat on her cat?”

  “Can you believe that?” I agreed. “It was more plausible for a dog to have sat on her cat until it was dead than to have a crazed drug fiend kill it a block away from Crack Park. I mean, how did the dog know the cat was dead? Did he put a little doggie mirror in front of the kitty’s mouth?”

  My therapist, who looks just like Sigourney Weaver, continued to laugh, wiping tears from her eyes.

  I absolutely adore my therapist. Every other week, I go and hang out, we chat, we laugh, just like girlfriends over coffee, except at the end, I write her a check for the hour we’ve just hung out. Sure, it’s the closest thing a married straight girl can do to hiring an escort, except that she never has to tell me that I’m sexy, just funny and not as insane as my mother likes to tell people. And she likes to see me. I think she really looks forward to our visits. I’m her favorite. I am.

  I am.

  “How did the dog know when to get up?” I continued. “If they don’t know it’s not bacon, how do they know the cat’s not still alive?”

  She laughed again. “You’re so funny!” she said.

  “Thank you.” I blushed.

  “So this blurting out . . .” my therapist said. “Is this something you think we need to work on?”

  “Hell, no.” I smiled. “It’s like my own little version of Tourette’s syndrome. I’m beginning to like it. It’s so . . . liberating. You should see the looks on people’s faces. It’s priceless, really.”

  “You are so funny!” she said with a smile and a short, little shake of the head.

  “Thank you.” I blushed.

  “Maybe we should work on your catastrophic tendencies today?” she asked.

  I waved my hand. “
What’s the point?” I asked. “I watched 60 Minutes on Sunday, and soon as I get it mastered, terrorists will park a dirty bomb outside my house.”

  “Funny, funny!” she giggled as she waved her finger at me.

  “I’m hungry,” I blurted out. “You know, you should really think about setting up some sort of snack bar in here. You could put a soda fountain right on that file cabinet and get a hot dog roaster for your desk. Like after our ‘time together’ is up, you could put on a visor, apron, and see-through gloves and have a business on the side.”

  “That’s hysterical!” she agreed, slapping her knee.

  “You could get a homemade cotton-candy machine, I’d love to have that to nibble on while we talk. And fresh roasted peanuts are always a really nice touch,” I added. “Chips and dip? That’s a party maker right there. And then you could bill it all to Blue Cross/Blue Shield!”

  We both got a good laugh out of that.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” I went on, “How about ice cream? You have enough room under your desk for an ice chest, nothing fancy, maybe some waffle cones you could whip up right over here, and of course, Ben and Jerry’s and—”

  “Time’s up,” she said quickly with a nice, sweet smile.

  “Oh,” I said as I smiled back, getting my checkbook out of my purse. “Boy, that went by fast, didn’t it?”

  She nodded slowly and stood.

  “You don’t really want to know what I think, do you?” she said, and then opened her office door.

  Stretching the Truth

  When the uninhibited lady on the couch winked at me, I knew I was in trouble.

  There was no way out.

  I smiled back hesitantly and then looked around the room nervously. No one had noticed, but there was no way I was engaging in a reciprocal wink.

  I was not there to make friends with winking naked people.

  I was simply there to paint them.

  When I initially signed up for the painting class, I thought it would be a great way to relax and have some fun, perhaps open the door for my inner Monet to pop out and introduce himself. Those hopes, however, were quickly dashed in the newborn moments of becoming a painting student, when, after greeting the class, the instructor simply told us to get out our paints and get to work on the still life he had created on a pedestal.