Best Friends, Occasional Enemies Read online

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Except it has. Twice.”

  An excellent point. One time, The Mothership died on the way to a bookstore in Connecticut, requiring the bookseller to pick me up at a truck-stop on I-95. I bet that never happened to James Patterson.

  So I needed a new car, and since I love my dealership, I went there. I thought they loved me, too, which they did, except when it came to the bottom line. They gave me a good deal on a new SUV, but a rock-bottom price on trading in The Mothership.

  I asked, “How can you do that to her? I mean, me?”

  I told you I get too emotional.

  And I added, “Plus you’re supposed to love me.”

  But they don’t. They run a business, and it’s not the love business. However, it’s my secret philosophy that all business is the love business, so I got angry. They had taken care of The Mothership for the past ten years, at top dollar, and it was worth so much more.

  Guess what I did.

  I walked out.

  I took my business elsewhere. That very day, I called up another dealership, who said, come on over, we love you, too. In fact, we love you so much that we’ll give you a better deal on your trade-in. And they did, after inspecting The Mothership and calling her “the cleanest 100,000-mile car they had ever seen,” which we are.

  I mean, it is.

  But just when I was about to say yes, my old dealership called and told me that they still loved me. I told them I was already rebounding with my new dealership, but they said they’d top the offer on The Mothership, and after much back-and-forth, I went back to my old dealership, like ex sex.

  But long story short, the day came when I was supposed to pick up my new SUV, and I felt unaccountably sad. I took final pictures of The Mothership. I stalled leaving the house. On the drive to the dealer, I called Daughter Francesca and asked her, “Wanna say good-bye to the car?”

  “Mom? You don’t sound happy.”

  “I’m not. I love this car.”

  “Aww, it’s okay. It’s probably not the car, anyway. It’s that you have such great memories in the car.”

  I considered this for a minute. “No, it’s the car.”

  By the time I reached the dealership, I was crying full bore, snot included.

  My sales guy came over, and when he saw me, his smile faded. “What’s the matter?”

  “I love my car. I don’t want to give it up.”

  “So keep it,” he said, which was the first time it even occurred to me. I know it sounds dumb, but it simply never entered my mind. I’d never bought a car without trading one in.

  “But what about the money?”

  “We’re only offering you a fraction of what the car’s worth. If I were you, I’d keep it.”

  “But I’m only one person. Why do I need two cars?”

  “They’re two different cars. The old one’s a sedan, and the new one’s an SUV.”

  I wiped my eyes. “You mean, like shoes? This is the dressy pair?”

  He looked nonplussed. “Uh, right.”

  “Really?” My heart leapt with happiness. I decided to keep The Mothership. It’s strappy sandals on wheels, if you follow.

  Thus ended my first attempt at hardball negotiations, which backfired. Having bargained for the best price on a trade-in, I couldn’t bring myself to trade anything in.

  Because I love it.

  It sits in my garage, aging happily.

  Soon we’ll both be antique.

  Priceless.

  Brush Off

  By Lisa

  I just read an article about women who pay $168 to have their bodies brushed.

  Good to know. I’d been looking for a new way to blow $168, and now I have one.

  Turns out you can go to a spa, get naked, and have your entire body brushed with hard bristles.

  A pap smear sounds like more fun to me.

  The article said that you can also buy a brush and start brushing your skin at home. One woman said it was like a “morning cup of coffee.”

  Also good to know.

  To me, the only thing like a morning cup of coffee is a morning cup of coffee. But I’ve been narrow-minded. The woman in the article brushes her skin every morning.

  I don’t even brush my hair every morning.

  Evidently, brushing the skin was an ancient ritual in Japan and Greece. I didn’t know that either, but to me, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. For example, another ancient ritual from Japan is foot-binding. And one from ancient Greece is democracy.

  Look where that got us.

  One woman in the article goes regularly to a spa for a body brushing, which she does “to get the toxins out.”

  Again, with the toxins.

  I’ve read enough about toxins. Everybody’s talking about toxins. To get rid of toxins, people go on fasts, where they don’t eat for a week, or they get colonics, which I’m not going to explain herein.

  You can figure it out. People who read are smart.

  Smart enough to avoid colonics.

  But here’s my question: What toxins do they need to get out of their bodies, and how did the toxins get inside?

  In the article, the spa owner said that her clients think, “If I eat a bunch of cheese, and eat a bunch of chocolate cake, it will go to my face or my rear, and I need to go detox.”

  Again. Wow!

  I’m no scientist, so I didn’t know that chocolate cake was toxic. I’ve eaten tons of chocolate cake in my lifetime, because it’s my favorite food, and it’s never poisoned me. Or at least I don’t think it has, but you never know. I’m keeping my eye on chocolate cake, from now on.

  Plus I never knew you needed to detox from chocolate cake. I always thought you needed to detox if you took heroin. But chocolate cake isn’t addictive.

  Oh, wait.

  Still.

  Even if it were, I didn’t realize that brushing your skin would cure you. I thought that the only thing you could do with a brush that would cure you of chocolate cake was to stick it in your mouth.

  The brush, not the cake.

  And you’ll be happy to know that the spa has a treatment they call FatGirlSlim, which includes body brushing, and another woman says she brushes her body “to stay thin.”

  Whoa.

  Who knew that brushing your skin would make you thin? I thought you had to diet and exercise to lose weight, but that’s old news, I guess. It seems a lot easier to wake up and brush my body, and I intend to start. After all, I brush my teeth every morning, why not my skin? Then I’ll be MiddleAgedSkinny.

  Finally, the article reports that women are now brushing their butts, in the hope that their cellulite will disappear.

  I could have told you that would happen. If I thought it would get rid of my cellulite, I’d buy an orbital sander.

  The spa owner insists that brushing gets rid of cellulite, but some doctor says it doesn’t. Nothing like a medical degree to kill the buzz.

  And he says that body brushing can put the skin at risk for inflammation, redness and an itchy rash.

  Clearly, he needs a spanking.

  With a brush.

  Love and Worry

  By Lisa

  I have a scientific theory that the bonds that tie mothers and daughters are love and worry, like the two strands in the double helix of some very twisty DNA.

  In other words, if I love you, I worry about you. And vice versa.

  Let me explain.

  The moment Daughter Francesca was born, I started to love and worry about her. And my worry, like my love, had no bounds. I worried if she was sleeping too much. I worried if she was sleeping too little. Same with crying, nursing, and pooping. If I was breathing, I was loving, and worrying. And my biggest worry, of course, was whether she was breathing. I’m not the only mother who has watched her baby sleeping to see if her chest goes up and down.

  I still do that.

  My theory also applies to grandmothers. Because they’re mothers,
too. Just grander.

  Mother Mary worried about Francesca, and all of our conversations back then were consumed with my worries and hers, and together we aimed our laser beams of worry on this hapless infant, which is undoubtedly why she turned out so great.

  Or guilty.

  But that’s not the point, herein.

  The point is that Francesca knows we worried about her. Uh, I mean, we loved her.

  Likewise, I know, in turn, that Mother Mary worries about me. She worries that I work too hard. She worries when I fly. She worries when I drive. She worries when I’m not at home, and even more when I am at home. For example, she worries that I could put too much food on my fork and choke.

  Let me suggest that this last worry isn’t so dumb. You’ve never seen me eat.

  I used to feel guilty that she worried about me, but now I don’t.

  She should worry about me, constantly.

  It proves she loves me.

  I realized this when I understood how much I still worried about Francesca, even though she’s living in New York, on her own. I don’t mean to make her feel guilty, and she shouldn’t. But I can’t help it.

  Motherhood has no expiration date, right?

  And what just happened is that the worry has boomeranged, so that I’m starting to worry about Mother Mary.

  Well, not starting.

  But recently my worry, and my love, has come to the fore, because of Mother Mary’s health. In particular, her nose.

  It’s blue.

  No joke. The last time she came to visit, the first thing that I noticed was that her nose had a distinctly bluish tinge. I told her so, in a nice way, and she told me to shut up.

  But still, I worried, big-time. Her circulation has never been good, due to a lifetime of smoking, but she finally quit at age 82, when she got throat cancer.

  Better late than never.

  Anyway, she beat cancer, which is remarkable enough, but she’s supposed to use oxygen at night, according to her doctor. But she won’t do it. Our conversation today on the phone went like this:

  “Ma, why won’t you use your oxygen?”

  “I don’t like the tube. It smells like popcorn.”

  “So what? Popcorn is good. Who doesn’t like popcorn?”

  “I don’t, and that’s what it smells like, so forget it.”

  “But it’s doctor’s orders, Ma.”

  “The doctor? What does he know?”

  I don’t know where to begin. “Everything?”

  Motherhood has no expiration date.

  But Mother Mary wouldn’t listen, even though I eventually raised my voice, which is another thing that mothers/daughters do to prove our love.

  If I’m yelling at you, you know I love you.

  Because I want your chest to keep going up and down, whether you’re my daughter or my mother.

  Or whether I’m your daughter or your mother.

  It’s all the same emotion, which is worry.

  Or love!

  So the next time your mother is worried about you, don’t tell her to shut up.

  And don’t feel guilty either.

  Try and understand. She can’t help it. It’s in her DNA.

  Chalk it up to mom genes.

  Getting It Straight

  By Lisa

  Women have come a long way, baby, except for one thing:

  Hair.

  By which I mean, curly or straight?

  Secretly, I have curly hair, and not wavy curly, I’m talking majorly curly. I don’t have curls, I have coils. I don’t have naturally curly hair, I have unnaturally curly hair.

  Let me take you back in time, to the Jurassic.

  By which I mean, 1955.

  When I was little, I had so many curls that once they sprouted from my head, they grew sideways, defying many natural laws, starting with gravity. Bottom line, on my shoulders sat a triangle of hair.

  I was too small to care. If anything, I thought it was good, because every adult who came up to me asked, “Where did you get that curly hair?”

  Let’s pause a moment to examine the questions we ask little kids.

  I had no idea where I got my curly hair or my blue eyes. Nor did I know the answer to the third question, which was usually, “Do you help your mommy in the kitchen?”

  I swear, this happened. There was a time in America when they asked little girls this question, all the time. Now, they’re not allowed to. It’s against federal law. Try it, and go to politically correct jail.

  Nowadays, nobody’s in the kitchen, and we’re all overweight.

  Anyway, I got older, and kids started to tease me about my hair. All the cool girls in school had straight hair, as did the girls on TV and in magazines. Also my best friend Rachel, whom I loved.

  So I discovered Dippity-Do. It was hair goop, and they still make it. I checked online and found the website, where they claim to be “the original name in gels, for over 45 years.”

  Bingo.

  I seem to remember that Dippity-Do came in pink or blue, maybe for girls or boys, but that could be my imagination. Boys didn’t use it, anyway, because they liked themselves the way they were, which was clearly insane.

  Girls used Dippity-Do by the tubful, and by ninth grade, I had mastered the art of slathering it all over my wet head, putting my hair on top of my head in a ponytail, and wrapping it around a Maxwell House coffee can, which I bobby-pinned to my scalp.

  Then I tried to sleep.

  If American girls were drowsy in math class, this was the reason. My hair didn’t even look good, because it would be bumpy on top, until it fell out. The sides would be smooth, except for telltale ridges from the coffee can. And the delicious aroma of Maxwell House.

  Still, I did not stop, as there was another product to try, which there always is, this being America, where we girls know that if we just buy X, we’ll be beautiful and our lives will change.

  I’m talking U.N.C.U.R.L. It was some kind of chemical straightener that you painted on your hair while holding your nose.

  It had great marketing, with a spy-girl on the front of the box, and if you bought it, you became “The Girl From U.N.C.U.R.L.,” which would make you feel like a cool double agent and not a miserable preteen with a triangle head.

  The stuff smelled funny but worked great.

  For two days.

  Then came blowdryers, and the rest is history. We could blow our hair straight, using an array of gels and mousses, and I still do, though it’s starting to seem like too much work. Once, on book tour, I got too tired to blowdry my hair, and my then-publicist looked at me in horror.

  “What did you do to your hair?” she asked, aghast.

  “I let it go curly,” I answered, in ninth grade again.

  She said, “But you don’t look like your author photo.”

  I blinked. That I knew already. I look nothing like my author photo. That’s the whole point of an author photo. If it looked like the author, nobody would buy the book.

  The girl in my author photo is from U.N.C.U.R.L.

  In contrast, Daughter Francesca was born with curls, lived through all the dumb questions people asked her, and always wore her curls with pride.

  “Mom, why don’t you wear your hair curly?” she said to me, the other day, and I told her this whole story. And she said, gently, “I think you should just be yourself.”

  I’m considering it, and we’ll see.

  Sometimes it takes a kid to straighten out a mom.

  The Heart of a Gambler

  By Francesca

  Recently, two friends and I decided to break free from our everyday lives and escape to Atlantic City for the weekend. None of us had ever really gambled before, but we were feeling lucky.

  But, as we wandered through the maze-like casino floor, our confidence dissipated faster than cigarette smoke. Poker was way too intimidating. Slots seemed like a hopeless long shot. Between the three of us, we know all the words to Guys and Dolls, but our collective understanding
of craps consisted of “seven is good.”

  When faced with forking over our hard-earned, first-job cash, we didn’t want to risk it.

  “I don’t think we’re cut out for this,” my friend said. “We don’t have the right personality for gambling.”

  I wondered if she was right. Am I always this risk-averse? What do I consider a worthy gamble?

  The answer came quickly.

  Love.

  When it comes to romance, I take my chances. Consider it high-stakes emotional poker. And what’s my weakness?

  Ex-boyfriends.

  I always give them a second chance, or third, or fourth to make it work. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I think, “the next time, this could really turn around.”

  I’d like to think I’m an optimist. But deep down, I might have the heart of a gambler.

  This time last year, I made my greatest romantic gamble. I had broken up with this guy years before, and we had barely spoken since, but he had remained a little ache in my heart. After attending a friend’s wedding, I was infused with enough sentimentality and champagne to fire off an email telling him how I felt.

  Turned out, he felt the same way.

  Not content to quit while I was ahead, I agreed to visit him on his military base. He’s training to be a fighter pilot, dreamy uniform included.

  See why it’s hard for me to get over him?

  I blame Tom Cruise.

  All of my friends warned me the trip was a bad idea. My mom’s take was a little different: “If you feel like you need to do it, do it. You can handle whatever happens.”

  Never bet more than you have to lose.

  So I did it. I packed more cosmetic toiletries than federally allowed and hopped two planes to see him. We spent a week catching up and generally feeling like no time had passed. It took me all of twelve hours to fall for him again.

  Before I knew it, I was all in.

  But as luck would have it, on the last day, he told me it couldn’t work.

  If you’re going to cry in a public place, an airport that serves a major military base is the place to be. Every airport employee and many passersby offered sympathetic smiles and words of comfort. The TSA employee at security even gave me a hug, though he still made me throw out my scented body lotion.