The Potty Mouth at the Table (20 page)

“Nothing,” I answered briskly. “I told you: I’m sticking to chips and dip. Reading almost made me blind. Do you know people thought I had a bean nipple?”

“So you’re not reading anything?” my friend questioned suspiciously. “At all?”

“No, not one book,” I confirmed, pulling
Auntie Mame
off the shelf. “But here is the one I was telling you about.”

“Isn’t that the one that blinded you?” Sebastiane asked.

“Yes, and I know page eighty-six by heart. I read it every
night while I’m waiting for my Ambien high to kick in, and it makes me cry with laughter.”

Sebastiane squinted. “Were you on Ambien when you read the little-person sex scene in
Wicked
? Because, you know, that wasn’t in the play. I kept waiting for the pygmy nudity, but even the flying monkeys kept their clothes on.”

“I’m so glad that wasn’t the page I was reading when I was book-blinded!” I informed her.

“So what books are you not reading this summer?” she asked.

“I just got a copy of Stella Gibbons’s
Nightingale Wood
,” I advised. “It was out of print for fifty years. You should read that and let me know how it is. And I just got a biography of the writer Jean Rhys called
The Blue Hour.
She goes to prison, abandons her babies, and then turns into a crazy, drunken landlady who attacks her tenants! That sounds so good. I think you should read that, too.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!
Americans in Paris
about expats who were caught in Hitler’s invasion during World War Two and couldn’t get out. Did you know that Sylvia Beach, the woman who owned Shakespeare and Company—the bookstore where every famous author hung out—was arrested and sent to live in the monkey house of the Paris Zoo during the occupation?

“Will you promise to read all of those books this summer and then tell me all about them?”

Sebastiane sighed. “I’ll try,” she agreed. “But I think you should just skip the chips and dip, stay inside, and read them yourself. You love reading! And you love central air, so really it’s a win-win.”

I shook my head. “I can’t. I have a book due in September.”

“Oh,” my friend said. “I see. So the stuff about snacks, the fear about book blindness, the grease on the iPad—those were all lies? I know the iPhone part is true—why
is
your skin always so shiny?”

“I don’t know but I have more creams and soaps and face scrub under that sink than the cosmetics aisle of CVS—that’s not the point,” I countered. “Did you hear anything I just said? Abandoned babies? Drunk landladies?
The monkey house?
You know if I start reading any of them, I won’t be able to stop myself. And then I won’t make my deadline. And then I’ll have to get a job. And I don’t like jobs.”

“Right,” Sebastiane conceded, and thought for a moment and then perked up. “I have an idea. Let’s get a bib, some chips and dip, go sit outside, and make your reading list for September. And I’ll bring all of the books home with me to remove the temptation.”

“Deal,” I said. “I’ll make the margaritas.”

Sebastiane looked at me disapprovingly, though I know she secretly wanted one, too.

“What? I’m thirsty,” I explained. “I’ll start writing tomorrow . . .”

I
couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I hadn’t seen anything like it since my little dog Maeby trotted into my friend Kartz’s house, stopped, squatted, and deposited a compact, medium-size log in the middle of a giant white wool flokati rug. She was very officious about it, as if it were standard protocol for a dignitary visiting a small, primitive land that suddenly tapped a relentless supply of oil and knew it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First and foremost, let it be said that I’ve thrown a lot of parties. As a result, I’ve had experience with all sorts of party guests: the one who stays long after everyone who could have possibly offered him a ride home has left; the one who knocks a full beer all over your living room rug and simply watches—still standing
in the spill, still wearing her Halloween pig mask—as you hunker down on all fours and try to sop it up; or the ones who help themselves to several bottles on the wine rack that weren’t meant to be imbibed by already drunk people, especially those you’ve never met before.

As a hostess, I’ve learned that when you invite others—both strange and familiar—into your home, be as prepared as you would be for a Mongol invasion. Some people automatically assume that everybody rents her home, and that whatever you destroy, pee on, or set on fire at someone’s house will be covered by a mythical security deposit.

I’ve also learned that a good offense is only as effective as the locks on your bedroom door, the level of childproof difficulty on the tops of your prescription bottles, and your ability to head off a situation before you’re kneeling at Pig Girl’s feet with a yellow dish towel in a scene plucked right out of a David Lynch movie.

However, I always thought that the act of hiding the after-dinner course was something that only happens on
Intervention
after the girl who gets hysterical when she sees a refrigerator counts out the six peas and four salt flakes she allows herself for dinner. Of course, you need to hide the good liquor and the Dilaudid that was the prize from your last kidney infection—
of course you do,
but donuts? Who the hell hides donuts? What kind of nut hides donuts?

Well, apparently, I do. Apparently I am the kind of nut who will put in the effort to camouflage the donut boxes with a stack of empty Tostitos and Lay’s Potato Chip bags. I am that nut. Because I’ve learned from past mistakes that if you don’t hide the three dozen donuts you bought from the best donut place on Earth, you never know what will happen.

You never know when you’re going to walk into your kitchen with the last of the dinner plates cleared and see the last bite of a donut slide down the gullet of a forager who sniffed out the irresistible scent of a bacon maple bar with more precision than a cadaver dog, hours before you planned on serving them, despite an excessive amount of trash on top of the boxes
because you had a feeling.
You had a feeling that a certain somebody was going to wait until the kitchen emptied and the coast was clear to embark on a search-and-destroy mission to pick out the very best donut underneath all the fake trash and try to devour it like a crocodile inhales a wildebeest in the seconds you’ve been gone.

Legs and all. A crispy fried hoof shaped like a bacon strip still sticking out her mouth.

At least when I caught my dog acting like she was in a barnyard, she had the decency to look away when I pointed and gasped.

Now, before I describe how quickly the situation disintegrated, I think I need to explain that I was the one who called and placed the donut order; I was the one who selected the perfect combination out of forty-two possible flavors; I was the one who made the executive decision to end the night on a sugar high in perfect party harmony; I was the one who went downtown to pick them up, circling the block five times before I found a parking spot; I was the one who paid for them and then carried fifteen pounds of party harmony back to the car; I was the one who pushed them all the way to the darkest corner of the breakfast nook and placed every piece of detritus with excruciating precision and a subtle eye for disorder so as not to attract attention, much in the way a bear caches a camper with a flimsy tent. And on top of all that, I was the one who was called a “Stingy Pregnant Cow” when I didn’t give the homeless ruffian on the corner a dollar for his trouble of getting enough face tattoos to render him unable to work at anything but creating a cardboard sign that says “I’ll be honest: I’m gonna buy vodka with it.”

All of that being said, I don’t think that my stopping dead in my tracks and demanding “Who told you it was Donut Time?” was a particularly outrageous thing to do, although it did not prevent the offender from swallowing, then marching back to the other party guests and declaring that I had just yelled at her.

That was not yelling.
It was not yelling.
Everyone knows the Act of Yelling must include a hand movement in order for it truly to be classified as Yelling, which would be impossible, since both of my hands were firmly planted on my hips.

In the future, I have decided that party-goods camouflage is not a strong enough security system if Dog the Donut Hunter is prowling around your kitchen armed with a search warrant and a pair of handcuffs from the Spy Store. Clearly, a layer of garbage is not enough of a deterrent to stop some people from clawing through it, particularly if a pork product is somehow involved. I mean, hey, I smelled them, too, in the private quarters of my car. They were strapped into the passenger seat; they couldn’t escape, but I stopped myself from digging in by envisioning party guests recoiling at the sight of donuts with thumbprints fossilized in the icing like the footsteps of early man stamped across a mud plain, or teeth marks scraped into the frosting like a beaver to a log. So I compromised and took the one on top without messing up anything to the side or below,
but I paid for them and I didn’t even particularly like the one I took.

In order to prevent another dessert attack from recurring, I realized I needed to draw up alternate plans. I thought about stashing the dessert items in a secure area, like my underwear drawer or the bathtub; although, truth be told,
the bathtub has not proven to be such a sacred, restricted area in the past. The truth of the matter is, if someone’s going to crawl into a dark corner and paw at trash in order to be the first (or second) one to snag a donut, only a surge of electrical current will stop them, and the clause in my homeowner’s umbrella policy is a little vague for my comfort level.

I honestly don’t know whether there’s a solution to this problem, other than reverting to animal instinct and marking my territory with a litter box or a spray of coyote urine to discourage predators. But then the donuts would be ruined for pretty much everybody (believe me: there would still be at least one taker) and all that effort you put into attaining perfect party harmony through donut consumption will have been for nothing. But the next time someone discovers a donut box buried under trash in my Intentionally Dark Breakfast Nook, that person better look before fingering.

There just might be a fragment of a used flokati rug that I purchased from a friend with a little brown item deep inside the box that isn’t exactly maple glazed.

A
ll I really wanted to do was order a pizza.

That’s all I wanted to do.

I didn’t want to get into a sparring match with anonymous assholes on the Internet, I didn’t want to argue about libel laws, and I certainly didn’t want to enter a metaphysical debate concerning my entire existence with people who actually take time out of their lives to write a review of Olive Garden for fun and post it online.

Then again, that’s what happens when you enter the arena of Roman-inspired public games on Yelp: before you know it, shut-ins who only venture outside to eat and then race right home to post their reviews are calling for your head on a flagpole.

Like I said, I was only planning to order a pizza from a
new Italian restaurant near our house. We had been there once before and the pizza was great—chewy crust, perfect sauce, mozzarella made by the owner every day. It was the closest thing to New York–style pizza in our neighborhood. And who doesn’t like a great new pizza place? It’s like discovering gold in your basement, or finding out that in the time it takes to pull on your Spanx, you will actually lose thirty pounds with a couple of deep breaths, some friction burns, and a sprained thumb—nothing but pure awesome as far as the eye can see—and
no one
has the right to mess with that.

But when I looked up the restaurant’s phone number online, I was shocked to find the following words under the second Google listing: “I would NEVER eat at this place.” It was the start of a thread on Yelp with numerous posts by people who had decided that although none of them had been to my new favorite pizza place, they were never going to try it because they were convinced that someone associated with the restaurant was posting phony positive reviews. And the Yelper bees were angry about it. Buzzing. Ready to sting.

“Goddammit, don’t kill my new pizza place!” I cried at the computer screen. Since when is it a crime to post a positive review of a restaurant when you genuinely love the food and just happen to know the owner? I must have missed the paragraph in Revelations that says the last sign of the
apocalypse is a nice review of a pizza place to cue Satan to step up and rule Earth for a while. Apparently, the phrase “the crust is good” was the wrong thing to say to people on the Yelp thread, and if you hadn’t guessed by now, I was the one who said it.

Maybe they didn’t like being called assholes—that was probably part of it. But seriously, what did all these people do before their life goal was to earn “elite” status on a message board because they went to six Starbucks in a two-mile radius and compared aromas? Were these the same people who subscribed religiously to
Reader’s Digest
and constantly submitted their own jokes? Were they compulsive couponers? Or perhaps the kind of people who would spend way too much time attempting to draw Tippy the Turtle in order to get into a correspondence art school? Is this what happens to society when people don’t have to use up spare time to darn their own socks or milk cows?

I don’t know how many hobbies you have to try and suck at before you find your way to Yelp, but it appears to be an overwhelming number. True, I do know some people who contribute useful, informative content, but they aren’t the ones organizing witch hunts and carrying torches to my favorite new pizza place. And, if I may be so bold, if you wanted to be a food reviewer, why isn’t that your job? (Sorry. Blogs don’t count. Really. They don’t.)

Instead, Yelp has evolved into a socially acceptable bloodsport, and suddenly, it’s perfectly fine to cast allegations out into the Google wind and have those accusations listed second on a results page. The first girl who came at me, Hannah “the Banana,” immediately said that I was a fake person with a fake profile, and if that wasn’t enough, she demanded: “Who r you? We r avid yelpers with numerous tips and photos and friends and reviews. I plan and go to events. I am elite.”