The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (7 page)

“Don’t worry,” my husband said, lifting the car keys from his pocket. “A Milky Way Midnight? Raspberry sorbet? And Charmin, is that what you said?”

“The extra-soft Charmin,” I replied, slowly and sadly nodding. “Blue package. The pink package is so rough it’s like planks of wood. The Dairy Queen in Apache Junction has softer toilet paper than that. Oh, no, and I forgot we’re out of milk, too, and I feel a pudding crisis coming on. And we’re down to one egg, which is not good, because I may need the solace and comfort of French toast for dinner. Do you see how my whole life just fell apart? My
whole life,
just because I’m a woman, and just because of one selfish rapist! I can’t even get myself an egg!”

“I’ll take care of it,” my husband assured me. “I’ll be right back. Don’t answer the door. And here’s the phone in case you need to call the police, but I’ll be back before the requisite three hours it takes them to show up, so understand that 911 is just a formality, in case they slap us with another false-alarm fine. Are we up-to-date on the life insurance policy?”

I nodded demurely, then watched as my husband left the house, made sure he’d locked the door, began sweating immediately, then proceeded to get into his barbecue of a car and kill thousands of his own brain cells as they boiled to death inside his skull like a pot of macaroni on a stove.

I, in turn, grabbed a Snapple, still wishing I had offspring or a nicely trained monkey to fetch it for me, plopped my hiney down into the cushions of the sofa with a
pop!
as I opened my diet raspberry iced tea and made sure I was directly in the path of the fan.

Now, much to my amazement, my husband kept up his knight-in-shining-armor routine for a week and a half, maybe two, and I have to say I could not blame him when the errand-boy life got a little stale. I sent him out almost every single night, sometimes twice if I was especially thirsty and the only thing that could save my life was a cherry limeade from Sonic (with two cherries in it.
Two. I’m a prisoner in my own home, so I ask you, is two cherries one too many to ask?
), while I stretched out on the couch and made him do my bidding because he was the gender that Kenny Ray only beat into unconsciousness. It was devilry. I know it. But resisting was futile. It was kind of like having a butler, but one that you could wear pajamas in front of and pinch if he made you a little mad. I was a little resentful, however, when he stood by the window for the first time and mentioned blithely, “There goes the ice cream man, and it looks like he’s having a sale on those cookie bars you like so much. Sure wish I had some shoes on…like you do,” or pointed out that Maria Elena, artisan of the most exquisite tamales anywhere in the world and one of my main reasons for still living in that house, had hit up everyone on the block but us with her stolen grocery cart and five-gallon bucket.

“Maria Elena is walking around out there just fine, and he hasn’t gotten
her
yet,” my husband noted. “Maybe you could go out to the car and kind of…see what happens.”

I got the hint completely and finally ventured back outside into the heat, but I felt much better when I had the “in case of fire, use to smash windows and attempt to bend the iron security bars until you peacefully succumb to smoke inhalation” crowbar in my hand that I kept beside my bed that had been left at our house by the burglar who used his Journey T-shirt for, I was sure, the rough kind of Charmin.

I
guess I’ll never
really know if it was the crowbar, the quality of my posterior view, or the fact that maybe our neighborhood scared even Kenny Ray, but I never came into contact with my neighborhood rapist; in fact, I never saw him, not once. As far as I know, he never left his house. I never saw him in the front yard practicing pouncing or springing from bushes, but maybe he simply hated 110 degrees as much as I did. Or maybe he was just as terrified of showing his mug to the thousands of people who must have gotten that letter as we were afraid of seeing it.

Eventually, over the next several months, I began leaving the crowbar at home more often simply because I would forget it and things started to level out, little by little, almost to the point that most days I even sort of forgot I had a class-three sex offender, kidnapper, man attacker, and abuser living 150 feet away from me. I know this was mainly because I wanted things to return to normal more than they had reason to, but it was an easy con. It became something that hung in the background like the warnings on cigarette packages; the danger was always present, always there, and always a second away, but with each day that passed without us coughing up blood, the farther away that warning seemed and the less it had an impact on our lives. Every day, it drifted farther away, and eventually, the goldenrod-colored letter from the police department with Kenny Ray’s thin-lipped mug shot on it became simply another piece of the puzzle on our refrigerator door, next to the pictures of our nieces and nephews, above and below recipes, coupons, and reminders. In a very odd way, we got used to living nearly next door to a violent, dangerous, but invisible rapist.

I don’t know what happened to him, and for that matter, I don’t know if he ever really lived there. I have a feeling that he did, because whoever lived there put a 1978 burlap sleeper sofa, a tree stump, and the obligatory broken dryer out in their front yard crowned by a
FOR SALE
sign, and four weeks later, the neighborhood pack of wild dogs had torn the stuffing out of the back of the sofa and peed all over the stump, the door to the dryer had fallen off, and the sign had changed to
FREE
, so my vote says “yes,” although I can’t prove it. But I still have that letter.

I did know, however, that the next time I got an envelope from the Phoenix Police Department with my address on it, I was going to jump for joy if it was a notification of a $150 fine for another false alarm.

Happy Birthday and the Element of Surprise

I
t wasn’t my idea
to go to the store.

It wasn’t my idea to be standing in line with the cashier and everyone in the general vicinity scrutinizing me, but there I was. It had all begun fifteen minutes earlier when I had perched myself in front of the bathroom mirror, unable to move.

“My nose is getting bigger,” I said aloud, studying it as closely as I possibly could.

“I’m going to unscrew the lightbulb in the bathroom if you don’t come out of there soon,” my husband said as he sat on the living room couch, trying to read a book.

“Did you hear what I said?” I complained louder. “I said my nose is getting bigger, and that’s not all. So are the pores on it. One of them on the tip of my nose has gotten so large I swear I saw a hand come out. Apparently, a small child from Texas mistook it for a well and fell into it.”

“Stop it,” he insisted.

“I can’t,” I said as I shook my head. “I just found a trio of hairs that are trying to colonize one of my necks. If I don’t stop them now, it’s just a matter of time before their relatives from New Jersey arrive to homestead a nostril or plant sideburn crops.”

“This is no way to spend your birthday,” he said, finally putting the book down and getting up. “Come on. Let’s go to the store, grab a nice bottle of wine, and sit out on the deck. It’s seventy-five degrees outside and the sun will be setting in about an hour. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

To be honest, anything sounded better than scouring my chest for a follicular Jamestown, and we still had several hours until our dinner reservation, so I made the better choice of catching a tiny little birthday buzz over scouring my body for age spots. To put it lightly, it was not an ordinary birthday, it was one of those Milestone Years in which you do not only investigate every visible inch of yourself (and would fully attempt, if possible, to search your own cavities to see how those areas were holding up as well), but go to the secret, bad place and open the Dusty Vault of Youth. That’s where you keep the photos of yourself taken in the precipice of your vitality that you hold next to your current hag face to tally up how much damage has been incurred. It’s also the place where you keep the last bra you owned that required no lowered tone when telling a Victoria’s Secret salesperson the size, the last thing you owned that bore horizontal stripes, and an ashtray that you, while inebriated, pried out of a cab with a butter knife when it was still cute and “unpredictable” to do those sorts of things. Should I attempt that same act of taxi unpredictability at my current age, I’d be shot in the ass with a heavy dose of lithium by county health services and then either get dropped off by the train tracks or given a free bowl of soup and a bed at the Mission if I agreed to let someone ramble some gospel at me from the good book. While the trauma of discovering three-inch-long stealth hairs that had been flourishing long enough that I could have knit a hat out of them was enough to push me to the brink of considering skin grafts from a Norwegian, I was in need of something
now
.

So
vino
it was.

“You know, the only benefit to being this old,” I told my husband as we got into the car, “is that the likelihood of a barren psychopath mistaking my girth for a ripe pregnancy, following me home, forcing me inside at gunpoint, and slicing open my belly only to discover that the baby is actually a ham-and-cheese sandwich with a side of potato salad has just dropped dramatically.”

“See?” my husband said as he backed out of the driveway. “Now, that’s the kind of birthday spirit I wanna hear!”

At the grocery store, we picked out a decent wine and then presented it to the cashier, who looked at the bottle, then looked back at us. Then she cleared her throat and made history as the Person Who Took Bumper Sticker Wisdom Far Too Literally.

“I need to see your IDs,” she said quietly, practicing a random act of kindness.

I choked on my own spit.

Now, true, since we live in a university town, I am sure the manager at Safeway insists that all of his cashiers are diligent about carding, but I suspected a different motivation altogether.

In my head, I assembled the options quickly:

a. She’d just taken her last hit of Ecstasy before her shift, sniffed some paint, or had a tooth pulled and is high on some top-quality pharmaceuticals.

b. She believes my husband to not be my partner for life but my underaged offspring.

c. She’s a barren psychopath who is trying to determine if I’m still of childbearing age and if my paunch is an indication of a yawning fetus or simply decades of bad living and poor choices.

d. Bribing the cashier is my birthday present from my spouse and we’re not going to dinner after all. And nothing makes me angrier than hunger.

But my husband, on the other hand, thought nothing of it, mainly because he doesn’t hold a photo of himself at twenty up to his reflection every five years to assess road wear, and he can still fit into the pants he wore when we were dating, although he, too, keeps an old 34C bra of mine in his sock drawer to remind himself why he married a woman who now has black yarn growing out of her neck. He pulled his wallet from his pocket without a second thought and handed his driver’s license over. The cashier nodded, handed it back, and looked at me.