We Thought You Would Be Prettier Read online

  “You know,” I said with a wave of my hand. “That one guy who looks like he spends his nights sleeping in a wind tunnel with his hair rolled up around hot dogs. The one who looks determined to outflip Valerie Bertinelli’s hair, as if they were in a duel.”

  “Oh, him,” she said. “I haven’t seen him today. He must be off.”

  “Is his hair is always like that?” I asked. “Or did I see him on a day when perhaps he was auditioning to play ‘Julie McCoy’ in a school production of Love Boat?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty much always been like that since I worked here,” the cashier replied.

  “Do you know why?” I asked

  She shook her head.

  “Well, I’m sure people comment on it all the time,” I continued, to which she shook her head again.

  “No,” she replied. “You’re the only person who’s ever said anything about it to me.”

  I was flabbergasted. It was worse than I had thought, because, apparently, other people found the Flippy Hair perfectly acceptable, or were perhaps so intimidated by it they were afraid to tackle the problem verbally.

  But that Friday, as Spaghetti Arms wrestled the Sensitive Stomach dog food bag like it was an angry bear fighting a park ranger for a two-day-old pre-eaten corncob, I looked carefully this time, and almost had to stop myself from reaching out and touching the hair, like it was a burner glowing on a stove.

  And just like a burner, I felt my face get hot. No matter how hard I studied that flip, I was just not getting that hair. It was impossible. The hair and I were not communicating, we had reached an impasse. I did not understand.

  That hair had made me obsessed.

  That hair had made me confused, it had made me doubt myself.

  That hair had made me cross the generational divide.

  That hair had made me old.

  That hair had made me mad.

  I hated that hair so bad I wanted to fight it.

  “I’m gonna kick your hair’s ass,” I whispered to the Flippy Hair under my breath, even though my bag of dog food had done a pretty damn good job of it already, as several purply bruises had floated to the surface of the cornflake skin, as if kidneys had suddenly bobbed up in a bowl of cereal.

  “I just hate you,” I continued under my breath, and then added for dramatic effect, and to no one’s astonishment but my own, “I hate your hair! Kidney arms!”

  When my husband asked me that weekend why our kitchen was suddenly stocked with a year’s supply of Sensitive Stomach pellets in twenty-pound bags, I was naturally reluctant and somewhat embarrassed to explain.

  “There was a sale,” I lied.

  “I don’t believe that for one minute, Miss Uncontrollable Id,” my husband replied immediately. “If there were twenty boxes of expensive shoes in this kitchen, twenty boxes of books you were never going to read, or twenty bags of Double Stuff Oreos, I’d give that answer the green light. Or if you were a fat little red dog with a farting problem, maybe. But an item that serves another being’s needs aside from your own? Not a chance. Spill that empty soul of yours, sister.”

  I sighed.

  “There’s this guy at the pet food store . . .” I started.

  “Ah-HA!” my husband yelled. “And you have a crush on him! You think he’s cute! Did he lift the bag of dog food with his pinky to impress you?”

  “Hardly,” I replied. “I think he popped six vertebrae and punctured a lung just by trying to slide it off the counter. His bones are like crazy straws, you can almost see the blood being sucked through. And I hate him. I don’t just hate him, I haaaaaaate him.”

  “What did he do?” my husband asked.

  I stood directly in front of my husband and put my hands on my hips. “He curls his hair!” I bellowed. “Stupid Flippy Hair Guy curls his hair. And he thinks it’s cool.”

  “So because a drag queen works at the pet food store we can no longer walk in our kitchen,” my husband said. “These are bigger than sandbags, Laurie. It looks like we’re getting ready to battle the Galveston Flood.”

  “He’s not a drag queen,” I cried. “He has eyebrows. How simple it would be if this problem just boiled down to a muted cross-gender sexual identity! You don’t understand. I don’t get his hair. I think he looks like an idiot.”

  “Um, if you don’t immediately identify yourself as Laurie Notaro and not Laurie Notaro’s mom, I’m going to take a hammer to my head,” my husband said.

  “And that’s exactly why I hate him,” I confessed. “The next thing you know, I’ll be going to church six times a week, shoving Afrin up my nose every five seconds, yelling at homeless people to get jobs, and carrying my blood-pressure machine with me in my purse. I can’t be my mom, not yet. I’m not ready, but Stupid Flippy Hair Guy is forcing the hands of time!”

  My husband took a deep breath. “Maybe it’s time you reentered the workforce,” he said with a strained look. “Maybe all of this time by yourself isn’t very healthy for you. Are you spending more time than normal talking into the mirror?”

  “So that’s what you think?” I shrieked back. “Well, wait till you see him if you think I’m so stir-crazy and insane! He has cornflake skin!”

  And then I had a wonderful idea.

  “That’s it!” I cried. “You have to come with me. You have to come to the pet food store so you can be the control group! That’s how I’ll know if it’s me or if it’s . . . him. Because, I tell you, this is getting serious. SERIOUS. I am going to kick his hair’s ass.”

  “I am not going to the pet food store to gawk at some dork’s hair,” my husband said defiantly. “And you can’t make me.”

  An hour later, from a terrific spying perch, I spied a purply, blotchy bruised arm trying to scoop up a bala shark in a tiny net.

  “That’s him!” I whispered excitedly to my husband. “Those are the bruises from the same bag of dog food you fell on!”

  My husband gasped. “It’s like he has Cling Wrap for skin,” he said sadly. “I can see right through him. He has arms like ET!”

  “I know,” I said with a slow nod. “See what I mean?”

  Then, all of a sudden, the Flippy Hair Guy stepped back, directly into our field of vision.

  “You are an idiot,” he said staunchly. “Three hundred pounds of dog food for THAT? Are you out of your mind? I can’t even believe I let you talk me into coming down here for that! His hair is FINE!”

  I didn’t know what to say, I was completely stunned.

  “That’s because,” I stuttered. “That’s because . . . he cut it. He cut the Flippy Hair! It’s gone! The Flippy Hair is gone! It just looks like normal hair!”

  It was true. Every lock of flippiness had been severed and discarded like skin from a peeling sunburn. What remained was a regular haircut, short all the way around, so short we could even see his transparent, crazy, straw cauliflower ears.

  “Why do you think he would do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Laurie,” my husband said, looking straight at me. “Maybe he heard someone call his hair a ‘fancy lampshade.’ Maybe he heard someone say he had ‘crazy-lady hair.’ Maybe he found out that someone wanted to kick his hair’s ass.”

  “I would have done something about the freckles first,” I said quietly. “They’re alarming.”

  “SHUT UP,” my husband said. “Just shut up. And if you see anyone else with weird hair from now on, just pretend it’s a wig, all right?”

  “It’s just like Samson,” I said, shaking my head as we walked out of the store. “All of his power and intrigue is gone, vanished, dried up. Just like that. He’s just an average pet store guy now.”

  “I thought you would be happy,” my husband said, completely and entirely out of patience.

  Truth is, I thought I would be happy, too. But as I turned and looked one last time down the aquarium aisle as the No More Flippy Hair Guy stuck his so-pale-they-were-almost-green noodly arms into another fish tank, I just felt sad.

  I Ruined E
verything

  Just as my husband and I were sitting down to dinner, the phone rang.

  My jaw tightened in the full clench of aggravation. This happens in the moments before my husband announces, “I’m not here,” which also just happens to coincide with every single time the phone rings or the doorbell shrieks. It’s a proclamation that he regards as complete absolution from answering either, as if his last name was Bush, he was eighteen, and there was a draft going on.

  “Why can’t we just screen?” he repeatedly asks after he’s declared his motto and I throw him a dirty look before I am forced to get up and do the dirty work myself.

  “Because I have an eighty-six-year-old grandmother who may need our help and is not technologically advanced enough to leave a message communicating that she is in danger!” I yelled. “You’ve heard them! Her messages are composed of a million ‘Hello?’s, mixed in with a dozen ‘Laurie, can you hear me?’s, then topped off with her unsuccessful attempt to hang up the phone, followed by an hour or so of the audio of JAG or whatever Lifetime movie she’s watching. Trying to decipher her messages is like collecting random sounds from space. Even when you put all of the pieces of the puzzle together, it then just becomes a riddle.”

  “Well, I’m fine with screening,” my husband said. “It’s the least technology can do for me. If Safeway keeps track of everything I buy, if I get so much porn junk e-mail that even a thirteen-year-old boy would get sick of it, if Pottery Barn can sell my name and address to every catalogue ever mailed, including the one for a new Vietnamese wife who would be happy to pick up the phone, then technology can do me this one favor. I can screen. I’m fine with screening.”

  “Clearly you’re at one with screening,” I protested. “Clearly. The issue is not how clear you are. The issue is how cloudy you see the big picture.”

  “I don’t know why you bought a pig picture,” he said, barely listening to me. “But I’m sure it looks great.”

  I have been through several attempts at psychological warfare to remedy this situation: I told my husband that if he wasn’t going to answer the phone, he wasn’t allowed to give out our number, but everyone he knew already had it; when someone called for him and he repeatedly mouthed the words “I’m not here!” in front of me, I’d tell the caller, “He says to tell you he’s not here,” but that didn’t work because all of his friends figure he doesn’t call me The Mean Lady for nothing

  So with my jaw clenched so tight I swore I heard teeth crack—which is not as difficult as it may sound when your teeth are as sturdy as Bubble Wrap—I looked at the phone tiredly, really only wanting to eat my dinner in peace, when all of a sudden, a hand reached over and picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” my husband said into the receiver.

  I gasped in amazement. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing or hearing.

  After all, he had picked up the phone. The universe had just basically opened up with an infinite number of possibilities. A miracle had happened. Who knew what else was in store for us, I thought to myself, then suddenly had an overwhelming urge to run outside and see if an image of the Virgin Mary was now projected on the side of my house.

  “Yes, yes, this is he,” my husband said into the receiver. “Really? Oh, well—um, sure. Okay.”

  And then he vanished into his office for a good twenty minutes. I ate dinner alone, but believe me, it was a small price to pay for having half the phone responsibility lifted from my wrists.

  A couple of nights later we were again halfway through dinner when the phone rang. My husband actually got up and answered it, then, once again, retreated into his office. Twenty minutes later, he finally came out. He said nothing.

  Now, naturally, it was killing me not to know who was calling. Why all of a sudden was he willing and able to answer the phone? Did he have a secret lady friend? Was he a sleeper agent like Chuck Barris? Had he picked up some side work in the phone-sex trade but was too embarrassed to tell me? He certainly was being sneaky about it, and the third time the phone rang and he answered it, I demanded an explanation.

  “What is going on?” I bellowed as soon as he emerged from his office after another twenty-minute chat. “Who are you talking to? I am onto you! Are you taking a hit out on me? Because I’m onto you! Are you cheating? Because I’m onto you! If you’re buying another wife, I’ll tell you right now, I am not sharing closet space and she’s going to have to keep her little pigs outside!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he said as he laughed at me. “It was some political-opinion poll. They just wanted to ask me questions, and now they call all the time. I guess they like me.”

  “Oh,” I said, startled that I had been so off base. The thought of pesky opinion pollsters/questionnaire people had never crossed my mind. And of course, my husband being the nicer half of our union, he was far too polite to tell them to knock it off and would painfully endure a twenty-minute Q&A session.

  So I did, the next time they called and my husband wasn’t home.

  “Please take us off your list,” I said firmly to the pesky pollster.

  “Are you sure?” he had the nerve to ask.

  “Am I sure?” I replied, imagining a neoconservative minion on the other end of the phone. “Well, let me put it this way: I’m as sure as I am that I’m going to SUE YOU FOR HARASSMENT if you ever call here again! You people have been bothering my poor husband over and over again, and he’s just too nice to tell you to buzz off! He’s lucky that he has a wife like me who will tell little pests like you what you can do with your dumb old questions! Ever hear of the ‘Do Not Call’ list? Well, shrimp, you’re ON IT! Wait—I’M on it! No—are you on it? Or is it me? I don’t know. Just remember the ‘Do Not Call’ part! Don’t call him anymore!”

  “He sure sounds lucky to me,” the pollster said. “Fine, we’ll take you off.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say,” I said slyly and hung up. I smiled. I was thrilled. I had saved my husband. A wife’s duty done.

  And when he finally came home, I couldn’t wait to tell him that I had released him from poll duty, opened up the cage, and let him fly right out.

  “You’re free!” I added. “They’ll never call here again!”

  Instead of jumping for joy that I had severed his shackles, his mouth dropped and he just stared at me, probably in amazement, I thought.

  “They’re never going to call here again?” he asked slowly.

  “Never!” I said excitedly, trying to convey the good deed that I had done.

  “Now, why,” he said as he continued looking at me without even cracking a joyous grin, “would you do that?”

  I was stunned. “Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you happy that I got them to stop calling?” I asked.

  “Why would I be happy?” he replied. “Because someone finally asked for my opinion?”

  “But—” I tried to interject.

  “But nothing!” my husband almost yelled. “Oh my God. Didn’t you ever wonder when you see a poll on CNN or in the newspaper who those poll people are? It was me! It was me! I was a poll person! They had finally found me after all these years. Someone finally wanted to know what I thought. And now you ruined the whole thing!”

  “I ruined everything?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Do you know who I am?” my husband said, and then suddenly pointed to himself. “I am ‘undecided.’ You know how you see the ‘undecided’ vote on polls? Well, when I felt like it, when the mood struck, that was me! I was the Undecided Guy!!”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said shamefully. “I had no idea you led a secret life as the Undecided Guy.”

  “Well, I did,” my husband said. “Are you sure they’re never going to call back?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said as I nodded slowly. “I called him a ‘shrimp’ and threatened legal action.”

  “The Undecided Guy is dead,” my husband said as he shook his head sadly and sat down on the couch. “He barely had a chance to live.”

&n
bsp; Then the phone rang, and even before I had a chance to offer to get it, my husband lifted up his hand, looked at me, and said simply, “I’m not here.”

  “You know what?” I said, looking straight at him. “Then neither am I.”

  Attack of the XL Girl

  As soon as I opened the door to the boutique and took a quick look around, I shook my head, sighed, and went on in. It had been this way all day.

  Every stop my friend Meg and I made was like another flash of bad skinny-girl déjà vu. I’d open the door, take two steps in, and there we were, confronted by racks filled with nothing but really cool funky designer clothes.

  Initially, I was in heaven. I was visiting Meg in Seattle shortly after she had her baby, Carmen, and I was more than excited about my shopping opportunities. In my hometown, pickings are slim, and unless I wake up each day with the desire to dress “drone” and head to my local Gap, Banana Republic, or J. Crew like everyone else, I’m a little more than slightly out of luck. Since Meg, being a new mother with an infant, had been basically confined to the house for eight weeks, she was itching to get out. “I want to go shopping. I’m dying to buy something without an elastic panel that stretches from my crotch to my waistband,” she said to me over the phone a couple of days before I arrived. “I don’t even care that I’m completely fat right now, I am just dying for some real clothes!”

  Secretly, I was a little delighted because Meg had always been my rail-thin friend who made me look like a Pittsburgh Steeler when I stood next to her. She could eat troughs of any given dairy product without consequence and once actually wrinkled her nose at a box of Godiva, explaining chirpily, “You know, I’m just not a chocolate kind of person.”

  Although Meg lacked the very qualities that I counted as some of my finest and I somewhat doubted that her DNA was indeed human, she had remained a wonderful friend for over a decade, and now, for once, I was going to see her fat!

  After my plane landed, I met Meg at the curb, where she picked me up in her Bronco, which was now outfitted with a baby seat. As she jumped out of the front seat and ran to open the tailgate, I stood back and screeched.