The Potty Mouth at the Table (10 page)

Plus, I hear Chairman Mao has a solo.

T
he moment I walked through the front door when I came home from my sewing class, I saw it. There was no mistaking it, and I immediately felt the flush of anxiety rush up from my stomach and swallow my head in a fiery gulp.

On the side of the box, in bright blue and hideously large letters, its origin was declared.

“You got another box from Fabric.com,” my husband said from the couch without looking up from his book.

I nodded and fake smiled, trying very hard not to betray my panic and to remain as calm as possible.

Normally, I love getting mail—packages in particular. I love it so much that I rarely stop to think about what I look like before I answer the door, a character flaw that I am powerless to change. A package is a package. The UPS man
assigned to my route clearly drew the short straw, as I’ve been known to throw open the door in my bathrobe looking like a Lady Alcoholic on her way to Rite-Aid to kill her six-pack bag full of three-dollar chardonnay because I was so excited to claim my prize. The problem with this particular box was that I didn’t remember buying anything recently.

I cast a furtive glance over my husband’s head at the four-foot pile of totes and boxes, all containing fabric, in my Hoarder’s Corner and ferreted the box into the kitchen. I set it down on the kitchen table and eyed it suspiciously. This new box horrified me. How could I be so far gone with my fabric obsession that a purchase just got lost in the mix to the point that I didn’t even remember the delight of buying it?

A hobby is only as good as its accessories, and sewing barely has any competition in that area. After all, the reason I have so much fabric is because I love it. I’m not proud of it, but I will admit to making monkey sounds and flapping my arms like a heron when I encountered a particular brown-and-red pin-striped wool for thirty-five dollars a yard. (A yard, by the way, is not enough to make anything for a person with an ass my size.) I cooed over it like it was a baby I gave up in order to go to college instead of going on food stamps. It was ridiculous and deteriorated from there when I bought as much of it as I could afford (a yard).

So when you take someone who loves something so much that her inappropriate emotional response to it nearly caused her to hover and
then
tell her she can make a dress out of it, the game is over. By the time I brought the pinstriped fabric home, both sides of the armoire and former DVD cabinet were filled with wool, faille, crepe, challis, and silks. I had one box of patterns. Then two. Then three. I departed one day for Costco on a cheese and wine mission and came home with totes for “storage.” Boastful, foolish girls in my sewing class bragged about how they were making a dress out of a sheet they got at Goodwill for three bucks, but I had Vera Wang faille I scored on Fabric.com for $3.99 a yard, plus a thirty-percent-off coupon code. Eight yards of it in case I wanted to make two dresses from it, neither of which would make me look like a sister wife who had spent three bucks on a dirty sheet from Goodwill when I put them on.

And then Fabric.com had the entire Ralph Lauren fabric selection on sale and the totes filled up at the end of my bed. Herringbone. Taffeta. Plaid suiting. And on one lucky score, cashmere. One day, the UPS driver handed me several Minuteman missile–size objects as he averted his eyes in case I was dressed like a middle-aged version of Sandy in the last scene of
Grease
again. Bolts of Vera Wang satin. Buck ninety-nine a yard.
That’s like putting cocaine on sale.
Of course I was going to buy two bolts of twenty yards each! I’d be insane not to.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when I went back to Phoenix to visit my family, I rediscovered SAS, a fabric remnant store and the glories contained within each location, despite the brusque, gruff Eastern Bloc women who worked there; I suspect they have been kinder in cutting the throats of goats than in answering your questions. While digging through the piles of fabric for $2.99 a pound (that’s right, a pound; cocaine for $2.99 a pound—Pablo Escobar never got it so cheap, and cocaine doesn’t drape as nicely as a good dupioni does), I actually found a piece of fabric I had returned to Fabric.com two months before, the sticker still on it. It was the same stuff I had been buying online, but now it was even cheaper!

On one particularly fruitful trip to SAS, I bought so much cotton velvet, plaid wool, and high-end rayon ($1.99 a pound! That’s cheaper than expired Albertsons ham!) that I had to drag the bag to the car and wrestle it into the front seat like it was a thirty-two-dollar corpse with great nap. I put the contents in the first tote that broke ground in Hoarder’s Corner and began to spend so much time at SAS that on one memorable occasion, the woman who looked like she had lived through the most wars let me use her hand sanitizer and almost cracked a
smile when I made a joke about the trim section being a bigger mess than the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia in 1992.

Hoarder’s Corner grew to multiple levels, the penthouse being an enormous box from Fabric.com with those telltale blue letters on the side, big enough that I debated adding a pillow to it and using it as a napping box. But even when the corner began to crown above the couch with boxes and bags of fabric, reaching proportions that prompted my husband to ask whether I was planning on moving somewhere, I wasn’t that alarmed. It was just messy, I told myself, a problem that could be easily remedied when I cleaned out a “little shelf in my closet” to relocate the five-foot-by-five-foot fabric monument.

But when I saw the mysterious Fabric.com box as I walked through the door after sewing class, everything changed. I suddenly had the feeling that I needed to call Candy Finnigan and book a suite at the Red Lion Inn, because my episode was next up on
Intervention.
This was serious. How much fabric did I really need, anyway? I don’t buy anything I don’t love, but apparently, I have a lot of love to give and it’s clearly exclusive to textiles. I had more than I needed. I had more than I would ever use. I had more than sweatshops in India. And I suddenly mourned for the children with tiny fingers that I never had.

It took me approximately two hours to even get close to opening the box, but eventually, curiosity and my fabric-whore proclivity got the better of me. I sliced open the box and pushed the cardboard flaps aside. The contents were encased in a plastic bag, and I eagerly rifled through it to see what I’d bought and had no memory of buying. Was it silk? Was it the piqué I had waffled over for several weeks? Was it the polka-dot voile I was waiting to go on sale?

And then, there it was. A pair of eyes. A hairy chin. A large forehead, not unlike a former boyfriend’s. It was an embroidered portrait of Bigfoot and was accompanied by a vintage pattern for a Western shirt, and bags and bags and bags of vintage-class buttons. The card inside wished me a happy birthday and was signed by my friend Lore in California, who is almost a bigger fabric whore than I am, and whose tower of fabric boxes had occupied a corner, then a closet, until she went big-time by convincing her husband that she needed an even bigger house with her own sewing room. Despite the glory of her victory, she had still taken the opportunity to hide her own slutty fabric ways by sending the evidence to my house via my birthday present.

But it’s okay. I took a deep breath, exhaled a big puff of relief, wandered over to my pile of Fabric.com boxes, and
looked at the box that was the foundation for my tower. Even though a part of me had truly fantasized about curling up inside of the enormous box big enough to throw a pillow inside and take a nap in, it would be perfect for sending the pair of earrings I got Lore for her birthday the following week.

I
t’s 4:45 a.m., and a woman in polyester pants has just stuck her hand in my crotch.

Several people stop and stare unabashedly, their mouths hanging the slightest bit open. I can’t blame them, I probably would have stared, too. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that I am screaming.

An hour earlier, my husband pulled up to the curb and kissed me good-bye; I was on my way to a writing conference in Idaho and wasn’t all that happy about getting up so early to catch my flight. But I live in a small town with a smaller airport, and it usually takes three flights and an equal number of Ativans to deliver me wherever I need to go, so I have to get started early in
the morning. I typically don’t mind traveling, as long as I don’t remember it.

As I dragged my suitcase into the airport, I instantly sighed in complete dismay. The security line was long, longer than I had ever seen it, but I knew I had enough time to make the flight. It’s just that being awake at 4:45 in the morning is enough of an offense without being made to shuffle forward two steps at a time like a mental patient in socks.

I got in line, got my boarding pass and ID in order, and waited. And waited, and waited. The line was barely moving, and as I peered around the others in line ahead of me, I saw why. Only one lane was open as opposed to the usual two at the Eugene Airport—and that wasn’t all. The Eugene Airport had gotten a new toy courtesy of TSA, in the form of a monolithic Rapiscan imaging machine, and it was not a nice one that only blows at you. It was the one that sees you naked.

I was shocked. Why a little town like Eugene, Oregon, needed a naked scanner was beyond me. I’ve seen most of my fellow Eugenians naked at one point or another, and not by choice. They’ll throw on a loincloth and join a drum circle without hesitation, and there’re always at least a dozen women on hand in any locale who would jump at the chance to unbutton their shirts and breastfeed a hungry baby or kindergartener who was in need of refreshments. Frankly, what this town needs more than a Rapiscan image
machine is a Bra Fairy. We need to tie up some of those low-lying boobs like boats before a hurricane, not put them on a screen. The last thing Eugene needs is more nudity, especially at the airport.

Because at small-town airports, the TSA people take their jobs very, very, very seriously, just as, say, a lone deputy might in a town with one jail cell. Hey, terrorists can come from anywhere, right? Never mind that ninety-eight percent of my fellow residents in Eugene can’t operate a debit card terminal and will wait five minutes while the cashier asks her manager if the lettuce at Five Guys was organic (save yourself five minutes: the answer is NO). Sure, these are people whose biggest crimes are painting streetlamps rainbow colors in the middle of the night and yarn bombing bike racks, so I could see how it would be merely a hop, skip, and a jump for these people to strap explosives to their privates, particularly if they were locally grown.

This is the same airport, mind you, that flagged me for a luggage search when I was about to leave for a three-week-long book tour. When you’re going away for that long, you have to be careful about packing, and each piece fits like a puzzle. It’s a house of cards, and if you pull one piece out, the whole enterprise collapses. Carefully, and with the utmost spatial economy in mind, I placed twenty-one fiber-drink packets side by side in a pocket and was able to lay
them flat, and was carefully closing my suitcase as my husband walked by.

“Oh, good luck with that!” he said, pointing to the twenty-one little tubes lined up like soldiers. “That doesn’t look like dynamite or anything.”

“You’re an idiot,” I said as I gingerly laid the suitcase cover down and zipped it up.

Two hours later, standing in front of a stainless-steel table at the airport, I was watching a strange man with white hair and fat fingers destroy my maxipad-and-underwear pyramid when I decided I’d had enough.

“If you’re looking for the dynamite,” I advised, “it’s in the side pocket.”

He looked at me sharply, keeping an eye on me as his knotted hands groped the side pocket and he withdrew a packet.

“What is this?” he asked me sternly.

“It’s a fiber drink,” I informed him.

“Why do you have so many?” he questioned briskly.

“I’m on a book tour for three weeks,” I explained. “And it’s easier than packing twenty-one bean burritos.”

“They resemble explosives,” he added, still not taking his hard stare off me.

“Consumed in careless amounts, you are absolutely right,” I agreed.

He tried to shove the fiber packet back into the pocket
like someone who’s never been on a book tour for three weeks. My careful fiber row collapsed, spilling into the well of the suitcase in a huge heap. I was going to have to completely repack, which was evident the moment I saw him dig into my suitcase like a badger.

“Is that all the fiber?” he asked. “Is there any more?”

You know, this is getting a little gastrointestinally personal
, I wanted to say.
When’s the last time
you
ate a vegetable
? But I had already mentioned the word “dynamite,” and even though Guantánamo Bay actually sounds like more fun than a book tour, I decided to cooperate.

“Yes,” I confessed. “There are gummy fiber bears tucked between my girdles and there are some stool-softener gel caps in the first-aid pocket. Thank you. You now know me more intimately than my husband.”

He tried to close the top of the suitcase and then slid the whole mess over toward me. “You’re a writer?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, trying to line all of my fiber soldiers back up again.

“What book did you write?” he continued.

“The book you just bent the cover to when you were digging your way through the Kotex section of my suitcase,” I informed him.

“I write science fiction,” he said, and suddenly gave me a little smile. “Can you help me get a book published?”

I smiled back, zipped the suitcase up as best I could, and then yanked it off the table.

“Nope,” I said as I walked away.