Have a Nice Guilt Trip (9 page)

How could you not save that? Don’t you think it will come in handy, when you wear your plastic outfit?

I would bet money that nine out of ten women would save an Apple plastic bag if Bravo weren’t watching.

And now, in California, they’re telling you to save plastic bags and reuse them.

Recycling is politically correct hoarding.

Consider hotel soaps, which I love for their fragrance as well as their cuteness, shaped like miniature shells, balls, or bars, usually in pastel shades that scream guest bathroom. I save them though I’d never put them in the guest bathroom.

It’s not impressive when your soaps say Hilton.

Especially if your towels say Ritz-Carlton.

Just kidding.

My only excuse for saving hotel soap is that I use it upstairs and don’t have to buy bar soap as often. Never mind that few things are cheaper than bar soap. If you built a house of bar soap, it would cost you $36.75.

With a coupon.

The last thing I save is keys.

Truly, I don’t know why. I have old keys everywhere in my house, from all the stages of my life, and I have no idea what they unlock, yet I cannot bring myself to throw them away.

I could get locked out.

Or locked in.

Which is worse, and who knows?

I should throw them away, and set myself free.

I smell a metaphor.

Or maybe that’s the hotel soap.

Be Careful What You Wish List

By Francesca

I just added a pair of Chloe flats to my
Net-A-Porter.com
“Wish List.”

By the way, the shoes cost $495, which is $495 more than I have to spend on shoes. But that’s okay, because I don’t have any intention of buying them.

Isn’t that how everyone uses online-shopping wish lists?

For those of you who prefer a life grounded in reality and don’t know what I’m talking about, most online retailers allow users to save a list of desired items on a “wish list,” a sort of shopping-cart purgatory.

I love using wish lists, because then the site notifies me if the price of one of my chosen items gets discounted from totally-ridiculously-expensive to get-real-you-still-can’t-afford-it.

Okay, so maybe I’m doing it wrong.

But I don’t really know how one is
supposed
to use a wish list. Most sites provide the option of emailing the wish list to someone, but to whom? A mysterious benefactor? A sugar daddy? A blackmail victim?

But alas, I have moral integrity. So my wish list is for my eyes only. It doesn’t matter that I’m no closer to owning that swishy Prada circle skirt, it feels like I am.

Call it aspirational online shopping.

It’s the fantasy that I would buy clothes like these, just not now. I’ve even gone so far as to contact the live-chat customer service with a question about sizing for a bikini I could never afford.

You have to commit to the bit.

Eventually, the item on my wish list sells out or is no longer offered, and then I’m off the hook. Gosh, darn, better luck next time. My clicker finger gets some exercise, but my wallet doesn’t starve.

I’ve invented passive willpower. Fiscal responsibility by forfeit.

Plus, I like getting credit for my excellent taste that goes into curating my wish list. Credit from whom, you ask?

The NSA must have some women working for them.

Mostly, I get credit from my best friend. We recently discovered that we both practice delusional wish-listing, so the last time she was over, we sat down and compared our lists,
ooh
ing and
ahh
ing over our collections of the very best pieces from each designer line.

It’s like fantasy football, but with fashion.

My friend and I fantasy-shop for each other. I’ll email her items I know she would love, despite a stratospheric price tag, with subject lines like: “Getting this for your birthday 2025.”

By then, it might be on sale.

When we actually get together, we get crazier, which is the mark of true friends. The other night she was at my apartment, and we got giddy adding thousands of dollars of clothes to my imaginary closet. When we discovered our favorite fashion site had a bridal section, we lost it completely. We played a game trying to guess which wedding dresses the other would choose.

Of course we nailed it. We know each other’s tastes and closets as well as our own. If there were a Newlywed Game for best friends, we would come away with the dinette set for sure.

Then a lightbulb went off in my head. “Ohmigod, you know what? I’ve seen the most perfect wedding dress of all time, and it’s not in the bridal section. Hang on.” I navigated the website with the speed and intensity of a CIA operative.

And then I found it. The Dolce & Gabbana Rose-print Silk Mikado Dress. A stunning white silk gown with gorgeous pink roses painted on the skirt.

My friend gasped. We both needed a moment to recover from its loveliness.

But the price tag?

$14,400.

To reiterate: I am not engaged, not rich, and I don’t think my credit card limit goes that high.

But as we basked in the celestial glow emanating from the computer screen, my friend touched my shoulder. “I’m just gonna say it. If you bought this right now, I’d support you, and I’d never tell a soul.”

Now that’s friendship.

It’s also insane. I got us safely away from the computer, but my bff/enabler continued to make her case as we walked my dog outside.

“Maybe you could just order it, and we could try it on in your bedroom, and then you could return it,” she said. “After we take pictures, obviously.”

I laughed. “I should get my hair done for it.”

“Yes! You will get a blow out, and we’ll take pictures in it.”

We’ve had a lot of Lucy and Ethel schemes in our time, but this was definitely the worst. “What if something happens to it?”

“Like what? They have free returns!”

“But what if it tears? What if I take it out and it’s defective, but they don’t believe me? What if I try to send it back and it gets lost in the mail?”

“I’m sure they have a procedure for that.”

“Yeah, like charging me fifteen grand that I don’t have!”

We took a few steps without talking, our wheels silently turning.

A fellow writer herself, my friend came up with her strongest argument yet. “It’d make a great column.”

I didn’t buy the dress.

But I did put it on my wish list.

I Know It When I See It

By Lisa

You may have heard that pictures of a topless Kate Middleton were published on the Internet.

Did you look at them?

Fess up.

I looked.

You might think I’m a perv, but I admit, I was curious.

So what do Kate Middleton’s breasts look like?

I can tell you exactly.

They’re round, and each one has a nipple.

Just like my breasts, and most breasts you’ve ever seen.

Okay, maybe not my breasts, of late.

Late being since I turned thirty.

Which was when my breasts turned sixty.

I cannot explain why my breasts became a senior citizen before I did. All I know is that my butt is already on social security.

I’m here to tell you that if my breasts looked like Kate Middleton’s breasts, I would not be complaining when they showed up on the Internet. In fact, I would email pictures of my breasts to everyone in sight, until people blocked them as spam, and then I still wouldn’t stop.

When I saw Kate Middleton’s breasts, I got breast envy.

By the way, no woman I know has penis envy.

Freud was totally wrong about that.

Women envy men’s power, paycheck, and ability to take the lid off any jar.

But their penises, men can keep.

Not interested.

I have a tough enough time zipping my jeans.

Of course, I understand why it was an invasion of privacy to show the photos, and why the royal couple is upset.

But the royal pair is great.

It was a French magazine that published the photos first, and an Irish newspaper published them next. And finally the Italians, and being Italian-American, I’m very disappointed.

Why did they let the French get the jump?

What about
la dolce vita
and all that?

After all, Italians practically invented breasts. The proof is any fountain in Italy. The water ain’t squirting out of fish mouths.

Who wants to drink anything from a fish?

Perhaps to make up for their tardiness, the Italians intended to publish two hundred photos of Kate Middleton’s breasts.

Way to go.

That’s four hundred breasts, which is plenty for all of Europe. Its economy may be sagging, but guess what’s perky?

Right.

Interestingly, the brouhaha, or brahaha, over the photos of Kate Middleton’s breasts occurred in the same week that the U.S. Embassy in Libya was attacked and four of its staff slain, including our Ambassador, Christopher Stevens. I was reading the article about the attack online and was clicking through the photos, when all of a sudden, one was a photo of Ambassador Stevens, murdered.

There was no warning at all.

No NSFW.

Not even a NSFHB. Or, Not Safe For Human Beings.

To me, if photos of murdered people are Safe For Work, I don’t want to work there.

There are spoiler alerts for a plot twist in
Breaking Bad,
but there’s nothing when something breaks as bad as it gets.

Because, for some reason, it’s okay to show murdered people on the Internet, but not royal breasts. For example, one headline read, Kate Middleton Topless Photos Spark Worldwide Outrage.

But Ambassador Stevens’s photos didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

So I guess we have different definitions about what is obscene.

Stars and Puppies

By Lisa

Sometimes the stars align, and sometimes they collide.

And sometimes they do both, at once.

We begin when Daughter Francesca and I get invited to speak at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., about our previous collection in this series entitled
Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim.

Francesca thought of the title, which is very funny unless you happen to be the emotional baggage.

That would be me.

I don’t mind being her emotional baggage. On the contrary, I like being a big heavy thing she totes around, like a guilt backpack. Or something she drags behind her, a steamer trunk of doubts, worries, and strongly held beliefs based on no facts at all.

No mother wants to be a mere roller bag, or worse yet, a fanny pack.

At least not Italian mothers.

We leave it to others to say they don’t want to burden their children. We think that’s what children are for.

Faulkner had the right idea when he said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

And the great thing about emotional baggage is that even when I’m dead, I won’t be dead. I hope Francesca will carry me around with her in her head, hearing my voice tell her to put the knives in the dishwasher with the pointy end down, or to run a background check on that guy she just met at the bar.

Half of my advice is good.

The other half is awesome.

So, we get ready to leave for the National Book Festival, though we’re both busy on book deadline, and it’s tax time, too. Because I’m self-employed, I pay taxes every quarter, which means I start hating my government four times a year, like the change of the seasons except none of them is pretty.

No amount of money I send my country seems to satisfy it, and both candidates for president pay less of a tax rate than I do, which reminds me that my country and my government are two different things. I would do anything for my country, but my government can cook its own dinner.

My kitchen’s closed.

Anyway, not only are these two things occurring simultaneously, but then, as it happens, my little dog Peach became pregnant, on a date I fixed up. I bred Peach so I can keep her puppies, because as we know, I need more dogs. One of the many advantages to being a single, middle-aged woman is that nobody’s around to save you from your own tomfoolery.

And if they were, I wouldn’t listen.

But when I take Peach to the vet for a checkup, we learn that she is expected to deliver early, during the National Book Festival. Of course we feel instantly guilty, worried, and fearful, and we have instant emotional baggage from Peach, which may be the first recorded case of emotional baggage being transferred from dog to human, like a virus that jumps species. Still, we make arrangements to have Peach cared for and hit the road, which is when Francesca turns to me in the car.

“I’m worried,” she says.

“Me, too. Poor little doggie.”

“Agree, but I’m talking about me. I’ve never spoken in front of a large group before.”

“Yes, you have, at bookstores.”

“Not like this,” Francesca says, and I realize she’s right. We were scheduled to speak twice, in front of a thousand people each time, and in all my worrying about my doggie daughter, I had overlooked my real daughter. So I got my act together, gave her a big hug, and drove her to the Festival, where I sat back while Francesca spoke so astoundingly well that I cried.

Someone said to me, “She’s her mother’s daughter.”

And I said, “Thanks, but she’s herself, and she’s amazing.”

(Because no one gives my daughter emotional baggage but me.)

And when we came home, Peach had given birth to three adorable puppies, all beautiful, healthy, and happy.

It was that kind of weekend.

Stars collided, then aligned. And I got to see my own special star shine, bathing me in her light, leaving me blissful and blessed.