It Looked Different on the Model

by Laurie Notaro

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, then took a minute to refocus and pulled again.

  Not. An. Inch.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said to myself. “I am just not pulling hard enough. Try pulling one arm at a time, focus all of your strength into one arm. Focusing. Focusing. Now pull!”

  Something moved. But as my stomach flipped like a fish, I realized it was simply that the nail on my middle finger had bent backward.

  If I get this shirt off, I thought, I swear I will never try on a non-“L” shirt again. Never. Never will I try to tempt sizes. Never will I think that sizes don’t know what they’re talking about. The sizes are gods. They know all. They know all. I know nothing. I’ll stay in my size herd from now on and will never stray. There is safety in the herd.

  I thought I could not only get an “M” on but that I could button it. I have learned my lesson. I have. I have. I promise I have. I’ll only try things on with Lycra in them from now on. Never take on cotton straight. Never! You always need a mixer!

  Now go in there and get that damned shirt off!

  I grabbed each side of the shirt with opposite hands, rolled my shoulders like I was Beyoncé, and pulled as very hard as I could. And I did it again, and again and again. I jumped up and down, trying to jar the shirt loose, I leaned down to the left and then down to the right, I wiggled, I shook, I shimmied, I even bent my knees and squatted for some unknown reason, all trying to pull that thing off. After several minutes, with a beet-red face and a mustache of sweat bubbles, I stopped and had to take a break and plopped down in the antique chair.

  “I can’t believe this,” I whispered, my eyes closed. I was exhausted. Komodo dragons don’t lock on to prey this hard.

  “Honestly, why are you so fat?” even the nice voice inside my head asked me. To which I shook my head.

  I don’t know. I didn’t know. I just am.

  “Those arms are like tractor tires,” the nice voice informed me. “They are so large they almost have their own gravitational pull! And you lied about being strong. That’s not the reason they’re so big. You just eat too many pretzels.”

  I totally deserved this, I realized. I deserved to get captured in this shirt. I was roped in like a calf. Stupid. So stupid. Just because it was on sale, I had to try on a baby shirt. This was so completely my fault. Maybe I should go to Baby Gap tomorrow and try to get into some Onesies or a romper. What was I thinking? Really? You know what’s going to happen now? Firemen are going to have to come and cut me out of it, that’s what. I hate this shirt, I don’t like this shirt, and I don’t want it anymore. It’s not even a shirt, it’s a straitjacket. A straitjacket with preposterous puff sleeves that just make my arms look fatter surrounded by fat clouds.

  I looked so stupid. Sitting there. Sweating. Out of breath. Shirt hanging open like a domestic abuser’s after a NASCAR race. I just wanted to go home and eat pretzels and Google “Why do intestines gurgle?” I prayed there were no security cameras in here, because I knew if there were, the video—twenty minutes straight of a topless fat lady looking like she was fighting Freddy Krueger in a dressing room—was going to outdo Susan Boyle, David After Dentist, and any guy getting rammed in the nuts with a baseball bat or golf club in YouTube history.

  I sighed. All right, fine, I agreed, nodding to the universe. I’m in a shirt I can’t get out of, or one I’ll never get out of alive, anyway. Someday they’ll find me in here, the jaw of my skeleton hanging open, my bra exposed and dripping off my rib cage, the sleeves of the shirt floating ethereally around my humerus bones now that there was no permafat to keep them in place like handcuffs.

  I need a nap. I’m so tired. Done fighting. I give in. Shirt wins.

  “You win, shirt,” I whispered, just to make it official. “You win.”

  And as I looked in the mirror at myself—a half-naked woman, completely defeated—I understood now. The “friction point” was evidently the event horizon after all, and once I passed that mark there was just no going back. In a second, I’d be redshifted, stuck here forever, looking a little too much like the captain in WALL-E for my liking. But then I noticed something in the mirror under the gracious lighting, and for a moment, I saw Laurie Circa 1994 looking great in the shirt, her little Uma Thurman arms so nice in the loose sleeves, the placket buttoned without any bulging gaps from top to bottom.

  She smiled her Julia Roberts smile at me, I smiled back, and softly she gave me a look of sympathy. But then the smile quickly vanished and she stared me straight in the eye.

  “Get out of that goddamned shirt right now,” she fired quickly. “You look like an asshole just sitting there. You got it on; you get it off. Don’t you dare give up! You rip that shirt off if you have to!”

  And she was right, or maybe I was just rested, I don’t know, but my sweat mustache had finally dried up and I thought that maybe, yes, I could give it another shot. I stood up, and without any hesitation I went back in and pulled and fought and yanked, and suddenly the sleeves both popped free and the shirt slid down to my wrists.

  I got that thing off me as fast as I could and put it back on the hanger on the wall before it could reattach itself to my body. It was so wrinkled it looked like a dishrag, and no wonder with all of the tugging and pulling that had been going on. Then I saw a speck of something on the hem of the shirt, perhaps some lint or a thread, but it did not move when I brushed it off. I immediately saw another, next to a button, and another on the bodice, and yet another on the inside of the shirt. All were red, and none were coming off. And the more I looked, the more I found, all over the shirt: inside, out, up and down, some dots, some smudges, and then a streak across the front hem. How had I not noticed this when I pulled it off the sales rack? It was very obvious that there was something all over this shirt, even if you weren’t looking at it carefully.

  I pulled it closer to my eyes to see if I could figure out what it was, and it was then that I made a match. The red streaks and smudges all over this shirt matched the middle finger on my left hand, which—despite the fact that the circulation to my arms had been severed for the last twenty minutes—was bleeding like a Halloween prop from the hangnail I had picked at. I don’t know if I have arteries behind my nails or if I had moved around so much that I actually raised my heart rate to a healthy pace, but I had decimated this poor shirt so badly it looked like a Manson family member had worn it. A lot. To both houses. My struggle with the piece of clothing was now documented forever, my epic battle smeared all over the once-adorable shirt. No wonder I got all dizzy when I bent over, I realized. I lost a pint of blood in that fight! There was still no way I could present a bloody shirt to Amelie and then hand over my credit card with a smile and not have her push a panic button under the counter to alert authorities. So I got myself together, put my shirt that I could actually close back on, and walked out of the dressing room.

  “How did you do?” Amelie asked, still sporting a pleasant smile.

  “Oh,” I said, smiling back. “This shirt pretty much captivated me!”

  “It’s so cute,” she agreed. “I couldn’t believe it went on sale that much!”

  “I know!” I said enthusiastically, and walked back over to the sales rack.

  Frankly, I had no idea how I was going to get the shirt back on the rack without Amelie noticing that I had finger-painted it with body fluids, because that really was my first plan: Get it back on the rack and get out of the store. But after a moment I realized that you don’t try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness boundaries applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.

  So I picked up a little frilly slip I saw on the sales rack, too—also, duly noted, an “M” (there’s no such thing as an “L” on sale in a skinny-girl store, I am beginning to learn)—put it in front of the shirt, then walked the both of them back to the counter where Amelie stood, waiting.

  “Oh, and a slip, too?” she said, to which I nodded again and
laid them both on the counter, the slip on top and the tags for both visible.

  “You know what? You can fold them up together, save on tissue paper,” I offered.

  I didn’t want her handling the shirt any more than she needed to.

  “And I don’t need a bag, either,” I added, just to make sure she didn’t come in contact with any of my DNA.

  As I walked out of the store with my new tiny baby clothes in hand, I knew that, after all of that, the shirt was really the cutest thing ever, but it was still also an “M,” so in my book it sorta deserved what it got for messing with a big girl. Like Present-Day Laurie.

  Who had just bought herself a brand-new, bloodstained, size “M” ruffly shirt after the toughest fight she’d ever had.

  She’s a Pill

  As soon as I saw the red envelope fall through the mail slot, I knew something was amiss. But it wasn’t until I tore the perforated edge and slid the envelope out of the mailer that I knew she had struck again.

  “Oh no!” I whined, loud enough to prompt my husband to come running and entered the room with a worried look on his face.

  “What is it?” he said quickly.

  I extended my arm and stomped my foot as he took it from my hand.

  “Precious!” he exclaimed, reading the title. “Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire! You’re kidding. I thought you said you weren’t going to let her get on Netflix anymore.”

  “You know I can’t control her,” I said quietly. “I think getting Zack and Miri Make a Porno in the mail last week more than proves that. She’s an entity unto herself. She does what she likes; I have nothing to do with it.”

  “You need to get ahold of this,” my husband said, shaking the envelope. “Because this is now out of hand. I was expecting Battlestar Galactica today. And now I get to spend Saturday afternoon playing Halo and watching Precious?”

  “Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” I added.

  “Set her straight, and do it now,” my husband warned. “Before we get three copies of Prince of Persia in the mail.”

  “You don’t have to watch it,” I informed him.

  “Of course you have to watch it!” he protested. “If you don’t watch it, you’ve asked the mailman to walk up to your house and back for nothing. And that’s just sadistic. I hate her.”

  “Hate is a strong word,” I reminded him. “She doesn’t hate you.”

  “Oh yeah?” he replied snidely, and held up the red envelope. “What’s this?”

  I understood my husband’s anger, but, I mean, after all, it wasn’t me who put Precious on the list. She did.

  Now, I will admit that she can be somewhat of a handful, but no one has experienced the consequences of her actions with as much interest as I have. Imagine, if you will, me waking up in a hotel room in New York, getting out of bed, and having my bare feet land in a nest of something crunchy that attacked my body quickly and with a forceful bond, like leeches. That’s exactly what happened to me before I shuffled to the bathroom and I realized I had a multitude of sticky cellophane wrappers affixed to my feet and ankles, and one particularly skilled wrapper with amazing climbing talents had made it up to my calf.

  Initially, I was stunned and concluded that some hotel employee with a weird wrapper fetish and who liked to watch fat ladies sleep had been in my room the night before, opening DVDs and things from Costco by the side of my bed. But on closer inspection, I noticed that each wrapper had a residue on it—gummy, dense, and bright white. I recognized it immediately. It was frosting, and my suspicions were confirmed when I inspected one of the gummy patches closer and saw what could be nothing but the grooves of tongue tracks.

  Oh, I thought shamefully. I know that tongue. The wide, overreaching lick and misshapen taste buds due to obscene amounts of salt intake. I know that tongue!! When I looked in the mirror, I saw proof positive. There had been no fetishist in the room, unwrapping box sets of Ken Burns documentaries and baby wipes. Nope. On my face was a five o’clock shadow consisting of Devil Dog crumbs from a box of snack cakes I had planned to mail my father later that morning. Suddenly, flashes of the ravage popped into my head. Actually, I don’t think it was as much of a ravage as it was a chubby girl sitting in bed in a dark room, eating snack cakes one after the other as crumbs fell out of her mouth and she threw the wrappers to the floor after she was done licking them, using both hands. Truth be told, it’s the same scene in broad daylight, except more people would be repulsed. And children would be told to look away.

  The next morning, I shuffled out of the bathroom shortly after waking up and decided that the shoes I had seen on a website the day before definitely needed purchasing. I’d had dreams I was wearing them and was subsequently told by others in my reverie that the shoes “made my toes look quite thin.” Frankly, if anyone—real or otherwise—is seeing a shoe mirage that shows bones in my feet, I don’t care if there’s a squeak toy at the end of the big curled-up toe and a big red puff on them: Those shoes will be on my piggies by sundown.

  Now determined to secure them, I flipped open my laptop, and my computer screen went immediately to my email account, which showed me that at a little after midnight the night before, a receipt arrived.

  A receipt for shoes that, according to my imaginary friends, made my toes appear starved.

  This has to be a mistake, I thought to myself; I didn’t buy those shoes last night. I know I looked at those shoes but didn’t buy them. I am fairly sure that I didn’t buy shoes last night; how can you buy shoes without putting in a credit-card number? Wow. Look at that. At 12:13 A.M. last night I bought shoes, evidenced by the last four digits of my credit-card number right there on the email receipt, under “payment method.”

  I concluded that I must have clicked a button I didn’t intend to click, and, really, I was going to buy the shoes anyway, so was it that big a deal that I accidentally bought them?

  And my plan was to recount just that to my best friend, Jamie, when I called her later that day.

  “This is crazy, but last night I saw a pair of shoes online that I loved,” I began. “They were these super cute red—”

  “Open-toed slingbacks with white stitching,” she finished for me. “I know, I was on the phone with you when you bought them.”

  “You … what?” I said very slowly.

  “Yeah, you said that if you got them,” she continued, “you would even cut and paint your nails, including the patches of skin on those couple of toes where your toenails fell off and never grew back because you tried shoes on without socks in a thrift store in 1987.”

  “I told you about those fallen toenails?” I cried, almost hyperventilating.

  “Everyone knew why you wore cowboy boots in a-hundred-twenty-degree weather,” she informed me. “No one believed you were allergic to the rubber in flip-flops.”

  “I still don’t understand when it was that I talked to you,” I said, trying to piece together the events of the night prior. “What time did you call?”

  “No, no, no, my friend,” Jamie said. “I guess you called me at around nine.”

  “I called you? Which made it midnight my time,” I concluded. “How long did we talk?”

  “Long enough to plot out the entire strategy of my divorce proceedings,” she said. “So far, you decided that we’re going to retain Gloria Allred, have a press conference on TMZ, and then you gave me a voodoo spell to make his teeth fall out.”

  “Does it involve lemons, a black candle, and something called cursing oil?” I asked suspiciously.

  “As a matter of fact it does,” Jamie confirmed.

  “In my dream, that’s what I used on my feet to make the toes shrink,” I said.

  “Nope,” Jamie corrected me. “Makes your teeth fall out. We’ll know for sure in three to six weeks.”

  “How long did we talk?” I asked.

  “Long enough for you to take a trip to Hogwarts and then go shoe shopping,” she said.

  “This is crazy,” I
said. “I only remember part of it as a dream, but I don’t remember talking to you at all.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said blankly. “You told me you had just taken an Ambien.”

  “Ooh,” I cooed, as if I was talking about a cute baby or the surviving snack cake on the dresser. “I love Ambien. I slept all night. Didn’t wake up once!”

  “Or did you?” my best friend questioned. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t know about it. Ambien gives you amnesia. Once you’re out, you’re out. People sleep-drive on that stuff and all sorts of other crazy things.”

  It was like Nixon calling Frost.

  And, it turns out, some people get on their Netflix queues and then get movies in the mail after they’ve made statements like “I have no desire to see Precious, think The September Issue is a far more socially relevant movie, and I don’t care what that says about me as a person.”

  It turns out that with one pop of a little tiny pill, I unleash my id, also known as Ambien Laurie. Ambien Laurie, in more basic terms, is my raw monkey form. I don’t really think she plots out her brand of chaos, it just naturally happens, like the formation of the universe. She can be unpredictable. She can be naughty. She can be earthy. I don’t think she does it on purpose, much like monkeys don’t wake up in the morning with plans to rip people’s faces off; it sort of happens in the spur of the moment and if the time feels right. I’ve decided that Ambien is apparently kind of like taking a de-evolution pill, which shorts out the synapses and unwinds any social conventions already imprinted in the brain; for eight hours, I am nothing short of Australopithecus returning to the plains to hunt and gather, and if that means bringing back salty snack foods and snappy sandals to my bed, so be it.

  After I realized I was turning into a nocturnal ape zombie who would rip the guts out of any snack cake within an arm’s distance, had access to my credit card, and would delve into the kingdom of the dark arts with little to no provocation, I weighed the odds. And, I’m sorry, there was just no contest. I like sleeping, so if a Twinkie or Devil Dog had to die every now and then at the hands of a teeth-gnashing night-eater, I was cool with that. If a new pair of shoes popped up on my front porch every now and then, that was a thrill, and, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I lose in this game.