It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [34]
But the next morning my eyes were fine and my nose hadn’t swollen up, proof that I hadn’t broken it. I didn’t need X-rays or some resident sticking a hand on either side of my head trying to show off. I couldn’t breathe out of it or touch it, but my nose looked fine, despite my husband’s prodding again that I needed to go to the doctor.
“A bran muffin isn’t going to make this any better,” I reminded him. “Prairie medicine. Besides, it’s not broken. No black eyes.”
“If you sneezed, would you pass out?” he asked me.
“No,” I said truthfully. “But it would kill me.”
My nose wasn’t broken. I knew it wasn’t. It was just bruised inside, I told myself, and that’s why I couldn’t touch it for two months. But one day, months later, when I was checking out my teenage-boy mustache in the mirror from different angles, I got a good look at my nostrils. My once perfectly symmetrical nostrils—and, yes, I know it’s a little odd to boast about your perfect nostrils, but they were the only pair of anything that matched on my body and would make me the optimum model for a nasal-spray ad—were no longer mirror images of each other. Not only were they no longer twins and my Plan B as nostril model was dashed, but they were even off center, and the right one was all squished as if it was Stevie Nicks’s when it collapsed under the weight of an eight ball.
So it appears that my nose was indeed broken, but when you step on a cat—who was absolutely fine, by the way—you can never predict what’s going to happen. Your cat could deglove your leg with one swipe, or he could disfigure your nostrils forever. And I thought if I could suffer through that and just have a weird nostril, prairie medicine was my new MO. The results, after all, were the same as going to the doctor, and I never had to put pants on. I felt the whole experience was economical, convenient, and showed traits self-sufficient, even if my mortality rate had skyrocketed.
But with blood pumping out of my foot from the stab wound with the scissor, I knew my prairie-medicine streak had ended. Tetanus was too big of a foe to chance, although the thought of spider-walking in front of my mother in a nightgown held irresistible appeal.
In the waiting room at the doctor’s office, the nurse came out and called my name. I got up and walked toward her with a slight limp, ready to get my bran-muffin recipe.
I felt ripe.
It’s a Bomb
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” my mother said over the phone when I informed her of what time my flight would land in Phoenix. “That’s the same time we’re going out to dinner. And this place is nowhere near the airport.”
I hadn’t seen my family in six months, since Christmas. And while I didn’t exactly expect a ticker-tape parade to erupt at my arrival, I also didn’t expect that I’d be taking a cab ride that cost more than my plane ticket to my parents’ house, simply to sit on the steps in 110 degrees like a yellowed newspaper and wait for them to come home.
“Call your sister; maybe she can pick you up,” my mother said. “This restaurant was on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dumps, you know that show? It’s an Italian place, but the guy with the white hair said it was good. He drives around to all kinds of crappy places and eats there, so he should know. We can’t change it. It’s too late. I already made the reservation.”
“For when?” I asked a little angrily.
“Well, I was just about to call them,” she replied.
In my mother’s defense, it was her birthday. She had a right to go anywhere she wanted to go. In my defense, I was flying in to surprise her for said birthday, a monthlong plan that went suddenly awry when she had apparently not really made reservations at the same time my flight landed and my father, who was in on my conspiracy, put her on the phone to tell me.
“I’m sorry,” my dad said when