I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (8 page)

Putting the “Die” in “Diet”

I
knew exactly what I was doing. I had given the matter a great deal of thought, and my words were deliberate. I knew I was about to cheat.

“I really need you right away,” I quietly stressed to the man on the other end of the phone, while my husband sat in the living room, watching TV. “It’s an emergency! I have to see you soon. Please HURRY!!”

“Okay, okay,” the man agreed, and hung up.

I walked into the living room and flashed my husband a quick smile.

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked, without any trace of my deceit.

He looked at me disgustedly. “No more meat,” he said simply. “I can’t eat any more meat.”

I knew how he felt. I was really sick of meat, too. Ever since we had started a high-protein, no-carbohydrate diet two weeks before, we had eaten more meat than the entire Clan of the Cave Bear in one hunting season. We learned about the diet from our friends Jon and Kevin, who had lost an amazing amount of weight in just two weeks by cutting out bread and sugar from their meals. It sounded like a dream. Eat all the cheese, butter, cream, and meat you want, and watch the pounds drop from your butt like fleas off a hairless dog.

After thinking about it for fifteen minutes and deciding that we were prime candidates for this diet, I sprung it on my husband that we were going to start the following Monday to lose the twenty pounds we had gained during the course of our marital bliss. I stocked the fridge with roasts, chops, steaks, and cheeses, some from animals I’d only seen on the Discovery Channel.

During our first dinner, we were enthusiastic. Hovering over our plates piled with steak, we dug in, convinced that each mouthful of flesh got us that much closer to wearing old jeans. In that first week, one, two, three, four pounds magically disappeared while we slept. I had visions of myself in three weeks’ time, wearing a cute little sleeveless J. Crew dress without the disturbing presence of the two swags of flesh that live under each of my arms and are big enough to pull across a movie screen. I had dreams of tucking my shirt in, and actually fastening a seat belt in the car without bumping into my belly baguette first.

We chewed and chewed and chewed. Five, six, seven, eight pounds floated away. Life without bread and sugar was indeed nearly empty, but watching the scale drove me on.

“Honey,” I asked my husband a week and a half into the diet, “pick me up to see if I feel lighter.”

“No,” he said tiredly, almost in a whine. “My shoulder still hurts from picking you up yesterday.”

“Come on, pick me up,” I coaxed. “Pick me up like those dancing kids on the Gap commercial. I’ll kick my legs this time!”

During the second week, however, things were beginning to drag, even though we had both lost twelve pounds. We had eaten enough meat that we should have been branded and pierced with an ear tag. Our back molars had been ground down to the size of Tic Tacs. I knew things were bad when I passed a Taco Bell and my mouth watered, but my desperation was sealed after I saw a fat family buying a bag of pretzels at Safeway and I burst into tears. I was ready to quit the diet and lose the remaining eight pounds by shaving my legs. Frantic, I called Jon and Kevin for support.

“Don’t give in,” Jon urged me. “Be strong. A lady at work lost so much weight that she looks like Karen Carpenter. Now put down the box of Oreo cereal and get yourself a nice ball of mozzarella.”

“If you need a treat, make the recipe we gave you for Cheezy Beef Popsicles,” Kevin suggested. “That will pep you up!”

“How can anything pep me up?” I questioned. “Because of all the cheese and meat I’ve eaten, I haven’t gone number two since August. I’m a walking septic tank!”

“Maybe she’s eaten too much meat,” I heard Jon whisper to Kevin. “This sounds like mad cow disease.”

“I don’t need to be shot,” I hissed into the phone. “I just want to eat a roll. I found some hot dog buns from the Fourth of July on top of the refrigerator. I’m going to take a bite!”

“Step away from the buns!” they both shouted over the phone. “We’re going to talk you down. Put your hand to your face. Push in. What do you feel?”

“The nubs that used to be my teeth,” I answered.

“Go higher,” they said. “Now what do you feel?”

I did feel something. “I don’t know what that is,” I replied. “It feels . . . hard. And it’s kind of . . . round.”

“IT’S A BONE!” they said. “IT’S A BONE!”

“A bone?” I said weakly. “I have bones in my face?”

“Yes!” Jon exclaimed. “And you have more! They’re all over your body!”

I looked at my hands. I saw BONES. At my elbow. BONES. Right under my neck. BONES.

I had BONES.

And this was what I was thinking as I hung up with Jon and Kevin and dialed another number with my bony fingers, telling the man at the other end that it was an emergency, and that I needed to see him right away.

He didn’t disappoint.

Within thirty minutes, he was at the door, knocking. I took the box from his hands. “I knew I could depend on you,” I told him earnestly.

“It’s only a pizza, lady,” he said.

My husband looked stunned. “A pizza? You ordered a pizza?” he stuttered.

“Yes,” I answered without flinching. “We have suffered. We deserve this.”

“I’ve seen a lot of weird things, lady,” the pizza guy said. “But I’ve never had anybody order a pizza without the crust.”

My husband just looked at me, his hand on his head.

“Keep your hand right there,” I said to him. “Now push in.”

“The Sims”

W
hat is that?” my husband exclaimed from where he stood behind me. “What IS THAT? What is that thing right near the fireman’s foot in the front yard? Oh my God.
Oh my God.
What . . . what
have you done?!!
”

Honestly, it really wasn’t my fault. Things in my environment had gotten a little bit out of my control, as things sometimes do. I mean, we can’t control every little facet of our world all of the time, and I was trying to tell my husband that when he pointed toward the fireman’s foot and yelled again.

“Look at that! It
is
your fault!” he insisted. “That fireman is giving me the most disgusted look I’ve ever seen.”

I don’t know, maybe it really was my fault. After all, after my husband bought me the computer game called “The Sims,” the clerk at the Apple store was very careful to give me a stern warning as he handed my new game over.

“Now, since you get to create your own characters in this computer game, many people are tempted to duplicate themselves and their spouses,” he said cautiously as he looked me in the eye. “DON’T DO IT. No matter how tempted you are, DON’T DO IT. You’ll almost always end up getting divorced.”

For those of you unfamiliar with this game, briefly, this is the point: You create people, build houses for them, create a neighborhood, and watch how they coexist domestically and within the neighborhood. In short, it’s like making your own soap opera, and you get to play the almighty deity and Grand Puppetmaster, which I wish I could have chosen as my major in college. Wow, I thought, this is a powerful game, as I walked out of the store, went immediately home, popped in the game, and promptly created a Laurie character and a Laurie’s Husband character.

Now, it’s not like I wanted to prove the store clerk wrong by insisting that our marital bond was deep enough to forge through a computer game without involving simulated lawyers, but I do have to admit that he planted a seed. I mean, it certainly was tempting to see what would happen between Laurie and Laurie’s Husband when left to their own devices—if they got divorced, if they stayed married—it was like watching an ant farm, in a sense, only the ants had human heads that looked like you and your husband. Plus, being the empty, self-centered person that I am, how could I possibly resist spying on myself in 2-D? I mean, honestly, what was the worst that could happen?

I went to work at making myself and my husband. I picked physical characteristics that resembled our own, except that I thought my character should be most representative of Laurie in Her Prime, which included skinny upper arms, a single chin, and a belly that didn’t need twenty-four-hour suck-in control, because frankly, I’m rather busy at all hours of the day trying to rope in my own abdomen, let alone the big, fat, floppy breadbasket of an imaginary me.

Then I made Laurie’s Husband, and I was pretty nice to him, too, except that I didn’t want to make him too nice and appealing, fearing that might raise his fake self-esteem level to the point where he might have the inkling that he could get a better fake wife than Laurie in Her Prime. So I gave him a little bit of a belly. Just a little. Just a tiny, little, teeny belly. So teeny it was almost not even visible underneath the shirt with armpit stains, but kind of visible through the tears in it. Then, for a moment, I thought about making him bald, but ultimately I gave him a mullet, so savage and yet so free, instead for maximum marriage insurance.

When creating our personalities, I really did try to stay as faithful to the truth as possible, giving us the appropriate amounts in the required areas of neatness, niceness, playfulness, activity level, and outgoingness.

Now, truth be told, neither I nor my husband is very neat. We are not tidy people. At any given time, there are dishes in the sink, abandoned shoes in the living room, junk mail on the dining room table, the ironing board will not be put away, and there is the constant presence of a single roll of toilet paper that appears to simply roam about the house on its own. If you come to our house unannounced, we will probably not let you in, although it’s more likely that we will pretty much ignore you altogether. Last week, someone knocked on the door, and I foolishly stepped into the living room just in time to see a person, tall and eerily resembling my husband, peeking in the windows. I froze, backed up slowly, and scampered to the bedroom, where I hid from my mother-in-law for a full eight minutes before she had the good sense to simply get back in her PT Cruiser and go away.
No way
was I letting her in.
No way.
There were three loads of unfolded laundry heaped on the couch, a very dead poinsettia she had given us rotting away on a sidetable, a blanket of dust almost thick enough to smother Pompeii over everything, plus a sinister, mysterious poopy smell whose source had eluded me for several days, despite an entirely vigorous hunt in which I was armed with a stick, a flashlight, and a pair of barbecue tongs.

As far as niceness goes, well, I guess you could say that Laurie’s Husband got far more nice points than Laurie did—after all, what kind of person hides in a bedroom gnawing away on a Milky Way bar while her mother-in-law is rap-tap-tapping on the front door for four hundred and eighty endless and tortuous seconds? Not a very nice one, I can tell you that.

When it came to “playfulness,” I have to admit, I didn’t even know what the hell that meant. Playfulness? If that meant only being able to stumble through your days at your place of employment by pretending it was a madcap sitcom complete with a laugh track in your head, I guess I was playful. The same with the “outgoing” characteristic. In my opinion, the creators of this game wasted a lot of space by giving the players doltish characteristics, listing “playful” and “outgoing” when I didn’t see one single option for “resourcefulness” (being of sound enough mind to stave off credit collectors by paying a credit card payment with another credit card) or “trickery” (being a quick enough thinker to pretend that you’ve died when credit card people call to belittle you and try to force you to pay them when all cards are currently in a state of “denial”).

Personally, if we were being really truthful, I really think the game should have also had a category for deafness, since that’s the claw that slashes at a marriage first. My husband went selectively deaf approximately twelve hours after we took our vows (i.e., around the time he woke up and realized what he had done). I know now that if I say something and get a “What?” from my beloved, I’m already miles ahead of the game since 90 percent of the time I simply get a blank stare. It took me almost seven anniversaries and a chapter in a child psychology book to make myself heard, which I’ve learned entails shouting out a word that he recognizes first, like “BEER!,” “BOOBIES!,” “VIDEO GAMES!,” or “KATE WINSLET!,” and once I’ve got his attention, I can toss him the dead poinsettia with the words “Your side brought it in; you take it out.”

But there is no category for deafness or trickery in “The Sims”; they apparently subsist on playfulness, niceness, and count on a lot of outgoing activities to move the game along, which I decided was going to be very boring. It was going to be like living in a Mormon settlement, but without polygamy to spice things up.

After I created Laurie and Laurie’s Husband, I moved them into a house and started the game. Now, on a control panel toward the bottom of the screen, all of the characters’ needs are documented, along with how well those needs are being met. There are eight basic categories: “hunger,” “comfort,” “hygiene,” “bladder,” “energy,” “fun,” “social,” and “room,” which indicates how tidy and livable your house is. So as Laurie and Laurie’s Husband walked around in their house, it was my job to take them to the bathroom when they needed to pee, make sure they ate when they were hungry, make them take a shower when they got dirty, go to sleep when they got tired, and clean up after themselves. In short, it was like having an electronic pet, and to tell you the truth, I was not truly finding the game a whole lot of fun at all. It was like taking care of kids! Feed me, watch me, wipe me. Where was the action, where was the pull, the attraction to this game? I didn’t know, but I was hoping that if I took Laurie and Laurie’s Husband to the potty enough times, they would kind of get the idea and then more interesting things would begin to take place aside from having a game that consisted solely of all of the most boring elements of my own life.

One thing is for sure, however; Laurie and Laurie’s Husband were
pigs.
And I mean
pigs
! When she was done eating, she would simply throw the food on the floor, and one time I actually caught him leaving a turkey leg in the front yard.
In the front yard.
Okay, it’s true, I gave him a mullet and armpit stains, but the last thing I expected was an automatic lapse into “Livin’ in the Holler.” They left such a mess that flies were buzzing all around the house, and what I believed to be stink lines were waving before my eyes on the computer screen. Finally, I made them get jobs—which, in the Sims’ world, is as easy as picking up the newspaper—but making sure that both of them were up, washed, dressed, and fed before the car pool came was nearly impossible. After I would wake up Laurie’s Husband, I’d be getting her ready and off to work, only to find out that he went back to sleep,
just like in real life.
Eventually, after missing his ride to the office for
three days in a row because it was impossible to get him out of bed,
he lost his job, and really, who could have been surprised at that? Who? I could have told you that was going to happen. Anyone could have seen that coming!

Laurie, it was obvious, wasn’t too happy with him, either. She came home from work, found the house buzzing with flies, him watching TV, a pile of turkey legs by the front door, and she started stomping her foot and shaking her fist at him. He retreated into the bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the bed, put his head in his hands, and began to sob.

Oh, this is ridiculous, I thought, so I decided that he definitely needed to get another job, one he was actually going to go to this time. So I made him get the newspaper, and then, to my surprise, he looked at me, a bubble came out of his mouth, and there were words inside it that said, “I don’t want to look for a job right now. I am too depressed.”

And then he gave me a sad face.

I, frankly, did not know what to say. I was shocked speechless.

Too depressed? You’re too depressed to get a job, huh? I thought. “Well, that may have worked in real life, buddy boy, but this is MY game and I AM THE GRAND PUPPETMASTER,” I yelled at the computer screen as I made Laurie’s Husband pick up the paper again. “I will do in my pretend universe what I apparently cannot do in reality! I command you to get a job!”

And again, as if I didn’t understand him the first time, he informed me that he was too depressed to get a job. Then he shook his fist at
me.
And I mean
the REAL me.

“Who are you commanding to get a job now?” my flesh-and-blood husband said as he came into the room and looked at the computer screen. “Who is that fatty? Look at him go! He really wants to punch you out! Without the gut, he looks like Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo.
”

“No,” I said, trying to make Laurie’s Husband pick up the newspaper again. “It’s not Shaggy. It’s you.”

“Oh, great,” he said. “You made me a barrel-shaped, Schlitz-guzzling mechanic so I wouldn’t cheat on you, huh? What is up with my hair? I look like a member of REO Speedwagon.”

“I’m just trying to control my simulated universe,” I tried to explain as Laurie’s Husband took the newspaper and threw it on the kitchen counter, narrowly missing a growing colony of flies that was starting to resemble a small tornado.

“And who’s that?” my husband said, pointing to the screen. “That looks like Julia Roberts.”

“Why, thank you, kind sir,” I said, beaming. “That fetching vixen is your lovely bride.”

“I get to be married to Julia Roberts in this game?” he asked. “She’s okay, but she’s really not my type. Do they have a Kate Winslet type? Can I have Kate Winslet? I want a Kate Winslet.”

I just looked at him. “That’s not Julia Roberts, it’s me!” I heartily informed him. “And no, they don’t have a Kate Winslet, mainly because people keep their shirts on in this game. Kate Winslet would feel very out of place, I’m afraid, being on-screen and not popping out her boobs at least once.”

“In
Iris
she was
underwater,
Laurie, so that
hardly even counts
!” he replied.

“If I see an areola and a nipple, it counts, all right, whether it’s blurry or not,” I argued back.

“Why is the REO Speedwagon Shaggy threatening you with physical violence?” my husband asked. “And why is he crying?”

“He’s depressed,” I offered. “He lost his job and now he’s too depressed to get another one.”

My husband is far more familiar with computer games than I am, mainly because when the deadline for my first book was rapidly approaching, I knew he was too old for day care and we didn’t have enough money to send him somewhere for the whole summer, so I did the next best thing. I went to Costco, found the “Battle Chest” version of the “Diablo” computer game, gave it to my husband, and I didn’t see him again for three months. It didn’t take me long to understand that computer games just may be the cure for domestic hostility, and that the nuclear family could stay nuclear as long as there is a PC in the house with a CD drive. Daddy and Mommy don’t need to get a divorce; Daddy just needs to get “Diablo.” This way, Mommy will never see him again as long as she lives, but his paycheck will still pop up in her checking account twice a month. You see, as long as there’s fire, weapons, and the occasional hope of spotting a scantily clad figure with hips (even if she is trying to impale him with a javelin like a rotisserie chicken) a man will stay chained to that dream as long as you let him. And, as a result, I met my deadline.