The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (11 page)

“The corgi dog gang even chased her from her car to the front door,” Don said excitedly. “She saw it all. She wants the house, and don’t you even think about backing out. I’m making double commission on this, and I’ve already booked my cruise!”

I
’ve never printed
the pictures of the house we took on that last day.

I’ve looked at them once or twice, flipped through the folder I keep them in on my computer, but the emptiness that swallows the rooms catches me in the throat and makes my eyes burn. There’s my husband and our dog, Bella, kneeling down in front of the fireplace and the built-in bookcases, smiling, the floor so shiny and wide behind them. Barnaby, our old, deranged cat, standing on the spot where he peed in his kitty bed and stained the floor in my office where I had just finished writing my fourth book. My deserted kitchen, the soapstone counter patterned with the reflections of the tree outside, and the cabinets free of even Veronica’s things.

Everything looks so still in those pictures, like a house about to be left.

The woman who bought our house worked in historic preservation for the city, so I knew that she wouldn’t gut the place and tear all the wonderful things about it out. She had just gotten divorced, and I was honest when I told her that the house would take care of her, because as much as we had taken care of it, it had taken care of us. Especially with the iron bars on the windows and doors and the crowbar I left on the windowsill.

The last picture I took of the house that day was from the sidewalk, and the sky is so blue and the sun so bright and shining that it makes everything look so magnificently clean. It makes it look brilliant. The grass had just been mowed, the stripes of each lawn mower pass are apparent, and there’s not an errant piece of dog shit in sight. The sky is
so
blue, strikingly blue, and oddly enough, everything against it, the grass and the trees, looks amazingly green.

It was a lovely house, both Veronica’s and mine.

“Did you want one last hug?” my husband asked as I got into the car, packed with Bella, Barnaby, her bed, his litter box, and everything else that was relevant for our three-day drive up to Eugene and our new apartment.

I shook my head. “No, that last one took up most of the morning, and I still have the imprint of the wall texture on my cheek,” I said. “I think I’m good.”

“You brought those fancy crackers, right?” he questioned. “I’ve never had crackers like that. They are so good!”

“I got ’em, they’re in the back,” I replied.

And with that, we pulled away from the curb of our house and headed toward the freeway, toward I-5 West.

Balls and Putters

O
ne of the last
things I heard on the Phoenix nightly news before I left was that a male-only golf course was being planned for Maricopa, a small desert town a couple of miles outside of Phoenix. Consequently, I have to admit that I was mad.

I was mad and offended, thinking that the whole thing smacked of sexism and inequality. I was imagining the male-only golf course in my head, picturing the fellas slapping each other on the back, remarking, “Listen to how quiet it is here without women! It’s so peaceful! I haven’t heard a sound since Bill’s last burp and the splash of Bob’s urine hitting that tree trunk. It’s remarkable.”

And then, all of a sudden, I realized that a male-only golf course was a miracle. A pure miracle! In fact, women have been waiting for this event for years, hoping it would come, looking toward the skies for a sign. And now the time had arrived.

Naturally, it had to be men who made the first move of boorishly excluding the other sex, mainly because most women are far too polite to do such a thing. We’d worry about hurting men’s “feelings,” completely forgetting that most men don’t typically purchase the biological upgrade package that includes those options, although they’ll fork over eighty thousand dollars for a lifetime membership to a men’s only golf club. And now that it’s done, now that the line of exclusion has been crossed, it opens everything else up. I hope you’re ready, boys.

For starters, I’d like to suggest a female-only airline. I mean, imagine, ladies, actually utilizing an armrest that hasn’t been staked out and claimed by a big man arm, despite the fact that half of it is legally yours. Imagine the luxury of never having the dimwit in front of you recline all the back into your lap because he’s more self-absorbed than a Bounty paper towel and understands others around him merely to be props. Imagine a whole entire flight without getting kicked in the kidneys
once
by a Florsheim. And the peanuts would disappear, replaced lovingly by Ghirardelli chocolate squares.

Second, I’d like to propose women-only roads and freeways. Sure, you might get tailgated once in a while by a sister applying lipstick, but at least you can be fairly confident that when she passes you, there won’t the barrel of a shotgun poking out her window with your forehead centered nicely in the scope. And if that isn’t enough incentive, chances are that you’ll never have to hear a Boston or Rush tune blaring out of the Firebird pulled up next to you, or the thumping bass in a rap song played so loud that the sound waves are strong enough to remove the plaque from your teeth.

Next, I’d like to submit the idea of female-only bars. Yes, I know that we already have some of those, but I’m talking about some that aren’t so special-interest specific, I guess. Just a good old place where a girl can have a drink without anyone assuming that she used to work for Heidi Fleiss. It would also be nice to have a beer or two without hearing the words “High five!” and “Score!”

Now, a good majority of the offenses listed aren’t committed by all men, just by the kind of guy who thinks that his golf club should only be open to half of the world’s population. Unfortunately, however, it still means that all males would be excluded, not just the suckiest ones.

And just to make sure that no guys try to slip in, the security factor of nudity will be strictly enforced in all female-only areas, as will pillow fighting and brushing each other’s hair.

Hope you fellows have fun with your balls and putters.

The Uhhhhhmazing Dr. Wells

W
hen I saw
the infant black hair attempting to sprout on my chin, I have to admit I felt a little excited flip in my stomach.

The time, I knew, was almost at hand. It was going to be nothing short of a massacre.

Six weeks earlier, I had gone to see my dermatologist, Dr. Wells, after I had noticed a weird freckle on my arm and decided to get it checked out. While I was waiting for him in the examining room, I took a look at all the medical things on the walls—pictures of carcinomas and other kinds of skin cancers; diagrams of blackheads, regular old pimples, and boils; photos of acne, both before and after treatment. Then one poster caught my eye: it was an invitation to the wonderful world of laser hair removal, where traces of my Italian heritage and simian DNA could be eradicated with one pass of a concentrated light beam.

I nearly gasped at the possibility and, from force of habit, touched my chin, which was almost always compulsively plucked, lest I ignore it for a week and allow my jawline to begin to resemble that of a Chinese emperor. I imagined it soft and whisker-free, never having to worry if a bristle had grown in overnight and flourished to its full three-inch potential, never having to attack a stubborn one with a wax strip enough times that it left me with a rug burn and the squatter hair still smack in the middle of it. I wanted the chin of a supermodel, or I wanted at least one of my chins to resemble a supermodel’s—it didn’t have to be all three of them.

I remember when I found my first little piggy chin hair. I was sitting Mrs. Gaio’s senior-year high school English class, reading my part in
Macbeth
(I was ominously typecast as one of the witches), when I felt something pokey, yet flexible sticking out of my face, and I was so naïve and unspoiled that I actually thought it was a splinter. After class was over, I rushed to the bathroom to take a peek in the mirror and to my horror met the bane of my chin existence, which would taunt me for the next twenty-odd years. I was shocked when I saw that black sprout emerging from my skin. I actually recall my stomach becoming a cold pit of fear as I realized that the only explanation I could come up with was that I was a hermaphrodite, and that things would probably be getting much, much worse as other “parts” of me began to grow manly and I made the full transformation into a “shim.” For the rest of the day I wallowed in the sick feeling that at any moment my voice might change and my ovaries might drop, and I was terrified of what I might find when I took off my bra that night.

See, because that is what happens when the fifth-grade PE teacher doesn’t give you all the details, just the pretty sales pitch, suggesting that having a menstrual cycle is like having a timeshare, and the rest of your life as a woman will be like a Dove commercial. Sure, the girls get the boilerplate lecture and filmstrip about how becoming a woman is so magical and beautiful and silky, when really, they should be telling you that your days of living maintenance-free are quickly drawing to a close and that in no time at all, you’ll be finding yourself clutching your abdomen in a Circle K in the dead of night with a churning uterus buying some super-absorbency tampons from a tweaker, having hot wax poured on places a gynecologist charges extra to go to, watching your boobs get flatter and longer, and waiting for your cookie to fall out, because yes, that can happen and I know
because I asked.
Give that thing enough of a workout and someday you’ll be in Africa, picking it up out of the dirt with a stick, knowing it isn’t a dream.