“Hi, this is Melissa, how can I help you?”
“Tragically, Melissa,” I began, “I have just purchased three hundred dollars of your merchandise [a gross exaggeration, but necessary for impact] and I’m returning it ALL. I have never seen such poor quality.”
“You certainly have the right to do that,” she replied.
That wasn’t the answer I thought I’d get, since I was looking for something more along the lines of “I am so, so sorry”; “Oh no! Please don’t! Please!” or some gulping, audible sobs.
“I have tools,” I stammered. “So I know poor quality when I see it!”
“Okay,” she answered before she disconnected me.
I stared at the phone, then at the heap of cabinet. I was more determined than ever to put it together. For the next two hours, I wrestled, wrangled, and fought with the planks, studying the instructions, and following them step by step. I didn’t touch the finished product this time. It fell apart when the oscillating fan turned toward it.
“Hi, this is Sandy, how can I help you?”
“Sandy,” I began, “can you explain to me why—after I have spent seven hundred dollars on your products—they have such a problem getting along with gravity?”
“Oh, sorry,” Sandy replied, and that’s when I thought we were finally getting somewhere. “Gravity doesn’t come with the cabinets. It’s an accessory that’s purchased separately! Would you like a list of stores that carry it?”
I looked back at the pile. Then I kicked it. A plank flew across the floor and put a gaping, fresh dent in the bookcase I had built.
I picked up the instructions and looked at them again. On the very last page, next to a diagram of what should have been my newly assembled cabinet, it said, “You will need:” and showed a picture of a drill, then the words “Quizas necesite ayuda,” which, with the help of my Spanish dictionary, meant “An assistant may be helpful.”
“Hi, this is Denise, how can I help you?”
“Denise,” I said wearily, my voice cracking, “who’s writing these instructions? My drunk uncle Rossie? Is he being helped by my cousin Ray-Ray with the one eye that always stays looking at his nose?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Denise said, pausing for a moment. “I think his name is Bill. Yes. I’m pretty sure it was Bill.”
“Can you leave BILL a message for me?” I continued. “Can you ask him why—after I’ve spent two thousand dollars and nine hours trying to assemble your merchandise—why he failed to mention that I’d need a drill until the very last page? Could you also tell him that you’ll also need some superglue, staples, and a bunch of rope, though I’m saving a bit of that to hang myself with. Oh, and one more thing, tell him this, too: NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE I KNOW HAVE A SPANISH-SPEAKING ASSISTANT!!!”
“Would you like me to send you a set of instructions on how to assemble one?” Denise asked.
The M&M, the Bee, and the Man Baby
After my little sister had her baby, things really changed in my family.
My father, who made my sisters and me drive cars all during high school that he was going to “restore” when he retired, bought a brand-new Toyota minivan for my five-day-old nephew because his car seat didn’t fit well enough in the back of my sister’s unrestored car.
My mother, whose only hobbies were smoking and ordering useless appliances from QVC, kicked the nicotine habit, changed the channel to public television, and added an extra ie syllable after nearly every word, as in “bott-ie,” “blank-ie,” and the ever-popular “diap-ie.”
I, the one who swore she would talk to him as an adult and not talk down to him in that baby voice, have developed a full-blown falsetto, ventriloquist kind of thing because Nicholas does not respond to anything else.
And Halloween took on greater significance than any of us had ever thought possible. While we had come together to decide that we would steer Nicholas away from the White Trash Baby Syndrome by keeping him fully clothed in public places, never have his birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, and promised that he would never know the taste of a Little Debbie (although my mother came dangerously close to destroying the entire project by buying him a “Who Needs Lotto? I Have Grandma” T-shirt), a river of strife had risen between certain members of the clan, namely my sister and me.
I wanted Nicholas to be a bee for Halloween.
My sister wanted him to be an M&M.
“He’ll look stupid as an M&M,” I pouted. “If you make him into a brown peanut one, people will think he’s a potato. Years from now, he’ll look at photographs and inquire why, on the occasion of his first Halloween, we dressed him as a starch.”
“The bee is on back order,” my sister reminded me. “And he’ll look cute as a blue M&M.”
“The blue M&M is a poseur,” I snickered. “Besides, we don’t even know if Nicholas is cute or not.”
“Do you think he’s cute?” my sister asked me with a wince.
“Yeah,” I replied, following up on a promise I had made my sister when Nicholas still lived in his own carrying case.
“But what if he’s ugly and we don’t know it?” she insisted.
“That would make us look real stupid,” I answered, because we knew some people with these babies that looked like they were bred for sideshow purposes and their parents had no idea. And I understood why. He was the closest thing I’d ever have to my own kid, so he had to be cute. There was no alternative, although there was always doubt.
When I saw Nicholas’s last round of portraits, I carelessly mentioned that he looked like a Man Baby with a man’s head on a little baby body. It didn’t look like him at all, I added, but that wasn’t enough for my sister not to revoke my godmotherhood.
“The angle of the camera is bad,” I tried to explain, but that wasn’t enough for my sister not to throw my car keys at me and open the door.
“But Sam Donaldson is NOT a bad-looking guy,” I protested. “At least I didn’t say Woody Allen or Willard Scott!”
“Sam Donaldson sure would make an ugly bee!” she said as she slammed the door.
She didn’t talk to me for two days, and we didn’t patch things up until I agreed to baby-sit for her. I would have done anything to get back in the loop.
Secretly, though, I was scared. The only people I had baby-sat in the past ten years were very drunk men. There were some similarities, however, I thought to myself: Nicholas falls asleep in a sitting position, drools consistently, throws up on himself and others, always needs to be held up, makes absolutely no sense when he speaks, and wets himself while clothed. The only quality he didn’t possess was the ability to make sexual advances. Clearly, I had the upper hand.
Sure. For about two seconds. The moment I walked through that door on Saturday, he looked at me and then screamed so intensely he didn’t even make a sound. The kid didn’t breathe for a long time, and finally my sister had to hit him on the back to knock some air into his lungs.
When I tried to change him, he peed on my cheek, and when I burped him, a tunnel of formula shot out of his mouth and into my lap, drenching me. Then he cried, and he drooled, and he pooped all over his leg, and then he cried some more. After forty-five minutes, I was exhausted, frustrated, and ready to cry myself. I tried to take a nap but he kept waking me up. I couldn’t wait for my sister and her husband to get home.
When I finally heard their car pull up into the driveway, I was as excited as if my dad had bought me a new van. I waited at the door with the dogs.
“How’d it go?” my sister said as she opened the door.
“He peed on me,” I said.
“He does that.” She nodded.
“He threw up on me,” I said.
“He does that, too.” She nodded.
“I got his poop on my hand,” I said, holding it out. She nodded.
“He does this to you every day, doesn’t he?” I asked. She nodded.
“I think he’d be a cute M&M,” I said. “After all, who doesn’t love carbohydrates?�
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Burning the Bra
I had never been to the outlet mall before.
I had heard about its wonders and the majesty that was held within it; I had listened to others describe the magic of its stores, and how they obtained their dreams almost for free. You could buy, I was told, Wonderbras for three bucks.
Looking at my own bras (a sad collection that predated New Wave), I knew I needed to be a part of it. It called to me.
So then I called my sister, still on maternity leave, and talked her into driving me out to Casa Grande, a literal Mecca of outlet shopping.
Visions of all sorts popped into my head during the drive down there. I was going to get shoes. I was going to buy sheets. I was going to find some great dresses. Casa Grande is a dusty, grimy little colony of waddling diabetics. I was gonna get new bras.
There is something about getting new bras that men will never understand. Never. There’s just a quality about wearing a bra in which the underwire is still in its rightful place and hasn’t yet caused any bloodshed. There’s just something about a clean, unstretched-out strap that lays perfectly flat and isn’t covered with nubbies. There’s something pristine about a new, flawless cup in which none of the nipple is visible through a tear or hole.
I had even gone up a size, I suspected, although this was due more to an increase in back fat than anything else. This also makes getting bras exciting. It makes you feel like you have more to offer. When we reached the mall, I made my sister head straight for the bra store. She, on the other hand, wasn’t as excited as I was. Since she had given birth, things had, well, changed for her.
“There’s nothing in this store that could give me enough support. I’m going to have to start tying them up with ropes,” she mentioned as we passed through the doors.
It was true. I had never experienced true-life grisly horror before the day she called me a week after she had given birth and insisted that I rush over to her house. I found her sitting on the couch, topless, with a massive suction cup affixed to each breast and tears streaming down her face as she sobbed heavily. She looked like a hybrid of Barbarella and a Holstein in the middle of a shift. It was the stuff of pure science fiction, a bad Star Trek episode/commercial from the Dairy Council. My brother-in-law just stood there, shaking his head as he continually shrugged, until I finally took control of the situation, flipped off the switch to the pump, and said to my sister, “Let me introduce you to your new best friend, Infamil.
“We are a bottle-fed breed, my dear,” I told her. “How could you not know that? We’re Catholic! Boobs stay covered! Do you think Mary flashed around her bazongas every time her baby cried? Even Jesus was raised on a bottle and a mix! Look at you, trying to be all modern!”
At the bra outlet, I dug through the $2.99 bins, but I only found sizes that I wore when I began to blossom in fourth grade. I was going to have to graduate to the $5.99 racks, which I saw were bursting with bright silks, satins, and knits in all colors of the rainbow. I finally decided on two, plopped down my thirteen bucks, and I had the bras that would see me through my thirties and possibly to menopause. I doubted that a better deal could have been found.
I wanted to put them on right away, though I managed to resist my urges in the car and waited until I got home.
Although I knew that in the bras I was going to more closely resemble Rosie O’Donnell’s Secret than Victoria’s, they still made me feel good. My right boob didn’t pop out of its cup all the time like it did with my other bra, and all of the back hooks were still intact.
I wore one the next day to work, feeling pert, perky, and maybe even a little bit thinner. I felt clean. I also felt a little ticklish.
By noon the little tickle had turned into something of an itch, and by midafternoon, I couldn’t keep my hand out from underneath my shirt. My boobs were driving me crazy, and I couldn’t get the itching to stop. I would scratch for a second, it would be fine, and then the sensation of a million ants running across what made me a woman was nearly forcing me to scream. It was intolerable.
By the time I ran to my car, the evil apparatus was unhooked and being threaded through my sleeve. I threw the bra in the passenger seat, relieved but still itching. When I got home, I saw the damage: two bright red smiles underneath each boob and two bright red frowns on each. Complete with hives.
My husband was mortified. “What did you do?” he asked in a panic. “Did you try to wax up there?”
“No,” I said, wincing. “It’s one of the new bras. It gave me bra burn.”
Bra burn on a girl with back fat is the furthest thing from attractive, so I decided to go to my mother’s to retrieve some aloe vera from her backyard. The minute she saw me, she looked at me funny and exclaimed, “What in the hell is wrong with you? Why are you touching yourself like that? That’s a sin, you know.”
“I bought a bad bra,” I explained. “It burned me.”
“There’s no such thing as a bad bra,” she informed me. “You’re probably allergic to something on it. Where did you buy it?”
“The outlet mall.” I sighed. “It was five ninety-nine.”
“Oh. Well, there you have it. You bought a bad bra. What do you expect for six dollars, a bra that won’t make you break out in hives? Who the hell knows who owned that bra before you? Could you not do that in front of me, please?”
For the rest of the night, I had to lie on my bed, with yellow, smelly, sticky, runny aloe vera stuff smeared all over me, topless. Nothing could touch me, otherwise it would itch so bad I would have to scratch it, and I had already begun to make myself bleed. I had scabs. I had hives. I had back fat.
Oh well, I thought as I lay there, the yellow stuff dripping onto my sheets. It could have been worse.
I could have bought underwear, too.
The Lonely, Brown House
They say it’s a natural progression. It’s an obvious thing, an occurrence that happens to everyone who’s recently gotten married.
In fact, I believe legislation has passed in several states that freshly married couples have up to one full year to either A) buy a house or B) have a baby.
If you negligently pass on either obligation, every citizen within the continental United States is fully within their rights to consistently and repeatedly harass and interrogate you about when you will meet your deadline on choice B.
There was no way my husband and I were going to have a baby. We have a dog that I forget to feed at least three times a week, and that doesn’t even require unbuttoning my shirt.
What choice did we have? Instead of finding an obstetrician, I called a Realtor and embarked on a trail that would have made Lewis and Clark cringe.
I knew what kind of house I wanted; growing up in the stuccoed, Mexican-tiled, saguaro-landscaped suburbs of Phoenix, I wanted something different. I wanted brick, I wanted a fireplace, and I wanted wood floors. I wanted something interesting with character, history, and a claw-foot bathtub.
I wanted something old.
I was up for a challenge, and determined to find the right house in the right price range. We could commit some elbow grease and sweat equity as long as my potential new neighbors weren’t constructing a crystal meth lab in their rompus room or housing eighty illegals. I scanned the newspaper every Sunday, collected real estate magazines, and drove up and down prospective streets with such frequency that parents began to keep their kids inside.
Prospect #1 was a beautiful wood-shingled Tudor Revival with a sweeping lawn and three bedrooms. The minute I stepped in the door, a Leggo whizzed by my head and another struck me in the neck. “Get out! Get out!” screamed the resident children, who were crouched behind the sofa. “You can’t have our house! You can’t have it!” Their parents, who were outside washing their car, just looked in and grinned. I was puzzled until our Realtor discovered that the house was entering foreclosure, and we quickly left before the children armed themselves with kiddie stun guns or Chinese stars.
Prospect #2 led us to believe
that it was an English-style cottage from the exterior. Once inside, however, we knew better. Steeped in that pitiful gold-shag decade we knew as the seventies, the house had not survived a remodeling attempt that included slump block, an overzealous amount of corkboard, and, the coup de grâce, gold-veined mirrors. It looked like Huggy Bear had left only the day before, leaving the water stains from his waterbed permanently soaked into the floor.
Prospect #3 was snatched out from underneath us by an investor with cold, hard cash who planned to gut the Craftsman-style bungalow and “make it modern, you know, with a conversation pit, Berber carpet, and track lighting.” Prospects #4, #5, and #6 also fell to the same end, and Prospect #7 inadvertently caught on fire.
After four months of searching, I was beginning to question our luck. Where was the house of our dreams? We had been patient, diligent, giving up our weekends in an effort to homestead. We didn’t have large amounts of capital to wage war with investors who proudly exhibited the traits of hyenas, and fixer-uppers were the only homes that fell within our price range. Worse yet, the search was taking a toll on our newborn marriage. Being confined to a car while staking out the downtown neighborhoods in hopes of spotting a “For Sale” sign had spurred such arguments as “The Smell of Your Deodorant Makes Me Nauseous,” “Don’t Drive Like That With Me in the Car,” and the tightrope walker, “If You Would Get a Better Job, We Could Afford It.”
We were thrashing in the throes of “That Is Not What I Said to Your Mother” when we drove by it.
“STOP!” I said, throwing my hands up into the air after I spotted the sign in the corner of the yard. “BACK UP! Look . . .”
It was lonely.
It was empty.
It was brown.
“Let’s look at it,” I said quietly.
It was a little brick bungalow with large windows, a porch, and a big dirt yard.
“Wow,” my husband said as he got out of the car. “I like it.”
Autobiography of a Fat Bride Page 10
