It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [64]
In the candy aisle, we passed by a friend of mine from school, who had a permanent rumbling cough, and her mother, who was wearing a housecoat and had her hair in curlers.
We exchanged smiles and I waved quickly.
“Don’t you dare ever go to that girl’s house and put your mouth on anything, and I mean a glass, a soda can, or a Popsicle,” my mother warned me. “Why do you think she has a cough like that?”
“They’re dirty?” we all replied.
“No!” my mother shot back. “They’re filthy! I can’t imagine what the inside of that house looks like. I heard that they have cats. God. I don’t know why we can’t smoke in here.”
On the way out to the parking lot, my mother pointed to an Econoline three spaces away from our station wagon.
“Don’t ever walk next to a van, unless being kidnapped is your goal for the day,” she said, as she dragged my sister by her arm beyond a fifteen-foot radius of the vehicle. “Only weirdos drive vans. It’s not normal.
“See that door?” she continued, pointing to the large sliding panel on the side of the van as she loaded the groceries into our car. “Takes two seconds to slide that thing open, grab you, and slide it back. No one would see a thing. You wanna be kidnapped, take your time walking past it. You wanna stay alive, you better friggin’ run.”
I took my mother’s advice to heart. To this day, I don’t even drink out of the same glass as my husband, and he will be the first to admit that he couldn’t pick my cleavage, if it does indeed exist, out of a boobie lineup. Additionally, as a result of my mother’s parenting, I spent my formative years sprinting past any van I saw in a parking lot like lions were chasing me, fueled by my mother’s warning that eventually, someday, if I didn’t pick up the pace and remained the slowest girl in any parking lot, tragedy would befall me and I’d end up begging for change, wearing a sister-wife dress of calico, somewhere in Utah. When I was twenty, however, she upped the ante and amended the warning to include the fact that Van People were now working in tandem, or as independent contractors, and that I should circumvent any two large vehicles parked next to each other or with an empty spot in between.
“Two against one,” she warned. “And they don’t care how stupid your hair looks dyed that way. I wouldn’t kidnap you, but Van People aren’t very picky.”
Those words haunted me. To this day, if the only parking spot left in the grocery store is between two vans, chances are we’ll be having Pizza Hut for dinner and I’ll just come back the next day to get the milk.
Now, in my mother’s defense, she is the cleanest person I know and kept an absolutely spotless house, so everyone is dirty to her. I’ve seen her look at the baseboards in hospitals and cringe in disgust. During my entire childhood, I never once saw a speck of dust on anything or so much as a crumb on the floor, a streak on the window or on the floor-to-ceiling mirrors we had in the hall. I, unfortunately, did not get the green light on that chromosome and received the signal for toe hair instead.
She also grew up in Brooklyn and saw weird people doing weird things every day, and by the time we left in the 1970s, New York’s weirdness was at a fever pitch; I’m sure that left an imprint on her somewhere. This is just a theory that has taken me the better part of a lifetime to form, but I believe it. My mother believes in “normal.” But my mother is also a no-nonsense sort of person, and when she identifies whatever it is she considers dangerous, or “abnormal,” she reacts swiftly and without hesitation to cut it off at the source.
For example, yesterday my five-year-old nephew saw a pregnant lady and asked my very unprepared sister, the same one who was willing to wander into the fifteen-foot snatching radius of the van, “Where does the baby come out?”
“At the hospital” was my mother’s response, without so much as a second’s pause.
This is not to say that she is a master of strategy, because there