It Looked Different on the Model Read online

  You Must Be My Lucky Star

  “You need to stop eating in bed,” my husband said, after I had just gotten all comfy under the covers. “I know you’re eating candy in here. Please don’t do it again.”

  “I don’t eat candy in bed,” I protested, surprised that he would even think such a thing.

  “But you do,” he said, laughing at me. “Look at my pillow. It’s covered in melty bits of chocolate that fell out of your mouth during one of your nighttime Ambien candy binges. All I’m asking is that you eat the candy downstairs and don’t bring it in here.”

  I looked at his pillow and, sure enough, it had dots of what looked like little chocolate stars on one side of it.

  “Well, that’s not me,” I argued. “I have nothing to do with that.”

  “Well, I don’t know what else it could be,” he mentioned one last time, and turned out the light.

  I didn’t know what it could be, either, I thought. I really wasn’t eating candy in bed. That I remembered, anyway. That was ridiculous. Wouldn’t I remember eating candy in bed, even if Ambien Laurie had participated in a nighttime chocolate binge? There would be evidence, I reasoned. She’s a pig. She leaves wrappers everywhere. Or little bites of things. Or it would still be in my hair. It was impossible, I reasoned, because otherwise it would be too sad to be true. One should always remember eating chocolate.

  So the next morning I searched the house for empty Hershey’s wrappers or anything comparable that Ambien Laurie might have attacked. I suddenly remembered I had a bar of dark chocolate to make frosting saved in the spice cabinet, and I started feeling very, very guilty that I was the Chocolate-Star Bandit. But then I opened the cabinet door and it was still there, nestled in its as-yet-untouched wrapper.

  I didn’t find anything, and I knew that if I didn’t find it, she didn’t eat it.

  Two nights later as I climbed into bed, however, my husband had his pillow in his hands and was closely examining it.

  Then he looked at me with his lips pursed.

  “I don’t know if you think this is funny,” he told me. “But I already asked you to stop eating candy in bed. Now it looks like this is one big joke to you. There are more chocolate stars on my pillow.”

  I threw my hands up and shrugged.

  “You got me,” I said honestly. “There’s not even any chocolate in the house besides Baker’s chocolate. I looked all over yesterday morning, and nothing. I don’t know what you want me to say. All I can tell you is that it’s not me.”

  “Very funny. I hope you’re getting a big laugh out of this,” he said as he turned over, rammed his head into the chocolate-star pillow, and turned out the light.

  Whatever, I thought. I didn’t know what to say. What was I supposed to do, confess to something that I knew I hadn’t done, just to make my husband think that I wasn’t playing a joke on him? Plus, this wasn’t the first time that my husband had misidentified something.

  When he was a kid, it was his job to take out the trash, and inevitably, because he was seven, the trash sometimes piled up. When his mother would take him to task and make him do his job, garbage would end up getting spilled on the way out to the alley, because there was so much of it. It was during one of those unfortunate runs that my husband discovered that trash—once an unenviable chore that he hated—was actually a treasure trove of toys. He looked at the bounty spread out before him on the sidewalk; there were cardboard rolls, tinfoil balls that could be made into anything, and little white telescopes. Tons of them. So many of them that he couldn’t figure out how these marvelous things had not been seen before. Obviously, they had come from the house, and someone was throwing these perfectly good tiny telescopes away! The fools he lived with! Idiots! Why were they keeping these from him? He surveyed the land through them, pretended to be a pirate, and gathered them together to add to the telescope collection that he kept in a shoe box in his room. He even found special pink plastic ones, which he considered far more collectible and rarer than the regular white ones.

  Now, I’m not sure when he discovered that he most likely had one of the world’s only collections of Tampax applicators under his bed in a shoe box, or that he realized he had been mashing them up to his face, but it just goes to show that sometimes what you think is a magical gift from the toy gods is really a confusing nightmare that you’ll only reveal when you’ve been drinking heavily at parties. And I have to say that, honestly, many, many years later (although the wounds still heal), his method of discovery has not exactly changed. Or improved.

  Yesterday, someone I live with pulled a jar of salsa out of the fridge, opened it, and said, “There’s white all in there. What do you think that is?”

  I said I didn’t know and told him to taste it, but the person put the lid back on the jar and returned it to the fridge. After a second, I asked him why he put it back and he said, “You might eat it.”

  So clearly we’re still facing challenges in the mystery-solving department, and if my husband happened to touch his pillow with muddy fingers and forgot about it, that really wasn’t my fault. Or my problem.

  But the next day I was bringing some laundry up to the bedroom when I saw my little geriatric cat, Barnaby, walking along the bed near the headboard. Honestly, I didn’t like the cat walking all over my bed, but he was old and I doubted he was going to see another ring grow under his bark, if you know what I’m saying. I thought, fine, walk on the bed. I love pulling animal fur out of my mouth at three in the morning.

  He was flitting around on the bed, and when I went to put some of my husband’s socks away, he came to that side of the bed and promptly sat down on my husband’s pillow, square in the center.

  “Oh, you need to get off that,” I said, and lifted him up, repositioning him on the comforter pointing toward my side. He was happy. His little stump of a tail was up and he flicked it.

  I gasped.

  “I know that star!” I said as I snapped my fingers in victory. “I knew I wasn’t eating candy!”

  That night, my husband got into bed with a book in his hand, ready to have a nice, relaxing bedtime, but then he noticed a new chocolate star right smack in the center of the pillow.

  He looked at me and shook his head.

  “I don’t know how or why this is hilarious to you, but it is annoying to me,” he informed me, and he put the pillow behind him.

  “I told you I have nothing to do with that,” I replied.

  I grabbed Barnaby from the edge of the bed and turned his tail toward my husband.

  “But does this look familiar?” I asked.

  He looked at Barnaby, then the pillow, then Barnaby, then the pillow, and I almost thought he was going to reach for the cat and put it back in the fridge in case I might still eat it.

  “Let me give you a hint: I wouldn’t wish on this one!” I said.

  My husband shook his head. “I just don’t know where you’re going with this,” he said, getting a wee bit angry. I knew I had to cut to the chase.

  “May I present,” I said, doing some fancy game-show-hostess finger moves under my cat’s ass, “Barnaby’s Little Chocolate Star!”

  Then I moved his tail down like a lever. “IT’S AN ASS,” I said with the tail down.

  “It’s a stamp!” I said, lifting the tail up.

  “It’s an ass,” I said, moving the tail back down again.

  “It’s a sta—”

  My husband looked me dead in the eye.

  “You need to tell me right now that you’ve been eating chocolate in this bed,” he said firmly.

  And, in a way, I wished I could have. But I already knew what movie was playing in my husband’s head, and it was of him, fast asleep and drooling all over the chocolate stars, then, in slow motion, rubbing and nuzzling his face all over it. And my version is the same, but he is even smiling, which I know he is not doing in his, and mine rounds out nicely with a laugh track behind it, too.

  Because it was true, and I knew it was true. He could h
ave buffed that pillow to a shine with all the rubbing he’d been doing against that thing. I offered to have a lineup so my husband could identify the right butt, but he quickly declined.

  “Oh, honey,” I said reaching out comfortingly. “I’m sorry that I didn’t lie to you and that I repeatedly told you the truth, and that for the past four nights you’ve been sleeping on a pillow that your cat shit-stamped on both sides with his leaking asshole. Maybe now you should change your pillowcase.”

  “Shut up,” my husband said, as he shot off the bed and stomped down the hall and stairs to the linen closet. “I’m probably going to have cholera!”

  “That’s good,” I yelled back. “Because it’s still in the jar in the fridge.”

  Instant Karma

  My dentist looked at the X-ray and then looked back at me.

  “How’d you do it this time?” he asked.

  “Trying to teach a hippie a lesson at Trader Joe’s,” I answered.

  “Well, not only is that a waste of your time,” he replied, “but it’s going to cost you twelve hundred dollars.”

  I nodded in agreement and rolled my eyes. Sure, I should have known better, but sometimes the moment arrives when you do or die; either you take a stand or you shrink away and shut up forever.

  When we first moved to Eugene, I understood that it was my duty to adapt to my new environment instead of expecting my new environment to adapt to me. But that proved far more difficult than originally expected, because, you see, we moved to a place that is the homeland to the horror of FaerieWorlds. It’s an annual Eugene festival in which anyone can spend twenty dollars a day to wander in and out of crafts booths staffed by people who decided they could make a better living weaving fairy crowns out of polyester ribbons and dead grass than investing in a couple of semesters in community college. Pan is hanging out on every corner, the prosthetic-elfin-ears vendor sells out, and no one there has ever heard of hair conditioner. It’s similar to a Renaissance Fair but with more demons and flutes. (And if you can even explain the difference to me, you win. I happen to think the two are rather synonymous.)

  However, that’s not to say this is Eugene on a daily basis but rather to show what the petri dish that could birth something of the magnitude of FaerieWorlds looks like. The challenge I was up against was somewhat larger than initially estimated, but I convinced myself I could do it.

  While Phoenix certainly isn’t a bastion of normalcy—you can take your gun anywhere you can take a baby, and that’s the law—it seemed far easier to make friends there. I found it difficult to fit in when we arrived in Eugene but naturally thought it would pass and that I would eventually find my people. They had to be out there somewhere, right? I clearly recall the exact moment I realized how much trouble I was in and when I first felt hope flush away. My husband was also trying to make new friends and had invited a cohort from grad school and Shakespeare scholar, Bennet, to a baseball game at the historic WPA stadium down the street from our house. I was on the phone with my sister when Bennet arrived, and when my husband announced that they were going to go, I hung up the phone to meet my husband’s new pal. He was very nice, very polite, on the reserved side, but that’s fine, I was meeting him for the first time. Shy is fine. His name is Bennet and he studies Shakespeare, I reminded myself. So I decided to break the ice a little bit by relating a story that my sister had just told me on the phone.

  It seemed that her son Nicholas, who at the time was about nine, had just gotten into honors math, which was exciting because now someone in our family besides my father could do fractions, and having an understudy would come in very handy when cutting birthday cake. She told me that he had also joined band and had taken up the clarinet, which we were less excited about. Not that playing a clarinet is a bad thing, but in a year, when the kid got braces, if he was walking down the street wearing a Mathletes shirt and carrying a clarinet, even I would have to beat him up.

  Apparently, however, Nicholas, who is a perfectionist, was a little upset that his mother only rented the instrument and didn’t buy it. But clarinets ran about $450, so to buy something we were hoping he’d suck at was out of the question.

  “At least he hadn’t figured out yet that a shitload of other kids already had their mouths all over it before he did,” I relayed as I started laughing. “My sister said he’s trying so hard to play it right, but he’s shoving the damned mouthpiece in so far he’s making himself gag on it.”

  I thought at least my husband would laugh, but, instead, the two of them stood there smiling very nicely, which wasn’t the response I expected at all. I mean, my nephew is gagging himself on a member of the woodwinds family, and that is hilarious. I decided I must not be explaining it very well, so I added, “Not a good look for fifth grade.”

  Again, nothing but stiff smiles, and I didn’t get it. It was a funny story; what was missing, what hadn’t I said?

  Then I did the unthinkable, just to make sure I drove that punch line home, deep, deep, deep into the ground so no one could miss it: I very quickly, although apparently quite accurately, imitated a little boy gagging on a clarinet.

  And I wasn’t even done with my imitation, I was still in the middle of it when I realized that I was doing something highly regrettable, and my mouthful of pretend clarinet sort of melted away with any chance of humor the story might have had.

  When I looked at my husband, his lips were tight across his face in a frown, and he said simply, “Wow, that’s quite a story, Laurie. Are you ready, Bennet?”

  I was pretty sure that, in one swipe of unintentional pornographic charades, I had ruined everything. My first introduction to one of my husband’s colleagues and that’s what I did. I mean, tell that story to an undergrad, sure, no problem, but to a nineteenth grader, a Shakespeare scholar no less? I once fell asleep at a performance of Macbeth I was so bored, and I was playing one of the witches. All I could do was hope that my husband and Bennet got seats behind home plate and that some freak fly ball would boomerang and bounce off Bennet’s head, creating no physical marks or lasting effects but memory loss from an hour prior to the game.

  At least I was on my own when I destroyed the dreams of innocent children of Eugene during a potluck at my neighbor’s house last summer. I mean, if you were invited to a gathering and it was going to be full of kids, what would you bring? You would bring cupcakes, right? Homemade, straight-from-the-box cupcakes with thick, swirly chocolate frosting and sprinkles on them. Right? Isn’t that what you would bring?

  So that’s how I arrived, with a tray full of cupcakes that I spent the morning making and decorating, thirty cupcakes in all, which, honestly, I felt wouldn’t be enough. I was already down for three of them, so that left twenty-seven for everyone else, and if there were even ten kids there at three apiece, supply was short.

  I placed them on the table, carefully took the tinfoil off, and exposed the bounty of the little round cakes of heaven below. And the children gathered, glowing at the sight of the shiny frosting and the happy rainbow sprinkles. They crowded all around the tray, each deciding on which was going to be theirs. One girl, who looked to be about eight, was the first to reach her hand out, her middle finger and thumb making the spread in preparation for a landing, when she looked at me and said:

  “Are these vegan?”

  Thank Cheezus I wasn’t drinking anything, because my mouth would have rained over the entire tray.

  Instead, I laughed. “Goodness, no!” I said in my Nice Neighbor Lady Who Makes Cupcakes voice. “Those are real cupcakes, right out of the Betty Crocker box, I can assure you!”

  And just like that, the little girl retracted her formerly happy hand, the glee on her face turned forlorn, her head dropped, and she simply said, “Oh.”

  Her mother came forward and patted her on the back and said to me, “She’s vegan. She made that choice when she was three.”

  It was quite possibly the saddest thing I had ever heard. That child, apparently, had never had a Pop-Tart. Cocoa
Puffs. Fritos!

  Then the mom said to the tiny vegan, “I’m sorry that they aren’t the right kind.”

  Immediately, all of the other little children backed away from the tray as if someone had said they were poocakes.

  Now, I’m sure you are thinking, were they really children, or were they adults who hadn’t eaten protein or calcium in so many years that their bone structure was actually in an advanced state of atrophy and they appeared much smaller than people who eat food? Because that’s sort of what I was inclined to believe, and, I’m sorry, but when I was three, cotechinata—pork skin rolled up with garlic, parsley, and parmesan cheese, then cooked in tomato sauce—was my favorite food. My mother simply called it “skin.” When I asked her what the “skin” on my plate was, she looked at me and said, “Skin,” and when it was apparent I wasn’t getting it, she pointed to her arm and said, “Skin,” again, as in, “Skin is skin, what don’t you get?” Now, I don’t know what that lady was feeding her vegan kid for her to make that choice, but it took me years to finally understand what my mother was talking about. And then, sure, yeah, I quit asking for “skin.” Didn’t quit asking for bacon or ham sandwiches, but at three I certainly didn’t equate something as blatant as the skin on my mother’s arm with my favorite food. I’m not saying that the story about the three-year-old vegan isn’t true, just that if someone had eaten a real, moist, spongy cupcake with buttercream frosting piled on top prior to making a declaration that would ruin a Nice Neighbor Lady’s potluck experience five years later, the outcome that day might have been different. All I’m saying is that maybe she didn’t have all the information at hand when she made a definitive decision about a minuscule bit of butter and an egg. That’s what I’m saying. And for the record, upon hearing that I had decided to become a vegan at three, my mother would have shook her head as she informed me, “Well, either you should find another family or you’re going to be hungry a lot, little girl, because I’m frying an animal right now.”