Autobiography of a Fat Bride (23 page)

I Think Someone Forgot About My Needs

I
just about froze when I saw on CNN that some stupid scientists in San Francisco have developed an experimental vaccine designed to fight Alzheimer’s disease, and not only does it appear to be safe, but “a significant proportion of the patients were able to demonstrate an immune response” to the disease.

Great. Just great. I know you’re going to think I’m mean, but I was
really counting
on an appearance from Alzheimer’s in the golden years of my husband’s life so that I could finally RELAX.

Sure, I’m totally happy that the vaccine will help everybody else in the world who may have gotten Alzheimer’s later in life, but man, that was going to be my time to SHINE. I mean, my husband pretends to have selective touches of Alzheimer’s now so that he may lead a resort-style life, but I just kept thinking, “You just wait until you REALLY don’t know what your name is and we’ll see who lays on the couch all day watching a
Law and Order
marathon THEN.”

I had it all worked out. As soon as his memory started to slip and he started calling everyone “Mommy,” out would come the tails and white gloves and they would go on my other half. “Your mommy traded you for a two-liter of RC Cola and a bag of Funyons,” I’d get to say to him. “You’re a butler now and you have fifty years’ worth of trash-taking-out to catch up on! Grab that Hefty and chop, chop!”

You see, the day after our wedding, the man turned feral. As if he were a wolf-child just emerging from the forest, I had to reeducate him in the methods of subsistence as he barely clung to life, exclaiming, “What that big thing?” when pointing to the washing machine and howling in terror while retreating into a fetal position when I turned the vacuum on. I once found him wandering the house rubbing his chin and wondering aloud, “If I was a fork, where would I be?” In 1998, he started to paint the house, got half of the eave done, and then claimed that he saw a bright light and an angel told him to come back down. On another occasion, he actually did attempt to wash some dishes, but that little miracle was interrupted when he stopped to call 911 because he thought the shriveled skin on his hand meant that it was about to fall off.

Oh yeah. I had a list of projects I was saving for when the hallowed day arrived, including building a second-story bedroom-suite addition for me and “Go to the store, I have a craving for chocolate Twizzlers!” errands. Paint would never peel from my house again, because if my husband didn’t remember who he was, how could he remember that he was afraid of heights? If he couldn’t recall that the lawn mower was his enemy, I could reintroduce them as longtime friends.

See, Alzheimer’s was going to be my last chance, because all other attempts at house-training him have failed. We’re talking about a man who took down the Christmas lights with
big scissors,
remember, a man who would rather live in the dark like a bat for sustained periods of time than change a lightbulb, and a man who could not locate the alley if he had a sled and a team of dogs to lead him there. I had all kinds of plans and now they’re all RUINED. I was finally going to get some work out of him, work I have been OWED!! With his memory wiped out, it would have been like programming a robot from scratch; I would have had a clean slate with which to work! NOW all I have is a dirty slate with more hair falling off him and more of a mess to clean up!

Well, on second thought, maybe it’s ME who deserves to forget everything.

Queen Bee

B
ZZZZZZZZZ.

Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzz.

The noise was driving me crazy. It had begun earlier in the morning in my office, and at first I thought I was having a stroke or that I was finally hearing the voices I had been waiting so long for. But after I entered the kitchen to light a cigarette off the stove, I noticed that the noise had stopped.

I returned to my office, and at first, all was quiet. I worked a little, made a phone call, then:

BZZZZZZZ. Bzzz. Bzz.

Investigating, I followed the sound and came to the window, where the noise was loudest. It was coming from behind the curtains, and when I lifted them I saw the culprit.

A big, black bee, trying to get back outside. Although I felt sorry for it—it must be frustrating not to understand the properties of a simple pane of glass—my natural instinct was to kill it. The last thing I needed was something the size of an OB tampon zooming around my head, trying to poke at me. Only the week before, I had a Conflict With Nature after I came in the house from watering the grass and something caught my eye. A mass, which was brown and the length of my hand, had attached itself to my T-shirt, right on my left boob, and it was moving. I became paralyzed and couldn’t do anything but emit noises, which sounded like this—
WOOOOO! WOOO! WOOO! WOOO!
—and meant “Somebody help me! There’s a bat on me! There’s a bat on me!”

Sensing my danger, my husband ran in the kitchen after five minutes and pointed at the boob, his mouth dropping. Instead of swatting at the creature before it bit me and gave me rabies or laid eggs in my skin, he took me by the shoulders and walked me back outside. Protesting, I shook my head but he continued, remaining calm.

“It’s okay,” he said slowly. “Just get back outside.”

“WOOOO!! WOO! WOO! WOOOOO!”
I said, but I meant “Get this thing off me, you idiot! NOW! I know it’s a bat! Hurry! It’s giving me the hantavirus!”

As soon as we reached the porch, he swatted at me repeatedly until the thing came off and flew away.

“That bat was trying to suckle me!” I finally said after I caught my breath.

“That’s funny,” my husband said, going back inside. “That bat sure looked like a butterfly to me.”

So following my husband’s butterfly example (he’s reading a book on Buddhism and he’s not going to kill anything anymore), I found a cup and a piece of paper, scooped up the bee, and freed it outside, figuring the bee, like the butterfly, had followed me after I had watered the yard. I felt good about it until the next day when I heard
BZZZZ. Bzzz. Bzzz
from the window.

I gathered the cup and paper, and reliberated another captive bee.

I began to think it was odd that two bees had found their way into my office, but figured that sometimes bees zoom in the house when a door is opened, much like flies.

But the bee came back. Again. And again. And again.

For nearly two weeks, a bee would squat in my office until I found and captured it, and sometimes, while trying to get to the bee, I’d find a couple of dead ones, too.

I was starting to get scared. I mean
really
scared. Where were all of these bees coming from? Why did they like my office so much? Why were they all big and black?

I decided to eliminate all noise in the house, so when one came in, I could hear it and isolate it right away. I began to listen to the walls, and that’s the way my husband found me one day when he came home from work.

“What are you doing?” he said, looking at me with my ear against the wall in my office.

“Shhh!” I said in a whisper. “Bees don’t like noise!”

“Are they talking to you in the walls, honey?” he whispered back. “Are they asking you to be their queen?”

“Shut up,” I shot back. “Killer bees!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “They only attack old people in Apache Junction that try to light them on fire.”

“I’m serious,” I added. “I’m afraid we’ll wake up one day and our bed will have turned into a honeycomb! I can’t wash that out of the sheets! They’re Polo!”

“You know, you’ve been acting very strange since the butterfly attack,” he said calmly. “You keep seeing all of these bees, but I haven’t seen one. Where are they?”

“I’ve been freeing them!” I exclaimed. “Because of Buddha!”

“You’re not Buddhist, you’re Catholic,” my husband said. “You people will kill anything. Remember the Inquisition!”

Just then, I heard it.
BZZZZ. Bzz. Bzzz.

“You’ve aggravated them!” I cried. “They’re coming! Put a wet towel on your head!”

It was too late. The buzzing became louder and louder above us, until it almost echoed like the inside of a tin can. We both looked up at the ceiling, just in time to see a single bee emerge through a remnant of an old metal stovepipe that goes up into the roof that I forgot was there. The bee floated around the room for a second and then headed straight for the window.

“Well, there’s your swarm,” my husband said. “I don’t think we’ll need a blowtorch, though. Masking tape ought to do it.”

I captured the new bee, freed it, and then taped up the hole.

I was finally safe from nature, I thought, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Somewhere, from the other end of the house, I heard a slight squeaky noise.

Chee-chee. Chee-chee.

Crickets.

Thirty-fffff

Y
ou’ll never believe this,” my husband said as he stood in the doorway of the bathroom, looking down on me. “You know that woman I hate in my English class? The one with the continental shelf for a rear end who insists on broadcasting the details of her gory sex life in public?”

“The one who came to the class potluck with her three filthy kids who then touched every single roll and helped themselves to the cold-cut platter by using their hepatitis-contaminated fingers?” I asked, nodding. “The woman who had upper arms big as hams?”

“YES!!” my husband continued. “Well, it was her birthday today, so she brought in cupcakes. Someone asked her how old she was, and guess what?”

“What?” I played along.

“She said she was thirty-four!” he said, a look of amazement spreading across his face. “Thirty-four! So I said to the guy next to me, ‘My wife is going to be thirty-four, and
she
doesn’t look like that!’ ”

“OH MY GOD!” I yelled, standing up. “Don’t go around
telling
people that! I am not going to be thirty-four, I’m going to be
thirty-three.
”

He looked at me as if I had just said, “Look at this pretty little vase I made today from my own doody.”

“You’re thirty-three
now,
” he said slowly. “And on your next birthday, which is the week after next, you’ll then be
thirty-four.
”

I did not believe him, and I continued to argue until he found a pen and paper and wrote, right in front of me, that the current year minus the year of my birth equaled thirty-four.

I’m not good at math, but my husband actually balances his checkbook, so he’s more familiar with it than I.

I didn’t know what to say. I
couldn’t
say anything, although I was on the verge of freaking out. I had spent the entire year not only thinking—but believing—that I was thirty-two going on thirty-three. And it’s not that thirty-four is old, because it’s not, it’s just that thirty-five is right next door, even though it has the altogether different zip code of Adult Land. It’s a whole new category on surveys. I was shortly moving from the “24 to 34” group to “35 to death or life support.”

Just like that, my days of carefree, reckless youth were suddenly behind me, shattering any hopes I now had of becoming a child prodigy, a girl wonder, or even a daytime television ingenue. How could this be? Beyond thirty-three was a whole realm of things I was not ready for. I might have to start acting my age, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do that except I was pretty sure it involved eating something other than Cocoa Puffs for dinner and wearing clean clothes. I am still a child. I am basically an infant. Last week I ate a complete can of spray cheese in one, single day, solid proof that I am still incredibly immature. I always thought when it was time to grow up, I would just slip into my adult skin and be happy with it, but it didn’t happen that way. I never got it in the mail.

When my mother was thirty-four, she drove a Country Squire station wagon and I was in high school. Me with a child, let alone one who survived into adolescence? I could drive a station wagon, sure, although chances were good to unbeatable that there’d be an occupied car seat riding on the roof of it.

What may be considered still somewhat “cute” or “wacky” at thirty-three—things like tucking your skirt into your panty hose and walking around like that for an entire day, eating a whole bag of chocolate Twizzlers in one sitting, and sticking your tongue out at a nasty driver who took your parking space—are no longer considered “cute” or “wacky” but now fall under the category of “functionally retarded” and “assigned a caseworker.”

What’s worse is that I only had a few days to get accustomed to this, due to my rapidly approaching birthday. It was impossible, I thought; how am I supposed to grow up in a little over a week?

“Oh my God, I’m really going to be thirty-fffff . . .” I muttered to myself, unable to even say the word.

I had, however, a partner in this crisis; Jamie, my best friend since third grade, was born exactly a week before I was. I ran for the phone.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said when she picked up. “Are you busy?”

“No, I’m just watching
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,
” she answered.

“Do you know we’re going to be thirty-fffff . . . ?” I whimpered. “I just found out.”

“You
are
bad at math,” she said.

“You knew?” I asked.

“I’m a microbiologist,” she explained. “It’s important when you’re trying to find a cure for cancer that you know how to subtract.”

“See? At least you have a career,” I argued, feeling even more depressed. “When you answer the phone at work, you say, ‘Molecular Genetics, this is Jamie,’ and when I answer the phone, all I get to say is ‘Hi.’ I don’t feel like a grown-up, do you?”

“No, I’m a kid in a lab coat,” she admitted. “I keep having stress dreams that I get exposed at work and my boss calls me ‘duplicitous,’ and I don’t even know if that’s a
word.
”

“I can’t be thirty-fffff . . .” I whined. “I ate an entire can of spray cheese yesterday by myself, except for the stuff that I sprayed into the dog’s mouth.”

“People stared at me all day yesterday, and I thought it was because I looked especially beautiful,” she said. “But when I got home, I realized it was because a button had popped off my shirt and my left boob had come out to get some air.”

Then we both giggled.

“I don’t want to be thirty-fffff . . . ,” I sniveled. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to stay thirty-three,” she said firmly.

“Can we do that?” I asked.

“Of course we can,” she answered. “If we don’t feel thirty-fffff, let’s not be thirty-fffff. When the time is right, then we’ll move on. But I have to go now. My Cap’n Crunch is getting soggy and the Crunchberries are beginning to bloat.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were eating dinner.”

“Nah, it’s just a snack,” she said. “For dinner, I’m having chocolate. At thirty-three, you can still do that.”

“Yeah, you can,” I agreed. “In fact, I spy with my big eye another can of spray cheese in the cupboard.”