Survival of the
Fittest—Well,
Kind Of
I had high hopes for the May morning after my college graduation. I cleared all the food and crumbs out of my bed the night before, tucked the blankets in securely, placed a pack of smokes, a lighter, and a Pepsi on my night table, and tacked two black sheets over the bedroom window so that the sun couldn’t sneak in before I was ready to get up at three.
I forgot one thing.
It seemed, as soon as I got home, my head sank into my pillow, and my eyes rolled back in my head, something shrieked in my ear. And that demon from hell was the phone.
Impossible, I immediately thought, as my brain sourly attempted to flicker on, impossible, no one I know functions well enough at this point in the night to remember a phone number, let alone
dial
it. No one would dare to violate the sanctity of the Two O’Clock Rule, which used to be the Twelve O’Clock Rule until 75 percent of my friends decided to become unemployed and we voted to have the rule amended to two o’clock. The Two O’Clock Rule states, more or less in its entirety, that “it is against Holy Nocturnal Law to purposefully and intentionally disrupt and shatter the sleeping patterns of those who condemn and shun daylight, especially when those persons are inebriated, with a phone call or social visit. Doing so may kill those comatose with loud sound vibrations, as will the exertion of speaking.” The only exception to this rule that we could think of for making a phone call before this appointed time concerned the efforts of a troubled friend trying to make bail.
There is no one I associate myself with that would execute a phone call so repulsive in its conception, no one I know that yearns to communicate with me while I am hung over and woken suddenly because when I am, I’m nastier than when I’m drunk. There is no enemy, no ex-boyfriend, no creditor, that will dare to experience that—especially before I have my first three cigarettes and go to the bathroom. There is no sane person in this world who would dare go there—no person except my mother.
Before I even screamed “WHAT?” into the receiver, I heard her say, “For Christ’s sake, don’t tell me you’re still sleeping! I’ve been up for eight hours! Haven’t you let the dogs out yet? It’s no wonder they crap all over the floor, you keep them locked up so damned long.”
“You’re killing me, Mom.”
“Did you find a job yet?”
“I’m almost dead, Mom,” I said, wondering if my mother had swarmed on my sister, who had also graduated the day before. Then I suddenly remembered that, unlike myself, my sister possessed qualities of responsibility, ambition, and survival instincts, whereas my survival instincts consisted solely of lighting an entire pack of cigarettes end to end because I only had one match.
“Have you applied anywhere? How are you going to support yourself? Your sister already has three interviews.”
“I’m hoping I can sell some crack to grade-school kids, and then if I still don’t have enough money I’ll turn a couple of tricks,” I mumbled.
“Don’t play funny with me. Your father and I aren’t going to support you forever.”
Okay, so I had been living on the dole while I was in college, collecting my allowance of seventy dollars a week from their house every Thursday, which is when I would also steal food, because seventy bucks does not stretch far. And every Thursday, my mother would hand over the three twenties and a ten all folded together tightly, and proclaim as it touched my fingertips, “And don’t spend this at the bar buying drinks for all your friends.”
My mother was convinced that I was living as glamorously as someone who had another of Mick Jagger’s babies. “What do you do with all of that money?” she asked me one Thursday after she’d caught me stuffing my father’s Oreos into my purse.
I ran down the list. “Twenty dollars for gas, seventeen for a carton of cigarettes, and twenty dollars for dog and cat food,” I answered. “And that leaves me thirteen dollars to live on.”
“Well, if you didn’t spend all of that money on gas so you could drive to bars and on cigarettes, you might have enough money to buy your own food,” she said.
“And then you’d find me with seventy dollars clutched in my hand, swinging round and round from the ceiling fan with a noose around my neck,” I said earnestly.
I lived through this summer on the dole, trying to find a job after three o’clock during the days and trying to find drink specials at night that would stretch my thirteen dollars of mad money from Thursday to Thursday. Those were the salad days.
I didn’t find a job until the end of the summer. When I told my mother I had an interview, I knew tears of elation were swelling down her cheeks, drowning her cigarette. “Thank God,” she wept, “thank God. You have an interview for a full-time job. It is full time, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“We are so proud of you. Your sister has an interview, too. Actually, now she has five.”
I went to the interview with my résumé in hand, and I even wore a dress and panty hose with the crotch still intact. I sat on the couch in the reception area and was euphoric to find an ashtray on the front desk full of smashed butts. This is a great and holy place, I thought. People smoke here. My kind of people.
My new potential boss walked through the door, and a familiar face was he, though I couldn’t place him right away. We started the interview, and I noticed he was looking at me strangely—like he knew me, too. I looked back, and then it hit me, though not all at once:
Fourth of July, earlier that year; I am very drunk. I am going to my friend Kate’s house for a barbecue, I slam the front door open, exclaiming, “I want to set something on fire!” and throw all fifteen pounds of my purse down next to a long-haired man sitting cross-legged on the floor. It lands with a solid
THUD,
and he starts rummaging through it and exclaims, “Look at all this shit! You’ve got a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in here!” and begins to throw away what he thinks to be insignificant empty cigarette packs, little scraps of paper, and gum wrappers. I am immediately offended and frightened that he may want some of the bottle, so I scream, “Who the hell are you, little man?” kicking him as hard as I could in the leg.
And that little man is the same little man sitting across from me now.
He looks at me quizzically. “Do you know Kate?” he asks.
“I DON’T KNOW ANY KATE,” I blurt out.
“Didn’t I clean out your purse, and you—”
Oh, shit. This is the part of your life, Laurie, when your past comes back to haunt you, remember? Your mother told you this would happen. You always thought it would take the form of kinky photographs, but you never wanted to be Miss America anyway. You’ll never get off the dole and seventy-dollar Thursdays. Never, never, never. You’ll never get a job where you can smoke at your desk, you loser. Just confess.
“YES I WAS THE ONE WHO KICKED YOU AND CALLED YOU ‘LITTLE MAN.’ BUT I WAS DRUNK. IT WAS A HOLIDAY. IT REALLY WAS.”
And I got the job.
I am a receptionist.
I work every day.
I make the coffee for the Little Man.
I make more, though not much more, than seventy dollars a week.
My sister also got a job and came over to tell me the news. She makes seventy dollars in a day.
“I got the job!” she cried.
“So did I!” I cried back.
“I have my own office!” she said.
“I have a swivel chair!” I said back.
“I have my own phone extension!” she exclaimed.
“I learned how to put toner in the copier!” I exclaimed back.
“I have my own business cards!” she shouted.
I smiled. She may have had the cards, she may have had the voice mail, but there was no way she had the prime perk that I did.
“Who gives a rat’s ass?” I shouted back, about to embrace victory. “I can smoke at my desk!”
And that’s what I call survival instinct.
Extreme
Clean Sports
The box in my nana’s carport was bigger than she is and twice as wide.
“I just want to bring it inside,” she said, throwing her hands up as my sister, her husband, and I stared at the box. “You never know, with all the rotten kids running around here who might come by and steal it. And then what would I do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea what’s in this box, although by the consonants,
Q, V,
and
C
printed all over it, I sense that my mother has some connection to it.”
“Yeah,” Nana nodded. “She said the doctor said I needed it, but I don’t remember hearing that.”
Several weeks before, my mother and Nana ended up in the emergency room after they had attended a baby shower, at which Nana broke her arm.
“I don’t know what happened,” my mother later recounted when they returned from the hospital. “We were heading for the platter with the little chimichangas on it, and the next thing I know, Nana dropped like the
Lusitania.
Never even made a sound, God bless her.”
“I didn’t want to be any trouble,” Nana offered. “I thought if I was quiet, no one would notice.”
“Of course not,” my mother agreed. “Who’s going to notice an eighty-two-year-old woman with a broken arm laying on their living room floor in between the enchiladas and the spinach dip? Yeah, Ma, you looked just like a rug.”
The doctors then conducted a battery of tests on Nana to try to find out why she fell down in the first place, although none of the professionals seemed to think that her three-inch high heels might have been a contributing factor.
One of the doctors then examined Nana’s bones and asked her if she exercised. I really don’t know what he expected her to say—“Oh yes, I’m a lightweight contender on the kickboxing circuit,” or “I can bench-press more than your IQ”—but after a careful ponder, she looked at the doctor and told him, “Well, at the mall, I walk a lot in between stores. It’s a long way from Easy Spirit Shoes to Sears.”
“That doesn’t count,” he apparently answered, and told her to begin a routine on a regular basis. “You have to be more active.”
I guess that doing a load of laundry, making your bed, pulling weeds in 114-degree weather, vacuuming the entire house six times, and pounding chicken breasts into paper-thin cutlets every day isn’t considered a “regular, active routine.” My nana keeps a house cleaner than a Gap store and has the endurance of a short, compact athlete. You could easily perform a triple bypass on her kitchen counter using her pizza cutter and salad tongs without the slightest risk of infection. In my book, that’s more than active, that’s called “extreme clean sports.”
I mean, come on. The woman is eighty-two. When I’m eighty-two, all I plan on doing is sitting in a chair, spitting on people, and gumming bits of chocolate until they’re soft enough to swallow whole. Push a vacuum cleaner? I’d spit at you.
In any case, what my mother heard the doctor say was that Nana needed to get in shape, and since Nana doesn’t drive, the gym needed to come to her. And it sure did.
In the shape of an enormous brown box.
“I still don’t understand,” I said as we looked at the box in the carport. “What is it?”
“Oh, it’s one of those
things,
” Nana tried to explain. “I don’t know. I get on it, put my feet into slings, and walk without touching the ground like the astronauts.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” I answered honestly, and my sister agreed.
“I have a feeling it’s the same E-Z Glider you bought me after I had my insides ripped out as I was giving birth to your son,” she said, pointing at her husband, who just shrugged. “It was almost as good as the diamond ring I was expecting. I got on it once, fell off it once, used it to hang sweaters on and then sold it at our garage sale for seven dollars. It was a great drying rack for bras, though.”
My brother-in-law hauled the box inside, cut it open, and started putting the pieces together. Along with the skeleton of the E-Z Glider was an instructional videotape that Nana popped into the VCR.
In the video, a squat, buff little man with the tiny arms of a T. Rex was pumping away on the E-Z Glider, spouting off on how easy it was to operate.
“Just get on and go!” he proclaimed as his legs swung back and forth, and his petite squirrel arms pulled the handles in opposite directions. “Let’s get to know one another! Tell me something about yourself! Tell me why you want to enhance your life with the E-Z Glider!”
Dear God, I thought as chills ran up and down my spine. Why do I have a feeling that the E-Z Glider will be listed next to “Cause of Death” on a coroner’s report with my nana’s name on it? I could just see her hanging on for dear life as her legs swung wildly below her, her little Nana voice crying out to the video in between panicked breaths, “MY NAME IS CONNIE! I WALK AT THE MALL BUT THE DOCTOR SAID THAT WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH!! I CAN’T FIND THE OFF BUTTON!
I CAN’T FIND THE OFF BUTTON!!!!
”
On the TV, the video cut from the midget-arm man to a scene with a couple making love in the frothy waves of some beach, to keep Nana motivated, I suppose.
“That’s disgusting,” Nana said as she clucked her tongue and just stared at the screen. “This is
filthy.
I hope this isn’t part of the exercise.”
“Okay, Nana,” my brother-in-law said, tightening the last bolt. “It’s all ready.”
“I
really
don’t think this is a good idea,” I protested. “Nana, I’ll take you to the mall every day. We can walk from Easy Spirit Shoes to JCPenney and then to Sears! I just don’t feel good about you using this thing!”
“Oh, I’m going to use it, all right,” Nana said, looking it over. “I think I can fit three whole bras on here!”
Amy’s Mom,
the Fairy, and
the Hedge Clippers
I usually never answer the front door when someone rings the bell. Never.
I made it a force of habit after countless bored, middle-aged men kept coming up to the door inquiring about the aging, disintegrating 1968 Oldsmobile rotting in my carport under a thermal blanket of dust. I would explain that the car didn’t belong to me. They’d offer me money. I would explain that it belonged to my father. They would ask why he didn’t wash it. I would explain that the whole thing was a restoration project he was going to start when he retired. They would tell me that’s why they wanted it, too. I would then explain how my father entrusted to me the car’s only existing set of keys in case I needed to move it during a fire. They would ask me if the car still ran good. I would explain that I had no idea. I had placed the keys in an old jar for safekeeping, but by mistake had not realized that some silica-gel crystals at the bottom of the jar would dissolve any kind of metal in a matter of three years, which was how long it took me to open the jar and discover that the keys had turned into little metal matchsticks and that I was scared shitless to tell this to my father. Only then would the men go away.
I got tired of telling the story, so I quit answering the door.
One Saturday, something changed. I don’t know what, but the doorbell rang, and before I could stop myself, I was turning the knob and opening the door.
Through the screen door I saw two short figures, one of whom was wrapped in an explosion of pink tulle and sequins. As I stared closer and tried to understand what creature was before me, the other one spoke.
“Hi,” it said.
“Hi,” I replied hesitantly, slowly recognizing them.
“We’re from down the street,” it continued.
“I know,” I said, finally realizing what was on my front porch. They were children. Girl children. One was dressed up like a ballerina. And they were each carrying a pair of hedge clippers.
I shook my head. No one is going to believe me, I thought.
“Can we cut your bushes?” the bigger one asked. “We like cutting bushes, and we’ve been in business for two years.”
“You’ve been cutting bushes since you were two?” I asked.
“I’m
eight,
” she sighed disgustedly.
“And I’m six,” the ballerina said.
“Does your dad know that you have those?” I asked, pointing to the clippers that were as tall as the ballerina’s shoulders. “They’re kind of dangerous.”
“Oh, yeah, he knows,” the older one said. “He told us to do it.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but my bushes were just cut,” I lied. “But if they start getting crazy and growing out of control, I’ll run right down to your house to get you, Child Bush Cutters.”
“Okay,” the big one said, rather disappointed as she started to turn away.
“Out of curiosity, how much would you charge me?” I asked, not knowing that, essentially, I had a big stick in my hand and was getting ready to poke a big, mean bear with it.
“However much money you had in your purse,” the ballerina offered.
“What if,” I replied, “I only had a nickel?”
“A nickel would be fine,” the big one said. “We’re supposed to get six hundred dollars from Amy’s mom next week.”
I was confused. “Are you Amy?” I asked the ballerina.
She replied that she was Staci, and the bigger one was Casey.
“Amy’s . . . kind of our sister,” Casey said.
“Why is Amy’s mom going to give you six hundred dollars?” I probed. “Is that how much money she had in her purse when you cut her bushes?”
“No. It’s because we have custody of Amy,” Casey informed me.
“Oh,” I said, deciding not to say anything else.
“Vicki and her live-in boyfriend attacked my mom,” Staci, the six-year-old ballerina, said.
“Yeah, and Vicki drives up and down the street trying to figure out where we live,” Casey added.
I was confused again. “Who’s Vicki?” I asked.
“Amy’s mom,”
the girls said together.
“How did Vicki attack your mom if she doesn’t know where you live?” I asked.
“She didn’t attack her at home,” Casey told me. “Vicki attacked her at the courthouse. She punched my mom in the neck.”
“We were glad that Amy’s mom went to jail,” Staci added. “But it was only for one night.”
I didn’t want to know anything else about Amy, her mom, or the courthouse; I had heard enough to know that it wasn’t any of my damn business.
“Can we pet your dog?” Casey asked, peering in the house.
“Sure,” I figured, letting them in. “Keep the hedge clippers on the porch, though.”
“Cute house,” Staci said as her pink tulle swept inside and she looked around.
“Thanks,” was all I could manage to say.
A half-hour later, the girls were sitting on my couch, eating Pop-Tarts and drinking iced tea. They had filled me in on every other detail of their lives, including the facts that Casey had four dads, while Staci only had three; they had to take their dog for a walk later that day because the Realtor was coming over, and if she saw it, they would all be thrown out on their butts on the sidewalk; they were vegetarians, and did I think that maybe I could give their mom and dad some sugar because they hadn’t had any in a while for their coffee. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, also drinking iced tea, and wondering how the hell to get them out of my house.
“I have to start fixing dinner soon,” I announced.
“For us?” they said together happily.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you’d like what we’re having.”
“What are you having?” Casey asked.
“Um, just a lot of meat,” I lied. “Big pieces of meat.”
“Do you have a husband?” Staci asked.
Although I knew that she understood the concept of a “live-in” boyfriend, I lied again. “Yes, I do,” I stuttered. “And he’s a big meat eater, but I think it’s time for you girls to go home now. I’m sure your mom’s worried.”
“I bet she’s not,” Casey said.
“Bye,” Staci said as she petted the dog. “See you tomorrow!”
“Um, I work tomorrow,” I mentioned quickly.
“We’ll wait till you get home,” Casey said. Staci nodded.
I felt bad. I felt bad that they didn’t want to go home, that no one gave a shit where they were, and I felt worse when I realized that they were more than likely smarter than their parents. I felt bad as they walked out the door and down the driveway with their huge hedge clippers in both hands, but I knew better than to think that Staci and Casey were my problem to solve.
I kept thinking about them up until my live-in boyfriend came home, and when he walked through the door, I made him sit down right away.
“I’ve got to tell you this before I forget one detail,” I insisted.
“Wait,” he said, waving his hands. “I have to tell you this first.”
“But you won’t believe what happened this afternoon,” I stressed.
“You won’t believe what I just saw,” he interrupted.
“Mine’s funnier,” I insisted.
“Impossible,” he replied.
“You wish,” I shot back.
“I just saw those two little girls from down the street cutting our neighbor’s bushes with hedge clippers, and one of them was dressed up like a fairy!” he exclaimed.
We laughed, and it all seemed pretty funny until he called me at work the next day. He was home and he sounded kind of angry.
“Your fairy friends are here, and they won’t go away,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Apparently, he had been relaxing after work when the doorbell rang. He, having better sense than I, did not answer it. So the girls rang the bell more, and more, and more, and eventually just left a finger on it until the bell did nothing but ring.
“They finally stopped ringing the bell,” he continued, “and that’s when I heard them crunching around the gravel in the front yard. They’re looking for you, they’re peeking in the windows, and I’m in my underwear! I had to close the doors to all the bedrooms, and I’ve been trapped in the hallway for the last thirty minutes!”
I thought I heard, from his end, the sounds of little children screaming something at the top of their lungs. “Are they singing?” I asked him.
“That’s not singing,” my boyfriend confirmed, “those are sounds of demons being freed from hell.”
Then he held up the phone so I could hear the evil chorus of the bush-cutting fairies shrieking, “LAAAAAAY-DEEEEEEE! LAAAAAAY-DEEEEEEE! LAAAAAAY-DEEEEEEE!” over and over again, trying to seduce me out into the front yard.
“I’m sorry,” I offered when he came back on. “I won’t answer the door anymore.”
“No,
lady,
you won’t,” he snipped. “As soon as they go away, I’m putting on some pants, and I’m welding it shut!”
It’s okay, I thought to myself, I hardly ever use that door, anyway.