It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [84]
“Was this some sort of beauty mugging?” she asked. “Are you in L.A.? You’d better check your boobs. They could have gotten six sizes bigger before you even knew what was happening.”
“No, no, no, I was getting a touch-up on my roots and it’s part of the service,” I explained. “I could either get a hand massage or I could get my makeup done. So I let someone touch my hand. It was a mistake.”
“You’re telling me!” she exclaimed. “Remember when I went on that business trip to South Carolina at that fancy resort? I decided to get a massage, because I thought it would be fun and that I deserved it because I just had a baby. Fun? A stranger touching me all over? No one deserves that!”
Apparently, as soon as the massage began, my sister knew she was in trouble and tried to drop hints to the masseuse that it just wasn’t her thing.
“I told her I was ticklish,” my sister said. “So instead of it ending, she put lotion on me for an hour, which turned a regular old massage into a stranger caressing me. Moistly.”
“I’m establishing a ‘safe’ word if strangers ever want to touch me again,” I said. “Blueberry! Blueberry!”
“No kidding,” my sister agreed. “I gave birth faster than it took that hour to pass. Mistake? When I finally got back to my room, I felt like I’d just been involved in a long-term relationship with a sixty-year-old Yugoslavian lady. I apologized to my husband for weeks.”
Notaros, at least in our dynasty, are not huggers. We’re not touchers, patters, or embracers. We’re flinchers, jerkers, and re-coilers. We like a loooooot of space. Honestly, I don’t think that being able to lift up my arms and do one copter rotation without having my elbow in someone’s mouth is really asking all that much. We do best in that environment. When our physical security boundaries are breached, the issue will be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly. If you creep up behind me in a checkout line and the alarm is sounded, I will be forced to ask if you intend to crawl up my ass, because that’s clearly where you’re heading. If you persist, I may have no choice but to challenge you to a kicking fight in the parking lot.
This has been awkward, however, because I married into a touching family that has no problem walking by one another in a galley kitchen, picking a stray leaf out of one another’s hair, or reaching over and wiping a smear of jelly or peanut butter off a sibling’s cheek. In my family, the game of “There. No, there,” is so prevalent that we played it for prizes one year at my nephew’s birthday. It lasted for so long that he burst into tears, wiped his face off with a paper towel, and left everyone in the dynasty without bragging rights.
“What’s going on here?” I asked the first time I saw my then to-be husband and his mother say goodbye, a hug that lasted longer than some sitcoms. “It was like you were going off to war.”
My husband shrugged. “The lady likes to hug” was all he said, and I had no choice but to wonder what made his family skin-friendly and mine skin-averse.
Then one night when I was on the treadmill watching Nova, thrilled that it was an episode I could understand, and my husband was in the living room watching the same thing. It was about scientists in Montreal who were studying the epigenome and how it was built to respond to experiences around us. Not only does the epigenome respond, but experience itself, it turns out, actually changes it by turning genes on and off. The scientists tested their theory out with two types of rats: mothers who licked and groomed their offspring after birth, and mothers who didn’t. The results showed that the offspring of the licking mothers were good at mazes, had calm demeanors, and didn’t eat all of the candy in the bowl. The mothers who drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and talked on the phone all the time had offspring who were anxious, blew at puzzles, and got chunky because they couldn’t leave the jelly beans alone.
I can’t even tell you if I turned the treadmill off, because the next thing I knew, I was in the