It Looked Different on the Model (23 page)

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“The emails I sent you about the website
snopes.com
?” I asked. “Did you get them?”

“I don’t know,” my mother finally answered. “Maybe I did.”

“How do you not know if you got them or not?” I asked suspiciously.

“I may have deleted some of them,” she said.

“Some of them?” I asked.

“Well, most of them, really,” she answered. “Actually, all of them. When your name pops up in the list, I just hit ‘delete.’ ”

“You don’t even open them?” I asked, a little stunned.

“Most of what you say is nonsense,” she informed me.

“Oh,” I said, nodding my head. “It’s nonsense? You think it’s nonsense? Of course, hitting *77 is nothing short of scientific theory, because guess what? Not only is dialing *77 only useful in a handful of counties in the United States, but it’s the exact number of keys required to hit 911, which works … well,
everywhere.
”

“They couldn’t send out the email if it wasn’t true,” my mother insisted. “When I get pulled over by an unmarked police car driven by a serial killer, I am dialing *77!”

“Okay, fine,” I snipped. “Push *77. You go right ahead. And when your abductor takes you to the ATM at gunpoint, you try to remember your birthday backward, but don’t worry, because you have plenty of time. The police will never come,
because there is no backward-pin-number panic signal. It doesn’t exist; it’s an urban legend. And guess what I’m going to do right now? I’m going to go to the closest Walmart and ask anyone walking by if they’ll sell me cheap perfume, but only if they can test some on me with a squirt bottle! In my face! In my face!”

“You’d better not!” my mother warned. “It’s
ether
, Laurie! It says it in the email!
It’s not perfume
!”

“I’m putting my hair in a ponytail!” I threatened.

“Go ahead and be an idiot!” my mother countered. “It’s like putting a handle on your head. Try to grab a pitcher without a handle. It’s almost impossible!”

“I have to go now, Mom!” I said, my voice rising. “I hear a crying baby on my porch and I’m afraid it’s going to crawl into traffic! Bye! Bye! If you hear me scream, please push *LIES!”

I didn’t hear from my mom for a while after that, which was probably for the best, especially since I was still making a point of not carrying an umbrella until after 9:30 a.m. But then one day it came, a message too important to ignore, an email too frightening to deny. Doing what all good mothers do; trying to ensure my survivability.

“FWD: FWD: FWD: verry important to know!”

And there, unfolding before me in red 70-point Helvetica:

Clearly, in the world of FWD, this was a hallmark moment. Never before had my mother sent an email that was illustrated with photos featuring the hands of the corpse. I mean, really, it was almost proof. For a moment I was lost in the excitement of the bloated, waxy sausage fingers, and I thought, I can’t believe I’ve answered an instrument of death when it was being charged and I lived! I am still alive!!

And then, as if there was a cherry on this cake, I spotted something incredible in the very last line: “Verified by
snopes.com
!,” followed by a link.

Wow. I thought, I am impressed. Finally, my mother has sent me a true Forecast of World Destruction. I couldn’t believe it. The fear was real. It was justified! In fact, I had just gotten up to unplug my instrument of death when I sat back down and decided to click the link.

And, to be honest, much to my dismay, the page that came
up was indeed to
snopes.com
but was a blank page that said only, “You wanted
what
?”

A dead link. No such page.

I took a deep breath and reached for the phone, since I was positive my mother was about to embark on a door-to-door mission to inform her neighbors of the catastrophe, armed with the “dead hands” photo as evidence. To her, sending the email with photographic evidence that the fear was real was not only an accomplishment, but a message to me that every time she had sent out another FWD, she really was helping to stop someone from dialing a truly evil area code or being roasted by a cellphone charger or keeping a serial killer who was terrified of umbrellas from impersonating an officer.

I dialed the right area code for her phone number (the temptation to dial 809 still soooo great) and then stopped.

I looked at the last line of the email again.

“
FORWARD THIS TO THE PEOPLE THAT MATTER IN YOUR LIFE!!
!”

I thought for a minute.

And with that, I hung up the phone.

T
he first time I walked into the kitchen of the house I would eventually buy, the current owner saw my eyes immediately catch fire when they saw the stove. It was a huge late-forties white enameled antique gas stove with cast-iron burners and big, rounded corners, and it was the finest piece of stove porn I had ever seen in my life. I do recall actually having to catch my breath. It was so big it gobbled up six inches of the doorway, and rightfully so. Despite the fact that I was ready to make her an offer based on the white giant in the kitchen, the woman noticed my leer and quickly stepped in front of the stove, as if to protect her young from a predator. She wasted no time in telling me that the stove was not staying; it had been her grandmother’s and was coming with her to the new house.

“We have a stove in the basement that we’ll replace it with,” she added. “It’s a KitchenAid.”

Which was a drag, since I had left a similar yet not nearly as grand stove behind in our last house, and felt compelled to do so because it was original to the bungalow I’d just sold. It would have been greedy to break them up.

Indeed, true to their word, the former owners had the
KitchenAid in place when we moved in, although they neglected to mention that I’d run three cars into the ground since that thing was considered “new.”

Getting the KitchenAid stove to even function was a process. Before the burners would consider glowing red, there was a series of bumps, groans, and moans that sounded like it was listing and in comparison made the
Titanic
seem silent when sinking, prompting us to change its name to First Aid. I didn’t even get what was
in
the stove that was making those sounds, unless it was a portal to hell and we were roasting souls every time we made macaroni and cheese.

I had no idea that I hated the First Aid as much as I did; it was just a stove, it served its purpose, I suppose, as long as I considered that only cooking over a hearth in my kitchen with kindling could take longer to get a heat element working. But one day I looked at it and it made me mad and I decided that I hated its stupid glowy burners, its almond color, and the arthritis it apparently had. I remembered, in pristine detail, how great the old stove looked in this kitchen, and I also missed the gas stove I’d left behind.

I immediately went to eBay, typed “old stove” in the search box, and, within seconds, there it was: a gorgeous old O’Keefe & Merritt, the Cadillac of antique stoves, for sale, fifty miles away in Salem.

The woman who was selling it seemed very nice and within an hour emailed that I should meet her at her storage unit. I asked my husband to come along, just in case I was never heard from again and my mummy was found a decade later in various Rubbermaid totes after an auction of the contents of #209 at Hoarder Storage in Salem, Oregon.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I don’t think they could fit you into just one.”

“Did you know,” I casually mentioned, “that when the wife suddenly vanishes, it’s usually because the husband rented a wood chipper?”

“I wouldn’t even know how to turn one on,” he replied. “Everyone would know that. I’ve broken everything with an ‘on’ button even remotely related to household maintenance.”

“Okay, then you have fun sharing an eight-by-eight with your cellie, George the Whore, for the next ten years until they find my head in a cake carrier,” I added.

“I’ve heard Salem has some of the most beautiful storage-unit structures in the state,” he said wearily. “Meet you at the car.”

It became clear that my fear of being dismembered was rather empty when we spotted the stove lady, Tina, at the entrance with her twelve-year-old son. She was very nice and friendly, but we hadn’t been in the elevator for half a minute when Tina confessed that she loved the stove and really didn’t want to part with it yet had to out of necessity. I nodded and smiled, knowing a sales ploy when I saw one. The soft pitch.

“There’s a man who’s interested in coming to see it tomorrow,” she added, putting a little bit of arm into the second ball.

Sure there is, I thought, as I smiled and nodded at her again. The elevator doors opened and we followed her down the hall to her unit. My husband and I stood back as she raised the unit door, and I braced myself for disappointment after seeing her dilapidated stove, which probably had rodents nesting in it. Yes, the photos on eBay were beautiful, but when I take a picture of myself from a higher angle, I shave off two chins, control my nose hair, and shrink the girth of my nostrils faster than a surgeon with a beach house in Malibu who texts when he drives. Tricks of the trade, my friend.

As the door rolled up, it revealed a hulking shape with a
tarp draped over it. I held my breath, and as her son pulled the tarp off, I gasped. A harp strummed somewhere, and a chorus of angels sang that one note that they do when something incredible happens and changes everything forever.

It did not look like the stove in the eBay photo; it looked better. It looked incredible. There was a chrome griddle in the center, a periscope window on the backsplash to see down into the oven without opening the door, a Grillevator, a warming oven, and it was all in absolutely pristine condition for a stove that came off the assembly line in 1954. When I opened the oven door, it was so clean it was almost impossible to believe that anyone had ever cooked in it. The chrome on it gleamed, the white enamel shone, and I swear the corners of the oven doors curled up and smiled at me.

“I really don’t want to sell it, but I have to,” Tina repeated. “We sold the piano last week. This is the last thing I have left from the house I had with my husband. He was killed by a drunk driver on New Year’s Day several years ago, and this is like saying a final goodbye.”

And then she looked at me and started to cry.

Oh boy.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as her son hugged her and they both relived the pain of that New Year’s Day. She patted his head. And then he began to sob, too.

“We moved up here because my husband’s brother said he would be a father figure to my sons,” she continued, as tears streamed down her face. “But that didn’t happen. It turns out he’s … he’s not the man we thought he was.”

Oh, Jesus, I said to myself, as I released the grip on my wallet. I thought the worst thing that could happen at the storage unit was that I’d be lured into a trap, lose my life in a valiant struggle, get divvied up like a chicken, and be left to rot in the
dark, but a weeping widow clutching her fatherless son as they remembered the fun family stove time was a little bit beyond my established skill set.

And that’s when I looked at my husband, and it looked like he super wanted to punch me in the face with that stove.

“I’m going to cook on it a lot,” I mouthed to him.

As far as Tina & Son were concerned, I didn’t know what to do. If it was an act, it was a good one; it had the same amounts of embarrassment, despair, agony, and vulnerability as Courtney Love’s
Behind the Music
episode. But it seemed real to me, and honestly, if this was a ploy, wouldn’t there be easier things to sell than old appliances? It’s not like there’s a band of antique stove bandits who will wait until you go on vacation to bust down your door to steal an heirloom that requires a dolly, a ramp, and a can of Easy-Off.

So, believing that what I was seeing was true, and despite the fact that I am an inappropriate hugger who has trouble assessing when the time is right, I kind of reached out and tried to comfort this person—whom I had only known since the storage-place front door—and I wasn’t sure what my hand was going to do once it made a landing. At the last second, my palm sort of curled up like a claw, and then I found I was rubbing the back of my pointer finger up and down a square-inch area of her arm three times, albeit awkwardly. That really was as much as I could do, given the prep time, atmosphere, and the fact that I was getting kind of hungry.