It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [20]
“Oh, good,” she said as she reached for the glass. “I would like a little quiche, too, please. With a splash of water. Got that?”
Great, I thought, anything to help soak up the bathtub of vodka that was immersing every cell in her body. I ran and plucked a quiche off the table and handed it to her when she was done laughing. She popped it whole into her mouth, giggled, and then took a drink.
Oh, boy. I knew she had lost any coherency for the night, but maybe if she drank enough fluid to prevent the alcohol from shrinking her brain, she wouldn’t lose most of tomorrow dry-heaving and spinning in my guest bedroom, even though “guest bedroom” is a loose term for a blow-up mattress on the floor of my husband’s office. I couldn’t believe she had gotten drunk without me; she had just taken off like a spooked racehorse, speeding around the track, all by herself! Besides, I had biscuits and gravy planned for the Day After My Birthday Breakfast, and somebody was coming with me even if she had to carry her own retch bucket, though in the past her purse has doubled very effectively for that purpose.
Suddenly I heard a loud gasping sound, and I turned around to see Jamie’s sunken-in eyes grow large, then humongous, then exponential.
“What’s the matter?” I cried, although the only response she gave me was another desperate long gasp.
The quiche! I thought. It’s lodged in her throat! Holy shit, she’s choking. She’s choking.
Jamie’s hands flew up around her neck. She tried to draw another breath in.
Her face was turning red.
There was no time to waste. No one, no matter what their age or how likely it was that they didn’t exercise or have an age-appropriate heart rate, was going to die on my watch.
Not at my party!
I immediately shifted into Laurie: Panic Level One: Strike Offense! © 2011, during which my first impulse is typically always blunt-force trauma.
“I’m going to hit you!” I warned, and she nodded frantically, still terribly, horribly silent.
I pushed her forward with one hand and brought my other hand behind me. Then I struck her. Square in the back, right between her shoulder blades.
Oliver Twist, Maude Greenberg, and Nancy, the Vampire Queen, stood and watched as Baby Jane Hudson beat the living shit out of Blanche.
Nobody said a word.
Whack. Whack. Whack.
I hit her several times, but I couldn’t dislodge the quiche chunk. Precious seconds were ticking away as smaller and smaller amounts of oxygen were getting to my best friend’s brain, although I have to admit that, with the amount of vodka she had just poured down her throat, there probably wasn’t much of a difference from ten minutes prior.
All I knew was that I wasn’t saving her, her eyes were beginning to bulge, and, before I knew it, I had arrived at Laurie: Panic Level Two: TV Moves! © 2011.
So I guess it is necessary to mention here that if you reach a level of danger—life-threatening or otherwise—in my presence, I will most likely lunge at you like I did to Jamie and lock my arms under your breasts.* In other words, I will Heimlich you.
Admittedly, I don’t have much experience with this sort of technique and I never took a class, but I did it once to my dog and she stopped coughing, so I tend to think my success rate is pretty good. Or at least better than most. But at this juncture, I didn’t think I had any choice. Jamie was choking, her face was an even deeper red, I had exhausted all of the tools at my disposal. I had nothing left.
I went in.
In fact, it probably didn’t resemble the Heimlich maneuver as much as it did me trying to wrestle a corpse out of the ocean, but I wasn’t doing it for the glamour. Heimliching people is not as easy as it appears on TV, especially if you’re behind the victim, who is in a wheelchair that keeps rolling away across the kitchen, and you have to keep Heimliching her as you move to other rooms of the house.
Still, no one said anything, and although I didn’t notice it at the time, in hindsight I’m not sure if it was because the bystanders were speechless at activities at my party or because the heroine was wearing