Undeterred, and clueless to my striking resemblance to The Scream, I took off to run errands.
At the bank, my favorite teller skipped the style small talk we usually make and instead asked how my family was faring with the “flu thing.” I replied that we hadn’t had it. And she said, “Oh, well, get ready.”
At the feed and grain co-op, the cashier wanted to know if the “chest thing” was going through our house. I swear I heard her mumble, “Must be somethin’,” when I said no.
At the post office, the clerk saw me coming and reached for a fresh pair of plastic gloves. Since this is pretty much the norm, I didn’t take it personally. But when he asked if I had the “bad cold” he and his co-workers were coping with, and I replied in the negative, he actually slipped on a surgical mask.
It went on like this at the video store, gas station, and dry cleaner’s, where the owner pointed first to her face, then to mine, and whispered, “Oooooh. You have skin like Sleeping Beauty!” Initially I took it as a compliment. But then I wondered, Wasn’t that poor kid in a coma?
I was beginning to feel like an unwitting participant in some covert study of communicable diseases when it hit me: My makeup-free face was freaking people out.
What was I thinking, listening to some self-proclaimed magazine beauty pro? I was in the magazine business. I should know better. They come up with an idea (think cuffed wool short-shorts, halter tops, and spiked heels “Perfect for your big sales presentation!” or modified mullets and green mascara—“He’ll love your new look!”) then perpetrate it on the American public. Trust me when I tell you they don’t wear the stuff themselves.
And they don’t run around naked faced.
I can’t believe I was out and about with my complexion as “rosy” as a clove of garlic. I raced home to my mad scientist assortment of drugstore and department store cosmetics, locked myself in the bathroom, and didn’t emerge until I’d L’Oréal-ed and Lancôme-d, Maybelline-d, Trish McEvoy-ed, Revlon-ed, and MAC-ed my way back.
And, boy, was Hemingway happy. “Whew! For a minute there you looked like Snow White,” he said. First Sleeping Beauty and now Snow White. When will I learn not to take beauty advice from Dopey?
Of course when magazines aren’t pushing their 45 IS THE NEW 35! and moisturizer-and-mascara mantras, they’re devoting feature after feature to saving face the newfangled way: with needles. And I confess, they’ve got me seriously considering my nonsurgical options.
With a pretty significant birthday staring me in the face, and the lines on my forehead forming a six-lane freeway with little off-ramps headed toward my hairline, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the only way to rectify my sad state of facial affairs and survive the big day is with—dare I say it?—a bit of Botox.
Toward that end I’ve found a doctor (a local one; just because I’ve learned to drive to D.C. doesn’t mean I want to), booked a free consultation, and pillaged our mutual funds in preparation for bankrolling my body work. I think that’s fair. After all, that money was earmarked for the kids’ college. So even if Casey and Cuyler can’t go, at least I’ll look young enough to.
All kidding aside, I hate birthdays. Particularly “landmark” birthdays family and friends fuss over. You know; the kind of milestone event that elicits covert phone calls and furtive whispers as people try to decide what to buy me to cushion the blow.
Of course no one says that, but it’s what they’re thinking. Only on big birthdays do people proffer trips and shiny trinkets, spa days and designer handbags. On regular birthdays it’s a coup just to get a card.
And frankly this year I’d even be happy to forgo the Shoebox Greetings.
There’s really nothing anyone can give me that I haven’t already got. Flabby abs and stretch marks? Check. Under-eye bags the size of breasts? Mine are at least a B-cup’s worth of badness. Saggy lids, adult acne, spider veins, and the luster-free skin that’s the hallmark of the hot-flash set? Trust me; I’m a dermatologist’s dream.
Clearly I’ve got it all, so there’s no need to buy me anything.
There is, however, one gift everyone can give me that requires no shopping, no wrapping, no rushing to make sure I receive it on the exact day the earth was graced with my wiseacre attitude, and no wondering if I’ll like it. Believe me when I tell you I’ll love it. Are you listening?
A lie.
Not a big, soul-blackening lie. A small lie. An itty, bitty, teensy-weensy white lie. The kind of insignificant, inconsequential prevarication I’m pretty sure even God would give a pass to.
You can tell it whenever you want to whomever will listen. And all you have to say is, “Wow, I can’t believe my ______ [insert how you know me here: friend, wife, mom, daughter, sister, favorite fake farm girl, Jazzercise buddy] Susan just turned thirty-five.” (Rest assured; this is an improvement.) “She doesn’t look a day over thirty.”
Easy to recall and recite, it’s a one-size-fits-all fib. And it’s available for you to give to me with virtually no worries on your part. Unless you’re afraid God really will be galled. Then you might want to give me money.
If my family and friends won’t advance my falsehoods, I’ll have to hire the doctor I’m due to see. Sure, it’ll be tough on my sweet sons, but there’s a discount on Botox, Restylane, and collagen if I pay cash.
Chapter Thirty-five
THE CATTLE GOT NOTHIN’ ON MY KIDS
Warning: As beautiful and picture-postcard-perfect as the country is, it is as bad as it can smell.
Consider for a moment the scent of steaming horse poop on a hot and humid June day. Now imagine it filling your nose while you’re stuck, with your drop-top down, behind Seattle Slew and his fancy-pants mistress as they trot their way oh, so slowly down Main Street in Middleburg.
The worst, right? Wrong.
On the Barnyard Aroma Richter Scale, the odor of bloating roadkill197 beats fermenting horse feces. And the gag-inducing scent of the girls’ “gifts,” strewn over every inch of the great bovine bathroom I call home, takes the top spot.
That is, until my kids enter the competition.
Tough as this is for me to admit, my sons get the gold in the Stink Olympics. Their ability to wield a body odor is enough to make your eyes bleed. And I’m not talking strictly about the stomach-turning scent of Eau de Shower-less eighth-grader after a day of both phys ed and football practice. I’m talking about their passion for bad-breath burps and a love of farting on each other that I will never fathom.
If you’ve got little boys, you’re hoping like hell I’m making this up. If you’ve got big boys, you’re wondering if I’ve been stalking your loved ones and for how long. Trust me, I’m not making it up, and I don’t need to look any farther than my own backyard198 to state some universal truths about sons and stink.
For starters, their love of “letting one rip” is unrivaled. I swear Casey saves up every nasty gas bubble in his body for the moment he steps into the Durango, and then lets loose with such strength and stench I’ve more than once been forced to pull over and flee the vehicle. And if that’s not bad enough, Cuyler then feels compelled to make his own award-winning contribution, and I wind up suffering their fraternal flatulence in stereo.
They also like to play the “Guess what I had for lunch?” game in the car. This spectacular scent offensive (part of the Bombard ’Em with Body Gas competition, and an event in which Casey’s never scored less than a perfect ten) is almost as disgusting as the aforementioned fart festival.
We’ll be driving along like a regular family, with Casey punching buttons on the radio and Cuyler kicking the seat and screaming, “Stop! I like that song! Stop! I said stop!” when suddenly Case will shout, “Guess what I had for lunch?” Before I can shove my right hand over his mouth (because, believe me, I know what’s coming), and while holding fast to the steering wheel with my left and trying desperately not to drive off the road, he lets out a belch that could shatter the windshield, and exhales the last (God willing) scent
of his lunch. “Mmmmm. Hot dogs!” he announces. Like I needed to be told.
Clearly their behavior in the body odor department is abhorrent. But it’s got nothing on their frightening fascination with body parts.
It seems every time I turn around, breasts, butts, “baginas” (as Cuyler so sweetly puts it; when he outgrows his little-boy lisp I’m going to cry), and of course penises are the preferred topics of conversation.
“Do girls have penises?” my little man asks while playing with his own over breakfast one morning.
“No,” I tell him for the hundredth time. “Now take your hand out of your pants and finish your pancake.” Sounds disgusting, I know, but if I made the kid stop and wash between every bite and fondle, he wouldn’t have finished a meal in his entire life. Keeping his hand down his sweats, he segues to his next-favorite subjects—babies and “baginas.”
“You don’t spit a baby out of your mouth, do you, Mom?” he says, stuffing a mouthful of pancake into his. “’Cause it would get covered in germs, right?” (Honey, you don’t know the half of it, I think to myself.)
“Right,” I answer, just as he exclaims, “Babies come out of baginas!”
The big swig of half-caff swirling in my mouth comes streaming out of my nose. “Baginas, huh?” I say, scrambling for a napkin and wondering how he knows this, who told him, and how much jail time I’ll get for killing that person. “Interesting,” I respond, trying to regain my composure.
“Or butts,” he says sweetly, wiggling his own off his chair. “Babies come out of butts.” Now, there’s a nice clean place for them, I think to myself with a sigh of relief. Anything but “baginas.”
A short while later I’m at my desk, giving half my attention to drafting a direct-mail piece I’m certain will go directly into the garbage pails of all those who receive it, and the other half to watching Hefner have his way with a harem of hens, when Cuyler pops up at my elbow. “Hey, Mom,” he asks, “what are these?” I turn and there’s my baby, bare-chested and pulling at his little-boy breasts.
“Those little circles are part of your chest and the dots in the middle are nipples,” I reply.
“Nipples?” he cries indignantly. “Nipples like on a baby bottle? I’m not a baby!”
“No, no, not like that,” I respond, but it’s too late. He’s trying to rip his right nipple off his body and bellowing with every tug.
Suddenly he stops and screams, “Why do boys need nipples, anyway?”
“Hell if I know, honey,” I say, and he’s stunned. He could care less about nipples now that he’s got the goods on Mom.
“You said ‘hell,’” he says, eyes wide.
“I sure did,” I admit.
“Can I say it, too?” he asks.
I pause. “Just till Dad comes home, OK?”
“OK!” he says, running from the room to find his big brother, and yelling, “Casey! Casey! Where the hell are you?”
Maybe you think I’m nuts, but the way I see it, there’s nothing like a little well-placed profanity to prevent a trip to the emergency room. (Or with my sons, the psych ward.)
“Mom, why are Quentin’s mom’s breasts so much bigger than yours?” Cuyler asks innocently during dinner one night.
“Yeah, hon, why are they?” cracks Hemingway from the head of the table.
Before I can respond, Casey adds his two cents with a snicker: “Lots of my friends’ moms have bigger breasts than Mom. Heck, lots of my girlfriends do, too, and they’re only thirteen!”
“But why are they bigger than Mom’s?” my little guy persists.
“Because,” I begin to respond, shooting Hemingway what I hope is a look that says “Speak, and you’re on the sofa” but there’s no stopping Mr. Smart Mouth.
“Because Mom was supposed to be a boy!” he says suddenly. “But at the last minute God changed his mind and made her a girl.”
Now Casey is completely cracking up and, I confess, so am I, but Cuyler is buying it by the bushel. “So he only had time to give her tiny ones?” he asks matter-of-factly.
“That’s right.” Hemingway nods sagely.
“And no penis, either, huh, Dad?”
“Nope, son, no penis, either,” Hemingway agrees, shaking his head in mock sadness.
“Poor Mom,” Cuyler says, pondering my sad state of flat-chested affairs. “Well, at least you almost got to be a boy, Mom,” he adds, patting my arm consolingly. “From the looks of Quentin’s mom’s chest, I bet she never even had a chance.”
I guess it’s pretty obvious that in our house, it’s all about being a boy. I’d describe it as penis-centric, but penis central is more like it. That fact is never clearer than during football season. Every Sunday afternoon you can find my sweeties stretched out on the couch, watching the game. They’ve got their six feet atop the ottoman, their left hands cradling a Coke and their right hands tucked down their pants. Now, there’s a family photo for you.
I’ve tried the “Hey, guys, that’s gross” routine and gotten nowhere. I’ve tried ignoring them, but that hasn’t worked, either. So finally I decided, if you can’t beat ’em, see what happens when you join ’em. I squeezed onto the couch, put my feet up, stuck my hand in my pants, and cleared the place faster than Casey after his first encounter with Thai food. (Who knew beef satay could smell so good going in and so bad coming out?) In less than ten seconds I had the room, the remote, and the fabulous Brett Favre all to myself.
Sometimes my sons’ barnyard behavior really works in my favor. But most times it just gets my gag reflex going.
One night not too long ago I was standing in the kitchen, whipping up dinner (which, to the chickens’ great relief, was not a poultry recipe), when suddenly Cuyler came speeding toward me with a golf ball-size boogie stuck to the tip of his index finger.
“Mom, check this out!” he shouted, like he picked the winning lottery numbers and not his nose.
“Yup, it’s a biggie,” I responded, backing away from the greenish-brown specimen he seemed to be trying to stick in my eye.
“It’s way bigger than the others,” he continued excitedly.
“The others?” I asked, my stomach turning at the thought of a full-blown boogie collection somewhere in the kid’s room.
“Yeah, they’re too small. I’m only gonna keep this one. Come see!” And then he was off and running to his bedroom, cradling his precious booger like a baby.
Of course I was hot on his heels, and not two steps through the doorway I glimpsed a display of fresh snot streaks on the wall next to the self-portrait he did in his other favorite medium, marker.199 “At first I thought this was the biggest,” he said, using his flashlight to highlight the first of four rows of yellowish goop, each topped off by a dollop of mucus so massive I felt my stomach flip. “But then this one was bigger,” he continued, spotlighting boogie number two. “And these two were even bigger than the others,” he concluded, shining his flashlight on boogies three and four before flipping it off dramatically and turning to me. “But now I’ve got the biggest booger ever born, right, Mom?”
“Right, hon,” I responded, wondering how one gets mucus off Benjamin Moore.
Unfortunately, while I was lost in thought, he leapt onto his bed and began scanning the room for the perfect spot for his perfect pick. “Wait!” I cried, desperate to prevent the desecration of another wall. “Why not keep it in a container? I mean, if you put it on the wall it could dry up and fall off”—(please God)—“but if you keep it in some Tupperware you can . . .”
“Take it to school for show-and-tell!” he cheered, springing off the bed and barreling back to the kitchen. Not exactly what I had in mind, but hey, if it saves my house and what’s left of my sanity, I’ll take it.
Not five minutes later, the World’s Biggest Booger was safely ensconced in a plastic container and tucked inside his backpack.200 Feeling slightly more in control of the situation, I decided to broach the topic of basic hygiene with my younger son. (Further proof that any sanity I onc
e possessed passed along with the placenta.) “Sweetheart,” I began, “you know it’s really not hygienic to pick your nose and wipe it on the wall.”
He furrowed his brow. “Hygienic? What’s hygienic?”
“Clean,” I continued. “Hygienic means ‘clean.’ It means using a tissue to wipe your nose, and washing your hands after you use the bathroom.”
“Sounds like heinie. HYGIENIC HEINIE!” he says, flopping to the floor in hysterics.
“What’s up with him?” asks Casey, who’s suddenly clomped in from football practice, covered in mud (but not manure, thank God) from his cleats to his Giants cap, and looking pretty unhygienic himself.
“I’ve got a hygienic heinie!” Cuyler replies, roaring.
“Trust me, bath-free boy,” I interject, “you’ve nothing of the kind.”
Now my big guy is completely confused. “What’s a hygienic heinie?” he wants to know.
“Hygienic means ‘clean,’” I begin to respond, “but . . .”
“There’s no way his heinie is clean!” Casey howls, and that’s it. He’s thrown down the gauntlet, and Cuyler’s up and chasing him from room to room.
“Is so clean!”
“Is not!”
“Is so!”
Last I saw, they were running around the chicken coop, trying to pull each others’ pants down. I’d have stopped them, but I was too busy trying to bleach boogies off the wall.
Having been raised in a house with three brothers, I know there are degrees of disgusting, and my sons’ performance pales in comparison with that of their uncles.
Growing up, I used to watch in horror as the three maniacs I’m related to by blood wrestled each other to the living room rug on a regular basis. This in and of itself was fine. But the fact that the “match” was over only when the weaker sibling was butt-bombed in the face by the stronger sibling—who’d deftly positioned his derriere directly over the nose of the brother beneath—made it a perfect ten in the disgusting department. On more than one occasion I watched my poor mom use a wooden spoon to beat the offending victor off his perch atop the proboscis of the screaming victim, in a futile attempt to get my gasbag brothers to break it up.
Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl Page 20