The Potty Mouth at the Table (19 page)

After “the incident,” I realized that if gagging was my go-to response, I was going to need to round it out with a believable finish to cover the fact that I found my dear friend’s saliva so repulsive that it triggered one of the most undesirable physical reactions in the human repertoire. True, while gagging is far favorable to say, stabbing, the message is remarkably similar.

I could only hope that if I were on the precipice of a subsequent vomiting at the table in the same situation, I would not try to hide the fact, in hopes that my friend would hopefully ask if I was all right. (I must note here that this is not effective in the least with most husbands or sociopaths with an easily excitable parotid gland, and if you really want to avoid spittle flying on your food like a meteor shower, avoid dining with anyone on antipsychotic meds. I learned the suggested standard antipsychotic med radius of five to ten feet—depending on the visible froth—the hard way after hiring a guy with “emotional challenges” to clean the leaves out of my gutters. As he scrambled up the ladder, he relayed stories about his family—how his mother was a whore and that his father never loved her—and although I
was transfixed, I was much more horrified to discover that those weren’t raindrops I felt while holding the base of the ladder that day.)

Thinking quickly, I decided I’d try to trigger my friend’s gag response by describing the
hair
I’d just seen in her biscuits and gravy. Should she be so bold as to investigate, I would just explain that: “
It was a thick hair. Heavy. It must have sunk into the gravy.”
And then . . . the coup de grace:
“It was curly.”

If this is not enough to make her avert her eyes and hail the waiter, then either I am a worse liar than I thought or I need to make new friends. Unless you are someone who owns every single
Jackass
episode on DVD or you are a gynecologist or waxer, very few people could argue with having a gag reflex in response to that. And chances are, you’ve ruined their appetite as well.

Hey. They started it.

As my friend tried to get the waiter’s attention to alert him to the “spoiled” food, I told her not to mention the hair and just have him bring two glasses of wine—each. After one brush with a saliva globule, I wasn’t about to send the food back and risk the possibility of consuming a secretion from the cook’s parotid gland.

I’d rather see a curly hair.

A
fter a close call with the Big Sleep yesterday, I am happy to report that I am a better person than I thought. Because when faced with the possibility of my own demise, my first thought was not to mourn my own passing; rather, I thought first of my husband. What would happen to him if I died? Yes, there would be a short period of mourning followed by a longer period of jubilation and buoyant celebration of his newfound freedom, but what exactly does that freedom mean?

It means that my husband would be left to supervise himself. And for a man who kept eating mystery cheese from the refrigerator until it actively burned his tongue (and never established that it actually was cheese), he might as
well just be buried with me like in ancient Egypt. It would just be a matter of days until the backhoe was needed again. Therefore, with the help of several of my longtime married girlfriends, I have created “A Handy Manual for a Widower, My Husband.” Feel free to annotate this list with your own individual inspirations.

Dear Husband,

If you’re reading this, the inevitable has happened. I’ve stuck a knife into the old toaster you told me not to buy, which shot sparks at the dish towel you said I keep too close to the stove, and then burst into flames, igniting one of the expired coupons sticking out of that drawer that you enjoyed reminding me to clean out, before spreading to the rest of the house and killing me because I’m on Ambien, which you told me to stop taking because I was getting too “aggressive with my snacks in bed.” Well, you don’t have to worry about snorting Cheetos dust anymore in your sleep. You have found this note because I am dead, “death by misadventure,” and you are finally going through the motions of rifling through my things so you can throw it all away, because I’m guessing your new lady friend requires some additional space in, well, my house.
Not so fast,
my friend. I have a couple of words of advice for you.

You may not know it, but take it from me, a dead person, that your mortality is as fragile as a piece of cheese bread that has fallen apart in an electrical appliance. First, a few commonsense things that you probably already know, but a dead wife has to cover all the bases to rest in peace:

1. Never put a fountain in the front yard unless you just joined the mob.

2. When your next wife has a birthday, it is not enough to invite people to a party. You actually have to throw one.

3. Do not let your second wife wear my clothes.

4. Go back out to the garage and move my goddamn clothes back into the house. Now.

5. Never do your Heidi Klum impression out of this house. No one will ever get it when you say “That dress makes me sad,” and it sends an otherwise terrifying message. You sound like you swallowed a chunk of banana whole and are about to throw two small children into an oven.

6. Bring your sleep apnea machine with you on dates. Yes, I know showing up with a suitcase full of medical
equipment might be a deal breaker, but so is waking up next to a corpse.

7. Just to reiterate: theoretically, yes, you’re right, you are clean after a shower, but again, that cleanliness does not translate to the towel, especially after you have used it twenty times.

8. Never again list watching every single episode of
Law & Order
on Netflix as an “honor.”

9. Keep the food in the basement
in the basement.
You will so eat something that expired in 2009 if it’s the bona fide Apocalypse. (Don’t worry, Anderson Cooper will let you know when that is.)

10. You have no street cred. If you want a second date, don’t say things like “street cred.” Ever.

11. Don’t eat the leftover Mexican food you forgot was in the trunk yesterday when you find it today. Just because opening a hot trunk feels like opening an oven doesn’t mean they are both equipped to incubate botulism.

12. Never clap at skunks in the garage to “scare them away.”

13. If the milk has crust on the drinky part, go to your Drink Plan B. And when your fruit juice is bubbly like soda, chew something tangy-flavored to generate saliva if you are that thirsty.

14. You cannot wait out the smell in the refrigerator. The house will eventually be nothing but stink and rubble. The fridge will win. Every time.

15. If you can put your thumb through a piece of fruit, don’t bite into it, although there is nothing funnier than watching you eat rotten food.

16. Which reminds me! If your back starts to hurt, unbutton your pants. Your waist hasn’t been a thirty-two since you were in high school.

17. You blamed too much on Ambien Laurie and I let you because I needed to let her legend grow.

18. Never go into the attic. First, you are too fat to fit through the trapdoor. Second, there is
nothing
up there that you need. Third, there are monsters up there.

19. Drinking soda is not the same as drinking water. Your pee should not be the same color as a Ticonderoga pencil.

20. I lied. Lambskin is from lambs.

21. When your cousin’s kids send you a graduation announcement, no, it isn’t “just to let you know.”

22. Despite the fact that it could feasibly work with the right positioning, thou shalt not ever clean the fireplace with a leaf blower.

23. If you discover your date is sneaking a bottle of water into the movie theater, do not put your hands on your hips and demand to know her plan “for when you get caught. In fact,
show
me the plan!”

24. Ovaries are not jazz hands. They cannot flutter and block unwanted things on demand, no matter what the frat boys say.

25. If you want a lady to love you, call Angelina Jolie’s arms “pipe cleaners” again.

26. If you can toss the word “diaspora” into a conversation, back that smartness up by remembering to take out the trash (and remembering to bring it back in before you have to bring it back out again, despite the fact that you walk inches from it every time you leave the house).

27. You should not laugh when your next wife accidentally takes a dog pill and you are chortling so hard when you call poison control that the operator thinks it’s a prank call.

28. So how did this work out? “I don’t care. That’s fine. That’s fine. My next wife will think my story of reciting Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Mountain Song’ in my high school drama class is cool. Even if I didn’t get to use the element of fire like I asked. She’ll still think it’s cool. Even though she will be way too young to know who Jane’s Addiction is.”

29. Remember when you said that if you ever got a chance to send a message from beyond it would be: “Frank Burns eats worms”? I’m going to try that, too. You will know that I’m watching you every time you hear someone behind a cash register say “Can I take your order?”

In closing, my dear husband, if you are still alive now, you’ve already beaten the odds, which means you only have 10,950 brushes with death to go, an average of one a day for roughly thirty years or so. I have tried to train you well, Grasshopper, and with this manual to guide you, I believe that you can live long enough to experience heart disease. I
have faith in you. And remember, if anything tastes like it has bubbles in it when it shouldn’t have bubbles in it, like cheese, you should probably stop eating it before you get sick and throw up in a soup bowl you grabbed instead of the trash can.

Love,

Your Dead but Still Concerned Wife

A
lthough I played with the idea of reading a book this summer, I just don’t think it’s going to work out.

I know that’s what all of my friends are doing; I bet every one of them is out there right now scanning the new-release tables at brightly lit bookstores, measuring one brightly colored clever cover against the one next to it, searching for books that look interesting: e.g., anything related to food or booze, any book with Tim Gunn on the cover, and discreetly jacketed, socially acceptable porn.

But when I thought about it, I realized all I really wanted to do this summer was sit outside and eat chips and dip. That’s my idea of a good time, frankly, and it requires a great deal of focus. The last time I lost my concentration while feeding, I walked around with a chunk of refried beans on
my boob until it was jammie time because people apparently thought it was an ugly, awkwardly placed brooch or, more likely, a snack for later.

Chips and dip require all hands on deck, and if I have one of those hands holding a book, chances are good to excellent that I will lose my focus and grow a bean nipple or at the very least wind up looking a little homeless by the end of the chapter. This is especially true if the book happens to be
Wicked
because that’s the book I was reading that time when nobody told me about the turd on my shirt. I had just bought tickets to the show, so I decided to read the book first. It was all going well until I got to the munchkin/animal orgy where a little guy goes all cellie on a lion and my mug of
hot hot hot
coffee completely missed my mouth and hit my neck instead. And I am here to tell you that there is nothing quite like the experience of being over thirty years old and having cashiers look at you, with a blend of confusion and disgust as soon as they spot the hickey on your neck. It’s the same face people make when they can’t tell what smells so bad in the fridge but this experience comes with a visual when they picture which mug shot from Match.com it was who was sucking on your neck.

So, no. Reading is out for me this summer. Snacking takes precedence.

Besides, reading can make you blind if you do it too
much. It’s totally true. Last summer I was outside reading
Auntie Mame
by Patrick Dennis (yes, the Auntie Mame of the 1950s Rosalind Russell movie fame and it’s hilarious) when I looked up, and all of a sudden, everything went white. Initially I thought:
I knew I put too much salt on my lunch! Sandwiches don’t even need salt! What the hell was I thinking?
But then, after I cried “Help!” several times and no one answered, even though the windows were open, my sight gradually returned and I saw my husband framed in the kitchen window, regarding me with a thoughtful expression—as if wondering whether or not I came with a return policy. I checked to make sure I had a pulse and then looked out the window to give my husband the thumbs-up even though he’d already walked away, when the blindness struck again.

“Damn it!” I said. “How many strokes can one person have in a day? It was just a little salt! It’s not like I ate a Lean Cuisine! Plus, I had a vegetable yesterday!”

As soon as my vision cleared, I looked down at my book again and that’s when it hit me: I was book blind. Scientifically, I don’t know the specifics of the condition or what the medical term for it is, but I am pretty sure I saw a
Nova
episode about it. And what happens is: the rays from the sun streaming through the window reflect off the book page and char your retinas like a well-done steak, imprinting a
photonegative of the page you were reading on the backs of your lids.

And I don’t want that. I mean, I enjoyed the book very much, but the last thing I want to do is read the same page of
Auntie Mame
every night before I go to sleep, while “
Hurry with my tray, darling. Auntie needs fuel
,” repeats on a loop in my mind. Maybe I’d be better off with an iPad, but truthfully, I see what a grease trap my iPhone is and I hate myself each time my french fry of a cheek leaves a rainbow effect on the screen. There’s no way I can deal with an oil spill of that size. I’d have to keep a bottle of Dawn in my purse at all times.

These were all things I was telling my friend Sebastiane on the afternoon we had just returned from seeing
Wicked
and she asked me what I was planning on reading this summer.