Autobiography of a Fat Bride (22 page)

You Have Already Been Preapproved for a Decline

H
ere, Casey!” the woman on the commercial called out gently. “Here, boy!”

Casey, a puppy in the same commercial mere seconds before, was now a hobbling, geriatric dog who was not too far off from being sent to “live” on a “farm” in the “country.”

My throat swelled, expanding painfully as if I had eaten a pretzel that had lodged itself there and then hit my face on the coffee table after losing consciousness. As I felt a wet little tear rush down my cheek, I sniffled, and then I heard it.

A faint, nearly inaudible chuckle from the other end of the couch.

“What?” I said somewhat angrily, shooting my husband a look as I wiped my nose.

“You’re crying at a dog food commercial,” he informed me as he laughed and shook his head. “I’ll get you some Valium in case Hallmark or an insurance company has the next thirty-second spot!”

“I’m not freaking out,” I protested. “I’m just a little sad. That dog was so old.”

“Um, I hate to point out the obvious,” he added, “but you’re crying because you’re experiencing an ’emotion.’ Last night when I told you I was going to bed, you said, ‘I’ll be there in a minute. I’m waiting for the weather report,’ and the other day when we took your car to the store, you had a full tank of gas! You’re getting old.”

I wanted to argue, I wanted to deny the whole thing, but I didn’t. I retreated into my office, sat down, and thought about it. Okay, so I’ve seen grandmothers on Jerry Springer who are my age, but so is Cindy Crawford!

Was it true? Was I past my prime? Were my salad days now just dried-up remnants of lettuce at the bottom of the bowl? Was there a little expiration stamp someplace on my body that says, “Best if used by 10/31/1999”? I had to know the truth, and I had been dreading this moment since I first read in
Seventeen
about the “pencil test.” It was the ultimate detection device that would signal the time when I, too, would soon go to “live” on a “farm” in the “country.”

Placing a yellow No. 2 under each boob, I stood back and waited. And waited. But the pencils didn’t budge, they didn’t fall, they didn’t wiggle, even when I shimmied. They were adhered to me as if I had stuck them there with chewing gum or Polident.

I sighed and felt like crying again.

Rocks in a sock. Past my prime. So past my prime, in fact, that I could have leaned a little to the left and drafted an entire letter or signed a check to my doctor for hormone therapy. I was sure that if I lay down with my arms outstretched, I would feel each boob slide off my rib cage and settle in its rightful spot, my armpit, like a beer can in a cozy. I braced myself against the bathroom sink and sighed. When did this happen? How could I have not seen the symptoms?

My mind raced with excuses, but it was all there. In little flashes, my mind clicked from one scene to the next. In the last election, I voted for a
Republican.
A week ago, I watched the
Billboard
Music Awards and didn’t know who anyone was. Standing in line behind a kid with a tattoo across his entire arm, my mother’s voice popped into my head and snarled, “Now there’s a wise investment. The only time it really pays off is when you’re lying on a steel table in a morgue without a driver’s license in your pocket.” I don’t understand the new commercials for Levi’s. I saved $19.34 on groceries a couple of days ago by using coupons and a Fresh Value card. When my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I replied that I wanted some moles removed. I just finished reading something that had an “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker on the cover. I still have all of the lids from a set of Tupperware I bought
a year ago.
Under very bright fluorescent lights in a bathroom at Rubio’s Baja Grill, I discovered that God likes to play funny tricks and that gray hairs aren’t limited simply to your head.

But those things can be explained, I told myself, you can attribute all of that behavior to stress or improper prescription-drug use in combination with alcohol. To a possible chemical imbalance. A split personality. I probably just have a brain tumor. Radiation and psychoanalysis can fix all of that. There’s hope, I struggled to believe. Maybe my boobs are just taking a nap!

I guess I always knew this day would come, but I just didn’t expect it so soon. Did it happen one day when I realized that I was sitting at a KFC drive-through window, dressed in a sweatshirt and slippers, waiting for my order of Popcorn Chicken to come up? Or was it the moment I spotted a teenage couple holding hands and I had the overwhelming desire to scream, “Don’t trust him! You’re three bases away from becoming a statistic living in government-funded housing, honey!”

And if so, if I am maturing, what’s next for me? Do I wake up one day and find my uterus nestled at my feet, next to my cat? When do I start sneezing and peeing at the same time? When do I get teeth that I can keep in a glass of water or pull out at parties? When do I start farting in the company of others because I believe if I can’t hear it, they can’t either? Now it’s just a matter of time before I start calling my husband “Daddy,” despite the fact that my reproductive parts have remained on standby alert for decades but have never been called in for active duty.

It can’t be true, I thought. I am completely immature. I’m in a bathroom jumping around with writing instruments stuck to me.

But after I put my shirt back on and went outside to check the mail, it was all in front of me in black and white, and there was no more denying it. Waiting passively for me in the mailbox was a letter. A simple little letter telling me that I had already been approved for an unsecured Visa credit card.

I thought it was an act of God when I got my long-distance phone service reconnected. But an unsecured Visa? Could it be true? Have I really been paying my bills on time? It was worse than I thought. Just how old have I become?

I ran inside to tell my husband, who was walking toward me with arms outstretched.

“I’m sorry I called you ‘old,’ ” he said, putting his arms around me. “I just get so frightened when I see you show any kind of emotion besides anger and hate. It’s so unlike you!”

“It’s okay,” I said, hugging him back.

“When I saw the full tank of gas,” he added, “I thought, ‘What has this creature done with my wife?’ ”

“It wasn’t me,” I replied, hugging him harder. “Nana filled up the tank after we ran out of gas and had to push the car to a Mobil when I was taking her to get a perm! Oh honey, you must have been so scared!”

“What was
that
?” my husband yelled suddenly and pulled away, plugging his nose. “Man, give me a little warning before you blow on that trumpet, will you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied staunchly. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

Tiger Woods Doesn’t Know Where I Live

W
hen my gardener called one day and asked if I wanted a winter lawn that year, I’ll admit that I gushed as unabashedly as a Junior Leaguer over the thought of a diamond-anniversary tennis bracelet.

Did I?
Did I?
My mind screamed. The promise of a thick, lush carpet of emerald green stretched over my front yard when all of the other lawns in my high-desert neighborhood sported ferret brown was a dream too beautiful to resist. A lovely, velvety, jeweled lawn. It would be the pride of my street. The envy of my neighbors. And, if I could convince my husband to remove the tinfoil that lined the inside of his office window, our home might never be mistaken for Section 8 housing again! I just might have the prettiest lawn and house in the neighborhood.

I imagined it, my mind flashing to the sight of cars lined up two deep and a mile long, people coming from miles around to catch a glimpse of my majestic, flawless winter lawn. It was a dream I had waited for my whole life.

“A winter lawn will be a hundred dollars,” my lawn guy said.

“You are high! Forget it!” I screeched right before I hung up.

A hundred dollars! One hundred dollars! For a patch of winter grass? My lawn guy had obviously spent too much time inhaling around fertilizers and chemical products or licking his fingers after he handled them, like a dog that eats antifreeze. A hundred dollars!

I mean, honestly, what do you really need to make a winter lawn? Manure, seed, water, and sunshine. That’s it. Manure is a buck a bag, the water comes out of my hose, and sunshine is free until it bakes a big, bulbous carcinoma on your face and you have to pay for chemotherapy. And although I didn’t know exactly how much seed was, I was sure it wouldn’t be much.

I don’t know if my lawn guy thought I sat at home all day, passing out hundred-dollar bills to people who would change a lightbulb for me or for someone to butter my toast, but I thought a hundred dollars was an awful lot just to distribute a bag of seed and then sprinkle cow turds over it. It’s not like it takes a degree or a license or anything; you just basically need to be able to walk. It’s essentially a menial task. Honestly, the only reason I had a gardener/lawn guy in the first place was because I learned far too late that my husband was far too lazy for my own good.

I will freely admit that I married for love and because it seemed like the next logical step after stalking him got a little boring. I did not marry for money, status, or for my own personal groundskeeper, although I am not ruling out that possibility for subequent marriages. I knew my husband wasn’t bringing the assets of a manly assortment of Craftsman tools to the marriage; the man could barely work a flashlight. He would try to shine it on me when I hovered outside his bedroom windows at night, but it looked more like a strobe light, since the missing battery-chamber cover was replaced with a slice of Scotch tape. Instead, he brought a guitar, the strobe flashlight, and the complete works of Shakespeare, the sum of which is almost not even worth suing over. I married my husband because he is the nicest man in the world, and I am the meanest girl, which I thought might bring me extra bargaining points with God after I died and was negotiating my release from becoming Mrs. Satan.

However, had I known that he had such a developed aversion to yard work before we got hitched, I could have negotiated for far less obligatory time in the bedroom before I took those vows. Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson, however, because “Ability to Push a Mower Once a Week” is notched right up there at number two on my list for “Essential and Nonnegotiable Qualities for Laurie’s Second Husband,” sandwiched in between #1) Does Not Experience Cramps and the Need to Run to the Public Rest Room Every Time We Make a Purchase Over Ten Dollars and #3) Will Have Goals Over and Above What Programs He Wants to Watch on TV That Night.

But the seed for a winter lawn was planted, so to speak, and instead of giving up on my dream, I decided that I would embark on the project myself.

Once at the home improvement store, I stood on the grass-seed aisle perplexed. There were about fifteen different bags of grass seed, and I had no idea which one I needed. Then, as if a ray of light from the heavens above was sent to direct me in my quest, a man walked up beside me, and as he reached for a specific bag of grass, I saw the telltale sign: big, brown half-moons over each fingertip. He had dirt under his nails! A gardener! He certainly knew which seed to pick if his hands were all filthy! I marveled at my good luck, and as soon as the gardener left with his prized bag of perfect seed, I grabbed the next one in the stack and struggled to flop all fifty pounds of it into my cart. It left me breathless, sweaty, and with one leg numb all the way down to my ankle, but when I was done, I had seed in my cart and I was one step closer to a winter lawn.

I pushed the cart over to the manure aisle, but since I really felt no need to be as choosy about feces, I selected the cheapest brand and loaded four bags on top of the seed. Then I headed toward the cashier, my cart piled high with one hundred pounds of neighbor envy.

The lady manning the register was none too pleased to see me. She looked at the goods towering in my cart, took a deep breath, and rolled her eyes.

“You know I’m going to have to unload all of those bags of manure to get to the UPC code on the seed,” she said, just so she could be confident that I knew how grossly I was inconveniencing her.

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said cheerfully, deciding to play along. “You just go for it! I don’t mind one bit.”

She looked at me, sneered, and then lifted all four bags out and onto the counter, although the last one gave her a little tug-of-war when it got snagged on the bottom of the fold-up seat, and she gladly took her pent-up vengeance and job dissatisfaction out on it.

I just stood there and smiled.

“The manure is two-fifty a bag,” she said as she scanned each bag, and I was about to complain about the inordinate price when I heard the register beep with one more scan and the cashier continued, “And the seed is sixty dollars. It’s specially engineered for golf courses. Will this be on your Visa?”

As the cashier piled all of the manure bags back on top of the seed, I was too stunned to say anything. I really wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t put the seed back and grab another bag. I knew that I probably had only one more good lift in me—and that was to put the bag of seed into the car—before I damaged my spinal cord so badly that I went numb from the waist down, although I was sure my husband wouldn’t notice the difference. And frankly, I was just glad that he wasn’t there to tell me he was going to have to poop when I pulled out that credit card.

So I paid for the seed and manure, which, with tax, came to an amazing total of $74.69, and I began pushing the cart out to my car. And I started to get mad. And then I got madder. And then I got madder. And madder, and madder, and madder. By the time I was at my car, I was fuming.

Sixty dollars for grass seed!
Sixty dollars!
For golf course grass! Who’s going to be walking on my grass, Tiger Woods? Tiger Woods is
never
going to come and see my grass! I don’t need golf course grass, I just need something green to make my neighbors jealous!
Sixty dollars?

The more I kept thinking about it, the angrier I became, and as I was unlocking the back door of my car, I apparently began vocalizing my dissatisfaction. I’m sure I noticed that people in the parking lot were turning around to look at me, but I didn’t exactly care. In fact, I didn’t care at all, especially when I lifted the second bag of manure into the car, the same bag that had fought valiantly with the cashier, and the moment it made contact with the upholstery, it spilled wide open, belching a huge, black dookie flow all over the back of my car.

“Goddamnit!” I yelled. “
Goddamnit!
There is shit in my car! There is
a ton
of shit in my car! It’s like I lined six bulls up back here, poised their asses over the backseat, and fed them Ex-Lax! Jesus Christ! Goddamnit!
Goddamnit!
”

Well, apparently my outburst was enough for some housewife to dig her cell phone out of her purse and call the store’s managers, or maybe I had attracted that kind of attention on my own, I don’t know, but suddenly before me were two guys wearing back braces and the home improvement store’s aprons.

“Can we help you with something?” the taller one asked. “It seems like you’re having trouble.”

That little question was the exact provocation I needed to unleash, and I am unashamed to say that I completely lost my shit. “Do you know how much this bag of grass seed cost me?” I said as I whipped around to face them. “Sixty dollars!
Sixty dollars!
How can you charge people sixty dollars for grass seed and not even have a sign up that says it’s rich people’s grass? How can you even get away with that, it’s like false advertising? Which is illegal, I’ll have you know!
It is illegal!
It is
against the law
! You know what I think? I think everyone in that garden department is licking their fingers after they handle chemicals, that’s what I think, because you’re all high! You have to be high to charge sixty dollars for grass seed! That’s sixty dollars!
Sixty dollars!
And now look at this! That cashier sabotaged this bag to leak cow doody all over the back of my car. How am I going to clean that up? Can you smell that?
Can you smell that?
It smells like a 4-H parade in my car! I will never be able to get that smell out—it will cost me
another
sixty bucks to do that!”

And finally, after I got all of that out, after I had purged my anger, I just took a deep breath as the two home improvement store guys stared at me and I stared at them for a long, long, long time.

Finally, one of them broke the silence and cleared his throat.

“Um,” he said, pointing up toward his eyebrow, “you have poop on your face.”

All I could do was look at him.

Yes, I then nodded, I was sure I did have poop on my face, and I just kept nodding.

“Do you really need golf course grass?” the other guy in the apron asked.

“No,” I barely croaked as I shook my head. “I don’t even know Tiger Woods, there’s no reason for him to come to my house.”

“Okay,” he replied in a gentle tone. “Then why don’t I take this back to the store, exchange it for the bag of seed you do need, and get you a refund.”

“Thank you,” I squeaked. “I only wanted a winter lawn.”

“I know, I know,” the other guy said softly, as he took a paper napkin out of his pocket and handed it to me, again pointing to his head.

As I drove out of the home improvement store parking lot with the right bag of seventeen-dollar seed and a mostly poop-free head, I realized I had learned a great lesson.

If my gardener offered to change a lightbulb in my house for a hundred dollars, I was sure as shit going to give it to him.