It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [37]
“You know it skeeves me!” she said as she dumped a towel into my arms. “I’m not picking up your hair and neither is my cleaning lady Patricia! The last time I went into a bathroom after you left it, I thought some monkey war had happened in there!”
“I was using Sun-In then, Mom!” I protested with a sneer. “You spray that shit all over your head and see what your scalp manages to hang on to! Everyone knew it! Even the FDA! Kmart should never have been selling it!”
Frankly, it wasn’t just my mother who had difficulty with the transition of having her daughter return for a week. I don’t think my Dad was ready for me to come back home, either. I think it had been a long time since he was forced to make conversation at the kitchen table over coffee, especially with the person who had been canceling out his vote in every single election since the mid-eighties.
“So,” he said with a chipper, good-morning smile. “That president of yours doesn’t seem to be able to cough up his birth certificate.”
“Dad,” I said, my eyes still half closed, being that I had been awake for eight minutes. “I don’t even have a bra on yet. Maybe we should save the birther debate for Mid-Morning Snack Time. Give us something to live for.”
“All right then,” he agreed. “I noticed from my office window that you parked facing the wrong side of the street yesterday afternoon for fifteen to twenty minutes, at about four, four fifteen P.M. You know you’re going to get a ticket for that. Everyone on this street obeys the law.”
“Dad,” I said, now that I had been awake for eight minutes and fifteen seconds. “No cop has ever set foot on that asphalt, and if they have, it’s because someone saw a car driving down the street that was a model older than 2005 and they panicked.”
“Your mother deleted all of my very important emails,” he started again. “I had them all filed in my trash folder, and if I had wanted to throw them away, they wouldn’t have still been in the trash folder. Do you know how to get them back?”
“I wouldn’t have the slightest idea,” I said, knowing it was unwise to tackle that debacle with or without underwire support. “But if there’s anything you can do to get her to stop wearing the shorty showgirl nightgown, I’m all for it.”
“Damnit,” he said, wincing. “I’m gonna have to call The Geek. Gonna have to call The Geek. Did you know they found the Garden of Eden in Iraq? It’s starting to grow back.”
“I don’t know how hard Glenn Beck was crying when he told you that,” I said, getting up and throwing my napkin onto the table in a feeble act of surrender. “But you might want to get a second source. I’m going to go pull my hair out in the shower now.”
“Oh, Jesus. Just don’t let your mother see it” was all he said.
But, to be perfectly honest, my mother didn’t really know what to do with me at the breakfast table, either, although she does wear pants on the first floor of the house, so it was a much safer atmosphere.
“You broke my coffeemaker the last time you were here,” she said after she sat down and took a sip from her mug.
“You know that just isn’t true. I didn’t really break it,” I replied. “I just put the water in the wrong hole. It dried out by the time I left. You used it this morning and sixty percent of the coffee stains came out of the dish towels. It’s like the space shuttle of coffeemakers. It’s far more complicated than it needs to be for an appliance that can only make one cup of coffee at a time.”
“And my coffee is never stale now,” she said adamantly. “It’s an anti-stale coffeemaker.”
“Really?” I replied. “Where are you going between the time you put the filter in your old coffeemaker and the time the dripping is done? Are you going into the bathroom, or are you bending the time–space continuum? Where are you going? The Civil War? American Revolution? If it takes you