It Looked Different on the Model Read online

  My mother, apparently, though searching the email with her eyes, told my sister she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and went on to inform my sister that she didn’t know anything about attachments, either.

  “Oh, I don’t, huh?” my sister told me she protested. “Look right there. That paper clip proves that I know how to attach a document. I do so know how to send attachments!”

  “There’s no paper clip!” my mother replied. “You keep talking about a paper clip and there’s no paper clip!”

  “The paper clip is right here,” my sister said, pointing her finger and showing my mother on the computer screen. “It is right here.”

  “Oh,” my mother suddenly said. “You mean the little ‘g’?”

  “Does it look like a little ‘g’ to you?” my sister asked me as we flew down the freeway.

  “Then, right as I got to the front door, making my escape, Dad asked me if I knew how to recover emails on his computer,” she said. “Apparently, he keeps all of his emails in his trash folder, and mom went through it yesterday and deleted them all. He was very upset because he said if he wanted to get rid of them, he would delete them himself, and now they are all gone. Every important email that he never wanted to throw away in his trash folder is gone.”

  “Why was all of the important email in his trash folder?” I queried.

  “Why are you even asking that?” she replied furiously. “How is a paper clip a little ‘g’?”

  I nodded. I got it. Coming back home and staying with my parents did take some adjusting, I have to admit. Even though I left home a long, long time ago—in a move that included defiantly throwing my clothes into the backseat of my car and driving away, before Lady Gaga was born—the second my suitcase rolls into the tiled foyer, I feel as though I’ve got crow stuck between a crown and one of my last remaining real teeth. And that’s because in my parents’ house, the parents are parents and the children are still very much children.

  I have found myself asking if it was “okay if I had a cookie” before dinner, and I’ve noticed distinctly that, after being out, I try my hardest to act sober in front of my parents when I’m already sober.

  Maybe it comes from years of conditioning from my mother lurking in the shadows as I barely made my curfew as a teenager. When I was a junior in high school, I made the mistake one night of coming home by the designated time but unable to walk, due to the poor decision-making process of an immature fifteen-year-old girl named Laurie, who heard that the boy she liked really liked someone way cuter. My mother, clearly a novice at identifying reality-altered behavior, couldn’t wait to pronounce that I was on LSD and that our whole family was in crisis, even though the culprit was an unholy mixture of Tang and gin. Ready to pounce and test me for the signals of LSD on any night thereafter, my mother began her drug research, which included (and was limited to) watching ABC Afterschool Specials that Melissa Sue Anderson was in, what she heard on the radio in song lyrics, and from Helter Skelter, the only book she read in its entirety from 1976 until 1985, or at least that’s how long it was in the bathroom on the back of the toilet. While the data was more than incomplete, that never stopped her from believing that she was qualified to distinguish a person who was hallucinating from someone who was a tumbler away from alcohol poisoning, even though shooting fuel-injected Tang out my nose cured me of drinking for a decade afterward.

  “I know what ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ is about, you know,” she’d say, taking the last drag from her cigarette as she sat at the kitchen table when I walked through the door. “You’re not foolin’ nobody.”

  “That’s weird, Mom,” I said as I got some milk from the fridge. “I thought you boycotted Beatles albums when they stopped wearing ties and you couldn’t see their earlobes anymore.”

  “I bet you think you could fly to your room, don’t you?” she replied, and then oddly flashed me a peace sign. “How many fingers am I holding up? Or are you too spaced out to count?”

  “I wish I was on LSD, because then this would be hilarious,” I said tiredly, as if I really needed to remind her that I was a white middle-class dork who still passed football-shaped notes to her friends between classes and who had no idea where to get underwear that didn’t have flowers on them, let alone psychedelic substances from the neighborhood recreational chemist.

  “You don’t shoplift, do you?” she asked me, grinding out the butt as I chomped on an Oreo, trying to ignore her. “Because shoplifting is just a hop, skip, and a jump to joining a cult. One minute you have a free lipstick in your pocket, and the next thing you know you’re carving a pinwheel into your forehead. AND GODDAMNIT, DON’T HITCHHIKE!!”

  Even decades later, as an adult bunking with my parents, just asking where the bath towels were might prove to be a dangerous game and could transform me into a ten-year-old in seconds flat. The first time I stayed with them as a taxpaying, car-owning, weed-pulling home owner, who had already experienced her first cancer scare and who wanted to take a shower, my mother simply shook her head. “Here we go,” she said with an exhausted sigh, her nightgown riding up terrifyingly higher than her tennis outfit in the seventies, even though my mother still has the legs of a showgirl (a very short Italian showgirl, but even so, it’s my mom). “I’m telling you right now, if you’re going to take a shower here, this is not a hotel. I’m not cleaning up your hair that’s all over the place in the bathroom. If you’re going to shed, pick it up. Hair makes me gag. All I need is one look. Don’t pretend that you don’t know that. That’s why you’re not allowed to bring food over on holidays, only drinks.”

  When I responded to her “hair talk” with a blank stare—mainly because I hadn’t taken a shower in her house since I was twenty years old, my shedding patterns have most likely changed in that time, and also because I was afraid that if I moved my eyes the delicate position of her shorty nightgown might have shifted into a danger zone—I clearly made her more angry. I expected buttons to pop off her nightgown placket and ricochet off the walls or my apparent bald spot.

  “You know it skeeves me!” she said as she dumped a towel into my arms. “I’m not picking up your hair and neither is my cleaning lady Patricia! The last time I went into a bathroom after you left it, I thought some monkey war had happened in there!”

  “I was using Sun-In then, Mom!” I protested with a sneer. “You spray that shit all over your head and see what your scalp manages to hang on to! Everyone knew it! Even the FDA! Kmart should never have been selling it!”

  Frankly, it wasn’t just my mother who had difficulty with the transition of having her daughter return for a week. I don’t think my Dad was ready for me to come back home, either. I think it had been a long time since he was forced to make conversation at the kitchen table over coffee, especially with the person who had been canceling out his vote in every single election since the mid-eighties.

  “So,” he said with a chipper, good-morning smile. “That president of yours doesn’t seem to be able to cough up his birth certificate.”

  “Dad,” I said, my eyes still half closed, being that I had been awake for eight minutes. “I don’t even have a bra on yet. Maybe we should save the birther debate for Mid-Morning Snack Time. Give us something to live for.”

  “All right then,” he agreed. “I noticed from my office window that you parked facing the wrong side of the street yesterday afternoon for fifteen to twenty minutes, at about four, four fifteen P.M. You know you’re going to get a ticket for that. Everyone on this street obeys the law.”

  “Dad,” I said, now that I had been awake for eight minutes and fifteen seconds. “No cop has ever set foot on that asphalt, and if they have, it’s because someone saw a car driving down the street that was a model older than 2005 and they panicked.”

  “Your mother deleted all of my very important emails,” he started again. “I had them all filed in my trash folder, and if I had wanted to throw them away, they wouldn’t have still been in the trash folder. D
o you know how to get them back?”

  “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea,” I said, knowing it was unwise to tackle that debacle with or without underwire support. “But if there’s anything you can do to get her to stop wearing the shorty showgirl nightgown, I’m all for it.”

  “Damnit,” he said, wincing. “I’m gonna have to call The Geek. Gonna have to call The Geek. Did you know they found the Garden of Eden in Iraq? It’s starting to grow back.”

  “I don’t know how hard Glenn Beck was crying when he told you that,” I said, getting up and throwing my napkin onto the table in a feeble act of surrender. “But you might want to get a second source. I’m going to go pull my hair out in the shower now.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Just don’t let your mother see it” was all he said.

  But, to be perfectly honest, my mother didn’t really know what to do with me at the breakfast table, either, although she does wear pants on the first floor of the house, so it was a much safer atmosphere.

  “You broke my coffeemaker the last time you were here,” she said after she sat down and took a sip from her mug.

  “You know that just isn’t true. I didn’t really break it,” I replied. “I just put the water in the wrong hole. It dried out by the time I left. You used it this morning and sixty percent of the coffee stains came out of the dish towels. It’s like the space shuttle of coffeemakers. It’s far more complicated than it needs to be for an appliance that can only make one cup of coffee at a time.”

  “And my coffee is never stale now,” she said adamantly. “It’s an anti-stale coffeemaker.”

  “Really?” I replied. “Where are you going between the time you put the filter in your old coffeemaker and the time the dripping is done? Are you going into the bathroom, or are you bending the time–space continuum? Where are you going? The Civil War? American Revolution? If it takes you so long to go to the bathroom that it makes your coffee stale, I hate to tell you, but the issue isn’t with the coffeemaker. Eat more fiber. Ripe banana.”

  “I told you to watch the tutorial,” she volleyed. “You don’t just open a coffeemaker and pour a gallon of water in the first hole you see. It’s not a girl at the bar.”

  And then she gave me a “you know what I’m talking about” look.

  “Sorry, that’s the way it works with coffeemakers that don’t come with a DVD and a certificate of completion. And it’s a mystery why you bought a coffeemaker that uses the special coffee packets you can only get on QVC,” I shot back. “They look like Chicken McNugget dipping sauces. I still can’t figure out if I got the sweet ’n’ sour or honey mustard latte.”

  “I’m getting a new hip,” she said, changing the subject.

  “You just got a new hip,” I reminded her. “You haven’t even sent Barack Obama a thank-you note for the first one yet. So when did QVC start selling body parts? Is this one bedazzled with Diamonique, or does it have a lighthouse embroidered on it? Are you getting a Joan Rivers hip? Please tell me you’re getting a Joan Rivers hip!”

  “I’m getting my other one done,” she informed me, and I remembered all too well the incident of the last hip replacement the year before. Pre-surgery, she got ready for it like a mama bird and began assembling her Recovery (Vicodin) Nest. She moved into my sister’s old room, where she had set up a television, a fold-up dining tray, a recliner, and a patio chair, which my father had informed me that she called “the visitor’s chair,” to which he commented without pause, “Oh, yeah, they’re lining up around the block.” In essence, my mother had established her very own assisted-living apartment within her very own house. The hospital also gave her a hook hand on a pole—the Gripper—with a squeeze handle at the bottom of the stick to control the opening and closing of the claw.

  “Are you getting another Gripper?” I asked. “So when your skin grows back together as one sheet and your transition into the Bionic Woman is complete, maybe you can get some whaling or seasonal migrant fruit-picking work?”

  “I don’t think that’s funny,” my mother said. “I hate that friggin’ lemon tree in the backyard. Who the hell needs all of those lemons? Why can’t it just give me one or two lemons a week? That’s all I need. I should stop watering it.”

  “Are you bringing your visitor’s chair back into your apartment?” I asked. “I noticed you moved it in front of the sink in the bathroom. Actually, I didn’t notice it as much as realize that I was going to have to get a running start and pole-vault over it if I wanted to get to the toilet.”

  “It takes a long time to dry my hair with the blow dryer,” my mother replied adamantly. “Standing the whole time makes my hip very tired.” This was a woman who, if asked what was the single most important possession she would save from a burning house, would answer her handicapped-parking permit or her Ambien bottle, so the chair in the bathroom shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to me.

  “Maybe we should buy you some Sun-In,” I replied. “Cut down on your beauty time.”

  “Why would you keep an important email in a trash folder?” my mother said suddenly, throwing up her hands. “That’s like keeping your checking account in the toilet bowl. Right? Right?”

  I shrugged, knowing better than to touch that beehive, so I turned matters to the only subject my mother and I couldn’t possibly argue about: her grandsons, my nephews.

  “You know, I can’t believe how tall Nick got,” I said, referencing my nephew who had suddenly sprouted five inches since I had last seen him at Christmas. “I feel like someone switched him out with a random mall kid wearing a McDonald’s uniform; did you bring him back after a spin on your Time Traveler Toilet? I don’t know why we didn’t keep him in a terrarium so he could only grow as big as his surroundings would allow. Remember his little baby teeth? I want his little teeth back. You’d better return this version before he sprouts a mustache and our Future Family decides to keep Little Teeth Nick!”

  “Oh, if you think his teeth take some getting used to, you should see the hair on his legs!” she said, dropped her voice to a whisper, made a disgusted look, and pointed to her deodorant place. “He even has hair … other areas. Like under his armpits. I’m trying to talk him into shaving them.”

  “Mom, do you want to turn him into a drag queen?” I balked, horrified that he might have even considered asking other boys his age if their grandmas were helping them shave their armpits, maybe even buying them pink razors that they might pop out in the showers after PE, thinking that it was perfectly normal because Grandma said so. “Oh my God. You need to stop that. That’s what happens when we mature. We’re animals, Mom; mammals get hairy! What did you expect?”

  If my mother had hind legs, she would have reared up on them and then kicked me in the face with a front hoof.

  “I,” she quickly informed me with a pointed finger, “am not an animal. You are an animal! I read the Bible! I am not an animal!”

  And with that, her chair left tire tracks on the tile as she pushed away from the table and stood up.

  “By the way,” she said as she walked away and gave me one last look, “your shirt is too small. You look like friggin’ Pooh Bear.”

  I looked down, and it was pretty much true. My mom had probably used a vast amount of restraint not to voice that observation as a breakfast opener.

  But, to be honest, even that revelation couldn’t prepare me for what I saw one afternoon a few days later when I walked through my parents’ front door after parking my rental car in the wrong direction on the cop-free street. I don’t know how my mom and dad didn’t know I was there—I had to unlock the door, so I know I made noise. I was making noise, I tell you! But as I came around the corner from the foyer, I saw my mother sitting on the chair with her leg extended, and my father kneeling on the floor, a shoe in his hand. There they were, my parents—who, to my knowledge, had never even made eye contact, let alone touched—and here he was, slipping a shoe on her foot. What was going on here? They both turned and looked at me in the same second,
their eyes wide with unexpected horror and shame. I’m sure the look on my face was no different.

  No one said a word. The silence actually echoed.

  I’m so glad this didn’t happen when I was six, I thought as I turned and fled up the stairs, not stopping until I closed the guest-bedroom door behind me.

  “—and he was putting on her shoe! They both turned to look at me. Their eyes. Their eyes!” I cried quietly into the phone to my sister.

  “Oh. My. God,” my sister replied in a horrified whisper. “You should really come and stay over here.”

  “She was on the couch,” I said again. “With her bad-hip leg sticking out—”

  “SHUT UP,” my sister demanded firmly. “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!”

  “How am I going to go back downstairs?” I asked. “How am I going to face them, after seeing what I’ve seen?”

  “Stay upstairs!” my sister warned. “Don’t leave that room. Do you have enough snacks to get you through until morning?”

  “Oh,” I said, on the verge of a full-fledged panic attack. “I have a bag of chocolate Twizzlers and two protein bars in my suitcase from my book tour in 2008. I won’t make it until sundown. Wait—”

  I suddenly spied a red bag that was on a chair and could be one of two things: Godiva chocolates from my friend Lucy, or handcrafted, beautifully scented bath bombs from my friend Kathy Monkman. I held out hope for the chocolates as I crossed the room. I knew that Lucy had not only included truffles in her bag but also dark-chocolate-covered almonds, which feasibly could be enough protein to keep me in the guest bedroom until my flight left in two days.

  But as I got close enough to the bag to touch it, I smelled the wonderful aroma of flowers, and, though heavenly, that doesn’t smell like Godiva. Still, just to be sure, I looked into the bag, and that’s when I definitely saw the two delicately packed boxes with the rounded spheres of bath bombs covered in white powder, each resting in a white paper cup. There was no mistaking them.