It Looked Different on the Model (3 page)

“How did you do?” Amelie asked, still sporting a pleasant smile.

“Oh,” I said, smiling back. “This shirt pretty much captivated me!”

“It’s so cute,” she agreed. “I couldn’t believe it went on sale that much!”

“I know!” I said enthusiastically, and walked back over to the sales rack.

Frankly, I had no idea how I was going to get the shirt back on the rack without Amelie noticing that I had finger-painted it with body fluids, because that really was my first plan: Get it back on the rack and get out of the store. But after a moment I realized that you don’t try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness boundaries applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.

So I picked up a little frilly slip I saw on the sales rack, too—also, duly noted, an “M” (there’s no such thing as an “L” on sale in a skinny-girl store, I am beginning to learn)—put it in front of the shirt, then walked the both of them back to the counter where Amelie stood, waiting.

“Oh, and a slip, too?” she said, to which I nodded again and laid them both on the counter, the slip on top and the tags for both visible.

“You know what? You can fold them up together, save on tissue paper,” I offered.

I didn’t want her handling the shirt any more than she needed to.

“And I don’t need a bag, either,” I added, just to make sure she didn’t come in contact with any of my DNA.

As I walked out of the store with my new tiny baby clothes in hand, I knew that, after all of that, the shirt was really the cutest thing ever, but it was still also an “M,” so in my book it sorta deserved what it got for messing with a big girl. Like Present-Day Laurie.

Who had just bought herself a brand-new, bloodstained, size “M” ruffly shirt after the toughest fight she’d ever had.

A
s soon as I saw the red envelope fall through the mail slot, I knew something was amiss. But it wasn’t until I tore the perforated edge and slid the envelope out of the mailer that I knew she had struck again.

“Oh no!” I whined, loud enough to prompt my husband to come running and entered the room with a worried look on his face.

“What is it?” he said quickly.

I extended my arm and stomped my foot as he took it from my hand.

“
Precious
!” he exclaimed, reading the title. “
Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
! You’re kidding. I thought you said you weren’t going to let her get on Netflix anymore.”

“You know I can’t control her,” I said quietly. “I think getting
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
in the mail last week more than proves that. She’s an entity unto herself. She does what she likes; I have nothing to do with it.”

“You need to get ahold of this,” my husband said, shaking the envelope. “Because this is now out of hand. I was expecting
Battlestar Galactica
today. And now I get to spend Saturday afternoon playing Halo and watching
Precious
?”

“
Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
,” I added.

“Set her straight, and do it now,” my husband warned. “Before we get three copies of
Prince of Persia
in the mail.”

“You don’t have to watch it,” I informed him.

“
Of course
you have to watch it!” he protested. “If you don’t watch it, you’ve asked the mailman to walk up to your house and back for nothing. And that’s just sadistic. I
hate
her.”

“Hate is a strong word,” I reminded him. “She doesn’t hate you.”

“Oh yeah?” he replied snidely, and held up the red envelope. “What’s this?”

I understood my husband’s anger, but, I mean, after all, it wasn’t me who put
Precious
on the list.
She
did.

Now, I will admit that she can be somewhat of a handful, but no one has experienced the consequences of her actions with as much interest as I have. Imagine, if you will, me waking up in a hotel room in New York, getting out of bed, and having my bare feet land in a nest of something crunchy that attacked my body quickly and with a forceful bond, like leeches. That’s exactly what happened to me before I shuffled to the bathroom and I realized I had a multitude of sticky cellophane wrappers affixed to my feet and ankles, and one particularly skilled wrapper with amazing climbing talents had made it up to my calf.

Initially, I was stunned and concluded that some hotel employee with a weird wrapper fetish and who liked to watch fat ladies sleep had been in my room the night before, opening DVDs and things from Costco by the side of my bed. But on closer inspection, I noticed that each wrapper had a residue on it—gummy, dense, and bright white. I recognized it immediately. It was frosting, and my suspicions were confirmed when I inspected one of the gummy patches closer and saw what could be nothing but the grooves of tongue tracks.

Oh, I thought shamefully. I know that tongue. The wide, overreaching lick and misshapen taste buds due to obscene amounts of salt intake.
I know that tongue!!
When I looked in the mirror, I saw proof positive. There had been no fetishist in the room, unwrapping box sets of Ken Burns documentaries and baby wipes. Nope. On my face was a five o’clock shadow consisting of Devil Dog crumbs from a box of snack cakes I had planned to mail my father later that morning. Suddenly, flashes of the ravage popped into my head. Actually, I don’t think it was as much of a ravage as it was a chubby girl sitting in bed in a dark room, eating snack cakes one after the other as crumbs fell out of her mouth and she threw the wrappers to the floor after she was done licking them, using both hands. Truth be told, it’s the same scene in broad daylight, except more people would be repulsed. And children would be told to look away.

The next morning, I shuffled out of the bathroom shortly after waking up and decided that the shoes I had seen on a website the day before definitely needed purchasing. I’d had dreams I was wearing them and was subsequently told by others in my reverie that the shoes “made my toes look quite thin.” Frankly, if anyone—real or otherwise—is seeing a shoe mirage that shows bones in my feet, I don’t care if there’s a squeak toy at the end of the big curled-up toe and a big red puff on them: Those shoes will be on my piggies by sundown.

Now determined to secure them, I flipped open my laptop, and my computer screen went immediately to my email account, which showed me that at a little after midnight the night before, a receipt arrived.

A receipt for shoes that, according to my imaginary friends, made my toes appear starved.

This has to be a mistake, I thought to myself; I didn’t buy
those shoes last night. I know I looked at those shoes but didn’t buy them. I am fairly sure that I didn’t buy shoes last night; how can you buy shoes without putting in a credit-card number? Wow. Look at that. At 12:13
A.M
. last night I bought shoes, evidenced by the last four digits of my credit-card number right there on the email receipt, under “payment method.”

I concluded that I must have clicked a button I didn’t intend to click, and, really, I was going to buy the shoes anyway, so was it that big a deal that I accidentally bought them?

And my plan was to recount just that to my best friend, Jamie, when I called her later that day.

“This is crazy, but last night I saw a pair of shoes online that I loved,” I began. “They were these super cute red—”

“Open-toed slingbacks with white stitching,” she finished for me. “I know, I was on the phone with you when you bought them.”

“You … 
what
?” I said very slowly.

“Yeah, you said that if you got them,” she continued, “you would even cut and paint your nails, including the patches of skin on those couple of toes where your toenails fell off and never grew back because you tried shoes on without socks in a thrift store in 1987.”

“I told you about those fallen toenails?” I cried, almost hyperventilating.

“Everyone knew why you wore cowboy boots in a-hundred-twenty-degree weather,” she informed me. “No one believed you were allergic to the rubber in flip-flops.”

“I still don’t understand when it was that I talked to you,” I said, trying to piece together the events of the night prior. “What time did you call?”

“No, no, no, my friend,” Jamie said. “I guess
you
called
me
at around nine.”

“I called
you
? Which made it midnight my time,” I concluded. “How long did we talk?”

“Long enough to plot out the entire strategy of my divorce proceedings,” she said. “So far, you decided that we’re going to retain Gloria Allred, have a press conference on TMZ, and then you gave me a voodoo spell to make his teeth fall out.”

“Does it involve lemons, a black candle, and something called cursing oil?” I asked suspiciously.

“As a matter of fact it does,” Jamie confirmed.

“In my dream, that’s what I used on my feet to make the toes shrink,” I said.

“Nope,” Jamie corrected me. “Makes your teeth fall out. We’ll know for sure in three to six weeks.”

“How long did we talk?” I asked.

“Long enough for you to take a trip to Hogwarts and then go shoe shopping,” she said.

“This is crazy,” I said. “I only remember part of it as a dream, but I don’t remember talking to you at all.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said blankly. “You told me you had just taken an Ambien.”

“Ooh,” I cooed, as if I was talking about a cute baby or the surviving snack cake on the dresser. “I love Ambien. I slept all night. Didn’t wake up once!”

“Or did you?” my best friend questioned. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t know about it. Ambien gives you amnesia. Once you’re out, you’re out. People sleep-drive on that stuff and all sorts of other crazy things.”

It was like Nixon calling Frost.

And, it turns out, some people get on their Netflix queues and then get movies in the mail after they’ve made statements like “I have no desire to see
Precious
, think
The September
Issue
is a far more socially relevant movie, and I don’t care what that says about me as a person.”

It turns out that with one pop of a little tiny pill, I unleash my id, also known as Ambien Laurie. Ambien Laurie, in more basic terms, is my raw monkey form. I don’t really think she plots out her brand of chaos, it just naturally happens, like the formation of the universe. She can be unpredictable. She can be naughty. She can be earthy. I don’t think she does it on purpose, much like monkeys don’t wake up in the morning with plans to rip people’s faces off; it sort of happens in the spur of the moment and if the time feels right. I’ve decided that Ambien is apparently kind of like taking a de-evolution pill, which shorts out the synapses and unwinds any social conventions already imprinted in the brain; for eight hours, I am nothing short of
Australopithecus
returning to the plains to hunt and gather, and if that means bringing back salty snack foods and snappy sandals to my bed, so be it.

After I realized I was turning into a nocturnal ape zombie who would rip the guts out of any snack cake within an arm’s distance, had access to my credit card, and would delve into the kingdom of the dark arts with little to no provocation, I weighed the odds. And, I’m sorry, there was just no contest. I like sleeping, so if a Twinkie or Devil Dog had to die every now and then at the hands of a teeth-gnashing night-eater, I was cool with that. If a new pair of shoes popped up on my front porch every now and then, that was a thrill, and, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I lose in this game.

From what I can piece together, the de-evolution of myself to Ambien Laurie is fairly swift, and the entire transformation takes place within a single second. According to my husband, who has in fact seen her materialize, when Ambien Laurie takes
charge, I become a very calm yet highly aggressive person, like a gunfighter, who looks at him with an expression that relays calmly, “Sure, go ahead and eff with me. I’ll eat your face off. I’m cool, either way. You make the call.”

To me, however, it goes almost unnoticed until the next day, when I might see what I believe is a shard of wood on the bathroom floor and panic, thinking we might have termites, until I pick it up, realize it is a pretzel, and my mind quickly flashes to Ambien Laurie sitting on the potty and shoving pretzels into her gullet like popcorn at 3:00
A.M
. Or when walk into my office and see a cheese cracker sandwich delicately balanced on the corner of the hall table, and I have an immediate flashback of walking into the living room in the middle of the night, rooting through my purse like a truffle pig. I’m eating the twin of the cracker, instead of throwing them away because they were in my purse for the better part of a solstice, although Ambien Laurie filed that nugget of information away for later retrieval, when it was her feeding time. Or when I’m getting my morning coffee and the box of Triscuits is open and sitting on the counter, and I remember that I was standing there at three in the morning, looking at the Triscuit and then at an Oreo and thinking: I’ll eat
this
now while I’m waiting to eat
that
cookie.