by Jill Kargman
Your dog
The final straw for you? I hope we can still be friends. Or maybe not. If you French-kiss your pooch, we probably can’t be. And, no, it’s not like you saying you hate my kids. My kids aren’t licking your vagina when you walk into a room and barking incessantly. Okay, maybe they bark incessantly, but they won’t forever! I am a magnet for dog tongues, and while I of course believe in ethical treatment of animals and believe that beast who shot poor Cecil the lion should rot in a Namibian jail, that doesn’t mean I want your dog jumping on me and covering my all-black outfit with golden retriever fur. Once I was at an ATM, taking out money to pay the painter/extortionist, and the next thing I know, this dog is jumping up on me on hind legs and licking me. The owner was blithely taking out her fat wad of cash, unawares. When I nicely said something like “Um, ma’am, I’m so sorry, but your dog is, like, on me,” she acted like I should be so lucky and took her dog, saying, “Come on, honey, let’s get you away from that mean, mean lady.” Bitch. And BITCH!
Here’s a weird fun fact about me: I hate Hollywood futuristics and I hate Hollywood make-believes. I hate flying things that are not airplanes. I hate wizards. I hate capes. I hate powers. I hate swords that glow. I haaaaaate dragons.
But the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which features all of the above and then some? I am obsesssssed. I could watch the movies five hundred times and still want to watch them in full when I stumble upon one of them on TNT. Each time is like the first time. I drool with excitement.
The real first time was actually the premiere of the first movie. Harry is a total fan—he’d been counting the days to opening night like those blond-dreadlocked lunatics who camp outside the Apple store. I’m pretty sure he jerks off to the books, and he was so euphoric to score those tickets I just had to go.
When the lights went down in the Ziegfeld, the look on his face was happier than on our wedding day. Fuck, I should’ve brought a flask. This was going to be the seventh circle of Beelzebub’s bubbling lava pits of infernal hell.
And then I heard the spine-tingling tones of genius Cate Blanchett’s powerful, soothing voice. She gave us the backstory of man’s hubris and greed, and explained how the ages had passed as the ring slept in the murky waters of layers of time. I was, oddly, shockingly, lured. Big-time. The coming scenes reeled me in further, though the happy Shire shit was second for me to the spooky elements connoting impending doom. The darkness of that flaming vagina thing and Mordor’s blackened Gothic gates turned me on almost as much as Viggo’s blue eyes.
(Note: We interrupt this broadcast to clarify that this rhapsodic panty wringer is for Lord of the Rings EXCLUSIVELY and not, I repeat not, about the prequel trilogy of The Hobbit. That is categorically different and not in this league and the cast is entirely made up of eye broccoli. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming of jazzing over LOTR.)
So, Veegs. I mean.
In a word: smoldering. Liv Tyler, already genetic lottery winner, hit extra jackpot getting to play tonsil hockey with Aragorn. My boner was longer than Liv’s fairy fingers, or, as JAPs say, “I die.” He had it going on with his armor and with his sword (no, not that one) and honor and bravery and hairstyle. Oh, and, PS, he could’ve totally boned that pretty blond princess ’cause his pointy-eared gal pal was on her way to those ghost ships to Neverland, but he totes didn’t. Unicorn! Instead he touched that Art Nouveau necklace charm gifted by his love, who could make halfling-saving potions out of weeds. For the record, I would’ve wished they had Cathy Waterman design something a tad more chic, like Charlize’s cray crowns and rings and shit in Snow White and the Huntsman, but I say bygones, yo.
And even though the vile fucked-up melted ogre-like Orcs still haunt my dreams, I have heart palps when I remember or see those ladders leaning against the fortress wall, or the battering ram with a flaming wolf mouth at the head. But thank goodness for those green-ghosty pirate peeps lurking in that mountain crevasse that scared the horsies shitless as they bucked and whinnied their way out of their posts. That ruled. Sorry to be Beavis and Butt-head over here but it did. And in the end, who doesn’t adore a kiss as a bow at the Hollywood ending. I sure as hell do. So if there are any of you who haven’t seen it—and therefore whom I have completely lost with my homage to this genius in celluloid form, do yourself a favor and on the next blizzardy January sick day, when you’re sniffling and miz and holed up, and binge watch all three. It will be penicillin for your soul. At the risk of sounding like a frat boy with a limited vocab, I daresay it is epic.
Selfies on private jets
Guys, make it stop. Like, seriously. So happy for you that you’re firin’ up the bird, but need you post dasshit? Doing so smacks of insecurity. And besides, the people who actually own private jets keep them private; it’s the renters who post. And, by the way, we can tell by the oval windows that you’re on a private plane. You don’t need to zoom out to be sure to capture the wide interior and leather seats. We get it. You’re fabulous. Knock it off! #braggart
Publicly thanking Valentino for that time on his yacht
It’s always nice to instagram a thanks to a hostess for a backyard BBQ or cozy dinner party, but a tabletop shot with caviar and black-tie waitstaff? Public thanks is a tricky one—sometimes it’s genuine gratitude to the host, and other times it’s pretty clear you’re bragging. I’m sure it was fun to be invited to an event that’s harder to get into than Fort Knox, but see above. Cut the shit.
Food you just made
Unless you have published a cookbook, we really don’t care about your caprese salad. Yes, it’s nice to know people are still making things and that is so nice for your kids that you prepare delicious meals rather than heat up ready-made from Citarella (ahem), but it’s not only mildly smug to show us your culinary masterpieces but also boring. Special mention for über-perfect kids’ birthday cakes. If you want to share a botched Elmo, I love you. Duncan Hines with a Ninjago cake topper, go for it. But if you get off on fondant-covered wedding-worthy cakes for a toddler only so you can show what a virtuoso frosting artist you are, it makes us all feel like lazy losers. Which we are, but no need to squeeze lemon juice.
Your pets doing dumb shit
Is that your cat in your husband’s hoodie? Oh, you silly goose! Your dog throwin’ shade with a frown and a caption that reads No More Mister Nice Guy! Isn’t that just the cutest? No, I’m not amused. I know you are, because you’ve owned and raised him since puppyhood and know his every darling move, but you are likely the only one squealing with delight over that punim.
Outfit options in a full-length mirror
Nothing says teen girl before a night out like a body shot in front of a door mirror. This is totally fine to do privately—like in a text to one person—if you need advice. But sharing your pregame outfits online? So odd! We all like to blast music and get ready for a night out, but it’s so awks to take that fun, private moment alone or with a few friends and make it public. Also your phone is blocking part of you. And you look so serious. If you really need to do it, at least own it with a smile.
Happy eight-month birthday to my baby who can’t read
I know, your “heart is exploding” and you didn’t know you “could love like this.” That’s great! And it’s for your family and friends, but when you address your comments to the kid directly, it’s weird. He or she is an infant and will not be able to see or respond to that post. All that said, I will admit that I understand the impulse on this faux pas. I wrote thank you notes as Sadie after she was born. But I did not make them public.
To most people, Nantucket is a caricature of preppiness: whale-patterned pants, perky blondes, and lobster rolls. It’s true that it’s very much Aryan Nation time out there. There are barely any people of color, and we Kopelman/Kargmans are part of the few-Jew club. In point of fact, there is a synagogue on the island. Sure, it’s in the basement of a church. And they sell whalebone mezuzahs and Nantucket red kippot, with embroidered navy whales around the perim
eter. But still.
We first started visiting Nantucket as a family when I was little.
We’d take the two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from Cape Cod, and I was intrigued to watch all the over-the-rail vomiters. I definitely felt out of place, like Wednesday Addams in a place where Lilly Pulitzer herself had vomited on the entire population. But I loved the long walks; the simple food; and, most of all, the unique time-warpy, quirky character of the island. We returned every year right before school started, when my dad could take off work, renting a home each time.
When I was a freshman in college, however, my parents said they’d decided to buy a place—a small historic house built in 1790. Cool fact: Nantucket has a greater concentration of historic homes than any other place in this country. Talk about the epitome of time warp!
My dad is a fanatical preservationist, so when we did some work on the house, he had his godson, Johnny, who is a blacksmith in Pennsylvania, make every nail so that the hardware was in synch with 1790 building materials. Semi-psycho, but supercool.
“We’re going for Thanksgiving,” said my dad. That was a month away.
“Thanksgiving? But I want to go home!” I was constantly homesick for the city and couldn’t stand the thought of not getting my parade fix.
But my protests yielded nothing. We went to the Rock, or what I called Preppy Alcatraz, on the most frigid day ever. I had never been in the off-season, and here I was, on my favorite holiday, in a brand-new house.
But it was heaven. Arctic tundra heaven, but heaven. The thickest fog I have ever seen outside of a Tim Burton movie rolled down our street. It looked like you could touch it. Willie and I used to make fun of the dude from the tour outfit who dressed up in a ye olde toppe hatte and led mainland morons on a tour of island suicides and murders: Pilgrim spirits stuck in limbo on the whale oil capital of the Eastern Seaboard. But with the fog and the emptiness of the streets, that was the moment when I started to understand the appeal of those tours.
The day after our turkeyfest, we were told to gather on Main Street for the tradition of hot spiced wine, apple cider, and next-holiday-anticipatory caroling. We followed the hordes of people in thick wool sweaters, scarves, and earmuffs. I felt a tad like I was off to Gobbler’s Knob in Groundhog Day, and I was Jill Murray, a bitter curmudgeon who thought the holidays were getting a little overdone. But, like Bill, I melted despite the cold. All my grinchiness evaporated as I saw little apple-cheeked children running up and down the evergreen- and lantern-lined, cobblestoned street. The whole town counted down from ten in unison, and then the mayor pressed a button and tiny twinkling Christmas lights illuminated the entire street of trees. It was absosmurfly amazing. I instantly became a Who in Whoville rather than a grimacing Grinch. I sang my heart out and decided we would always go back for Thanksgiving.
As the years passed, I had several ups and downs and retreated, often in October and November, to the island. Once after a bad breakup, I went alone. I was also training to walk the New York marathon (one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, BTdubs), so went out one day to walk to ’Sconset, the tiny dot of a town on the opposite side of the island. I came home and was so freaked by the howling wind that I slept with the TV on. Not that I truly thought a cleaver-toting dug-up Christopher Walken look-alike would hatchet me to death, but loneliness + time warp = nightmares.
Now I go with my own kids, and while they love it for normal-person reasons—surf, sand, and ice cream—I will always love the goth side. I actually think Tim Burton needs to shoot a movie there in the winter. Until then, I’ll walk the winding, tiny stone streets in the rain, filming the cobalt sky for the haunted film sequence in my mind.
At a dinner party last summer, I was seated, avec calligraphed place card, next to some dude I didn’t know. But he saw someone at another table—an old friend he just had to catch up with—and so switched his wife into his place next to me. She was a supermodel. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not just trying to communicate that she was gorgeous. And she was not a model who calls herself a supermodel, she was a bona fide, million-Twitter-followers legit supermodel.
Unfazed, I introduced myself, and I was pleasantly surprised to find she was quite intelligent. Her work from a very young age (she’d been dropped off in New York to make her own way at fifteen!) had exposed her to countless international editors, photographers, designers, artists, and fashion clients, and it showed. She was truly a citizen of the world, and I was impressed.
We started talking kiddies and she told me how she had opted for a water birth with no epidural. I find that cray but, as Ali G would say, respeck. I certainly couldn’t handle that pain and personally wanted my epidural put in as soon as possible—in the fucking parking lot wouldn’t have been too early. I joked with her how my gyno told me to wait four to six weeks before exercise or “intercourse,” which became “six to eight weeks,” when I relayed the news to Harry. The elegant mannequin threw her head back in laughter and I’d have sworn I’d seen the same effortless giggle in a Mario Testino snap. Then she opened up to match my postpartum guilty admission.
“When my child was about two weeks old, I walked into the bathroom and my husband was…” She curled her hand and mimed him jerkin’ the gherkin. Nervously, I looked over at him, drunk, dumb, and happy with his ol’ pal, while I was now picturing him as Donald Trump firing his apprentice. But she continued. “I burst into tears and could not stop crying because he cheated on me!”
I paused. Huh? Everyone knows all men help put Mr. Kleenex’s kids through college forever!
“Are you kidding? He’s not cheating on you. He’s fiddling the flesh flute!” I said, laughing. “It’s not like it was someone else’s hand, it was attached to his arm!”
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s cheating.”
“It’s completely normal!” I protested, defending her horny husband. “It’s so not cheating! It’s just hand-to-gland combat.”
“I was simply devastated,” she said, wincing at the memory of his soapy schwantz through the shower glass. “I told him NEVER, EVER to do that thing again. I made him promise.”
I was so thrown and had never heard of such a thing! Didn’t she hear guys discussing the five-knuckle shuffle at every turn? And then I realized, maybe not. Men probably changed the way they spoke around her, and she hadn’t picked up on the fact that masturbation is most dudes’ favorite pastime. I thought everyone knew that. So commonplace is it that I hadn’t even been surprised to hear that in the U.S. Navy the sailors are taught by the higher-ups how to slice off the top of a cantaloupe, stick it in the microwave to warm and soften it, fuck the fruit, and then blow their load in its orangey pulp. Clearly she had not heard this high seas myth. She was more than a little horrified.
“Listen, every guy on earth high fives with Yul Brynner, that’s par for the course,” I went on. “It’s natural.”
“But he is married to me!”
Ah. Lightbulb. Gotcha. Every other guy on earth must be married to trolls like me. Or fat aging housewives who wear asexual pleat-front jeans and tapestry vests, not haute couture. Rules were different in her rarefied world, it seems.
If I had cared just a little bit more, I might have continued the conversation and educated her to the fact that all guys—even guys who are married to supermodels—whack it to someone else. Maybe another supermodel. And, yes, maybe all other guys whack it to her, but if her hubby can schtupp her, naturally his mind will drift to her catwalking comrades sometimes! I mean, really, variety is the spice of life and should be embraced!
And I might have told her something I learned from a male coworker many years ago. We’d had a department lunch and were walking down the street back from the restaurant. A model walked by with no bra, and her nips were showing through her blouse as her boobs bobbed. All the dudes’ eyeballs popped out as if animated by Looney Tunes, and their tongues rolled out like a Hollywood red carpet. I grimaced—they were acting like animals, almost panting even. A coworker noti
ced my disgust.
“Don’t worry, Jill,” he consoled me with a hand on my shoulder. “For every hot girl you see, there’s a guy who’s tired of fucking her.”
This insight into men’s minds was very revelatory. I marveled at his candor and actually in that moment changed the way I thought about monogamy. If models can’t be the sole joystick maneuverer of their husbands’ dicks, how the hell could I? It actually totally released me from jealousy and stress. And if I ever walked in while my husband had a shower date with Palmela Handerson, I wouldn’t care! With three kids, if I had to bang every second he wanted to, I’d be exhausted. That supermodel may be unusually smart, but she was dumb to bust in while the shower was going.
“Where did you summer?”
It’s the same thing every September. I want to get T-shirts made that say MINE WAS FINE. How WAS YOURS? Enough with the torturous default travel-flaunting small talk; I already saw on your Insta that you flew privately to Capri, then hopped on Valentino’s yacht! So shut up about it. When people smarmily ask me where I summered, I blithely respond, “DURITO!” They look a little confused, assuming it must be the new It island floating in some far-flung time zone, and ask, “Oh, yes…Isn’t there’s a new Aman resort there?” I correct them: “Nope. DURITO is where I live in New York City: Down Under Roosevelt Island Tram Overpass. That’s where I summer.” That shuts them up. They bite their lower lips and give me a look of pity, like I spent Julaugust opening fire hydrants with a wrench and dancing in the stream of water or joining in a rat conga line down Madison, kicking tumbleweeds out of my way with my not-Louboutins. VOM people. And stop using summer as a verb!