It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [7]
Initially, I was stunned and concluded that some hotel employee with a weird wrapper fetish and who liked to watch fat ladies sleep had been in my room the night before, opening DVDs and things from Costco by the side of my bed. But on closer inspection, I noticed that each wrapper had a residue on it—gummy, dense, and bright white. I recognized it immediately. It was frosting, and my suspicions were confirmed when I inspected one of the gummy patches closer and saw what could be nothing but the grooves of tongue tracks.
Oh, I thought shamefully. I know that tongue. The wide, overreaching lick and misshapen taste buds due to obscene amounts of salt intake. I know that tongue!! When I looked in the mirror, I saw proof positive. There had been no fetishist in the room, unwrapping box sets of Ken Burns documentaries and baby wipes. Nope. On my face was a five o’clock shadow consisting of Devil Dog crumbs from a box of snack cakes I had planned to mail my father later that morning. Suddenly, flashes of the ravage popped into my head. Actually, I don’t think it was as much of a ravage as it was a chubby girl sitting in bed in a dark room, eating snack cakes one after the other as crumbs fell out of her mouth and she threw the wrappers to the floor after she was done licking them, using both hands. Truth be told, it’s the same scene in broad daylight, except more people would be repulsed. And children would be told to look away.
The next morning, I shuffled out of the bathroom shortly after waking up and decided that the shoes I had seen on a website the day before definitely needed purchasing. I’d had dreams I was wearing them and was subsequently told by others in my reverie that the shoes “made my toes look quite thin.” Frankly, if anyone—real or otherwise—is seeing a shoe mirage that shows bones in my feet, I don’t care if there’s a squeak toy at the end of the big curled-up toe and a big red puff on them: Those shoes will be on my piggies by sundown.
Now determined to secure them, I flipped open my laptop, and my computer screen went immediately to my email account, which showed me that at a little after midnight the night before, a receipt arrived.
A receipt for shoes that, according to my imaginary friends, made my toes appear starved.
This has to be a mistake, I thought to myself; I didn’t buy those shoes last night. I know I looked at those shoes but didn’t buy them. I am fairly sure that I didn’t buy shoes last night; how can you buy shoes without putting in a credit-card number? Wow. Look at that. At 12:13 A.M. last night I bought shoes, evidenced by the last four digits of my credit-card number right there on the email receipt, under “payment method.”
I concluded that I must have clicked a button I didn’t intend to click, and, really, I was going to buy the shoes anyway, so was it that big a deal that I accidentally bought them?
And my plan was to recount just that to my best friend, Jamie, when I called her later that day.
“This is crazy, but last night I saw a pair of shoes online that I loved,” I began. “They were these super cute red—”
“Open-toed slingbacks with white stitching,” she finished for me. “I know, I was on the phone with you when you bought them.”
“You … what?” I said very slowly.
“Yeah, you said that if you got them,” she continued, “you would even cut and paint your nails, including the patches of skin on those couple of toes where your toenails fell off and never grew back because you tried shoes on without socks in a thrift store in 1987.”
“I told you about those fallen toenails?” I cried, almost hyperventilating.
“Everyone knew why you wore cowboy boots in a-hundred-twenty-degree weather,” she informed me. “No one believed you were allergic to the rubber in flip-flops.”
“I still don’t understand when it was that I talked to you,” I said, trying to piece together the events of the night prior. “What time did you call?”
“No, no, no, my friend,” Jamie said. “I guess you called me at around nine.”
“I called you? Which made it midnight my time,” I concluded.