It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [36]
I have found myself asking if it was “okay if I had a cookie” before dinner, and I’ve noticed distinctly that, after being out, I try my hardest to act sober in front of my parents when I’m already sober.
Maybe it comes from years of conditioning from my mother lurking in the shadows as I barely made my curfew as a teenager. When I was a junior in high school, I made the mistake one night of coming home by the designated time but unable to walk, due to the poor decision-making process of an immature fifteen-year-old girl named Laurie, who heard that the boy she liked really liked someone way cuter. My mother, clearly a novice at identifying reality-altered behavior, couldn’t wait to pronounce that I was on LSD and that our whole family was in crisis, even though the culprit was an unholy mixture of Tang and gin. Ready to pounce and test me for the signals of LSD on any night thereafter, my mother began her drug research, which included (and was limited to) watching ABC Afterschool Specials that Melissa Sue Anderson was in, what she heard on the radio in song lyrics, and from Helter Skelter, the only book she read in its entirety from 1976 until 1985, or at least that’s how long it was in the bathroom on the back of the toilet. While the data was more than incomplete, that never stopped her from believing that she was qualified to distinguish a person who was hallucinating from someone who was a tumbler away from alcohol poisoning, even though shooting fuel-injected Tang out my nose cured me of drinking for a decade afterward.
“I know what ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ is about, you know,” she’d say, taking the last drag from her cigarette as she sat at the kitchen table when I walked through the door. “You’re not foolin’ nobody.”
“That’s weird, Mom,” I said as I got some milk from the fridge. “I thought you boycotted Beatles albums when they stopped wearing ties and you couldn’t see their earlobes anymore.”
“I bet you think you could fly to your room, don’t you?” she replied, and then oddly flashed me a peace sign. “How many fingers am I holding up? Or are you too spaced out to count?”
“I wish I was on LSD, because then this would be hilarious,” I said tiredly, as if I really needed to remind her that I was a white middle-class dork who still passed football-shaped notes to her friends between classes and who had no idea where to get underwear that didn’t have flowers on them, let alone psychedelic substances from the neighborhood recreational chemist.
“You don’t shoplift, do you?” she asked me, grinding out the butt as I chomped on an Oreo, trying to ignore her. “Because shoplifting is just a hop, skip, and a jump to joining a cult. One minute you have a free lipstick in your pocket, and the next thing you know you’re carving a pinwheel into your forehead. AND GODDAMNIT, DON’T HITCHHIKE!!”
Even decades later, as an adult bunking with my parents, just asking where the bath towels were might prove to be a dangerous game and could transform me into a ten-year-old in seconds flat. The first time I stayed with them as a taxpaying, car-owning, weed-pulling home owner, who had already experienced her first cancer scare and who wanted to take a shower, my mother simply shook her head. “Here we go,” she said with an exhausted sigh, her nightgown riding up terrifyingly higher than her tennis outfit in the seventies, even though my mother still has the legs of a showgirl (a very short Italian showgirl, but even so, it’s my mom). “I’m telling you right now, if you’re going to take a shower here, this is not a hotel. I’m not cleaning up your hair that’s all over the place in the bathroom. If you’re going to shed, pick it up. Hair makes me gag. All I need is one look. Don’t pretend that you don’t know that. That’s why you’re not allowed to bring food over on holidays, only drinks.”
When I responded to her “hair talk” with a blank stare—mainly because I hadn’t taken a shower in her house since I was twenty years old, my shedding patterns have most likely changed in that time, and also