It Looked Different on the Model (7 page)

But I went back again, and this time I brought two packages. Both Priority. With tracking numbers. I wasn’t fooling around.

As she was getting ready to slap the post office label on the second package, someone shouted out to her from the photo department and told her she had a phone call. I watched her face drop as the person informed the Mean Lady that the call was about her daughter.

“Can you wait a minute?” she asked me, her skin tone suddenly ashen.

“Sure,” I said.

She went over to the photo department and took the phone call, then returned to the counter a couple of minutes later.

“Thank you,” she said. “I was so worried when they said it was about my daughter. But everything’s fine; she just wanted to stay at her friend’s house longer, so her friend’s mom called. I was so scared!”

“I know,” I replied. “I saw the look on your face. I’m glad everything is okay.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Thank you for being so nice about it. You’re nice. A lot of people wouldn’t have been so nice.”

I stopped for a moment.

“I know you must have to put up with a lot working at the post office,” I told her, to which she nodded vigorously.

“Some people are crazy,” she semi-whispered.

“I know. I’ve seen it. I saw a lady freak out about
‘automatic tape,’
” I informed her, after which I shrugged, furrowed my brow, and mock-laughed loudly.

The Mean Lady nodded. “
I know her
!” she hissed, lightly pounding her fist on the counter.

“And I think you’re nice, too,” I finished, to which she smiled, nodded, and smoothed the postage label on one of my packages.

“Hey,” I said quickly, noticing something very, very odd about her wrist. “Where’s your tattoo?”

It was gone. The fiery, tempestuous dragon had vanished.

“Oh,” the nice lady said as she laughed and pointed behind her, where on the wall was an entire display of vibrantly colored tattoo decals, including the legendary dragon.

And right then, at that second, we were cooked in the middle.

O
liver Twist looked at me with more horror in his eyes than I had ever seen on any street urchin, his bowl limply dangling from his hand in shock. Next to him, the Jewish bubbie from Scottsdale was speechless, her missile-sized ta-ta’s resting on her belly just above her waist. The Vampire Queen by her side looked on in silence as I lifted my arm up and went in as hard as I could, hitting Jamie, my best friend, in the middle of the back and nearly shooting her out of the wheelchair she was sitting in.

This was not exactly the way I had envisioned my birthday celebration to unfold. I happen to have a Halloween birthday; I am here to tell you that it is not as exciting as it may seem to non-Halloween-birthday people, for the following reasons:

And

Well, what do you know, I thought, as most people nodded their heads and noted that he would be missed. I was no longer a “tragedy.” The rings on this tree were now old growth. In fact, I bet no one would blink an eye if I dropped dead immediately. Instead of muttering “Such a shame, so young” at my funeral, or the preferred “Promising life cut
so short
,” people were more apt to whisper something apart from quick, sad clichés. “Well, of course she’s dead! Did you see what that girl ate?” would be the more common thing heard at my funeral, followed by “Between you and me,
miracle
she lived to this
point. The only regular workout she had involved nothing but her teeth,” or “Well, she had a decent run. She lived longer than a caveman,” or even “Hey, I just won fifteen dollars! She was top of the list in my Friends and Family Death Pool. Let’s celebrate!”

Now continually aware that an ungrievous death was right at my fingertips closest to the saltshaker, I had one hope for my birthday party, and that was simply that I wouldn’t be found heaped over the hors d’oeuvres station with guests lifting my limbs and skull for easier access to the onion dip. As long as I survived the celebration, or even if I died and one person cried, I was going to consider it a success.

But so far, everything was going according to plan as the 31st drew nearer. I wasn’t hospitalized, needing an organ transplant or atrophying in a coma due to age-related
age
. Instead, I was elated when Jamie mentioned several weeks before that she would drive the hundred miles from Portland to attend, and it was then that I got a brilliant idea. I presented my plan to her and she agreed, saying, “The only thing better than a party is a party where I never have to get up.”

And thus it was sealed.

When she arrived at my house on Halloween morning, she had her little suitcase and a satchel with her, and in the suitcase was everything she needed to complete my plan and become her Blanche Hudson to my Baby Jane from the classic camp horror movie.

Jamie and I first watched
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane
? in high school, absolutely glued to the screen as the former vaudeville child star Baby Jane, played by Bette Davis, tormented her sister and former movie star, Blanche, played by Joan Crawford. Ever since then, I had tried to talk Jamie into using the sisters as Halloween characters but had never had
much luck. Confined to a wheelchair due to an accident blamed on her drunk and jealous sister, Jane, Blanche—and her pets—are helpless as Jane dives deeper and deeper into boozy rages and insane, delirious tantrums. Honestly, if there’s anything more hilarious than an aged drunk with smeared makeup, it’s an aged drunk dressed up like a Little Miss pageant contestant reliving her youth in delusions and liquor-fueled hallucinations. True, that’s how I plan on spending my retirement, but as soon as you add a witness to a sullied, addled existence, it quickly loses its playful charm. Which sheds some light on why I could never talk a sixteen-year-old Jamie into dressing up on Halloween to flirt with boys at parties in which every single teen male was dressed as Bo or Luke Duke and wanted to spend the end of the night making out with Daisy, not a fifty-year-old malnourished paraplegic.

But now things were different. Although I was still conscious and was not writing letters to everyone I’d ever met asking them to see if they were a kidney match for me, I do have high blood pressure, and my dentist has thrown around the word “implant” like it’s a party streamer. Two steps closer to death. I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them. And at this stage in the game, when my friends “make out” on anything, it means we have a coupon. Clearly, the time was now or never for our activation into the Hudson sisters. Gingerly, I led Jamie/Blanche across the living room to the corner where the wheelchair I had just rented from the medical-supply store awaited her.

“Ooooh,” she cooed in a dramatic voice several octaves lower than her own, taking on the patiently proper Blanche persona immediately as she adjusted herself in the chair.

“You didn’t eat cha din-din!” I cackled as I channeled Jane, quoting a line from the scene where Jane serves Blanche a feathered friend on a silver plate.

“You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair!” Blanche shot back at me accusingly in a dead-on Joan Crawford impression.

“Butcha
are
, Blanche!
Ch’are
in that chair,” I replied as I threw my hands up, Bette Davis–style.

It was a stellar performance, and I could already tell it was going to be a night to remember. After we had set the food up and the guests had started to arrive, Jamie parked her wheelchair in the kitchen. She headed toward the breakfast nook, started rifling through her satchel, and then grabbed something.

“What is that?” I asked cautiously.

“Mama’s Booze Bag,” she said matter-of-factly, and then pulled out a full fifth of Absolut by the neck. She ripped the seal off with her fingernail, using surgical precision, much like a falcon’s talon gutting a lemming.

As people began to arrive, it was relatively clear that most of my husband’s friends had no idea who Jamie and I were dressed as, and I have to say I wasn’t exactly surprised. At a party several years ago, I bought a black shift from Talbots, a Cher-length blond wig, and a plastic baby doll, which I shoved between two pieces of ciabatta bread to make a baby sandwich, and came downstairs as Ann Coulter. I thought it was pure genius and talked loudly over anyone who spoke in my general vicinity, but people spent the evening smiling politely and moving away from me. Not one person cried, “Baby sandwich! Blowhard! Fiend! You’re Ann Coulter!” Somehow, everyone ID’d my husband, Hamid Karzai, immediately, even when he was catching non-halal meatballs in his mouth. The only
people his costume was lost on were my friends, who had puzzled looks on their faces when they asked me, “I think I get it.… Is your husband supposed to be Omar Sharif in
Doctor Zhivago
?”

I was very disappointed about my Ann Coulter costume and searched diligently over the next eleven months for something wicked, funny, and
obvious
. One day it came to me, not in a dream but in a TMZ.com video of Sad Clown Anna Nicole wandering around her backyard, snookered on pharmaceuticals, her face painted like John Wayne Gacy at a kid’s party, and mumbling that her belly was upset not because she was pregnant but because she just had to fart. Halfway through the footage, she picked up a plastic baby doll and insisted it was real, and that’s when I
knew
. I have that
same baby doll
, I thought. It’s the filling in my Ann Coulter sandwich!!

I bought another blond wig, clown makeup, and a sheet to tie around me to duplicate the toga Anna was wearing. I also collected pill bottles and taped Anna’s name to them, then Velcroed them to the toga.

Seriously, a
slam dunk
. And then she died. But I was not letting go of my dream and my fantastic costume. In fact, I thought my plaudits to a gassy, wasted Anna Nicole in white, green, and red face were nothing short of a tribute to her greatness.

However, I didn’t yet realize that, year after year, I was involved in a tiring game of Stump the English Grad Student, which was remarkably easy to win, unless you had an arcane trivia question about
The Canterbury Tales
or
Daniel Deronda
(that joke is only funny to 0.2 percent of the population, and it’s not you); in that case, all hands would pop up and monkey sounds would be made. But anything concerning pop culture and the outside world, forget it. How can this be, I thought as
the next person looked at me, my crazy clown makeup
that looked exactly like Anna Nicole’s
, and my baby doll, then swiped a carrot through some ranch dip and walked away. I made a mental note to myself that we simply had to start inviting more gay men to our Halloween parties, because they were clearly the only ones with a finger on the pulse of current events.

My husband—that year, Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer—wasn’t making things any better. Sporting his two-day pencil-thin mustache, he was sitting between a fairy and a girl in a platinum wig who was wearing a tiny tiara and a shiny pink dress that showed altogether too much of her corpulent, goose-pimpled flesh. After standing there for several minutes with absolutely no acknowledgment whatsoever, it dawned on me that not only did the guests not know who I was supposed to be but they didn’t know who I
was
. I was completely anonymous and also quite irrelevant.