We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

I don’t know how they found me, but the merchants of smut were after me with a vengeance. Somehow my home e-mail address had landed on a list that I was sure was compiled by chunky women with massive red up-dos à la Gunsmoke and wearing nothing but see-through negligees and high-heeled slippers with tufts of feathers on them. I really can’t figure out how my name got there, since I am a devout subscriber to the theory that if you’re going to waste time looking at porn on the Internet, it’s best to use work time for that, and since I’m unemployed, it’s useless if I’m not on the clock.

  I have to admit, when I first began receiving dirty e-mails, I was slightly amused at the colorful subject lines. That novelty, however, quickly lost its entertainment value when I soon started getting ten to fifteen nasty e-mails a day and the novelty was replaced with words even I gasped at. I was grossed out, and then I realized that I was also, sadly, powerless. I mean, honestly, what can you do about it? Who was I going to contact to stop it? And besides, even if I could find the smut peddler himself, it was highly doubtful that a person who puts bread on the table by pushing “Hot, Nasty Teenage Sluts” was really going to pay attention to my priggish little e-mail requesting to be removed from his mailing list, if he would be so kind.

  So I adapted my “Plan B For Life” to the situation, which is if you can’t fix something, eradicate it or shame it into subversion, then ignore it. And I got very good at it, so good that if I saw a word that I wouldn’t even mutter without six or seven margaritas pulsing through my bloodstream, I sent it into e-mail limbo without a second thought. Bink! Bink! Bink! I’d send the obscenities off to cyberspace, all the while careful that I didn’t erase an important message from my seven-year-old nephew, who promised to e-mail me from his vacation at Disney World. On one particular afternoon, I was treated to eight steamy messages, and as I highlighted the entire block for disposal, I nearly did the unthinkable.

  There, sandwiched between “Horny Sorority Ladies” and “Watch Hot Amy Shower,” was “Hi From Sno White and the Seven Dwarfs.” I was furious that my nephew was surrounded by such filth, and I kept on shaking my head and uttering obscenities of my own as I clicked on my nephew’s letter to read what he was up to at Disney World. I sure hope what I saw wasn’t it. There was “Sno” White, all right, but there was way more than seven little men, all engaged, or about to be, in a very alternate version of “hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go.” They were in places that midgets should never be, particularly Dopey, who looked like he was taking the brunt of the workload.

  It was chilling.

  It was far too unclean to ignore.

  So I developed my “Plan C For Life,” which now consists of firing any service provider I pay and hiring their competition instead. I finally changed not only my e-mail address but my Internet provider. I had prevailed over porno.

  And when I checked my new e-mail for the first time, imagine the look on my face when I got a message from Sno White and her band of tiny perverts saying “Hi.”

  Campaign of Terror

  “Now you listen to me and you listen good,” I said to the girl on the other end of the phone line. “Believe me, you don’t want to mess with the Campaign of Terror!”

  I could almost hear her trembling in the silence on the other end. It was definitely trembling—that, or she was chewing gum.

  “I want my treadmill!” I asserted. “And I want it tomorrow!”

  More silence.

  “Campaign of Terror!” I threatened again.

  “Hold, please,” the girl said dryly, and a Journey rock block came over the line.

  All I wanted was my treadmill. That’s all. After my doctor had informed me that I had gained more weight than an Atkins devotee who takes a bite of a dinner roll, and I could no longer attend my local YMCA because I’d made lewd gestures to a child, I took a second mortgage out on my house and bought sports equipment. After burning approximately three calories on it, I heard a “clink,” which developed into a rattle, which then matured into a full-fledged scream. The next thing I knew I was flying backward across the room, though most of the skin from the left side of my body remained on the rubber conveyor belt.

  I called Sears. They promised to bring a new one out in two days.

  They lied.

  When the new treadmill didn’t arrive and night began to fall, my husband shrunk back into a corner as I furiously flipped through the phone book. “You know what this means, don’t you?” I uttered loudly at no one in particular.

  “Campaign of Terror?” he said quietly as his eyes rolled.

  “CAMPAIGN OF TERROR!” I confirmed as I grabbed the phone and dialed the number to Sears.

  The Campaign of Terror is the method of psychological warfare I invented for dealing with incompetent and ineffective customer-service people, which basically translates into THE WHOLE WORLD. I developed it several years ago while trying to get a refund for work done on my refrigerator by an inept and possibly mainstreamed repairman—also, coincidentally, from Sears. Though he demonstrated an enthusiastic effort to correct my overheated freezer with a screwdriver and hair dryer, both of which he borrowed from me, I had my doubts. Taking his word that the fridge was now fixed, I suspiciously handed over a $112 check with the words “If the ice maker breaks, perhaps we should try a perm.”

  And so, when the freezer proved to remain broken, the Campaign of Terror was born—out of rage, fury, revenge, and the need to get my money back because I borrowed it from my mom.

  Step One in executing the Campaign of Terror: “Greasing the Pig.” Be polite and kind, mainly to gain the trust of your vile opponent. Explain the situation carefully and nicely. Then strike with a pleasant, yet firm “I’m sure you folks can easily solve this problem,” even though you are aware that the entire population of Mayberry is employed by the company you are calling and Ernest T. Bass is the president. Don’t expect a solution; it is far too early and you haven’t inflicted enough pain yet. Step One will almost inevitably end with the words of Barney saying, “I’ll have a supervisor call you,” which has as much meaning behind it as “Officer, I only had one beer.”

  Step Two: “Fly on a Turd.” Get the direct number of the supervisor before you hang up. This is VITAL. Otherwise, it’s just like waiting for a boy to call you, and before you know it, you wake up and you’re eighty with your privates shriveled up to the size of a raisin and able to tie your boobs into a pretzel knot. Give them a window of one hour to call you back, and when time is up, start dialing. Call every fifteen minutes until you get through. Step Two can be very effective if you are recently unemployed or have just broken up with somebody.

  Step Three: “Verbal Tornado.” Remember the motto of the Campaign of Terror and repeat it to yourself and the supervisor: “Nothing is impossible. Everything is negotiable. If you aren’t capable of solving this, I’ll move on to your supervisor, then their supervisor, and then their supervisor, until I have wasted thousands of dollars in your company’s time and someone from upstairs calls you and says, ‘Why can’t you handle a hundred-and-twelve-dollar problem? Get this lady off my back! That moron tried to fix her freezer with a twelve-hundred-watt Conair!’ ” A special touch here, for seasoned pros only, is to mention “I’m recently divorced and rage is bubbling in a bottomless pit inside of me.”

  I was just about to mention my recent fake divorce when the customer-service girl put me on hold and my dog started to bark. My husband peeked around the corner and then winced.

  “Goober and Gomer are here,” he said. “And it looks like they’re carrying a boat. Oh, wait. That’s a treadmill.”

  “Ma’am?” the girl said, returning to the line.

  “Never mind!” I said as I slammed down the phone and then pointed at the front door. “You see, honey? Another victory for the Campaign of Terror!”

  Moving Day

  Nana’s house looked small and weird.

  My husband and I looked around Nana’s empty house. It was all gone. The only thing that remained wa
s a roll of paper towels on the counter, and the outlines etched deep in the carpet where Nana’s furniture used to be.

  “I think that’s everything,” my husband said as the moving van pulled away from the curb outside.

  For more than thirty years Nana had lived in that house, basically ever since we had moved from Brooklyn to Phoenix.

  It was, however, time for Nana to go. The neighborhood had started to turn sour, and considering that my eighty-seven-year-old Nana still lived on her own after my Pop Pop had died, everybody agreed it would be best to get her closer to family, so when a house on my parents’ block came up for sale, my father jumped on it.

  Still, even though Nana’s new house was beautiful and she would be far closer to family, it was sad to see her old house empty and alone. I had spent a lot of my childhood in that house, and although we once all lived in that neighborhood, Nana was the last holdout. One by one, we had all moved—myself, my parents, my sister, and now Nana. I had been trying desperately to get her out of that house for years, but looking at her empty living room, I realized that after it was gone, the last place that our old family memories lived in would be gone, too.

  It was a bit unsettling, I have to admit, to see something that was so much a part of my life and my past belong to someone else. I had felt that way when our family home wasn’t our family’s home anymore, too, but when the house I had grown up in went up for sale, I couldn’t blame anybody.

  My sister Lisa and her husband had been living in that house after my parents moved, several years before, and, quite frankly, the neighborhood had changed, just as Nana’s had.

  Gradually, the old neighbors started moving away. They sold their houses to people who let their yards go, didn’t water their trees, and who considered their front yards as an extension of their living room, hauling out couches, chairs, and tables and just leaving them there until the weeds eventually masked their presence.

  For me, it was rather sad to see our neighborhood disintegrate like that. For my sister, who still lived in it, it was a test of faith. Directly across the street, her new neighbor had been mowing the lawn when the motor seized; apparently discouraged by the unfortunate event, he had simply given up and left the lawn mower to rust dead in its tracks, where it still sat six months later.

  The folks who lived in the house behind Lisa developed something of a chicken farm on their patio, which for a rural couple may seem quaint, but when you’re living a block away from a major freeway it’s a little disturbing, especially on one occasion when a nasty chicken chased my sister down the alley while she was taking out the trash.

  I suppose the last straw in Lisa’s patience was when the neighbor next door to the Chicken People dragged home a dilapidated railroad car, parked it in his backyard, and used it as a tool shed. Although my sister quickly added two feet to the height of the fence in her backyard, the damage was done and a FOR SALE sign was about to be spiked into the front lawn where I used to do cartwheels under the huge olive trees.

  When she told me that the house had sold, I was both relieved and happy for her, but I wasn’t really sad. It was just a house, after all, and now it was a house in a crappy neighborhood. On the day Lisa moved, I went over to help out and was standing in the empty kitchen, staring at the Z Brick my father had slapped onto the walls in the mid-seventies, when it hit me.

  We were losing our house. OUR HOUSE.

  Our house, where up against that wall my mom used to lie on the couch with her hand over her eyes because she got a headache in 1972 that never went away.

  Our house, where, in that same spot, I came home drunk for the first time at sixteen, and despite the fact that I had vomit up my nose and my unfortunate friend Doug had to hold me up with both his arms, my mother insisted I was “spaced out on LSD” and demanded that I confess. I guess she was too busy giving birth in the sixties to know any better.

  Outside the side door is a small walkway to the carport, where I fled on my tenth birthday during a life-changing event that marked me forever and I won the Most Ungrateful Person, Child, or Adult the Universe Has Ever Seen Award.

  I thought my Nana and Pop Pop were going to get me my own TV, for they had indicated as much, and I felt so liberated from the plebeian television-viewing habits of my family that in preparation I walked down to Circle K and bought my own damn TV Guide. With a pink highlighter I carefully marked all the shows I could watch in complete and utter freedom, as my ten-year-old life no longer held any obstacles to my delighting in Little House on the Prairie alone and in private, or the Battle of the Network Stars, when I could cheer on Ma Ingalls without my sister’s comments that Jaclyn Smith was going to kick her butt.

  But when I opened the package on my birthday, there in my hands was no TV, but a light-blue Lady Remington electric razor, despite the fact that at the time I was still wearing undershirts. Honestly, I don’t know what sort of reaction I was supposed to have as I unwrapped the razor—was I supposed to be happy that I was about to sprout more hair than a silverback? Was I supposed to be thrilled that my childhood ended the moment I tore off the wrapping paper, or that the magnitude of my Nana’s folly would haunt me for a lifetime? Was I supposed to understand that an electric razor was supposed to make me feel grown up when all I really wanted to do was watch Little House on the Prairie with absolutely no interruptions?

  I WAS TEN.

  I ran out of the house, threw myself on the sidewalk, and promptly bawled my eyes out. My dad came out and sat next to me. He had already taught me important lessons in my short life, because although I believe my self-loathing, low self-esteem, and manic-depressive tendencies stem from my mother’s side of the family, my antisocial behaviors and general intolerance of humanity come straight from my dad, wrapped like a slice of bacon around a filet mignon, in these words of wisdom:

  • Ninety-five percent of the people you meet will be complete idiots. Find the other 5 percent and stick to them like glue. Even if they don’t agree that you’re in the 5 percent.

  • Anyone who doesn’t agree with you is an idiot.

  • Any boss who fires you is an idiot.

  • Most of the people you work with will be idiots.

  • There should be an Idiot Jail.

  • Everyone is trying to rip you off because they think you’re an idiot.

  • Never buy anything in a dented box.

  The biggest lesson, however, came on that sidewalk when he sat with me and said, after a while, “You can’t always get what you want. But sometimes, you get your knees.” When I mentioned that I already HAD knees, he added, “Yeah, but when you get old they go. And . . . then you really want them back.” It was a good effort in rock-and-roll wisdom, but my dad probably should have stuck with the Beatles, whose lyrics were much easier to understand than those of the Rolling Stones. So I learned right then and there that if you’re going to quote a song, you better get it right, otherwise you look kind of like an idiot.

  Anyway, when it got dark inside, I went back to my house and threw the razor away while no one was looking.

  As a point of interest, and as a side note, I didn’t lose my Most Ungrateful title until several years ago, when someone beat me hands down. (This will be funny in just a minute.)

  It turns out that the first guy to ever have a hand transplant turned out to be an ex-con from New Zealand, and when people found out he had served time in prison, it caused a big brouhaha. Well, not only was he completely undeserving of the handout (I told you it would be funny), but a short while after the transplant he said he didn’t even LIKE his new hand and wanted it chopped off again. “I’ve become mentally detached from it,” the New Zealander said in an interview with a British newspaper that I read, cut out, and framed, adding that he realized later that it wasn’t his hand after all.

  I can’t believe he was that big of a loser and I had never dated him. Statistically that’s impossible, but in any case, I think my mother needed to take a crack at him. “You’d better use that
hand and you’d better like it!” I can imagine her screaming. “So what if it doesn’t look like your other hand? You know, there are veterans in Europe who would KILL to have a hand like that!”

  And then he’d get a beating.

  So apparently, some dead guy gave up his dead hand for absolutely nothing, not even a thank-you. At least my Nana got a thank-you after my mother dragged me to the phone by my hair the next morning after my birthday.

  “You’re welcome,” Nana said. “And don’t come crying to me when you start to get all fuzzy and you don’t understand what’s going on! That’s what you get for throwing away a perfectly good electric razor! You know there are women in Italy who would KILL to have a razor like that!”

  Down the hall is my bedroom, where, during a freak-out fit of child anger, Lisa, then eight, blew a hole through the door with her foot when she discovered I cooked and ate her last E-Z Bake Oven cake. Hey, it was chocolate and I was thirteen and meeting my hormones for the first time. I was an uncontrollable monster, crazed by chocolate, who would eat anything brown that was in my path, and this included a crumb particle of what looked like a fudge-dipped macaroon but instead turned out to be a dropping of Cycle 3 for fat dogs.

  Across the hall is her room, where, as a fourth-grader, she cried for nearly seven hours straight after my mother gave her a home perm that made her look like a Harlem Globetrotter.

  The next door is my parents’ room, where she stood one Sunday morning, screaming at age five, “OPEN UP, MOMMY! WHY IS THE DOOR LOCKED? WHO IS GOING TO GET ME MY SUGAR SMACKS? UNLOCK THE DOOR!!!!”

  Across the hall was my other sister’s room, into which she ran after a particularly gruesome fight, slamming the door so hard that it broke the lock and we had to call my Uncle Jimmy to disassemble the window to let her out.

  The backyard marks the spot where I taught Lisa, then in eighth grade, how to smoke, to make up for eating her E-Z Bake Oven cake. I lit it for her, told her to suck super hard and hold it as long as she could. Three seconds later, she threw up in the grass.