Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (10 page)

And you’re welcome.

So anyway, here’s why this matters.

If you were dignified before you gave birth, you cannot tell me that labor and delivery didn’t cure you. Half the world saw you naked and as undignified as it gets. And oh yeah, another human being popped out of your body.

Yikes!

I never understand people who say that childbirth is beautiful. This would be another time I’m out of sync. Childbirth is not beautiful. Children are beautiful. Childbirth is disgusting. Anyone who says otherwise has never met a placenta.

I’m surprised ob-gyns don’t have post-traumatic stress from seeing a few of those a day.

The only thing we can all agree on is that childbirth is a miracle, but that doesn’t change my analysis. As miracles go, it’s easily the most disgusting. For example, the parting of the Red Sea would be cool to see. Also the pulling a sword out of a stone. And one final miracle, like getting on a plane and getting off safely, all of us, forever.

That’s the one I want to see.

Mousetrap Part II—This Time It’s Personal

By Francesca

When we left off, a mouse had just woken me up with its noisy chewing. Didn’t its mother teach it to chew with its mouth closed?

I guess it’s hard to raise them right when they come in litters of twenty.

Unless you have a TLC reality show.

But where was I? Oh yes, terrified and appalled in my bed. At that moment it hit me that these hippy-dippy methods of rodent removal—the peppermint, the Irish spring, the “human” traps—were not cutting it. The mice had violated the sanctity of my bedroom, and something had to be done.

I called Ervin the Slavic Super right then. As it was the third time I’d called him that week, and seven o’clock in the morning, he was not pleased to hear from me.

“You got to use poison. I got seventy tenants, I don’t want mice even more than you. Soon they think they can run over whole building.”

“But the dog,” I said. “I can’t risk it.”

Ervin assured me it could be put out of the dog’s reach and accused me of worrying too much.

No such thing. Just ask my mother.

“Exterminator comes this Saturday, only day this month is coming.” His Slavic accent took on a sterner tone: “Listen to me, let him do what he need to do.”

I hung up the phone. I was still firm in my resolve that under no circumstances would I allow poison anywhere near my precious Pip. But I knew there was truth in what he was saying.

Pests don’t respect pacifism.

So I compromised. I decided I’d let the exterminator put down poison, and as soon as the deed was done, I’d drive Pip home to my mother’s to stay for a month. After that time, I’d take all the poison up, and my son—I mean, my dog—could return.

Seemed like a good plan, until Saturday rolled around. The exterminator was supposed to come between 8:00
A.M.
and 11:00
A.M.
I got up at 7:00
A.M.
to pack so I’d be able to flee the toxic zone immediately.

By 4:00
P.M.
, still no exterminator.

I know when I’m being stood up.

Finally, I decide to buy my own darn d-CON. I leave a Post-it on my door with my phone number and run to the store.

Of course this is when he arrives.

I catch the guy just as he is getting on the elevator to leave. I nearly throw myself prostrate before him.

As soon as he’s in the apartment, I can tell something is off about this guy. He’s friendly and nice, but also jumpy, excitable, talking a mile a minute. His near-monologue went something like this:

“What do you do for a living? Writer? Cool, I also run a T-shirt business. Hey, what’s your sign? Aquarius? Me too! I knew it. Bedroom this way? Sure smells minty in here. That perfume? Are you judgmental?”

Even amidst the hysteria, this last question throws me. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Aquarius, we don’t judge people, we’re not superficial. Like, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re beautiful. I saw that picture of you and your friend in the living room.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“But if someone saw you now, in your sweatpants, glasses on—they might think you’re busted. But they’re only looking on the outside.”

Thank you?

Officially uncomfortable now, I walk out of my bedroom. But our game of twenty questions is not over.

“Do you smoke?”

“No. I used to want to sing opera, so smoking’s never been my thing.”

“Do you smoke weed?”

“No, never.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

He practically exploded. “You have to try it! I can get you some!”

“That’s okay—”

“Don’t be scared, if it’s your first time, I won’t smoke, I’ll just watch you do it.”

Oh, well in that case …

At this point, all I can think about is getting this guy out of my apartment. I manage to usher him out the door, and just when I’m wondering if there is a polite way to slam a door in someone’s face, he spins around with another question.

“So you wanna hook up sometime?”

For the first time all day, he accurately read my facial expression and backpedaled. “Hey, don’t take that the wrong way. I mean hook up, like, you know, as friends.”

“Um…”

“No pressure. You wanna hook up, you call me.” He wrote his name and number on my service receipt.

I took it, thanked him, and closed and locked the door as quickly as possible. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Francesca should have called Vivi.

At least one pest was removed.

Which is not to say I didn’t take his number, I did put it in my phone.

He’s currently in my contacts as “Creepy Exterminator.”

This Old Homebody

By Lisa

I get my neighbors’ mail all the time, and I never open it, even juicy stuff like bank statements or brokerage accounts. I respect my neighbors’ privacy.

Also I can see through the envelope.

We begin with me mistakenly getting some of my neighbors’ mail in my mailbox. Specifically,
This Old House
magazine. I flipped through the first few pages, then I got more interested than I’d expected, and you’ll see why.

The magazine has articles about beaded wainscoting and vintage accents, as well as “how to give your laundry room a spa spirit.”

I stopped, astounded. My laundry room has no spirit, spa or otherwise. My laundry room only has dirty clothes, piled on the floor. I eliminated hampers a long time ago. Now when I have to wash something, I just open the door to the laundry room and throw it on the floor.

Gravity is my hamper.

Back to the magazine, which showed a photo of a woman in a huge laundry room with white cabinets on all four sides, a sink under a pretty window, and marble counters on which to fold towels.

Girl paradise, right?

I couldn’t believe this was a laundry room. I checked the caption to be sure, where I learned that the counters were quartzite. I have no idea what quartzite is, but it makes a counter and that alone has me beat. My laundry room has no counters. I fold my towels on top of the washing machine, near sticky blue pools of spilled Wisk.

The magazine even showed a library ladder in the laundry room. I don’t even have a library ladder in my library. Okay, maybe I don’t have a library, either. But I do have a dining room with bookshelves.

Also the laundry ladder was painted lavender. And the laundry room wallpaper was covered with painted lavender plants. And on the counter was a pot of fresh lavender.

We get it.

But that isn’t even my point. My point is that as I kept reading, the magazine started showing photos of men fixing all the broken things in an old house. There was a tall man with silvery hair installing a new windowsill of cellular PVC, to replace a rotting one. And a stocky guy with a brushy mustache drilling upward into a ceiling beam. Then a red-haired landscape contractor bringing a lawn back to life, plus a smiling man with a screwdriver, above a caption that read
MASTER CARPENTER.

My interest in the magazine was growing, but it wasn’t about the PVC sills.

The magazine was morphing into a man catalog.

And I started thinking, maybe I should order me some Master Carpenter for Christmas.

In other words,
This Old House
got This Old House very interested.

There was a heavyset guy installing a base cabinet, above the caption
GENERAL CONTRACTOR.
A bald dude, the Plumbing and Heating Expert, fiddling with some red pipes. A younger guy with a caulking gun, whose caption read,
HOST.

I didn’t know what he was hosting, but I knew who was hostessing.

What’s sexier than a man with a (caulking) gun?

You have to understand that these men wouldn’t have turned heads if they were walking around the mall. But installing drywall, fixing pipes, and painting things?

They’re Mr. Right.

And not because they’re hot, but because they’re actually doing something. And in the fantasy, they’re doing something for me, which means I don’t have to do it myself. Also that it would get done right.

They’re Mr. Done Right.

Remember, I’m the freak who painted her entire first floor in two days, and it looks it. In fact, I learned from
This Old House
that those blobs of orange paint I left on the white ceiling are called bleed lines.

Except that my ceiling isn’t bleeding, it’s hemorrhaging.

Bottom line, I have to buy a replacement magazine for my neighbor.

And I’m subscribing to
This Old House.

I hope it comes in a plain brown wrapper.

Little Dog, Big Pill

By Lisa

The night started out quietly, but it didn’t end that way.

I was sitting across the family room from Penny, my old golden retriever, who’d just had the doggie equivalent of a total surgical makeover. She was lying on the couch, her head stuck in a plastic cone, because I had to fix all manner of old dog things that were happening to her.

That they sound like things that are happening to me is purely coincidental.

She was forming little fat deposits everywhere and they were starting to sag. I also have saggy little fat deposits. I call them breasts.

My other saggy fat deposits aren’t little. I call them buttocks.

Well, that’s only what I call them in print.

Also, she had started to sprout brown warts on her face. Some were flat, and others protruded, like the one on her left eyelid. When I asked the vet what caused them, she answered, “They’re skin tags and they come with age.”

I blinked. I remembered that that was exactly what my dermatologist had said to me, when I showed him a new brown mole on my own eyelid. The left eyelid, same as Penny. He’d said it came with age and called it a skin tag, too, but I secretly wondered if that was just a nice way of saying it’s an age spot.

Bottom line, Penny and I have age spots. Due to the fact that we have age.

Age, Spot, age!

Yes, I have an age spot on my eyelid, and you can imagine how fun that is when I’m trying to put on eye makeup. If I want to put on eyeliner, I draw a straight line until I come to the age spot, at which point I make a sharp right turn and go around it, like a jughandle off of Route 38 in Cherry Hill.

And imagine trying to put blue eyeshadow over a brown age spot. No amount of powder can hide the spot. Blue plus brown equals men turning their heads away in revulsion.

In other words, it’s a good look, for a Cyclops.

Maybe I should buy a new color of eyeshadow, let’s say, in brown. We could call it age-spot brown. Then all my age spots would be camouflaged, but it would look like someone smeared dirt on my lids.

Here’s mud in your eye!

So I was looking at Penny and thinking these things when I realized that she needed her meds. I went into the kitchen, got her antibiotic, and hid it in some peanut butter. All the other dogs trotted after me, as they love peanut butter.

Also anytime I go into the kitchen at night, we’re talking good news for dogs. I’m never going in for a snack of water, if you follow.

Carbs are always involved.

So guess what happened next?

I started to give Penny her pill, but Peach intercepted it and gulped down the peanut butter with the pill inside.

Uh oh.

Suddenly the night was no longer quiet. Peach is a tiny Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and she weighs 10 pounds. Penny weighs 80. I checked the medicine bottle and the label read
CIPROFLOXACIN, 250 MG
. You don’t need to be Doctor Doolittle to know that it was too big a dose for Peach.

So I’m on the phone to the emergency vet, whom I have on speed dial, and they tell me that the dose may be toxic for Peach, so I have to call Poison Control.

“But I’m calling you,” I say, into the cell phone. Meantime, I’m hurrying for my car keys with Peach. “I’m on my way.”

“If you bring the dog here, you’ll still have to call Poison Control.”

“From your office?”