Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development

by Jen Lancaster

  I’m underwhelmed with my results thus far. I appear to have the same blowout I came in with and if I can do it myself, why pay thirty-five dollars for duplicate results? I mean, I like Sandy Bullock and I root for her [Seriously, no one is Team Jesse James. No one.] but there’s no reason to fork over that much cash to see a movie she made ten years ago while someone may or may not be stealing my lucky paper clip.

  “I’m going to use the curling iron now,” the stylist informs me.

  Ah, there’s your pro-tip, I think. I bet that’s why my hair always falls—I’m too lazy to lock in the body with a curling wand.

  While Stacey takes a call from her fiancé, I read my e-mails and catch up on a couple of blogs. [I’m obsessed with the girl who blogs about her morning oatmeal every day. Even though my day-to-day life is uneventful, she makes me feel like Kim Kardashian in comparison.] She finishes before I do and when I finally glance up, I see her staring wide-eyed at my reflection, her mouth positioned in a perfect O.

  And that’s when I finally notice the stylist’s interpretation of the Southern Comfort. There’s no elegant back-combing going on here, no sexy tousling, and I don’t look like I’ve just rolled out of bed after a three-martini lunch with Don Draper on the set of Mad Men.

  Instead, I appear to be making my debut on the child pageant circuit.

  My hair has been forced into a tight series of sausage curls and seems to be a solid four inches shorter than when I arrived here thirty minutes ago. Seriously, it was shoulder length and now it’s barely past my ears.

  The hair is not “big” so much as it is “wide.” With a perfectly level crown, it’s so flat on top that one could land a tiny helicopter up there before the hair shaft bends at a ninety-degree angle in a cascade of bizarre ringlets. The entire effect is that of a cubed Afro. There’s an eighties hip-hop duo dying for this look, I can feel it.

  Stacey’s sputtering with barely suppressed laughter and sneaking photos of me in the mirror. However, I’m an ace with a round brush, so I don’t panic. I mean, when I did my friend Angie’s hair on our last girls’ weekend, she looked exactly like Phil Spector until I did the final comb-out and then, voilà! She was all Katie Holmes Interprets Jackie Kennedy Before All the Unpleasantness and it was FAB. What’s going to happen here is he’s going to give my tresses a few flicks of a rattail comb and then Stacey is going to be VERY jealous.

  The stylist gives me a few flicks of a rattail comb and… now I’m ready for the swimsuit competition on Toddlers & Tiaras.

  What the hell?

  “This is more ‘Shirley Temple’ and less ‘Brigitte Bardot,’” I tell him.

  He assures me, “It’ll loosen up while retaining volume. Give it a few minutes and tousle it with your fingers.”

  I tousle the ever-loving shit out of it while Stacey pays and gets us a cab, but all that does is make my fingers tacky from product. When I try to separate the curls, they don’t loosen up and give me big, sexy volume. They instead splinter into smaller, angrier, more aggressively springy curls.

  I’d have been a big pain in the ass about this if I were paying, but it’s on Stacey and the whole experience was fun, so I gather my hair-snakes into an elastic band and we ride back to the hotel. I spend most of the trip sticking my head out the window, but thus far thirty-five miles an hour of wind hasn’t made a dent in the do.

  While Stacey rests before dinner, I assemble my hair-fixin’ tools—dryer, conditioning spritzer, round brush, comb, travel-sized flat iron, and the kind of silicone-based serum that takes even the most unruly tresses from Shakira to Gwyneth in seconds flat.

  I spend the next thirty minutes alternately squirting my hair and pulling it taut with a brush, but every time I release the lock, it sproings back into an enormous spiral.

  Why is this happening?

  The more I tug and spritz, the bigger and stickier my hair gets.

  I feel like David After the Dentist. I keep looking at my head and asking, “Is this real life?”

  I finally give up and rinse, assuming that if I start from scratch, I can turn this hair-don’t back into a hairdo. However, since I’m only using Dallas tap water and not, you know, holy water, it is almost completely ineffectual.

  I remember one time I watched an episode of Jersey Shore where Pauly D. went swimming and his coif stayed perfectly in place. At the time I thought this was some sort of trick photography, but now I realize he must have employed the same kind of witchcraft as my stylist today.

  When Stacey and I meet up in the lobby, she asks if I took a nap instead of dealing with my Medusa. When I tell her no, she clamps her lips together and her eyes water, but she makes no further remarks. Yet the entire time we’re on the patio enjoying our dinner, her gaze keeps falling on my barely restrained hair-bush.

  I scour my hair in the morning to no effect and it’s not until I wash it on Illinois soil that I finally get it looking normal again.

  I don’t know why I was so surprised by all of this because with a motto like “Everything’s bigger in Texas,” it’s not like they didn’t warn me.

  But going forward, trust me, I will never mess with Texas.

  Reluctant Adult Lesson Learned:

  The phrase “Are you game?” is an enormous red flag. Heed it or eat beef heart. Your call.

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R T·W·E·N·T·Y

  Quickbooks, Quicker Shovels

  Never hire the cheapest accountant you can find.

  This dictum doesn’t have direct bearing on what happens next, but it’s an important rule that Fletch and I learned the hard way; ergo it bears repeating.

  Speaking of business, last year, Fletch quit his job to manage the corporate end of my writing career full-time. I realize this sounds like we’re very fancy and important, but that’s not the case.

  Frankly, I needed someone to get my lunch.

  Between what Fletch spent on multiple daily Starbucks runs, monthly parking at the Sears Tower, dining out, and dressing up, his salary was kind of a wash. You know how some moms quit their jobs because the child-care costs are killing them and it’s cheaper for them to stay home with the baby? In this case, Fletch is the baby with a taste for custom-tailored shirts and indoor parking. [Fletch just read this and says it’s me who’s the baby in this scenario and he’s the caretaker. He is wrong.]

  Also, after putting in years of sixty-hour weeks at jobs he hated in order to earn enough for me to pursue a writing career, I kind of owed him. That’s not to mention how I kept screwing up the business end of things by stuffing important corporate notices in drawers because they looked boring and I was busy creating. [Fletch made me add this whole paragraph. And he rolled his eyes at the “creating” part.]

  So we decided he would become my assistant.

  Turns out he’s kind of terrible at it and I would fire him in a minute if he weren’t particularly conscientious about providing a noncereal-based lunch. Since we’ve started working together, I’ve yet to waste a single afternoon recovering from a sugar crash. Yay, Fletch!

  We’re eating our Fletch-fetched lunch in the kitchen today—Jimmy John’s Beach Club, a perennial favorite of mine—when Libby leaps to her feet and begins to glower at something outside the sliding glass door. Her entire ruff goes up, too.

  “That’s weird,” I say. “What’s with her?” It’s unusual to see her like this because there’s absolutely no one and nothing she doesn’t like. Case in point, this morning she finagled her way onto a chair I didn’t fully push in, climbed on the kitchen table, and swiped and ate a banana (peel and all) and most of an overripe pear. [Actually, yes, we do go through a ton of antibacterial spray in our house. Why do you ask?]

  We follow her gaze all the way to the back of the yard where we spy… something gray with a pink tail.

  “That is the biggest freaking rat I’ve ever seen!” I shriek.

  “Jen, it’s a possum,” he replies between bites of his Billy Club sandwich. “You really need to have your vision rechecked.
”

  Darkly, I reply, “I would… if my assistant ever made me an eye doctor appointment.”

  “I’ll put it on the list.”

  Don’t get me started about The List.

  I hate The List.

  I want to punch The List.

  Every time I need something done, Fletch says he’s going to put it on The List but at this point, since nothing in the history of ever has actually been accomplished on The List, I don’t believe The List even exists.

  The List is a Lie.

  I scrub at my eyes and squint at the distance between me and the possum. “What’s he doing?”

  Fletch peers out the window behind him. “He appears to be eating dog shit. That’s what they do; they consume waste.”

  This is so wrong.

  I drop the salt and vinegar chip I’m about to eat. “So, what you’re telling me is this possum is a giant rat, only with a better PR department. Are you going to call the doody removal service now? Please?”

  Recently we had a few warm days when the snow in the yard melted and all the dog crap that magically disappeared in the winter magically reappeared. The guys who mow our lawn are supposed to take care of this but we won’t see them until spring. Also, their usual preferred method of “removing it” entails driving a riding mower over it, chopping it into a thousand shards, and then nodding enthusiastically when I inquire if it’s gone. The whole thing turned into a bit of a Mexican standoff [In the figurative sense, not the pejorative.] and we need a better long-term solution.

  He nods complacently. “It’s on the list.”

  I grit my teeth. “In the interim, we’re just going to have the possum take care of it?”

  He takes a thoughtful chew. “We’d probably need to bring in more than one possum for that to be an effective solution.”

  This? Right here? Is why he’s a terrible employee.

  But if I fired him, I’d have to pay him unemployment. [I checked.]

  I make the executive decision to find a waste removal service my damn self and it turns out we can get weekly poop-removal for eleven dollars! Eleven dollars!! I can’t imagine how the company possibly makes a profit by only charging eleven dollars because the time needed to pick up the dogs’ deposits is not insignificant.

  Maybe we use the same accountant?

  I hope they’re up-cycling the waste somehow and selling it as fertilizer so it makes financial sense because I’d like for them to stay in business so I never handle dog poop again. Last year we had a tiny yard and a lot of snow, so in the spring it fell to me to do clean-up as Fletch was busy at his job drinking lattes and wearing shirts with fancy cuffs. A sudden thaw left us with a backyard that looked like the open sewers of Bombay and even though I was wearing protective rubber boots up past my ankles, let’s just say they weren’t high enough. As I sloshed through the SlushPoopy™, I would have happily paid someone ten times eleven dollars. When I finished my gruesome mission, I stripped everything off from the underpants down and threw it all away. That I didn’t somehow catch hookworm is nothing short of a miracle.

  After lunch I snap a photo of the possum and post it on my Facebook page. People write on my wall telling me that if we’re seeing a nocturnal animal in the daytime, he’s likely ill. When I relay this information to Fletch, he replies, “How do you know they’re sick? Was he in his bathrobe? Did he have a tiny cup of tea?”

  So now I have yet another furry creature to worry about. Poor little Libby almost died as a puppy because of starvation, which is why I never give her too hard a time when she steals food. We didn’t get her until she was perfectly healthy, but I still have trouble letting down my guard. Both my cats Tucker and Jordan seem happy enough, but at seventeen and eighteen respectively, they’re thinner and less energetic than they were back in their heyday.

  Of course, Maisy has her issues and even though she’s doing well, particularly because of Libby, I perpetually fret over the “what ifs.”

  I don’t quite know what to do with a sick possum or how I might go about having him treated. If I could even get my hands on him, I’d probably have to take him to a different vet because I’m kind of embarrassed about my last visit when I took Tucker in for date rape.

  Yeah.

  Talking about this visit at lunch is fun.

  “What do you mean your cat is a ‘date rapist?’” Gina asks, while Stacey and Tracey gawp at me, trying to form questions.

  I set down my grilled cheese because I probably can’t recount the story without hand gestures. “You know how Libby had a little adjustment period when we first got her? Everyone was jealous and there was some aggression. We’d keep them from fighting and in turn Loki and Maisy would get frustrated so they’d hump each other.”

  Everyone’s witnessed this at my house at one time or another and it’s a sight to behold. Maisy’s always been the main culprit and what’s so weird is she’s female and generally opts to hump the wrong end. [It’s a dominance thing.] But she’s also kind of fat and a little slow, so her victim generally escapes and then she’s left with all this pent-up energy and she, for lack of a better description, air humps.

  I call it her Elvis impersonation and it is hilarious.

  I brush crumbs off my shirt and continue. “Sometimes when Maisy couldn’t catch anyone else, she’d hump Tucker. And because Libby worships Maisy, Libby thought, ‘Hey, that must be what we do,’ so she started humping Tucker. Our trainer Elaine has basically told us we’re morons and we have to stop this behavior, and we did, but it’s too late. Poor Tucker has apparently snapped and now he’s doing things to the other cats. Dirty things. To the other male cats, that is.”

  “Like… prison?” Tracy asks.

  “Like Welcome to Oz [HBO, not Judy Garland.] things?” Stacey adds.

  I nod. “Exactly. I’ll be asleep and I’ll wake up to this god-awful howling and Tuck will have the other cats pinned and he’s… kind of going at it. He’s been fixed for, what? Seventeen years? But apparently there’s some muscle memory. We’ve done our best to eliminate all the humping from every creature and we thought everything was copacetic. Then Tucker started doing this weird squatting thing so we rushed him to the vet because we worried that he had kidney failure.”

  “Poor guy!” Gina coos.

  I take a swig of my iced tea. “Um, no, he’s fine. Three hundred and fifty-two dollars later, we come to find out there’s nothing wrong with him and he’s just a dirty old man, trying to lure kittens into his panel van with saucers of milk.”

  Stacey’s still confused. “Wait, does he have syphilis? What is the test they administer to find out if your cat is a date rapist? Did they check him for HPV?”

  I wave her off. “Not anything specific like that—they just ran a ton of blood work to eliminate all the other possibilities and they determined there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him. He’s just a pervert.” I lean back in my chair and sigh. “It’s the cycle of abuse.”

  Stacey processes this and then says, “So what you’re telling me is they didn’t do a swab under his claws or anything.”

  “Right.”

  Tracey interjects, “Now are the other cats… is it a big hump-fest? They’re just taking it?”

  I run my hand over my ponytail, forgetting that it’s probably greasy from my sandwich. “No, they’re kind of sad and withdrawn… you know, they’re not on Facebook anymore and they’re not really seeing their friends.”

  “They’re probably not going to go back next semester?” Stacey adds.

  “Yeah, they’re probably not going back,” I laugh.

  That’s when I launch into possum updates and I mention how Fletch, bless his Appalachian-American roots, has offered up what he finds to be the most elegant solution. “He wants to shoot the poor creature to put it out of its misery, to which I responded, ‘We’re not shootin’ us some possum in Lake Forest.’”

  Seriously, would you hire this man?

  Regardless, the possum thing ends up being moot bec
ause I don’t see him for a couple of days. Perhaps now that we’ve hired the poop patrol, he’s off to greener, more vile pastures. Plus, it’s since snowed again and I don’t see any signs of him having come in the yard.

  I’m getting ready for bed and the dogs have had their final out of the evening. That’s when Libby decides it’s time to wrestle and afterward everyone inhales a gallon of water. Even though “final out” is Fletch’s responsibility because he tends to be clad in real shoes and not just slippers, he went to sleep early and the task falls to me.

  As Libby’s still working on the “come” command, we keep her on a very short leash. In fact, the few times during the day that we don’t walk her, we clip her on a long lead within the backyard so she’s always in our sight when she does her business. We have a small hole in the fence by the pool mechanicals and we have it blocked off, but this dog’s got the flexible exoskeleton of your average city rat, [Or possum.] so we’re extra careful.

  In terms of being smart, Libby is very, very pretty. She’s sweet and trainable but she’s not much of what you’d call a “critical thinker.” This is evidenced every time she clotheslines herself at the end of a long lead, which is every time she’s on it. She’s yet to figure out where her personal force field ends and her wipeouts are both spectacular and frequent. No matter how many times we slowly and deliberately demonstrate her reach, the lesson never seems to stick.

  Loki, on the other hand, understands the “come” command, but he could give a good goddamn about it when he catches the scent of something in the wood line, which leads to me having to traipse through the snow in my bathrobe and slippers to retrieve his yappy ass. So now, I’m choosing to save myself some aggravation by clipping Loki to the long leash. Libby’s always sucking up to him and I figure if he’s confined to a fifteen-foot radius, she won’t go anywhere.

  I figure wrong.

  Immediately Libby takes off for the other side of the yard and I find myself bounding through snowdrifts in Crocs and a robe. Then we play a long, freezing game of hide-and-seek, which culminates in Libby spotting the hole in the fence. We both make a mad dash and reach it at the same time. Libby, however, has the good sense to not trip over the small grayish object right in front of it.