Best Friends, Occasional Enemies Read online

  Yet somehow, everything I said or did rubbed her the wrong way. Our troubles culminated on the day of my first story workshop, when she opened the discussion by decimating my piece. The awkward silence that followed her diatribe was impenetrable; no one in the class wanted to say anything. We were dismissed early.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I can take criticism. I’m a big girl.

  So I waited until I was in the privacy of my dorm room to cry.

  “Yeah, that wasn’t really one of the high points of college, Mom. I ended up dropping the class, remember?”

  “I do remember. However, didn’t you find out later that four other students in her advanced workshop had also dropped the class?”

  “Actually, I think it was five.”

  “Right. And dropping it wasn’t all you did. The next semester, you got into another workshop with the department head. And a year later, you graduated with honors and a novel as your award-winning thesis.”

  Yes, my mom brags about me, to me.

  Aren’t moms the best?

  “So what I think you’re saying is the cat today was an assassin sent by my disgruntled writing professor? A hired hit-cat!”

  “The point is,” she continued, “you believed in yourself. Not everyone will like you. Some people just want to take swipes at you. You need to trust yourself enough to ignore them.”

  Or at least have a mother who loves you enough to pick you up and run away.

  Holy Moly

  By Lisa

  I have a mole on my butt. I’m telling you, but I can’t bring myself to tell my dermatologist.

  Ironic, no?

  Maybe he’ll read this, give me a call, and tell me I need to come in. And I’ll get an appointment before 2023.

  I go to my dermatologist every year, for a mole checkup. He puts on a visor that magnifies his eyes to the size of brown golf balls, then he rolls them all over my body, scanning my skin for bad-news moles. So far, so good. All my moles are harmless. In fact, they’re adorable, and I think my stomach sports the Big and Little Dippers.

  During my annual mole checkups, I lie down on the padded table and yap away, so I feel less self-conscious. I’m a champ at yapping away during medical exams. At the gynecologist, I’m Chatty Cathy.

  I conduct monologues when any doctor examines me, for anything. I filibuster if I’m naked, but also if I’m not. As soon as that stethoscope goes inside my blouse, I start talking about the weather. My doctors go home at night with massive headaches from listening to me, their brains swimming with relative humidity, barometric pressure, and whether this winter will be as bad as the last.

  Cold enough for you?

  The other thing I do during medical exams is avert my eyes, especially when my gynecologist is palpating my breasts for lumps. I bet I’m not alone in this. Whether your gynecologist is male or female, when he or she is examining your breasts, I bet you avert your eyes like crazy.

  You have to. If you look at them, it’s sex.

  When I’m getting a breast exam, I avert, avert, avert. I look around the examining room as if it’s the first time I’ve been to the United States. Wow, look at that chair! And what is that, a desk? And there’s a telephone!

  Jeez, what will they think of next?

  And all the while, I’m chatting away. Cold front. Warm front. My front.

  I shift my monologue into high gear during my pap smear. As soon I get my feet in the stirrups, I’m the Weather Channel. And when that speculum shows up, I add a news and traffic report.

  But to stay on point, I’d just had my yearly mole check-up, and my dermatologist didn’t find my butt mole because you don’t have to take your underwear off for the exam. I don’t know why. Maybe they think you can’t get a bad-news mole on your butt, because it never sees the sun. Except that mine does, every time I bend over in my jeans, for that oh-so-attractive muffin-top spillage.

  Now there’s a visual.

  Plumber’s butt isn’t limited to plumbers, if you follow.

  So I have a mole and a problem. I should just call the dermatologist, but I’m not sure the mole is anything to be worried about or if it’s even new. I have no idea when it got there, much less when it took up residence. I mean, how often do you look at your own naked butt?

  Too personal?

  If you said yes, you’re new around here.

  We all ask does-this-make-my-butt-look-big when we put on a pair of jeans, but not many of us are looking at our butts, in the buff. That kind of behavior makes navel-gazing look tame.

  The safe thing to do is call the doctor and get an appointment, and I probably will, but what do I say? Put differently, do I want to be the creepy patient who insists that the doctor look at my butt?

  I didn’t know what to do, so I told Daughter Francesca, and she told me to go tell the dermatologist. But I thought she was being alarmist, so I told two of my girlfriends, and they both agreed with Francesca. In fact, one of them had a butt mole of her own, and so did her daughter.

  One needed surgery.

  Yikes.

  So I’m calling. And before I go, I’m checking the weather report.

  I have to bone up on the humidity.

  Cover Me

  By Lisa

  I don’t know who invented duvet covers, but judging from the spelling, it was the French, and I’m guessing they did it in retaliation for Pepé Le Pew.

  Oo-la-la, mon cheri.

  I don’t know when I got sucked into the duvet-cover scam, but I think it was in the eighties, a time before I had dogs, which is relevant here. Because back then, the duvet cover never needed washing, and everything was fine. But now I have to wash it all the time, as a result of sleeping with various and sundry critters, which means that I have to put it back on the bed again.

  And it’s just impossible to put a duvet cover back on a duvet, or if we stop being pretentious, a comforter.

  I don’t know how to do it in less than an hour. And last time, I got so disgusted that I gave up and just placed the duvet cover on top of the comforter, making my bed like a cheese sandwich.

  I mean, what’s the difference? The cover was covering the duvet, after all, and who’s coming after me? The gendarmerie?

  I simply can’t do it.

  Here’s my procedure: I stuff the corner of the comforter in one corner of the duvet cover, then jump up on the bed and shake the comforter down the sides and into the other corners, which is when I realize I have the comforter twisted like a double helix inside the cover. So then I have to dump the comforter out and start all over again while profanity commences, and I forget about bothering with whether the comforter is lengthwise or not, because I pretend it’s a square. Bottom line, I struggle and struggle until the comforter is shoved back inside the cover, like a baby stuffed back into its amniotic sac, a process that’s only slightly less painful than giving birth in reverse.

  If you follow.

  I’m over it. I’m done with duvet covers and the other impossible things around my house, like halogen bulbs. I have them under my kitchen cabinets, and the contractor swore to me they would be beautiful, and they are. But he never told me that it would be impossible to change the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, twenty-watt, double-pronged bulb.

  And by the way, you’re not allowed to touch it with your fingers.

  I’m not kidding.

  He told me that the oil from my fingertips will somehow rub off on the glass of the halogen bulb and cause it to spontaneously combust or perhaps cause World War III, and that I’m supposed to take a paper towel or piece of toilet paper, wrap it around the halogen bulb, then hold the wrapped bulb between my thumb and index finger and stick that assembly in the pinpoint holes in the fixture.

  Try this at home.

  The bulb will pop like a cork from the paper towel, sail through the air, land on the counter, and shatter into lethal shards. It will take four bulbs to get one inside.

  You’ll see.

  Or, if you manage to keep your grip
on the paper-and-bulb combo, try sticking the bulb’s two prongs, which are the gauge of sewing needles and just as pointy, into the tiny holes in the fixture, which are the size of a needle’s eye.

  Good luck with that. You could attach a spaceship to a docking station with greater ease.

  And the kicker is that since my fixture is under the cabinet, I have to bend backwards in order to change the bulb, so that the back of my head is resting on the counter. Then I try to stick the bulb in the fixture, like a mechanic under a car, only doing the limbo. The last time I changed a bulb, I felt like I ripped my stomach muscles. It gave new meaning to shredded abs.

  So I tried a new way, climbing onto my counter and lying down under the cabinets like I was going to sleep. I went through two bulbs and gave up, and now I’m cursing the halogen bulb and the duvet cover.

  And Pepé Le Pew.

  Mother Mary and The Retirement Village

  By Lisa

  Sooner or later, most families will deal with the question of whether an aging mom or dad should move to a retirement community. The pamphlets say it’s not an easy decision, and they never met Mother Mary.

  We begin with some background.

  As you may know, my mother lives with Brother Frank in South Beach, and lately they’ve been talking about selling their house.

  By lately, I mean the past twenty years.

  The Flying Scottolines move slowly. So slowly, in fact, that we try to sell houses in the worst recession of all time, in which the real estate prices are at an all-time low. If you need investment advice, just ask us. We hear that tech stocks are superhot.

  If Mother Mary and Brother Frank sell their house, the question becomes whether they should continue to live together, or whether Mother Mary should move to a retirement village.

  It takes a village to raise Mother Mary.

  And I wish it luck.

  Anyway, they can’t decide what to do. They love living together. He’s gay, and his gay friends love their moms, so they’re all living in a happy circle of fragrant stereotypes.

  And Frank takes wonderful care of her, taking her to all of her doctor’s appointments, grocery store runs, and occasional dinners out. There’s a special place in heaven reserved for people who take such great care of their parents, and once my brother gets there, he’ll not only get a free pass, he’ll be allowed to park anywhere.

  By the way, Mother Mary doesn’t want to live with me, because she says, “All you do is read and write.”

  To which I plead guilty.

  And though we prefer her to live with family, we all know that Frank might not always be able to take care of her, and that even though she’s in great health now, she might not always be. So we’re all confused, and I decided that we should go visit a retirement village near me in Pennsylvania, since none of us had ever seen one. In fact, we’re so old-school that we kept calling it a “nursing home,” which is the last term that applies.

  On the contrary, it’s paradise.

  We were shown through a lovely building, complete with two restaurants and a “pub,” which serves drinks in front of a big TV. We read a daily menu that included trout almandine, duck with wild rice, and baked Alaska. We toured a gym that had a Jacuzzi and an indoor pool. We saw a beautiful one-bedroom apartment with freshly painted walls, cushy wool rugs, and maid service. We got brochures on discount trips to Egypt and London. And they have a computer class, a book club, canasta, bridge, and pinochle clubs, plus yoga, aerobics, free weights, and “seated” exercise.

  So you know where this is going:

  I’m ready to move in.

  Now.

  Say the word.

  Retire me.

  I’m old enough, at least I feel old enough.

  They had me at “seated exercise.” Exercising while seated is my kind of exercise. It’s a piece a cake.

  Just do it.

  For example, I’m seated right now, watching football on TV, which I gather is “unseated exercise.” How conventional. All that moving around.

  Who needs it?

  But to stay on point, I fell in love with the place, and so did Brother Frank. It even had a huge model train set, which he began playing with immediately, pressing the button to make the toy locomotive chug through the fake forest, until it derailed, careened off the track, and vanished into some fake shrubbery.

  He walked away quickly.

  I blamed it on my mother.

  Why not? It’s the American way.

  And I bet you think you know what Mother Mary thought of the place.

  She loved it.

  Surprise!

  She’s hasn’t decided she wants to move there, and they’re going back to Florida to let it sink in. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll let you know. I’m just happy that she didn’t reject the idea outright.

  I think they had her at “maid service.”

  The Suburbs Are Killing Me

  By Francesca

  Many people believe that cities are dangerous places, and they’re not entirely wrong. There are higher crime rates, cabs speeding around corners, shaky scaffolding, fizzling car bombs, uncovered manholes, bedbugs, and pianos being delivered via deteriorating rope.

  But does that make a place unsafe?

  I’ll tell you about unsafe.

  This summer, the suburbs almost killed me.

  And not in the figurative sense. I mean the suburbs were actually, physically, beating me up.

  That may sound ridiculous, but let me give you the facts: a perfectly healthy twentysomething went home to the ’burbs and ended up in the emergency room four times.

  It began when I came home one long weekend in July. I was walking around in my backyard when CRACK! I stepped in a hole and heard my big toe break. Who had booby-trapped the yard?

  Ruby, the dog.

  Unlike municipal construction workers, dogs don’t string CAUTION tape around their worksites.

  My foot ballooned, and I agreed with my mother that I ought to get it checked out. We went to the emergency room, and I explained how I broke my toe, a story with the panache of slipping on a banana peel.

  I had yet to recognize the cunning of the suburbs lies in its ho-hum façade.

  This same weekend, a storm knocked out our power at home. With the temperatures in the nineties every day, I thought the worst of the outage was the lack of fans and air-conditioning. But it was evening, and there were no lights in the house, and I was looking for my cell phone. I spotted it on the floor, bent to get it, and WHAM! I hit my head on a shelf and knocked myself out.

  The ER nurse looked at my chart and frowned. “Your record says … you were here yesterday? Is this a related incident?”

  I felt like an idiot. No, ma’am, yesterday I stepped in a hole, today I hit my head on a shelf. Oh, the banality!

  At least when you’re mugged in the city you have a story to tell.

  I was treated for a concussion and in a few days I hobbled back to Manhattan, nursing a headache and a limp.

  But the blow to the head must have damaged my memory, because by August, I returned home for a week of staycation. One day, my mom and I joined some friends for a horseback ride. We were cantering out in the open field with the sun on our backs and the wind in our hair. My horse must’ve felt the thrill too, because he bucked, and the next thing I knew, I was feeling the wind everywhere else. Sailing through the air, I had only enough time to think, “Oh, dear,” before I ate dirt.

  Emergency room visit number three.

  The last thing Francesca saw before she ate dirt

  Thankfully, my second brain scan of the summer showed no damage to my noggin—thanks to my helmet—and a slideshow of X-rays to my back and pelvis showed no breaks. My pain was severe soft-tissue damage that would heal with time.

  The suburbs know better than to leave a mark.

  So they loaded me up with prescriptions for Vicodin and a muscle relaxant, and sent me home.

  Exactly one week later, I woke up wi
th terrible stomach pain. I went to my regular doctor, but he couldn’t pinpoint the cause. He said he would need a CAT scan of my body to rule out ailments like appendicitis. Of course, there’s only one place that provides that kind of equipment without an appointment.

  At the emergency room check-in desk, the woman looked up and smiled. “Francesca, right?”

  You wanna go, where everybody knows your name …

  Four hours later, my new friends at the ER concluded that I was experiencing a bad reaction to my pain medication.

  Popping painkillers—the quintessential suburban sin. How did I, a single twenty-four-year-old who lives in the city, become a desperate housewife? And where is my sexy, shirtless gardener?

  But the real question is, how did the cocoon of my childhood become a house of pain? Are the suburbs kicking me out? I don’t know what’s going on.

  All I know is that I need to get back to the city.

  Where it’s safe.

  The Mothership

  By Lisa

  I’m a terrible negotiator. I’m too emotional, and I can’t pretend I don’t want something I really want.

  Like George Clooney.

  But today we’re talking cars, and this is the tale of my first attempt at negotiating.

  To begin, I have an older car that I take great care of, and it’s aged better than I have, sailing past 100,000 miles without estrogen replacement.

  But around 102,000 miles, things started to go wrong, and flaxseed wasn’t helping. I knew I’d be driving long distances on book tour, and I started to worry. I called up my genius assistant Laura to ask her advice, as I do before I make any important decision, like what to eat for lunch.

  I asked her, “Laura, do you think I need a new car?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “But it’s paid off, and I love it.” And I do. It’s a big white sedan called The Mothership.

  “I know, but you have to be safe. What if it breaks down on tour?”