Autobiography of a Fat Bride (21 page)

Boys and Girlas

A
unt Laurie,” my nephew said to me as he tugged on the fanny of his Pull-Ups. “My diaper feels funny.”

I looked up from my magazine as he played with a puzzle on the coffee table. “Did you do fluffies?” I asked, using my mother’s designated term for “doody.”

He shook his head. “It feels
funny,
” he said again, this time tugging at his diaper from the front.

I didn’t really know what to do. I was only the baby-sitter, and was watching my nephew for the afternoon while my sister was at a doctor’s appointment getting an ultrasound of my nephew’s not-yet-born sibling. It was that doctor’s visit that would tell us whether I was going to have a new niece or another nephew, and personally, I was pulling for a double X, or “girla,” according to my nephew.

It’s not that I don’t like boys; I’m just not equipped to deal with them. I was raised with my two sisters in a household that was 80 percent female; the only guy, my father, dealt with his den of she-wolves by retreating to his upstairs cave and staying there for thirty years. Family issues consisted of each of us growling, “Mom, she’s wearing my shirt without my permission!” “Mom, she used my Love’s Baby Soft without my permission!” and “Mom, I only gave her permission to wear my clogs on Tuesday, and today is Wednesday!”

So when my sister, pregnant with my first nephew, informed all of us that she was going to have a BOY, we looked at each other, completely perplexed, though my father finally came downstairs and grinned from ear to ear. It would have made more sense if she would have said, “They think it’s a badger!” or “Looks like we’re having a cuttlefish!” because then at least we could have identified it, or pictured it in our heads. But a BOY?

A BOY? She
had
to be kidding.

“But there are no cute BOY clothes,” I argued. “Not even in Baby Gap.”

“I can think of only one way to do a boy’s hair,” my other sister said. “And that’s down.”

“We’ll love this baby no matter what it is,” my mother said, trying to comfort my pregnant sister. “Even if it is a BOY.”

“Maybe we can make it gay,” I offered.

At the time I was thirty, but my mother hit me anyway.

Then, the BOY was born, and I recognized how special he was the first time his pee hit my mother’s cheek as she changed his diaper prematurely.

“Every time you pee on Grandma,” I whispered in his baby ear, “Aunt Laurie will pay you
ten dollars.
”

Watching my mother deal with my nephew’s equipment was worth passing up a linen blue and white sailor dress at Baby Gap, and buying the overalls instead. She was shocked speechless and I believe consulted a priest the first time my nephew touched what my mother called “the wingding.”

“He was in the bathtub, and he just grabbed it,” my mother later whispered to me. “He kind of gazed off into the distance, and got this look on his face like he was in a fantasy land.”

Admittedly, I have to say I wasn’t much better at dealing with it, although I was able to identify his tools by the correct biological term, “wee-wee,” or the more advanced “hinky-dink.” Still, however, if I could avoid speaking about it or referring to it in passing conversation with my nephew, I would. But that would prove impossible the afternoon I baby-sat.

“Aunt Laurie,” my nephew insisted again, yanking at his diaper, “my wee-wee is big.”

“Do you have to go pee-pee?” I asked.

“No,” he said adamantly, “it’s BIG.”

I sighed. Dear God, I said to myself, they certainly do start obsessing about this kind of thing at a young age. No wonder it’s such a tremendous deal. Big, big, big. I decided simply to feed into his ego.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Yep, it’s big.”

“Aunt LAURIE,” he said, getting frustrated, “LOOK AT IT!”

And then, suddenly, my Idiot Veil lifted, and I understood what my nephew was telling me.

“It’s BOTHERING ME!!!!” he added.

How did this ever, EVER fall into MY lap? Why was I chosen to explain the nature of men to my nephew? ME.
ME!!!!
The one who didn’t know the difference between boys and girls until I was consumed by horror when my best friend (who had a little brother) educated me about the male biology as we played tether ball on the playground when I was ten. I was so stunned that when the ball came swinging around the pole it smacked me square in the head. That means I spent nearly a third of my life thinking that everybody has the same stuff down there. That fact alone disqualifies me from dispensing any information of this sort. To ANYBODY, especially an impressionable toddler.

But I had to come up with something, and something fast.

“That sometimes happens with hinky-dinks,” I said. “It’s okay. If you think about kittens, it will go away.”

“But why?” he asked, which was not what I wanted to hear.

“Let’s sing a song!” I suggested, and began clapping my hands. “This land is your land, this land is my land! From California to the New York Island!”

He was having none of it.

“
WHY,
Aunt Laurie?” he insisted.

I took a deep breath. “Well,” I started. “I’m not a boy, so I don’t really know, but it’s nothing scary. Every little boy has a wee-wee that sometimes . . . bothers them.”

“Like Scotty across the street and Baby Mitchell?” he asked. “Just boys, no girlas?”

“Exactly.” I nodded.

Luckily, at that moment, his mother and father walked through the front door.

“Guess what?” my sister said to her son. “You’re going to have a new little brother!”

My God, I thought to myself, I can’t do this again. Not again. At least now, however, I’d be a little more prepared for the next “big wee-wee” talk, where there would be no song singing, no clapping of the hands, no conversations about
stuff,
only a mad dash to the nearest pet store to find the kitten corral.

Pissing Off the Pee Taker

A
s soon as the door closed behind me, I knew that there was no going back.

Standing alone in a strange bathroom with a cup in my hand, I was slightly horrified and a little excited at the same time. Finally, I thought, a test I can pass, and I didn’t even have to ruin a pair of shoes by writing the answers on them!

Apparently, I was the last of any of my friends to comply with a mandatory drug test for potential employment, mainly because I’ve been unemployed the longest. As a precaution, many of them filled me in with warnings:

“You’d better be nice and not treat them like pee handlers, because if you don’t, they’ll drop a rock of crack cocaine in your cup and foil the test, which goes on your PERMANENT FBI RECORD.”

“Do the wise thing and shave, because they come in with you and watch the whole time. No, I don’t think you can use your religious beliefs as an excuse, because no one likes a hairy girl, devout or not.”

“You’re going to have to get naked, I mean really naked.”

“Don’t try to sneak stuff in by shoving it up your butt. They’ll look up there, oh they certainly will.”

“Are you serious? Really, you’re not kidding me? Someone actually wants to hire you?”

So with those words of wisdom and three gallons of Diet Coke under my belt, so to speak, I went to the drug-testing lab/medical center confident that I was prepared.

When I walked in, I realized I was sadly mistaken. A teen mom-to-be sat by the door in a chair, breathing heavily in patterns; a man with what looked like a knife wound moaned from the adjoining room; and a band of hooligans grouped in the corner looked like they were there for the same reason I was, except they were holding papers that listed them as defendants.

I timidly walked up to the front desk and gave the receptionist my paperwork.

“I’m here to pee,” I told her quietly.

“Please have a seat,” she said with a smile. “We’ll call you when we’re ready.”

I suspected “getting ready” entailed the plugging in of stadium-quality lights and warming up the anal probe. And I sincerely hoped they would hurry, because I had been holding it in all day for this, and my bladder felt as big and full as the uterus of the teen mom who was sitting next to me.

I tried to read a magazine, but I was already getting itchy from the marathon shaving session I had conducted earlier. In fact, I’d had so much work to do that I had to conduct the session in segments because I kept running out of hot water in the shower. As a result, my entire body was so follicle-free I looked like a newborn rat, though I could feel the rush of fresh growth commencing in the areas that I had cleared the forest from first. And frankly, it wasn’t in places I felt I could scratch without having to explain myself in front of a judge.

I really had to go, and had already been sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes. I looked at the teen mom, hoping that her water hadn’t broken yet, so that if my bodily functions surpassed my own control, I could blame it on her.

“Laurie,” the receptionist finally called, opening the door.

She led me down a hallway to an alcove where a rather large, stocky bald man was waiting for me.

“This is Arthur,” she said. “He’ll be conducting the test.”

Arthur smiled at me. He looked like an anal-probe kinda guy.

I shivered, and felt my bladder crack.

“Wash your hands, but don’t use any soap,” Arthur instructed, motioning toward the sink.

“If I turn that thing on,” I warned, knowing that the levee was about to break and drown all of us, “I’m very afraid that we’re going to have to collect my sample from a wet/dry vac via the carpet. I drank more this morning than an insecure freshman at a little-sister rush.”

He motioned again.

I had to comply, and did it as quickly as I could.

“Now,” he said, handing me a plastic cup, “fill this up to thirty.”

“Thirty?” I asked, not understanding what he meant. Thirty seconds, thirty droplets, thirty ounces?

“Thirty,” he emphasized again, pointing to a thin line on the cup, which I guess was marked in milliliters. “If it’s less than thirty, you’ll have to come back.”

I walked into the bathroom and waited for Arthur to follow, but he just stood there.

“Ready when you are,” I said, taking a deep breath and unbuttoning my pants.

Arthur just looked at me. “I don’t take bribes, ma’am,” he informed me as he stepped forward and shut the door.

Great, I thought as I stood alone in the bathroom. I’ve pissed off the pee taker. Now he’s going to put rock cocaine in my sample just to get back at me, and the only job I’ll ever be able to get will be in a live show in Tijuana with a donkey as my partner, because they’re always looking for junkie whores.

Quickly, I sat, positioned the cup, and I let the river roll. In fact, the river was rolling so productively I felt it was kind of a shame to stop and waste all of that perfectly good urine as I topped off the cup.

When I was done, I stood, buttoned up, and opened the bathroom door to Arthur waiting on the other side.

“I know you said you don’t take bribes,” I said with a grin as I placed the cup in his hands, “but I figured a three hundred percent tip couldn’t hurt.”

What Drugs Can Do to a Family

L
aurie,” my sister’s slow, cracked voice strained on the answering machine. “I have to confess something (cough, cough), and I hope you’re not mad.”

My husband looked at me as we listened to the message together. “She sounds . . . drunk,” he said with a puzzled look.

“Close,” I sighed. “I think she’s high.”

It seems as if my sister had been picking up my old habits by executing some DUIs—Dialing Under the Influence—and something pretty big was about to tumble out of her mouth.

“She’s
wasted
!” my husband exclaimed. “Listen to that slur! She sounds like Tom Brokaw!”

It was true. She was totally bombed.

But honestly, it really wasn’t her fault. She has the flu.

Almost everyone I know has the flu except me, because I’ve learned my lesson. Last year, I had the flu so bad it made me give up my favorite hobby of smoking, and that was about as much fun as running into an ex-boyfriend after you’ve gained roughly forty pounds. So this year, I did the wise thing and got a $10 flu shot at the grocery store because I have only one hobby left, and if this year’s flu wiped away my desire to pick at my face, I seriously doubt that I would ever feel any kind of joy ever again. Personally, I have to tell you it was the best ten bucks I ever spent, not counting the time I bought the Suck-and-Tuck-It girdle, which I got a couple of months ago instead of rejoining the gym.

Almost everyone in my family got bit by the virus: both sisters, my father, brother-in-law, and nephew. My youngest sister was probably hit the hardest. Seven months pregnant and casting the same-size shadow of a market umbrella, she not only had herself to take care of, she had her husband and her son to attend to.

I can’t really speak about my brother-in-law, but when the male in my house gets sick, no human on Earth has known greater pain. And I’m talking about
me.

With two males in my sister’s house, her husband and three-year-old son—only
one
of whom was actually acting his age—I could only imagine the agony she was going through. Out of what I believe was more pity than actual medicinal purposes, my sister’s understanding obstetrician prescribed a bottle of cough medicine with minute traces of codeine to ease her suffering.

It did a little more than ease them. Unlike me, who spent the entirety of my baby-making years on a bar stool, my sister had no prior experience with prescription-strength pharmaceuticals. During my college days, there were some mornings that I surprised myself just by
waking up.
For my sister, however, a little bit of codeine was apparently enough vice that I half expected her to have changed her name to Jasmine and donned sparkly hot pants and clear platform shoes, and to introduce me to her new gold-toothed friend “Manny” the next time I saw her.

“I took my cough syrup and I’m feeling a little bit better (cough, cough),” my sister’s voice said, confirming what I had suspected. “It’s supposed to make me sleep, but it’s just kind of making me think about some stuff, and I wanted to call you and confess something to you.”

“This should be good,” I said aloud. “I always had a feeling that letter wasn’t really from David Cassidy saying that when I turned twelve he would date me and sing at my birthday party!”

“When you were in high school, Dad used to have Susan B. Anthony dollars in his top dresser drawer,” the message continued, “and I remember one time (cough, cough, cough) they thought you were stealing them, and I don’t know, maybe you were, but I was stealing them, too. Not many. A couple dollars at a time when I needed extra lunch money, but then I saw Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer today and these two girls were sleeping with the same guy, and I was thinking, you know, it wasn’t very nice of me to let Laurie take the blame for that.”

“Susan B. Anthony dollars?” I said to the machine. “I never took any dollars! There were
dollars
?”

“And, like I said,” the message went on, “maybe you were taking money, and I tried to tell Mom and Dad one time, and they said, ‘WE KNOW WHO’S BEEN TAKING THE MONEY!’ And I just wanted to tell you that. And my doctor said I would be fine,
burp,
excuse me, as long as I don’t get addicted to codeine. Okay? Bye.”

“I never took any dollars!” I said as my husband eyed me suspiciously. “I didn’t! I swear!”

“BEEP!” the machine emitted, signaling another message.

“Laurie,” the new voice said, “this is Dad (cough, cough). I just talked to your sister, and I’m sorry for placing all the Susan B. Anthony blame on you.”

“I didn’t take them, Dad!” I cried. “It wasn’t me!”

“But I just took some medicine and got to thinking,” the machine persisted. “And I wanted to ask you what you knew about my bicentennial quarters.”

My husband looked at me again.

“Uh-oh,” I said as I just stood there.