I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

by Laurie Notaro

  Our lives would rock. We were in the Babyless Club.

  Besides, I’ve been close enough to the fire to know that I don’t necessarily need to step into it. As I mentioned, my sister has two kids, and honestly, I’ve seen what they’ve done to her. The CD she has in the player of her car is the ubiquitous Dino Rap, of which she knows all the words and began unconsciously singing at a recent family dinner: “Velicor Raptor is mean/he hisses and growls/one swipe of his claw/will surely disembowel.” Physically, she can’t stay up past 9 P.M. and actually confessed to me that her eight hours a day at work was her “private time.” Her private time? I thought to myself. What the hell is going on in that house? Yes, I’ve seen my five-year-old nephew burst into a round of inconsolable tears when the cheese slid off his pizza, in her hallway there is a spot that was once the debut of an abstract doody mural created by a self-absorbed two-year-old, earlier this week the same two-year-old woke her up before dawn to pull a booger out of his nose, but can it be so bad that work is a sanctuary? Her private time?

  Obviously, my friends had no such privilege, because one by one, they began to defect. Sure, there were some that I knew didn’t stand a chance against a Bellini sleigh crib with a coordinating suite set or an Eastertime window display at Baby Gap—I mean, nothing can make a woman ovulate faster than a smocked dress in pastel colors. It is nothing less than an arrow right through your ovaries. Some of my friends were easy baby prey. My friend Jeff and his wife, Kristin, for example, went in search of a Vornado fan and simply wound up on the wrong aisle at Target, finding themselves face-to-face with an Eddie Bauer car seat and, bing! within seven days he gleefully proclaimed over the phone to me that “his boys could swim!”

  And then he giggled.

  I just sat there for a minute, trying to decode his message. My boys can swim, my boys can swim. Hmmm. I didn’t know. I didn’t have the faintest idea. Anagram? My scab is my own? My icy-ass womb? I’m sown by my sac? My icy snob swam? Cow Man, by Missy? None of those made sense. Maybe it was a male thing, I decided.

  “Hang on,” I said before I covered the mouthpiece and beckoned to my husband. “Jeff said, ‘My boys can swim.’ ”

  My husband stopped dead in his tracks and his face dropped. “They’re having a baby?” he asked in a voice that sounded like someone had swung a bag of russet potatoes into his gut.

  I rolled my eyes. “Jesus, you are such an idiot,” I said, returning to the phone, and that’s when I heard Jeff yell, “We’re having a baby!”

  Jeff was my first friend to become a parent. It was an odd transition for all of us. As long as Kristin was only pregnant, I could ignore the fact that my best friend’s life was going to change for good, and that nothing would be quite the same again. But I wasn’t prepared at all. Then, when the baby showed up, things turned wild.

  “Oh, you should see him!” Jeff bragged. “The doctor says we have to wean him soon, but he’s the best suckler the doctor has ever seen. He just latches onto Kristin like a vacuum cleaner. He’s in the ninety-ninth percentile of sucklers!”

  I was aghast. I hadn’t heard such talk since the last time I drank margaritas and dialed a 1-900 number. Suckling, weaning, latching! Who wanted to know that kind of stuff? I certainly didn’t. Nor did I want the visual accompaniment of a topless Kristin, now a MOTHER, holding a baby with a mouth that had the properties of a Dustbuster.

  Months later, my friend Amy was the next one to drop out of the Babyless Club, and the last time I talked to her, a hard-nosed, take-no-shit investigative reporter who has toppled administrations and exposed scandals from high to low, told me (and I quote): “Trying to pick up some freelance work so I can buy the $140 Petunia Pickle Bottom Toddler Tote I’ve been lusting after.”

  Now, honestly, really and truly, it’s not as if I resented my friends’ sojourn into baby land, whether or not they had broken the childless oath. I was actually happy for them—now Amy could shop at Baby Gap, where a baby arrow once had not only knicked her ovaries, but pierced her uterus as well. And for a couple of months, I get to be the thinner friend. Babies are adorable and I love looking at pictures. But when Jeff declined to come to my first-ever book signing because his four-month-old son was invited to a party at the railroad park with a bouncy house and a face painter, I finally got it.

  My friends didn’t just have babies. They were parents.

  I was now Beta and everyone was leaving me for VHS. It’s true. Over the last two years, I’ve lost more friends to babies than I did to booze. One by one, they’ll call, drop the bombshell over lunch, or break the news with, “Actually, I can meet you for happy hour, but I can’t drink. So don’t force me to. And I can’t tell you why. So don’t force me to. Okay, I’m pregnant. I’m not supposed to tell anyone yet, so if my husband asks you, you forced me to, okay?”

  And that’s when I know I’ve just become obsolete to my mommy-to-be friend—that’s when I know I’m outdated, last year’s model. We’ve got about six to eight months of friendship time left, and then we go our separate ways.

  “Congratulations,” I’ll say. “It was nice knowing you.”

  In fact, I’ve taken to performing a new ritual when I get baby news: I smoke a cigarette, say a bunch of curse words, and then pour out a beer for my homies who have passed to the other side, because they’re gone. It’s a proven, scientific fact that once someone has a baby, there’s only a one in 125 chance that she’ll ever answer the phone again when you call. It’s an activity that she’s relinquished along with watching a movie with a higher than G rating, driving a sedan, and eating meals in any joint that doesn’t serve chicken nuggets.

  It’s like the series Left Behind—and if you think battling the devil during Armageddon sucks, try being left behind in my world and getting someone to go with you to a party on Friday night who’s not only going to bring along a third wheel, but that third wheel’s Aprica stroller, vibrating bouncy chair, and floor carnival and can only stay until said third wheel throws up or shits his pants.

  Finally, suffering loss after loss, the Babyless Club had shrunk down to me, Jamie, and its founder, Meg, while Jeff unabashedly, and occasionally in public, demonstrated dances from The Wiggles, Amy slung a well-earned Petunia Pickle Bottom Toddler Tote over her shoulder, and when I heard her newborn cry, I had to warn my friend Colleen that if she suddenly started whipping her boobs out all over the place, I was cutting my baby visit short and wouldn’t be coming back until baby Ben’s bar mitzvah.

  “We should have had more gay couples in our club,” Jamie said, exasperated. “All of a sudden, we’ve become the satellite station out in space that you see in horror movies. ‘They’re all gone, Captain, well almost. The only thing left behind is some green slime, an abundance of chocolate calcium chews, and three wrinkled old broads who shriek when you pull out a onesie.’ Not only are we childless, we’re on the friggin’ Baby Ghost Ship.”

  Then, one day not long after that, I got the impossible phone call.

  “I need to talk to you,” Meg urged. “I have news.”

  “Congratulations,” I replied, shaking my head. “It was nice knowing you. I’m guessing it was a Bellini Elegante four-drawer chest with changing-table top in the mahogany finish along with the Vanessa crib. Who could resist? I heard my uterus sob when I saw it in Amy’s nursery.”

  “Nope,” I heard Meg say. “Moses basket, Pottery Barn Kids, pink gingham.”

  “Wow,” I replied, stunned. “That’s an unfair fight. That’s a sucker punch.”

  “Do you think three hundred dollars is too much to pay for it? I mean, it really is just basically a big breadbasket,” she stumbled, “with eyelet ruffles and pink gingham! PINK GINGHAM!”

  “Well—” I started to reply.

  “Well, of course it’s worth it!” Meg said, answering her own question. “Especially if we use it for the second one.”

  “The . . . second one?” I gasped.

  I hung up immediately and called Jamie.

  �
��I know just what to get you for your birthday,” I cried when she answered the phone. “How’s about a nice hysterectomy?”

  An American

  (Drug-Smuggling) Girl

  I’m,” I proclaimed loudly and proudly to the man who had a gun secured at his hip, “an AMERICAN!!!”

  My mouth was dry, my hands were shaking, and I was scared out of my mind, especially now that the border agent was glaring at me and obviously pretty pissed.

  Still standing in Mexico, wishing desperately that I could just fly the five feet to the United States, I realized that I was probably the shittiest drug smuggler of all time.

  I totally sucked, but it wasn’t my fault.

  Merely two weeks before, I went to Walgreen’s to pick up a prescription for allergy medication and discovered, much to my horror, that the pharmacist wanted eighty dollars from me, which was sixty dollars more than what I paid the previous month.

  Now, you know, if I’m going to spend eighty bucks on drugs, I’d better have to show ID and sign my name for the release of a controlled substance. I’d better be walking away with some Vicadin or her delightful little cousin Xanax in my little paper bag, not a month’s supply of Allegra, which you can mix with alcohol and nothing happens.

  In my book, that’s called “a one-trick-pony drug.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said as I stared at the white lab coat. “I paid less than that to have my gallbladder removed, I got knocked out for that, I got to keep the bedpan and a box of tissues. When did sneezing become so expensive?”

  “Since Claritin went over-the-counter, the manufacturer of this drug raised its price, and your insurance company decided to make it a third-tier drug, which means it’s ‘lifestyle enhancing,’ and not a necessity, like Viagra,” the pharmacist informed me sympathetically.

  “Wow, how appropriate,” I replied. “The activity of breathing is now considered less important than giving an eighty-year-old a boner. You know, if Allegra was oil, the marines would have invaded and we’d have bombed the manufacturing plant by now.”

  So when I went home and told my husband that ounce per ounce, Allegra was worth more than cocaine, we decided to stage a standoff. A Mexican standoff.

  After all, isn’t that one of the perks of living in Arizona, the land where you can die in fifteen minutes of dehydration during the summer if skin cancer doesn’t kill you off first? But the trade-off is that cheap tequila and pills that we can actually afford are a mere border hop away. Now, I had heard from about a million different people who had all gone to Mexico and come back with all sorts of things—big, giant bottles of Valium, cigarette carton–size boxes of muscle relaxers, antibiotics, you name it— and it was there for the taking. They came back from a Mexican pharmaceutical shopping spree like they were Liza Minelli the weekend before she was due to check herself into a joint called “Resurrections.”

  We’ll go to Bisbee for a couple of days, we decided, hang out, then swing by Nogales on the way home, grab some lunch and pick up our stash. It was a plan.

  It was a bad plan.

  After our trip to Bisbee, we pulled into Nogales, and let’s just say for the interest of those who have not been there, border towns aren’t exactly known for their glitz and glamour. Suddenly, I felt like I was on a soundstage and at any minute, a grainy image of Benicio Del Toro in cowboy boots was going to cross the street in front of me and Catherine Zeta-Jones would turn the corner with a big, creepy cocaine clown in her hand. And mind you, I was still on the American side of things.

  We parked our car on the Arizona side, paid five bucks to an old man who looked like he’d sat in that dusty, dry parking lot for so long he’d simply mummified, since essentially all he could move were his eyes.

  Now, getting into Mexico is easy, because Mexico knows you’re not going to stay. I mean, who really wants to fill out a change-of-address form sporting a zip code south of the border, unless you’ve just killed your pregnant wife on Christmas Eve, assaulted your scalp with a box of Feria frosting, grown a jaunty goatee, and lost your chubby-hubby pounds to do your best “No, I’m not the guy who killed his pregnant wife on Christmas Eve, I am Ben Affleck, hombre!” act? Who really wants to stay there long enough to see if Mexico has seasons? Vincente Fox isn’t putting on airs, he knows the score, he doesn’t need to shell out extra pesos for any sort of border patrol. Instead, there’s just a turnstile. Getting into the Target by my house is harder once you consider the metal detectors.

  We went through the turnstile and we were in.

  Within five minutes, I had the goods—enough for almost a whole year, plus some other bonus things I picked up as long as I was there—swinging from my hands in a plastic bag. I was so happy. I was jubilant. I now had the ability to breathe out of one, possibly both nostrils, and for about the same price that my insurance company wanted to charge me for two months’ worth.

  “I’m a little hungry, do you want to get something to eat?” my husband said.

  I scoffed. “Are you kidding?” I said, taking in my surroundings. “I feel like I’m in a United Way commercial. I just saw a donkey. To be frank, I really enjoy my intestines in their present, parasite-free condition. Sure, I’d like to lose some weight, but a tapeworm is the last way I’d like to do it, except becoming a prisoner of war. If you have to boil the water here just to drink it, there’s no way I’m touching taco meat.”

  Ready to go home, we walked to the U.S. border checkpoint, which isn’t as loose and loving as Mexico’s. At all. It’s easier to get backstage at a State of the Union address than it is to get back into your country. My husband and I stood in line with the other people ready to be questioned, scrutinized, and searched, and it was just about our turn when I saw it: a sign in black and white that proclaimed that IT IS THE LAW THAT ALL PHARMACEUTICALS AND MEDICATIONS PURCHASED IN MEXICO AND BROUGHT INTO THE UNITED STATES MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A VALID U.S. PRESCRIPTION.

  I looked at my husband in a panic. He looked at me, then looked at the plastic bag hanging from my wrist.

  I had a prescription. I did. It was just two hundred miles away at Walgreen’s.

  “Back to Mexico!” I hissed quickly. “Back to Mexico! Go back to Mexico!!”

  We bolted out of line and walk/ran back to the marketplace, where we found a seat on a bench and sat.

  “What are you going to do?” my husband said. “Do you think the pharmacy will give you your money back?”

  I openly laughed. “Not even with a pretty por favor,” I replied. “I’m stuck. I’m totally stuck. There’s only one thing left to do.”

  My husband looked at me.

  “Smuggle,” I said, shrugging. “It really isn’t breaking the law. I have a prescription. If this goes to trial, I’m sure Walgreen’s would bring it down to the courthouse. It’s either that or try to find a toy manufacturer to get the Allegra compressed and formed into the shape of a clown doll.”

  “Oh my God,” my husband said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Oh my God. Please tell me you’re not going to stick a year’s worth of Allegra up your ass.”

  “Wish I could, but with my luck, they’d probably shoot out as bullets. No, they’re going into my other black hole,” I said as I opened my purse and started shoveling in my purchases. “I’ve just spent two hundred dollars on this stuff, there’s no way I’m leaving it on this bench and walking away.”

  Back at the border checkpoint, we bravely took our place in line again, and this time, I noticed the cameras all around and above us, which had, without a doubt—in jerky, fuzzy black-and-white Circle K burglary footage—captured our previous appearance in line as we stood for a while, chatted, made fun of the people in front of us, the plastic bag swinging in my hand, then as we suddenly noticed the horrible, horrible sign, reacted with the appropriate melodrama, ran out of line, and then returned five minutes later with no sign of the plastic bag, save for my bulging and gaping open purse, me looking as if I were Winona Ryder on a shopping spree or conducting res
earch for a role.

  When it was our turn, the border agent motioned us over to his station.

  Deep breath, I told myself as we walked to his counter, be cool. Be cool. Stay calm. Act casual. Do not act like a smuggler.

  “Citizenship?” the border agent, a gruff, surly, stocky, and sweaty man, said.

  Be cool, I reminded myself.

  I stepped forward, my arm outstretched, my driver’s license in hand.

  “I’m an American!” I proclaimed excitedly, as if I were auditioning for a public service announcement boycotting any products manufactured by the axis of evil. Or France.

  The agent looked at me drolly and glanced at my license. “You with her?” he asked my husband, who nodded. “Citizenship?”

  “I, as well, am an American, sir,” my husband said so subserviently that had I not looked at him out of the corner of my eye, I could have sworn he was standing at a full salute.

  “What were you doing in Mexico?” the border agent asked as he looked at us with suspicious, angry eyes.

  “We ate lunch, sir,” my husband, the fake marine, lied.

  “You came all the way down from Phoenix to eat lunch in Nogales?” the agent questioned, raising his perspiration-dotted brow. “I don’t believe that.”

  This was the precise moment that the stuttering began.

  “No. Ub—ub—ub—ub,” my husband, whose face had now turned the color of a hot tamale, said. “Bisbee! We were in Bisbee for the weekend!”

  “Bisbee,” I added, nodding vigorously. “Bisbee!”

  “Did you buy anything while you were in Mexico?” the border agent asked, his eyes narrowing in on me.

  I looked back at him, smiled as best I could as my face flushed with hot, hot fear, nodding and shaking my head at the same time, giving him more of a convulsion than an answer.