It took me approximately two hours to even get close to opening the box, but eventually, curiosity and my fabric-whore proclivity got the better of me. I sliced open the box and pushed the cardboard flaps aside. The contents were encased in a plastic bag, and I eagerly rifled through it to see what I’d bought and had no memory of buying. Was it silk? Was it the piqué I had waffled over for several weeks? Was it the polka-dot voile I was waiting to go on sale?
And then, there it was. A pair of eyes. A hairy chin. A large forehead, not unlike a former boyfriend’s. It was an embroidered portrait of Bigfoot and was accompanied by a vintage pattern for a Western shirt, and bags and bags and bags of vintage-class buttons. The card inside wished me a happy birthday and was signed by my friend Lore in California, who is almost a bigger fabric whore than I am, and whose tower of fabric boxes had occupied a corner, then a closet, until she went big-time by convincing her husband that she needed an even bigger house with her own sewing room. Despite the glory of her victory, she had still taken the opportunity to hide her own slutty fabric ways by sending the evidence to my house via my birthday present.
But it’s okay. I took a deep breath, exhaled a big puff of relief, wandered over to my pile of Fabric.com boxes, and looked at the box that was the foundation for my tower. Even though a part of me had truly fantasized about curling up inside of the enormous box big enough to throw a pillow inside and take a nap in, it would be perfect for sending the pair of earrings I got Lore for her birthday the following week.
THE GUANTÁNAMO BAY KNITTING AND BOOK CLUB
It’s 4:45 a.m., and a woman in polyester pants has just stuck her hand in my crotch.
Several people stop and stare unabashedly, their mouths hanging the slightest bit open. I can’t blame them, I probably would have stared, too. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that I am screaming.
An hour earlier, my husband pulled up to the curb and kissed me good-bye; I was on my way to a writing conference in Idaho and wasn’t all that happy about getting up so early to catch my flight. But I live in a small town with a smaller airport, and it usually takes three flights and an equal number of Ativans to deliver me wherever I need to go, so I have to get started early in the morning. I typically don’t mind traveling, as long as I don’t remember it.
As I dragged my suitcase into the airport, I instantly sighed in complete dismay. The security line was long, longer than I had ever seen it, but I knew I had enough time to make the flight. It’s just that being awake at 4:45 in the morning is enough of an offense without being made to shuffle forward two steps at a time like a mental patient in socks.
I got in line, got my boarding pass and ID in order, and waited. And waited, and waited. The line was barely moving, and as I peered around the others in line ahead of me, I saw why. Only one lane was open as opposed to the usual two at the Eugene Airport—and that wasn’t all. The Eugene Airport had gotten a new toy courtesy of TSA, in the form of a monolithic Rapiscan imaging machine, and it was not a nice one that only blows at you. It was the one that sees you naked.
I was shocked. Why a little town like Eugene, Oregon, needed a naked scanner was beyond me. I’ve seen most of my fellow Eugenians naked at one point or another, and not by choice. They’ll throw on a loincloth and join a drum circle without hesitation, and there’re always at least a dozen women on hand in any locale who would jump at the chance to unbutton their shirts and breastfeed a hungry baby or kindergartener who was in need of refreshments. Frankly, what this town needs more than a Rapiscan image machine is a Bra Fairy. We need to tie up some of those low-lying boobs like boats before a hurricane, not put them on a screen. The last thing Eugene needs is more nudity, especially at the airport.
Because at small-town airports, the TSA people take their jobs very, very, very seriously, just as, say, a lone deputy might in a town with one jail cell. Hey, terrorists can come from anywhere, right? Never mind that ninety-eight percent of my fellow residents in Eugene can’t operate a debit card terminal and will wait five minutes while the cashier asks her manager if the lettuce at Five Guys was organic (save yourself five minutes: the answer is NO). Sure, these are people whose biggest crimes are painting streetlamps rainbow colors in the middle of the night and yarn bombing bike racks, so I could see how it would be merely a hop, skip, and a jump for these people to strap explosives to their privates, particularly if they were locally grown.
This is the same airport, mind you, that flagged me for a luggage search when I was about to leave for a three-week-long book tour. When you’re going away for that long, you have to be careful about packing, and each piece fits like a puzzle. It’s a house of cards, and if you pull one piece out, the whole enterprise collapses. Carefully, and with the utmost spatial economy in mind, I placed twenty-one fiber-drink packets side by side in a pocket and was able to lay them flat, and was carefully closing my suitcase as my husband walked by.
“Oh, good luck with that!” he said, pointing to the twenty-one little tubes lined up like soldiers. “That doesn’t look like dynamite or anything.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said as I gingerly laid the suitcase cover down and zipped it up.
Two hours later, standing in front of a stainless-steel table at the airport, I was watching a strange man with white hair and fat fingers destroy my maxipad-and-underwear pyramid when I decided I’d had enough.
“If you’re looking for the dynamite,” I advised, “it’s in the side pocket.”
He looked at me sharply, keeping an eye on me as his knotted hands groped the side pocket and he withdrew a packet.
“What is this?” he asked me sternly.
“It’s a fiber drink,” I informed him.
“Why do you have so many?” he questioned briskly.
“I’m on a book tour for three weeks,” I explained. “And it’s easier than packing twenty-one bean burritos.”
“They resemble explosives,” he added, still not taking his hard stare off me.
“Consumed in careless amounts, you are absolutely right,” I agreed.
He tried to shove the fiber packet back into the pocket like someone who’s never been on a book tour for three weeks. My careful fiber row collapsed, spilling into the well of the suitcase in a huge heap. I was going to have to completely repack, which was evident the moment I saw him dig into my suitcase like a badger.
“Is that all the fiber?” he asked. “Is there any more?”
You know, this is getting a little gastrointestinally personal, I wanted to say. When’s the last time you ate a vegetable? But I had already mentioned the word “dynamite,” and even though Guantánamo Bay actually sounds like more fun than a book tour, I decided to cooperate.
“Yes,” I confessed. “There are gummy fiber bears tucked between my girdles and there are some stool-softener gel caps in the first-aid pocket. Thank you. You now know me more intimately than my husband.”
He tried to close the top of the suitcase and then slid the whole mess over toward me. “You’re a writer?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered, trying to line all of my fiber soldiers back up again.
“What book did you write?” he continued.
“The book you just bent the cover to when you were digging your way through the Kotex section of my suitcase,” I informed him.
“I write science fiction,” he said, and suddenly gave me a little smile. “Can you help me get a book published?”
I smiled back, zipped the suitcase up as best I could, and then yanked it off the table.
“Nope,” I said as I walked away.
It was clear that things hadn’t changed—the Eugene TSA was still taking things very, very seriously, even more so with the new naked machine. I had been in line for at least twenty minutes and had barely moved, and once I paid attention to what was going on in front of me, I understood why.
There were children lined up at the naked machine; many, many children. Most of them looked to be middle-school aged, about fifteen to twe
nty of them, accompanied by three chaperones. All of them were deaf, or had hearing aids that were setting off the machine, and the TSA was in something of a tizzy. They were shouting to the kids to step into the machine and put their hands up for the imaging to take place, but it was all going horribly wrong. As a result, some of the kids were getting frisked and others stood confused in front of the machine as the TSA haplessly shouted directions. It was a mess. And time was ticking.
The security line was now incredibly long, and by the time I got even close to the machine, I had only twenty minutes until takeoff. I tossed my suitcase on the conveyor belt, and this time (I had learned my lesson), as the fiber packets were resting in my purse. I took off my shoes and waited next in line to be blasted by naked rays.
The guy in front of me passed through without a hitch, and I was glad; I barely had enough time to run to the gate and catch my flight. When the TSA agent called “Next!” I stepped into the machine and put my feet in the designated space and held my hands up when I was instructed to. I did not even breathe, not wanting to cause the least bit of delay.
When I exited the machine, I began to walk over to fetch my suitcase, but the agent stopped me.
“Female!” he yelled, and in a minute, a woman in a ponytail and wearing polyester pants came up to me and asked me to spread my arms.
Shit, I thought.
“Do you have any metal in your body?” she asked me, to which I answered no.
“Are you sure, ma’am?” she said sternly, clearly not believing me. “There seems to be some metal in your torso.”
“Um, no,” I said, shaking my head. “My underwire bra, maybe?”
“This appears to be in the rib area,” she informed me as she started patting me around my midsection.
“I don’t have a metal rib,” I assured her.
“And in the left hip? What do you have there?”
“Pardon me?” I asked as she continued to pat. “Nothing. I have a real hip. I have no metal in my body.”
“That’s not what the scan says,” the agent replied, patting down my boobs with the backs of her hands.
“I don’t have metal in my body,” I reiterated. “I have real ribs and an arthritic hip.”
“Stand with your feet apart, please,” the woman said.
I just wanted this to move along. I positioned my feet on the yellow footprints on the rubber mat.
And then it happened. Her hand was patting my ass, and then, suddenly, it was in my crotch.
I turned my head suddenly, trying to determine if that had really happened. IN my crotch, like I need to be married to you in my crotch. Or like you’d better have a degree from a medical school in the United States in my crotch. Like I’m having a baby in the back of a cab, I didn’t even know I was pregnant and you’re the only one who can help me, mister, in my crotch. But not like you’re a lady with two semesters of community college, you have a scrunchie in your hair and you think I am lying about having a metal rib in my crotch. Because that kind of in my crotch is not cool. It is not cool with me. I’ve been frisked before, the full pat down, several times, in fact, and this was different. This was . . . extensive. Now, sure, I was naturally wearing the tightest spandex sausage casing known to the female gender, and I was as taut as a full helium balloon or a vacuum-sealed ball of mozzarella. But believe me, if I had a cookie bomb shoved into my girdle, you could not spell yeast infection fast enough, and that’s enough of a deterrent for me to reject being a terrorist.
“Um,” I started to say.
“Ma’am,” the agent said again as she came around to my side. “Is there metal in your hip?”
“No, there is not,” I said, as firm as I dared. “I don’t know what scan you are reading, but it’s not mine.”
“It’s yours,” she said, running her hand down the outside of my leg, and then back up the inside of my leg and right back to ground zero. Where she had clearly just been.
“Okay,” I said, without a thought, and then added, “That’s enough. That is enough.”
She went back down the other leg and then back up again.
“This is unnecessary,” I said, louder, and without any control over my mouth, because once, twice, three visits to the same region was enough to flip the switch, and the only reason the switch didn’t get flipped on the first visit was because, yes, I was on Ativan and my delay times were appropriately slow. Normally, if you stick your gloved hand into my high-rent parts without proper authorization once, you’d get a tooth knocked out. Three times and I’d be sucking the eyeballs out of your face and spitting them back at you.
From behind me, she went back a fourth time, and that was when I, knowing better, knowing that I could be detained and cuffed and held by the authorities for standing up for myself, began to yell, “I demand that you stop. This is unnecessary! You are violating my civil rights! You are violating my civil rights!”
But I couldn’t stop myself. It was impossible. And that’s when people stopped and stared. But I said it again, and again, and again, until she finally dropped her hand and walked away.
“That was bullshit,” I said loud enough for the people now watching me to hear. “She did not need to touch me like that. It was bullshit.”
And then I waited. I waited to be led away to some windowless al-Qaeda room where I would not be read my rights because in an airport security line, you simply don’t have any. Oh well, I thought, it might not be so bad. I could start a knitting club at Gitmo; I mean, everyone needs a prayer rug and a beanie, right? That could be fun. Or maybe a book club, or, more accurately, the Quran Club, that might be enlightening—it’s probably better than The Help. Just trying to look on the bright side here, because man, I really friggin’ hate hummus. And falafel. Oh, falafel.
But no one came. No one took my arm. No one said, “This way, please, Metal Rib Bomber.” I was just there by myself, with my arms outstretched, standing on a mat with my feet spread. The people in the security line went back to gathering their shoes, suitcases, laptops. I found my boots at the end of the conveyor belt, along with my purse that had five packets of fiber powder in it, and my artfully packed suitcase. I gathered everything up, and pulled on my boots.
I got to my gate just as my plane was shooting down the runway, then tilted upward and lifted off into the sky.
BUSTED
Dear Municipal County Clerk:
Let me start by saying I am sure you don’t have an easy job. I suppose that’s apparent by the fact that you have to sit behind shatterproof glass, which says to me that you have your share of irate customers on a daily basis, and you probably see crazier things and touch dirtier objects than the girl who works the return counter at Walmart.
However, just because you deal with people paying their fines and court fees as a result of lawlessness does not entitle you to jump to conclusions about every formerly law-abiding citizen who steps up to your window. Lawbreaking is a spectrum, you know, with all sorts of colors in between. Not every color is jumpsuit orange. So when you look at my citation with a clearly disparaging look and say, “Whoa!” I take issue with that response for a variety of reasons:
1. Reserve your disdain, sir, for those who actually take the law into their own hands and who were not really speeding but, more accurately, going downhill and submitting to the forces of physics. I didn’t invent physics; I didn’t vote for physics; I don’t even understand physics. I was simply going downhill on a road made by your employer, the city, and I can hardly be held responsible for the grade it deemed appropriate. Apparently they signed off on a perfect physics-fed speed trap that I believe was solely created as a moneymaking venture for the city, like a police-staffed lemonade stand.
2. Doing 43 miles per hour in a 35-miles-per-hour zone is not breaking the sound barrier, m’ lord. It’s not like I was all gassed up and making my way to Mars in a Prius that in certain moments gets 99 MPG. Ninety-nine miles per gallon sometimes, even if it’s just for a fraction of a second. If that doesn
’t demonstrate how seriously I take my responsibility to humanity, including people overseas who I do not understand when they call me to tell me my credit card payment is late, then frankly, I don’t know what does. I had a V6 Camry before I decided to provide a future for children I don’t even have, so it’s clear that I traded speed and power for a car that everyone who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity drives, and even some Doctors Who Don’t Have Borders.
a. I was not drunk. Nor was I cited for that, but I could see the look of speculation that crossed your face when you saw my speed of eight miles above the posted limit. “What sort of madwoman is this?” it said. Stand down, sir. Stand down.
I will have you know that for most of the summer, we have had our teenage nephew staying with us, and whenever I got a little too happy at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, all I had to do was toss him the keys and my chances of walking the line dropped dramatically. Sure, sure, it was my plan to wait a week before I drank “magic grape juice” in front of the Mormon side of the family, but happy hour is happy hour and if there’s a three-dollar glass of chilled rosé calling my name on a summer afternoon, you can hardly expect me to ignore that sort of value. Alcohol rarely goes on sale. But I can usually find it when it does.
b. Yes, it’s true that I did not have my proof of insurance with me at the time of the bust, but that was only because State Farm sends me a letter every other day describing what horrors and lawsuits could befall my household, and I simply cannot live in a world of fear like that. That is too much stimuli, and I can’t keep worrying about wiping spilled orange juice off my floor every time I leave my house in case a crackhead breaks in, slips in the kitchen, and hurts himself. Or if a hobo sidles into my backyard, goes to take a poop in my vegetable bed, a rusty trellis scrapes his ass, and he needs a tetanus shot.
The Potty Mouth at the Table Page 8
