Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim Page 6

  But last week, when the temperature hit 100 degrees, I eyed my pool and told myself it was time to conquer my fear.

  Putting on a bathing suit.

  Just kidding.

  I have no problem putting on a bathing suit. After all, no one else is around, and the dogs think I look superhot. They have great taste, even if they think cat poop is a meal.

  So I went into the pool, stood in the shallow end, and decided to swim a lap. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, as I lack gills, but I’d seen Penny do it a bunch of times. So I started paddling, my head above water, and all four paws flailing wildly.

  Dear reader, I made it to the side. Gasping. Panting. Exhausted. But alive. Which only encouraged me to get Mother Mary into the act. Yes, she’s still here, and no, I didn’t use her for a raft.

  It began with, “Ma, wanna come in the pool?”

  And ended with “please please please.”

  But when the temperature hit 104 degrees and the power went out, including the air-conditioning, my nagging did the trick. She came to the pool with me and put her feet in. We sat on the side, me in a bathing suit and her in her tank top and shorts. Our feet dangled in the water, and she wears a size five-and-a-half shoe, which means that there are kittens with bigger feet.

  “Feel cool?” I asked her.

  “No. Feels wet.”

  “I paid extra for wet,” I told her. “And look, no sharks.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  In my last story about Mother Mary, the headline read, MOTHER MARY, WHY SO CONTRARY? I don’t write the headlines, but I had to admit it was kinda true. “Mom, you say ‘no’ a lot, you know that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  I thought about it then, looking at her tiny feet under the clear water. She’s come a long way. She was the youngest of nineteen children and had a mother who wanted her to drop out of high school, go to work, and bring home her salary. But she insisted on graduating. In short, she said no.

  And she still does.

  “Ma, you don’t have to go in the pool if you don’t want to.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  So I helped her to her feet and put her into her sneakers, and we walked to the house, hand in hand. “Swimming is overrated, anyway,” I told her. “I know, I tried it.”

  This is as close to swimming as Mother Mary gets.

  “Don’t do it again, without me there.”

  “I won’t,” I promised her. “You want salmon for dinner?”

  “No,” she said, and we went inside.

  The Facts of Life

  By Lisa

  You may not know that you can see a movie in closed-captioning, but I do, and it’s all because of Mother Mary.

  That it was the wrong movie to see in closed-captioning is entirely my fault.

  We begin when I realize that she’s getting bored. To be honest, I don’t realize it at all until she tells me so, one day.

  “I’m bored,” she says.

  This happens to be a pet peeve of mine, as I believe people have an obligation to busy their own minds, and whenever anybody says I’m bored, I always think:

  Read a book.

  Sing a song.

  Go to the movies.

  But I love my mother, and she has a good excuse for being bored, at eighty-seven. She can’t read because of her eyes, and she can’t sing because of her throat. That leaves one thing. “Wanna go to the movies?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she says.

  I blink, surprised. “Yes? But you always say no.”

  “I know, but I heard from Cousin Nana that you wrote about it. So now I’m saying yes, for spite.”

  I take her to Crazy, Stupid, Love because she thinks Steve Carrell is cute, and she has a blast. She smiles the whole time, rapt, at the screen, her hands held curiously in front of her, in a happy little ball. Her tiny white head is the brightest spot in the theater, and her feet don’t touch the floor.

  But she’s the only one laughing at the wrong times.

  I look over, puzzled. She has both of her hearing aids in, but she still can’t hear. When we leave, I say, “Did you have fun?”

  “I loved it! Let’s go again.”

  “Okay, maybe next weekend.”

  “Can’t we go tomorrow night?” She turns to me, hopeful as a toddler in a gift shop, and I can deny her nothing when she looks at me that way, which is never.

  “Of course.”

  “I want to see that movie in the preview, with Justin Timberlake. He’s cute.”

  “You mean Friends with Benefits?”

  “That’s the one!”

  I hesitate. I don’t know if she knows what the phrase means. Someday I’ll tell her the facts of life. Maybe when she’s older. “Ma, do you know what that movie’s about?”

  “Of course, they’re shacking up.”

  So there you have it.

  I go online and notice that Friends with Benefits is playing the very next night, at ten o’clock, in closed-captioning.

  Dirty movies for the hearing-impaired.

  Yay!

  So we find ourselves in the theater, with six other people, all young couples, sitting around us. They’re not there for the closed-captioning, they’re there to make out, and they dig in, even before the movie starts. And there we are, mother and daughter, at the center of their R-rated action, like the calm eye of a sex hurricane.

  In other words, we’re seeing Friends with Benefits, with friends with benefits.

  Mother Mary notices none of this. She awaits Justin Timberlake.

  Actually, so do I.

  The movie begins, and the captions come on, but they’re not like closed-captioning on TV, which is small and at the bottom of the screen. They’re mile-high letters that take up almost the entire screen and they’re translucent, so you actually see through them to watch the movie.

  I’m trying to get used to it when the PROFANITY begins, in HUGE LETTERS.

  I can’t print them herein, but this movie has at least twenty F-WORDS in the first five minutes, evidence of its screenwriters showing they’re down with the demographic, except that the demographic is playing tongue hockey and the only people watching the movie are the postmenopausal.

  And the postpostmenopausal.

  And just when I’m getting used to that, the sex scenes begin, and I get to read MY NIPPLES ARE SENSITIVE, complete with nipples.

  With my mother.

  But she watches the movie with the same smile as the night before, her hands clutched in the same little ball, and she sees plenty of Justin Timberlake, even his naked butt. The screen reads TOUCH MY ASS.

  “Great movie!” she says, afterwards.

  “Did the captions help?”

  “They were great!”

  But she looks too happy to be talking about the captions.

  THE END.

  Southern Exposure

  By Francesca

  When I invited my stepsister up to the city to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday, I thought I could show her all that New York has to offer—fantastic shopping, fine dining, and of course, the sights.

  I didn’t mean for us to get an eyeful.

  We were walking our dogs after a great dinner, when a man stepped out from between two parked cars and faced us. Let’s just say, he was not dressed for the weather.

  “EW!” I shouted at full volume. “GET AWAY! YOU’RE DISGUSTING. BACK OFF BEFORE I MACE YOUR…”

  You get the idea.

  So did he. He zipped up and zipped out.

  “Eyyucck!” I tried to physically shake the nasty image from my mind. “That makes me so mad. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  My innocent birthday girl was still trying to process the full-frontal affront. “Was he, was that his…?”

  “Yes, and yes. Gross.”

  “You reacted so fast. I didn’t even see it at first!”

  “I know that guy.”

  “You know him?” Her eyes widened.

  “N
o, I mean, he’s flashed me before.”

  In fact, this was the third time I had seen more than I wanted to of this un-gentleman. Each time, I tried to respond in a way that would convey my readiness to wake everyone in the five boroughs if he took one more step toward me. And I wasn’t kidding about the mace.

  One time, after he flashed me and bolted, I spotted him again minutes later one block over, but this time, he didn’t see me. I yelled at him from across the street, “I recognize you! Get out of here before I call the police!”

  At least I think it was him.

  It’s harder to tell with his pants up.

  So I’m an old pro with the perverts. Not only was this not my first time being flashed, this guy wasn’t even my first flasher. The first one happened outside of an ultra-chic, expensive restaurant in my neighborhood. This place is so exclusive it has an unlisted number; you have to physically stop in and grovel to get a reservation. Unless, of course, you’re one of the celebrities who frequent the it-spot—I’ve seen stars like Beyoncé, Madonna, Hugh Jackman, and repeat guest Salman Rushdie.

  Unfortunately, the flasher was not Hugh Jackman. He couldn’t sexually harass me if he tried. I’d consider any amount of Jackman nudity a public service.

  Rushdie, not so much.

  Instead, it was a member of the kitchen staff who, when I walked by with my dog late one night, decided to offer dinner and a show—a 2 A.M. show of him doing the hand jive, wearing his apron as a loincloth.

  The next morning, I told my mother, who was visiting, what had happened. We were both angry and creeped out, and I said I intended to march over there and tell the management.

  She supported the idea, adding, “Maybe we’ll get a free meal out of it.”

  “Mom! I don’t want to eat there now. That guy who did this works in the kitchen…”

  I don’t have to make the joke, do I?

  “Oh, right.” Still, my mother looked disappointed. Apparently star sightings are worth the risk of contamination.

  To his credit, the manager was appropriately appalled and apologetic. I didn’t even have to say, “What if this had happened to Beyoncé?!”

  I’m sure he was already thinking it.

  I never saw the naked chef again.

  This other guy has been harder to shake, no pun intended.

  It was only a couple weeks after the birthday incident when I saw the Repeat Offender again. I gave my usual response, with added exasperation:

  “EW! That is SO RUDE! I do NOT want to see that!”

  Only this time, I think I got through to him.

  Not that he put his not-so-shy friend away. No, he remained exposed, but he moaned, “So-oo-rrr-ry.”

  And they say men can’t apologize.

  I stormed off, and he slunk back into the dark, but for the first time, we both left satisfied.

  Wag the Technology

  By Lisa

  The dog is supposed to wag the tail, not the tail wag the dog, but somebody needs to tell this to technology.

  We begin when Daughter Francesca comes home for the holidays, and we want to see a movie. Unfortunately, the movie is at 8:20 P.M., which means that if we go, we’ll miss two of her favorite TV shows, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and The Bachelor.

  And by her favorite, I mean my favorite.

  I love trashy reality TV, but I never think of it that way. I try to find the deeper themes in these shows, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of the lies I tell myself, like that it’s not fattening to eat M&Ms after lunch, but it is after dinner.

  Dinnertime is the line in the sand, carbs-wise.

  “So what should we do?” I ask Francesca. “Go to the movie or stay home and watch TV?”

  “We can do both.” She picks up the remote. “I’ll record the shows, and we’ll go to the movie.”

  I’m not a rube, I know you can record TV shows, but I don’t make a habit of it, because I’m not pro-active in general. If I missed the TV shows, I’d have lived with missing the TV shows. Everything happens for a reason, so maybe I was meant to miss The Bachelor.

  Come to think of it, maybe we’re all meant to miss The Bachelor.

  And the typical reality TV show will repeat what happened in the previous segment at the beginning of each new one, like programming for people who lack short-term memory.

  Or a frontal lobe.

  I guess they do this so that new viewers can start watching the show at any point, but I don’t know how many people have new viewers strolling into their family room every five minutes.

  I don’t know half that many people, and I wouldn’t let them in if I did.

  Or maybe it’s because of people who change the channel a lot, but I generally can’t be bothered to do that, either. When I watch TV, I vegetate. There are eggplants that change the channel more often.

  Plus I can never find the remote. That’s why I work so much at night. In my house, it’s easier to write a novel than to find the remote.

  Francesca and I went to the movie and got home at 11:30 P.M. Left to my own devices, I would have walked the dogs and gone to bed, but Francesca is a lot more fun than I am, so she had other ideas.

  “Let’s watch our shows,” she said, going into the family room.

  “Okay,” said I, because I’m generally eager to act like I’m not dead yet, when I really am.

  So there we were, both in our chairs, with Francesca clicking away on the remote to start the Real Housewives recording, hitting PLAY, then pressing buttons to speed through the commercials and even more buttons to replay parts we missed.

  I watched her, figuring all that button-pressing probably used up enough calories to justify a few M&Ms, even after dinner.

  But the net result was that we were up for the next two hours, trying to watch our shows. My eyelids got heavier and heavier, but I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep, and I began to wonder when entertainment morphed into work.

  Without the money part.

  Francesca felt the same way. The night wore on, and even she got tired, but we decided we had to finish watching the shows or we’d have to get up early to watch them, since she was leaving the next morning. To me, it hung over my head, a chore that couldn’t be ignored, like a pile of laundry to be folded or a sinkful of dirty dishes.

  Okay, those I can ignore.

  But a fresh ep of The Bachelor?

  Please. I’m only human. And the world’s oldest-living Bachelorette.

  Somehow the TV shows had finagled their way onto my Things To Do list and gone straight to the top, simply by virtue of being recorded. Francesca and I were up watching TV until after one in the morning, and we were sleepy the next day.

  It’s all technology’s fault.

  Before I got a DVR, I got plenty of ZZZs.

  But now the tail is wagging the dog, Francesca, and me.

  Stay tuned.

  Kicking Tuches

  By Francesca

  On a lark, my friend and I decided to take an introductory class in Krav Maga. Krav Maga means “contact combat” in Hebrew, and it’s comprised of the physical training and self-defense techniques developed by the Israeli National Army. It is a no-rules, no-holds-barred style of combat intended for street fighting.

  Still, I don’t think either of us was taking it too seriously. We like to work out together, so when the class was offered on an online sale site, we signed up. The morning of, we met up outside the building with our bouncy ponytails and a spring in our step, excited for our fitness adventure.

  The studio was on the third floor, but taking an elevator to a fitness class seemed hypocritical, so we opted for the stairs.

  By the first landing, we regretted our decision. The stairwell was dark, dirty, and industrial, lit by a crackling fluorescent light. It was as if the entrance had been designed to convince you that you need a self-defense course. You need one yesterday.

  They should stage mock muggings around the corner to drum up business.

  When we made it
safely to the studio, our bravery was rewarded with a free T-shirt. A huge man with a very precise haircut was handing them out. I imagined they chose him for the job to deter women from asking to “see the small,” when we all know we’re a medium. Fortunately, all the sizes looked like baby clothes in his meaty paw.

  “We got two colors, black or blue,” he said.

  I laughed. See, that’s funny, because black-and-blue …

  His stony affect indicated the pun was unintended. This guy seemed like the type for less wordplay, more gunplay.

  I swallowed and took my shirt.

  My friend and I sat in our matching blue T-shirts, giddy with nerves. I was surprised to see we were the only ones who hadn’t chosen black.

  Perhaps “baby blue” wasn’t the best color to convey intimidation.

  Excuse me for wanting to bring out my eyes during combat.

  Two female instructors entered and introduced themselves. I was relieved they seemed more personable than the human-Cerberus guarding the T-shirts.

  Within the first few minutes, I could tell these women were badass. They stood with their feet superhero-width apart. They said the F-word. They looked good in drawstring pants.

  I was impressed.

  In a quick demonstration, they morphed into Krav Maga Tasmanian Devils, a whirlwind of spinning and shouting and kneeing and grunting.

  People who feel comfortable grunting in exertion fascinate me. That kind of confidence is like a superpower. Can they say, “I love you,” first? Can they also poop at work?

  I was already feeling empowered.

  Until they started talking.

  The best and worst thing about Krav Maga is that the instructors make no bones about the objective. Krav Maga is not treated as the “practice” of an “art,” but a set of practical methods of hurting someone, or, as with this women’s self-defense class, stopping someone from raping and/or killing you. This frankness makes the information both easy to understand and completely terrifying.

  The instructor began describing the scenarios and attacks that we would address in the seminar. I listened as she outlined what to do if someone is a) choking you against a wall, b) choking you while forcing you backwards, or c) pushing you forward into a car or trunk.