Autobiography of a Fat Bride (17 page)

The Dead Zone

T
he smell was nauseating. It enveloped nearly the entire backyard, shooting into our nostrils the minute we opened the back door.

If you’ve ever smelled death, you’re not likely to forget it, and can identify that hellish scent without a flicker of hesitation. That’s exactly what I did when the initial whiff hit me and nearly knocked me on my ass.

It didn’t help that it was 106 degrees outside, either. Hoping that I was wrong about its origins, I turned to my husband for confirmation. The look on his face should have told me what I needed to know, but I asked anyway.

“Do you smell that?” I asked, as he covered his mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head. “Do you think it could just be stagnant water?”

“Not unless there’s a body floating in it,” my husband responded. “I think it’s that cat.”

I was afraid he would say that, though it’s not my cat, Pee Boy, aka Barnaby (who I’m convinced is being kept alive by dark, supernatural forces to torment me in my own personal hell), he was talking about. The previous Saturday, my neurotic dog, terrorizer of all things blind, crippled, or severely injured, sounded the alarm that something was horrifyingly amiss in the far corner of the yard. Being that my dog also barks at trash floating through our yard, occasional gusts of wind, and falling leaves, you could say that I wasn’t exactly reaching for a rifle to confront any potential danger, and chalked up her terrorized yelps to a fallen branch or perhaps a mysterious and taunting pile of doody she didn’t remember creating the hour before.

Finally, under the suspicion that if she didn’t cease her belabored moans, one of my neighbors was certain to shoot her, I went out to bring her back indoors. When I reached the corner of the yard, however, I gasped and covered my mouth.

There was Miss Kitty, a feral cat who had lived underneath our house longer than we had lived in it. A tiny little black and orange calico, she wasn’t exactly what you would call affectionate, though after three years, our relationship had blossomed to the point that she didn’t run away anymore when we encountered each other.

Now, however, Miss Kitty was hissing and spitting at my relentless dog, batting at her with full claws. I saw that she was in pretty bad shape, covered in dirt and bits of grass, as she tried to drag herself away from my dog but wasn’t strong enough to do so. It was pretty apparent that she had been hit by a car. I grabbed the dog and took her inside, but when I came back to the corner of the yard with some water, Miss Kitty was gone. I searched the yard, the barn, and the shed, but she had vanished. I hoped that she wasn’t as hurt as I thought she was and had scrambled off someplace safe to recoup.

But when I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days and we smelled that smell for the first time, I knew what had happened. Miss Kitty had run into the little Kitty Light, and had departed for a place where Happy Cat Vittles are served at every meal and there is a conspicuous absence of lunatic dogs that bark at their own feces.

Miss Kitty may have been finally at peace, but I sure wasn’t. Following the trail of stink, it led me, by thicker concentrations, to the crawl space under the house directly beneath my bedroom.

“It’s impossible,” I said to my husband, who had turned a greenish sort of hue and was now breathing into a paper bag. “All of the vents have been blocked up. She couldn’t have gotten in there.”

I had blocked the vents as a precaution, since Miss Kitty was not the first inhabitant of the City of the Dead that existed beneath my floorboards. While we were replumbing the house, we removed the bathroom floor, only to find what we initially thought was a twelve-piece bucket of KFC lying in the dirt below. We actually had the nerve to giggle about it until both my husband and I realized, in the same moment, that the Family Combo Meal had a tail. And ears. And a place for eyes.

It was a Kitty Mummy, and sometimes, on hot, humid nights, my husband still has dreams that the Mummy is chasing after him on two little fried-chicken legs, holding a shovel and a Hefty bag.

Now that the catacombs had reopened for public use, my husband was convinced that the Curse of the Kitty Mummy had been unleashed and began noticing unusual whiffs of coleslaw and mashed potatoes and gravy. That night, just for fun, I put a biscuit on his pillow.

The next morning, I woke to find him dressed in rubber gloves, a dish towel wrapped around his nose and mouth, and a hoe in his hands.

“I’m taking care of this now. Miss Kitty has got to go,” he said as he looked for a flashlight. “There’s danger under there. I’m no fool; I’m not waiting until I suddenly find a Spork plunged into my calf!”

Outside, he dropped to his belly and removed the barricade from the vent opening. The stink wave hit me in one, solid push. With his flashlight, my husband examined the burial chamber, but then stood up and shook his head.

“I can’t find her,” he mumbled from beneath the dish towel. “She’s not under there.”

“She HAS to be!” I cried. “That’s where the smell is coming from. You didn’t see anything?”

My husband shook his head. “Only this,” he said as he held up a pure white Spork, perfectly contained and sealed in its own little package.

I gasped.

Peace, You Stupid Asshole

I
was going down big-time.

It all happened very slowly.

I felt the THUD as I hit the floor, facedown.

I felt the dust settle around me.

“Oh my God!” I heard my husband yell, standing in the bathroom not two feet away from me. “Are you all right?”

I have told him before NOT to try and communicate with me if it appears that I am in pain, because I cannot be responsible for what flies out of my mouth. I guess he just forgot.

“JESUS, I HATE YOU, YOU STUPID ASSHOLE!” is apparently what I replied.

Don’t think I’m mean; he has that rule, too. I learned it one day after he was lying on the couch and our special-needs dog jumped up on him and inadvertently almost popped the family jewels like they were ripe little figs.

He suddenly looked as if he had inhaled a golf ball, staggered off the couch, threw a matchbook at the dog, uttered the words “KILL THE BAD THING,” and then stumbled into the kitchen. I followed quickly behind in case I needed to get the bag of frozen peas for an ice pack, but as I turned the corner, I saw him squatting on the floor with his hands on his head, pulling out his hair. Without turning his head, he growled,
“Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!”
and continued to rock back and forth like Dustin Hoffman in
Rainman.
Sympathetically, I tried to feel his agony. I guessed that it came kind of close to the time that my husband’s friend was drunk at a party and decided to show us how well she Riverdanced. At the precise time that we heard her ankle crack and she crumpled into a heap, her cigarette flew from her hand and burned a big, brown hole in my brand-new irregular Kate Spade purse that I got for ten dollars at a clearance center but pretended in my head that I paid full price for, making me superior and special. I’m not sure whose howls were louder, mine or the Riverdancer with the splintered bones, but I learned at that moment that agony doesn’t have to be physical to rip your elitist soul right out of your body.

So I understood, and just whispered, “Peas are in the freezer under the ten-pound brisket you were going to take on that camping trip and eat off of for six days but couldn’t fit into your backpack and is now costing us ten dollars a month to keep frozen,” and tiptoed back into the living room to watch TV.

I am a
great
wife.

But as I was sprawled on the floor, facedown like a drunk, my husband wasn’t being as understanding, even though he saw the whole thing and didn’t even laugh, which I guess means he loves me.

I looked at my fingers. They were starting to swell.

“Peas!” I gasped as my husband stood there. “Peas!”

“Oh honey, don’t worry about it!” he said as he came forward. “I knew you didn’t mean it when you called me an asshole. Peace to you, too!”

“Get me the frozen peas before I pop your little figs like bubble wrap, ASSHOLE,” I winced.

When my husband returned with green beans, two of my fingers—the swear one and the one in between it and the pinkie—had grown to both the size and color of bratwurst. I could bend both a little, so I knew they weren’t broken, but probably sprained pretty bad.

“What did I trip over?” I asked, looking behind me.

“A sheet,” my husband said simply, crouched down and holding the green beans on my hand. “I was doing laundry and I guess I forgot to put the dirty stuff back in the hamper. . . .”

I’m no fool. Opportunities like this happen once in a lifetime. I’ve wanted a maid for three years, and now that my husband had rendered my extremities useless, this was prime time to cash in.

“My WHOLE HAND is broken!” I cried, holding it up. “These hands are my livelihood! I type with these hands! I make my living with these ten instruments!”

“I thought you only typed with the two pointer fingers,” my husband answered.

“I WAS LEARNING,” I growled. “Yes, those are the
primary
typers, but I was beginning to incorporate other helper fingers on a one-by-one basis!”

“Do you want to go to the emergency room?” my husband asked, and I really did think about it, even if just for the drama.

“What’s a doctor going to do?” I asked, mostly to myself. “He’s going to put a splint on my finger and wrap it with tape, right?”

My husband nodded.

“Well, I ate a Fudgsicle last night so I have a stick, and we have tape,” I said. “Pioneer women would have just bandaged their hand and gone back out to work the crops! I don’t need a doctor! I’m from strong stock! What I really think we need to do is immediately call a maid service.”

“First of all,” he started, “the only strong thing about your stock is their New York accents. Second, pioneer women regularly died in childbirth and pulled rotten teeth out with their bare hands, but we don’t live on the prairie in South Dakota. The hospital is right across the street. And third, if you think you can pick a crop right now, you can jiggle a dust rag.”

“I was speaking in metaphors!” I protested. “Besides,
you
broke my finger! Why can’t you put things away?”

“
I
broke your finger?” he questioned in a loud voice. “Why can’t you watch where you’re going?”

Then he gasped.

“You put that finger down,” he said harshly. “Put that finger down!”

“I can’t,” I said as I smiled. “I have a feeling it’s going to be like this for the next six weeks, or until I get a maid with ten more helper fingers.”

My Mother, My Self, My God

H
ow long is this going to take?” my mother said as she sat down at the table. “I’m missing a very good show on QVC by having lunch with you.”

I took a deep breath.

This whole thing was my therapist’s idea, not mine. Ever since my mom and I jointly planned the whole wedding shebang, things had been rather strained between us. A few months ago, while engrossed in a telephone conversation with her, we got into a disagreement that began because I hadn’t returned a piece of Tupperware I borrowed. After we finally hung up on each other, she kept calling me back, over and over and over again. Finally, I became exasperated and just let the phone ring, because I didn’t feel like fighting anymore.

Early, early,
early
the next morning, almost before the sun even rose, the doorbell rang. Then someone knocked. I finally got out of bed and answered the door. There was no one there. I stepped out onto the porch, and there, in
my front yard,
was my Nana and Pop Pop, peeking in my bedroom window.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Nana, who was clutching her little Nana purse tight against her, was surprised. “Oh thank God,” she said. “We were so worried.”

“Worried about what?” I asked. “Why are you looking in my window?”

“Your mother sent us over,” Nana explained. “You didn’t answer the phone. She thought you . . .”

“What? She thought I . . . what?” I said, shaking my head.

“You know,”
Nana said, waving one of her hands.

I still had no idea.

She leaned in closer.
“Died,”
she whispered.

I understood immediately.

“You mean she thought I killed myself,” I answered.

“Well,” Nana said as she shrugged slightly.

“You mean she thought I killed myself over
a piece of Tupperware
and then told you to come over and find my dead body?” I said again, a little stunned at the thought of my grandparents pointing through the glass of my bedroom window, asking each other, “Is that her or is it a pile of dirty laundry? Do you think that thing hanging from the ceiling fan is a body or a big cobweb? These windows are so filthy we can’t see anything!”

So, in order for us to set things straight and to avoid having my grandparents sent on any more corpse-recovery missions, I invited my mom out for a nice lunch, even though it was courting danger. The last time we sat down and had a one-on-one talk, face-to-face, without a referee, I was nine and taking a bath when she opened the bathroom door and proceeded to set up a display that rivaled anything a Kimberly-Clark sales rep had access to. She had maxi pads, she had belts, she had a copy of
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Then, as my bathwater began to form a thin layer of ice, she handed me some literature, told me to read it, take the quiz at the end, and then tell her my score. Right then and there I knew that the single most important piece of information I could take away from our mother-daughter talk that night was just how important it was to lock a bathroom door, especially if you don’t feel like breaking out a window and running through your own backyard naked, looking very much like the girls you just saw in the graph labeled “Breast Buds” of the “You’ve Made a New Friend and She’s Coming to Visit You Once a Month!” pamphlet. Still, that enlightenment could not compare with “the talk” my mother delivered to my youngest sister, Lisa, when she was about nine. Apparently, my mom had abandoned her suprise-attack method and actually cornered my sister, fully clothed, after she arrived home from school one day. She summoned Lisa to the kitchen table, where she had already set up her cigarettes, a cup of coffee, and ashtray, which had taken the place of Judy Blume books and the entire Kotex product line. She cleared her throat and looked sternly at Lisa.

“Girls,” my mother said, “have eggs.”

And then the phone rang, and it was my aunt Joanne, so my mother lit a cigarette, went into the next room, and left my sister sitting at the kitchen table. Lisa sat there while my mom talked to my aunt Joanne, while my mom made dinner, while we ate dinner, then as my mom did the dishes, and as my mom smoked a cigarette and watched Tony Orlando and Dawn on TV.

And that was it.

“’Girls have eggs,’” Lisa, now in her thirties, recounted to me several weeks ago. “That’s all I got. I spent the next six months completely terrified that the next time I went to the bathroom, I was going to find a full dozen in my pants, or at least enough to make a quiche.”

Honestly, I was dying to ask my mom about my eggs, but as soon as we sat down at our “pal” lunch, as my therapist called it, I knew it was prime time for her to bug me about the menu of things she lives to bug me about. Although some subjects change seasonally (“Do you still have that pimple on your neck or is it a hickey?” “Just when are you going to return my Tupperware?” “If you’re planning on giving me perfume for Christmas, save yourself the trouble and give me the cash instead. I can get everything cheaper on QVC.”), she also has a schedule of regular items. These find their way into every conversation and consist of “When are you going to make an appointment for the gynecologist?” “Is your house clean or is it still filthy?” “You’re not smoking, are you, even though I can smell it on you so don’t lie?” and “When are you going to be in a better mood?”

“You don’t need to borrow money, do you?” my mother began by asking, which is an alternate selection. “Is that why you asked me to lunch? A lunch that I have a psychic premonition I’m going to end up paying for.”

“Here is my Visa card, Mom,” I said, pulling it out of my wallet. “I am planning on using this to pay for your lunch, just as long as the total bill does not exceed fifteen dollars and eighty-one cents. For the tip, I have five dollars in rolled pennies that Nana forgot in my car after I took her to get a perm. It’s not stealing, really; if she would have called a cab it would have cost her twice as much.”

My mother rolled her eyes.

This is my mom. In those rolling eyes, I will never be an adult. Never. I have a mortgage. I have a husband. I kind of, sort of have a job. To my mom, however, I’m still the sixth-grader whom she made get undressed in a dressing room with an eighty-year-old bra saleswoman at Sears when my “lentils” (breast buds) started to become “pintos” (knockers). Honestly, there was nothing I could do about it then, and if it happened today, I’d still be helpless. According to my mother, child abuse wasn’t illegal until the 1980s, so under the grandfather clause, she can still whip off her shoe and hit me with it at any given time without consequence.

Just to be on the safe side, I ordered a bowl of soup. I winced when my mother ordered the chicken salad, because with her iced tea, her share of the meal was already eating half of the remaining available credit.

“What’s the matter?” she said, staring at me. “You made a face.”

“I did not,” I denied, completely lying.

“Yes, you did,” she said. “I saw a face. I swear I saw a face.”

“No face, Mom,” I denied again. “No face. No face for my New Pal.”

My mother sat there, just looking at me.

“What do you want to talk about?” she said with a stone face.

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “What did you do today?”

“I watched QVC,” she said. “I bought four things.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something else. “What did you do yesterday?”

“I watched QVC,” she answered. “I bought three things.”

Then she just sat there, looking at me.

Our food was delivered to the table.

My mother poked at her salad with a fork.

“How’s your husband who does the thing with the ice?” she said, taking a forkful of lunch. “Pass the salt.”

“See? This is pal talk,” I replied, slurping off my spoon. “This is good. Well, it finally happened. I had to ban him from making ice cubes. He only fills up the tray halfway with water, which doesn’t really make ice
cubes,
it makes ice
disks.
Not only is it impossible for me to get my fingernail positioned correctly to lift up the disk, but it takes half a tray to fill up a glass. Would you pass the salt?”

“And you wonder why you have a broken finger. Why didn’t we go to the Camelback Inn?” my mother asked. “This place is awful. Pass the salt. “

“Look,” I said, holding it up. “It’s all deformed and useless. It doesn’t even look like a finger anymore. It’s like a claw. Pass the salt.”

“You get a real kick out of doing that, don’t you?” my mother said, shaking her fork at me. “That’s a sin, you know, sin you wear like it’s a fur coat! Did you make an appointment for the gynecologist yet? Pass the salt.”

“Well,” I said quietly, “I have been having that . . . not-so-fresh feeling. . . .”

“I’m
eating,
for Christ’s sake!” she said as she shot me a look. “No porno talk when I have food in my mouth, all right? That’s disgusting.”

“How’s your blood pressure?” I replied. “I see a vein in your neck that’s pulsing out the rhythm to ‘La Vida Loca.’ ”

“How are you doing with the smoking?” she volleyed back at me as she pushed her plate away. “And don’t tell me that you quit, because your head smells like a big round ashtray!”

“It’s not me, Mom,” I started, taking a big breath. “It’s sitting in all of those AA meetings. Did
you
go to the gynecologist yet? Or are there no more eggs in the henhouse?”

“Get that picture out of your head!” she hissed as the waiter took our dishes. “You should be more worried about the fact that you haven’t been to the dentist in two years! I’m amazed that you don’t spit out little bullets of teeth when you talk. Your mouth is as clean as your house. Filthy!”

“I only have one good hand!” I protested, holding up my bandaged digit. “I can barely wipe myself!”

“Excuse me,” the waiter butted in quietly. “Do you have another card, because,” and then he whispered this part, “this one’s been . . . ‘used up.’ ”

“I should start my own hot line, like Jackie Stallone,” my mother said wryly as she dug for her Visa. “I told you I had a vision.”

“Read my mind now, Mom,” I said.

She looked at me.

“I’m wearing flip-flops,” she warned. “I can have them off faster than you can say, ‘Mommy, don’t hit me!’ ”

“Mo—” I started.

“Lay off the salt,” she said, looking at me closely as she put her shoe back on. “It’s not a vitamin, you know. Your face is all puffed up like a water balloon.”

“I learned it by watching you, okay!” I replied. “Do you think maybe we could get some diuretics on QVC?”

“You can get
God
on QVC,” my mother said. “Come over. I’ll even put it on my credit card. Quit rubbing your arm. I didn’t hit you that hard.”