It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [40]
Bath bombs.
“Never mind, I accept it. I’m going to die,” I told my sister. “I left the chocolate downstairs. Please remember me as forty pounds lighter. But if I toss the keys out the window, will you come over and put my car in the right direction? I’m afraid Dad is going to write me a ‘citizen’s arrest’ ticket for aggravated parking. And if I never see you again, check Nick’s armpits for stubble.”
As soon as I hung up with my sister, however, I heard my Mom yell from downstairs.
“Laurie?” she called.
“I only want to talk about it with my therapist!” I called back.
“We’re going to dinner at Outback! Do you want to come?” she replied.
I actually thought about it for a second, because who passes up a free steak and baked potato? But then the reality of spending the next hour and a half attempting to avoid the “Sometimes Mommy Can’t Get Her Shoes on By Herself and That’s Perfectly Normal Only Because She Has a Bad Hip” talk would cost me more in trying to cure the residual twitching and spontaneous sobbing than a free baked potato was worth, even with all the fixin’s.
“No thanks,” I shouted back. “You know it’s only two forty-five.”
“Your father likes to order off the day menu,” my mother yelled. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? We gotta hurry. The lunch special is only good for fifteen more minutes. After that, everything goes up two dollars.”
“Nah, I’m good,” I called back, sighing with relief when I heard the front door close.
When my father sat down at the kitchen table the next morning after I had just taken my first sip of coffee and announced, “You know, Anderson Cooper is waging a war against Christmas,” I knew that I was most likely in the safe zone and that the jarring “touching incident” from yesterday would not be discussed, just like every other traumatizing family event. Which is exactly how we like it. Everything was back to normal and completely ignored, no matter what the residual effects. Nobody touched nobody.
Until an hour later, when I was ironing the dress I had planned to wear that day and there were two quick knocks at the door.
I was about to say, “Hang on a second,” and grab a robe, a shirt, a towel, or anything that would have covered me up, since I was only wearing a vintage full slip—which is legally considered underclothes—when the door swung open and there stood my father.
“He—” He stopped abruptly in mid-word when he saw the look on my face, which I’m sure was the same face I use when people walk in on me when I’m using the toilet (I have now used that face exactly three times in my life: The first was at SXSW, when a girl burst into the stall I was occupying and demanded that I get up because she needed to pee “real quick,” and I would have punched her had my underwear not been wrapped around my ankles. And the other time, when my nephew was a toddler and every room was free range for him. Between seeing me in a compromised situation and my mother wanting to Nair the Y chromosome off him, that child has had plenty of deep-rooted RuPaul-level damage).
There I was, wearing basically a long bra dress with my fat old-lady arms naked and exposed, my bra straps visible, and I didn’t even have tights on at this point. I looked like every little old Italian widow, except I didn’t have food stains on me yet. The only thing that stopped me from slipping into a psychotic break was that, in the event of my developing an alter personality, it would take my father longer to close the door.
“—eeyyyyyyyy,” he resumed, in the same amount of time it has taken for comets to crash into the Earth, species to go extinct, established civilizations to collapse, and the world to completely forget that the Romans invented indoor plumbing.
“Good job with the parking,” he said. “I can see you’re making an effort.”
“Okay,” I forced out. “I do have a bra on, but I would prefer to talk about this when I’m actually wearing clothes.”
“You should really come and stay over here,” my sister reiterated over the phone three minutes late.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.