We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier

by Celia Rivenbark

  Later on, gents, the women will begin to whine for an “eternity band,” which is the ring in the commercial that shows the husband renting a whole movie theater to show home movies to his wife chronicling their fabulous life together. He is hated by normal husbands everywhere.

  If you do give an eternity band, for heaven’s sake, get the one with the diamonds all the way around, not just on top. What does that mean? “I’ll be with you for, well, half an eternity, sugar booger”?

  Honesty, along with that diamond upgrade, will keep a marriage together.

  A recent poll found that 40 percent of Americans keep secrets from their spouses and, most of the time, it’s about how much money they spend.

  What is wrong with you people? Don’t you realize that the foundation of a successful, vibrant marriage is complete honesty? That anything less is demeaning and destructive to your relationship? I know, I know. Sometimes I crack myself up.

  Here’s some advice. (Heather, put down that kielbasa and listen up!) I haven’t told my husband a truthful price on any personal or household item in more than a decade. Don’t get me wrong. He’s not the kind to carp about money, it’s just that it’s no fun to say, “Look at my new coat, love dump. I paid full price for it and it wasn’t really worth it and I’m not even sure I like it all that much.”

  My standard answer to the straightforward “man” question of “How much did it cost?” is always the same: a quickly-muttered-while-leaving-the-room “Oh, not that much.” To prevent a follow-up question—the dreaded “How much is ‘not that much’?”—it’s a good idea to say something to immediately change the subject such as, “Lord! Is that beetle larvae in your ear?” Works every time.

  According to the survey, men and women lie to each other in equal numbers about spending habits. Your coat is his fish finder. Women also tend to hide purchases, usually clothing, then bring it out weeks later, and say, “This? I’ve had this old thing for ages, you big silly! Now are you going to get that larvae checked out or not?”

  A friend recently confided that her husband lied to her about the price of a T-shirt he bought at a rock concert because he was afraid that she would be mad at him. He said the band had tossed the shirts to the audience during the encore but she found a credit-card receipt for the shirt in his jeans pocket the next day.

  “Can you believe he’d do that?” she huffed. “I mean, if he wants to spend twenty bucks on a Pantera T-shirt while I’m over here clipping coupons for thirty-five cents off Prego, what business is that of mine? I’m just the wife, after all.”

  Okay, so she’s pretty scary.

  More interesting findings of this survey of one thousand men and women: Only 2 percent of them said they lied to a spouse about having an affair and 16 percent admitted they wished they could wake up and not be married anymore.

  Not me. But occasionally I do wish I could wake up and not be lactose intolerant anymore. Hey, you have your dreams, I’ll have mine.

  6

  WHERE WERE YOU

  When Stringbean Passed?

  A Real Southerner Would Know the Answer to That Question

  Southerners are preoccupied with death. As far back as I can remember, news of the recently dead was the number-one topic at any get-together. I have friends who can spend a solid forty-five minutes eulogizing a fifth cousin twice removed (don’t ask me removed from what) without coming up for air.

  When I go back home and bump into old friends and family, the conversation almost always starts with a recitation of the near or recently dead and disintegrates into sputtering frustration when it’s obvious I have no idea who they’re talking about.

  “Of course you remember Boddie Sue. She was the one who wrote a fan letter to Stringbean and he wrote back that one time but then he got shot in the chest and died when those robbers broke into his house.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t you remember Stringbean on Hee Haw? Lord, missy, where did you spend the seventies anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Seventh grade?”

  Maybe because we’re all adults now, we’re expected to know all the players.

  “You know Pearlie and don’t say you don’t! Remember how he used to live down from Cousin Maynard’s house and everybody always said he wouldn’t amount to much because he had a crazy eye?”

  I don’t even remember Cousin Maynard, let alone the pitiful soul with the wandering eye that apparently could keep an eye on the front door while the other eye amused itself with the TV Guide crossword puzzle.

  It’s a small-town thing, perhaps, but when you reach your forties, you no longer greet one another at the Wal-Mart with “How are you?” Nope. You always start with a hushed and ominous, “Well, I guess you heard about Maudie….”

  The news that follows generally falls into two categories. Either Maudie has abandoned her husband and children and run off with the repo man at the Rent-a-Center or she’s gone to that great double-wide in the sky, where the streets are paved with asphalt and all the men pay their child support on time and you don’t even have to “garish” their wages, as my friend Petey-Lou calls it.

  Petey-Lou swears she let the good one get away.

  “Sure, all he done all day was smoke pot and watch Gunsmoke,” she said wistfully, “but I think it’s just ’cause he just loved Festus.”

  Sometimes, the trip back home is to “funeralize,” something Southerners love to do because funeral food is so good. I’ve always thought that people who died in July are the most thoughtful because you just know there will be fresh butterbeans and tomatoes still warm from the garden when you pay your respects.

  Ghoulish, you say? Not at all. That’s how Pearlie would’ve wanted it. At least I think it is.

  If you’re not going home to funeralize, you’re probably visiting the nursing home.

  The last time I visited my husband’s aunt at the Shady Havens Garden of Despair, I was a little late getting to her room because there was a sweet ol’ thing pushing a walker standing at the entrance and screaming to anybody who came inside: “Can’t anybody in this place tell me how I can get saved?”

  My aunt-in-law’s roommate was a pistol. Auntie shooed her away as she came over and foraged for one of the Payday bars she knew Auntie stashed in her bedside table.

  “I can’t keep a decent candy bar in this place,” she hissed.

  I was a little embarrassed by Auntie’s outspokenness but I didn’t need to be.

  “She’s deaf as a post,” said Auntie. “Can’t hear a thing.”

  But that didn’t stop her from trying.

  While I told Auntie about my only child’s first trip to the bowling alley at age five, the roommate perked up.

  “Is that Carmine Bowling, the one who used to run the Wash-a-teria?”

  “No, no.” I shook my head. “I said I took my daughter to the bowling alley.”

  Roomie smiled widely.

  “Yes, he was an alley cat, that Carmine. I think he was from up North, that’s kind of an I-talian name. He may have been from Raleigh.”

  Auntie looked as if she wanted to scream but simply reached into her nightstand drawer, extracted a Payday, and started chewing, her dentures snapping like castanets.

  Roomie decided this was a good time to hold court on all things Yankee.

  “They tip for everything,” she said. “You probably know that since you know Carmine so well.”

  Auntie rolled her eyes and made elaborate circles in the air beside her temple.

  I had to agree with some of what Roomie was saying. Ever since so many Yankees have moved down South, everybody has his hand out, even the movie usher whose sole duty is to mumble “third theater on the right.”

  Like every former waitress, I tell Roomie, I am a generous tipper, but the proliferation of tip jars is starting to piss me off.

  Frankly, after I’ve paid over three bucks for a small coffee, I’m thinking the tip is probably included. It’s not like counter boy is Juan
Valdez out there tying up the donkey and hauling the beans in from the back room.

  And, if I do tip the jar, I consider it kind of a waste if no one sees me do it. It’s the age-old question: “If a tip falls in a jar and nobody saw it, did it really happen?”

  The copy shop now has a tip jar on the counter to reward employees who do what they were hired to do. You know. Make copies.

  Although I could tell Auntie just wished I’d stop encouraging her, I told Roomie that I’d seen a jar recently that contained a long-winded plea that ended with “the rent is due and things are getting pretty tight.”

  “I love fair night, too,” Roomie said.

  Right. Fair night.

  “You know what the best part is?” Roomie asked. “The sideshows! I once got to see the World’s Tiniest Woman and it was the truth. She was so little she could fit inside a teacup and her legs didn’t even dangle off’n the sides!”

  Auntie perked up a bit at the discussion of sideshows.

  “Biggest ripoff I ever saw,” she said, ripping into another Payday. “I paid extra to see the girl who was born with two bladders. She just stood there grinning at us. I mean, when you think about it, it’s not like you could really tell.”

  We agreed that, next time the fair was in town, we’d visit, the three of us. I knew Auntie would eat too many deep-fried Snickers and Roomie would never be able to hear those Air Supply tunes they blast all over the fairgrounds, but it would be fun if they had the diving mules again.

  “You’re right!” screeched Roomie. “Those Yankees are driving fools! Make it dangerous for all of us, you know.”

  ’Deed I do.

  Part 2:

  Kids

  Just Because They Don’t Have Gills Doesn’t Mean They’re Human

  1

  CHUCK E.

  Cheese’s

  Where a Kid Can Be a Kid While Mommie Gets

  Hammered on Watered-Down Bud Light

  Having a child at age forty meant that I managed to get through my entire twenties and thirties without setting foot in Chuck E. Cheese’s, a kid wonderland where the star is an oversized, bucktoothed rat.

  But when Sophie had a birthday coming up, she begged for her party to be at the giant rat’s crib (“Where a Kid Can Be a Real Pain”). Kids love Chuck E. They practically hold up tiny Bic lighters to coax him out of the kitchen and onto the stage, where he gyrates his fat furry butt to happy songs that are best listened to through a beer haze.

  It cracks me up that this wholesome family joint serves beer by the pitcher but then I think the idea is that you’ll get so ’faced you end up tacking on a couple of extra hours to sober up. Meanwhile, your kid is pumping tokens into the whack-a-mole with the flushed desperation of a SAS-shoe-wearing senior at the nickel slots in Atlantic City.

  Of course, the silver lining here is that, for every token, you earn “tickets” that can be redeemed for a prize before you leave. I don’t want to imply that this is a rip-off, but the last time we went, I calculated that we spent $44.89 for a hot pink curly drinking straw. Of course, that’s because we only had 5,580 tickets. To actually get enough tickets to claim the foot-tall stuffed Chuck E. at the “prize redemption” counter, you’d have to physically move into the building and play stomp-the-spider and skee-ball until you were old enough to develop cataracts, erectile dysfunction, and an inexplicable fondness for aspic.

  At Sophie’s birthday party, the kids chanted “Chuck E.! Chuck E.! Chuck E.!” until his royal rodentness finally emerged waving both arms to the kids, Nixon style. Several of the little girls visibly swooned and I feared they would have to be revived with red pepper flakes, which are on every table to add flavor to the “pizza.”

  If only the parents shared the excitement. From the moment my daughter’s party invitations went out, parent-friends had the same underwhelmed tone as they called to flatly recite “We wouldn’t miss it.” Down to the last one, they rallied with genuine cheer, saying “Well, at least there’s beer!”

  Oh, but not nearly enough.

  Don’t get me wrong. This place is a kid’s dream: games, ball crawls, tubes to get stuck in (I’m convinced there are still a few toddlers stuck in there from the late ’80s somewhere just waiting to be freed and find out whatever happened to Wham!).

  There are sing-along videos, a stage show with giant dancing animals, “Hi-waiian” punch, the works. One of my daughter’s friends surveyed the surroundings and somberly announced, “It just don’t get no better’n this.”

  Oh, sure it do, if you’re over eight, in which case you pretty much think if you hear Chuck’s theme song one more time you’ll start chewing your own body parts just so you can quietly disappear.

  When we arrived for the big party, I saw the beautifully appointed table for twenty in the distance and smugly congratulated myself on letting the rat do the heavy lifting this year. It was magnificent: neon sparkly derby hats holding color-coordinated helium balloons, confetti, party whistles. Stunning!

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t our table.

  No, no. Our daughter’s table was the one next to it with a paper plate and cup at each place setting and no balloons. It looked as if Tiny Tim had booked a party on the same day as Bill Gates’s kid.

  “Oh! The mom brought all those things,” explained the relentlessly perky party attendant when I asked why it looked as if we would be serving piping hot bowls of gruel at our table.

  “Listen, toots,” I growled at her. “March your skinny ass back there, round up eight dozen balloons, and start blowing. Get rat-face to help you.” She scampered away with fear in her eyes.

  Our table started taking shape but then I noticed the competition had three videographers setting up tripods and a cake with the birthday boy’s likeness fashioned out of tinted sugars.

  “Who does he think he is? A Kennedy?” I hissed to my husband, who just hung his head and stuffed our $7.99 disposable camera back in his pants pocket.

  I was starting to feel major mom guilt. After all, we hadn’t taken our kid to Disney World that summer only because I was put off by a news report that some of the costumed characters were suing the company laundry, which was, you guessed it, a Mickey Mouse operation. The employees said their poorly washed costumes had even given them body lice and scabies.

  As I explained to my daughter, once you’ve heard that Snow White’s crabby, the fantasy loses its luster. (“Somedaaaay my ointment will come.”)

  And now, no videographer, a pitiful-looking table, and a cake that would only feed twenty kids if it was sliced thin enough to see through.

  Once again, I had flunked the Mommy Wars, a sort of self-imposed and unspoken awfulness that we suffer, a sick something that shows up at the worst times. Like in church a few weeks ago, when a beaming little family stepped forward to have their kid baptized and the minister shared that the tot was wearing “a baptismal gown that was worn by her great-great grandmother.” “What?” I huffed to my seatmate. “They couldn’t afford a new one?”

  I first noticed the Mommy Wars a couple of Halloweens ago. Halloween is a silly holiday that I used to ignore except for a last-grab bag of Tootsie Pops on the way home from work at 8:00 P.M.

  All that changes with kids. Halloween is much bigger, for instance, than my sturdy favorite: Thanksgiving Day. Halloween is sexy with witches, black cats, bloody ghouls. Thanksgiving was, like my daughter’s table at Chuck E. Cheese’s, an obvious also-ran, a dollar-store “Barbee,” the one that’s supposed to be just like a real Barbie but whose legs always snap off before you can get her to the car.

  (My idea? Combine the Halloween and Thanksgiving into a mid-November “Hallothanks Day” where everybody dresses up as pilgrims and goes door to door trick-or-treating for maize.)

  The Mommy Wars kick into high gear at Halloween. My daughter was invited to seven Halloween parties last year. By the time we got to the last one, her Little Mermaid costume looked like it had taken a detour through the Chicken of the Sea factory.

&nb
sp; Halloween, as I see it, is just another chance for the Stepford Moms to do the superior dance over those of us who are craft-impaired.

  While they’re dutifully cutting plastic milk cartons they’ve saved for a year into ghostly luminaria or making a chocolate graveyard cake with Milano cookie headstones, I’m wondering why the hell anybody would need to buy cobwebs.

  Back in the day, Halloween meant that my sister and I would wear a sheet or a foil crown and traipse to the school carnival for an hour or two to admire the spaghetti “intestines” and grape “brains” at the eighth-graders’ Spook House.

  Today, the Supermoms who host a haunted-house party are so competitive that I wouldn’t be surprised if the human head on a platter was, well, a human head on a platter.

  The mom competition continues through Christmas, of course. My mom-friends and I have an unspoken, and completely unhealthy, contest for the Perfect Family Christmas Card Photo.

  I’m still seething over last year’s card from my friend who dressed her sons as wise men, she and her hubby as Mary and Joseph, and her newborn son, lying in a makeshift manger, as the Christ Child. The Christ Child! It’s not like he can ever be an elf after that.

  If I were catty, I’d point out to her that it is doubtful that the Christ Child actually had enough money to wear Hanna Andersson swaddling clothes. I’d also be unable to resist speculating that this woman is so competitive she only conceived a fourth child so she could complete her long-dreamed-of Bethlehem diorama.

  Although she may have gone too far with her baby Kyle/ Jesus, I have to admit that the simple sitting-with-the-drunken-and-slightly-lecherous-mall-Santa card photo isn’t enough anymore.

  I’m really tired of the baby Santa suits, too. These are the same kids who were pumpkins at Halloween. I’ll bet they grow up resentful and anorexic with an irrational fear of oversized produce.

  Last year, the card competition seized me and I dressed my daughter as a holly-topped candy cane and stuck her on the beach. In the cold. At high tide.