It Looked Different on the Model (27 page)

“I am
not
the omega!” he insisted. “That is not what my call meant. My call was bold.”

“Translator doesn’t think so,” I volleyed.

“It’s wrong,” he insisted. “That was definitely an alpha call. I did an alpha call!”

“Well,” I offered. “Maybe you were an alpha barking in Chinese.”

“
A-wooooooo
!” my husband barked into the collar.

“And the survey says … ‘Please be nice to me.’ Again,” I said, with an odd look. “You are one pathetic, insecure dog, my friend.”

“I don’t believe you,” my husband said, pulling the translator from my hand to read for himself. “It may have been the
call of a lone wolf, but it was
not
pathetic. And there you go. It was a wolf call, that’s why. It was clearly wolf. This translates Dog. Not Wolf. Apparently it’s not trans-species.”

He then emitted a rather ferocious bark, during which I was surprised that spittle didn’t fly from his jowls and that he retreated from the translator without leaving bite marks on it.

“Was that a wolf or a chupacabra?” I asked. “We don’t need to fight over the translator. It’s a walkie-talkie, not the hindquarters of an elk.”

“But it’s not understanding me,” my husband said.

“Can’t you see how frustrated I am?” the translator relayed. Angry face.

“Really?” I asked him. “Because I think this walkie-talkie could easily work at the United Nations.”

“No,” my husband insisted. “It’s broken. It’s clearly off. Maybe we need new batteries for it.”

“Maybe it just needs time to heal,” I suggested.

And then I saw a shadow pass by the front door, and before I could put on my cameltoe pants, rip off a bra, or become soaking wet, the first note of the mailman ringing the doorbell hit the air. This was followed immediately by the frantic scratching of lupus dog toes clawing wood floors, as Maeby came around the corner into the living room like a hillbilly with a pit crew and a sponsorship from Walmart.

And there was no preparing for it. The bark, high and shrill and real, sliced through the living room like a machete through a block of government cheese. My husband and I both winced as she charged through her excruciating symphony, her dagger bark so painful it reached up and punched me in my sinuses.

Then, as soon as it shot out of her mouth, it ended once she realized it was Dave, the postman, who is her best friend.

“Wait …” my husband said, staring at the translator. “I’m getting something, I’m getting something …” I bent in closer to see.

And there, on the screen, in response to Maeby’s bark, was “We’re having fun now!” and a big, fat smiley face.

My husband and I looked at each other.

He was the first one to say it.

“Oh, my Dog,” he mumbled quietly. “That’s her
happy
noise.”

“We’re in trouble now,” I replied, almost in a whisper.

“Please be nice to me,” my husband barely added.

“J
ust relax,” Brandie said, as she reached forward to give me a hand massage. “This is going to be fun.”

It was the first time I had been to this particular salon to get my hair done, and when Brandie, the colorist, was done applying the color, she informed me that as part of the salon service I could either have a hand massage while we waited to wash my hair out or I could have my makeup consultation.

Now, the last time I had my makeup done was the day I got married, and I walked out of that salon looking less like a girl who was about to snag a cute boy for the rest of her life and more like an undercover cop who was about to go stand out in front of a cheap motel and arrest ministers. All I needed was a fur vest and a chipped eyetooth. So I wisely passed on the dolling-up and chose the hand massage instead, because I’d never had one.

I limply presented my paw, which Brandie took and started … massaging. I tried my best to ignore it.

“Just relax your hand,” Brandie said calmly.

“Okay,” I said with a little laugh.

“Are you relaxing it?” she asked me.

“I am,” I replied.

“Because it doesn’t feel relaxed,” she hinted.

“I’m very relaxed,” I said with a nod and a smile.

She kept doing more massaging things.

“Juuuuuust relax; let your hand go limp,” she said softly.

“I did,” I let her know.

She looked up at me and smiled, but even I could see that my hand looked like I had pulled it from a freezer covered by tarps in the basement of a clown’s house. And, honestly, that’s about as limp as I go.

“Maybe we should stop,” I suggested, pulling my hand lightly at first, then tugging harder, then finally yanking.

“See? It’s cool!” I said very cheerily. “Thank you very much. That was nice.”

“Okay,” Brandie said, a bit alarmed at my aggressive limb recall. “Would you like to play with some eye shadow?”

“Maybe I should have magazine time now,” I suggested.

“That’s a great idea,” she said, a little too eagerly.

As soon as my hair was done and I got in the car to go home, I called my sister.

“You wouldn’t believe what just happened,” I said as soon as she answered. “I freaked out over someone giving me a hand massage. I was forced to do that or play with makeup.”

“Was this some sort of beauty mugging?” she asked. “Are you in L.A.? You’d better check your boobs. They could have gotten six sizes bigger before you even knew what was happening.”

“No, no, no, I was getting a touch-up on my roots and it’s part of the service,” I explained. “I could either get a hand massage or I could get my makeup done. So I let someone touch my hand. It was a mistake.”

“You’re telling me!” she exclaimed. “Remember when I went on that business trip to South Carolina at that fancy resort?
I decided to get a massage, because I thought it would be fun and that I deserved it because I just had a baby. Fun? A stranger touching me all over? No one deserves that!”

Apparently, as soon as the massage began, my sister knew she was in trouble and tried to drop hints to the masseuse that it just wasn’t her thing.

“I told her I was ticklish,” my sister said. “So instead of it ending, she put lotion on me for an hour, which turned a regular old massage into a stranger caressing me. Moistly.”

“I’m establishing a ‘safe’ word if strangers ever want to touch me again,” I said. “
Blueberry! Blueberry
!”

“No kidding,” my sister agreed. “I gave birth faster than it took that hour to pass. Mistake? When I finally got back to my room, I felt like I’d just been involved in a long-term relationship with a sixty-year-old Yugoslavian lady. I apologized to my husband for weeks.”

Notaros, at least in our dynasty, are not huggers. We’re not touchers, patters, or embracers. We’re flinchers, jerkers, and re-coilers. We like a loooooot of space. Honestly, I don’t think that being able to lift up my arms and do one copter rotation without having my elbow in someone’s mouth is really asking all that much. We do best in that environment. When our physical security boundaries are breached, the issue will be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly. If you creep up behind me in a checkout line and the alarm is sounded, I will be forced to ask if you intend to crawl up my ass, because that’s clearly where you’re heading. If you persist, I may have no choice but to challenge you to a kicking fight in the parking lot.

This has been awkward, however, because I married into a touching family that has no problem walking by one another in a galley kitchen, picking a stray leaf out of one another’s hair, or reaching over and wiping a smear of jelly or peanut butter
off a sibling’s cheek. In my family, the game of “There. No,
there
,” is so prevalent that we played it for prizes one year at my nephew’s birthday. It lasted for so long that he burst into tears, wiped his face off with a paper towel, and left everyone in the dynasty without bragging rights.

“What’s going on here?” I asked the first time I saw my then to-be husband and his mother say goodbye, a hug that lasted longer than some sitcoms. “It was like you were going off to war.”

My husband shrugged. “The lady likes to hug” was all he said, and I had no choice but to wonder what made his family skin-friendly and mine skin-averse.

Then one night when I was on the treadmill watching
Nova
, thrilled that it was an episode I could understand, and my husband was in the living room watching the same thing. It was about scientists in Montreal who were studying the epigenome and how it was built to respond to experiences around us. Not only does the epigenome respond, but experience itself, it turns out, actually changes it by turning genes on and off. The scientists tested their theory out with two types of rats: mothers who licked and groomed their offspring after birth, and mothers who didn’t. The results showed that the offspring of the licking mothers were good at mazes, had calm demeanors, and didn’t eat all of the candy in the bowl. The mothers who drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and talked on the phone all the time had offspring who were anxious, blew at puzzles, and got chunky because they couldn’t leave the jelly beans alone.

I can’t even tell you if I turned the treadmill off, because the next thing I knew, I was in the hallway, where I almost crashed into my husband.

“I had a non-licking mother!” I cried.

“You had a non-licking mother!” he yelled.

Suddenly it all made sense. The hand-yanking. The anxiety. The Pooh shirt. The aversion to tall walls and sharp corners. The challenges to parking-lot kicking fights. All of the symptoms now came together. I had a non-licking mother, my genes had been turned off as a result, and I was nothing more than an anxiety-filled, jelly-bean-eating lab rat who couldn’t stand to be touched, even for free.

So it made sense to me that if my environment had turned my genes off, maybe I could get them to go back on. I decided to take it slow at first and try out some hugging. I hugged my neighbor Louise, after her dog died, and that went really well. I hugged my friend Jim after I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years and we met for dinner during Christmas vacation. Now, I want to make it clear that I was still very much at a beginning-hugger level; I was taking it slow and trying not to move too fast. I was not embracing, by any means. Hugs that had time parameters, like One-Mississippi Hugs. I gave out a couple more, although I couldn’t actually say they were changing my life and making me more of a licked rat. I was keeping it safe, keeping it in the family, so to speak, until one day when I got a little hug-cocky.

I was visiting Seattle for a couple of days and met a friend for coffee while I was there. We had both attended a creative-writing conference a year earlier; I got to know her and her husband and thought both were very cool, very nice people. We had a great time talking and drinking wine and I really enjoyed their company.

So I was thrilled when she said she had the afternoon free during my visit. We met and walked to a little café. As we were taking the last bites of our chocolate chip cookies a couple of hours later, it began to rain heavily, and just then my friend’s phone rang. It was her husband, who offered, very nicely, to
come and pick us up so I wouldn’t have to walk back to my hotel in a downpour.

Now, that’s sweet, right? Isn’t that thoughtful and kind? That’s exactly what I was thinking, because even though I didn’t have that long of a walk, maybe a mile, I would have gotten soaked. As we pulled up to the front of the hotel, all of this was running through my mind, and certainly this met the parameters of a One-Mississippi Hug. No, I decided, just go for the handshake. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re not ready.

You’re not ready
!

And I was firmly comfortable with my decision about the handshake or the wave as the car pulled to a stop. But the next thing I knew, I was reaching across the front of the car with my arms open toward the driver’s seat—although my momentum came to a sudden and jarring halt because I had neglected to take off my seat belt. Once I had been jerked back to reality, like I was in a log on Splash Mountain and someone quickly applied the brakes, I knew this had been a terrible choice, but I was in it now. There was no getting out; there was no abandoning the mission. You just can’t open your arms to someone, change your mind, and high-five them instead. Once freed from my restraints, I had no choice but to go back in and deliver a second attempt, but I hadn’t come close to mastering the art of positioning. Going in from the side angle, and basically lying over the console, I got my right arm around him but my left arm got all squished up against the side of the driver’s seat like a flipper, which I realized was moving wildly, as if I was patting him on the back with both hands, all while my friend watched the whole thing from the middle of the backseat. When I eventually retreated, it was clear that not only had he gotten a face-full of my slightly damp hair but that I had administered a Five-Mississippi Hug, and it was probably one of the Most Inappropriate
Hugs on record (that was not given at a funeral to the person in the casket).

I’m not the only one in my family to breach the touching protocol, either, by the way. My father staged a coup around 2000 and started to kiss people hello and goodbye on the cheek, a move that I could only assume was generated on a trip to Italy. We all just tried to take it very lightly and not get too worked up about it, since they were basically air kisses; he also put up a red, white, and green sign in his garage that said,
PARKING FOR ITALIANS ONLY
. He was clearly feeling the Motherland. We sort of brushed it off when he started incorporating the Psych Hug, which was putting his hand on our shoulder right before leaning in for the kiss. Not a full hug, but just enough of a wrestling move that you couldn’t easily get away without collapsing or igniting a jet pack.