It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [39]
“Oh, if you think his teeth take some getting used to, you should see the hair on his legs!” she said, dropped her voice to a whisper, made a disgusted look, and pointed to her deodorant place. “He even has hair … other areas. Like under his armpits. I’m trying to talk him into shaving them.”
“Mom, do you want to turn him into a drag queen?” I balked, horrified that he might have even considered asking other boys his age if their grandmas were helping them shave their armpits, maybe even buying them pink razors that they might pop out in the showers after PE, thinking that it was perfectly normal because Grandma said so. “Oh my God. You need to stop that. That’s what happens when we mature. We’re animals, Mom; mammals get hairy! What did you expect?”
If my mother had hind legs, she would have reared up on them and then kicked me in the face with a front hoof.
“I,” she quickly informed me with a pointed finger, “am not an animal. You are an animal! I read the Bible! I am not an animal!”
And with that, her chair left tire tracks on the tile as she pushed away from the table and stood up.
“By the way,” she said as she walked away and gave me one last look, “your shirt is too small. You look like friggin’ Pooh Bear.”
I looked down, and it was pretty much true. My mom had probably used a vast amount of restraint not to voice that observation as a breakfast opener.
But, to be honest, even that revelation couldn’t prepare me for what I saw one afternoon a few days later when I walked through my parents’ front door after parking my rental car in the wrong direction on the cop-free street. I don’t know how my mom and dad didn’t know I was there—I had to unlock the door, so I know I made noise. I was making noise, I tell you! But as I came around the corner from the foyer, I saw my mother sitting on the chair with her leg extended, and my father kneeling on the floor, a shoe in his hand. There they were, my parents—who, to my knowledge, had never even made eye contact, let alone touched—and here he was, slipping a shoe on her foot. What was going on here? They both turned and looked at me in the same second, their eyes wide with unexpected horror and shame. I’m sure the look on my face was no different.
No one said a word. The silence actually echoed.
I’m so glad this didn’t happen when I was six, I thought as I turned and fled up the stairs, not stopping until I closed the guest-bedroom door behind me.
“—and he was putting on her shoe! They both turned to look at me. Their eyes. Their eyes!” I cried quietly into the phone to my sister.
“Oh. My. God,” my sister replied in a horrified whisper. “You should really come and stay over here.”
“She was on the couch,” I said again. “With her bad-hip leg sticking out—”
“SHUT UP,” my sister demanded firmly. “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!”
“How am I going to go back downstairs?” I asked. “How am I going to face them, after seeing what I’ve seen?”
“Stay upstairs!” my sister warned. “Don’t leave that room. Do you have enough snacks to get you through until morning?”
“Oh,” I said, on the verge of a full-fledged panic attack. “I have a bag of chocolate Twizzlers and two protein bars in my suitcase from my book tour in 2008. I won’t make it until sundown. Wait—”
I suddenly spied a red bag that was on a chair and could be one of two things: Godiva chocolates from my friend Lucy, or handcrafted, beautifully scented bath bombs from my friend Kathy Monkman. I held out hope for the chocolates as I crossed the room. I knew that Lucy had not only included truffles in her bag but also dark-chocolate-covered almonds, which feasibly could be enough protein to keep me in the guest bedroom until my flight left in two days.
But as I got close enough to the bag to touch it, I smelled the wonderful aroma of flowers, and, though heavenly, that doesn’t smell like Godiva. Still, just to be sure, I looked into the bag, and that’s when I definitely saw the two delicately packed boxes with the rounded spheres of bath bombs covered in white powder, each resting in a white paper