It Looked Different on the Model Read online

  My neighbor—the hostess—and her daughter both noticed what was going on at the cupcake portion of the table and immediately came over and grabbed cupcakes for themselves, and I will forever love them both for it. But when I left a while later, twenty-five cupcakes, more or less, still sat on the tray, refused and rejected like little girls whose thighs touched and who couldn’t run to too many bases before asking to go to the nurse after the teams were picked for softball.

  I still insist my cupcakes are the right kind. It’s cupcakes without eggs and butter that are weird. And at the next potluck we were invited to later that summer, I brought napkins. Someone else, as you might have guessed, brought cupcakes. Made from gluten-free flour and a wish, was my estimation. I had a Revenge Cupcake, just to be polite, just to take the high road, and I can report that it was nothing conversion-worthy. Chances are you’ll see me strutting a burqa before you’ll see me stop loading a heap of bacon in my mouth. But if I thought the cupcake disaster was a true Eugene experience, there was nothing that could prepare me for what happened several weeks later.

  It was a lovely evening, a gathering of grad students and their spouses, significant others, and partners (you have to say all three). The sun was letting go of the brightest part of the day and people were chatting and having conversation when I looked up and saw a young woman several feet away ease the strap of her top down—like she was in a dirty dressing room at Ross—pull her arm through it, and then bring her boob out. Uncovered. Exposed. Unabashed. Then it flopped like a fish and hung loosely, like it had a hook through it, while she had a conversation with two other people. There it remained, exposed to the elements and accessible to anyone who needed to wipe their hands.

  I don’t know where the baby was. It wasn’t on her, that’s for sure. I don’t know if the baby ever came in for a landing or what. The baby was not in the general vicinity when the incident began. Maybe the baby had a GPS device implanted and this was all prep work, but I think it would have been more considerate if she had a visual of the baby before I had a visual of her. And the boob sat there, and sat there, and sat there. It actually behaved very quietly for the ten minutes it was left to roam free in my field of vision before I could talk to someone else and face a different direction.

  I had never been at a barbecue before in which one person was playing a solo version of spin the bottle without notifying anyone else. Frankly, I didn’t know how to react, so I didn’t. I just attempted to carry on with my conversation, though every thirty seconds or so my eyes would shoot over to see if the boob had made a retreat. It had not. Honestly, I thought I had to be seeing things, as in “I had a feeling I put too much salt on the potato salad and now I am having a stroke and experiencing horrifying hallucinations of hippie breasts,” and then I convinced myself that I simply must have gotten two pills confused an hour earlier and ended up taking a whole Ambien instead of a Beano.

  And you know, I really have to say this: If your baby isn’t even in the room and you can’t bear to come equipped with a blanket, kindly put your boob away in its rightful compartment. Don’t leave it hanging out for ten to fifteen minutes at a barbecue like you’re waiting for someone to hang a Christmas ornament on it. In hindsight, maybe what I should have done was run over to stand next to her, whip out my own bewbie, and cry, “Oh! I didn’t know there was a contest! Look, I win! My boob still looks like a boob, since I can’t fold it in half like a taco.”

  Now, I know that babies get hungry and babies need to be fed, but this wasn’t about breast-feeding, because there was no feeding going on for the portion of an hour that the teat got a tan. This was about pulling a private part of your body that resembles a tortilla with an eraser located randomly at the bottom edge of it out at a party and letting it sit there because you don’t know the meaning of the word “inappropriate.”

  But apparently I was the odd one out here, because when I mentioned this to a group of people several weeks later, someone asked me if I was ashamed of my own body, which, honestly, didn’t have anything to do with the topic of a free-range boob at a social gathering. I wasn’t the one softly cajoling the boob out from under its tank top. And frankly, the answer to that question is that I am downright proud of my boobs; I had the best boobs at that party, because I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant, and you’d have a better chance selling someone a meat grinder in this town than you would anything with a Maidenform tag on it. There are hippie boobs everywhere, and if you like ’em lean, long, swingy, and Stretch Armstrong-y, this is your boob command center. I, on the other hand, have been devout every day since my charges popped on the scene when I was ten, and they have served me well ever since. I have a huge ass and I have a blap (hybrid of a belly + a lap), but you reap what you sow, and I have plowed a lifetime of underwire fields. Believe me, if there was anyone who deserved to be showing off that day, it was me. Instead, it was the shocking horror of that boob that made a cameo, and, to put it bluntly, in a lineup I would have definitely identified it as a Kombai of Papua New Guinea, considering that it looked like a rooty yam.

  So things, all in all, weren’t working out that well for me in Eugene. I had offended, shocked, and disgusted large portions of the population, including intelligent people, children with morals, and anyone with offspring, and I was quickly on my way to being on the shit list of the police when I picked up the phone one night at 10:20 P.M. because a cover band at a house party down the street had been blasting all night and was now halfway through another excessively loud, terrible song.

  “This is ridiculous,” I told the operator as soon as she answered the phone. “This band is so loud! Right now they’re playing Loverboy’s ‘Turn Me Loose’! Who wants to hear that? Who wants to play that?”

  “Loverboy does, ma’am,” she told me. “They’re at the county fair. Noise ordinance goes into effect at ten-thirty. Is ten minutes too long for you to hang on? They’ll probably play ‘Working for the Weekend’ next.”

  I said thank you and shut up; I know when to take my hits. Then I ran upstairs, where my husband was getting ready for bed, and shrieked, “Oh my God! Loverboy is at the fair! The police said they’re going to play ‘Working for the Weekend’ next! It’s Loverboy! It’s Loverboy!”

  After the incident with the Eugene Police Department put me in my place, I tried to keep a low profile, even when I was putting groceries into my car at Safeway and a guy with a black goatee, long black hair in a tight ponytail, sharp widow’s peak, and black pigeon eyes who was parked across from me walked up to his car—a black shiny Mustang with a full-sized skull on the dashboard. He clicked his car alarm, it revved the engine with no one in it, and then I saw the license plate: DIABLO. I assumed that even Hell needs milk and spray pancakes.

  I kept quiet when I was at Kinko’s and saw the Angel of Death walk in—who, by the way, is a three-hundred-pound teenager with face paint and tiny pigtails, wearing black feathered wings as wide as a Mini Cooper, and who pulled out a frilly parasol while waiting for the bus. And yes, she smoked. Just in case there was a question.

  And when I saw a “free box” on a corner, I said, “Guess what, Eugene hippies? When you start a ‘free pile’ on the corner, you’re not recycling; you’re just throwing your old filthy shit on a corner. Because no one wants your punctured football, your camping chair missing an arm, the tube from your bong, or anything that touched your body. Really. Nobody,” but only to myself.

  But then wonderful things started to happen that seemed rather indigenous. It was the first gorgeous day with sun after a very long, rainy winter. My husband and I went down and had garden burgers at a restaurant by the river, sat outside, and watched two people behind us drink several pitchers of beer, then totally break up, complete with lots of crying from both parties.

  As soon as they left, the lady sitting behind me informed her dinner companions that “I can’t have a library card, because felons can’t have library cards. I’m learning a lot about this felon thing.” Th
is was almost better than what I’d overheard a waitress say when someone asked her what she was doing over spring break and her response was, “I’m going to California to turn myself in.”

  And one day, when the weather had turned back to rain, I was waiting to make a left-hand turn when a woman in a Rascal entered the crosswalk. In Eugene, you are not allowed to make any progress on your turn until the person in the crosswalk is safely on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, so I knew I was in for a wait. As I sat there, she rolled along slowly, an enormous Raisa Gorbachev fur hat resting atop her head and a full-length yellow rain poncho draped around her, making her look like a Dole banana float. She was wearing blue hospital socks, and I know what they are because I have a pair just like them. Then the wind kicked up turbulently, and her poncho fluttered at the edges and was picked up by a gust of wind that flipped it over her head, completely blinding her.

  But she made no attempt at all to pull the poncho away as she veered off course and into the intersection and slowly, at two to three miles an hour, headed right toward my car. I could only cover my gaping mouth as I watched her get closer and closer, the hum of her scooter getting gradually louder and louder. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t go anywhere, according to Eugene law; I had to stay exactly put until she got onto the sidewalk. Still, she advanced, believing that she would roll up onto the other side at any moment now but instead aiming right into the center of the intersection. So I did the only thing I could do, which was roll down the window and scream, “Hey! Big Banana! You’re going the wrong way!” But she apparently didn’t hear a word over the wind and just kept humming toward me.

  All right, I told myself. Brace for it. Accept it. She’s going to hit your car, she’s going to scratch the paint with her stupid basket, and then the rest of Eugene can hate you, too. But when she got within ten feet of my car, another miracle blast of wind came up on the other side and flopped the yellow poncho right back to where it was supposed to be. The Big Banana and I locked eyes, our destinies so close to being intertwined.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” I shouted to her again, and pointed to the sidewalk. “You need to be over there.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, she looked at me, said simply, “You shouldn’t hate old people,” then put it in reverse, and, although it took her an additional light to make it back up onto the sidewalk, I finally got to turn left.

  So things were starting to look up, I thought. There’s a lot of fun to be had here. It wasn’t as if I hated Eugene; quite the contrary. I really loved it. The landscape was unparalleled, the general citizenry was incredibly nice, people you’ve never seen before always greeted you with a smile or hello when passing on the street, and I had an adventure near every single time I left the house. In Eugene, there was excitement, beauty, and friendly people. You really couldn’t ask for anything more of a town. Maybe things aren’t so bad, I realized; it might just take me awhile to find my spot here, that’s all. I was sure that I could make my peace with Eugene and that Eugene could make its peace with me. I just needed to be on the lookout for breast-feeding flash mobs and bring nothing but napkins to potlucks. I was positive, after all, that once I had seen a hundred boobs at a barbecue, the horror would eventually erode, like the cliffs of Dover. I realized that everything was going to be all right.

  Until I was at Trader Joe’s one day, where I noticed there was a table set up near the coffee station that was giving out free samples of something in little paper cups. But the process of sampling wasn’t working out as well as it could have, mainly because as soon as the sample girl put a cup out, a bearded old-man hippie, who had strategically stationed himself between the dairy section and the coffee counter, would take a step, swipe the sample, and toss it back like it was a tequila shot before anyone else had a chance to get near it.

  I couldn’t believe it. I stood down at and watched him as he swiped seven in a row, taking some of them directly from beneath the fingertips of other shoppers trying to get a sample. His stealth was amazing, I will admit, but it was getting out of hand. But this is a thing in parts of this enclave: Free samples are just an open invitation for someone to park themselves and feed for the afternoon. I firmly believe that Eugene was founded when one person with ill-placed intentions left a bowl of spelt crackers out in the middle of the forest with the sign FREE on it; the hippies descended upon it like ants and then stayed, waiting around, playing drums, and popping their boobs out until the next free sample bowl was produced. I’ve seen a line of twenty-five people crowd together for the opportunity to eat one free raspberry at the farmers’ market. ONE FREE RASPBERRY. I mean, really. It’s only a free raspberry. For two bucks, you can buy a whole carton, and there’s nobody in that line.

  Watching the sample swiper, I felt my anger rise quickly, and as I saw the sample girl getting ready to put another specimen out, I left my cart, marched over to the table, and literally stole the sample right out from underneath him. “That’s what you get for being rude” was the message, and I believe it was successfully parlayed in my evil grin as I walked away with the sample in hand. My success, however, was quickly dampened when I looked down and saw what the sample was: peach salsa and a tortilla chip. No wonder they were giving it away, I thought. It looked disgusting. But just in case the hippie was looking at me, I took the tortilla chip, scooped up the salsa, then threw the cup away in the trash, and on the first bite felt a shot of pain up the left side of my face.

  A week later, I was in the dentist’s chair after I got the X-rays taken, and my dentist was shaking his head.

  “You didn’t even want the salsa but you ate it anyway?” he said to me, chuckling.

  “He was being rude,” I insisted. “And I decided to teach him a lesson.”

  “What was the lesson?” he asked, still laughing.

  “Instant karma’s gonna get you,” I replied.

  “And, oh, did it,” he replied. “Because I’m afraid I don’t give out free samples.”

  “Ask Your Grandmother What a Hairy Tongue Is”

  Sitting in the waiting room at my doctor’s office, I looked next to me and glared at my husband. When we arrived, he had almost any seat in the house to choose from while I checked in, and when I was done forking over my insurance info I joined him across from the only other lady in the waiting area. Fifteen seconds after I sat down, she burst forth with a rattle that sounded more like a machine gun submerged in Jell-O than the recognizable cough of a mammal.

  Before I could even say something like “We need to build a barrier out of magazines and Fisher-Price toys,” a grown man walked by in his pajamas, and the sounds of another violently retching in a nearby bathroom were more than audible.

  Before the nurse called my name, a man in the third scooter I had seen in ten minutes shot by with a gallon bag full of urine hanging off his front basket on what appeared to be a pee hook.

  “Really?” I asked my husband when I regained the ability to speak and say mean things. “Really? Do you know how long it takes to pee a gallon? At least a couple of days. At least. Days. And you can’t tell me Mr. Rascal hasn’t passed a sink since Monday.”

  My husband just looked at me.

  “That,” I said as I pointed down the hall in the direction he rolled, “was for shock value. One wrong pass by a magazine rack or sudden jolt over a broom handle and that thing will rupture and have no mercy within a ten-foot splash zone. What would you do if you got soaked by week-old pee and you saw the guy it came from? Fire. Fire is the only answer. I’m going to have nightmares for three nights about that humming urinal on wheels. This is why I hate coming here. I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”

  “You got stabbed in the foot by a pair of scissors,” my husband replied. “And you’re here because you haven’t had a tetanus shot in twenty years, although I do agree that if lockjaw can also paralyze your tongue into silence, I will take you home right now.”

  That is roughly why I was there. The da
y before, I had been looking for a specific pair of shoes in my closet and was pulling down a shoe box from a shelf when I saw something flash by and hit my foot, then felt a twinge of pain. But honestly, I didn’t think it hurt all that much, until I looked at it and saw blood pumping out of it as if Jed Clampett had been shooting at some food.

  I was already standing in a puddle of blood that was spreading quickly, but after I hobbled downstairs and got the bleeding to stop, I realized the wound was deeper than it was wide.

  “Oooh, you’re going to need a tetanus shot for that,” my husband said, wincing.

  “Shut up,” I replied quickly. “No. I can weather this. Prairie medicine.”

  My husband rolled his eyes.

  “Break your toe, break your nose, fine, go ahead with the prairie medicine,” he said. “But lockjaw is a different story. That will make your body flip around like a little girl possessed by the devil doing a spider walk down the stairs of a D.C. townhouse. The kind of behavior that made people in the Middle Ages and modern-day Catholics call a priest to their house. That’s never been a quality I was looking for in a spouse.”