Me Talk Pretty One Day (12 page)

At the age of ten Amy was caught taking a fistful of twenties from an unguarded till at the grocery store. I was with her and marveled at my sister’s deftness and complete lack of fear. When the manager was called, she calmly explained that she wasn’t stealing, she was simply pretending to be a thief. “And thieves steal,” she said. “So that’s what I was doing.” It all made perfect sense to her.

She failed first grade by pretending to be stupid, but the setback didn’t seem to bother her. For Amy school was devoted solely to the study of her teachers. She meticulously charted the repetition of their shoes and earrings and was quick to pinpoint their mannerisms. After school, alone in her simulated classroom, she would talk like them, dress like them, and assign herself homework she would never complete.

She became a Girl Scout only to become her Girl Scout leader. For Christmases and birthdays she requested wigs and makeup, hospital gowns and uniforms. Amy became my mother, and then my mother’s friends. She was great as Sooze Grossman and Eleanor Kelliher, but her best impersonation was of Penny Midland, a stylish fifty-year-old woman who worked part-time at an art gallery my parents visited on a regular basis. Penny’s voice was deep and roughly textured. She wasn’t shy, but when she spoke, certain words tended to leave her mouth reluctantly, as if they’d been forced out against their will.

Dressed in a caftan and an appropriate white pageboy wig, Amy began phoning my father at the office. “Lou Sedaris! Penny Midland here. How the … hell are you?”

Surprised that this woman would be calling him at work, our father feigned enthusiasm as best he could. “Penny! Well, what do you know. Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice.”

The first few times she called, Amy discussed gallery business but, little by little, began complaining about her husband, a Westinghouse executive named Van. There were problems at home. Her marriage, it seemed, was on the rocks.

Our father offered comfort with his standard noncommittal phrases, reminding Penny that there were two sides to every coin and that it’s always darkest before the dawn.

“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to … talk to someone who really … understands.”

I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and came upon my twelve-year-old sister propositioning our father with lines she’d collected from Guiding Light. “I think we’ve both seen this coming for a long … time. The only question left is… what are we going to do about it? Oh, baby, let’s run wild.”

This is what my mother meant when she accused people of playing a dangerous game. Were our father to accept Penny’s offer, Amy would have known him as a philanderer and wondered who else he might have slept with. Everything he’d ever said would be shaded by doubt and called into question. Was that really a business trip, or had he snuck off to Myrtle Beach with one of the Strivides twins? Who was this man?

Amy studied her reflection in the oven door, arranging her white bangs and liking what she saw. “All I’m saying is that I find you to be a very attractive… man. Is that such… a crime?”

It is to his credit that our father was such a gentleman. Stammering that he was very flattered to be asked, he let Penny down as gently as possible. After offering to set her up with some available bachelors from his office and country club, he told my sister to take care of herself, adding that she was a very special woman who deserved to be happy.

It was years before Amy finally admitted what she had done. They were relatively uneventful years for our family but, I imagine, a very confusing period of time for poor Penny Midland, who was frequently visited at the art gallery by my father and any number of his divorced associates. “Here’s the gal I was telling you about,” he’d say. “Why don’t I just take a look around and give you two a chance to talk.”

The passage of time has not altered my father’s obsessive attention to my sisters’ weight and appearance. He wonders why the girls don’t drop by more often, and then when they do, he opens the door asking, “Is it just my imagination, or have you put on a few pounds?”

Because she has maintained her beautiful skin and enviable figure, Amy remains my father’s greatest treasure. She is by far the most attractive member of the family, yet she spends most of her time and money disguising herself beneath prosthetic humps and appliquéd skin diseases. She’s got more neck braces and false teeth than she knows what to do with, and her drawers and closets overflow with human hair. Having dreamt of one for years, she finally broke down and bought half of a padded, custom-made “fatty suit,” which she enjoys wearing beneath dirty sweatpants as tight and uninviting as sausage casings. Unable to afford the suit’s matching top, she’s been reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort of cruel experiment. From the waist up she’s slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by a wide, dimpled bottom so thick that she could sit on a knitting needle and never feel a thing.

She wore the fatty suit home one Christmas, and our father met us at the Raleigh airport. Visibly shaken, he managed to say nothing on the short ride to the house, but the moment Amy stepped into the bathroom he turned to me, shouting, “What the hell happened to her? Christ almighty, this is killing me! I’m in real pain here.”

“What?”

“Your sister, that’s what. I just saw her six months ago, and now the girl’s the size of a tank! I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her.”

I begged him to lower his voice. “Please, Dad, don’t mention it in front of her. Amy’s very sensitive about her … you know.”

“Her what? Go ahead and say it: her big, fat ass. That’s what she’s ashamed of, and she should be! You could land a chopper on an ass like that.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Don’t try to defend her, wiseguy. She’s a single woman, and the clock is ticking away. Who’s going to love her, who’s going to marry her with an ass like that?”

“Well,” I said, “from what I’ve been told, a lot of men prefer rear ends like that.”

He looked at me with great pity, his heart breaking for the second time that day. “Man, what you don’t know could fill a book.”

My father composed himself when Amy reentered the room, but when she turned to open the refrigerator door, he acted as though she were tossing a lit match into the gas tank of his Porsche. “What in God’s name are you doing? Look at you - you’re killing yourself.”

Amy stuck a tablespoon into an economy-size vat of mayonnaise.

“Your problem is that you’re bored,” my father said. “You’re bored and lonely and you’re eating garbage to fill the void. I know what you’re going through, but believe me, you can beat this.”

Amy denied that she was bored and lonely. The problem, she said, was that she was hungry. “All I had on the plane were a couple of Danish. Can we go out for pancakes?”

She kept it up until our father, his voice cracking with pain, offered to find her some professional help. He mentioned camps and personal trainers, offering to loan - no, give - her the money, “And on top of that, I’ll pay you for every pound you take off.”

When Amy rejected his offer, he attempted to set an example. His Christmas dinner was gone in three bites, and dessert was skipped in favor of a brisk two-mile run. “Anyone want to join me? Amy?” He extended his age-old exercise regimen from ten minutes to an hour and trotted in place while speaking on the telephone.

Amy kept to her fatty suit until her legs were chafed and pimpled. It was on the morning of our return flight that she finally revealed her joke, and our father wept with relief. “Ha-ha, you really had me going. I should have known you’d never do that to yourself. And it’s really fake? Ha-ha.”

He reflected upon the fatty suit for the next several months. “She had me fooled for a minute there, but even with a big, fat ass she can’t disguise the fact that she’s a beautiful person, both inside and out, and that’s what really matters.” His epiphany was short-lived, and as the photo shoot approached, he began calling me with technical questions. “Do you happen to know if this magazine will be hiring a professional beautician? I sure as hell hope so, because her hair is getting awfully thin. And what are they going to do about lighting? Can we trust the photographer to do a first-class job, or should we call and see if they can’t come up with someone better?

There’s a lot I don’t tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn’t understand that she has no interest in getting married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky.

The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, “Thanks for asking, but I’m really not into white guys right now.”

That alone would have stopped my father’s heartbeat. “The clock is ticking,” he says. “If she waits much longer, she’ll be alone for the rest of her life.”

This appears to suit Amy just fine.

When my father phoned asking about the photo shoot, I pretended to know nothing. I didn’t tell him that, at the scheduled time, my sister arrived at the studio with unwashed hair and took a seat beside the dozen other New York women selected by the magazine. She complimented them on their flattering, carefully chosen outfits and waited as they had their hair fashioned, their eyebrows trained, and their slight imperfections masked by powder.

When it was her turn at the styling table, Amy said, “I want to look like someone has beaten the shit out of me.”

The makeup artist did a fine job. The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by an arrangement of scratch marks on her forehead. Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.

Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, “I’m in love. Can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and I feel great.”

Nutcracker.com

IT WAS MY FATHER’S DREAM that one day the people of the world would be connected to one another through a network of blocky, refrigerator-size computers, much like those he was helping develop at IBM. He envisioned families of the future gathered around their mammoth terminals, ordering groceries and paying their taxes from the comfort of their own homes. A person could compose music, design a doghouse, and … something more, something even better. “A person could … he could …”

When predicting this Utopia, he would eventually reach a point where words failed him. His eyes would widen and sparkle at the thought of this indescribable something more. “I mean, my God,” he’d say, “just think about it.”

My sisters and I preferred not to. I didn’t know about them, but I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead. Unfortunately, my father’s team won, so computers it is. My only regret is that this had to happen during my lifetime.

Somewhere in the back of my mind is a dim memory of standing in some line holding a perforated card. I remember the cheap, slightly clinical feeling it gave me, and recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross. My father saw it coming, but this was a future that took me completely by surprise. There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten. I wasn’t really aware of computers until the mid-1980s. For some reason, I seemed to know quite a few graphic designers whose homes and offices pleasantly stank of Spray Mount. Their floors were always collaged with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops. I had always counted on these friends to loan me the adhesive of my choice, but then, seemingly overnight, their Scotch tape and rubber cement were gone, replaced with odorless computers and spongy mouse pads. They had nothing left that I wanted to borrow, and so I dropped them and fell in with a group of typesetters who ultimately betrayed me as well.

Thanks to my complete lack of office skills, I found it fairly easy to avoid direct contact with the new technology. The indirect contact was disturbing enough. I was still living in Chicago when I began to receive creepy Christmas newsletters designed to look like tabloids and annual reports. Word processors made writing fun. They did not, however, make reading fun, a point made painfully evident by such publications as The Herald Family Tribune and Wossup with the Wexlers!

Friends who had previously expressed no interest in torture began sending letters composed to resemble Chinese take-out menus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Everybody had a font, and I was told that I should get one, too. The authors of these letters shared an enthusiasm with the sort of people who now arrived at dinner parties hoisting expensive new video cameras and suggesting that, after dessert, we all sit down and replay the evening on TV. We, the regular people of the world, now had access to the means of production, but still I failed to see what all the fuss was about. A dopey letter is still a dopey letter, no matter how you dress it up; and there’s a reason regular people don’t appear on TV: we’re boring.

By the early 1990s I was living in New York and working for a housecleaning company. My job taught me that regardless of their purported virtues, computers are a pain in the ass to keep clean. The pebbled surface is a magnet for grease and dirt, and you can pretty much forget about reaming out the gaps in the keyboard. More than once I accidentally pushed a button and recoiled in terror as the blank screen came to life with exotic tropical fish or swarms of flying toasters. Equally distressing was the way people used the slanted roofs of their terminals to display framed photographs and great populations of plush and plastic creatures, which would fall behind the desk the moment I began cleaning the screen. There was never any place to plug in the vacuum, as every outlet was occupied by some member of the computer family. Cords ran wild, and everyone seemed to own one of those ominous foot-long power strips with the blinking red light that sends the message YOU MUST LEAVE US ALONE. I was more than happy to comply, and the complaints came rolling in.