Autobiography of a Fat Bride (10 page)

My Poor Sister

M
y sister and her husband decided one day that they wanted a baby.

“Are you sure?” I asked her. “They’re a lot of work and your nipples will get as big as hubcaps.”

“They will not,” she answered. “We’re going to start trying right away.”

Six days later, she called me again.

“Guess what?” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Maybe you just ate something that was dead too long.”

“No, it’s true,” she assured me. “The pink dot says so.”

“It’s impossible,” I said. “Take another test.”

“I’ve taken seven,” she asserted. “Seven pink dots say you’re going to be an aunt.”

“What did you do?” I asked her. “Put your ovaries underneath your pillow last night and wait for a visit from the Fertility Fairy?”

This was weird. How could my baby sister have a baby? And how was she going to tell my parents? I knew damn well that it didn’t matter that she had been married for over a year; they were still going to try and ground her.

But I guess they took it okay, despite the fact that my mother wanted a signed and notarized note from the doctor to prove it, and my dad didn’t get violent or anything. He just looked my brother-in-law in the eye starkly and said, “I wasn’t aware that you did that sort of thing.”

They were going to be grandparents. I was going to be an aunt.

My sister and her husband were excited. They started looking at cribs and strollers and decided which room would be the nursery. They bought the baby its first toy, a teddy bear that played “You Are My Sunshine” when you wound it up.

I caught my sister lying on the couch in her house one day with the wound-up bear on her stomach.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m playing the song so the baby can hear it,” she said with a smile.

“I hate to be the buzzkill,” I said honestly, “but the baby still has a tail. It could still be a fish. It doesn’t have ears, and it’s got the thought process of a ballpoint pen.”

She didn’t listen to me, and kept the bear right in its place on her stomach.

She started to get big. And got bigger. And bigger. And BIGGER. By her seventh month, I was ecstatic because I wasn’t the fattest person in my wedding party anymore. She lost her belly button and instead got a big, brown circle on her stomach and her breasts each weighed as much as a four-door Lexus.

If you looked closely at her midsection, you could see the baby—which by now had become a mammal and was in the shape of a boy—squirming around like an alien. Her feet were so swollen that she couldn’t wear regular shoes, so she took to wearing foot apparel from Kmart that looked like a lace-up cast.

“Just so you know, you’re wrong,” my sister informed me. “My nipples are not the size of hubcaps. They more proportionately resemble dinner plates.”

My poor sister. I was starting to feel really, really sorry for her, especially when she started that swayback waddling thing because if she stood up straight, she’d topple right over.

“What if he’s ugly and we don’t know it?” she said to me one day. “What if we think he’s the most beautiful baby and he really looks like Ernest Borgnine? How will we know?”

“Pictures,” I said after I thought for a while. “That’s how. Pictures can’t lie. And if I detect ugliness, I will tell you, I swear. I won’t let you have an ugly baby without knowing it.”

That night, I had a dream in which the baby was born with teeth growing out of his nose and my sister kept insisting that it was normal.

“It’s totally okay,” she said repeatedly. “You’ve never had a baby, so how would you know? We just have to use a different kind of toothbrush.”

From that night on, the vision of nose teeth haunted me, and I hoped with everything I had that the baby would not be born a javelina.

The morning that my sister’s water broke it was early and her husband asked her if she had wet the bed. She called me right away, and I told her I’d meet her at the hospital, and I rushed as fast as I could. When I got there, she was hooked up to some monitor thing that measured her pain as the contractions gripped her belly. She was starting to go off the chart.

It looked awful. We weren’t allowed to talk when the numbers on the monitor were rising, and if we did, she would get a look on her face like a wild animal ready to bite your leg off. After she was forced by her pain to mutter the
F
word a couple of times, she made us leave, and after several hours, his head popped out, then his shoulders, and we all had a brand-new baby.

He was fat, he was purple, and he had two black eyes, but he was perfect. He stuck his hand in his mouth right away and that’s when we knew he was a genius baby.

He was Prince Nicholas, and after I checked for any signs of dental work in his nostrils, he was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen.

Following Instructions

T
he bead of sweat ran down the length of my nose, paused silently on the very, very, very tip before it rolled suddenly forward, leapt, and careened toward the floor, flattening when it hit.

“I CAN follow directions! I built THAT!” I yelled, pointing to a bookcase on the far side of the room.

“I refinished and reassembled THOSE!” I bellowed, pointing to the mantel of my fireplace and the two flanking glass-fronted cabinets.

“I GOT AN ELECTRIC MITER SAW FOR MY BIRTHDAY,” I roared at the ceiling, my arms open wide, “AND A CHAIN SAW FOR CHRISTMAS!”

Surely, I was indeed qualified for the task at hand. It shouldn’t have been any trouble at all for me to assemble the two-shelf cabinet that I had just hauled into my living room from the home improvement store. My troubles began after I poised the seventy-pound box against the wall and sliced it open with a utility knife, only to discover that both the instructions and the hardware were MIA. To remedy the problem, I called the store to inform them of the situation, and to inquire if they could locate another set for me.

The first fellow I talked to listened patiently, then put me on hold to conduct a reconnaissance hardware mission. Moments later, another fellow, Daniel, picked up the line and asked if he could help me.

“Thank you, but I’m already being helped,” I replied.

“Obviously NOT,” he snapped at me. “If you were, they’d be on the phone RIGHT NOW.”

Who am I to judge the wisdom and expertise of a warehouse worker? Clearly, I knew not of which I spoke, being a mere amateur in the world of home improvement customer service. So I repeated my story again.

“We don’t have any of those cabinets left,” Daniel informed me simply.

“Can you . . . check?” I brazenly ventured.

“I don’t need to CHECK,” he said. “I KNOW.”

“Well, there was a whole stack of them there two hours ago.”

Daniel took a deep breath. “YOU KNOW,” he said in his best spouse-abuser voice, “I’m standing IN FRONT of the cabinets right now and they’re all gone, but I guess
you know best.
They must all be invisible to ME!”

What could I do now? I bit my nail, and looked at the box in my living room filled with useless wooden planks. Then I got my keys.

When I got to the home improvement store, I slipped down the cabinet aisle, found the box I needed, and, well, helped myself to the parts that were missing from my box and wrote, “This Box is Incomplete and Invisible: See Daniel,” on the top. Then I ran out of the store as fast as I could without further aggravating the inner-thigh burn I had acquired the week before at the gym.

Back at home, I got my screwdriver and went to work. With the illustration-only instructions in hand, I assembled the frame of the cabinet according to the pictures, even though I was missing the part that looked like a gumdrop and used the part that looked like a Chiclet instead.

I stepped away from the cabinet and looked at it. Then I did a bad thing. With the brush of one fingertip, it was reduced to a pile of laminated chipboard that scared my little dog so badly she tinkled on the floor.

I noticed the first bead of sweat streaming down my forehead when I saw the toll-free number at the bottom of the booklet, and the words
FOR HELP CALL
next to it.

“Hi, this is Melissa, how can I help you?”

“Tragically, Melissa,” I began, “I have just purchased three hundred dollars of your merchandise [a gross exaggeration, but necessary for impact] and I’m returning it ALL. I have never seen such poor quality.”

“You certainly have the right to do that,” she replied.

That wasn’t the answer I thought I’d get, since I was looking for something more along the lines of “I am so,
so
sorry”; “Oh no! Please don’t! Please!” or some gulping, audible sobs.

“I have tools,” I stammered. “So I know poor quality when I see it!”

“Okay,” she answered before she disconnected me.

I stared at the phone, then at the heap of cabinet. I was more determined than ever to put it together. For the next two hours, I wrestled, wrangled, and fought with the planks, studying the instructions, and following them step by step. I didn’t touch the finished product this time. It fell apart when the oscillating fan turned toward it.

“Hi, this is Sandy, how can I help you?”

“Sandy,” I began, “can you explain to me why—after I have spent seven hundred dollars on your products—they have such a problem getting along with
gravity
?”

“Oh, sorry,” Sandy replied, and that’s when I thought we were
finally
getting somewhere. “Gravity doesn’t come with the cabinets. It’s an accessory that’s purchased separately! Would you like a list of stores that carry it?”

I looked back at the pile. Then I kicked it. A plank flew across the floor and put a gaping, fresh dent in the bookcase I had built.

I picked up the instructions and looked at them again. On the very last page, next to a diagram of what should have been my newly assembled cabinet, it said, “You will need:” and showed a picture of a drill, then the words
“Quizas necesite ayuda,”
which, with the help of my Spanish dictionary, meant “An assistant may be helpful.”

“Hi, this is Denise, how can I help you?”

“Denise,” I said wearily, my voice cracking, “who’s writing these instructions? My drunk uncle Rossie? Is he being helped by my cousin Ray-Ray with the one eye that always stays looking at his nose?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Denise said, pausing for a moment. “I think his name is Bill. Yes. I’m pretty sure it was Bill.”

“Can you leave BILL a message for me?” I continued. “Can you ask him why—after I’ve spent two thousand dollars and nine hours trying to assemble your merchandise—why he failed to mention that I’d need a drill until the very last page? Could you also tell him that you’ll also need some superglue, staples, and a bunch of rope, though I’m saving a bit of that to hang myself with. Oh, and one more thing, tell him this, too: NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE I KNOW HAVE A SPANISH-SPEAKING ASSISTANT!!!”

“Would you like me to send you a set of instructions on how to assemble one?” Denise asked.

The M&M, the Bee, and the Man Baby

A
fter my little sister had her baby, things really changed in my family.

My father, who made my sisters and me drive cars all during high school that he was going to “restore” when he retired, bought a brand-new Toyota minivan for my five-day-old nephew because his car seat didn’t fit well enough in the back of my sister’s unrestored car.

My mother, whose only hobbies were smoking and ordering useless appliances from QVC, kicked the nicotine habit, changed the channel to public television, and added an extra
ie
syllable after nearly every word, as in “bott-ie,” “blank-ie,” and the ever-popular “diap-ie.”

I, the one who swore she would talk to him as an adult and not talk down to him in that baby voice, have developed a full-blown falsetto, ventriloquist kind of thing because Nicholas does not respond to anything else.

And Halloween took on greater significance than any of us had ever thought possible. While we had come together to decide that we would steer Nicholas away from the White Trash Baby Syndrome by keeping him fully clothed in public places, never have his birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, and promised that he would never know the taste of a Little Debbie (although my mother came dangerously close to destroying the entire project by buying him a “Who Needs Lotto? I Have Grandma” T-shirt), a river of strife had risen between certain members of the clan, namely my sister and me.

I wanted Nicholas to be a bee for Halloween.

My sister wanted him to be an M&M.

“He’ll look stupid as an M&M,” I pouted. “If you make him into a brown peanut one, people will think he’s a potato. Years from now, he’ll look at photographs and inquire why, on the occasion of his first Halloween, we dressed him as a starch.”

“The bee is on back order,” my sister reminded me. “And he’ll look cute as a blue M&M.”

“The blue M&M is a poseur,” I snickered. “Besides, we don’t even know if Nicholas is cute or not.”

“Do you think he’s cute?” my sister asked me with a wince.

“Yeah,” I replied, following up on a promise I had made my sister when Nicholas still lived in his own carrying case.

“But what if he’s ugly and we don’t know it?” she insisted.

“That would make us look real stupid,” I answered, because we knew some people with these babies that looked like they were bred for sideshow purposes and their parents had no idea. And I understood why. He was the closest thing I’d ever have to my own kid, so he had to be cute. There was no alternative, although there was always doubt.

When I saw Nicholas’s last round of portraits, I carelessly mentioned that he looked like a Man Baby with a man’s head on a little baby body. It didn’t look like him at all, I added, but that wasn’t enough for my sister not to revoke my godmotherhood.

“The angle of the camera is bad,” I tried to explain, but that wasn’t enough for my sister not to throw my car keys at me and open the door.

“But Sam Donaldson is NOT a bad-looking guy,” I protested. “At least I didn’t say Woody Allen or Willard Scott!”

“Sam Donaldson sure would make an ugly bee!” she said as she slammed the door.

She didn’t talk to me for two days, and we didn’t patch things up until I agreed to baby-sit for her. I would have done anything to get back in the loop.

Secretly, though, I was scared. The only people I had baby-sat in the past ten years were very drunk men. There were some similarities, however, I thought to myself: Nicholas falls asleep in a sitting position, drools consistently, throws up on himself and others, always needs to be held up, makes absolutely no sense when he speaks, and wets himself while clothed. The only quality he didn’t possess was the ability to make sexual advances. Clearly, I had the upper hand.

Sure. For about two seconds. The moment I walked through that door on Saturday, he looked at me and then screamed so intensely he didn’t even make a sound. The kid didn’t breathe for a long time, and finally my sister had to hit him on the back to knock some air into his lungs.

When I tried to change him, he peed on my cheek, and when I burped him, a tunnel of formula shot out of his mouth and into my lap, drenching me. Then he cried, and he drooled, and he pooped all over his leg, and then he cried some more. After forty-five minutes, I was exhausted, frustrated, and ready to cry myself. I tried to take a nap but he kept waking me up. I couldn’t wait for my sister and her husband to get home.

When I finally heard their car pull up into the driveway, I was as excited as if my dad had bought me a new van. I waited at the door with the dogs.

“How’d it go?” my sister said as she opened the door.

“He peed on me,” I said.

“He does that.” She nodded.

“He threw up on me,” I said.

“He does that, too.” She nodded.

“I got his poop on my hand,” I said, holding it out. She nodded.

“He does this to you every day, doesn’t he?” I asked. She nodded.

“I think he’d be a cute M&M,” I said. “After all, who doesn’t love carbohydrates?”