It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [35]
But that’s my family for you. My grandfather spent two years in France and Belgium as a medic in an army hospital in World War II, and when he finally came home—after marching across several entire countries, trying to save lives of soldiers, sailing back across the ocean on the Queen Mary, and taking a cab to Brooklyn after the ship docked—he found the house empty. My Nana and my mother, whom my Pop Pop hadn’t seen since she was a couple of months old, simply weren’t there.
“It was dinnertime,” my Nana explained sixty years later as she shrugged. “My father called and said supper was on the table. What was I supposed to do? Everyone was waiting for me. Pop Pop was late!”
It goes to show that in the genome of my family, nothing can fight against the lure of tomato sauce and melted cheese; the mere presence or mention of food has Jupiter’s gravitational pull and cannot be stymied. Not even a prodigal patriarch—after helping stop the Nazis from world domination, thus rescuing humanity from having black cheese infested with mites on every menu and reclassifying “cutlets” as “schnitzel”—could be considered if he came home fifteen minutes late from the war. So I guess I should have been happy that I was just flying in from Oregon to meet an empty house and not arriving after battling dictatorships and triumphing over relentless evil, only to discover that if I had to go head-to-head against a meatball, I didn’t have a shot.
My sister, it turns out, was more than happy to pick me up, even before she ate, bucking centuries of tradition and her very own primal instinct.
“How do you deal with staying back home?” she said point-blank as soon as I got into the car. “I had to go over there yesterday to pick the kids up and I only lasted eight minutes. Mom didn’t know how to send an email attachment, so I showed her, went through the steps several times, and she still didn’t get it. Finally I said, ‘Don’t you see the paper clip? The paper clip will tell you that you attached a document.’ ”
My mother, apparently, though searching the email with her eyes, told my sister she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and went on to inform my sister that she didn’t know anything about attachments, either.
“Oh, I don’t, huh?” my sister told me she protested. “Look right there. That paper clip proves that I know how to attach a document. I do so know how to send attachments!”
“There’s no paper clip!” my mother replied. “You keep talking about a paper clip and there’s no paper clip!”
“The paper clip is right here,” my sister said, pointing her finger and showing my mother on the computer screen. “It is right here.”
“Oh,” my mother suddenly said. “You mean the little ‘g’?”
“Does it look like a little ‘g’ to you?” my sister asked me as we flew down the freeway.
“Then, right as I got to the front door, making my escape, Dad asked me if I knew how to recover emails on his computer,” she said. “Apparently, he keeps all of his emails in his trash folder, and mom went through it yesterday and deleted them all. He was very upset because he said if he wanted to get rid of them, he would delete them himself, and now they are all gone. Every important email that he never wanted to throw away in his trash folder is gone.”
“Why was all of the important email in his trash folder?” I queried.
“Why are you even asking that?” she replied furiously. “How is a paper clip a little ‘g’?”
I nodded. I got it. Coming back home and staying with my parents did take some adjusting, I have to admit. Even though I left home a long, long time ago—in a move that included defiantly throwing my clothes into the backseat of my car and driving away, before Lady Gaga was born—the second my suitcase rolls into the tiled foyer, I feel as though I’ve got crow stuck between a crown and one of my last remaining real teeth. And that’s because in my parents’ house, the parents are parents and the