The Potty Mouth at the Table Read online

  My husband wasn’t on board with the idea of spending three hours at the Anne Frank ballet to begin with, but after I told him he could go to the home-brew festival without me the following weekend, we had a deal. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, because this production could have gone any number of ways. After watching pirouettes and arabesques for the first act, I was somewhat relieved that it was a regular ballet. Regular, until the usually discreet Anne Frank flashes the entire audience. I mean, the least the director could have done was put Anne in a pretty blue pair of bike shorts to make it more sporty and less . . . Anne Frank’s panties.

  Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank, and there is no changing the ending. But I’m sorry, perhaps I need a revisit, but I don’t remember the Franks tumbling, rolling around on the floor, or having nightmares that, onstage, translate into something that looked like bugs getting crop dusted and involved an excessive amount of cramping and various stages of rigor mortis. Now, Margot I can see having a tumbling tantrum and Mrs. Van Daan, of course, but Mrs. Frank? And Otto? I hardly think so. They were in an attic, not a loft. And I think it’s safe to assume that Mrs. Frank was not an acrobat by nature.

  Whatever my level of disbelief with the gymnastic portion of the evening, my eyes opened further when the curtain rose on the second act and a huge gate appeared on the stage with a slew of people huddled behind it, wearing more black eye makeup than models on a Prada runway.

  “Ballet concentration camp!” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes away, and in a reflex move, I automatically slapped my husband’s knee with the back of my hand.

  “This is not worth one night of drinking beer alone,” he whispered back, equally unable to turn away from the people onstage, who were now, one by one, collapsing, writhing, and apparently dying right before us. “I think I may need you to leave for the whole weekend.”

  For the next hour, I stifled an anxiety attack as Nazis hit people, kicked them, shot them, and were, generally speaking, acting like Nazis, but Nazis who sometimes pirouetted when the situation called for it, to their own nefarious tune. And I’m sorry, apparently I had some difficulty separating the performance part of the evening from the Nazi part. This was clear when the devils in knee-high black boots and overcoats skipped onto the stage for curtain call after the Franks died. I have to be honest and say I felt somewhat forced to clap (albeit weakly) for storm troopers who took their turns bowing.

  I scanned the audience, watching everyone applaud pleasantly as the Nazis nodded and smiled. Why are we clapping for fascists? I just came to see some toe-shoe dancing, and now I’m cheering for an Axis power?

  Certainly I am someone who appreciates people who work hard, especially if they’re breaking a sweat, but honestly, I was having just a bit of trouble joining in on the round of good cheer for some Nazis who just killed an entire ballet troupe. The feeling did not subside after we left the theater and I saw one of the meanest Nazis, still in costume, hugging his mom, a tiny gray-haired woman in a light blue sundress, in the lobby.

  I threw a look of disdain at the back of her head that said, Frankly, you could have done a little better of a job, Nazi Mom. Did you see what your kid just did in there?

  I already knew I was in big trouble with my husband, so I thought it best to stay silent on the short drive home. I looked out the window and started nodding to a Star Wars–like theme song that had suddenly popped in my head. We were two blocks away from home when my husband began lightly humming a jaunty tune. I took this as a good sign; I figured if he was humming, he couldn’t be that mad at me. After another three seconds of listening to him hum, I realized that it was the same little song playing in my head, and without any effort whatsoever, I jumped right in, in tempo, and hummed along with him. My husband smiled and nodded along until the grin dissolved from his face at about the same time it melted on mine.

  “Holy shit,” he said, our eyes locked in disgust. “That’s the Gestapo song. We’re singing the gestapo song!”

  “My world is upside down!” I cried as I slapped my hand on my thigh and stomped my foot. “This is Crazy Land! I don’t know who I am anymore! I just went to the ballet on half-price tickets. I didn’t expect to time travel and come back a Nazi collaborator!”

  “I am very disturbed by the fact that we were humming the gestapo song independently,” my husband said. “Very disturbed. That’s almost like a mind experiment, I feel like I have been played with! Are you sure this was a ballet and not a psychology department experimenaaaaaaaah!”

  My husband sort of screamed, as much as a man who is not allowed to mow the lawn can. I followed his gaze and, in the pitch-black darkness of our driveway (because I have waited seven years for the motion detector lightbulbs to go on sale), I saw them. Four enormous, glowing, almond-shaped eyes. Enormous. Like my hand enormous. Yellow. Almond shaped. Four of them, which meant plural.

  And in that moment, human instinct kicked in and I sent out my distress call, which is known as my “Conflict with Nature” sound. Apparently, I don’t scream, though I am thoroughly at ease with going primitive when suddenly confronted with unknown fauna, and signaling danger as if I’m leaping from treetop to treetop on some continent where things actually leap from treetop to treetop.

  “Wooooo wooo wooooo woooooo!” I woooooed, I suppose to alert my own species of the unwelcome guests blocking my driveway.

  I have to be honest here and admit that my initial thought was Oh my God. Aliens! But you have to remember, I was already traumatized by the time we pulled into the driveway. I had seen and done terrible things that evening. And if these two beasts really were aliens, then who was to stop one of them from hypnotizing us while the other one did unseemly things to us?

  My husband slammed on the brakes and the headlights illuminated enough of the driveway for me to see that my extraterrestrial suspicions were incorrect. Rather than facing off with brain-sucking aliens, we had managed to box in a deer and her fawn, which were now wedged in between our neighbors’ house and ours, with our car blocking their exit.

  Now, a different person might have beheld the moment as a rare gift, gazing at wildlife in your front yard from the passenger seat of your car—a moment in nature that isn’t often observed by people who can see a Safeway from their backyard. But I’m not that person. I’m a person from the desert of Arizona, where deer don’t exist and if anything glows at night, it’s a scorpion that you can throw a rock at and be done with it. I’m also the person who has seen videos on YouTube of a threatened deer taking down a fatty in a purple tank top who had been taunting him, and kicking the living shit out of a hunter who incorrectly predicted who was going to be mounted on whose den wall by nightfall. Now, some would say my fear of these mutant woodland creatures was a silly overreaction, but I know for a fact that deer can and will run over cars and through plate-glass windows of shopping malls if the opportunity presents itself.

  Sitting in the car in what I was sure were the last moments that I would have teeth, I had an immediate vision of both deer rearing up on their back legs and kicking their hooves at me like a windmill in a hurricane until my skull was smashed like a Whopper. Additionally, I am pretty sure that deer can bare their teeth and growl, because that’s what I believe caused me to stop my wooo-wooo-wooo-ing and begin shrieking, “Back up! Back up! Why aren’t you backing up? Back up!” until my husband put the car in reverse and floored it out of the driveway, made a sharp right turn, and sped up the hill, fleeing from our house like we had both heard the devil shout out our Social Security numbers and throw dishes at us before locking the door behind him, helping himself to snacks, making himself comfortable on the sofa, and settling in to watch The Real Housewives. New Jersey edition.

  We were at the end of our street when my husband made a wide-angle U-turn. I looked at him as we drove three hundred feet back to our house, where he hit the curb, drove up on the sidewalk, then bounced us back into the street and slammed on the brakes with a squeal.

  “What
are you doing?” I said after my brain settled back into place.

  “Maybe they left by now,” he assessed, scanning the bushes for those amber alien eyes peeking through the shrubbery.

  “We’ve been gone for six seconds,” I informed him.

  “Just run to the front door,” my husband said, gently pushing me toward the door with his hand on my shoulder.

  “Oh my God!” I shrieked, pulling away. “Are you serious?”

  I quickly had a vision of myself making it two steps out of the car before a frothy-mouthed Bambi leaped from the rhododendrons and used my face as a punching bag, while I curled into a fetal position and attempted to roll toward my porch like a pill bug, as my husband shouted encouraging but muffled words from the driver’s seat through closed car windows.

  “I’m not Sigourney Weaver,” I said slowly with a sly grimace. “And I am not the last one left on this ship in deep space. I will stay here until help comes.”

  “Help?” my husband questioned. “What, are you going to call animal control? Is there a deer catcher? ‘Hello, Deer Catcher? There are two woodland creatures in my driveway that I initially mistook for extraterrestrials. Yes, I saw Fire in the Sky, too. So you can understand my apprehension. They did unholy things to that man. That was a true story! We’ve actually been to that area, you know. It was in Arizona. We’re from Arizona. I know. I know. I think that governor is a nut, too! You should hear her on the radio, she has some pretty crazy mouth sounds. You would think that a governor could afford better-fitting dentures. They sound like they’re going to slide out of her mouth like a bar of soap!’ ”

  I gasped and my mouth stayed open, accusatorily. “I would totally stay on message in a time of crisis,” I hissed. “And I resent your implications otherwise.”

  My husband cleared his throat. “Come on. You go first.”

  I shot him an incredulous look, mouth agape. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  He pressed on: “I saw three-quarters of Anne Frank’s buttocks tonight while her father lifted her up inappropriately while she did the upside-down splits above his head,” he said clearly. “Someone needs to pay for that.”

  I looked away and took a moment, eyeing the front door as I calculated the distance up the walk.

  Then I opened the passenger-side door and, recalling a recent Liam Neeson movie I had seen on cable, ran to the front door with my house key poised in between my index and middle fingers in case I needed to suddenly stab a deer in the neck.

  Though armed with what essentially amounted to a long fingernail, I was still caught off guard when the moonlight reflected off one gigantic retina staring me down through the rhododendron bush as I neared the front door. Moments away from having my skull crushed like an eggshell, I felt adrenaline shoot through my body so fast that it made me dizzy; the keys tumbled out of my hand and landed with a tinny clatter on the concrete steps of the front porch.

  “Keys! Grab the keys!” my mind screamed at me, as my hands sliced through the air like a feather through tar. “Get the keys! That thing is going to kick you in the back of the head, and if there’s one thing you don’t need, it’s another head injury. One more blow to the head and that’s it. You’ll be in diapers and on a leash in a dayroom somewhere, probably in Arizona. I can’t feel my legs. Jesus, I have to go to the bathroom!”

  I grabbed the keys, flipped through them like a madman, repeatedly glancing back to keep an eye on my pursuer, and finally found the one for the front door just as the big eye blinked, ready to attack, and I froze. The deer took a step forward and I winced, trying to fold my body inward, bracing it for blunt-force trauma. As I waited for my fate, the creature took a step behind me, then another, and another, sauntered across my lawn, in front of my husband, who was encapsulated within the safety of our car, and then swaggered slowly up the hill like a model on her last runway. Her fawn followed with a spring in her trot, bounding around as only babies, unaware of the danger around them at all times, can. This time that danger was represented by a lady in a body shaper that had rolled so far up both legs, it looked like a Speedo and cut off circulation to the point of tingling.

  The next week, when I opened the envelope that contained my tickets to the opera Nixon in China, I smiled slightly, thinking, How bad could it be? I mean, I did get them for half price.

  Plus, I hear Chairman Mao has a solo.

  FABRIC OBSESSION

  The moment I walked through the front door when I came home from my sewing class, I saw it. There was no mistaking it, and I immediately felt the flush of anxiety rush up from my stomach and swallow my head in a fiery gulp.

  On the side of the box, in bright blue and hideously large letters, its origin was declared.

  “You got another box from Fabric.com,” my husband said from the couch without looking up from his book.

  I nodded and fake smiled, trying very hard not to betray my panic and to remain as calm as possible.

  Normally, I love getting mail—packages in particular. I love it so much that I rarely stop to think about what I look like before I answer the door, a character flaw that I am powerless to change. A package is a package. The UPS man assigned to my route clearly drew the short straw, as I’ve been known to throw open the door in my bathrobe looking like a Lady Alcoholic on her way to Rite-Aid to kill her six-pack bag full of three-dollar chardonnay because I was so excited to claim my prize. The problem with this particular box was that I didn’t remember buying anything recently.

  I cast a furtive glance over my husband’s head at the four-foot pile of totes and boxes, all containing fabric, in my Hoarder’s Corner and ferreted the box into the kitchen. I set it down on the kitchen table and eyed it suspiciously. This new box horrified me. How could I be so far gone with my fabric obsession that a purchase just got lost in the mix to the point that I didn’t even remember the delight of buying it?

  A hobby is only as good as its accessories, and sewing barely has any competition in that area. After all, the reason I have so much fabric is because I love it. I’m not proud of it, but I will admit to making monkey sounds and flapping my arms like a heron when I encountered a particular brown-and-red pin-striped wool for thirty-five dollars a yard. (A yard, by the way, is not enough to make anything for a person with an ass my size.) I cooed over it like it was a baby I gave up in order to go to college instead of going on food stamps. It was ridiculous and deteriorated from there when I bought as much of it as I could afford (a yard).

  So when you take someone who loves something so much that her inappropriate emotional response to it nearly caused her to hover and then tell her she can make a dress out of it, the game is over. By the time I brought the pinstriped fabric home, both sides of the armoire and former DVD cabinet were filled with wool, faille, crepe, challis, and silks. I had one box of patterns. Then two. Then three. I departed one day for Costco on a cheese and wine mission and came home with totes for “storage.” Boastful, foolish girls in my sewing class bragged about how they were making a dress out of a sheet they got at Goodwill for three bucks, but I had Vera Wang faille I scored on Fabric.com for $3.99 a yard, plus a thirty-percent-off coupon code. Eight yards of it in case I wanted to make two dresses from it, neither of which would make me look like a sister wife who had spent three bucks on a dirty sheet from Goodwill when I put them on.

  And then Fabric.com had the entire Ralph Lauren fabric selection on sale and the totes filled up at the end of my bed. Herringbone. Taffeta. Plaid suiting. And on one lucky score, cashmere. One day, the UPS driver handed me several Minuteman missile–size objects as he averted his eyes in case I was dressed like a middle-aged version of Sandy in the last scene of Grease again. Bolts of Vera Wang satin. Buck ninety-nine a yard. That’s like putting cocaine on sale. Of course I was going to buy two bolts of twenty yards each! I’d be insane not to.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, when I went back to Phoenix to visit my family, I rediscovered SAS, a fabric remnant store and the glories contained within e
ach location, despite the brusque, gruff Eastern Bloc women who worked there; I suspect they have been kinder in cutting the throats of goats than in answering your questions. While digging through the piles of fabric for $2.99 a pound (that’s right, a pound; cocaine for $2.99 a pound—Pablo Escobar never got it so cheap, and cocaine doesn’t drape as nicely as a good dupioni does), I actually found a piece of fabric I had returned to Fabric.com two months before, the sticker still on it. It was the same stuff I had been buying online, but now it was even cheaper!

  On one particularly fruitful trip to SAS, I bought so much cotton velvet, plaid wool, and high-end rayon ($1.99 a pound! That’s cheaper than expired Albertsons ham!) that I had to drag the bag to the car and wrestle it into the front seat like it was a thirty-two-dollar corpse with great nap. I put the contents in the first tote that broke ground in Hoarder’s Corner and began to spend so much time at SAS that on one memorable occasion, the woman who looked like she had lived through the most wars let me use her hand sanitizer and almost cracked a smile when I made a joke about the trim section being a bigger mess than the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia in 1992.

  Hoarder’s Corner grew to multiple levels, the penthouse being an enormous box from Fabric.com with those telltale blue letters on the side, big enough that I debated adding a pillow to it and using it as a napping box. But even when the corner began to crown above the couch with boxes and bags of fabric, reaching proportions that prompted my husband to ask whether I was planning on moving somewhere, I wasn’t that alarmed. It was just messy, I told myself, a problem that could be easily remedied when I cleaned out a “little shelf in my closet” to relocate the five-foot-by-five-foot fabric monument.

  But when I saw the mysterious Fabric.com box as I walked through the door after sewing class, everything changed. I suddenly had the feeling that I needed to call Candy Finnigan and book a suite at the Red Lion Inn, because my episode was next up on Intervention. This was serious. How much fabric did I really need, anyway? I don’t buy anything I don’t love, but apparently, I have a lot of love to give and it’s clearly exclusive to textiles. I had more than I needed. I had more than I would ever use. I had more than sweatshops in India. And I suddenly mourned for the children with tiny fingers that I never had.