The Potty Mouth at the Table (15 page)

“You should have been an engineer,” he said, starting to walk out of the room.

“One more thing,” I said, standing on my toes in unbridled excitement. “There’s this red chai—”

“No,” he said as he walked into the kitchen.

“But you don’t understand,” I said, presenting my case. “It’s magnificent and—”

“No,” he said finally, without even turning around.

Okay,
I thought.
I get the hint. I have pushed the limits with the vanity, I need to back off and let it go and forget about the chair.

For dinner, I made his favorite meal and tried again after he took the first bite.

“This is great,” he said, giving me the nod of approval.

“It really isn’t great,” I replied. “There are very few things in the world that are great, like Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, Yo-Yo Ma, Gandhi, and the red chair. That’s how awesome the red chair is.”

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t even look at me.

“As I was trying to explain earlier, I was at St. Vinnie’s when I saw the vanity, and then the red chair—”

“Stop with the red chair,” he advised. “I’m never going to say yes. We have too much furniture in this house as it is.”

“But you don’t understand,” I pushed. “It was incredible in there. Somebody
really good
died, because it was like walking into my own estate sale. There was stuff that seemed like it already belonged to me. So it’s like I have to get it back.”

“This argument would have much more weight if you didn’t meet an eighty-year-old lady with crazy hair, wearing bright red glasses and a beret—at a jaunty angle—with a huge red velvet flower on it while walking the dog last week and become convinced you just met yourself from the future,” he added.

“I’m sorry,” I said adamantly. “That was future Laurie, and you are in for a wild ride, my friend!”

“If you say one more word, I’m going to tape you and play it for people,” he informed me.

The next day, I woke up from my dream about sitting in the red chair, in which I was wearing my favorite lint-free smallest dress from 2000, eating Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, and my bald spot (I reserve the right to call it a cowlick) had almost completely grown in.

An hour later I repeated what I could of the dream and realized that unless I had arrived already equipped with ice cream, I was foolish to even try. Every St. Vinnie’s employee who passed offered to help, to which I replied that being in the store “was like being at my own estate sale. Somebody
really good
died!” until the manager came over and told me he’d give me a discount if I’d sit in that chair all day—at my own house:

“Ten dollars off,” he said.

“Fifteen,” I volleyed.

“Sure,” he answered. “Sixty and the chair is yours.”

“Will you hold that price for twenty-four hours?” I bargained. “In the meantime, I want this rug. It looks very familiar to me. Like I’ve walked on it before.”

I was dragging the wool rug into my house when my husband came home early.

“What are you doing?” he asked as I struggled with the small fifty-pound, bedroom-size rug.

He looked at me and when I didn’t say anything, he shook his head.

“Did you buy that at your estate sale?” he asked.

“I was just visiting the red chair,” I tried to explain. “And I saw this.”

“I thought we were past the red chair,” he said. “I thought that was your obsession for yesterday.”

“I got him to come down on the price,” I said weakly with a trace of hope. “It’s only sixty dollars now.”

“I’m never going to say yes,” my husband reminded me. “Never.”

“I’m feeding hungry families,” I added. “Or naked ones. Probably both at the same time. And they only need the price of a cup of coffee a day to live well. I don’t know if that’s deli or Starbucks prices, but the point is I am making a difference.” My husband looked at me expressionlessly, waiting for me to finish. “It’s for the children. They’re naked,” I added.

“We don’t need another chair,” my husband said. “There are nothing but chairs in the living room as it is. You don’t even sit in the leather chair you bought at St. Vinnie’s two months ago. It looks like Rent-A-Center in here. All we need is a couple of washing machines and we’re set!”

I didn’t say anything else about the red chair. Not through dinner, not during commercials that my husband forgot to
fast-forward through when we were watching TV, not when we were playing with our dog. I waited until he put his sleep apnea mask on, a complicated facial contraption/vacuum apparatus complete with buckles, snaps, and an accordion hose that rises from the middle of it and stretches out about the length of an intestine. I am positive that in the fire that will ultimately engulf us, my husband will squander his chance to live because he’ll be too afraid to run outside and let another man see that he had let his wife browbeat him about his snoring until he agreed to vacuum-seal an elephant’s trunk to his face for eight hours a day.

With the whir of the machine going, I climbed into bed and faced the red chair’s greatest adversary.

“Hey,” I whispered right into his face. “I know what I could do with the red chair.”

My husband’s sleepy hand batted me away like a pesky mosquito.

“I’ll use it in my office for my sewing chair,” I continued. “Can I get it?”

His mouth opened and made a huge sucking noise, which I understood as “Yes, you must go and fetch the red chair before another lucky husband gets to have it blocking doorways in his house.”

After I woke up in the morning, I immediately showered and squealed into the St. Vinnie’s parking lot. Within fifteen
minutes, I was back in my driveway with a red chair sticking out of the hatchback. I dragged it into the backyard next to a dresser I forgot I bought at Goodwill. I wasn’t hiding the chair exactly, but I knew it was a sore subject and didn’t want to make it worse by flaunting it so soon.

The next day, my husband was taking out the garbage, bumped into the chair, said “Ow,” and continued on his way without a word. He said nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief—his initial confrontation with the chair had come and gone with not so much as a dirty look in my direction. I took that as a very good sign that although all was not exactly well, I’d overcome the first hurdle in getting the chair onto the premises undetected. Still, I was hesitant to press my luck and move the chair into the house. I figured by the end of the week, he’d be used to hurting himself on it and I could complete the relocation.

The next day we were sitting on the deck when he looked at me and said, “I’m so glad you let that red chair thing go. You haven’t said a word about it for days and I really appreciate your considering my opinion on it. I’m sure it found a good home.”

My eyes got wide. I smiled. And I panicked a little.

“I think it did,” I said. “Once I get it inside.”

He shot me an incredulous look.

“You said I could get the chair! So I did! It’s under the
deck. It is ten feet from you. And you ran into it yesterday!”

“I did not,” he replied, quite adamant.

“Look at your knee! I bet you have a red chair bruise on it,” I added. “You would be the worst witness ever to take the stand.”

“Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable,” he informed me. “What shirt was I wearing five minutes ago?”

My mind went blank. I didn’t know. I was stumped. What
was
he wearing five minutes ago? I had no idea.

His smile grew bigger as my silence did, and then I took a chance.

“I have an answer, but if I’m right, you have to help me move the chair into the house,” I said, to which he nodded.

I pointed at his chest. “You were wearing that shirt,” I said, knowing that in our house, once we get dressed, that’s pretty much it. We could have a carotid artery splash like a fire hose on our clothing and we would seriously weigh the effort of finding another clean outfit or just ignoring it until bedtime required otherwise.

He laughed. And then he helped me bring the chair inside.

I promised not to go to St. Vinnie’s anymore, in addition to promising that I wouldn’t buy any more furniture from Goodwill or Value Village, or bring anything home that I
found in an alley. Later that night, when I passed by the living room to go to the kitchen, I saw my husband reading a book.

I’m sure that he abandoned the effort of getting to the couch after trying to scale the valley of the red chair and realizing he would need some rope, a spotter, and something to pee in, but that really didn’t matter. He was relaxing in the chair, with its wingback so widely and elegantly spread, the brass tacks in perfect, gleaming lines down the sides, completely blocking the doorway from the living room to the dining room.

It fit perfectly.

L
ast week, I was on a flight from Salt Lake City to Austin to visit some friends, and the man seated next to me, who had not uttered one solitary word for the whole hour we had been in each other’s breathing space, suddenly flipped off his seat belt and ran down the aisle toward the cockpit. It happened immediately after beverage service, so I told myself he must have had to urinate superbad. So bad that he didn’t care that he looked like Mohamed Atta as he catapulted out of his seat. His enormous body was so large that he had to sit sideways in his seat merely to fit, but he was surprisingly fast.

The need to pee is a powerful motivator; it can rouse you from a wonderful dream in which you are carelessly digging into a ten-pound slice of cake from Cheesecake Factory by
yourself; it can drag you away from the last fifteen minutes of
Inception;
and it can force you to put the responsibility of ordering dessert in the hands of your husband, who once misheard the words “Can you get me the bananas Foster?” as “I’ll just meet you out in the car.”

Despite his suspiciously terrorist behavior, he would not have been the person of interest I would have picked out of the security line. First of all, his physique did not lend itself to jumping over hurdles, eating nothing but roasted goat, and living in caves in Pakistan, which is where Sara Rue and Jennifer Hudson secretly have been. He also had a neck tattoo of the sun, a clear lapse in judgment that would make any al-Qaeda leader wary of putting him in charge of the dirty bomb.

Then again, it’s always the ones you least expect; I’ve watched enough
Scooby-Doo
in my life to know that much. Still, I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt and took advantage of the elbow room, only to have the flight attendant take his seat twenty minutes later, lean over, and ask me in a whisper what I could tell her about the man who had been sitting there.

After I told her that I didn’t know him, she replied that he had told her that when he was in SLC, he got involved in some drugs, and now “the dealers were sitting all around him and were out to get him.” I glanced at the two cute boys
with spiky hair in front of me, who were taking turns sleeping on each other’s shoulder—drug traffickers rarely kiss each other, so we could rule them out. And if the woman across the aisle was selling meth bags, she was really good at acting like she was enjoying every smug word of
Eat, Pray, Love
while unabashedly picking at the dead skin on the soles of her bare feet. And the middle-aged man behind us was clearly too busy trying to hit on the hottie half his age seated beside him to sell a gram of anything.

And I, by the way, was eating the complimentary biscotti and trying to conjure enough turbulence with my mind power (yes, even people who still have nightmares about fractions can have mind power) to coerce my seatmate’s untouched biscotti to slide off his tray and into my purse. So, obviously I couldn’t have been pushing pills on him—it would take way too much mind power for someone who still has nightmares about fractions to sell drugs
and
coax those cookies into my purse.

As a result of his paranoid complaints to the flight attendant, the purser thought it was in the best interest of the remaining passengers that he be seated up front, away from the girl in 17D with the fat ass and arthritic knees who was too busy eating her in-flight biscotti to realize that her enormous seatmate was losing his shit at a cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet. Either that or it was all a ruse to move
closer to the cockpit so he wouldn’t have to run as far in his flaming underwear.

The flight attendant then went on to tell me that the authorities would be meeting our plane at the gate, but if the Big Ray of Neck Sunshine returned, I was to alert her immediately. Which, honestly, took a little bit of the enjoyment out of the last bite of my cookie. But I did feel a bit relieved that if my seatmate returned with a knife in one hand and a nice bottle of Chianti in the other, this 110-pound blonde in a size 00 pantsuit would come to my rescue in her Christian Louboutin knockoffs from JCPenney.

I was going to ask her if she could drop off a few more biscotti, you know, because I am always far less nervous when I am chewing. But I thought better of it in the end lest she think I wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, I take any kind of erratic behavior on airplanes very seriously—doesn’t matter if it’s coming from terrorists, schizophrenics, or children. When I see the wheels popping off the bus, I am not afraid to press that stewardess button.

Which is why I need to find investors for my multimillion-dollar idea: Batshit Airlines—the go-to airline for anyone who doesn’t take his lithium or haloperidol on a regular basis. Passengers are strapped into straitjackets, outfitted with noise-canceling headphones, and tuned into the
guided relaxation channel until the captain turns off the restraints sign. At that time, flight attendants will come through the cabin, dispensing sedatives and electroshock treatments as needed, and—for an extra charge of seven dollars, payable by credit card only—a variety of pills are available for recreational use, all of which can be found at the back of your in-flight magazine.

Batshit Airlines may sound elitist to you; it may sound like I am trying to round up all the nutjobs so as to keep “their kind” off commercial flights (even though I would obviously say it was “for security reasons”). And if that makes me elitist, then call me Sir Richard Branson, because if I have to stand in line to have my ass crack x-rayed to see whether I’ve got a stick of dynamite tucked in there, I should at least have a say in who will be sharing my recycled air.