The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (8 page)

BOOK: The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death
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I pointed to myself and raised my eyebrows. “Me, too?” I asked.

“Yep, you, too,” the young woman, who looked to be slightly past the drinking age herself, said politely, and then I suddenly understood that this might be for real.

She might really want to see my ID, I think to myself as I feel a tingle dance up my spine. I might really be getting carded.

I might really be getting carded!

And all of a sudden, I realized I was glad. Happy. Thrilled. Flattered. Delighted. It was more than that, it was wonderful, and made me realize how foolish and masochistic I had been, holding up a picture taken in my twenties and chastising myself because I had aged a little since then! In that mirror at home, I had just hit an ugly Milestone Birthday and was decaying minute by minute, but in Safeway, I was possibly under twenty-one. UNDER TWENTY-ONE. Holy shit, I thought, the light in here must be great. I love Safeway light, I love it! I am never leaving. I am moving to Safeway. I felt my ass tighten, I felt my stomach get flat, I felt my pores shrink to the size of pudding cups. I was young again, and my birthday didn’t matter. I’m not old, I said to myself. I am not middle-aged. I look like a Rolling Stones song. I rock. If you took a picture of me in the Safeway light, I bet it would have looked pretty darn close to the glamour shot in my Dusty Vault of Youth.

I felt
so good.

So naturally, I couldn’t leave it at that and enjoy it. Of course I had to poke at it until it burst.

As I handed over my driver’s license, I humbly, almost bashfully, added, “Oh, I bet I’m old enough to be your mom!”

To which the cashier promptly noted as she handed my ID back to me, completely innocently and without malice, “Actually, my mom is younger than you are.”

Instantly and without hesitation, my ass made a plopping sound as it hit the floor, the seams on my jeans popped like gunfire as my stomach returned to its regular size, the hair on my neck sprouted to a length that made Rapunzel’s look butch, and my spine lurched forward as I suddenly lost 70 percent of my bone mass.

Apparently, the look on my face embodied all of these physical atrocities, and if that wasn’t bad enough, I even saw my husband wince. It was not lost on the cashier, who quickly tried to remedy the situation before I needed the assistance of a Hoveround to leave the store.

“But my dad is older than you,” she offered. “By a lot.”

I smiled weakly and wrestled with the urge to reply, “Who the hell is your mother, Loretta Lynn?”

“It’s all gooooood,” she cooed at me as she handed my husband the receipt and we left the store.

“Boy,” I said to my husband as we got into the car. “That was more fun than the birthday you took me to the pound to get a dog and pointed out which ones were going to be put down next.”

The minute we returned home, I raced for the phone, picked it up, and dialed my best friend, Jamie, who lived in Marina del Rey, not only because she’s my best friend but because her birthday was exactly one week earlier. If there was anyone who would understand, it was Jamie.

But it was Jamie’s husband who answered the phone, and he had some news of his own. “Guess what I did this weekend,” he said.

“Took your wife out for dinner for her birthday?” I asked.

“Oh no, better,” he informed me. “I threw her a surprise birthday party!”


You did not!
” I said, gasping, completely unbelieving. As a man, he did simply not possess the skills of organizing a sandwich let alone something as complex as a social gathering with a purpose and that also involved advanced levels of trickery.

“I DID!” he boasted.

“You’re lying!” I replied.

“I’m not,” he insisted. “I really threw her a surprise party!”

“Were there other people there besides the two of you?” I questioned suspiciously.

“Yeah, like twenty,” he replied.

“And they were there on purpose?” I asked. “People passing by or people you can see through a window and who might be able to see you back don’t count, you know.”

“No, no, they were invited,” he said.

I was stumped. “Put her on the phone,” I demanded.

“Hi!” my best friend said.

“He threw you a surprise birthday party?” I asked immediately.

“No,” she said.

“He said he did,” I informed her.

“Oh, I know,” she answered. “He’s very proud of himself.”

“But you didn’t get a surprise birthday party?” I said.

“No,” she confirmed. “I did not.”

“So you found out about it?” I asked.

“Oh God no,” she said, gasping. “He kept that little nugget to himself.”

“Do not spare one detail,” I demanded.

Apparently, several days before the event, it came to her husband’s attention that Jamie’s birthday was exceedingly close, and like many men who go to Target in search of a gift for their wives but come out empty-handed aside from the Xbox they have purchased for themselves, he was at a loss.

And then he had a brilliant idea. Gazing at his Xbox and realizing how happy he had made himself, he remembered that it was his friend Oscar’s birthday, too. Maybe Oscar would also get an Xbox. Maybe they could have an Xbox war! And then he remembered that Oscar’s wife, Maria, had sent out invitations to Oscar’s party for that very weekend.

For Oscar’s
surprise
birthday party.

Jamie’s husband made a phone call to Maria, and like any nice, young wife trying to do something special for her husband’s birthday who was suddenly backed into a corner by his friend, she agreed politely to make a trade.

Jamie’s husband would buy the decorations, put them up, and pay for half the cake if Maria would pick up the cake, then have the party at her house as she had originally planned.

And it was all set.

Jamie and her husband arrived at the party, hid with everyone else when Oscar was close to coming home, and shouted “SURPRISE!!!!” when he finally walked through the door. They mingled with all of Oscar’s friends, drank some wine, and Jamie’s husband pointed out the pretty decorations. Then it was time for the cake.

As Maria brought out the cake dotted with tiny, festive candles, everyone began to sing the familiar song, “Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Oscar…”

And then one little, tiny, but proud male voice rang out suddenly, “and Jamie!”

“Happy Birthday to you!”

Jamie, thinking her husband a bit of a jokester, most likely grinned at his little insertion, but it wasn’t until her husband brought her over to the cake that she realized the magnitude of what was happening.

“Because there, Laurie,” my best friend recounted, “in all fancy, big red letters, was ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY OSCAR!’ on the top of the cake, and then on the bottom, in teeny-weeny, little tiny, last-minute ‘Hey, could you stick this on there, too?’ letters was ‘
AND JAMIE!
’”

“Oh my God,” I said.

“And that’s when he turned to me and said, ‘Surprise!’”

“When did you punch him out?” I wanted to know. “Because you’d better tell me you punched him out!”

Jamie wisely abstained, because at that moment, knocking her well-meaning husband to the ground took a backseat to what she saw displayed on the dining room table with candles sticking out of it. At first sight, Jamie believed it to be a mountain range covered in snow with a red rose topping each of the peaks, but as she continued to stare at the cake, she realized that what she believed to be Kilimanjaro was, in stark and triple-X reality, a gigantic pair of enormous cake boobies.

I gasped. “You mean to tell me that not only did he hijack another guy’s birthday party,” I said slowly, “but you got a titty cake for your birthday?”

“I got a titty cake. I guess the left and larger breast was Oscar’s,” Jamie told me. “And mine was the right one. I believe I ate an areola.
That
was surprising.”

I started to laugh, and Jamie started to laugh, and soon I couldn’t even make any sound at all except a clicking in the back of my throat that resembled dolphin talk. I even tinkled in my pants a little, but honestly, I was surprised that didn’t happen without provocation when I was standing in line waiting to get my ID back.

Because as crappy as my birthday had been thus far, no matter how badly I thought it sucked, one thing was true: I highly doubted that at the end of the night anyone, let alone a room full of strangers, was going to see me put an areola, familiar or otherwise, into my mouth.

And that, certainly, was something to celebrate.

 

Leaving, but Not on a Jet Plane

T
he first thing
that popped into my head when I saw the
FOR SALE
sign in my front yard was, What the hell is
that
doing there?

I gasped and felt my head spin a bit. Don, our Realtor, must have sent his guy over in the morning to put it up, I realized. I just hadn’t expected it so soon.

We were leaving.

We had known we were going for some time now, but up until this point it had all been talk. Talk, talk, talk. I got the distinct impression that no one believed us, and to be honest, we barely believed it ourselves.

Almost a year earlier, my husband had decided that he had not run up a significant enough amount of student-loan debt, and that if you’re going to borrow money from the government, you might as well borrow enough so that they put a lien against your house, otherwise you’re just going through the motions. He filled out the applications to numerous graduate schools and sent them off, and we barely talked about it again until he got a big envelope in the mail six months later, read it, then looked up at me and said, “Hey, um, could we move to Chicago?”

“If you’re getting extradited, I’ll visit,” I offered. “So sure, move to Chicago.”

“I got into grad school,” he said plainly.

I paused for a minute and tried to catch the little nugget he had just thrown at me. Did he just say he got into grad school? He got into grad school. Now, it wasn’t like we had never known any grad students, or that I didn’t think my husband had it in him, but he had applied to some good schools. Really good schools. Schools that were a little hard to get into.

“You got into
grad
school?” I asked, just to make sure that he hadn’t said “bad school” or “sad school.”

He nodded.

My head started spinning, and then it started spinning faster, and faster and faster. “You got into
grad school
?” I asked again, only this time a little more loudly, and a little more excited. “You got into
grad school
?”

“YES!” he said with a big smile.

His smile, however, was nowhere near as big as mine.

“Do you know what this means?” I asked, a second away from hopping up and down.
“Do you?”

“I don’t know, what?” my husband said, his eyes lighting up.

“I dated a retarded person, you know!” I laughed as exhilaration washed over me in big waves and my hands flailed. “Actually, I’m pretty sure I dated two, but I didn’t mention one because he said he didn’t have a driver’s license and was only sort of illiterate, so I just count the one. And now you’ve gotten into grad school! Which is incredible! This is so fantastic! This is awesome! I’m so happy!”

The joy on my husband’s face was diluted only slightly by confusion. “So…this means we’re…moving to Chicago?”

“It means that by getting into grad school you canceled them out!” I said, now fully jumping up and down. “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! My record has been cleared! It’s been restored! Atonement! I have achieved atonement! I never thought I’d live to see the day!”

“I will still never understand how you didn’t know he—now they—weren’t special-needs people,” my husband said, shaking his head.

“His mouth was gripped around that bong 95 percent of the time,” I answered. “How could anyone even tell the difference? Goofy grin, never a full sentence, always laughing. And they all watch cartoons. Trickier than you think, my friend.”

“All right, all right,” my husband said impatiently. “Back to grad school. And Chicago.”

“Unless there’s another Chicago fire, I doubt we could ever afford a house there,” I said reluctantly, but I promised to look into the real estate market of the Windy City to see if there was anything we could swing.

BOOK: The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death
11.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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