It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [30]
A week later, I was in the dentist’s chair after I got the X-rays taken, and my dentist was shaking his head.
“You didn’t even want the salsa but you ate it anyway?” he said to me, chuckling.
“He was being rude,” I insisted. “And I decided to teach him a lesson.”
“What was the lesson?” he asked, still laughing.
“Instant karma’s gonna get you,” I replied.
“And, oh, did it,” he replied. “Because I’m afraid I don’t give out free samples.”
“Ask Your Grandmother What a Hairy Tongue Is”
Sitting in the waiting room at my doctor’s office, I looked next to me and glared at my husband. When we arrived, he had almost any seat in the house to choose from while I checked in, and when I was done forking over my insurance info I joined him across from the only other lady in the waiting area. Fifteen seconds after I sat down, she burst forth with a rattle that sounded more like a machine gun submerged in Jell-O than the recognizable cough of a mammal.
Before I could even say something like “We need to build a barrier out of magazines and Fisher-Price toys,” a grown man walked by in his pajamas, and the sounds of another violently retching in a nearby bathroom were more than audible.
Before the nurse called my name, a man in the third scooter I had seen in ten minutes shot by with a gallon bag full of urine hanging off his front basket on what appeared to be a pee hook.
“Really?” I asked my husband when I regained the ability to speak and say mean things. “Really? Do you know how long it takes to pee a gallon? At least a couple of days. At least. Days. And you can’t tell me Mr. Rascal hasn’t passed a sink since Monday.”
My husband just looked at me.
“That,” I said as I pointed down the hall in the direction he rolled, “was for shock value. One wrong pass by a magazine rack or sudden jolt over a broom handle and that thing will rupture and have no mercy within a ten-foot splash zone. What would you do if you got soaked by week-old pee and you saw the guy it came from? Fire. Fire is the only answer. I’m going to have nightmares for three nights about that humming urinal on wheels. This is why I hate coming here. I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”
“You got stabbed in the foot by a pair of scissors,” my husband replied. “And you’re here because you haven’t had a tetanus shot in twenty years, although I do agree that if lockjaw can also paralyze your tongue into silence, I will take you home right now.”
That is roughly why I was there. The day before, I had been looking for a specific pair of shoes in my closet and was pulling down a shoe box from a shelf when I saw something flash by and hit my foot, then felt a twinge of pain. But honestly, I didn’t think it hurt all that much, until I looked at it and saw blood pumping out of it as if Jed Clampett had been shooting at some food.
I was already standing in a puddle of blood that was spreading quickly, but after I hobbled downstairs and got the bleeding to stop, I realized the wound was deeper than it was wide.
“Oooh, you’re going to need a tetanus shot for that,” my husband said, wincing.
“Shut up,” I replied quickly. “No. I can weather this. Prairie medicine.”
My husband rolled his eyes.
“Break your toe, break your nose, fine, go ahead with the prairie medicine,” he said. “But lockjaw is a different story. That will make your body flip around like a little girl possessed by the devil doing