Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim Read online

  It was unappetizing, to say the least.

  I frowned and misted twice.

  Day 6: Holy! These babies are twice as big as they were yesterday and, more frightening, they’ve multiplied. I’ve got what looks like a million of them. It’s a mushroom metropolis. Their roots are forming a subway system.

  And did you know the mushroom seeds aren’t called seeds, but “spawn”? That’s kind of concerning, right? I needed this information six days ago.

  Nervous, I checked the website, where the end-result photos show a much more reasonable number of caps, ten to fifteen, so I can only assume these wicked mushrooms eat their young. That, or it’s a Lord of the Flies scenario where only the strong survive.

  Lord of the Fungi.

  Or maybe I just have an overachieving fungus.

  I’m almost proud.

  Day 6½: I take that back—I’m disturbed. They’re bigger than they were this morning. And by the way, I’m only getting my 4 P.M. coffee.

  Day 7: They’re taking over! This rapid growth is out of control. I go out to walk my dog and by the time I come back, they’re a little bit larger. I find myself creeping over to the mushroom garden several times a day and peering at it with suspicion, inspecting it for signs of movement.

  What kind of space plant have I allowed into my home?

  Any minute I’m going to hear, “Feed me, Seymour!”

  I risked allowing the creature near my face when I put my ear up to it to see if I could hear it crackling, popping, grumbling with growth. But I heard nothing.

  It’s not so foolish as that.

  I imagined the mushroom tentacles advancing when my back is turned, but just when I look at it, they freeze again.

  Heedless of my better judgment, I continue to water it. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein.

  Day 8: I learned something today: A fungus is not a plant. I should say relearned, because I’m sure my high school biology teacher taught this, but all I remember of him is that he was very young, very nervous, and completely abused by us. He was only at our school for one year, after which I’m afraid we drove him to some terrible fate.

  Like law school.

  Somehow, nine years and a Harvard degree later, my command of science remains at, “Is it a plant, ’er is it a critter?”

  With apologies to any botany geeks I’ve been annoying thus far, I now know that a mushroom is neither plant nor critter, but it is a living organism.

  I find this very confusing. I was just getting used to the concept that yogurt has “live active cultures” in it.

  Calm down, yogurt, I’m not even that live active most days.

  But it’s true: Fungi lack chlorophyll to feed themselves through photosynthesis, so they’re classified in a separate kingdom from green plants. But fungi can’t ingest their food like animals either. Instead, they absorb it.

  These freaks get their own kingdom!

  But now it all makes sense—the “spawn,” the sneaky, creeping growth.

  Do you think it knows I’m planning to “harvest” it?

  Day 9: Either the mushrooms are growing more beautiful, or I’m developing Stockholm Syndrome, but somehow I have had a change of heart. Checking on the mushrooms is now my favorite activity of the day.

  “My pretties.”

  Now that they’re larger, it’s easier to see how amazing they are. All the caps have a cute little dimple at the top where they still need to fill out. Their curved necks are bedecked with a fan of pleats, as if each one is wearing an Elizabethan collar. Some still carry the blue cast of their babyhood, while others are maturing to a warm brown.

  I’m this close to naming them.

  Day 10: My little babies are all grown-up! They grow up so fast. I’m glad I kept this mushroom baby diary for them to read later. I’ll edit out the parts where I called them spawn.

  Now I adore them. Every morning, I touch their spongy heads, and it feels like a wet doggie nose.

  Wait, what?

  I have to chop them, cook them, and eat them?

  Don’t talk like that.

  Not in front of the mushrooms.

  I would never have cut it in 4-H.

  These are beautiful, a miracle of nature on my kitchen counter. Buy these for your kids, or pretend you have kids and buy these for yourself.

  Just don’t give them names.

  Mythical Beastie

  By Lisa

  I know I’ve written about my feet before, but changes are afoot.

  Sorry.

  To begin, my feet barely look human anymore. My soles have thickened to an elephant’s hide, and my toenails have turned to horn, curved and yellowing.

  I don’t have feet, I have hooves.

  Bottom line, I’m becoming a centaur. Or maybe a Minotaur. Either way, I’m not getting remarried anytime soon.

  Unless Thing Three is the Old Spice guy.

  To top it off, my amazing disappearing little toenail is now long gone. I guess it was vestigial. I think it dissolved into my sock when I was fifty-one or so, but I forget.

  Turns out that memory is vestigial, too.

  I suppose a pedicure would solve these foot problems, but I generally ignore them. I don’t want to inflict my feet on a salon, which probably lacks the requisite nuclear weaponry.

  But now there’s something about my feet that I can’t ignore.

  First, a warning.

  The following may be an overshare, but why stop now? Overshare is my middle name. Besides, how can sharing too much ever be wrong? It’s the season of giving, so here goes:

  I have a bunion.

  You know what that is? The Internet will give you the medical details, but all I know is that a few years ago, that big bone on the side of my foot started growing sideways, completing my transformation into a gargoyle.

  Nobody told me that in my middle age, I would turn into something from the Middle Ages.

  But as you know, I try to look on the bright side. For example, I’ll be more stable on a windy day, now that my foot is sprouting a foot. I’ll be harder to knock over now, though I bet nobody will try. They’d be afraid I’d bite them with my pointy teeth or fly at them on leathery wings.

  I’m cranky, for a mythical beast. After all, I’m a menopausal mythical beast.

  But to stick to the story, I ignored my bunion for as long as I could, which means until all my fancy shoes couldn’t fit anymore. I’m lucky enough to have quite a few pairs of nice shoes, which I save for signings and dates.

  Okay, mostly for signings.

  But a bunion renders all those great shoes unwearable. In other words, a peep toe is sexy. A peep bunion is not.

  Plus it’s straight-up unfair of your body to be growing something new, at this point in life. Middle age is already undignified enough, with waistlines widening willy-nilly and chins sprouting hair, like bamboo for the face. Now, my bones are stretching my skin.

  Which is my fat’s job.

  Honestly, if I get stretch marks, I want it to be from chocolate cake.

  So I went to the doctor’s for my annual exam, and he took one look at my right foot, frowning. “You can’t keep ignoring this bunion,” he said, gently.

  “I can’t?” I asked, then I corrected myself. “I agree, I can’t. But why?” I didn’t explain that I ignore everything bad, in the hope that it will go away.

  This works, but only with husbands.

  The doctor continued, “If you deal with it now, you can avoid general anesthesia. You can get a local block.”

  “You mean I need surgery?”

  “Yes.” The doctor pointed to my second toe. “See how your big toe is shifting over and taking up the room where your second toe should be? If you don’t fix this, in time, your second toe will be on top of your big toe. That’s called hammertoe.”

  I tried not to vomit in my mouth.

  “This may run in your family,” said the doctor.

  Then I remembered that all of my aunts wore bedroom slippers everywhere, eve
n to weddings. One aunt even had dress flip-flops, for funerals.

  The Flying Scottolines keep it classy.

  So by the time you read this, I should have gone under the knife and will have to stay off my feet for seven weeks.

  But I’m looking on the bright side. I have a new book to write and I like sitting.

  God willing, I’m going to earn some stretch marks.

  Blizzard of Oz

  By Lisa

  I’ve been nesting like crazy lately, which is funny considering that I have no eggs left.

  I can’t explain this, but I’m betting that I’m not the only Mama Bird who looked around her empty nest and realized that it needed curtains.

  At first I dismissed the idea. I thought it made no sense, timing-wise. I’ve had no curtains, on any of the windows, for the past twenty years. Why fix up the house now that it was empty? The horse had not only left the barn, she had moved to New York.

  Then I realized that I still lived here, and I still count, even though no one is peeping inside my windows to see me, except a bird or two, and a really desperate squirrel.

  But I have bats in the shutters outside my bedroom window, and that’s reason enough to get curtains. The bats aren’t looking at me, but I’m looking at them, and it’s spooky. I see them when they fly, squeaking, at night, like the winged monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

  I’m the wicked witch, of course. She used to terrify me when I was little, but now I relate. It’s hard to say when in life we stop identifying with Dorothy and start identifying with the witch, but my guess is:

  Now.

  Sometimes I stand at the window and call to the bats, “Now, fly! Fly!”

  Also the witch was a shoe fan, like me. She even says to the monkey, “Take special care of those ruby slippers! I want those most of all!”

  The Wizard of Oz was a movie about two women fighting over a pair of pumps.

  This happens every day at a Nordstrom’s shoe sale, but goes unremarked.

  You may remember that my curtain renaissance began after the decorating debacle of the family room, where the yellow curtains came dotted with black spots that looked like pre-toxic mold. In the end, the company agreed the fabric was defective, and I learned to love again. In fact, I found a new curtain maker who came over, measured my windows, and is already on the case. But when I imagined the nice, new curtains against the scuffy walls, I realized that the walls needed painting. And then I looked again and realized that nobody could paint anything with the room so messy, so I started cleaning.

  This is why you should never actually look around your house.

  You see things.

  And I realized that if I wanted new curtains, I had to clean my entire house, and I couldn’t clean after my bunion surgery, so I got busy.

  Also, if I died in surgery, at least my house would be clean. Everybody would say “she kept a nice house,” when they came over after the funeral. My tombstone could read, SHE REALLY WASN’T THAT MUCH OF A PIG.

  So I started by cleaning my family room, then moved on to my office, my bedroom, and my laundry room. Yes, even the laundry room, where gravity is the hamper.

  I picked up all the dirty clothes and even went through all the sheets falling out of the shelves. The sheets don’t fit on the shelves because there are way too many, leftover from beds of bygone days, and even past marriages. You know you don’t clean enough when you find ex-sheets on the shelves.

  I wanted to burn them, but settled for throwing them away.

  The laundry-room shelves are a mess because nobody can fold a fitted sheet, not even Tom Cruise. Folding a fitted sheet is Mission Impossible, so I always roll them up into a ball and stuff them onto the shelf. This time I tried to make smaller balls, in case my mourners came upstairs.

  Then I cleaned my bedroom closet.

  It took me eight hours of sorting through old shirts and sweaters, and even skirts. I can’t remember the last time I wore a skirt. Soon, skirts will become extinct, like slips and sanitary belts.

  Moment of silence for the sanitary belt.

  Even though it wasn’t sanitary.

  Finally, I sorted the filthy mound of shoes at the bottom of my closet, setting aside muddy clogs and ancient Frye boots until I found a pair of black pumps I’d been looking for for ten years.

  Not exactly the ruby slippers, but close enough.

  And wearable when I get my new feet.

  Fly!

  Mother Mary and the MRI

  By Lisa

  Mother Mary tells me on the phone that they’re building giant red condominiums across the street from her house.

  “Really?” I ask her, confused. Her street is a small, quiet backstreet, the last of its kind in South Beach.

  “Yes,” she answers. “I can see it outside the window. New red condos. They’re ugly.”

  “But there are houses there. What about the houses? Did they tear them down?”

  “I don’t see them.”

  This makes no sense. “And the condos are red?”

  “Bright red.”

  I don’t like the sound of this, and suddenly I lose my sense of humor. “Put Frank on the phone, okay?”

  So she does, and my brother picks up. “I know, right?” he says, and it’s all he has to say, because he sounds worried, too.

  “There aren’t really condos, are there?” I ask.

  “No, and she thinks everything’s red.”

  “You mean she’s seeing red? Literally?”

  “Yes.”

  It would be funny, if my sense of humor came back. Mother Mary has been seeing red her whole life.

  So we’re both worried she had some kind of ministroke, though I have no idea what kind of stroke causes you to see red condos. If I had a stroke, I’d see Bradley Cooper. And he can be whatever color he likes, because he’s the new George Clooney.

  So Frank takes Mother Mary to the doctor, who finds nothing wrong but schedules her for an MRI, and we know right away that this is a problem.

  Mother Mary hates MRIs.

  First, she hates small spaces. Second, she hates hospitals. Third, she hates most things.

  She hasn’t had an MRI for years, when she was getting radiation for throat cancer. She beat the cancer, though it left her with some throat issues, but she still hated the trips to the hospital, and I don’t really blame her, but I get her on the phone.

  “Mom, you have to get an MRI. We have to see if something’s wrong with you.”

  “No.”

  “You have to go. It’s doctor’s orders.” Never mind that it was doctor’s orders to use her oxygen, which she also ignored, and I’m wondering if this is why she’s seeing red. “Please go, for me.”

  “No.”

  “What about for Frank?”

  “Maybe,” she answers, then laughs.

  Long story short, my brother convinces her to get the MRI, and I call to see how it went.

  Mother Mary answers, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, alarmed. “What happened?”

  “I said, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I have no idea if this means something is really wrong, because nothing is drama-free with Mother Mary, especially not drama. “Put Frank on, okay?”

  So she does, and he tells me that she didn’t have the MRI at all, because of what happened.

  Drama. To wit:

  He accompanies her into the MRI room while they slide her into the MRI machine. She lies down, and they give her a rubber ball to squeeze if she gets panicky. Frank hears her clear her throat a few times, then all of a sudden he sees the rubber ball fly across the room. The MRI technician doesn’t see this. Frank starts yelling, and they slide her out of the machine, where she was choking from fluid that blocked her throat.

  “What fluid?” I ask him, horrified.

  “Since the radiation, when she lies down too long, fluid builds up in her throat.”

  “What about when she sleeps?”


  “She moves around then, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t she squeeze the ball, like they told her?”

  “She did, but her grip wasn’t strong enough for it to register. That’s why she threw it.”

  I picture the scene, shaken. “So did she really almost choke?”

  “Honestly, yes.”

  I feel awful for her. “She must have been terrified.”

  “To be real, she was pissed.” Frank chuckles. “I think she was trying to throw the ball at the technician.”

  That sounds like her. “So now what?”

  “They said she needs an upright MRI.”

  “Think she’ll go?”

  “We’ll make her.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll do what we always do,” Frank answers. “You nag her, and I’ll use my feminine wiles.”

  I smile.

  I love my brother, because he never loses his sense of humor, and for many other reasons.

  God bless the caregivers, especially Mother Mary’s.

  Grandmother Whisperer

  By Francesca

  They call me The Grandmother Whisperer.

  Grandmothers are complicated, sensitive creatures. You can’t “break” a grandmother’s spirit, nor should you try to. That spirit has been around two, three, maybe four times as long as yours has.

  And Mother Mary is no exception.

  Every whisperer has a stunt to show the true extent of his or her influence. Cesar Milan will bring an unleashed pit bull to calm an aggressive Chihuahua; Buck Brannaman will get a wild mustang to lie down on its side. And I will tell you how I entered the ring, or “kitchen,” with my untamed grandmother, and, using the following gentle guidelines, took over the cooking of Eggplant Parmesan.

  Mother Mary was recently staying with us while she had work done to her house in Miami, and my mom had been begging her to make us her famous Eggplant Parmesan.

  “C’mon Ma, if you’re here, we’re gonna put you to work!” Mom joked.

  My grandmother flung an arm out to swat her.

  It’s attitudes like this that get people hurt.

  Rule Number 1 of grandmother husbandry: Appeal to their innate sense of hierarchy.