Suckers
It was 1976.
I remember the orientation in sixth grade when the boys went with the gym coach and the girls went with the school nurse into separate rooms and learned about male and female private parts and how to spawn. It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man’s head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us that becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful thing.
I remember thinking to myself, You’re damn right it had better be magic, because that’s going to be what it takes to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.
I didn’t.
I raised my hand.
“Mrs. Shimmer,” I asked the nurse cautiously, “so what kind of security napkins do
boys
wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?”
The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles.
“You haven’t been paying attention, have you?” Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. “Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self-control, but you’ll learn that soon enough.”
I was certainly hoping that my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like a pistil of a flower) didn’t get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did. Maybe that’s why Mrs. Shimmer said that girls should stay away from horseback riding when it was “their time.” I could see how a horse could really get spooked with a wild and whipping pistil coming at them, wagging like a cobra with an appetite for death.
“And stay out of the water!” she added. “No swimming, especially in oceans! You could easily pollute a public pool, and if you even set foot in the ocean, fish from miles around will pick up the scent!”
She then reiterated the perils of becoming a woman by displaying on an easel a poem about the subject, which replaced her hand-drawn diagram of a bleeding flower that bore the title “You’re in Bloom!” She had apparently penned the poem herself, which she made us read together out loud.
“Menstruation,
Fact of life;
Belts and pads
From girl to wife.
Though cramps and spotting
May keep you down,
You’re now a queen
With Kotex as crown.
Swimming’s out,
Just stay inside.
Sharks can tell,
So keep it dry!”
The whole thing, frankly, was freaking me out.
“But my mom doesn’t use a belt,” my best friend Jamie said from where she sat beside me. “Her maxi pads have a sticky strip.”
Mrs. Shimmer whipped around, and her happy-poem face melted into one of sinister, thrashing contempt.
“Practice using the belt!” she shot, her glare directed straight at the corner where Jamie and I sat on wooden benches in the PE dressing room. “Sticky strips are a fad! Nothing replaces the security of a belt! Nothing!”
I got the feeling that Mrs. Shimmer didn’t really like being a girl. She didn’t really feel like a queen when she pinned that belt into place, I could tell. It wasn’t magic to her. Not even a card trick.
None of the eleven-year-olds in that room had a look that said something magical or beautiful was about to happen to her. We wanted to ride horses, we wanted to go swimming, we wanted to use sticky strips when the time came. No one wanted to strap a slingshot around her private parts to keep the pistil restrained. Every single one of us had a look on her face that said we had all been duped.
Like we were all suckers.
It Smells Like
Doody Here
Every August, a couple of weeks before school started, my father would crank the handle on our pop-up trailer and air it out in our carport.
It was the sole signal that it was time for another Notaro family vacation, and a sign that in the coming weeks ahead, our family would return from some spot up north, traumatized, most likely injured, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
None of us, to this day, knows why my dad bought the trailer. I was ten when he came home one Saturday afternoon with it hitched to the bumper of the Country Squire station wagon, swaying and groaning as it pulled into the driveway.
“We’re going camping!” my father said.
My sisters and I nodded. Then we went back inside and fought with one another.
At first, my father would chart our camping journey, studying maps and marking lakes and campsites. Well, they really weren’t campsites but KOAs, which are basically big paved parking lots off the sides of highways, with spigots and maybe a gift shop. There really wasn’t much for me and my sisters to do for an entire week except find rocks and try to sell them to one another, or bug my mom for a quarter so we could buy Jolly Rancher candies from the gift shop and then loiter. One gift shop lady got so aggravated with our frequent visits that she wanted to talk to our mom. When we explained that Mom was lying down with her hand on her head because she got a headache when we got there on Saturday, the gift shop lady just made us promise not to come back again. So we went back to the trailer and fought with one another for the next four days.
When I was in eighth grade, my dad finally broke free from the safety of the KOAs and decided that we were experienced enough to try a real campsite, one with dirt. He had heard of a great spot in the White Mountains, near a lake. He aired out the trailer in the carport, and the next week we were on our way.
When we got there, Dad found a great spot right by the lake and parked the trailer.
“It smells like doody here,” my youngest sister said.
“It does not,” my mother snapped. “That’s the way lakes smell.”
We popped the trailer up and brought in our pillows and sleeping bags from the car. As soon as my mom brought over the last bag of food, the sky broke open, and it started to rain.
Then it started to pour.
And then it started to hail.
“It’ll stop soon,” my dad said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” my other sister said quietly.
We all looked at each other. The toilet was in the trailer, yes, but its location was not in what you would call a discreet spot. It was, in fact, under the cushion that acted as a bench on one side of the table, which also turned into a bed at night.
“Now?”
my mother said. “You have to go
now
?”
My sister nodded. My mother took the groceries off the tabletop, my father dismantled it, and the cushion was lifted.
“Go ahead,” my mother said, motioning.
“Make them go outside,” my sister insisted.
“I’m
totally
not going outside,” I said irritably. “Forget you! For sure! Dream on!”
“Everybody out,” my father demanded, and we stood in the downpour to give my sister some privacy.
“This is getting ridiculous!” my mother said after ten minutes, as she knocked on the door, her cigarette wet and broken in half. “All right already!”
My sister opened the door and returned to her spot on one of the beds, where she wasn’t doing anything but reading
People
magazine.
After standing in four inches of water and mud, our shoes were soaked through, and my mom wouldn’t let us in the trailer until we took them off.
“From now on,” she said, pointing a finger at all of us, “if you have to go to the bathroom, hold up a towel around you!”
My father gathered up all of our wet shoes from outside and took our small hibachi out under a tree. After lighting a fire and watching it carefully, he placed our sneakers on the grill until he was satisfied they were dry. He was getting ready to bring the shoes back into the trailer when he realized the soles had melted so thoroughly that they had become one with the hibachi. He entered the trailer with the sentence, “I hope you guys brought a lot of socks.”
For the next six days, we were confined to the trailer while the rain continued to pour down around us in sheets, all of us shoeless except for my sister. She read her
People
magazine over and over while my remaining sister and I fought. My father stared out the window looking at the rain, and my mother lay on the bed with her hand over her head.
It was on that sixth day that my mother begged my father to get us out of there. “I can’t stand it anymore!” she pleaded. “I took the last of the Tylenol this morning!”
My father explained that we were in the mountains, on an inclined dirt road that had by now seen a foot of rain. It was impossible, he said from behind the held-up towel; it would be too dangerous.
“Then
you
just go see how the roads are,” she said adamantly. “I’m also out of cigarettes, you know!”
My father got the keys to the Country Squire and headed out. “Get the kids a board game before I kill us all!” she shouted as he pulled away.
“And this week’s
People
!” my sister yelled.
He returned twenty minutes later, empty-handed and frustrated. The road was too muddy, he said. We’d just have to wait it out.
Later that night, as I was sleeping on the toilet bed, my head over the bowl, I was awakened by a jostle. As I sat up, I felt the trailer move slightly, then move again. Another, more violent, jolt was the one that woke the rest of my family.
“What is it?” my sister yelled.
“It smells like doody!” my other sister cried.
Another bump. I started to get really scared. Oh my god, it’s Bigfoot, I thought, sucking myself into a white, blinding panic. “It is so totally Bigfoot!”
We heard movement around the trailer. To the right. To the left. In front. In back.
“Dad?” my youngest sister asked. “Is a bear going to eat us?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s a bear!” my mother yelled. “It’s a bear! Run!”
“We don’t have any shoes!” my youngest sister screamed.
“It’s Sasquatch!” I heard myself yell. “It’s the yeti! Talk to it softly, and we’ll be okay!”
“Whoever has my
People
magazine,” my other sister said sharply, “I did not give you my permission to read it!”
My father, in the midst of the chaos, had made it to the trailer door and was peeking out the window. We didn’t notice as he opened the door and stood there, watching.
Cows. Lots and lots of cows. A herd of them surrounded the trailer as they moved through the campsite and on to the other side of the lake, bumping into our trailer as they clumsily made their way along. We, apparently, had camped in their pasture. It did smell like doody.
My dad paid a guy with a Chevy truck thirty bucks and the
People
magazine to tow us out the next morning to the main road and to give my mom a cigarette.
We all had nightmares for weeks.
The next year, when he cranked up the trailer, my mom came out of the house, shot him a look, then lay down on her bed with her hand on her head.
He sold it the following week.
A Morsel from
the Garden of Eden
The basket had been passed, and there was no way out of it.
It was my turn.
Ever since my grandfather, Pop Pop, had gotten sick, my mother, two sisters, and an uncle all had our turns. We worked in shifts, and duty generally called us in once a week.
I never knew what my assignment with Pop Pop was until I got to his and Nana’s house. It was like flipping a coin, though usually it consisted of one of three things: taking Pop Pop to the bank, to the bakery, or, the most feared of all the duties, to the grocery store.
Pop Pop had been on medication to relieve some of the pain that the cancer had caused, which worked really well; in fact it worked so well that I briefly thought of “borrowing” some. In turn, this mother of all painkillers had made him slightly dizzy and more forgetful than usual, so his nurses assured us that it was in his best interest not to drive. Actually, they assured us that it was in the general population of Phoenix’s best interest that he not so much as commandeer a shopping cart on anything that could even slightly be considered pavement.
So here and there, whenever he expressed a need to go somewhere, he would make Nana call one of us up and arrange to take him to his destination. He usually expressed his need by yelling that he had become “a caged animal” and that he felt he was an “inmate in his own home.” This, coupled with the fact that he’d insisted for fifty years that Nana never needed to learn how to drive, is how we began taking turns, although he did begin spreading the rumor that he was going to get himself an electric wheelchair so he could take himself to Safeway—which was three miles away and a quick hop over an interstate from his house.
It was revealed that Pop Pop was ignoring his nurses’ advice and had been driving himself around the neighborhood to run his errands. We discovered this when my younger sister went to visit and saw that one of the posts supporting the green carport was now standing at a sixty-degree angle, in addition to the suspicion that one side of his car had been visibly sideswiped by something big and wooden and green. When confronted with the evidence, Pop Pop insisted with a huge grin that he was simply “reparking” his car and hadn’t even driven out into the street, although Nana stood behind him and continually rolled her eyes.
In any case, taking Pop Pop to the grocery store was always the least desirable turn, especially since that’s where his area of expertise bloomed. He had been a grocer since the days of the Depression, and felt that he had learned a couple of things in his time, which he wanted to pass on to the next generation of grocers. This included sometimes verbally assaulting butchers, cashiers, bakers, and general managers, though he usually left the bag boys alone. Everyone in every store knew him by his name and knew him on sight—evident by the way they suddenly disappeared upon catching a glimpse of him shuffling down the aisles.
When I got to my grandparents’ house on the day of my turn, Pop Pop already had his coupons and his strategy laid out. We were going, undoubtedly, to the grocery store.
As he gathered his store advertisements and got his cane, he looked at me and disgustedly shook his head.
“You know, Laur,” he said, grimacing, “I’ve been praying to God for three days for something to feed the birds, and not one time this week have I found anything on the day-old racks. What am I going to do? What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t you bring any old bread home, Nick!” my Nana shouted from the kitchen. “I just got rid of all the goddamned ants in the backyard from the last moldy loaf you spread around out there.”
“Ah, Christ,” Pop Pop said to me, shaking his head again, “I am a caged animal. A goddamned caged animal in my own house.”
I decided not to say anything.
“I hope we find some old bread,” he continued as I held his cane and helped him into the car. “Sometimes they throw the old bread away.”
Oh, no. I was having no part of this. No sir.
“You can forget it, Pop, I’m not getting in the Dumpster,” I said firmly. “I don’t care if the voice of the Lord was commanding me from a fiery Hefty bag, it’s not going to happen.”
Pop Pop looked at me in complete disgust. “You don’t have to get in,” he asserted. “Most of the time you don’t have to dig that much; they put the bread right on top.”
I hoped that I was doing a poor job at evaluating the situation as I drove him to Safeway and followed his directions to pull into the loading docks behind the store, where a Boar’s Head truck was already parked and being unloaded.
“There’s the Dumpster,” Pop Pop said, pointing. “Just stop right here.”
I stopped the car and didn’t even have time to turn off the engine when I heard Pop Pop gasp. I looked up. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
It was Pop Pop’s Holy Grail.
His pot of gold.
A morsel from the Garden of Eden.
It was a shopping cart, directly in front of us as if God had placed it there himself, nearly toppling over with bakery goods.
I will swear on anything that the eighty-two-year-old man in the seat next to me, who was using a cane merely nine minutes before, got out of that car and ran to the cart.
He dragged it back to the car, flung open the back door, and began shoveling the equivalent of a Hostess warehouse into my backseat.
There were brownies and cheesecakes and jelly rolls. There were loaves of bread and poppy-seed rolls and hot dog buns. There were Oreo layer cakes and lemon loaves and something that had peanut butter in it.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” Pop Pop kept saying. “Most of this stuff is only one day past code! One day!”
I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t seen it firsthand. After eighty-two years, he had finally done it.
Pop Pop had won the lottery.
The backseat was nearly full when I heard a loud beeping sound, and Pop Pop began screaming.
“Oh my God! Laurie! The Boar’s Head truck! The Boar’s Head truck!”
And then I saw it; the big red-and-black truck with the pig’s head on the side was backing up quickly, and was in danger of very quickly driving over my car.
What else could I do? I hit the gas. I had to. If I get in one more car accident, my insurance gets revoked. I had only driven a couple of feet, only enough to escape danger. But I guess a couple of feet was all it took to drag my grandfather—who despite the mortal severity of the situation could not interrupt his heist for two to three seconds—almost to the ground.
I gasped when I saw him get knocked over by the car, but he got right back up and tossed another cheesecake into the backseat.
“Are you all right?” I screamed at him.
“I can’t stop, gotta keep loading,” he assured me. “Gotta keep loading!”
My mom was going to kill me when I told her that I had run Pop Pop over with the car. It would prove how irresponsible I was. I couldn’t even take an old man to Safeway without hurting him and giving him road rash.
Finally, when the entire backseat was so full that it was filled up nearly to the roof, Pop Pop got back in the car with a look of a man twenty years younger.
“See?” he affirmed. “I told you! I told you! I prayed to God for bread, and he answered my prayers!”
“But I ran you over and almost killed you because of the bread,” I replied.
“Eh,” he sighed, “what the hell’s a little dirt?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I agreed, “but you better start praying again, and you better pray harder this time. Because when Nana sees what’s in the backseat, she’s going to kick your ass.”
He just looked at me and laughed.