It Looked Different on the Model

by Laurie Notaro

  Bath bombs.

  “Never mind, I accept it. I’m going to die,” I told my sister. “I left the chocolate downstairs. Please remember me as forty pounds lighter. But if I toss the keys out the window, will you come over and put my car in the right direction? I’m afraid Dad is going to write me a ‘citizen’s arrest’ ticket for aggravated parking. And if I never see you again, check Nick’s armpits for stubble.”

  As soon as I hung up with my sister, however, I heard my Mom yell from downstairs.

  “Laurie?” she called.

  “I only want to talk about it with my therapist!” I called back.

  “We’re going to dinner at Outback! Do you want to come?” she replied.

  I actually thought about it for a second, because who passes up a free steak and baked potato? But then the reality of spending the next hour and a half attempting to avoid the “Sometimes Mommy Can’t Get Her Shoes on By Herself and That’s Perfectly Normal Only Because She Has a Bad Hip” talk would cost me more in trying to cure the residual twitching and spontaneous sobbing than a free baked potato was worth, even with all the fixin’s.

  “No thanks,” I shouted back. “You know it’s only two forty-five.”

  “Your father likes to order off the day menu,” my mother yelled. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? We gotta hurry. The lunch special is only good for fifteen more minutes. After that, everything goes up two dollars.”

  “Nah, I’m good,” I called back, sighing with relief when I heard the front door close.

  When my father sat down at the kitchen table the next morning after I had just taken my first sip of coffee and announced, “You know, Anderson Cooper is waging a war against Christmas,” I knew that I was most likely in the safe zone and that the jarring “touching incident” from yesterday would not be discussed, just like every other traumatizing family event. Which is exactly how we like it. Everything was back to normal and completely ignored, no matter what the residual effects. Nobody touched nobody.

  Until an hour later, when I was ironing the dress I had planned to wear that day and there were two quick knocks at the door.

  I was about to say, “Hang on a second,” and grab a robe, a shirt, a towel, or anything that would have covered me up, since I was only wearing a vintage full slip—which is legally considered underclothes—when the door swung open and there stood my father.

  “He—” He stopped abruptly in mid-word when he saw the look on my face, which I’m sure was the same face I use when people walk in on me when I’m using the toilet (I have now used that face exactly three times in my life: The first was at SXSW, when a girl burst into the stall I was occupying and demanded that I get up because she needed to pee “real quick,” and I would have punched her had my underwear not been wrapped around my ankles. And the other time, when my nephew was a toddler and every room was free range for him. Between seeing me in a compromised situation and my mother wanting to Nair the Y chromosome off him, that child has had plenty of deep-rooted RuPaul-level damage).

  There I was, wearing basically a long bra dress with my fat old-lady arms naked and exposed, my bra straps visible, and I didn’t even have tights on at this point. I looked like every little old Italian widow, except I didn’t have food stains on me yet. The only thing that stopped me from slipping into a psychotic break was that, in the event of my developing an alter personality, it would take my father longer to close the door.

  “—eeyyyyyyyy,” he resumed, in the same amount of time it has taken for comets to crash into the Earth, species to go extinct, established civilizations to collapse, and the world to completely forget that the Romans invented indoor plumbing.

  “Good job with the parking,” he said. “I can see you’re making an effort.”

  “Okay,” I forced out. “I do have a bra on, but I would prefer to talk about this when I’m actually wearing clothes.”

  “You should really come and stay over here,” my sister reiterated over the phone three minutes late.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “I might as well stay here. I have a feeling Dad’s been working hard on a lecture about the Lie of Global Warming, which he plans to present tomorrow at seven-thirty A.M. at our Breakfast Assault. I think he has diagrams, and earlier today someone was printing out pictures of polar bears dancing on a beach and nuzzling with seals. I guess the world isn’t perfect. If it was, Milky Ways would only have one gram of fat and Tim Burton never would have made a musical.”

  The imperfection of the world proved itself a minute later when I walked into the bathroom to dry my hair.

  “Mom!” I cried. “Where is the salon chair? The salon chair is gone! I can walk straight through to the toilet! Where is the salon chair?”

  “I had to move it; it’s Thursday,” she called back from downstairs. “Patricia and the cleaning ladies come today.”

  You have got to be kidding me, I thought angrily as I plugged in the hair dryer. Now I have to stand up while I blow-dry my hair? I don’t want to stand up while I blow-dry my hair. The thought of it is just exhausting. Standing up is ridiculous! Who does that? Who does that!

  “What are you doing up there?” my mother called again.

  “I’m drying my hair,” I replied indignantly. “And I have to do it upright because it’s Thursday!”

  “Don’t make a mess! Patricia will be here in ten minutes!” she replied. “I know you’re up there making a mess with all of that goddamned hair!”

  “I am not!” I shouted back. “I am not making a mess! I am rolling up a big ball from all the hair that fell out of my head this week, and I’m putting it on your toothbrush like an ornament on a Christmas tree that Anderson Cooper doesn’t want you to have, right at this moment!”

  It had only taken a week, even without sitting on my mom’s Time Traveler Toilet, for me reset the clock and become twelve years old.

  The following Sunday, after I’d returned home, my mother didn’t even say hello when my father asked if I wanted to talk to her and then handed her the phone.

  “What the hell was in that goddamned red bag?” she demanded immediately.

  “Mom,” I said. “I’m fifteen hundred miles away. Did you buy a Joan Rivers webcam on QVC and think I can see you? Because I can’t see you through any of the holes in the ear portion of the handset.”

  “The red bag you left here,” she explained. “You left it upstairs with all of that other stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said simply, trying to remember. Point is that I never fully embraced the fact that my suitcase does not possess the magical powers of a Lion, a Witch, or a Wardrobe, and cannot carry the contents of a magical, mysterious land within it. Add to this the fact that I live in a land where Soysage is available in convenience stores on any corner, but if you try to buy the only kind of ricotta legally allowed by your mother for lasagna or tortillas that don’t “expire” for half a year, you’re out of luck, as well as room in the suitcase. As a result of filling it up with cheese and starches, a couple of things got unknowingly left behind.

  “Oh,” I said slowly. “I’m sorry, I forgot to ask you to mail it to me.”

  “Mail it to you?” she said sharply. “Mail it to you? Why don’t you tell me what the hell it was?”

  “In the red bag?” I asked. “The one with the ribbons on it and—”

  “I don’t know if it had friggin’ ribbons on it or not,” she snapped. “But I do know that when I bit into one of those goddamned little balls, it disintegrated like sand all over my tongue and started fizzing up like acid! I tried to spit it out and it wouldn’t come off, and when I drank water it started foaming more!”

  “Kathy Monkman’s bath bombs?” I asked, even though my jaw was hanging open. “You ate Kathy Monkman’s bath bombs?”

  “What the hell is a bath bomb?” she shot back. “I opened up the bag and there were these two little boxes with balls of candy! They smelled sweet! I thought it was marzipan!”

  “Marzipan?” I asked. “Mar
zipan? Where would you even find marzipan after 1910?”

  “There was powdered sugar on top!” she insisted.

  “That was baking soda!” I cackled. “I can’t believe you ate Kathy Monkman’s bath bombs!”

  “I didn’t eat them!” she denied staunchly. “I took a bite! Then it melted, the bubbles started, and I had to lean over the sink and let the froth build-up drain from my mouth. While your father watched. I’ll never forget that taste. Never! It was disgusting!”

  “Well, I’ve never seen anyone on Top Chef make anything out of borax, Epsom salts, and baking soda,” I agreed. “You were approximately one chemical compound away from eating crystal meth. But maybe throw in some tuna and cream of chicken soup and it would be excellent.”

  “I can’t believe your mother ate bath bombs,” my husband said from the other end of the couch as he shook his head. “This is better than the time your sister ate the dog cookie.”

  And that was true, it was better than the time my middle sister found a bag of treats I had just bought my dog, Maeby, from the gourmet pet store. My sister dug into them, uninvited. After she ate the whole thing, I walked into the kitchen and she took that opportunity to tell me that “Those cookies weren’t very sweet!”

  “You mean the ones shaped like a dog bone?” I replied, noticing the open bag, which was cellophane with little dog bones printed on it; and it was tied with a ribbon decorated with paw prints.

  “They had frosting on them,” she argued, as if I was somehow wrong and I had mistaken a Mrs. Fields for a pet-supply store with leashes, pet-odor remover, and puppy pads.

  “The frosting provided even more detail that it was a dog bone,” I informed her, looking into the bag. “You ate the one that had Woof! written on it.”

  Yet my mother had beaten my sister in consuming the unthinkable, because she had identified as delectable edibles not even objects digestible by any species, but bathroom cleaners and ant killer.

  “Wow, Mom,” I said to my mother over the phone. “Tell me what you wouldn’t eat if you thought there was sugar on top of it.”

  “They were in candy cups! In candy boxes!” she protested. “All fingers pointed to candy!”

  “Oh, no,” I corrected her. “No. All fingers were pointing to your mouth. I’m going to leave all kinds of stuff around your house now to see if you will eat it. It will be like an Easter egg hunt, but sometimes foamy. Sometimes not.”

  “You’re so funny,” my mother responded sharply. “For a ten-year-old.”

  “Oh,” I replied. “You got that right.”

  Why Not Take All of Me?

  So I was just informed that there’s a thing that can block your private parts in X-ray scanners. You know what I’m talking about: the Rapiscan machine that can not only see through clothes but can show how much saggage my multiple decades—despite preventive measures and expensive body butters—have inflicted on all parts affected by gravity and all the unnecessary time I spent not lying down. I know for a fact that Rapiscan is installed at the Phoenix airport, and since I go to Phoenix a lot, I will eventually be instructed to take a trip through the tunnel of horror, which will not only rip my clothes off faster than a guy just released on parole but I’ll be STANDING UP. And I get a nice, single-serving dose of cancer for an amuse bouche.

  I thought for a moment that I would absolutely have to get these little things called Flying Pasties—tiny patches you can adhere to your “no access” areas to ensure privacy—and I was scrambling for my credit card when I suddenly stopped and thought, Why am I doing this? TSA, if you want to peek in my pants so badly, go right ahead. If you really need to invade my privacy the way you claim because some underachiever on a flight to Detroit tried to light his wiener on fire, you deserve what you get.

  And that’s not all.

  You really want to see me naked, let’s take this baby all the way. Take a good look, because if it’s so important to get to third base without even buying me any sort of dessert first—preferably chocolate-filled or anything on fire—shaving is off the table. If you’re looking for a belly ring, I’ll give you a jelly ring instead. It’s that thing that folds over. And you’ll be getting the bra that has one strap held to the cup with a safety pin, because that’s the one that doesn’t dig into my back fat so much. And underwear?

  If you’re sure you wanna buy a ticket to no-man’s-land, get an eyeful. Drink it in, my friend. No, that’s no loincloth, those are the panties that I save for Midol days, with the torn waistband and an aggressive stubbornness that OxiClean couldn’t conquer. And yes, that just might be fire shooting at you out of my nipples, drawn in Sharpie, and when I turn around, those just might be the words “KISS IT” and an arrow pointing to my ass, which no human eyes have seen since 1994.

  Until now.

  Enjoy.

  And don’t worry. I’ll be back.

  Show Ho Ho Time

  The moment I walked into my neighbor’s Christmas-perfect living room, I felt inadequate.

  I had never seen a Christmas tree in a non-retail situation look so pristine; the wood-stoked fire in the fireplace roared heartily, and the aroma of a freshly baked ham drifted all around us. The décor was so perfect that I expected Diane Keaton to waltz through at any minute, wearing all off-white cashmere. I wasn’t sure how my husband and I were going to work our way into the mix, but we were going to try, and I suddenly felt very lacking about the Christmas wreath hanging on my door, which I had cobbled together like a craft mom from fir and cedar debris that had crashed into my yard during the last storm.

  Being new on our street, we were thrilled when our neighbors invited us to their holiday gathering, since we were anxious to get to know the people in our community. We had already encountered some of the folks on our street, but this was a chance to not only get to meet a wide variety from around the neighborhood but to show our hosts that we were friendly, personable, and nice.

  Martha, our hostess, was welcoming and warm and showed us into the kitchen, where the holiday goodies had been spread out. Careful not to appear as either gluttons or too picky to enjoy the food that she had obviously gone to a great deal of effort to prepare, we took a little of this, a little of that, and tried to mingle. It was a house full of people that we had never met before, which is not easy when you’re limiting your drink to apple juice to ensure that “the new neighbors across the street desperately putting on a good front” don’t become “the alcoholics that just moved in, let the house go to shame, and are probably selling drugs, because she’s home all day.” We met the retired lawyer from up the street, whom I had seen walking his min pins several times a week; the librarian, who was the star in the senior-center holiday program; and a young wife who was there with her husband and really didn’t know a soul, either. She, however, was slightly less concerned with first impressions than I was, evidenced by the nearly empty wineglass in her hand. That is foolish, I thought. Glug, glug, glug! This is a neighborhood holiday gathering, not a bachelorette party. You need to be on your best behavior. This is showtime, lady!

  A half hour later, disaster struck. We had just finished nibbling on our ham and snacks when Martha came into the room and made a sweeping cull, choosing people here and there without any indication of criteria. Somehow, my husband escaped, but I wasn’t so lucky. With Martha’s hand at my elbow, I was guided into the living room with the rest of her picks. Once she had herded us in front of the piano, she had a helper hand out copies of the “Jingle Bells” lyrics to the guests, and she sat down behind the keyboard. I had been wrong.

  This was showtime.

  Oh, how I wish I had not only forgone the apple juice but had downed several shots. I am simply not a singer. I do not come from a family of singers. When we get together and warble “Happy Birthday” to one another over cake and candle, it doesn’t sound as much like a song as it does a pack of jackals yapping over a fresh carcass. And in my case, it’s nothing that you want to inflict on the innocent, or at least on people w
ho haven’t reported us to the city yet. Who is flat, off-key, or tone deaf in the Notaro clan is all up in the air—it doesn’t matter, and we can’t tell, anyway. The fact of the matter is that we all know it, and instead of choosing to come together as a family and embrace our difficulties, we have formed splinter groups, which then mock the available “talent” in the other splinter groups. On holidays, to the naked eye it will look like everyone is carrying on, singing a jolly tune, but if you pay attention, the sound is suspiciously thin. It becomes clear that 80 percent of us are lip-synching it, leaving only the people who have married into the family and the children, who aren’t aware of their hideous, hawkish voices yet, to round out the song.

  Therefore, I wasn’t too happy when I was handed the lyrics and Martha began to tinkle out some notes. I didn’t realize I was going to be expected to perform; the invitation certainly didn’t say anything about mandatory vocal contributions. In addition, I didn’t know why everyone wasn’t asked to join in, only a handful of victims. Why would you go and pick people like that instead of just plunking one note down on the piano and letting all of the guests who had the performer chromosome come running in seconds flat?

  The young wife that I had met in the kitchen had also been picked and stood next to me. We exchanged similar glances of pity, each wondering what we had done to make ourselves stand out.

  Martha finished her intro and launched jovially into the song, and I noticed that many of the singers possessed robust voices, like the librarian who was starring in the senior-center program. After pretending to get lost on the words of the first line, I feigned a laugh, acted a little goofy, and launched into the song myself.

  Albeit silently.

  But I was pretending to have a good time, even using my pointer finger to make sure I followed along with the right words, looking at the other singers, making my eyes smile thanks to Tyra Banks, and nodding my head when I felt the moment required an extra dash of jubilation to make it real. And, just for the record, this was new for me. No one practices Facial Song Acting in my family; we all just look pissed and hungry until the song is over.