Have a Nice Guilt Trip (22 page)

She laughed and shook her head, even tossing her hair with rhythm. “No, you’re fine. It’s a hard routine. We’ve been working on it all month.”

“Huh?”

Are you twerking kidding me?

I looked around at the other girls with new eyes. I wasn’t defective; they just knew the routine already! This truth didn’t make me any better of a dancer, but it did make me a little kinder to myself.

A few weeks later my boyfriend and I went to a wedding together for the first time. When dinner had been cleared and the DJ got going, he asked me if I wanted to dance. The thought did cross my mind—this is a guy who can call your bluff.

But then I figured, ah, twerk it.

We danced to every song the DJ played. I shimmied, I twirled, I snapped, I shook, we slow-danced, we swing-danced, we salsa-ed, we jumped, we bumped, we grinded, we electric-slided. After they played that last song, I all but collapsed into a dining chair, sweaty, exhausted, and happy beyond measure.

My boyfriend crashed next to me. “You,” he said, catching his breath, “are a great dancer.”

I shook my head. “Not really. I just try to have fun.”

Without twerking.

Gangrene Thumb

By Lisa

You may recall I mentioned earlier that I water my garden too much.

That problem is now solved.

Because I’m out of water.

Our story begins when I noticed that the water pressure in my house is low.

Hmm.

By the way, I have well water. We live like pioneers in our township, which has no police, fire, or garbage removal, though I don’t have to sew the American flag.

Thanks, township!

Anyway, the water level in my well generally goes down when there’s no rain, but it was getting worse and worse until I realized that something must be wrong in the springhouse.

If you don’t know what a springhouse is, welcome to the club.

All I know is that it’s a picturesque little shed that houses where the water comes up from the well. More than that I can’t explain, because I have no understanding of how my springhouse works. I never go in there because it’s damp, dark, and scary, like a basement on steroids.

I called the plumbers who specialize in wells and they wanted me to show them the springhouse, so I was shamed into going in. Inside were strange black gauges, weird blue tanks, and two body-size open trays of water, which is the water I drink, evidently lying around all day and night, so that bugs, snakes, paramecium, and God-knows-what-else can swim around in it before it finds its way into the glass that I put to my parched lips.

Delicious.

The plumbers inspect the well and say that it’s fine, so we all leave the springhouse and troop around the lawn to solve the mystery of why I have no water. You don’t have to be Nancy Drew to notice that the grass in my front yard, near the garden, is surprisingly soggy.

Uh-oh.

So we go find the faucet for the garden hose, which is in the garage, and the plumbers guess that the pipe must be leaking under the garage, since it was never used until I put in this stupid garden. They say it must have been corroding, but the corrosion was holding it together.

Like me.

Anyway, we trace the leak backwards to the basement under the garage, which is another place I never go because it’s damp, dark, and scary, like a springhouse on steroids.

As soon as we open the door, we see that the basement brims with water. Pieces of wood, broken glass, and kreplach float by.

Long story short, we call in the plumbers who specialize in flood damage and they use three pumps to pump the water out of the basement. They figure out where the leak is in the pipe, but also surmise it can’t possibly be causing the soggy grass. In other words, I have two leaks in two pipes, caused by watering the garden!

Yay!

We call in a third set of plumbers who specialize in second leaks, and these are the guys who put on their booties before going to work.

Lisa’s gardening requires heavy machinery.

For a middle-aged woman, a plumber is a booty call.

They find the leak under the soggy lawn but are not sure exactly where. They explain that they will need to dig trenches and lay new water lines, and that an estimator will come out on Saturday to tell me how much my gardening hobby is going to cost me.

Obviously, I have a green thumb.

Dollar green.

So by Sunday night, as I write, my entire front lawn is a swamp.

The only dry spot is the garden, where the flowers left by the deer are dying of thirst.

Reply Hazy, Try Again

By Francesca

We associate age with wisdom. “Heed the lessons of those who have come before” is common advice, and the word “sage” has never been used for someone below the age of seventy. My grandmother is one of the smartest women I know, and she has lived through quite a lot in her time, so I’ll gladly take any advice she has to give me.

If I could only understand it.

I know oracles are supposed to be cryptic, but help me out here.

First off, she loves to ask about my boyfriend. Every time she and I speak on the phone, her first questions are about him. How is he doing? Where is he right now? Where is he performing next?

I’m her only grandchild, not having me as her favorite person is a breach of contract.

And it took me by surprise. My grandmother hasn’t always shown such an interest in men that I’ve dated, just this one, and they’ve never even met. But my boyfriend is a musician and composer, and my grandmother was a songwriter in her youth, so I guess that’s the connection for her.

Also, I wondered if she secretly wants to see me settled and married. She’s ninety years old now, and I worry she won’t get to see my wedding if I don’t hurry up. But I can’t rush things—not with my family history.

My mother and father have each been divorced twice. Even my grandmother has been divorced twice!

I come from a long line of indecision.

I intend to break the curse. If the Red Sox could do it, so can I.

So every time my grandmother asked about my boyfriend, I tried to indulge her. I went out of my way to tell her how happy I was, to enumerate my boyfriend’s wonderful qualities, to talk up his career—
anything
I could say to make myself sound as content and secure as possible and ease her mind. Then, out of the blue, she had a new declaration:

“You need to shop around.”

Excuse me? “Well, I’m not rushing into anything yet, but we are exclusive.”

“So don’t tell him.”

“Muggy!” And here I thought she loved him.

“Be free. You don’t need a man. You have a lot to offer.”

Ah,
I started to put it together; maybe I went overboard with the boy-talk. My grandmother has always been very independent, she was a career woman when very few were, and she probably wants to instill that same self-reliance in me. I thanked her and told her not to worry.

And I stopped mentioning him when we talked on the phone.

But it wasn’t long until my grandmother had a new reading on my relationship:

“Where is your boyfriend? He’s never with you!”

“Wait, what? No, he is, I just…” I thought you didn’t want to hear about him anymore.

You know, the problem might be the medium, I thought. My grandmother has a hard time hearing me over the phone, and I have a hard time understanding her, so some things had to be getting lost in translation.

But then, last month, my grandmother was visiting at my mom’s house, so I went down, too, to spend time with her. One night, we were all hanging out in the living room, watching
Raymond
and discussing dinner plans when, without any prompting, my boyfriend popped into her mind again. And this time, she didn’t have any trouble making herself crystal clear.

“How much does he earn?” she said.

I laughed out of shock. “I wouldn’t know. I’m his girlfriend, not his accountant.”

“You don’t
know
?” Her eyebrows bounced atop her peach-framed glasses.

“I don’t worry about it, and neither should you. You know why? Because I make enough money myself,” I said, hoping to jog her memory of our independent-woman talk. “And what’s that expression you always say?
You marry for money, you earn every penny.
”

She nodded at her own sage wisdom. “That’s true.”

“Right, so I love him, and that’s all that matters.”

“Ahh.” She waved her hand at my silly idea.

But wasn’t it her idea first?

Thus I came back to New York after our visit, none the wiser. Recently, my grandmother happened to call me when I was with my boyfriend. So when she asked her usual question about how he was doing, I casually mentioned, “Oh, he’s here right now.”

“Let me talk to him,” she said.

Uh-oh.
Would she ask him about his bank balance, his plans for our future, his smothering love, or his absenteeism?

“She’s hard to understand,” I blurted out, as I handed him the phone. Hoping I could blame any untoward statement on her stroke.

They talked for a few minutes that felt like fifteen. I stepped away to give them privacy, but really, I was just too nervous to stand around for it.

When my boyfriend gave the phone back to me, it looked almost like he had a tear in his eye.

Oh, God,
I thought. But I plastered on a hopeful smile. “What did she say?”

“She told me she loved me,” he said,
verklempt.

Phew.
“Of course she does!” I cried, hugging him.

For now.

Restaurant Wars

By Lisa

I’m so excited about a new restaurant that just opened in a trendy part of Brooklyn. You know what’s on the menu?

Silence.

You got it. I’m going, and I’m taking Mother Mary.

It’s true. This new restaurant has rules, and one of the rules is that you’re not allowed to talk in the restaurant.

This is an even better restaurant rule than my personal favorite, Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work.

The restaurant owner got the idea for a silent-dining restaurant after a trip he took to India, where he saw Buddhist monks eating breakfast without talking.

This is what comes from travel.

Or so I hear, because I don’t travel.

I hate to travel.

In fact, if I travel, it’s to a restaurant.

The owner of the restaurant says that, “The silence speaks for itself.”

I agree. However, what the silence says is anybody’s guess.

I think the silence has strongly held opinions on the government shutdown, Obamacare, and most importantly, whether these jeans make me look fat.

The chef at the restaurant says that they don’t need talking because “there’s such a strong energy in the room.”

Wow!

I think I might go to Brooklyn and start talking to silence and energy.

I could
travel
to Brooklyn!

By the way, the menu at the restaurant is $40 per meal, which proves that silence is golden.

Or at least totally overpriced.

In case you’re interested in going, the restaurant is called Eat, but I think it should be called Shut Up.

Or Shut Up and Eat, which was what Mother Mary used to say to me all the time, when I was little.

She also used to say: Shut Up and Go Clean Your Room.

Shut Up and Wipe That Smile off Your Face.

Shut Up and Get out of My Sight.

And my personal favorite, Watch Your Tone.

Meanwhile, silent dining is a great idea!

I know a lot of people I would happily go to dinner with if I didn’t have to interrupt my eating to talk to them or worse, to listen to them.

Mainly my ex-husbands, Thing One and Thing Two.

In fact, both of my horrible marriages would have been improved if we could have eaten dinner in silence. Or better yet, if we could have pretended that our stony silence during dinner was somebody else’s rule and not the state of our horrible marriage.

Actually, that’s an exaggeration.

We did talk during dinner. I remember once I said, Pass the salt.

Does that count?

Probably not, because what I really meant was, Pass the arsenic.

Too dark?

Which gives me another idea, because I also read about another new restaurant called In The Dark, and the rule there is that you have to eat in total darkness.

Don’t you want to bring your exes there?

I would, but I’d go further. I’d like to open a new kind of restaurant that combined the two ideas. In other words, where you had to eat in the dark and you weren’t allowed to talk to the people you were with.

Wow!

Great idea, huh?

I might be onto something, right?

I swear, I’d still be married to Thing One and/or Thing Two if I never had to see them or talk to them.

I thought I had to get a divorce to avoid seeing or talking to them, but it turns out, all I had to do was take them to my new restaurant.

Who knew?

What a country!

Greased Lightning