Something New (7 page)

By seven fifteen on this Friday morning, I have already endured three juvenile meltdowns and an uncharacteristic postcoital argument with my spouse. Jonah had awakened me with an insistent erection at five forty-five, which I dutifully accepted despite my complete lack of interest. (A week has passed since our shower copulation and my impersonation of a sexual automaton, and although at the time I vowed never to have sex with my husband again, sometimes it’s easier to just let them have a go.) This morning, I thought that I might actually get some pleasure out of the deal and that my dreamlike stupor would promote a happy ending for both of us, but I was wrong. I could not, for the life of me, become aroused enough to climax, and the more I tried, the further from orgasm I got. I was finally so chafed, physically
and
mentally, that I had to fake it again. Not that Jonah noticed. He came with a thunderous groan that I was sure would wake up the children, leaving me to wonder why my
libido had suddenly taken a vaycay and whether I should investigate some kind of sexual therapy. Well, at least Jonah was satisfied.

I had been vertical for only ten minutes when the day went from bad to worse. It began before breakfast with Jessie’s tirade about her beloved denim skirt that had not yet made it through the laundry cycle. The way she ranted and raved about my failings as a mother, I could have sworn my eight-year-old daughter was having her period. This was followed by Matthew’s tearful proclamation that his Target boxer briefs were a “travesty” and “unacceptable” in the boys’ locker room and that only Calvin Kleins would be suitable garments to encase his decidedly scrawny nether parts. Then Connor sent me over the edge by turning on the Wii before school, which I consider a mutinous and grievous act rooted in his tween obligation to rebel against his parents at any and every opportunity.

After threatening to disconnect the contraption, I regained a modicum of control only to be informed by my husband that he had a client dinner tonight which he had failed to mention earlier. “What’s the big deal?” he asked when I complained. “It’s not like you have some big Friday night planned.”

“No, Jonah,” I replied, attempting to keep my voice calm and steady. “I have book club tonight. It’s on the calendar. You put it in your friggin’ Outlook, for God’s sake.” I swear, Jonah would forget to pee without a reminder from his scheduling software.

“What am I supposed to do, cancel? This is the CEO of the Irvine Company. So you miss one book club.”

He showed little or no remorse when I told him that six other people were counting on me, especially Jill. He merely
rolled his eyes and revealed his blatant skepticism that book club has any intrinsic value whatsoever.

“You have no idea what book club is all about,” I told him, seething. “It’s a communal experience, a chance for us to connect and discuss topics outside our own limited lives. It’s like church.” Okay, maybe that was a bit much, but still. Jonah hasn’t read a book since the Paleolithic era. He really has no concept of what books mean to me.

“Book club is an excuse for you and your friends to drink wine and gossip,” he proclaimed, as if he were the King Poobah of Universal Wisdom. I really hate that tone of voice. So I clamped my mouth shut and escaped to the loo.

And here I sit, musing about the sorry state of my hemorrhoids as I flip through my cousin’s magazine. I have managed to avoid reading it for more than a week now, but my excuses to Jill are starting to sound pathetic even to my own ears. (“No, I didn’t look at the competition guidelines today, I had to clean my lint trap.” “No, I didn’t read the competition guidelines because I was busy realigning my fifth chakra.”)

I am now twelve days into Operation Ellen, and feeling fine, but it has not been as cathartic as I thought it would. I still feel like me. Not that I expected to be transformed into some higher being, or Angelina Jolie or anything, but I thought I would somehow feel
different
. I have been eating right and exercising regularly and trying to have a positive, can-do attitude, and it’s true that my skin is looking good and my waistbands are slightly looser and I have a slight bounce in my step, but I haven’t yet reached transcendency. Perhaps I should have aimed lower with the whole reinvention thing.

I turn pages of the magazine mindlessly. I bypass the
article on spicing up your sex life, although after this morning, I could use some advice in that area. I briefly scan a two-page piece about a miracle cleanse that will scrub your intestines so clean you could eat off them and cause your colon to whistle “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” I’m not supportive of any diet or fast that erases wine from my daily consumption since, let’s face it, wine is a housewife’s heroin, and withdrawal symptoms include random crying jags over particularly sappy e-mails, littering the kitchen floor with every single pot and pan in the cupboard whilst screeching about how dinner is not going to cook itself, and beating the crap out of my kids—figuratively, of course. In my opinion, it’s better to have dirty intestines and a nonwhistling colon.

A few pages later, I find myself staring down at the competition guidelines.
You could win $10,000 and write for our magazine!
the headline announces.
Create a blog at Ladieslivingwelljournal.com, write about what you know, and the blog that receives the most hits wins!

I stare at the wall across from the toilet for a moment, searching through the cavernous recesses of my brain in an attempt to come up with at least one idea for a blog. The
write about what you know
part puts me at a disadvantage because I can’t for the life of me come up with something interesting that I actually know about. I have spent the last thirteen years as a wife and mother and have done little else. I know how to change a diaper (though even that skill is a bit rusty now), I can make a cake in the shape of the Empire State Building (but who can’t nowadays, thanks to the friggin’ Ace of Cakes), and I can tell you the best places to go for a good bounce: the G-rated, inflatable, kid-kind of bounce, not the lascivious, consenting-adults kind of bounce. But who wants to read about such banal things? Don’t people
want to be informed and inspired, made to really think and ponder things, to find enlightenment, to be hit with an emotional impact that causes catharsis?

I know what my friend Mia would say. She’d say, “Girl, you are overestimating the intelligence of the inhabitants of planet earth. Most of these people have the IQ of a pork chop. They don’t want to be enlightened. Not really. Oh, they might
say
they want that, to sound cool and all, but what they really want is to be entertained. Even the smart ones. For God’s sake, my husband loved, and I mean
loved
,
Jackass 3D
and he went to Harvard!”

A tentative
tap-tap-tap
sounds at the bathroom door, followed by an even more tentative “Honey?” My husband. He did
not
go to Harvard. Although he, too, loved
Jackass 3D
.

“What?” I retort, glancing at my watch. I note with dismay that I have managed to get only three minutes and twenty-seven seconds of alone time before the cursed knock.

“I know you’re probably in the middle of the mother of all poops.” I can detect a note of derision in his voice, but he is doing his best to mask it, knows he ought to err on the side of not pissing me off any further. “Want me to take the kids to school?”

A conciliatory gesture. No dice, pal.

“Yup,” I reply. Jonah hates it when I answer him with curt, one-syllable replies. Therefore, I do it whenever I know that he knows that I am displeased with him.

“Are you going to be okay about tonight?” he asks. He is making a concerted effort to pretend to care about my squashed plans.

“Yup.” In truth I have no idea what I am going to do about book club, but I realize that it’s not a crisis on the same level as, say, the polar ice caps melting.

“You sure?”

“Sure,” I snap, rolling my eyes at him through the closed door.

He sighs. I can’t hear the actual sigh, but I know Jonah. He always sighs. Another ten seconds go by. I count them down like Houston approaching liftoff. Just as I think,
Blast-off
, he says, “Okay, then. Have a good day.”

“Fuck you.” I whisper it so that he can’t hear me. “Bye,” I say, aloud, then return my attention to the magazine.

By the time I have finished reading all of the fine print of the competition, I am fairly certain that my house is empty. I am also fairly certain that there is no way in hell I can ever enter this blog contest. I mean, seriously. A blog post a day for fourteen days? That’s
fourteen
ideas, and I can’t even come up with
one
. And anyway, the deadline for the first blog post is today.

I know Jill will be disappointed, but she’ll just have to get over it. As our Grandma Phyllis used to say, you cannot suck water from a stone.

I exit the bathroom, toss the magazine in the trash can, and wander down to the kitchen to find that Jonah has left me about a third of a cup of brown sludge in the bottom of the coffee carafe. I turn off the machine, let Sally out the back door, and head for the fridge. Then I pull out a low-fat raspberry yogurt that is about to reach its drop-dead date and head for the little alcove off the kitchen, where I boot up my computer. I know I have to call Jill and tell her I can’t attend book club tonight because my husband is a fink, but I also know that she will go ballistic, so I put off making the call by going through my e-mails. As usual, I have a ton of spam, and several “special offers” from companies that I subscribed to in moments of weakness but from which I will never buy anything. I delete them all and am left with two PTA notifications, a short e-mail from my father that says “Hey girl”
and nothing else, and a long e-mail from my sister, Lisa. She lives in Riverside and is conflicted about whether to have a tummy tuck and a boob lift, which her husband has offered to pay for. Lisa thinks that surgery is a cop-out and possibly a sin, but at a particular age, like, say, mine, or my sister’s, who is eleven months younger than I am, a woman should take all the help she can get. In my opinion,
not
taking help is the sin. Gravity is a bitch. Metabolism slows to the pace of a snail on downers, and the imbalance of hormones causes women’s bellies to bloat to barrel proportions. And once you pass a certain point, there is no going back, no matter how many fucking crunches you do.

I take a moment to reply that I think Lisa is crazy not to take Malcolm up on his offer and that if she doesn’t, I will in her stead. Who gives a crap about cop-outs? I ask her. Sin-shmin! Anyone gives you a hard time, just tell them to go to hell, and then go get your new navel pierced!

Now, I love my sister, but she is very much influenced by her peers. And a large percentage of her peers belong to her church, which I call the Praise the Lord Church of the Word of God. I have nothing against good Christians, but the bulk of the women who attend Praise the Lord have made holy rites of quilting bees and bake sales and resembling giant pears, and they believe that anything a woman does that is not related to pleasing God is a sin punishable by ostracism. Taking care of yourself, applying makeup, and trying to look attractive is considered vanity with a capital
V
. Plastic surgery equals downright harlotry. I have told Lisa numerous times that she is still a vibrant woman who has the right to look and feel good. She is beautiful, I tell her. She just needs a little professional assistance to reach her potential. In my opinion, if God wanted people to be fat, He wouldn’t have invented liposuction.

I know that she will suffer over this decision for another six months, and then will probably decide to embrace her inner Dom DeLuise and put on fifty pounds by consuming every unpurchased baked good left on the Praise the Lord banquet table at the church’s holiday sale. She’ll cry and be ashamed, but the church ladies will love her.

After sending off the e-mail, I skim over the PTA notices, which are in reality calls to action. “Spring Carnival is coming, ladies! We need everyone’s help to make this the best carnival ever! Anyone who hasn’t signed up to work the event needs to get on it!” What the e-mail doesn’t say is that if you don’t volunteer, Penelope Larson, the PTA prez, will hunt you down, trusty clipboard in hand, and publicly lambaste you into submission until you are begging her to let you—please, please, please—work the water-dunking booth. Last year I got dunked seven times before the next glassy-eyed PTA sucker—uh, volunteer—came to relieve me. And yes, four of the seven dunkings were at the hands of my own traitorous kids.

The second PTA blast is a too-long, preachy dissertation about the evils of candy in the classroom, written by Caroline Klum. Caroline fancies herself a wordsmith extraordinaire, seeing as how she is the editor in chief of the
Garden Hills Echo
, the free local handout that mostly gets used as liner for litter boxes, birdcages, and kennels of house-training pups. I find three errors in the first paragraph, and this gives me a certain smug satisfaction. I am not an editor in chief of anything. But I know that
i
comes before
e
except after
c
. Yay for me. Caroline does make some good arguments, though, about the blood sugar/hyperactivity connection. Candy equals frenetic and unruly behavior equals overwhelmed teachers equals nobody learns anything for the hour and a half after lunch. It makes me rethink the Jelly Bellies I put in
my kids’ lunch sacks this morning. Oh well, I think, unsympathetically. That’s their teachers’ problem, not mine. My bad mood is exacerbated by the fact that I’m screwed for book club, I’m not even an editor in chief of a stupid local home-printed newsletter, I’m an unhealthy influence on my children, and I can’t think of one effing thing to write about in a blog. Even the teachers whose kids are high on crack candy have it better than I do.

The blog contest. Why am I still thinking about that? I’m not doing it. I’ll fail terrifically. I’ll be a loser not only in spirit, but in glorious megabyte-me reality.