Housebroken

by Laurie Notaro

  And there, under the yellow roof of Waffle House, behind the usually dirty windows and the sign out front in the dirtiest window, which says it does not discriminate against pregnancy, my nephew joined the world of Waffle House, where he would see men in tank tops, babies with no parents, and people with fewer teeth than he was born with.

  It was a far cry from Chuck E. Cheese’s or the wood-fired-pizza place he was used to eating at.

  “Waffle House is a place of truth,” I told him. “It is a sacred, holy sanctuary where you can come at three in the morning, eat all you can, and then get in a fistfight with another man in a tank top. You can’t do that at Chili’s. This is the place where you can ask me anything, and I will tell you the truth.”

  “Wow,” Nick said, trying to absorb everything that Waffle House was.

  The waitress took our order, then returned a moment later and said, “I’m sorry. Did you want your hash browns scattered, smothered, and covered, or just scattered and smothered? I got menopause. Can’t remember a thing.”

  “What’s menopause?” he asked the waitress.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Freedom,” she answered blankly. “Although it makes my wig sweaty.”

  “Oh,” Nick replied. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sweetie, I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” she laughed. “I just go back there and wipe my head off and I’m good to go.”

  “Scattered, covered, and smothered,” Nick answered.

  After Nick ate what he declared the best waffle he had ever had, I paid at the counter and turned around just in time to see a “traveler” shuffle toward us as we were leaving.

  “Hey, buddy,” the ragged man asked Nick through an aroma that had taken weeks, if not months, to procure and perfect in equal notes of urine, sweat, booze, and exhaust. “You got any change?”

  “I’m sorry, I do not,” Nick answered.

  “Don’t you get an allowance?” the man muttered.

  “I spent it on Pokémon,” Nick explained. “I don’t get very much.”

  I quickly guided my nephew out to the car and fastened his seatbelt.

  “Can I still ask you a question?” he asked.

  “Of course. We’re still in the parking lot,” I replied.

  “Was that a bum?” he queried.

  “We call them hoboes,” I explained. “And that is what happens when you drink too much beer in college after you join a fraternity. You grow up and become a hobo and ask little boys for money.”

  “Oh,” he concluded, “I don’t want to be a hobo. He smelled weird.”

  “That’s what you smell like when you live under the freeway,” I told him.

  “I bet he has monkey butt,” Nick added.

  “I bet you’re right,” I confirmed. “You’re so smart! I can’t wait to give you your birthday present!”

  “I know!” he exclaimed gleefully. “Mommy said you got me Dinosaur Mountain!”

  “I have a secret to tell you…” I said.

  Waffle House became our spot, and Nick looked forward to our lunches and breakfasts there. Over the course of a couple of years, he learned what disability checks, ankle-monitoring bracelets, and probation were. Then, when his younger brother, David, was old enough to encounter hoboes and sweaty women in wigs, he joined our Waffle House crew. One of the first things he learned was vital when he ordered bacon.

  “Do you want black-people bacon or white-people bacon?” our African American waitress, now completely postmenopausal but still sporting a wig, asked.

  David thought for a moment, and then asked, “What’s the difference?”

  “Black-people bacon is crispy,” she explained. “And white-people bacon is soggy.”

  “Black-people bacon,” David replied, and he has ordered it the same way from the same waitress ever since.

  Eventually their mother and father joined us in our excursions, and it’s somewhat of a tradition to make our trek out there every time I come home to visit. We sat in the same booth at the same Waffle House the day before Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were photographed there, and we are often informed by the hostess or waitress about the goings-on in the establishment that we have narrowly missed by unfortunate timing or because someone couldn’t find their cellphone.

  “An hour ago, some lady got up and marched behind the counter because she didn’t like the way Mark was making her eggs and she started throwing things around,” the hostess told David the last time we were there. “And then another woman in a tank top jumped up from a different table and yelled, ‘Back off! Back off! I will fight you right here in Waffle House, bitch!’ ”

  “We missed that by an hour?” David, now fifteen, said. “I told you to leave your phone behind, Dad!”

  “I’m sorry,” my brother-in-law said as we all slowly and sadly shook our heads. “I’m sorry.”

  You just can’t pay for an education like that.

  In case some people are worried that I have scarred these children, the exact opposite is true. David holds a 4.5 GPA in high school, has completed ten college courses already, and wants to be a physicist. Nicholas, now twenty, is a double major in an honors program at college. If you ask the kids what I’ve taught them, David will wait a minute and then say, “ ‘Don’t be an asshole’ is probably one of the best. And never to wear a tank top.”

  Nick, who has had more time under my tutelage, will be quick to answer, “How to wipe my ass.”

  And what else?

  “That Waffle House is a microcosm of society and culture.”

  And what else?

  “That syphilis is making a big comeback, but I do have to add that herpes is far more common.”

  And what else?

  “That you’re my real mother, but I’m just about finished with a paper I’m writing on double consciousness and racial prejudice. Can I call you back? Love you.”

  “Anytime, bub,” I reply. “Anytime.”

  I looked at the bubbling mass in the vial before me and immediately cast my eyes away.

  Don’tlookatit, don’tlookatit, don’tlookatit, I chanted over and over in my head. And please don’t throw up.

  From the other side of the couch, however, the sounds were inescapable. The echo of my husband spitting in his vial hit me in wave after wave, targeting my nausea button and pressing it without mercy.

  “Please stop,” I begged, after I heard him delivering his deposits two more times. “Or go into another room. Your spitting is making me gag.”

  “It’s just saliva,” he countered as I felt my stomach spin like a lazy Susan. “The directions say to get it bubbly. I’m just following them.”

  “Oh my god,” I muttered as I gagged. “You talking just makes it worse.”

  My vial was close; I only had to drool a third of an inch more into it and I would be done, but I did wonder if the DNA test we were doing this for needed all that spit just to find out who my ancestors were thousands of years ago, or if there was just a little sadism involved.

  My husband had been wanting to get both of our DNAs tested for a while after he watched Henry Louis Gates, Jr., use the same test on celebrities and famous athletes for his show on PBS. I wasn’t as anxious; both sides of my family are from Italy, and my father is a first-generation Italian American, so I pretty much knew what the results would be: straight-up one hundred percent Italian. My grandfather crossed the Atlantic in the early 1900s at seventeen, although my remaining three grandparents were all born here after their parents had made the crossing, some of them born in Little Italy. My husband’s pedigree contained a little more mystery, from the shores of Scotland and Ireland to the marshes of Arkansas, we know there were guns, slaves, a bunch of lumber camps, and probably a whole lot of non-family-values action going on in between.

  But the spitting. Ugh. The spitting to give 23andMe, the company we used, enough viscous fluid to test was reprehensible. I finally had to stop and try to focus on my breathing to avoid the eventual hurl that was c
oming my way. When I got near to the top, I had to stop and seal it.

  “That has to be enough,” I said. “If they can only go back to my mother with that much spit, that will clear up at least one question.”

  We sent the spit samples off the next day, and then promptly forgot about them until emails arrived a month later that told us we were ready to have our heritage unfold before us.

  My husband went first. He logged on to the website, and within moments, the whole world was laid out in a rainbow of colors.

  He gasped. “I’m from…everywhere,” he said unbelievably. “I am literally a man of the world.”

  And it was true. I don’t think there was a continent that didn’t have a piece of my husband on it.

  “Looking at that,” I said sorrowfully. “You could have applied for way better student loans.”

  “I’m Iberian?” he asked the monitor.

  “I thought an Iberian was like a deer,” I said. “No offense to your people.”

  “And West African?” he continued.

  “You’re from West Africa?” I said. “Oprah is, too! See if she’s on your relatives list. Then we can write to her and ask her for money.”

  “I’m Italian, too!” he cried. “Look!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I pooh-poohed him. “Seven hundredths of a percent. That means you ate macaroni once. Don’t jump on my heritage without a wifebeater and an Italian horn around your neck, all right, pally? You didn’t even know what an antipasto was until I married you. Italian.”

  “It says right there—” he started.

  “Sure. Say ‘rrrricotta,’ ” I challenged him. “Shut up. You don’t even have a nana.”

  “I’m not Native American,” he said, clearly disappointed. “My great-grandmother was supposedly a Cherokee. It says here that I am absolutely not Native American.”

  “I think that Grandma came from a little farther east,” I said, tapping West Africa with my finger. “But now it makes sense that you ordered chitlins that one time. I am sorry I mocked you.”

  “Rrrrrrricatta!” my husband said.

  “Please stop. You’re embarrassing yourself and the country of Italy shames you,” I said. “Now let’s look at mine.”

  I typed in my password.

  The world popped up again, but mine wasn’t so colorful and was contained to Europe.

  “See?” I said, full of bravado. “What did I tell you? All Italian. Nothing but.”

  “Wait, wait, wait, not so fast,” my husband said, leaning in closer to the screen. “Sorry, Ms. Notarrrrro. Looks like you have a little German in there.”

  I shook my head. “That’s a mistake. Absolutely not. German! Do I look blond and blue-eyed to you?”

  “Nope,” he said. “But your sister sure does.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing,” I snapped. “They clearly brought the wrong baby home, but when they saw how much she tormented me, they kept her out of necessity.”

  “And look,” he added. “There’s a little Frenchie in there, too. Madame.”

  “Stop making things up. It is offensive that you can’t accept me as I am,” I stated. “I’m all Italian. A little lapsed in my Catholicism—all right, a lot—but Italian nonetheless.”

  “Maybe you’re lapsed,” my husband added, moving even closer to the screen, “because you’re Jewish?”

  I said nothing, almost for a full minute.

  “Look,” my husband said. “Ashkenazi. Right here. You’re Jewish.”

  “Really?” I said, and leaned in to where he was pointing. “I’m Jewish?”

  “Yep,” he answered.

  “Oy vey,” I whispered. “You and me…we are one glass eye short of a Sammy Davis, Jr., sandwich!”

  Then I took off running.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted after me as I ran around, trying to find my phone.

  “I’m calling Amy!” I shouted back.

  “Which one?” he asked. “Silverman or Segal?”

  “Both! I’m going to three-way!” I replied. “Don’t you see? It all makes sense now! That’s why I always think I am going to die!”

  “What?” my husband asked.

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Dude,” I said, throwing my hands up and furrowing my brow. “I’m in the tribe!”

  “Like this much,” he said, barely holding his fingers apart.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I replied. “I’m IN. You can be my Saturday goy.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Well, you’re a goy and I’m not, now,” I explained. “My friend Cindy told me about this. Her mother has a Saturday goy who does stuff for her on the Sabbath that she is not allowed to do. Like, starting this week, I can’t turn lights on, push an elevator button, or even get near the stove. So now those are your Saturday jobs, except that I can’t tell you to do it. You have to want to do it for me. Oh my god. I can’t wait for Saturday!”

  “I don’t like where this is going,” he said.

  “And you’re going to need to like getting bagels for me on Saturday, too,” I said. “Al Gore used to have to turn the lights on for Joe Lieberman during the campaign.”

  “So then what do you do on Saturdays?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I need to talk to Amy and Amy. I think I just sit and wait for you to do things for me.”

  “Well, what do I get from my multicultural heritage?” he asked. “What do I get for being West African?”

  “I don’t want to be on CNN for not saying the right thing, so that’s not going in the book,” I advised. “Let’s focus on you being an Ibex.”

  “Iberian,” he said.

  “If there is such a thing,” I muttered to myself.

  “There is,” he insisted. “They are people of Greek and Roman sources, according to Wikipedia.”

  “So your people are extinct,” I said. “I’m sorry. I can’t indulge you in a culture that has died out thousands of years ago, whereas my tribe continues to flourish.”

  “Some of them are still in Spain,” he offered.

  “Fine,” I gave in. “I’ll make you Spanish rice and some sangria. But I only know how to make Spanish rice the Mexican way.”

  “All right, then,” he said, switching back to his profile. “What about my English background?”

  “You want beans for breakfast?” I asked. “You got it.”

  “…and Irish,” he added.

  “I’ll bake you a potato,” I said. “But I will do none of this on Saturday.”

  “Being that I’m Italian,” he said, “maybe I’ll make the gravy this Sunday.”

  “Listen,” I advised. “Do you really want to piss off an Italian Jew, brother?”

  “You’re not allowed to call me that,” he said. “That’s totally going on CNN.”

  “Write Oprah now,” I said. “If she can’t give us money, maybe she can give us tickets to her show, because I’d like a new car.”

  “Speaking of relations,” my husband said slowly. “Did you see this? On your list, there’s someone here who shares a lot of your DNA. Like enough for a close relative. I mean a really close relative.”

  “I told Lisa we were doing this,” I said. “Maybe my sister did it, too.”

  My husband slowly shook his head.

  “It’s a male,” he said.

  He looked at me. I looked at him.

  “A brother?” he whispered.

  “I don’t have a brother,” I laughed.

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  I didn’t say anything.

  And even though it wasn’t Saturday, my goy husband looked at me and said, “Maybe I should turn this off now,” and then he shut the computer down.

  “Whatcha writing?” I asked my husband, peering over to his side of the bed as I was reading a book.

  “Events,” he answered as he continued to scribble in his little black book, “of the day.”

  “Like what?” I questioned
.

  “Oh, you know,” he replied. “Just the usual.”

  The little black book began showing up at bedtime ever since my father-in-law had started organizing his mother’s papers after her death several years earlier. Tucked in among her recipes and family photos, he found her mother’s diary, which he transcribed. Then, digging a little further, he found his own mother’s diary. It was a little black book that chronicled her life from the time she was sixteen until he was born. Each entry had enough space for two or three lines, merely the events of the day, nothing more, but gave incredible insight into her life at that time. He transcribed that as well, and emailed my husband a copy.

  My beloved read through it in a day, and then announced that he, too, would take up the habit. He bought himself a little black notebook, and started documenting his days before we went to sleep that night.

  Sometimes he would giggle to himself as he was writing, which I found quite endearing. I would wait for him to tell me what was so funny, but he just continued writing and never said a word. Sometimes he would shake his head, and one time I caught him smirking.

  “Whatcha thinking?” I asked, hoping that he would tell me what it was that he was committing to paper.

  He shrugged and didn’t even look up. “Private thoughts,” he said simply.

  Private thoughts? Private thoughts? What kind of private thoughts? We were married! Were we even allowed to have private thoughts? I thought we shared everything. I thought for a minute. Did I, myself, have private thoughts?

  Absolutely not, I determined immediately. I had no secrets! There was nothing I couldn’t say to my husband; I was more than willing to share my thoughts. In fact, I am generous with sharing my thoughts!

  “Remember I found out that one thing about that one person we know who now does bad things in parks?” I reminded him. “That was private. And I shared it with you.”

  My husband shook his head. “That’s not the same,” he said. “That’s not a private thought.”

  “Sure it is,” I argued. “It was a secret, which means private, and I thought about it and it made me shudder. That’s a private thought.”

  “No,” he said without looking up. “That’s gossip.”

  “That was not gossip,” I denied. “It is a nugget of disgusting information. And I simply shared it. I felt I was being very unselfish by telling it to you.”