to remove it from the deceased’s coat pocket or did it on purpose, which gave me the idea to make funerals more fun. I think I’ll find a strong market in need of such a service. I’m dreaming of all the melodies I could crank out…Maybe even voice mail messages for those in attendance, like, ‘I’m so glad you all turned out for the service. Don’t cry. I’m going to be in a much better place than this stink hole.’”
And I figure the woman in this Mammogram Parlor talking about pork chops and goiters while I’m about to have the remaining vestiges of my four tits steamrolled into Pringles, is not about to shut up until the nurse calls her name.
“By the way,” she said, loud enough for the Lord to hear, “I read a story the other day…I think it was some kind of contest in Ohio for people who wanted to take a stab at writing like Erma Bombeck…Anyhow, this woman was talking about her first mammogram and how the machine caught fire while she was all hooked up…Uh-huh, that’s right. No, she’s fine. They doused the flames with a fire extinguisher.”
As soon as her words were out for all to hear, a nurse appeared in the doorway, clipboard in hand.
“Mrs. Reinhardt?” she asked. “Come this way, please.”
I strode passed the gabbing lady with half a mustache and hissed. She and her dumb phone had up and ruined my first multitittied mammogram. Just up and ruined it.
The entire experience wasn’t as bad as I thought, pain-wise. But once it was over, for at least five days, I had six breasts instead of four when I would lie in certain positions. I decided not to tell my husband about that. Thank goodness we’re back down to two on most days, four on other days. I can handle that.
What I can’t handle is the fact that he said tummy tucks are also for redneck bimbos and pole dancers. Why, my sweet Aunt Essie who went in for a hysterectomy—lucky dog—ended up leaving sans uterus (this is why she’s the NICEST member of the family) but with a complimentary tummy tuck.
I’ve always wanted one, but realize the family budget can’t support such vanity. I’ll just have to settle for multiple breasts and four tummy rolls to match. Maybe if I go to Lowe’s and get the Gorilla Glue without asking questions, they won’t call Security. I could pull up my stomach skin and glue it beneath my bra-top swimwear.
Not Junior League Material
S ome girls just aren’t Junior League material. We aren’t quite hussies and we aren’t quite saints. Our hearts are pure and loving, but our minds and actions can take quite a few unexpected turns.
We weren’t born with great chances of turning out normal enough to conform to society’s ways and rules, the code of living and wage-earning, the coat of arms and breeding to get us into such circles.
The fact a sorority or two wanted, even requested, my admittance into their Greek system and circles of exclusivity was shocking enough. The fact mine kicked me out three years later for not acting “the part” and being a wild child, was to be expected when you mix girls like me—those with their own ideas about how to behave in college—with a bunch of Izod-wearing, espadrille-footed coeds with bobbed hairdos and clear skin and the Clinique trio of cleanser, toner and moisturizer.
Girls like me had regular old Nozema.
These future Junior Leaguers of America, God love them, and I swear I do, were girls who mainly went to prep schools and finishing schools and whose mothers and fathers were well heeled and, for the most part, either intelligent or boring or both.
I was fortunate enough to have oddball parents: smart, loveable, crazy and selfless. Nothing normal about them.
Both grew up dirt poor but fairly happy. Mama had a kindhearted, but part-time drunken father who one time, on a bender, bought his daughters a pet mule. The three girls rode the mule to death. They came home from school one day and it was lying in the yard on its back, all fours in the air stiff as trees. They also had a goat that ate the clothes drying on the line and anything else it could get hold of.
My daddy had chickens, cows, sheep and a fairly public circumcision at age eight that was the talk of the town. I’m not sure why he didn’t get snipped at birth.
It’s no wonder I turned out crazy—from the time I began shaving off my eyebrows when I was four and wearing wigs in first grade, courtesy of my mother’s odd beautician experimentations, to the times in high school when I’d pull stunts no one else had the nerve to try.
No one will ever forget my swinging the skinned cat from biology lab in front of the teachers’ picture window in the cafeteria as they ate lunch. Or getting tipsy and driving a boyfriend’s black Trans-Am through the practice fields and into the marching band’s formations without so much as denting a tuba.
If one was to pinpoint the moment of genetic differentials, of who gets what and goes where in this world, I believe a big part occurs when sperm meets the egg of two unusual people and thus have no hopes of giving birth to anything other than mutant, though quite precious progeny.
It all began when Mama was 22 and went into labor on November 12, 1961. The doctors knocked her out cold because she was hollering up a storm and scaring the other laboring women and genteel moanings emanating on the ward.
A few hours later they woke Mama up and said, “Here’s your baby girl.”
She was coherent enough to notice that something about the doctor’s face wasn’t right. He wasn’t smiling and seemed chalky. “Looked like Elmer’s was coming out of his pores,” Mama said many years later.
He haltingly handed her the baby (me) in a pink blanket, doing his best to hide my temporarily disfigured and frighteningly ugly face. Mama gasped as if she’d been shown an alien or was a character in one of those sci-fi movies where the mother opens forth and delivers something lizardous.
“Sh-sh-she won’t look like th-this forever,” the doctor stammered. “It’s just a matter of, well…Your p-pelvic bones wouldn’t…you know, and we had to use the forceps and when that didn’t work we resorted to our su-suction method, but unfortunately that failed so we had to call maintenance and b-borrow their Industrial Strength Hoover Mega Vac, but don’t worry, we sterilized all the major attachments and brushes.”
Mama’s mouth opened as if she was going to scream, but being so young, she couldn’t find the words and after wiggling her tongue around and bulging her eyeballs at the doctor in what she hoped was a threatening gesture, told him to get his no-good butt out of there and that if her baby didn’t present any better the next day, she would be Hoovering his own head.
“This isn’t our baby,” she told my dad. “There’s been a big mistake.”
She never told me this story until I was fifteen when she had decided that there was a chance I may not end up tragically unattractive after all.
“Your nose was all the way on the other side of your face, lopped over like it was trying to scoot off your cheek and climb into your ear,” she said, showing me the pictures. “Your head had all these humps and rings around it. Kind of like Saturn but shaped awfully funny, plus you had all this black hair covering your body, and I just wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole. I’d never seen such an ugly and hairy baby, oh, but we loved you and just prayed you’d get prettier. With your ears being what they were.”
I didn’t say a word as she reached for my hand with her own and squeezed it. “You realize they were the exact
