Have a Nice Guilt Trip (6 page)

Until recently, my bill-paying system was working fine, but lately my VISA card has been getting declined left and right, which is always a nice moment, especially in a crowded grocery store. You really don’t want to be the person saying, “I’m sure I paid that.”

Nobody believes you.

They’re all thinking, “No way she paid that.”

And then you get to say, “I have another card.”

But everyone is thinking, “That one won’t work either. She might be a crack addict. Look at her hair. Also I think she slept in those sweatpants.”

So this happens enough times that I have a few cranky calls with my VISA card company, which seems not to have made my acquaintance, though I’ve sent them a small fortune each month for the last fifteen years. They say they keep declining the card because my payments were respectively one, one, and two days late for the past three months. The fact that we’ve been together forever doesn’t matter.

I’ve divorced men for less.

And the VISA card company isn’t the only bad husband.

I keep getting notices that threaten to turn off my electricity, and I don’t understand that either, because I paid that bill, too. So I looked again at the last bill and realized that I got it about thirty seconds before it was due. I was late to pay it before I even received it, which might be a land-speed record for financial shenanigans.

Finally, when I was about to get my bunion surgery a few months ago, I actually learned that my health insurance was in default because it hadn’t been paid in two months. But I knew I paid that. And it turned out that for a reason the insurance company can’t explain, my bills get sent to me every two months, not every month, and if I happen to miss paying a bill, which does happen from time to time, I am already two months behind. Don’t ask me why they don’t send it monthly, but it’s one of the reasons I hate my health-insurance company.

And so does everybody else.

I tell my friends these troubles, and they say I have to pay my bills more often, as soon as they come in, and that online bill pay will make this easier. So I go to my bank’s site, and it tells me it needs my social security number, my account number, and my VISA Check Card Number. But I don’t have a VISA Check Card, and the fine print says if you didn’t have such a card, to call a certain phone number, which I did. Then the mechanical operator asked me for my user name, which I didn’t know, and my telephone bill-paying PIN, which I didn’t have.

So I hung up.

I’m going to print out a bunch of checks right now, so they’ll be ready when the bills get here. I will stand at the mailbox like a dog and pay each bill the moment it arrives. I will pay for lights I haven’t turned on yet and shoes I haven’t even seen in stores.

I will turn every day of my life into tax day.

William Wordsworth said the world is too much with us, and he was right.

He didn’t have online bill pay, either.

Love and Marriage, Then Divorce

By Lisa

It should be clear by now that I know nothing about love or marriage.

But about divorce, I’m an expert.

Or so I thought.

Ask me anything, I used to think. I could’ve written a book. In fact, I always thought I would or I had, like twenty, but never mind, I’ve come to understand I don’t know anything about love, marriage, or even divorce.

The reasons?

Tom and Katie.

I’m a Tom Cruise fan, and so is Daughter Francesca. As you may remember from our previous book, we have Tom Cruise Appreciation Week, especially during power outages, when we watch his movies on laptops. And I remember very well when Tom fell in love with Katie Holmes and jumped on Oprah’s couch.

You know what I thought?

Yay!

Good for him!

He’s happy and in love!

Yes, I am the only person in America who did NOT think it was weird that he got so excited he jumped on the couch. Number one, I’m Italian, and we get excited easily. If somebody brings us a plate of spaghetti, it’s all we can do not to jump on the couch.

We like it. Couches, spaghetti, everything. We’re excitable.

But even so, I still don’t think it’s crazy he jumped on the couch for love. I myself, your favorite celibate, have felt like jumping on couches for love.

Why not?

Couches have cushions for a reason.

And the guy was happy.

An entire nation called him weird, but secretly, I was jealous. I hoped that someday, somebody would jump on a couch for me and be called weird by an entire nation.

So I admit, I was out of the mainstream on that one, which happens sometimes, and we all live. But the very next time I was completely out of the mainstream was when Tom and Katie announced they were separating, and nobody was surprised.

Except me.

I was
astounded.

I heard it on TV and I thought something was wrong with the set. I couldn’t believe it. They were so cute together and the kid is adorable, and so are the other kids, and they seemed like such a happy family.

Suffice it to say, I didn’t see it coming. I don’t know why they got divorced, and that isn’t my point herein. Rumor has it the reason is Scientology, but I don’t know anything about Scientology except that it’s kind of a dumb word. I have no view of Scientology and I don’t poke fun at other people’s religions, because believers will kill me in its name.

I was still working through the fact of Tom and Katie’s separation when they announced they were divorced.

WHAT?

Now I’m really confused.

Because I grant that I know nothing about love or marriage, but about divorce I know everything, especially that it takes FOREVER and costs A BILLION DOLLARS.

Tom and Katie went through separation to divorce in eleven days.

That’s not possible. They divided a couple of kids, massive amounts of money, several houses, plenty of cars, and more than one couch.

In eleven days!

In eleven days, I can’t pick a paint color.

If you ask me, this is a disaster. It contravenes all we know and hold dear about divorce, namely that it’s absurdly expensive and insanely painful. If people can go from married to divorced in eleven days, the problem is obvious.

It’s going to put a lot of divorce lawyers out of business.

They’re going to be out roaming the streets, with time on their hands.

Can you imagine lawyers walking around, with nothing to do?

It can only end badly, my friends.

So now I fear for our nation.

But not Tom.

He will be okay.

In fact, he will come and save the world.

I know, I saw it in the movies.

You Say Tomato

By Lisa

Did you hear about this?

I read in the newspaper that somebody noticed that red tomatoes sell better than greenish ones, so food engineers started changing the genetic makeup of tomatoes to make them redder, except that it also took out the taste.

I learned so much from this that I don’t know where to begin.

Number one, food has engineers?

I thought trains had engineers, and food had cooks.

I just went from choo-choo to chew-chew.

In fact, I thought you had to have an engine to have an engineer, but no.

If you ask me, this opens new job opportunities for engineers. For example, I see a lot of trees that could use a good engineer. They aren’t green enough, especially in fall, when they turn a lot of crazy colors that don’t match.

I mean, let’s be real. Yellow and red? Nobody looks good in yellow and red, except Ronald MacDonald.

He’s single for a reason.

Worse, in winter, the leaves on the trees actually fall off. That’s definitely an engineering problem. I feel pretty sure a tree engineer would fix that, no sweat.

Also the sun.

Don’t get me started on the sun. It’s supposed to be yellow, but it’s too bright to tell the color. In fact, it’s so bright that we have to buy dark glasses to even be around it.

Also the sun is hot, which can be a bummer. It makes us feel listless and uncomfortable, then we have to turn on the air-conditioning, or at least decide whether or not to, which can be a problematic choice for certain people, involving money and self-esteem, oddly intertwined.

Not that I know anyone like that.

And also in winter, the sky could use a good engineer. There are times when it changes from blue to a very boring whitish gray, then actually breaks up and falls to the ground in tiny, cold pieces that we all have to clean up.

Needs work.

Sky engineers should get on it. It’s like the sky doesn’t even stay up, which is a major engineering defect. Cantilevers, buttressing, and scaffolding may be required, and lots of it.

Really, lots.

Or worse, sometimes the sky loses its blue color, turns gray, but doesn’t break up and fall to the ground, right after I spent hundreds of dollars on a green machine to help me clean up the pieces.

That’s a lot of green, even for a green machine.

Who knew that colors required so much engineering? If you ask me, green is the color most in need of engineering. I wish those engineers who were trying to fix the tomatoes would fix the economy, but never mind, what do I know?

Let’s move on to my second point.

Having been astounded to learn that tomatoes have engineers, I was also amazed to learn that they had genes, too.

Who knew tomatoes were so busy?

I grow tomatoes, and I haven’t given them the credit they deserve for their rich inner lives.

To be honest, I had no idea that food had genes, at all. Just like I thought you needed an engine to have an engineer, I thought you needed, like, blood and a heart to have genes.

It’s hard enough for me to remember that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable, but now I’m expected to know it has DNA, as well?

Bottom line, I’m bad at biology. Anyone who’s slept with me will tell you that.

But now we know that tomatoes have genes, this opens up new job opportunities, namely for actors. Think of all the new TV shows this could create, like
CSI: Tomatoes,
where they collect tomato DNA to catch the killer tomato.

In fact, we could have murders for every fruit, then spin it off to vegetables, too.

To Catch a Salad Shooter.

Call of Jury Duty

By Francesca

When I received the summons for jury duty, I didn’t know what to expect. Turns out, jury duty is a lot like high school.

While our instructor was taking attendance, I felt like I was back in homeroom. Everyone was sleepy, grumpy, and seated in a collective slump. There were posters on the wall picturing a perfectly diverse group of smiling people, only instead of “Knowledge is Power,” it had fine print about doing your civic duty.

I don’t know how much motivation you need to do something that’s compulsory.

The instructor told us to correct him if he was mispronouncing any names then proceeded to mispronounce all of them. There was that one person who waited three beats before saying “Here,” and the person who made a point to say, “Present,” instead. Each time he came upon a no-show, I had to fight the urge to say “Bueller, Bueller?”

When a short lunch break was announced, there was a stampede out of the courthouse. Eating on campus was clearly uncool.

After a quick hunt for cheap fare, I ducked into a sandwich shop. The place had only a few café tables, all taken. A man sitting alone said I was welcome to join him, and after hesitating, I did a very un–New Yorker thing—I accepted.

“Thanks, I’m on break from jury duty.”

“Me too,” he said. And suddenly we were pals, griping about the lawyers, comparing cases, talking about our dogs.

I hadn’t been this happy to have someone to sit with at lunch since sixth grade.

Before we knew it, recess was over. Back at the courthouse, we were divided into smaller jury pools and sent to be questioned by the lawyers for each side in a process known as
voir dire.
French class all over again.

The defense lawyer was an older Asian man with the voice and demeanor of Joe Pesci. If you had any issues with authority, he was the type of guy you’d want to punch. On the other hand, the plaintiff’s attorney was a young woman, earnest but apologetic. She was the student teacher about to get torn to shreds.

Every time the lawyers stepped outside to argue, which was often, we erupted in chatter, gossip, and imitations of them, making the most of our unsupervised minutes. But as soon as the door would open, we’d snap back into the little angels that we weren’t.

And although our group was as varied as Manhattan itself, with every age, race, and profession imaginable, when it came to types, the room could’ve been cast by John Hughes.

We had the long-haired guy who sat in the back, brooding and mysterious. When I was sixteen, I dated that guy. This time, he didn’t even make me a mix CD.

There was the popular girl, with long, shiny blond hair, who already seemed to have made friends. She was like Marcia Brady with a better sense of humor and an advanced degree. I wanted to braid her hair.

The hot-girl foreign-exchange student. When a young, very pretty Hispanic woman asked the lawyer to define “hoarder,” every Spanish-speaking male jumped to help her.

Our class clown was sitting next to me in the back. He was smart, funny, and a little mischievous.

He just happened to be seventy-eight years old.

Once, when one of the lawyers asked a particularly vague, roundabout question, he called out, “Do you believe in Manifest Destiny?”

Everyone laughed, but the attorney didn’t appreciate his class participation.

The one difference from high school was the sense of camaraderie. A jury, by its very nature, makes peers of people who may seem completely different. Initially, I thought it was because we were all stuck in this chore together. But despite our shenanigans when the teacher’s back was turned, during the questioning, people took it seriously, answered honestly, and rose to the occasion. Because we’d want someone to do the same for us.