| A
Serious Misunderstanding
by
Noel Clarkson
---I got a cold from my
Mom. She’s always threatening me with death if I go over
to my ninety-five year-old Grandpa’s house and give him a cold.
And here she is, flying up from Oakland on Southwest Airlines and giving
me a cold. She said she’d loan me her favorite nose drops, too.
Then she wondered if she could re-catch a bastardized version of her
original cold germs after I used her nasal drops. She wondered if that
were somehow possible? My Mom wonders a lot. She wonders about stuff
I’ve never even wondered to wonder about. I became a wondrous
kid.
---Other kids were pretending to be Farrah
Fawcett, or playing Battleship, and I was wondering if one tiny bite
of Krissy Spencer-Jahn’s bologna was going to give me cancer.
Nitrates. Herpes. Questionable Moles. Toxic shock. Microwave rays. Botulism.
Drive-by shootings. AIDS. I actually thought the end of the world had
come when helicopters came and sprayed Oakland to get rid of the fruit
fly.
---In fact, I don’t know why I’m
still alive. If one were to leaf through Mother’s six-thousand
page index of DISASTROUS (YET ENTIRELY POSSIBLE) DAILY OUTCOMES and
really dwell upon my life, one would realize I should have expired shortly
after birth. My Mom takes everything quite seriously. My high school
friend, Lily, told me that when she witnessed my mother screaming “Jesus
Christ!” as she tried to get an empty Yoplait yogurt container
off the head of a desperate squirrel which was running around and around
our back porch.
---But Madre made me laugh on her last
visit up here. We were searching around this spooky town for “half
aprons.” (That’s like an apron, only just the bottom half.)
And all the sudden she lets out a tremendous sigh, and declares, “Well,
I guess half aprons have gone the way of the dodo bird! “ And
the sales girl kind of gaped at her with her mouth half-open, and that
made me laugh and laugh. All in all, though, it’s not too hilarious
being the product of a mumbly philosopher and my Mom. In fact, all it’s
done is made me a thoughtful neurotic. And who wants to be around one
of those?
---The closest I have probably come to
expiring was as an infant. I had a bowel obstruction. Mom said I was
lucky to be alive during this modern age, because in 1969 they knew
how to give me barium and dive in and fiddle around, and take out my
appendix (just for kicks), and stitch me up again. The second time I
came rather close to expiring was the lump in my neck episode. A golf
ball sized lump that appeared six days before I was to fly off to London
for my junior year abroad at an important drama school. The doctor said,
“I won’t know until I look at it if it’s cancer.”
Then he gave me a percentage. A percentage of malignancy! Why do doctors
even bother? Why not just fuckin’ say, “Hey, could be bad,
could be okay….stay tuned, kiddo.” Men are so hung up on
numbers.
---So this surgeon, who is also the team
doctor for the Oakland Athletics, he removed half my thyroid gland.
I don’t know what thyroid glands and pulled groins have in common,
but my Mom loved him because he answered all her questions with authority.
So that was that. Dr. Know-it-all took out a hunk of gland, bruised
my voice box, and I flew off to drama class being only capable of a
completely unsatisfactory stage whisper. But at least I didn’t
have cancer.
---I also didn’t have a very good
time in London. I was fat and hot and sweaty, and tired all the time.
Cyril, the old fart from the Royal Academy who brought his corgi to
class, liked me, though. He used to shout, “That was a joke!”
and glare at me. Cyril informed me, in a whisper, that I was the best
in stage combat. I even got written up in the British Society of Fight
Directors official newsletter. I always put “excel in stage combat”
at the bottom of every resume I write, but it doesn’t seem to
get me anywhere.
---Anyway, I didn’t start feeling
good until I was thirty, and then I realized I had a patch of cellulite
and had never fallen in love. My next door neighbor Dan, the King of
Caviar, tells me I look like Madonna and is always asking me why I don’t
have a boyfriend, and I always giggle, and say, “Ha …you
tell me, Dan.” That’s as far as we get before Nordstrom
wifey comes out of the driveway with the little pug, Oscar, and the
horrible, incontinent retriever who barks at me even though he’s
blind, and they peel off in the King of Caviar super-duper German SUV.
---All right, so here goes: I’m a
thirty-four-year-old woman stranded in a bizarre ghost town at the tip
of America who, through sheer stubbornness-and in clear denial-still
clutches a microscopic thread of hope that she may one day yet form
a profound intimate alliance with the appropriate man. How’s that?
---Sure, I did have a real boyfriend, once,
back in the time when one-fifth of the U.S. populace had access to the
Internet. The relationship lasted eleven months. And shortly after that,
he died. Went the way of the dodo bird.
---But I’ll bet I could last at least
twice that long - and, who knows; maybe forever with the next guy. You
know - The guy. Though absolutely no evidence has ever come to light
actually supporting the theory of His existence, I am willing to suspend
my disbelief through exactly one more Christmas with grandpa and his
caretaker Yolanda - then proceed with a regimen of very good anti-depressants,
or go to the shelter and pick up three particularly needy kittens who
will share my Queen-sized bed, with luck, through menopause.
---I like cats. I currently peacefully
co-exist with a borrowed one, a hairy male twenty-two-pound tabby named
‘Lil Buddy, belonging to my millionaire boss.
---I mention Lil’ Buddy so you don’t
start out thinking of me as some kind of total relationship retard,
because that’s my current fear: that I’m a total relationship
retard - that I haven’t met anyone special because, somewhere
deep down I frankly don’t want to.
---But then my friend, Practical Pam, who
has ten years on me and is therefore always smarter snaps me out of
it by rolling her eyes and barking, “Oh for God’s sakes,
you don’t have a relationship because you go on really crap dates.”
---Pam can be a bit of a downer. She obsesses
about, well, everything. And I do, too. Before you know it, we’re
in some obsessive feminine swirl, muttering about life and what it’s
doing to us.
---Pam’s not a lesbian, even though
the waitress at Uptown Café gave Pam and her friend Sara (who
we think is in denial) only one comment card to fill out after they
ate dinner last week, and that bugged Pam. And my friend Julie, who’s
an anthropologist in L.A., truly seems to think Pam has the hots for
me. But I know it’s just that Pam has never dated a man in her
whole life, except for her married landlord and some British wanker
in her Parisian student days. Oh, and that Metro bus driver I set her
up with. But then I went to Poland, and Pam wrote me that his teeth
the whole top half had fallen out at Starbucks.
---I just want her to stop wearing men’s
Hawaiian shirts to work. And the Hanes t-shirts. It’s like Pam’s
opted out of even being IN the play, when I want her to choose a character.
So, by default, I do all the female-male dating, and Pam lives vicariously
through me. I sit on Pam’s couch while she sits in her rocker
and crochets and laughs, like at the male nurse who claimed to be a
doctor on the Internet, and then when I met him, told me he couldn’t
help it if I had “assumed” he was a doctor. Then he got
pretty uppity and declares in a challenging tone, “I wipe asses.”
---What forty-year-old man tells a woman
he “wipes asses” within ninety seconds of meeting? Pam informed
me I should have just gotten up and left, but how do I do that? It seems
so dramatic, and there was something compelling about Nurse’s
brown 1970’s sailor sweater. His sweater looked like it’d
been rolled in mothballs for the last three decades, it still had shoulder
pads. It looked exactly like a sweater that had been to an Eddie Rabbit
concert. And I think it kind of captivated me, and forced me to sit
through a dinner of breaded chicken strips - which I ended up paying
for.
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