Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions (8 page)

You know how when you're growing up you think that everything in your house is normal?

You don't even realize there is another way until you meet other people and they look at you like you're crazy?

I remember the exact moment this happened, with my friend Miriam, who came over for dinner and remarked that both times she had been over my house, we had spaghetti.

And that's when I told her that we had spaghetti every night.

She looked at me like I was crazy.

Did she laugh? Did she bully me?

No and no.

She started coming over my house for dinner, every night.

You know why?

Because everybody loves spaghetti.

I myself could eat spaghetti every night, and probably every day for lunch, and also cold the next morning, for breakfast. It doesn't make sense to me, even now, that we change what we have for dinner.

Think about it.

Most people eat the same thing every day for breakfast—cereal, or maybe eggs.

So why would you change what you have for dinner, every day?

It creates a lot of problems, and also TV shows and channels and commercials, and unnecessary food products, and chain restaurants in strip malls, when we could all just make spaghetti, eat up, and be happy.

Buon appetito.

 

Mother Mary

By Lisa

I am very sorry to have to tell you that Mother Mary's health has taken a dramatic and unexpected turn for the worse, so this won't be funny.

Except for the fact that she is at her funniest when times are darkest.

She's been newly diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, has moved up North with me, and has entered hospice care at my house. Mercifully, Brother Frank, Daughter Francesca, and family and friends are all around her, and she is resting comfortably. So comfortably, in fact, that the hospice nurses, who are saints on wheels, cannot believe it. One nurse asked Mother Mary if she was having any pain—and she pointed to me.

So you get the idea.

She sleeps a lot, but when she is awake, she loves to have visitors. It hurts her throat to talk too much, so she writes on a wipe-off erase board, and you will be happy to know that most of what she writes is unprintable here.

Not even cancer can trump profanity.

Whatever she writes is funny and brilliant, and her mind is sharper than it's ever been. Some friends visited her yesterday, and she remembered the name of a lawyer they both knew some fifty years ago, though they could not, at a fraction of her age.

Me, I can't remember where my car keys are.

Maybe I should tell Mother Mary and she'll remind me.

Please don't think my tone herein is inappropriate. These have always been books about family, the ups and downs, the laughter and the tears, and I think it's appropriate to have both here, maybe even in the same sentence.

I would guess if you're a fan of this series, and especially of Mother Mary, you have a great sense of humor, and The Flying Scottolines have always handled disaster with humor. In fact, catastrophe is our middle name.

That's why you pronounce the final E, to make it Italian.

I also know that many of you have gone through this heartbreaking journey yourselves. If you have, you already know that hospice plunges you into a world different from any other, filled with irony and incongruities.

You will get a delivery of a shower chair and a commode, which will be the only furniture delivery you don't get excited about.

You will open the refrigerator and it will contain potato salad and morphine. Only one of these is organic.

You will find yourself granting every wish of your mother's as if it were her last, because, well, it could be. We have all been running hither and yon getting mango sorbet, Bud Light, Entenmann's plain donuts, and mashed potatoes with gravy. I had a fight in Whole Foods over the last jar of pur
é
ed pears baby food, which was for my Mother Mary.

You haven't lived until you've bought baby food for your mother, depriving a nine-month-old.

Take that, baby. Try the carrots, you selfish little thing.

We are alternately happy and sad, getting along wonderfully or bickering. I don't worry about this. In fact, I think it's par for the course. If you're not irritable at a time like this, you lack perspective.

I never sweat the small stuff, but this is clearly not the small stuff. I've spent my life dismissing minor annoyances because they aren't a matter of life and death, but this is a matter of life and death.

Trust me, we're sweating it.

Yet we persevere, because we have no other choice and we're lucky to have this one. We ask the hospice nurses how long we will have Mother Mary with us, and one nurse says something truly profound—that people die the way they lived.

That's good news with Mother Mary.

She's a fighter and she's fighting. When the priest arrived to give her last rites, she sent him away.

Actually what she said was, “Never!”

So she is not going gentle.

She cannot spell gentle.

She even insists that I go on book tour, since I have a book out this week, and though I am torn, I will obey her. She doesn't want me to act like the end is near, or it makes her feel as if it is, and I understand that, too. So in another irony, because she comes first, I'm going to listen to her and do my job.

By the way, I showed her an advance copy of the new book that Daughter Francesca and I wrote, which is dedicated to her. She was thrilled to see it, and the book will be out in summer. I'm betting on her being with us then too.

Because here's the one thing I truly believe:

Mother Mary will be with us forever.

 

Fear of Flying

By Lisa

Lately, I'm grabbing men on airplanes.

This could be the new
match.com
, for frequent flyers.

Let me explain. I have a medical excuse.

I seem to be developing a fear of flying.

And I blame Liam Neeson.

Because after seeing the movie
Nonstop,
as well as lots of other airplane crash movies, I can visualize all too well what happens when planes become lawn darts. It might be too much information, or too much imagination. Either way, all of a sudden, I'm nervous when I fly.

I found this out this week, when I took a business trip to Florida from Philly, down one day and up the next, which describes the turbulence both ways.

There had been bad rainstorms all over the country, and the plane ride south started off rocky and never got better. I popped flop sweat. I gripped the armrests. I gritted my teeth.

But when I looked around at the other passengers, they were reading their books, ebooks, and newspapers and answering email. Oddly, they seemed not to realize that the world was about to end.

The captain got on the speaker and said things like “random air pockets,” “being rerouted,” “keep your seat belts fastened,” but I was too stressed out to hear any of it, and all I can tell you is that it was the first flight I wouldn't get up to go to the bathroom.

I almost went in my seat.

Then the plane dropped suddenly, and I instinctively reached over and clutched the arm of the man next to me.

I say instinctively, but God knows if it's instinctive.

Maybe it's instinctive for single women.

Either way, he looked over and smiled, and I apologized.

Then he said, “Don't worry. We're at thirty-five thousand feet.”

Oy.

I said, “That's exactly what worries me.”

He shook his head, patiently. “It shouldn't. If anything goes wrong now, the pilot has thirty thousand feet to fix it. The only times to worry are at takeoff and landing.”

Yikes.

So I gutted it out, and I helped land the plane through the sheer power of will, hope, karma, prayer, or all of the above.

It took the next three hours for my stomach to settle, and I dreaded the flight home the next day, which was even worse. The sky was sunny and clear, but wind buffeted the plane, up and down, right and left, and again, when we made a sudden drop, I grabbed the guy next to me.

Are you getting the idea? Don't sit near me on a plane.

But this guy was nice, too. He laughed patiently as I apologized and unhooked my nails from his arm, one at a time like a kitten.

Then he said, “You don't have to worry. There's nothing out there.”

Oy.

I told him, “That's exactly what worries me.”

“It shouldn't. It means there's nothing for us to hit, or to hit us.”

“But it also means there's nothing
underneath
us.”

“No worries. You're in more danger on the street, with all those crazy drivers. This is nothing, and the plane's on autopilot. Do you know they don't even drive with their hands on the wheel?”

I almost threw up.

Then, by some miracle, after we landed safely, I filed weak-kneed down the aisle, where the pilot stood next to a flight attendant. I asked the pilot, “Is it true that you don't drive with your hands on the wheel?”

“No,” he answered.

“Yes,” answered the flight attendant, at the same time.

And I'm driving to Florida, from now on.

 

Love Without Rough Edges

By Francesca

During most of grandmother's time in hospice, I was sitting only a few feet from her. I tried to help however I could and keep her company the rest of the time. But hospice is a game you play to lose, and it was difficult to adjust.

Often, I felt helpless.

So when my uncle said that my grandmother had specifically asked for me to do her nails, I was elated—unlike the daunting medical side of hospice, this was something I knew I could handle.

My grandmother took meticulous care of her fingernails. She always carried an emery board in her handbag, and even when her knuckles knotted with arthritis, she kept each filed to a perfect almond shape.

Even now, she could feel her nails were long, but she couldn't feel the advanced cancer in her chest.

One of many blessings.

So I was happy to help. I envisioned giving her a salon experience, complete with soaking bowls of warm, sudsy water and a hand massage with scented lotion. I wanted so badly to do something nice for her, something special.

When you know that anything could be the last something, you want everything to be perfect.

But the next morning, I could see she was exhausted, more so than the day before.

It takes a lot for a body to launch a spirit. Especially one like hers.

I put my hand on her shoulder as she napped on the couch. “Is it all right if I do your nails while you rest?”

She opened her eyes for a moment and gave a nod.

I took her hands one by one, my fingers threaded through hers. I filed each nail gently, so as not to disturb her, rounding the tips into half-moons. I ran my fingers over them to make sure they were perfectly clean and smooth, no rough edges.

I thought of all that those hands had done in ninety years. Before my time, she was a songwriter, her hands played many melodies on piano. I imagined her penciling in the margins of a new song, adding dynamic changes, a
ritardando
at the end.