We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

  I was exhausted, still had my Japanese Teen Basketball headache, and all I really wanted to do was find a nice stall “backstage” and hunker down for the winter. My mission was interrupted by a young girl who worked at the bookstore and was running the event because her boss had abandoned his post and left her in charge. Which was not a good thing, mainly because she was green.

  “You don’t look so good,” I told her. “Are you okay?”

  “I had my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday,” she explained as her skin got greener by several shades and she broke out into a heavy sweat. “I didn’t have to go to school today, but my boss called me in.”

  “Are you at Berkeley?” Grania asked.

  “Oh, no,” she replied, holding on to a table to keep herself up. “I’m a junior in high school, and I thought if I came in it would show my boss that I was dedicated and might advance my career in the company.”

  “This is what I think,” I said point-blank. “You need to go home, pop some Vicodin, go suffer in your own bed, and apply at Dairy Queen when your head swelling recedes a bit so it’s not so . . . circus size. Any boss that would make you come in to work is a guy you need to tell to kiss your grits.”

  “Okay,” the little green girl said weakly.

  “And go to college! Graduate, come back, and show that joker how to run this store!” I said quickly, being that her eyes glazed over and were fluttering to stay open. “Oh boy. I know that look. That’s a throw-up face.”

  “I just need to sit down,” she said, plopping into one of the seats set up for the reading as Grania offered to get some water for her.

  I, in turn, took this opportunity to go “backstage” and go over some notes before the reading started. And that’s just what I was doing in my own private little stall, when, suddenly and without warning, I heard a trumpet blow.

  Oh dear Lord, I thought to myself and tried really hard not to laugh at the person who had done it.

  Until I realized it had come from me.

  Oh no, I thought to myself, I hate it when that happens. I hate it when one little bubble gets ahead of the pack and simply can’t wait to get out and see what’s on the other side without a permission slip.

  With only minutes to go before the reading started, I reluctantly got my stuff together and left the stall, and smiled at the lady washing her hands at the vanity. She smiled back, too, but a smile that said, “So it was you, huh? Now I can put a face to the fart.”

  It was a very uncomfortable few seconds for me until she finally finished up and left, leaving me feeling ashamed, embarrassed, and also not quite so bloated. I dried my hands and headed out to the reading.

  “Are you ready?” the green girl said, to which I nodded, but as soon as I saw rows and rows and rows of empty chairs, I didn’t feel quite so enthusiastic. Aside from the green girl, aside from Grania, there was only one other person in the audience. Only one person had come to my reading. Only one lady.

  And she was the very one who had heard me blow the trumpet merely moments before.

  Now, honestly, I’m not sure which of our expressions best exemplified the look of naked horror, mine or hers, but for the next half hour, I couldn’t go anywhere and she couldn’t go anywhere. We were both prisoners, held there by the glue of mortification and not knowing what else to do. I mean, I couldn’t even look anywhere else but at her, she was the only person there, and she couldn’t look at anyone else but me, and there we were, for thirty long, torturous minutes, locked in this unpleasant, suffering circumstance until the green girl wandered over and announced, “My painkiller is wearing off, I’m going to call my mom to come get me.”

  And when it was over, when I called it a day at that very moment and freed my one unfortunate audience member, letting her go forth into the world never to forget the most ghastly, appalling half hour she had spent in her life, quite thankfully, no one clapped.

  7

  I guess a tooth can just fall out of your head at any time. You never know. You could just be nibbling on a roll in a restaurant, waiting for your dinner to arrive, when all of a sudden, there’s a tooth in your napkin.

  And I happened to know that pretty darn well, because there I was in Los Angeles an hour before my reading, looking at my tooth in my napkin.

  Now, to be fair, what I was looking at was a crown, the brand-new $800 crown my dentist had just fitted me with before I left for my book tour. Some people don’t really consider crowns as teeth, but let me tell you, when bad genetics and lazy flossing have their way with you, you’re happy to consider anything in your mouth pale in color and harder than chewing gum a tooth. To be truthful, however, I was not looking at a pale tooth but a gold tooth, I suppose because my dentist has what I would now classify as a “skewed” sense of humor. Apparently, he took advantage of the fact that while under the gas I was higher than Courtney Love gets minutes before a court date then he saw fit to install things in my mouth that were sparkly, pretty, and had a far higher profit margin than a regular old porcelain job.

  “What did you do?” I said when I finally came to and caught a glimpse of the gold tooth in the hand mirror provided by my madman dentist. “You put bling in my mouth! Look at me. I am BLINGING. I’m going to have to sell my regular-person car and buy an Escalade now, you know.”

  As I held the key to my rap/hip-hop career in my hand, I thought to myself, What are these things held in with, Scotch tape? I mean, I have nightmares about stuff like this, sure, but really, unless I was involved in a union brawl or went to live in a trailer park, I never expected to be able to spit a molar out of my mouth and into my palm.

  My dinner arrived, but unless, as I told my waiter, he could find a way to make a chicken parmigiana into an ice cream float, I was gonna take a pass. Plus, I didn’t really have time to worry about the hole in my mouth; I had a reading to get to in about twenty minutes. I figured that if I stuck a wad of chewing gum into the nub that my crown used to fit over, I could somehow protect it and I would not be so horrified about the fact that I essentially had a Tic Tac for a tooth.

  And the gum worked, I was surprised to find out, it really did. It worked as long as I kept my mouth closed and didn’t speak. Which, for an author about to conduct a reading stretching anywhere from an hour to several, wasn’t an ideal position. You see, once I started the reading, the gum fell off during the first paragraph I read, and feeling rather uncomfortable sticking my hand in my mouth to keep the gum tacked down, I simply swallowed it. Much to my dismay, however, even though my tooth was gone, jagged, sharp chunks of the cement that really hadn’t fulfilled its duty to keep it there remained, slicing the side of my tongue when I attempted to talk.

  Despite that, I would like to think that the reading had been going well; it was an intimate crowd, about five, maybe seven people, not big enough to warrant the PA system that had been set up, but still, small can be good. We were doing okay. So far, I had managed to swallow the blood leaking from my ripped and shredded tongue as I lapsed deeper and deeper into a lateral lisp, and, at this point, no one was complaining.

  Until they came.

  I saw them as soon as they rolled in, coming toward our small little contented group. The pair, an elderly man and woman, both in wheelchairs, made their way down the long aisle, spotted us, and then headed straight for my group.

  Eventually, they took two spots in the “back,” which, considering the small size of the audience, was about four feet from me. They both leaned in, cupped their ears like I’ve seen my Nana do, and began to listen.

  Well, sort of.

  “Wha?” the man sort of yelled. “Whatchoo saying? We can’t—can’t hear a word!”

  “Okay,” I tried to say with a little laugh as blood seeped from my ravaged tongue, and spoke a bit louder.

  “No,” the woman said after about two seconds. “No good, no. No good. Still can’t hear you. You’re going to have to speak up, miss. We can’t hear you.”

  I took a deep breath and smiled again, boost
ing my voice to an even higher level.

  This time they sat still for a while, about five seconds, before something beside me caught the man’s attention.

  “Hey, there,” he yelled, interrupting me again. “Miss! Miss! Use that thing there, that thing to your right, the bullhorn, the megaphone, right there next to you.”

  “The microphone?” I asked quizzically. “You want me to use the microphone?”

  “Yep, yeah, yeah, that thing right there,” the man said as his sidekick nodded.

  “Well, I—” I started, because I didn’t know what to say. Really, there were a handful of people in attendance, which included myself, all within such proximity that I could reach out and touch any one of them. Without leaning.

  “You know,” I wanted to say, “I am mishing a tooth, my tongue ish now shliced like a deli ham, and all of you jusht ought to feel lucky that I don’t look like Caligula here. I am bleeding for you people!”

  But I didn’t say any of those things. Instead, I picked up the microphone, turned on the PA, and resumed the reading.

  And yes, I was aware, I was all too much aware, that when my voice boomed out all over that bookstore as I was reading a column about explaining oral sex to my eighty-five-year-old grandmother and people came from the history section and the gardening section and the biography section to see what all the commotion was about, the last thing they expected was a lisping girl bellowing to a crowd that could have easily fit into a dressing room.

  I was almost done reading that piece when two hands raised up from the back row.

  “Miss?” the man called out. “Miss? When are you going to get to the part about sexual dysfunction?”

  Although I was relieved to learn that he could finally hear me, I stopped, and this time, I sighed.

  “What can I do for you, shir?” I said, putting my book down. “We don’t talk about shexshual dyshfunction in thish piesh. It’sh about my Nana not undershtanding what Monica did to the preshident under hish deshk. If there had been shexshual dyshfunction at the time of that inshident, Al Gore would now be the leader of thish country.”

  “No, we mean when are you going to talk about sexual dysfunction in seniors?” the lady said.

  “And how to fix it!” the man chimed in. “You wrote the book, you ought to know! Aren’t you the doctor that wrote that book?”

  I shook my head. “I’m shorry to tell you thish, but you’re at the wrong reading,” I informed them. “But you know, worse things have happened.”

  “We’re in the wrong place?” the woman said. “Isn’t this Barnes and Noble?”

  “Yes, but this is Los Angeles,” I explained. “I saw seven Barnes and Nobles just on the drive over here.”

  “Idiot,” the woman said as she hit the man.

  I just laughed.

  The Unseen

  My dog was acting strange. In the kitchen, she barked at thin air, growled at the microwave, and tried to dig her way under the refrigerator.

  The cat also got in on the act, hissed and batted at shadows and ran wildly from nothing.

  Then, one day, I encountered nothing, too. I was in the dining room when I heard a ruckus erupt in the kitchen, but when I ran to investigate, it was empty, and also eerily quiet.

  Something was there. I just didn’t know, and couldn’t see, what.

  After several days of this sort of taunting, I was getting a little freaked out. Fighting the unseen can be a tricky business, as my husband learned the hard way after reading the Dhammapada and refusing to kill a blithe little spider that had occupied a parcel of our dining room in between a lampshade and an aromatherapy candle because she “had as much right to a peaceful life as we did, and she was an exceptionally talented web weaver.” Sure, it was a pretty web, but the Michelangelo of her species had woven her beautiful home especially so that she could lay about ten thousand eggs in it that would all hatch one day while we were at work, only to be discovered when my husband came home and walked into a solid wall of minute teeny-tiny crawling spiders eager to make his acquaintance. It was not exactly a scene out of Charlotte’s Web. After he twirled, most likely seizurelike, in the giant wall web, gasping, battling at it and making monkey noises, he realized he was surrounded, and although the infant spiders were practically invisible, he could sense that they were in his hair, under his clothes, and that one crawled near his nostril. He grabbed the vacuum cleaner and in an act of sheer self-defense, massacred them all. He later recalled, “No Navy SEAL could function as well as I did. It was like a horror movie. That was Satan. What was in that web was Satan!”

  I tried to tell my husband what was going on now in our kitchen, but this is a man who chooses to exert what little control he has over his own life by ignoring me to the point that one time I actually thought he was dead for several days until I noticed he had fresh crumbs on his shirt.

  “Okay, have it your way,” I sighed, walking away. “It’s probably just a big, hairy, pregnant spider preparing a nest for her endless waves of soon-to-be-born offspring. I’d carry that vacuum cleaner in a holster if I were you, buddy.”

  Within an hour, our kitchen was completely disassembled and every available surface glowed with a thin, sticky layer of Raid.

  “I don’t see anything,” my husband concluded as a dust bunny the size of a squirrel rested in his hair. “There’s nothing here.”

  Several days later it was his eyes, however, that confirmed the fact that something was indeed horribly wrong in our house.

  “Why am I ALWAYS the first one home?” he shouted when I opened the front door. “WHY? Maybe, if just once you were the first one home, YOU could catch another one of nature’s aberrations lapping up a cool little drink from the kitchen faucet!”

  “Oh my God,” I said, feeling the blood drain from my veins. “What did you see? Tell me what you saw!”

  “It was a big, dirty, beady-eyed RAT that was hanging around our kitchen sink like it was a rodent saloon,” my husband informed me.

  “No!” I shrieked in denial. “No! How big was it?”

  “A foot, easily a foot,” my husband answered. “Maybe even more. And then, when it saw me, it leaped from the counter, flew a couple of feet like an action hero toward the microwave, and then vanished. It was like it went to rat school at Cirque du Soleil!”

  I gasped. “A Jackie Chan rat??” I cried. “Holy shit. Grab a suitcase. Let’s just move. I don’t want to live here anymore. We’ll just go someplace else, another state where no one knows us. I can’t sleep here with a rat. In England, rats wait until people fall asleep and then they bite their noses off. How do I explain that to people? ‘Oh, no, heavens no, not a nose job! Plastic surgery? Not me! I’m not that fancy! A rat bit it off.’ ”

  “I fought an entire spider colony that looked at me and saw a Hometown Buffet,” he asserted. “Those spiders came at me like Costco shoppers descend on the sample ladies with fried foods, and I won. I won. I can fight a tiny little rat.”

  “You said it was a foot long,” I replied. “A twelve-inch rat with huge teeth and claws and the legs of Mary Lou Retton is something different than newborn spiders!”

  “I FOUGHT SATAN,” my husband insisted. “AND SATAN WAS UP MY NOSE.”

  So reluctantly, and against my better judgment, I said okay, even though I did indeed add that by the way, this is exactly what happens when you won’t let me get that maid I’ve been asking most of my life for, you socialist bleeding heart. Our vacuum cleaner is in no way big enough to suck up a hairy mammal the size of a medium toddler, we’re going out to eat every night until you bring me the head of that thing because I know it’s pooping out poop pellets of bubonic plague all over my favorite snack foods and I’m having a terrifying vision that if I set foot into that kitchen, that thing will fling itself off the top of the refrigerator and bite me in the neck with its big buck Melissa Gilbert teeth, but fine, if this is what you need to do, fight the rat.

  Before fighting the rat, however, there’s obviously the
shame of having a rat in your house, because it’s not like everybody has had one. Popular opinion is that only very dirty people have rats, and even if those certain people who have rats were somewhat dirty, or merely even the smallest bit untidy—and I really mean the smallest bit in the tiniest, most minuscule sense of the word—it would really hurt those people’s feelings if that popular sentiment was directed at them. This is especially the case if these particular people were said to have once had a massive spiderweb in their home, even if it was only because one of them was appreciating its Creator’s universal right to live, even when it came back to suck the blood out of him.

  The Buddhist became a hunter. He left the house headed for Wal-Mart and came home armed with massive spring traps and off-brand peanut butter, on which he wrote with a big black marker, STAY AWAY, LAURIE: RAT BAIT, to make it really official in case our amazing rat could read. He assembled the traps, stuck a glob of peanut butter on them, and we waited.

  It didn’t take long. Apparently, we had a Mensa rat, because it essentially waited for the hunter to step one foot out of the kitchen before it swung in on its mighty rat trapeze or drove there in its little rodent car, snatched up its peanut butter dinner, and vanished again without consequence.

  And it did this again. And again. And again. That rat had moved in, and frankly, it was as unafraid of us as we were ashamed of it.

  The Buddhist hunter went to Wal-Mart again and returned with glue traps, placed the peanut butter bait on them, and we waited again.

  The first time we checked the traps, there it was, stuck to the very adhesive bottom of the glue panel, and my husband reached for it with a dishtowel.

  We couldn’t believe what we saw.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, covering my mouth.