It Looked Different on the Model (10 page)

And I wasn’t even done with my imitation, I was still in the middle of it when I realized that I was doing something highly regrettable, and my mouthful of pretend clarinet sort of melted away with any chance of humor the story might have had.

When I looked at my husband, his lips were tight across his face in a frown, and he said simply, “Wow, that’s quite a story, Laurie. Are you ready, Bennet?”

I was pretty sure that, in one swipe of unintentional pornographic charades, I had ruined everything. My first introduction to one of my husband’s colleagues and that’s what I did. I mean, tell that story to an undergrad, sure, no problem, but to a nineteenth grader, a Shakespeare scholar no less? I once fell asleep at a performance of
Macbeth
I was so bored, and I was playing one of the witches. All I could do was hope that my husband and Bennet got seats behind home plate and that some freak fly ball would boomerang and bounce off Bennet’s head, creating no physical marks or lasting effects but memory loss from an hour prior to the game.

At least I was on my own when I destroyed the dreams of innocent children of Eugene during a potluck at my neighbor’s house last summer. I mean, if you were invited to a gathering and it was going to be full of kids, what would you bring? You would bring cupcakes, right? Homemade, straight-from-the-box cupcakes with thick, swirly chocolate frosting and sprinkles on them. Right? Isn’t that what you would bring?

So that’s how I arrived, with a tray full of cupcakes that I spent the morning making and decorating, thirty cupcakes in all, which, honestly, I felt wouldn’t be enough. I was already down for three of them, so that left twenty-seven for everyone else, and if there were even ten kids there at three apiece, supply was short.

I placed them on the table, carefully took the tinfoil off, and exposed the bounty of the little round cakes of heaven below. And the children gathered, glowing at the sight of the shiny frosting and the happy rainbow sprinkles. They crowded all around the tray, each deciding on which was going to be theirs.
One girl, who looked to be about eight, was the first to reach her hand out, her middle finger and thumb making the spread in preparation for a landing, when she looked at me and said:

“Are these vegan?”

Thank Cheezus I wasn’t drinking anything, because my mouth would have rained over the entire tray.

Instead, I laughed. “Goodness, no!” I said in my Nice Neighbor Lady Who Makes Cupcakes voice. “Those are
real
cupcakes, right out of the Betty Crocker box, I can assure you!”

And just like that, the little girl retracted her formerly happy hand, the glee on her face turned forlorn, her head dropped, and she simply said, “Oh.”

Her mother came forward and patted her on the back and said to me, “She’s vegan. She made that choice when she was three.”

It was quite possibly the saddest thing I had ever heard. That child, apparently, had never had a Pop-Tart. Cocoa Puffs. Fritos!

Then the mom said to the tiny vegan, “I’m sorry that they aren’t the right kind.”

Immediately, all of the other little children backed away from the tray as if someone had said they were poocakes.

Now, I’m sure you are thinking, were they really children, or were they adults who hadn’t eaten protein or calcium in so many years that their bone structure was actually in an advanced state of atrophy and they appeared much smaller than people who eat
food
? Because that’s sort of what I was inclined to believe, and, I’m sorry, but when I was three,
cotechinata—
pork skin rolled up with garlic, parsley, and parmesan cheese, then cooked in tomato sauce—was my favorite food. My mother simply called it “skin.” When I asked her what the
“skin” on my plate was, she looked at me and said, “
Skin
,” and when it was apparent I wasn’t getting it, she pointed to her arm and said, “
Skin
,” again, as in, “Skin is skin, what don’t you get?” Now, I don’t know what that lady was feeding her vegan kid for her to make that choice, but it took me years to finally understand what my mother was talking about. And then, sure, yeah, I quit asking for “skin.” Didn’t quit asking for bacon or ham sandwiches, but at three I certainly didn’t equate something as blatant as the skin on my mother’s arm with my favorite food. I’m not saying that the story about the three-year-old vegan isn’t true, just that if someone had eaten a real, moist, spongy cupcake with buttercream frosting piled on top prior to making a declaration that would ruin a Nice Neighbor Lady’s potluck experience five years later, the outcome that day might have been different. All I’m saying is that maybe she didn’t have all the information at hand when she made a definitive decision about a minuscule bit of butter and an egg. That’s what I’m saying. And for the record, upon hearing that I had decided to become a vegan at three, my mother would have shook her head as she informed me, “Well, either you should find another family or you’re going to be hungry a lot, little girl, because I’m frying an animal right now.”

My neighbor—the hostess—and her daughter both noticed what was going on at the cupcake portion of the table and immediately came over and grabbed cupcakes for themselves, and I will forever love them both for it. But when I left a while later, twenty-five cupcakes, more or less, still sat on the tray, refused and rejected like little girls whose thighs touched and who couldn’t run to too many bases before asking to go to the nurse after the teams were picked for softball.

I still insist my cupcakes are the right kind. It’s cupcakes without eggs and butter that are weird. And at the next potluck
we were invited to later that summer, I brought napkins. Someone else, as you might have guessed, brought cupcakes. Made from gluten-free flour and a wish, was my estimation. I had a Revenge Cupcake, just to be polite, just to take the high road, and I can report that it was nothing conversion-worthy. Chances are you’ll see me strutting a burqa before you’ll see me stop loading a heap of bacon in my mouth. But if I thought the cupcake disaster was a true Eugene experience, there was nothing that could prepare me for what happened several weeks later.

It was a lovely evening, a gathering of grad students and their spouses, significant others, and partners (you have to say all three). The sun was letting go of the brightest part of the day and people were chatting and having conversation when I looked up and saw a young woman several feet away ease the strap of her top down—like she was in a dirty dressing room at Ross—pull her arm through it, and then bring her boob out. Uncovered. Exposed. Unabashed. Then it flopped like a fish and hung loosely, like it had a hook through it, while she had a conversation with two other people. There it remained, exposed to the elements and accessible to anyone who needed to wipe their hands.

I don’t know where the baby was. It wasn’t on her,
that’s
for sure. I don’t know if the baby ever came in for a landing or what. The baby was not in the general vicinity when the incident began. Maybe the baby had a GPS device implanted and this was all prep work, but I think it would have been more considerate if she had a visual of the baby before I had a visual of her. And the boob sat there, and sat there, and sat there. It actually behaved very quietly for the ten minutes it was left to roam free in my field of vision before I could talk to someone else and face a different direction.

I had never been at a barbecue before in which one person was playing a solo version of spin the bottle without notifying anyone else. Frankly, I didn’t know how to react, so I didn’t. I just attempted to carry on with my conversation, though every thirty seconds or so my eyes would shoot over to see if the boob had made a retreat. It had not. Honestly, I thought I had to be seeing things, as in “I had a feeling I put too much salt on the potato salad and now I am having a stroke and experiencing horrifying hallucinations of hippie breasts,” and then I convinced myself that I simply must have gotten two pills confused an hour earlier and ended up taking a whole Ambien instead of a Beano.

And you know, I really have to say this: If your baby isn’t even in the room and you can’t bear to come equipped with a blanket, kindly put your boob away in its rightful compartment. Don’t leave it hanging out for ten to fifteen minutes at a barbecue like you’re waiting for someone to hang a Christmas ornament on it. In hindsight, maybe what I should have done was run over to stand next to her, whip out my own bewbie, and cry, “Oh! I didn’t know there was a contest! Look, I win! My boob still looks like a boob, since I can’t fold it in half like a taco.”

Now, I know that babies get hungry and babies need to be fed, but this wasn’t about breast-feeding, because there was no feeding going on for the portion of an hour that the teat got a tan. This was about pulling a private part of your body that resembles a tortilla with an eraser located randomly at the bottom edge of it out at a party and letting it sit there because you don’t know the meaning of the word “inappropriate.”

But apparently I was the odd one out here, because when I mentioned this to a group of people several weeks later, someone asked me if I was ashamed of my own body, which, honestly,
didn’t have anything to do with the topic of a free-range boob at a social gathering. I wasn’t the one softly cajoling the boob out from under its tank top. And frankly, the answer to that question is that I am downright proud of my boobs; I had the best boobs at that party, because I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant, and you’d have a better chance selling someone a meat grinder in this town than you would anything with a Maidenform tag on it. There are hippie boobs everywhere, and if you like ’em lean, long, swingy, and Stretch Armstrong-y, this is your boob command center. I, on the other hand, have been devout every day since my charges popped on the scene when I was ten, and they have served me well ever since. I have a huge ass and I have a blap (hybrid of a belly + a lap), but you reap what you sow, and I have plowed a lifetime of underwire fields. Believe me, if there was anyone who deserved to be showing off that day, it was me. Instead, it was the shocking horror of that boob that made a cameo, and, to put it bluntly, in a lineup I would have definitely identified it as a Kombai of Papua New Guinea, considering that it looked like a rooty yam.

So things, all in all, weren’t working out that well for me in Eugene. I had offended, shocked, and disgusted large portions of the population, including intelligent people, children with morals, and anyone with offspring, and I was quickly on my way to being on the shit list of the police when I picked up the phone one night at 10:20
P.M
. because a cover band at a house party down the street had been blasting all night and was now halfway through another excessively loud, terrible song.

“This is ridiculous,” I told the operator as soon as she answered the phone. “This band is so loud! Right now they’re playing Loverboy’s ‘Turn Me Loose’! Who wants to
hear
that? Who wants to
play
that?”

“Loverboy does, ma’am,” she told me. “They’re at the county fair. Noise ordinance goes into effect at ten-thirty. Is ten minutes too long for you to hang on? They’ll probably play ‘Working for the Weekend’ next.”

I said thank you and shut up; I know when to take my hits. Then I ran upstairs, where my husband was getting ready for bed, and shrieked, “Oh my God! Loverboy is at the fair! The police said they’re going to play ‘Working for the Weekend’ next! It’s Loverboy! It’s
Loverboy
!”

After the incident with the Eugene Police Department put me in my place, I tried to keep a low profile, even when I was putting groceries into my car at Safeway and a guy with a black goatee, long black hair in a tight ponytail, sharp widow’s peak, and black pigeon eyes who was parked across from me walked up to his car—a black shiny Mustang with a full-sized skull on the dashboard. He clicked his car alarm, it revved the engine with no one in it, and then I saw the license plate:
DIABLO
. I assumed that even Hell needs milk and spray pancakes.

I kept quiet when I was at Kinko’s and saw the Angel of Death walk in—who, by the way, is a three-hundred-pound teenager with face paint and tiny pigtails, wearing black feathered wings as wide as a Mini Cooper, and who pulled out a frilly parasol while waiting for the bus. And yes, she smoked. Just in case there was a question.

And when I saw a “free box” on a corner, I said, “Guess what, Eugene hippies? When you start a ‘free pile’ on the corner, you’re not recycling; you’re just throwing your old filthy shit on a corner. Because no one wants your punctured football, your camping chair missing an arm, the tube from your bong, or anything that touched your body. Really.
Nobody
,” but only to myself.

But then wonderful things started to happen that seemed
rather indigenous. It was the first gorgeous day with sun after a very long, rainy winter. My husband and I went down and had garden burgers at a restaurant by the river, sat outside, and watched two people behind us drink several pitchers of beer, then totally break up, complete with lots of crying from both parties.

As soon as they left, the lady sitting behind me informed her dinner companions that “I can’t have a library card, because felons can’t have library cards. I’m learning a lot about this felon thing.” This was almost better than what I’d overheard a waitress say when someone asked her what she was doing over spring break and her response was, “I’m going to California to turn myself in.”

And one day, when the weather had turned back to rain, I was waiting to make a left-hand turn when a woman in a Rascal entered the crosswalk. In Eugene, you are not allowed to make any progress on your turn until the person in the crosswalk is safely on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, so I knew I was in for a wait. As I sat there, she rolled along slowly, an enormous Raisa Gorbachev fur hat resting atop her head and a full-length yellow rain poncho draped around her, making her look like a Dole banana float. She was wearing blue hospital socks, and I know what they are because I have a pair just like them. Then the wind kicked up turbulently, and her poncho fluttered at the edges and was picked up by a gust of wind that flipped it over her head, completely blinding her.