It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [16]
The Mean Lady nodded. “I know her!” she hissed, lightly pounding her fist on the counter.
“And I think you’re nice, too,” I finished, to which she smiled, nodded, and smoothed the postage label on one of my packages.
“Hey,” I said quickly, noticing something very, very odd about her wrist. “Where’s your tattoo?”
It was gone. The fiery, tempestuous dragon had vanished.
“Oh,” the nice lady said as she laughed and pointed behind her, where on the wall was an entire display of vibrantly colored tattoo decals, including the legendary dragon.
And right then, at that second, we were cooked in the middle.
*The corn-nut lady, by the way, sent her package to some P.O. box in rural Louisiana, where I am positive that not only are corn nuts available, but they’re a staple of the diet, along with Karo syrup and obscure pig parts. It’s a main protein source. I bet Corn Nut Stew, Corn Nuts and Dumplings, Corn Nut Salad, and Chicken-Fried Corn Nuts are served at every funeral or parole party.
Butcha Are, Blanche! Ch’are in That Chair!
Oliver Twist looked at me with more horror in his eyes than I had ever seen on any street urchin, his bowl limply dangling from his hand in shock. Next to him, the Jewish bubbie from Scottsdale was speechless, her missile-sized ta-ta’s resting on her belly just above her waist. The Vampire Queen by her side looked on in silence as I lifted my arm up and went in as hard as I could, hitting Jamie, my best friend, in the middle of the back and nearly shooting her out of the wheelchair she was sitting in.
This was not exactly the way I had envisioned my birthday celebration to unfold. I happen to have a Halloween birthday; I am here to tell you that it is not as exciting as it may seem to non-Halloween-birthday people, for the following reasons:
1. There will always be little children interrupting your personal holiday, wanting something from you, and in Oregon you may very well get the gender of the child wrong 100 percent of the time, even when the child in question is wearing a tutu, ballet shoes, and a tiara.
2. There will always be someone you know who is throwing another party on the same night. Sometimes that can get a little political and can even arrive at a point where people begin Big Talking if they are graduate students, saying things like “But I’m grad-fathered in to throw the Halloweeen party! I’ve been in grad school longer than anybody else!” when they believe that throwing a birthday party is a call to battle. We discovered that some people with little to focus on tend to lose sight that they’re talking about a Halloween party in a crumbling basement apartment that smells like Tinactin and has the filthiest toilet in the county and not something as crucial as Mideast water rights.
And
3. If that trick-or-treat nonsense wasn’t enough to cast a pall over my Halloween birthday, I wasn’t all that thrilled with rounding my age up yet again, since my age can no longer be mistaken for a football score and has more in common with a high-blood-pressure reading. This was especially true after a well-known person in my town—startlingly close to my age—dropped dead of natural causes and no one seemed particularly shocked but me.
Well, what do you know, I thought, as most people nodded their heads and noted that he would be missed. I was no longer a “tragedy.” The rings on this tree were now old growth. In fact, I bet no one would blink an eye if I dropped dead immediately. Instead of muttering “Such a shame, so young” at my funeral, or the preferred “Promising life cut so short,” people were more apt to whisper something apart from quick, sad clichés. “Well, of course she’s dead! Did you see what that girl ate?” would be the more common thing heard at my funeral, followed by “Between you and me, miracle she lived to this point. The only regular workout she had involved nothing but her teeth,” or “Well, she had a decent run. She lived longer than a caveman,” or even “Hey, I just won fifteen dollars!