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  “When are we eating?”

  “Can she open presents now?”

  “Is my arm broken? It really hurts. My daddy’s a lawyer and he said that the Slip ’n’ Slide is just a tort waiting to happen. Did you know that? Did you?”

  “I’m going to ask you for two hamburgers but I’m really just going to eat one small bite out of one and say it tastes “too hamburgery.”

  (Crying) “She said I liked a boy!”

  At exactly 1 A.M., my official lights-out deadline, I reminded the girls they’d better go to sleep or I’d have to stay up with them and then I’d be too tired to make pancakes that look like Hannah Montana the next morning.

  “Really? You can make pancakes that look like Hannah Montana?” my kid asked.

  “Of course not, but my wine buzz gave out, like, five hours ago and I gotta get some sleep. They’ll understand.”

  Besides, if pressed, I could always just glue a photo cut out of Tiger Beat to the pancakes because Hannah (really Miley Cyrus) is the modern-day equivalent of Partridge Family heartthrob Keith Cassidy for “most pictures in a preteen magazine ever.” And, yes, it’s beyond unsettling that I know that.

  When everything was dark and I was finally threading my way around and between ten sleeping bags to head upstairs to bed, I heard a small voice.

  “I forgot my white-noise fan.”

  Pretend I didn’t hear that and keep heading for the stairs.

  “Sophie’s mom! I can’t sleep without my white-noise fan. Do you hear me? I can’t sleep without it!!!!”

  Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap.

  “OK, honey,” I said with as much cheer as anyone could muster at one o’clock in the morning. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “Just call my mom and dad. They’ll bring it over.”

  “But, sweetie, your mom and dad live ten miles from here. It’s one o’clock in the mother—, I mean it’s one o’ clock in the morning! We don’t want to wake them up at this hour, do we?”

  “They won’t mind,” she said. “They love me.”

  “Trust me,” I said, patting her hair gently and looking at her sweet face in the soft moonlight streaming through the living room windows. “I’m sure your parents don’t love you that much. No one does!”

  Her eyes got all wide and wet like one of those Precious Moments dolls. What? What’d I say?

  “Sweetie, it’s like this. The big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the one. Get it? I’m not calling anybody at one o’clock in the morning unless it’s the cops because a stranger with a bloody ax has stumbled in here and threatened to open our skulls like a pile of ripe nectarines. Now night-night.”

  OK, bad idea. There were now ten exceedingly hysterical little girls sitting bolt upright in their Diva sleeping bags.

  “Mommy’s just kidding,” said Sophie. “She gets really cranky when she’s tired and she says crazy stuff.”

  “So there’s nobody with an ax coming to get us?” the sweet, shy kid who hadn’t said a word all day asked. I just knew that before the night was over she was going to pee on my new couch.

  “Of course not, darling,” I said. “I’m just having some fun. Gawd, haven’t y’all ever told spooky stories at a sleepover?”

  What was wrong with me? Now I’d never get to sleep. Don’t children have any sense of humor? I thought the ax nectarine thing was pretty funny, but kids? You can’t make ’em laugh unless you fart.

  While I pondered this in an exhausted haze, the clock ticked closer to 2 A.M. Finally, mercifully, I looked over and realized the little girl who needed her white-noise fan was sound asleep. I wanted to wake her up and tell her “Ha! You don’t need that fan. You were asleep!” but that would have been self-defeating, I guess. Still, it has always been very important to me for everyone to know when I’m right about something. Which is basically all the time.

  While some might say that’s an annoying character trait, I would just say that’s just one more thing they’re wrong about. Being right all the time is a burden, people. Feel my pain.

  Finally, one by one, the little girls began to wear themselves out. By two-thirty it was all quiet and I crept upstairs, finally, to sleep.

  And wake up again at 6 A.M. Yes, three and a half hours. That’s how long they slept before crawling out of their pink cocoons and deciding it was time to play Twister!

  I punched duh-hubby to inform him that the girls were awake but he just mumbled “OK” and resumed snoring.

  OK? No, not OK! He’d been asleep since 11 P.M. Where was the fairness in this?

  Still, I knew in my heart that little girls get freaked out at the sight of men in boxer shorts and “Dook Sucks” T-shirts stumbling around in the early hours.

  The sleepover is primarily the responsibility of the mommy-host and that will never change.

  While hubby snoozed with a big smile on his face, I went downstairs to make the damned pancakes.

  “These don’t look like Hannah Montana!” one little girl screeched.

  “Of course they do. Now just be quiet and drink your mimosa,” I said. “Have a few, as a matter of fact. By the sixth one, the pancakes will look like any damn body you want ’em to!”

  “Aaaaahhhhhh!!! You said the ‘D’ word. Sophie’s mommy said the ‘D’ word.”

  I silently reached into my robe pocket and tossed a dollar into the Swear Jar on the kitchen counter.

  I’d installed the Swear Jar a year earlier to curb the urge to cuss by any member of the family but, as of this moment, I had been the only one who had actually put any money into the jar. We’d emptied it at least three times.

  I’ve always had a problem with “potty mouth” but the most embarrassing moment had happened years ago on the job.

  As the wedding editor for the newspaper, I was used to dealing with demanding nut jobs day after day but one, in particular, led me to unleash a few well-chosens as soon as she was out of range.

  A Yankee man I worked with stared at me, mouth agape.

  “You eat with that mouth?” he asked.

  I was mortified. To be corrected on manners by a Yankee man was beyond humiliating.

  But here I was, cussing in front of a kitchen full of nine-year-olds. What was wrong with me?

  Sleep deprivation, that’s what.

  Hubby emerged in jeans and a clean shirt, freshly showered and feeling energized by his undisturbed ten hours of sleep.

  “Yummy! Something smells great! What’s for breakfast, honey?”

  “We’re having pancakes that look just like Hannah Montana,” I said sweetly.

  “Really?” he said, scowling slightly at the griddle. “They don’t look much like Hannah Montana to me.”

  I considered slamming his head into the griddle and asking him if he’d like to think again now that he had a closer look, but that would’ve resulted in having to put more money in the “Violent Behavior” jar, my latest anger-management tool for occasional perimenopausal outbursts.

  “Sophie’s mommy said the ‘D’ word,” one little girl snitched to hubby with obvious delight.

  “You got off lucky, kid,” he said, reaching for the orange juice.

  Four hours later, all the mommies arrived to pick up their little girls, who were all leaving with little director’s chairs with their names on them that we’d used for the outdoor movie. All in all, it had been a pretty great party.

  “Is it true that they only got three and a half hours sleep?” asked one of the more high-maintenance moms.

  “Yep.”

  “And that you used the ‘D’ word and gave them mimosas?”

  “Guilty as charged. Except their mimosas didn’t have champagne in them. Who do you think I am? Michael Jackson?”

  “And that you told them a man with a bloody ax was going to come through the door and chop them up like nectarines?”

  “Of course not. You know, you can’t believe everything a kid tells you.”

  The “Lies” jar is getting pretty full, to
o.

  17

  Christmas at the “Urgent” Care

  If you plan to travel with children during the holidays, there’s about a one-zillion-percent chance that you’ll spend at least some part of “the most wonderful time of the year” in the urgent-care outpost of some town you’ve never heard of.

  I’d hoped to avoid this feverish truth by demanding that everyone in the family use hand sanitizer roughly eighteen to twenty times a day during the month of December. Sadly, it didn’t work.

  As we sat for hour after hour in the Doctor’s Immediately Urgent Prime and Emergent Medicinal Care complex, I pondered the hollow nature of those words: “urgent” and “immediate.” I also comforted myself with the image of the Silkwood-style hot shower I would take the moment we got out of there. Gawd, who would’ve thought there would be so many sick people in this place?

  A few snarkily mentioned that they’d had time to write their wills during the wait and one claimed to have asked the receptionist to be his witness.

  I’d worked so hard not to be here with the Princess, who sat silent and beet-red, occasionally rousing long enough to mutter the word “brandy” over and over. In fact, she had awakened me the night before to simply say “Brandy” and I just thought she was having some weird dream about that skinny singer with the so-so pipes and snotty attitude. It’s not like we have a house full of snifters and ascots for shit’s sake.

  Because I’m a superstitious sort, I wondered if I had brought this misfortune upon us by failing to send Christmas cards this year. Out of time and patience, I’d announced that when it came to the whole buying, stamping, mailing thing? Over it. Duh-hubby said he’d do the Christmas cards this year, which was funny since he, like every other man I know, hasn’t mailed a Christmas, birthday, or any other greeting card since the “I do”s were spoken. Women do all that stuff, even when it’s his relatives. We’re brain-dead that way.

  Not sending Christmas cards was deliciously liberating.

  I know I should’ve felt guilty about it but I just couldn’t. When I think of all the years that I have agonized over our family Christmas card photo, I feel silly. There’s real tragedy in the world, people. Cate Blanchett is down to, like, eighty-five pounds, y’all. Now that’s something to worry about.

  The Princess squirmed in her seat while I filled out the required paperwork and continued to wonder if my selfishness had somehow jinxed our holiday.

  I had to giggle when I realized that one of the many forms I was filling out asked if my daughter, the fourth grader, was married.

  “Should I fill this out?” I asked the receptionist, from behind the turtleneck I had neurotically pulled up over my nose.

  “Oh, no. You’re special,” she said. “The forms are for all the other people to fill out.”

  Oh, snap!

  “Brandy” came a small voice from across the room.

  I returned to the plastic seat that had been factory-molded to most comfortably accommodate a chipmunk’s ass and dutifully filled out the forms detailing my daughter’s imaginary marriage and work history.

  Yep, I was in some sort of Purgatory, that much was clear. It was because, this year, I hadn’t “kept Christmas” as Aunt Sudavee used to say. I mean, not even close. She used to chide me when I was jealous of another kid’s toy on Christmas morning.

  “Envy is a sin. Get a cup o’ Jesus!” she’d say, which sounded like good advice but still left me without an Etch A Sketch.

  I was paying for not keeping Christmas. It was true. This year, for the first time, I didn’t bake a single cookie for other people, yet had happily received plenty of cookies, including those fabulous little butterscotch haystack things you make with chow mein noodles, plus a big tin of rum balls that I had to fight off my yard guy to keep.

  It wasn’t all my fault. A lot of friends and family members had said they were taking steps to de-stress Christmas so I was just going along with others.

  My sister-in-law had suggested that we skip presents altogether and spend more “real time” together doing meaningful things like constructing a gingerbread house together, singing carols around the piano and, in general, acting as if we were all Dickensian orphans trapped in a world without Neiman’s. Sis-in-law had read a book about “unplugging the Christmas machine” and it made not doing stuff you didn’t want to do sound almost noble.

  Out of respect for sis-in-law’s wishes, I didn’t buy her a present but I hoped that she, in turn, would respect my wishes. For an iPod Nano and some really expensive chocolate, not those trifling Hershey Krackel bars everybody got last year.

  Had my greed brought this plague unto our household? Verily, I thought so. Guilt overwhelmed me and I lowered my turtleneck, which had caused more than a few mean stares.

  One hour later, the doctor was ready for us. I don’t want to say he was young, but I could’ve sworn he’d trick-or-treated at my door in a Power Rangers costume just a couple of months earlier.

  He stuck two cotton swabs into my daughter’s precious nostrils for a flu test.

  “Why’d he do that?” she asked groggily, after the tiny doctor had left the room.

  “I don’t know, honey, but in some countries, I think it means you’re engaged.”

  After another fifteen minutes or so, the itty-bitty doctor returned and announced that it wasn’t flu but “just, uh, some kind of, like, virus or somethin’.”

  “Righteous,” I said. We left with a prescription for something that tasted exactly like, what else? Brandy. Out of the mouths of babes, I thought.

  With her fever hovering around 103, I bundled the Princess back into the car and we headed to the drugstore before returning to the rest of our Christmas “vacation.”

  To tell the truth, the curse I had brought upon her had spread to me by this time and I was feeling increasingly lousy. I decided to get some Sudafed while I waited for the “brandy” bottle to be filled by a pharmacist who also looked younger than half the stuff in my medicine cabinet.

  Oh, I got it. It was the day after Christmas. Everyone who had actually graduated from med school or pharmacy school was on vacation. We had been left to deal with the second string.

  Whatever. Where was the damn Sudafed? And then I remembered that it’s behind the counter these days. You have to show a picture I.D. and sign in before you can buy cold medicine because it contains pseudoephedrine, a fabulous decongestant that is a key ingredient in homemade methamphetamine. Think of it as the cream of mushroom soup of meth-making.

  This is so unfair. Just because Meemaw has given up cooking chicken and pastry in the doublewide in favor of cooking up a big ol’ batch of meth and biscuits, I get to be treated like some kind of junkie for trying to get a little cold relief?

  Besides, you know what they say: When they outlaw Sudafed, only outlaws will have Sudafed.

  I’m worried that it’s going to get even harder to get the stuff. Will I have to prove that my cold is severe enough for Sudafed? Will I need a note from my parents? What if my watery eyes and red nose aren’t good enough? Will I have to buy it in a dark alley behind the drugstore from someone named Knuckles?

  I’m sure meth is a huge problem but I do wonder why so many towns seem almost eager to call themselves “The Meth Capital” of whatever state. The way they carry on about it, I expect it won’t be long before you see it on city limits signs (NOW WITH EVEN MORE METH LABS PER SQUARE MILE!). Will deputy sheriffs say, “You call yourself a meth capital? Don’t make me laugh!”

  Next year, I’m going to make more of an effort when it comes to Christmas.

  And part of that is that I’m not going to call it “the holidays.” Nope, I’m just going to call Christmas what it is. If anyone finds that offensive because it doesn’t include any reference to their particular celebration of the season, if any, (and it is certainly their right not to celebrate anything at all although I should point out that there are some amazing prices on those circular diamond pendants along around late December), then
that’s just tough tinsel.

  I’m weary of trying to be politically correct about Christmas. This doesn’t mean I’m anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Buddhist, anti-Kwaanza, or anti-Perspirant.

  While waiting for the “pharmacist” to fill our prescription, I remembered a funny thing that had happened the week before at a kid’s birthday party.

  Some of us were standing around talking about last-minute gifts we still had to buy, when one of the guests in our little circle stopped the conversation dead in its reindeer tracks with a terse, and rather loud, “I’m Buddhist.”

  I suppose this was her rather ham-handed way of reminding us that we were excluding her religion, which, up to this point, could’ve been the devout worship of Little Debbie Raisin Creme Pies for all I knew. They’re cheap but soooo good so anything’s possible, right?

  And you know how some people do everything they can to avoid conflict because they’re just Really Nice People?

  And how others, meaning me, just feed off conflict like a roomful of cats on a week-old corpse?

  Coupled with the sad fact that I’m not Really Nice at all is this awful personality defect that makes me crack a joke at the worst possible time.

  What I should have said: “You’re Buddhist? Oh, how interesting! I’ve never had the opportunity to learn about Buddhism. Please tell me more about your religion.”

  What I did say: “You’re Buddhist? Wow! You don’t look a thing like Richard Gere.”

  I know! Completely inappropriate but come on, a little funny, right?

  Buddhist girl just sighed and walked away, presumably to find a quiet place in which to meditate about the ignoramus with the Little Debbie crumbs stuck to her sweater.

  In December, people who don’t celebrate Christmas must feel like the kid with the peanut allergy who has to eat lunch in the school library every day.

  I do get it, and I’m sorry. But I ain’t giving up my joy. Or my butterscotch haystack thingies.

  18

  How to Avoid Mortuary Science Camp