Housebroken

by Laurie Notaro

  “So I could be disgusted, too?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Are you writing about this? Right now? In your diary?”

  “Laurie,” my husband said, still not looking up, “read your book.”

  “Remember who told you about every single person in your department that is on Match.com,” I snipped. “And that one of the men on your floor is wearing a tank top and licking an ice cream cone.”

  A couple of nights later, my husband was writing in his journal, and when he moved I caught sight of the page he was writing on. Clear as day, I saw the word “Laurie.”

  He was writing about me!

  “What happened in your day today?” I asked, taking the slow approach.

  “Not much,” he answered, still scribbling.

  “Oh,” I said. “You certainly seem to be writing as if a lot happened.”

  “Not really,” he replied.

  I sat there for a moment and pretended to be reading my book. I gave him a chance to confess, and counted to thirty before I said, “Are you writing about the dishes?”

  “No,” he said simply.

  “You’re not writing about the dishes?” I questioned. “And how I pointed out that you left all of them in the sink this morning?”

  He said nothing.

  “Without the thought that I shopped for the food, I prepared your meal last night, and that because of leaving the dishes in the sink, I also had to clean up, too, as reflected in the text I sent you this afternoon?” I continued.

  He didn’t acknowledge me one bit.

  “I know it was tersely worded, but as I wrote, if you act like a customer in my house, then I shall treat you like a customer,” I added.

  He didn’t even look up.

  “And that I do not think twelve dollars a meal plus twenty percent gratuity is too much to charge you based on the quality of the ingredients and the high level of my cooking skill,” I went on.

  He didn’t even flinch.

  I waited for a little bit for him to say something, but he said nothing.

  “I know you’re writing about the fact that you shouldn’t be charged twenty percent gratuity because waitresses don’t send you nasty texts at work,” I said, going in for the kill. “Because I just saw you wrote ‘Laurie’!”

  My husband closed the book, put his pen on the nightstand, turned out the light on his side of the bed, and went to sleep.

  The next day, as I was taking the sheets off of the bed, I saw my husband’s little black book sitting plaintively on his nightstand. I looked at it.

  I thought for a moment about opening it and seeing if he wrote that I only deserved a ten percent tip.

  I looked at the book some more.

  It was right there. All of his private thoughts.

  Right there.

  Then I pulled the rest of the sheets from the bed and went downstairs to wash them.

  That night, as we were lying on freshly laundered sheets, I unmistakably saw him write a capital B.

  He did not, I thought to myself.

  “Did you just write a capital B?” I asked.

  “Yes, I did,” he answered, and kept on writing.

  “What was it for?” I asked.

  “Are you serious?” he replied.

  “A big B, right?” I repeated. “You wrote a big B?”

  “I said yes,” he answered. “Why?”

  “Because ‘Laurie is such a B’ has a big B in it,” I stated.

  “And I would be writing that because…?” he asked.

  “Because today you finally brought the trash cans in, but like I said this morning, you got an F for Trash this week,” I informed him. “You brought them in four days late.”

  “Yes, I remember your grading system,” he said. “I get docked a grade for every day.”

  “The trash gets picked up on Thursday,” I reminded him. “And today is—”

  “Monday,” he answered.

  “F,” I said, nodding. “That’s an F.”

  “I still don’t understand why I get graded every week in Trash,” he said.

  “As an incentive,” I replied.

  “An incentive for what?” he said, finally looking at me.

  “The satisfaction of a job well done,” I commented simply. “And a reward for knowing we are not the laziest people on our street.”

  “But we are,” he reminded me.

  “I know,” I snapped. “But that’s a private thought! No one else has to know that!”

  “So you think I wrote ‘Laurie is a big B’ because you gave me an F?” he asked.

  “I pretty much saw you do it,” I confessed. “I have a feeling you write that in there a lot. ‘Dear Diary: Laurie is such a B. She took a picture of me when she clearly knew my shirt had inched up over my belly.’ ‘Dear Diary: Laurie is such a B. All of my pairs of underwear are pink because she forgot to bleach out the washing machine after she dyed a dress red.’ ‘Dear Diary: Laurie is such a B. She put her hand over my mouth when I was sleeping to make me stop snoring.’ ”

  “You covered my mouth when I was sleeping?” he asked.

  “ ‘Dear Diary: Laurie is such a B. One of the cans in the ten cases of Canada Dry Ten that she keeps in the back of the car because she’s too lazy to bring them into the house rolled out of the hatchback, hit the ground, and squirted me straight in the eye and almost popped my eyeball out,’ ” I finished.

  “You covered my mouth when I was sleeping?” he asked again.

  “Only a couple of times,” I sighed. “Usually when I pinch you, you stop.”

  He looked me square in the eye.

  “Here,” he said, and offered me the little black book. “If you’re so obsessed about what I am writing about you, then see for yourself. Here. Take it. Read it. See what I say about you. If you’re dying to know, know.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Take it,” he said, pushing it toward me.

  “No,” I said, giving it back. “I can’t. Those are your private thoughts. I have no right to intrude on them even if your underwear is pink, you were blinded by soda, I posted that picture on your Facebook page, and you failed Trash again. And you ate the last of the AmeriCone Dream, I forgot to mention that.”

  “Please take it,” he demanded. “I cannot go through this night after night.”

  “No,” I said again. “That would really make me such a big B.”

  “Fine,” he said, and took the book back. I was relieved until he opened it, said “June second,” and then proceeded to read each and every one of his diary entries out loud.

  It took a very long time. And when he was done, I’d found out that he did mention me; I was not wrong. He read aloud, in three separate entries, “Laurie said she and Amy are having a good time in New York but she fell down in the rain outside of the Yale Club and her belly got wet,” “Laurie’s neck muscle is getting very developed on the right side,” and “Laurie is becoming alarmingly interested in my journal.”

  “Oh,” I said when he was finished. “Was there a big B?”

  “Yes,” he said, and showed me. “Better take in the trash earlier next week.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, seeing it with my own eyes. “Why don’t you write about me more? I’ll tell you which people in your department are on Tinder.”

  The batter, at best, simply looked secular. Its grayish-beige tint reminded me of “Oops” paint on sale at Home Depot, a gallon for five dollars. It was limp, held no body and surely no promise of becoming the sacred item I was hoping it would magically puff up into.

  Just like that, the keys to the Twinkie Kingdom had slipped through my fingers and clattered to the floor. I was almost sure I heard them.

  Now, I’m sure everyone remembers the Great Twinkie Famine of 2012. It was not an easy time for any of us when Hostess went out of business, which was pretty much the same as saying that someone better build a big boat and start collecting two of every kind of delicious snack, because God Hath
Spoken and he was about to do some much needed hosing down of the Earth.

  Of course, things change, evolve, move on, companies go out of business. But a world without Woolworth and Hollywood Video is one thing; you can always find flammable pajamas and Nicolas Cage movies somewhere. Frankly, we have gotten along well without either of those entities and our culture may have even progressed for it. Yes, it is always sad to see staples of the past fall by the wayside, but Revco was an australopithecine and was simply outpaced by Walmart, also an australopithecine, but one that has better connections in China.

  But what would the world be without the kind of snack that only the very best of mothers put into their kids’ lunches in the seventies? It was no secret as to who was loved and who was not loved when those Dukes of Hazzard and Holly Hobbie lunchbox doors snapped open. The message was loud and clear: “You may become seriously ill or die because you are eating a ham sandwich that hasn’t been refrigerated for six hours, but your last moments should be beautiful, so chew on this heavenly Twinkie, should the worst-case scenario present itself.”

  My lunchboxes typically contained a poisonous deli meat sandwich, a Thermos of milk heated enough by the Arizona sun to be considered runny cheese, and an off-brand collection of cookies called Areos or Neebler, if I was lucky. My family had three kids, a mother who stayed at home and smoked, and a pop-up trailer my father bought to save money on vacations by camping in parking lots near lakes. We were too poor at the time for my mother to slip an individually wrapped sponge cake of love into a meal of possible death and I understood, but that comprehension could not come close to channeling my jealousy, bountiful and fiery, in any healthy direction.

  Now, maybe if I had burned out on Twinkies before my brain had fully formed and I developed Section 8 eating habits, I might not be a diabetic today. I said might not. My mother will be the first one to tell you that my blood sugar level is not even close to her fault, much like my lady baldness and my deformed kneecaps. Not. Her. Fault. Smoking back then was only suspected of causing cancer, there was no solid proof, just as driving around with your baby in your lap was fine until some big mouth said it wasn’t and infants started flying through windshields.

  And I agree. It wasn’t her fault. Had we been able to afford that little luxury, a small, plastic-entombed symbol of her high-fructose love, my priorities may have sprouted in a different direction, like toward the light and not toward the bakery aisle. All I know is that when I started earning a paycheck, Twinkies and spray cheese were on the grocery list for life, and when I wanted either, all I had to do was wash off the Junior Mints cemented to the coins on the bottom of my purse, and I was chewing in seconds flat.

  Then came the news in 2012 that the Mayans or Incas, or whatever old extinct ancient people had predicted the end of the world, were basically right in their math. Only thirty or so days short of their mark, the world did indeed come to an end, and suddenly, Twinkies were a black-market item and were going for a hundred bucks a box on eBay.

  Hostess, the company that once symbolized the bond between mother and child, was now defunct.

  The first week that Twinkies went extinct, I had a dream in which I was racing my friend and fellow author Jen Lancaster for the last Twinkie on earth, and she won. She’s spunkier, and she always has nicer shoes. The next day, after texting her about the dream, she replied simply with an image of herself holding up what was definitely one of the last Twinkies on earth. By my estimates, it cost her $8.33, plus inflated shipping.

  I did what we all do in difficult times: bargained, mourned, denied, and then finally accepted. It was not an easy path, but at least I knew I was not alone; two thousand miles away, Jen admired her little golden prize, making the decision every day whether or not to eat it. One day, I knew, Jen would eat her baby. And then she would sob.

  I experienced the plague firsthand. It was real. Now, it’s not like I ate a box of Twinkies every day, but I had clearly taken the safety net for granted; when I wanted a Twinkie—which might be twice a week, or once a year—it was there.

  And when it wasn’t, I could hardly stand it. I did degrading things to scratch my itch; I did things that made me shiver with regret moments afterward, and I have to live with that.

  I did bad stuff.

  And then, after too many dark days, Twinkies came back. A company had swooped in and saved the beloved snack food. It was the Second Coming, and I saw it as the holy thing I understood it to be.

  God had changed his mind. The world was worthy after all.

  However, I have to be honest here, and I know I’m looking a resurrection in the mouth, but the truth is, they really don’t taste the same.

  They don’t. They taste a little sawdusty in the cake, and the filling has definitely lost its fluffiness, clearly experiencing a sort of marshmallow prolapse if you will.

  I know Twinkies. I could tell when the filling changed in the late nineties from the classic high-fructose magic it was, to a limper, halfhearted imposter. No one believed me, but I knew. I knew.

  And I also know that when you kill something and bring it back to life, its soul doesn’t return. And never will. It will forever be a shadow self.

  A Zombie Twinkie.

  Sure, it looks like a Twinkie, smells like a Twinkie, and feels like a Twinkie, but the taste of embalmment is undeniable, chalky and dull, merely a shell of what once was and will never be again.

  Until a miracle happened.

  My friend Kim emailed me a link to one of her favorite shopping sites, and when I clicked on it, two seconds later the clouds parted and the golden light of salvation glowed from my computer.

  It was a Twinkie maker. An honest-to-god Twinkie maker for $15.99. Similar to a panini press or a waffle iron, this gadget produced Twinkies in four and a half minutes and, I believe, was the universe’s apology for letting Hostess go out of business.

  My vision quest had arrived.

  Now, I’m sure you think it is completely irrational for me to think that I could make my own Twinkies. I would say the same. It flies in the face of God. But I have seen it done. There is a small bakery on Eighth Avenue in New York that has mastered the homemade Twinkie. I know from whence I speak, as I have partaken in their remarkable goods. I sat my double-wide ass down at a table and ordered one of everything. A Twinkie. A Ho Ho. A chocolate-covered Twinkie. A red velvet Twinkie. A Sno Ball. From my purse I pulled out a carton of milk and sat there for over an hour, delighted, a pig in red lipstick wearing a Spanx and rolling around in Twinkie mud that was so beautiful I threw all public courtesies aside and chewed with my mouth open while I made a nummy noise. I might have farted. I don’t know. I was in a cloud of glory, and in that hour, no other world existed.

  So it was possible, I knew, to re-create the alchemy required to produce little golden babies en masse. Babies I could eat without guilt because I could simply pop out some more.

  The conjuring began within the hour of the Twinkie maker landing on my doorstep. I ripped the package open, and immediately saw the promise of a new day. The fact that, listed under “Check out some of our other great products,” the Personal Corn Dog maker looked unsettlingly similar to the Twinkie maker did not deter me. This was still true when my first try, using the recipe provided in the Twinkie maker booklet, birthed something that looked like a Twinkie but tasted like a corn dog right down to the pig entrail flavor. I had made not Twinkies but Shitties, and fed them to my husband, who remarked, “You know, I don’t see a wiener, but I taste a wiener. If you closed your eyes, you would think you were eating a vegan dog. Same texture. If you found a sightless audience that liked meat cake, this could be big.”

  My second attempt, a “copycat” recipe found on the Internet, included a box of pound cake mix with some alterations. It was simple, smelled delicious during the four minutes and thirty seconds it took to bring the Twinkie through a full gestation from batter to baby, and, on the first bite, there was no lingering spirit of a processed-meat product. It was not
a Shittie, I will admit, but was its marginally less disgusting relative, the Crappie. This was confirmed when I took samples to my next-door neighbor Gemesa, who took one bite and said pointedly, “This is crap. It’s so dry I will still be choking on this a year from now.”

  I am nothing if not tenacious. It took me seven years to get my first book deal, and if I had to spend the rest of my natural existence perfecting the Twinkie, so be it. A friend sent me a recipe that had directions that were similar to launching a rocket into space. First there was cake flour, then there was sifting. Then there was the separation of the eggs and after that it required cooking on the stove to an exact temperature. Then bringing the eggs back together again. Then there was more whisking, beating, folding, and blending. Most people spend less time making a child. At the end of this Twinkie experiment, I had used every bowl in the house, and my kitchen looked like Pablo Escobar had just sneezed on a mountain of cocaine.

  But I was closer. They still weren’t Twinkies, but when I brought them to Gemesa again, she nodded her approval and gave me the thumbs-up. When her eight-year-old daughter, Morgan, came into the kitchen, she asked if she could try one.

  “Of course,” I said. “But I have to warn you that even though they look a lot like Twinkies, they aren’t the ‘real’ thing.”

  She shrugged and said simply, “What’s a Twinkie?”

  I shot my accusing eyes over to Gemesa, who could not meet my gaze.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “Did your little girl just say, ‘What is a Twinkie?’ ”

  “What is a Twinkie?” Morgan reiterated.

  “I am calling CPS on you!” I said as I pointed to her mother. “I had no idea you were raising your children in a deprivation chamber! Can she come to my house? I have a feeling I need to show her what spray cheese is.”

  “They just never expressed an interest,” Gemesa tried to explain, clearly fumbling.

  “What are you putting in their lunches?” I demanded to know. “How are they getting through the day?”