The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (17 page)

And even though an extended warranty doesn’t cover electronics not working because your U-boat feet have repeatedly kicked the plug from its union with the socket, the extended-warranty people could have told me that and then mocked me, respectively, which would have cost me far less than the resulting sixty-nine dollars for a new TV and sixty-nine dollars for the ensuing extended warranty.

And the truth of the matter is that my treadmill breaks. Quite often. It has broken at least once a year since I bought it, therefore, I’ve just about broken even or may even be a little ahead of the extended-warranty game, and once a year, some very nice lady from India will call me and remind me of that, right before I give her my Sears credit card number to renew my sucker status.

“Thank you very much, Miss Laurie Notaro,” she says.

“I
love
papadum,” I gush.

Whenever the treadmill broke, I shut the thing off and called the lady in India, who called the repair person to come and fix it, and in each case, they showed up within their designated forty-eight-hour appointment window with their toolboxes and their treadmill wisdom and greeted me with a smile and a handshake—with one exception.

Her name was Maria, and she had been fixing my treadmill for three years in a row when I felt the machine shudder and shake and I knew it was time to make the call. I made an appointment for later that week, but the day before she was to come, Maria called and said she couldn’t make it because she had a bad cold, so was Monday okay? I agreed, happy that I could sleep in, and I did exactly that. Due to my sleep mask and earplugs and blessed be thy Tylenol PM, it was a long, luxurious sleep. When I rose, my husband was already up, judging by the empty side of the bed, so I got up, found my big, fuzzy slippers (which completed my bold ensemble of a white pair of grandma panties and a
far
too tight tank top), and shuffled down the hall past my office and past the living room to the bathroom to get my morning business started.

And a grand morning it was, with a hearty business agenda to attend to, and I called the meeting to order. As my morning thunder rumbled and my colon went bowlin’, my husband suddenly appeared in the doorway of the bathroom.

He looked angry, very angry. “What are you doing?” I sort of figured he was saying, since I still had my earplugs in and couldn’t hear a thing.

I winced and got a little offended myself. I mean,
come on,
it was
morning.
Things needed to be attended to, like my morning symphony. I didn’t bother him while
he
was having his morning time!

“Oh, sure,” I said as I waved him away with my hand. “It’s not like this is something you haven’t seen before!”

“SHUT THAT DOOR!” he seemed to be yelling, and his brow was furrowing deeper.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, lay off, would you?” I replied, starting to get angry at his suddenly offended demeanor. “We had Mexican last night! I’m sure your potty activities weren’t all that dainty, either!”

At that point, he began to get very animated and pretended to shut an imaginary door, and was saying things that I could neither read on his lips nor even hear. And damned if I was taking my earplugs out. I liked the muffled, droning silence of my private universe, and I was going to enjoy it for as long as I could. If he was going to play Miss Priss, that was his problem. I looked at him, furrowed my brow, and shook my head, and very quickly he appeared to become outraged. Frankly, I couldn’t figure it out. All of a sudden, after how many years of being married to me, and
now
he’s upset that all semblance of propriety and decorum had faded away and crumbled after our third date? If he had always been appalled at my open-door policy, why not say something to begin with? Why let it fester for years and years and years until it spurred a reaction such as this, leaving him angry and myself embarrassed? Not to mention that I’m not the only one in the house with that policy, thank you very much. So why pick on me, in the morning when I’m still groggy, quite deaf, and so full of bean-and-cheese-burrito by-products that if I was to come into contact with a heat source, I’d go up like the
Hindenburg
?

“Whatever,” I said as I expended a little extra effort, even squeezed my eyes shut, and delivered something I knew was spectacular. “
That
one’s for you, weirdo!”

The horror that attacked my husband’s face was simply unparalleled. He shook his head, and with his hands balled up into little fists, he began marching in place like a little soldier.

I shrugged and threw my hands up in the air. I had no idea what he was doing.

“Are you calling me a bathroom Nazi?” I queried, and got no response.

Then he pretended to be carrying a bag, proceeded to “open” the bag, took some pretend stuff out, and then embarked on what looked like knitting. This was even more insane than his previous antics.

“You want me to make you a hat?” I asked. “A soldier hat?
Now?
You want me to make it
now
? Did you eat something that didn’t smell quite right from the fridge or take the dog’s arthritis pill instead of your multivitamin?”

Suddenly, my husband stopped marching and began furiously pointing toward my office. Then he marched again. Then he opened his pretend bag and returned to his mime knitting.

In my office, I began to piece together, is a knitting Nazi. No. In my office is a walking knitter. No. In my office, I can walk and knit.

“In my office, I can walk on my treadmill and knit?” I guessed, to which my husband shook his head and began pretend hammering.

In my office, I can walk on the treadmill and build things? I can walk on the treadmill and work with tools? Work with tools? Using tools on the treadmill? Fix things on the treadmill? Fixing the treadmill with tools the broken treadmill awwww holy shit in my office is being fixed by a repairperson with tools while I’ve been performing my best trumpet imitation on the crapper with the door open half naked not to mention I just walked down the hallway with nothing on but a tank top, slippers, and my grandma panties holy shit good God holy shit!

If there were an Olympic event for mortified half-naked women to jump off of a toilet and slam a bathroom door shut with the might of a hurricane, I would have at least won a bronze.

At least.

Oh no, I thought. She heard everything! Maria heard everything, and even
I
didn’t hear everything. I can’t come out now. I’m going to have to stay in the bathroom until she leaves.

And then I heard a muffled, tiny
knock knock knock
on the door before it opened and my husband stuck his head in.

“Why didn’t you shut the door when I told you to?” he hissed at me in a harsh whisper.

“I didn’t know what you were talking about!” I shot back.

“I can’t believe you were prancing and farting around with someone else here like you didn’t even care!” he continued.

“Maria canceled her appointment! She’s not supposed to be here until Monday!” I replied. “How was I supposed to know she came anyway?”

“I tried to tell you,” my husband answered. “It’s not her! They sent another lady! You just kept sitting there, making those…sounds! And you didn’t stop! You just wouldn’t stop!”

“I couldn’t hear you from over there!” I hurled back. “I have my earplugs in!”

“TAKE,” he said as he raised his hands, “THOSE,” put them close to my face, “THINGS,” stuck his left hand in my right ear and plucked out a conical piece of yellow foam, “OUT!” and did the same with my left ear. “Now will you please cover yourself?” he begged, and I heard that loud and clear.

“Sure,” I said spitefully. “I have a shower cap and a washcloth. Which would you prefer?”

“I’ll go get your robe,” he said, exasperated, but it didn’t matter. There was no way I was coming out of the bathroom, even if the repair lady decided she was going to build me a whole new treadmill and it took days. Surely, she knew I was in there, and I knew I was in there, but never would the two of us meet. I had my husband bring me a can of Diet Pepsi and a Pop-Tart. I hung out in the bathtub for quite a while until I heard her toolbox shut, the front door close, and her truck rev its engine and then pull away.

Needless to say, I am especially careful about scheduling any morning appointments, lest my methane version of
The Ride of the Valkyries
makes a redux while a repairperson is quietly lurking around my house after I’ve drugged myself up with over-the-counter sedatives.

So this time, after the treadmill ground to a halt and my whooping and hollering was all done, when time to call the lady in India came, I made an afternoon appointment, and I couldn’t wait. You see, I’ve heard that treadmill wheeze, I’ve watched as the walking belt was severed, I’ve felt it jolt and shake. But this time it was different. It had never simply just stopped before, unable to be revived by putting the plug back in the socket or rebooting the console. Nope. This time, I knew it was gone for good, I had finally worked it to death, and that meant only one thing.

If it couldn’t be fixed, then a new one, a brand-new treadmill, would be delivered to my doorstep as a reward for paying one hundred dollars a year for half a decade.

I wanted the new treadmill. And not only would it be a new treadmill, it would be the new model. Have you seen them? They have built-in fans and cup holders and fluffy shock absorbers that make climbing at a 6 percent incline like walking up the cottony steps of Heaven. Some even have snack stations where your Oreos can wait until you devour them like a caveman in your primal sweat as an “I burned sixty calories!” reward. I wanted one of those, one of the treadmills that all you have to do is stand on them and your chunkosity melts away. So when I called Sears to claim my prize of a new treadmill, they told me a technician would come out to repair the problem—in four weeks.
Four weeks.
By then, I assumed, I would have gained enough weight to grow out of my big girl clothes and come home one day to find my living room full of strangers holding duffel bags as my husband explained, “You don’t have any friends here or people who like you, so I paid people standing at the bus station five dollars each to be here. This is your Fat Intervention.”

“That’s in a month!” I cried to the operator.

“A month is not four weeks, ma’am,” the operator scolded me.

Four weeks.
I looked at my old, dusty treadmill, sighed, and agreed.

I could wait for four weeks for a new treadmill. Four weeks and a brand-new one, with built-in fans and the Stairway to Heaven belt, would be in its place.

I waited patiently during those weeks. I gained weight and went up a size. Had to buy new pants. Had to buy two pairs of new pants. Had to buy a skirt. And three shirts. Getting fatter. Waiting for the treadmill. Watchin’ lots of TV. Started using safety pins to keep my shirts closed. “How fat do you plan on getting?” the worry in my husband’s eyes said to me. “Have you seen your ass? I looked at it last night and it looked like two bags of gravel hanging from your waist!”

The days of the calendar finally peeled away to the day of reckoning. The day before, I had started cleaning my office to get the piles of boxes and house overflow off the treadmill where they had accumulated for the past month while my body doubled and dimpled. I cleaned the dust off the treadmill belt, wiped it from the dead, lifeless console.

I detailed that treadmill to show the technician how good I was to it.

It took hours. Milky Ways are hard to scrape up, especially after they’ve turned white.

Then the phone rang. It was Sears. The technician couldn’t make it, so was tomorrow okay? Even though I ground my teeth (which had also gained weight) together, I wanted to appease the technician, to grease the gears, shall we say, and make him or her more disposed to granting me my precious treadmill dream.

Sure, I said, I can wait one more day.

Then the hallowed day arrived. It was yesterday. The technician was supposed to arrive between 1 and 5
P.M
.

It was 1:30.

2:30.

3:30.

4:00.

4:15.

4:37.

The phone rang.

“Yep, this is Ted,” he said. “So your treadmill is running slow, the report says.”

“NO!” I yelped, desperate at the thought that he might not fully comprehend the starkness of the situation. “It’s not slow! It’s just dead. It stopped when I was on it. And there’s been nothing since.”

Ted was silent.

“Nothing!” I cried again for emphasis.

“Anything on the console?” Ted asked. “Does it light up, beep, make any noise?”

“No,” I replied. “It’s just dead.”

Ted paused for a minute.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Do you see where the power cord connects to the treadmill?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Now, next to it, there’s a little switch,” he instructed. “Push it twice.”

“Okay, hang on,” I said with an exaggerated sigh, agitated that I had to crawl onto the treadmill to push a stupid button that I knew wouldn’t work. The treadmill was dead. There was no bringing it back. I just wanted him to do his job, get to my house, and give me a new one with the snack station.

I crawled onto the treadmill, found the button, and pushed it. Twice.

Beep.
I heard from above me.
Beep.

“I hear a
beep
!” Ted said. “That’ll do you. If it happens again, hit that circuit-breaker switch. I’m gonna get going, I’m running late.”

He hung up before I could respond, before I could even say anything. He was just gone; he never even walked inside my house; I never even had a chance to fart him out. I believed my dream was dashed.

But the very next day, as I trudged along, a spark of hope renewed my big, fancy plan.

I smelled smoke. Then I
saw
smoke, and as if I needed an excuse to jump off the treadmill, I did just that, my hop followed by a jig of happiness. This was not something pushing a little button would fix. This was
smoke.
That meant a burning
something.
So I called the lady in India. In four weeks, she said, someone would come to my house and fix it.