We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier

by Celia Rivenbark

  Typical is my friend Lee’s childhood memory: “Daddy would pace like a caged boar waiting for us to get ready and get in the car. He’d pretend to read the paper but, after a while, all you could hear was him snapping the pages and sighing.”

  When he could stand it no longer, Lee’s daddy would noisily leap from his squeaky recliner and boom to an empty room: “I’m starting the car!” This was always greeted with groans. Lee’s mother, after all, was still running around in her Shadowline slip with Mary Kay beauty-in-bisque on just the top half of her face like a carnival mask.

  Lee’s daddy would sit in the car, engine running, revving it ever so slightly until the whole family, grouchy and with shirttails hanging out, lurched down the steps and into the carport, slamming doors and jabbing elbows for the sullen Sunday ride to the house of the Lord.

  It’s not much different at our house. My husband, whose Sunday morning duties include dressing himself, memorizing the box scores, and fixing his own cereal, can’t understand why it takes me so much longer to get ready. I dunno. Maybe it’s because I must shower, get dressed, outfit the princess in her favorite “sunny school” dress complete with lacy socks and patent leather shoes, discover there’s a gigantic rip in her favorite dress and explain why, no, she can’t wear her Barbie nightgown with her church shoes, no matter how many sparklies it has in it. Then I must make her breakfast, fish my earrings out of the back of the toilet tank (don’t ask), round up snacks and a change of clothes, inhale a burned toaster waffle, stuff a sack of canned goods for the food bank, well, you get the idea.

  An elderly friend of mine said she remembers the time she and her husband groggily got themselves and their three preschoolers ready for church only to discover as they smugly situated themselves in the pew with a minute to spare, that, hmmmm, someone was missing.

  They raced back home to find their two-year-old happily playing in the driveway mud.

  I know it’s not just us because every week we see at least two or three other families sitting in church, perfectly dressed with soaking wet hair.

  And because, when the ushers pass the offering plate, the sound of checks being ripped out of checkbooks can drown out the choir. Once, I got so addled after we raced in late, I made the check out to Piggly Wiggly.

  One of the reasons we are chronically late is that I teach Sunday school to second- and third-graders and, being a huge fan of working under pressure, I like to discover that I must “paint a Last Supper backdrop” the morning I actually have to show up with it. The night before church, I have stayed up late making all sorts of pathetic arks, mangers, and man-eating whales so by the time I show up for class I am too tired to do much except throw out some Ritz Bits and tell them to wake me up in forty-five minutes.

  I would love teaching Sunday school except for the crafts part. For a long time, I tried to hide my secret: all the other moms were relentlessly competent, the kind of women who save Pringles canisters and paper towel tubes “just because.”

  One lesson had us making birdhouses out of tongue depressors dusted with glitter—apparently to attract Vegas-bound birds. Another had us using tongue depressors to construct Noah’s ark picture frames. One wonders if doctors are able to get a hold of these things considering the insatiable craft community’s demand. (“Sorry, Myra Jo, I can’t see your tonsils today. Bobby Jr.’s building an ark.”)

  Church ladies are almost always crafty and I am convinced that heaven will be filled with their handiwork, including the woven-ribbon Bible bookmarks I can’t make. Unlike the other church moms, I do not own my own monogrammed, double-action, chrome-handled glue gun. My daughter’s first four-word sentence was uttered in the church fellowship hall after I glued my fingers together while trying to make a burning bush.

  “Mommy can’t do it,” she said.

  While I tried to unglue my fingers, I listened to the other church moms chat about crafts they’d been working on. There were bubbly descriptions of birthday cakes for sleep-overs that were shaped like a real sleeping bag; puffy hand-stitched memory quilts, handmade charm bracelets, and even talk of the dreaded Creative Memories scrapbook.

  Many of my mom-friends have joined the Creative Memories cult and it has taken over their lives. Their families eat TV dinners while they spend hours using funny curvy scissors to cut pictures illustrating Junior’s first everything. One friend said she became frantic when she realized she had failed to take a single picture of her son’s first Fourth of July so she dressed him up in stars and stripes and put him outside the next January.

  “Who’s ever gonna know?” she asked, then laughed maniacally. The hair raised up on my arms.

  I guess I knew the crafts thing was going to be a problem six years ago when my very first Sunday school teacher task was to “build an Easter diorama.”

  Say who?

  This was not unlike “Define the universe; give two examples.”

  I had no idea what a diorama was, let alone how to build one. Over the years there have been plenty more scares (I still have trouble talking about the exploding baby Moses baskets in the microwave, although his head was still edible).

  The one thing I have mastered is how to glue tissue paper to baby food jars so it looks like a stained-glass window. Okay, actually, it just looks like tissue paper on a baby-food jar, but have a little faith, would you?

  As much as I enjoy church, even factoring in the early morning tension and glue gun fiascos, I admit to dreading the biannual church directory photo session.

  Portrait day is always the one where you’re late getting home from work, there’s half a latte staining the front of your shirt, and your kids go from zero to pinkeye in the time it takes you to drive two miles to the church.

  Because these photo sessions never run on time, you may have to pinch your toddler’s thighs just enough to get her to yelp.

  “Past her bedtime, you know,” you mutter pathetically to the portrait counselor in a vain attempt to move your appointment up. When that doesn’t work, you could try the ever-reliable: “They haven’t ruled out cholera….”

  Because these are church portraits, there are never any of the nifty props that you’d find in a glamour-shots studio. I love those glamour-shots pictures and my favorite thing in all the world is when a dead person’s family picks the glamour shot to use in the obituary.

  It’s like, you recognize the name but whoa! I never remember seeing Ethel Rae wear that jaunty sequined cowboy hat tilted just so. It’s just so precious, that sweet old Southern face having the last laugh from under a pound of pancake makeup, boa snaking around her neck.

  The last time we went for church pictures, we were finally ushered into the room where the photographer puts you on a little stool that puts your head even with your husband’s shoulder. I used to be uncomfortable with that whole dominant-male image as my husband fairly towered over me in these pictures but now I’m just grateful to have something to lean on. Must be past eight o’clock by now. Decent people are asleep.

  After it’s over, you are shown to a little room where, thanks to the miracle of digital whizbangedness, you can actually see your pictures before you order them.

  While you’re thinking, “Hey, we don’t look half bad,” the portrait counselor, a graduate of many fine sensitivity-training seminars, mentions that for only forty bucks extra for airbrushing, no one will ever notice that you have what appears to be the beginnings of a goiter.

  After this, she shows us a huge portrait of a particularly handsome family that has been turned into an actual oil painting for a few hundred dollars extra.

  I agree that they look fabulous and ask to buy them on the spot.

  “No, no, dear,” says the counselor. “The portrait would be of your family; this is just a sample.”

  I knew that.

  2

  “NEVER SAW ’EM BEFORE

  in My Life”

  What to Say at the Wedding Reception When Hubby’s Dressed Your Kid in Batman Sweats and Tweety Bird Sw
im Socks

  The toddler ahead of us in line was wearing a summery floral-print shirt, a striped skirt, mismatched socks, and shoes on the wrong feet. I looked at my friend and grinned. “Daddy dressed her,” we said in unison.

  Sure enough, she was standing with her daddy, mom nowhere in sight, probably working in an office somewhere, blissfully unaware that her husband had taken their child out in public wearing pink plastic sparkly sandals from the Dollar Tree.

  Men think this is cute, even endearing. Women think that taking their child out in public looking tacky is grounds for divorce. (“Your Honor, he deliberately ignored the adorable Gymboree leggings and top I had laid out—not to mention the matching bow, embroidered socks, and coordinating fleece jacket—and he dressed Kayleigh Sue in her older brother’s pajama top and the bottom half of a Jasmine costume. What? Jasmine, from Aladdin, Your Honor. Where have you been the past eight years?”)

  My friend, still observing the scene in line, sagely noted that “men never know how to put an outfit on their kids.”

  I pointed out that “outfit” is not a word in the male vocabulary. Men think it is good enough to get something, anything that remotely resembles clothing, on their child’s body. If you ask daddy why little Sammie showed up at church wearing camouflage thermal underwear and a Power Ranger belt, he’ll just say you’re too uptight and, “it’s just clothes.”

  And if their arms and legs fall off, I suppose it’s “just leprosy.”

  My husband is as guilty as any of ’em. One night he was in charge of getting our toddler dressed for a Christmas party because I had to work and was going to join the two of them at the party.

  He dressed her in a frilly red dress, so far so good, orange tights, and, Lord have mercy, white patent leather sandals.

  I walked into the party and assessed the situation in a split second.

  “Look,” the hostess purred. “Your husband and daughter are already here. See, they’re right over there by the fireplace.”

  “Who?” I snapped. “I never saw those two before in my life.”

  What else could I do?

  A friend confided that she no longer allows her husband to dress their infant after she came home and discovered daddy had had trouble figuring out the whole footed-sleeper concept so he cut the feet out of all the baby’s sleepers.

  “I got pretty good at it, too,” he had bragged. “Of course, the first one was hard because she was still wearing it….”

  Men don’t stress about “little things” like whether socks match or hair is combed. In fact, men don’t stress about much of anything, at least not the stuff that we think is important.

  My friend Teensie called me last week, crying so hard I could barely make out what she was saying. A death in the family? Sickness? An accident? Had she lost her job?

  When she finally calmed down enough to speak, I realized she was talking about her husband.

  “I… had. .. every …week…and…he… just… threw them away!”

  Teensie didn’t need to say another word. I realized her husband had tossed out the loyal-shopper frequent-buyer coupons you get at our local grocery store chain.

  See, if you shop ten out of twelve weeks and spend at least forty dollars, you can get free stuff. Good stuff like turkeys and towels and gas and even cash.

  We have all become a little obsessed with this giveaway coupon thing. Here was a woman who is getting her Ph.D. in Russian studies and she is sobbing hysterically because her husband trashed eight weeks’ worth of Gobbler Dollars.

  I felt her pain. Hadn’t I choked on the Thanksgiving Giveaway last year? Sure, I had ten coupons, but they included three week sixes, a rookie mistake.

  Listen to me. I don’t care if you only have a jar of garlic olives in the refrigerator and the kids haven’t had cereal since Saturday, you don’t go to the grocery store until the next coupon week starts—always on Wednesday.

  Last Monday, my husband began to whine about the lack of diet soda in the house.

  “Are you insane?” I shrieked. “We can’t have soda again until week seven. Do you have any idea how close we are to free gas?”

  “But I’m really thirsty,” he started.

  “Then try this!” I said, wrenching the cold water faucet on. “It’s called water! Get used to it!”

  Those of us who are good at this coupon thing have little patience for those who aren’t, or the people who tell the cashier rather high-handedly, “Oh, I’m not col lecting those things.”

  Hmmph. Guess their cars run on snob juice.

  This is the sort of stuff we women micromanage day in, day out, all week long. Men don’t do this because it would take valuable time away from calculating the earned run average of some long-dead ballplayer.

  Nothing fazes men. I couldn’t help but notice the relaxed faces of the fathers at our neighborhood Easter egg hunt recently.

  Their fingers and best khaki shorts were not dye stained; they looked refreshed and relaxed as they chatted against the deck rails, looking like a JCPenney casual menswear ad, only slightly less gay. I shouldn’t have been surprised how happy they looked since the only real contribution a man makes to a party is to buy the ice.

  A quick survey of my women friends reveals that, in most households, the man believes that once the ice is bought and the bags have been beaten on the deck (men love that part) and dumped into the cooler, it’s party time! Invitations? Food? Crafts? Decorations? That stuff’s for sissies, for people who say “cute and little” together.

  No wonder these men looked so well rested. Meanwhile, their wives had fallen, exhausted and face-forward, into the bird’s-nest cookies made out of melted chocolate and chow mein noodles that are a bigger pain in the ass than you’d think. The women had spent half the day filling and hiding 578 plastic eggs in the bushes, trees, transmissions.

  You can tell how long a couple has been married by the degree of enthusiasm they can inject into the statement: “Biff? Oh, he got the ice!” The dewy-eyed newlywed can say this with the same awe with which she might announce that her husband had thrown himself on a live grenade to save a vanload of orphans.

  Just wait a few years and you get the exaggerated eye roll and “Biff? Oh, he got the ice. He only got three bags because his back has been hurting ever since that football injury in high school. Yep, it’s been twenty-six years but apparently when the team bus hit that pothole, he was never the same.”

  Perhaps it’s as simple as admitting that getting the ice satisfies the much-ballyhooed hunter-gatherer instincts of primal man.

  You don’t really get that awesome surge of testosterone when you’re hand-tinting several dozen bunnies-on-a-stick, do you? But the ice, the ice! Why, not only do you get the ice but you also get to pick up a copy of Baseball Weekly at the same time so you’ve managed to fulfill your duties and carve out a little me time.

  Maybe it’s our own fault. We women have a way of letting men know that, no matter the task, we can do it better. Even as my husband poured ice into the cooler recently, I fumed that he didn’t put half in, layer the drinks, then another half on top.

  “If you think you can do so much better,” he bristled, “next time, you go get the ice!”

  “Are you kidding?” I shrieked. “That’s the one party chore you have left!”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, an evil grin spreading across his face. “I’ll get the kid dressed for the party while you’re gone.”

  3

  STUDY SAYS MEN LISTEN

  with Half Their Brains

  They Use the Other Half for Caulk

  A new study offers medical proof of something we women have long suspected: men listen with only half their brains.

  The fact is, if you’re a man and you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve already lost interest in this subject, dropped this book like it’s a snake, and gone off to caulk something, anything.

  The study by Indiana University’s medical school found that men only use on
e side of their brains when they’re listening and women use both sides.

  To be fair, there’s a school of thought (okay, half a school for men) that believes these findings simply mean that men are more efficient listeners, able to accomplish the same task while using half as much brain.

  Then again, who wants to be fair?

  I have long suspected that my husband, a man-type individual, hears only half of what I say during a typical conversation. Now I know it’s not his fault.

  Men apparently listen with just the left brain, which, as everyone knows, is associated with analytical thought, reason, logic, and the ability to urinate outdoors and not flap your hands and go “ooooh, icky!” afterward.

  Most men have very little or no use for the right side of the brain, which contains information on family birthdays, anniversaries, Jenny K jewelry sale dates, and a delightful hodgepodge of zesty and nutritious casserole recipes.

  This research certainly explains a lot.

  Like how men and women act different on the Supreme Court.

  Remember a while back when the high court was trying to decide whether Gore or Bush should be president?

  The girl and boy justices handled the matter completely differently, if you’ll recall.

  The man justices would all interrupt each other and talk about golf scores and stuff while Justice Sandra (“Boom Boom”) Day O’Connor thoughtfully considered the lawyers’ arguments.

  Consider this excerpt from a transcript of the high court’s proceedings:

  Justice Scalia: “Thank you very much, Counsel. Hey, has anybody seen my robe?”

  Justice O’Connor: (sighing heavily) “It’s right over there on the bench where you left it, Tony. I swear if your head wasn’t attached to your shoulders…”

  Justice Thomas: “What? What would happen if his head wasn’t attached to his shoulders?”

  Justice Souter: “You know, I’m getting kinda hungry. Let’s just send this puppy back to the folks in Florida to decide, okay?”