I credit nicotine gum with everything from keeping me thin to saving my marriage, but I admit it has its hazards. Not health hazards—at least, not any that I know about or want to acknowledge—but child hazards. Peter shares my affection for nicotine gum, and if he sits in any one place too long, at the computer or TV for example, he amasses a small pile of chewed pieces. I want to believe that he has every intention of disposing of these properly, but it doesn’t always happen, at least not in a timely manner. Naturally all the nicotine has been depleted, so it’s not as though the children are going to get a second-hand chew if they put it in their mouths, but still, it’s annoying.
One Sunday morning I was taking a bath—my rather long weekly bath, during which I try to catch up on personal maintenance. I heard Finn crying somewhere in the house and called in vain for someone, anyone, to check on him. There were at least six other people in the house who could have checked, after all. Receiving no reply, I left my legs half shaved and got out of the tub. I found Finn in the living room, standing on the coffee table, wearing a T-shirt and no diaper, his little genitals so completely encased in chewed nicotine gum that he looked like a baby hermaphrodite.
“Oh, my God,” I said to Peter, “Look at what he has done!”
“Yeah, I saw that,” he said.
In all fairness, had the problem been easier to deal with, like, say, the two hundredth spill of the day, Peter would have taken care of it, but this was, to say the least, a sticky situation. Well, thank God for the amazing citrus power of late-night-as-seen-on-TV cleaning products. It took half a bottle of Goo Gone to detach Finn’s little testicles from the side of his leg.
Despite the downside of gum chewing, and its inevitable move into the realm of taboo, I will continue to chew nicotine gum because it is the closest I will ever get to Nirvana, and frankly, given all I go through with this circus of mine, I deserve a vice. When Peter falls asleep with a piece in his mouth, I will dutifully cut it out of his hair in the morning and thank God every day for my twelve-piece blister pack of heaven.
I WAS RECENTLY HIRED BY THE PHARMACEUTICAL GIANT Glaxo-SmithKline to design dresses for two women who had won a competition to lose weight by using a new diet pill the company had developed. I took part in the presentation of the dresses and a press conference. When the event was over, the executives invited me to dinner. I spent the meal buttonholing executives about the diet-pill potential of their other product, Nicorette.
“Oh, did you start chewing it to stop smoking?” one suit asked.
“No way,” I said. “Smoking’s for losers. I chew because nicotine keeps me sane.” I went on to regale them with my thoughts on the product, about how when I put a piece of that gum in my mouth, and I feel that spicy taste running down my throat, a feeling of calm comes over me and all is right with the world. The fact that my mouth is busy chewing gum and not rabbiting popcorn or nibbling Triscuits is an added benefit in that it cuts some calories out of my day. I was willing to admit that I am so addicted that I get nervous when my supplies are low, so I have hidden gum all over the house and in random purses for emergency situations. I even have a friend who “holds” a blister pack for me, she is so worried about my mental state should I find myself without a fix.
“Really,” I said, “I love it so much, I act like a pusher, constantly offering it to other people.” By this time, I noticed that a few of the suits had left the table and the ones who remained were eyeing me skeptically, but with a small glint in their eyes. I have been waiting for the spokesmodel call ever since, and believe me, if you are out there, Mr. Nicotine Suit, I am your girl.
ANOTHER WAY I TRY TO CONTAIN MY BUTT IS BY RUNNING. IF I TRY TO tell you that I exercise for my health, don’t believe me.
“Why don’t you just join the YMCA?” Peter asked me one night as I peeled yet another layer of Lycra off my body.
“Old people go to the Y,” I shot back.
“They have an indoor running track,” he said.
Well, it was love at first sight. If I have to exercise, I would rather not suffer. Climate control is the way to go. I don’t have to worry about freezing winter or steaming summer days. The track is small—an eighth of a mile—so I tend to feel like Hamster in his wheel, but after about fifteen minutes I zone into my endorphin high and don’t really notice. I can spend a full hour just going in circles, passing the same old guy with his walker at least fifty times. If that doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, what will? Sometimes, just to unwind, I will sit myself on an exercise bike alongside a woman with an oxygen mask, her personal video screen tuned to The Price Is Right. She’s my inspiration. She’s always there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I feel that she would be discouraged if I didn’t show up as well.
Of course, dieting is partly an attempt to retain or regain a youthful appearance, which is why the majority of liposuction is performed on women over forty. One day as I was viewing my backside for the billionth time in the mirror, I flirted with the idea. I pictured my body facedown on an operating table. Naked. Concentric circles marking zones of imperfection drawn over my butt and thighs. Anonymous men in surgical gear discussing whether to have sushi or subs for lunch. Nurses quietly judging me for being so damn shallow, but happy to get a paycheck on the fifteenth and thirtieth of every month. A long rod slides violently in and out of my flesh, pulling lumps of bright yellow fat into a tube and then a plastic Ziploc bag, to be deposited God knows where on the planet. Then there are the weeks of healing, oozing sores connected to yet more tubes that you have to measure and empty every few hours. Gack.
I am not sure who the woman is who would opt for this over a twenty-five-dollar visit to the lingerie department at Macy’s, but it’s certainly not me. The idea of having my ass removed to a landfill is just too much to bear. I’m certainly not against cosmetic augmentation, as it is in keeping with my theory that you can make yourself feel good by making yourself look great. I dye my hair; I glue eyelashes onto my lids. I even once had Botox injected into my forehead. For this I went to a fancy uptown New York dermatologist frequented by many of my good friends. They all look terrific, I thought; this might be a good step. In the waiting room, reading Town & Country magazine, I began to take quick glances at the assorted women there. I began to get scared. Most of the women had an upper lip so filled with collagen that they could have half kissed their own noses just by exhaling. Many foreheads were broad, expansive, smooth, immobile. I cocked an eyebrow just to feel my own scalp move in reassurance. A few women had a tell-tale puffiness around the eyes, an attempt at filling crow’s feet quite apparent. Was it possible these women didn’t know that they didn’t look younger? That what they had accomplished with these various procedures was turning themselves into two-bit caricatures of their mothers?
“Don’t make me look like those women in the waiting room” was the first thing I said to the doctor.
“Those women are junkies. They go from doctor to doctor. It’s their own fault they look that way,” he assured me.
Well, the Botox looked fine, and for a few weeks I felt a tiny bit younger, maybe forty-three, but I never went back.
Then one night I was watching a Bravo reality show, one of the Real Housewives iterations. There was an attractive woman, divorced with two children, working hard to support her family. She wasn’t just kicking back and relaxing on the proceeds of her alimony. By the third season, this character hooked up with a rich guy, and her looks totally went downhill. She obviously now had access to money for procedures, and also had a newfound fear of the rich guy preferring a younger version of herself ere too long. What was once a pretty face morphed into a monster of alarming proportions. Her lips puffed up, her forehead grew, and she must have had cheek implants—how else could you explain the sudden resemblance to Joan Rivers? Before she had money, she looked great. No, she didn’t look twenty, but she rocked her forties.
I intentionally lie about my age. I actually tell people I am older than I am.
&nb
sp; “Fifty! Wow, you look great for fifty!” I may not be able to look like a girl in my thirties, but I can kick some fifties ass.
I’ve decided to forgo injections and fillers because I fully intend to become a crazy old lady who wears too much makeup, piles on all of her jewelry at once, and prances around the house in an enormous wig and a feather boa, like a redheaded Carol Channing. By the time I am wizened and wrinkled, my gay icon status will be improved upon by my greatest gift to my fans: another version of me to emulate. Young Laura Bennett, Project Runway Laura Bennett, Pregnant Laura Bennett, Crazy Old Lady Laura Bennett—the character lines will give young cross-dressers so much more range to play with. And they, better than most, know a thing or two about the beauty of shape shifters.
For the moment, I don’t fear aging at all. I will proudly walk into my fifties with my ass held high, thanks to my power panties.
DAIRY AIR
Located next to a stinky dairy farm, we call this place Dairy Air (pronounced derriere).
I HATE IT WHEN MY KIDS WANT TO HELP. I KNOW HELPING is how they learn, but I just don’t have the time or patience. Any task my kids assist with takes twice as long and yields four times the mess. I remember from my childhood a Duncan Hines commercial where the pretty apron-wearing mother prepares the cake mix with her three smiling children in a sparkling white kitchen, but in my house it never goes down that way. When Pierson insists on stirring the pancake batter, it ends up lumpy and all over the counter. If Truman wants to deliver a morning cup of coffee to his father, there is invariably a trail of joe leading from the kitchen to Peter’s morning perch at the computer. Everything is just so much cleaner if I do it myself.
Driving home from the country the other night, we stopped for gas an hour outside of Manhattan, as is our habit. The best way to enjoy living in New York City is to run screaming from it every Friday. The downside is the effort required to transport five boys three hours in one car without incident. Necessity demands a midway break. We stop to fill the tank and let anyone who is still awake buy junk food from the gas station mini-mart. Pumping gas holds a phallic fascination for my boys, and Peter wasn’t there to say no, so they immediately started begging me to let them wield the nozzle.
“Wait in the car; just let me do it myself,” I said, but it was too late. The doors flew open and three of them escaped. Once a child is out of a five-point-harness car seat, there is little I can do to stem the riptide of testosterone. A scuffle ensued at the pump, because Pierson thought he should be the one in charge, and by the time I swiped my card and chose the octane level, Truman had won the battle with his brothers and was filling the tank. Truman has pumped gas before and he seemed to have it under control so I stepped aside, resisting any arguments from Pierson and Larson about how the scenario was unfair.
When the pump detected that the tank was full, the nozzle clicked and Truman, on cue, pulled it out of the car. Somehow forgetting his previous expertise, he failed to let go of the lever that stops the gas. Flammable liquid shot everywhere at full speed. He pointed the nozzle up, as if to use gravity to stop the deluge, but that only caused a gasoline fountain. Larson, Pierson, and I were screaming at him to let go when gas splashed into his eyes, and he finally dropped the hose— which thankfully released the lever and stopped the river of gas. Pierson, who had been right up in Truman’s grille vying for the pump, was soaked with gas and standing in a puddle of it. He looked down at his saturated clothes.
“I’m gonna blow!” he yelled over and over, taking off running in hysterical circles. The poor kid had recently watched the scene in Zoolander where the male models have a gasoline fight to the tune of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham! on their way to buy orange mocha frappuccinos, then one of them lights a cigarette and sends everyone up in flames.
“Mom, I’m gonna blow!” he kept repeating. Peik, previously too lazy to leave the van, leaped out of the car and added to the mayhem by running around the gas station parking lot screaming, “I’ve got a match!” This sent Pierson into even greater hysteria. Meanwhile I did what I could to get us back on the road, picking up the hose and putting it in the machine while trying to avoid the puddles and not get gasoline on my Manolos.
“Screw the cap on,” I directed Truman, trying not to yell at him in front of the gathering crowd. “Can you manage that?”
“But, Mom, really, it should be impossible to pull the pump out of the car while the gas is flowing,” Truman insisted. “It must have malfunctioned.”
“No, you dipwad,” Peik said, taking a break from scaring the hell out of his little brother in order to debase this one. “How would you be able to fill a gas can, genius?”
Pierson had to be stripped of his soaked clothing. Larson, who was dressed as good Spider-Man, offered his bad alter ego Spider-Man costume, which he naturally had with him in case of emergency. It had built-in chest muscles and was so small it gave Pierson a wedgie and came up to his shins, but he was happy to put aside sartorial grievances in order to save himself from immolation. I threw his gas-soaked clothes in a garbage can.
“The show is over, folks,” Peik announced to the parking lot crowd as we boarded the van and drove away. Once we were safely back on the road, we really gave it to Truman, who was embarrassed and angry that we were laughing at him for potentially turning our van into a suicide bomb.
After retaliating with a stream of unprintable curse words, most of which started with “mother,” Truman declared, “When I grow up, I am going to be rich and you’ll all be sorry!”
“What does that have to do with dousing your brother with gasoline?” Peik calmly asked, as I rolled down the window to ease my burning eyes. “This car freaking reeks.”
“I like the smell,” said Larson.
“Oh, great, a future stoner,” Peik predicted.
The next time one of my kids offers to help me, I’m the one who’s gonna blow.
WHEN I MET PETER, HE ALREADY OWNED A COUNTRY HOUSE, THE ULTIMATE luxury for a New Yorker. Being able to get out of the city makes me better able to appreciate living here. Because Peter was unmarried, the raised ranch was, unsurprisingly, a bachelor pad. A one-bedroom house works fine for a single man, or even a couple who get along well, but with our baby habit came a need for more space. The ranch house was also perched on a cliff, and Peter didn’t have the stomach to look out the window and see an infant crawling toward a twenty-foot drop or a toddler scaling a rock wall. The roads were likewise steep, and it wasn’t unusual for Cleo to careen down a hill at thirty miles an hour on her bicycle. We sold the house and drove north until we found something that met our needs and that we could afford. Proximity to New York City determines a property’s value. The farther you drive, the more affordable real estate becomes. A second home in the hour range signifies that you are in the big bucks. This is not a completely linear system, as there are pockets of prestige here and there. You have to be on the lookout for what Peter calls the valley of value, which I suspect is somewhere near Brigadoon.
I have found that city people frequently lie about how long it takes to get to their country house. This is especially true of the Hamptons, an exclusive enclave of towns at the eastern end of Long Island. “It takes us about an hour and a half to get there” is the typical brag. Sure, in a Formula One car with a radar detector.
Our house is in the three-hour range, ideal for avoiding self-inviting houseguests. Three hours in a totally trashed van with five boys and one Butch Ballerina in uncomfortably close quarters. Before we even leave the parking garage, the boys are fighting over which movie they will watch. We have two DVD players so we can show flicks for two age groups, but the warfare over seats is still heated. By the time we reach the West Side Highway, someone has vomited. This is usually a by-product of the fight over the seats, which causes one of them to cry, thereby triggering the postsobbing gag reflex. By the time we pay the toll to cross the bridge out of Manhattan, the snacks and drinks brought from home have been spilled. This causes a seism
ic shift in the seating, because someone now needs to find a dry spot. Things then settle down until we hit the hour-and-a-half mark, at which point we stop at the Red Rooster. This tiny little hamburger stand in Brewster, New York, has become a habit for us, so much so that, like a speech-impaired Pavlov’s dog, as soon as Larson gets his seat belt on in Manhattan he starts reciting his order.
“Are we stopping at da Woosta? I want a cheeseburga, Coke, and cirka, cirka, cirka.”
This order is repeated endlessly until we get there, and in case you don’t speak Larson, “cirka” means an onion ring, and he literally wants only three of them.
Once we are back on the road, over the remaining hour and a half of the trip milk shakes are picked up by the lids, which pop off every time, soaking chicken strips in ice cream sauce; cardboard boats of French fries drizzled with ketchup end up upside down on the floor; and every single weekend, Blake finishes the exact same order of fried food, with a calorie count equivalent to the recommended daily intake for an entire Broadway cast, and then complains that he’s fat. A few miles on, the burping and farting commence, at first by nature and then increasingly by competition. Usually, with maybe five miles to go, at least one of the creatures in the back needs Peter to pull over so it can pee. By the time we finally arrive at our house, I hate my kids. Only the ones who have fallen asleep and the ones smart enough to pretend they are asleep are spared my arrival wrath.
The house is a converted barn in the Berkshires of Massachusetts; we call it Dairy Air. Next door is a dairy farm, and if the wind is blowing in the right direction, our entire property smells like derrière. The cows are lined up in large open-air sheds, standing in their own filth and producing enough methane to power a third-world country or at least provide the farmer with cable television. We thought it would be good for the children to be near real nature; maybe we could even buy milk from the neighbors. Instead, Peik has developed a Tourettian habit of emerging from the car half asleep on Friday nights muttering “This place smells like ass.”
Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? Page 11
