It's a Whole New World

The other day, after Katy read that The Lady-Killer had procured a pile of chips from a dumpster outside a Frito-Lay warehouse in town, she called and said, "You're SO going to eat those chips. I know you are! Jess of five years ago would have never eaten those chips! It's a whole new world."

I told her I wasn't going to eat those chips. I told her there was no way in the world I was going to eat those chips. But guess what? I ate those chips. TLK opened the bag of cheddar-sour cream Ruffles, which are, like, one of my favorites, and he said, "Hey! Look! These ones aren't even expired. They just didn't have a lot of air in the bag! I bet that's why they got thrown out."

And I tasted them. I just wanted to see. I tasted the dumpster chips.

I TASTED DUMPSTER CHIPS. What the hell is wrong with me?

TLK + Dumpster Full of Chips = My Brother?

Let me be frank: I love chips. Oh my God, I love chips. Here's how sick it is: The reason I love sandwiches so much (and I love sandwiches A LOT) is because I get to eat chips with them. If you try to give me a sandwich without chips, I am going to ask you what the hell is the point. This means that this is an apartment that is always stocked with chips. Especially now, because I live with a boy who would die for French Onion Sun Chips the same way I'd die for Doritos.

Knowing this makes you understand the crisis situation we are in right now: This apartment is chip-less. Or, to be precise, it was chip-less until late last night, when the TLK arrived home from a jaunt with one of his friends. This morning I got a look at the bounty he'd piled on the stove: bags and bags of Doritos, Ruffles, and Cheetos.

"That's a lot of chips," I said.

He looked proud. "Yup," he said.

"Where did you get them?"

"Well, I bet you don't know this," he said, "because I didn't either until last night, but there is a Frito-Lay warehouse just down the road in the industrial park."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"And so... what? They were getting rid of almost-expired chips or something?"

"Right."

"So they put them on sale and you stocked up?" I asked.

TLK smiled at me, the smile you save for a simpleton. "Something like that," he said.

I looked at him. He looked at me. I looked down at the chips.

"Did they have them in a bin out front or something?" I asked.

"Not exactly."

"Oh my God!" I said.

"They're fine!" he said.

"Oh my God!" I said. "You went dumpster diving for chips?"

"I wouldn't call it DIVING," he said. "It was just a giant dumpster full of chips. It's not like we had to pick through garbage for them or anything." He picked up one of the bags and turned it toward me. "See? It's just that today's its expiration date. No big deal." Then he realized there was a dark smudge on the bag, a crust of God-knows-what. He put it back down. "Doesn't matter," he said. "I'm still eating the chips. They're on the inside."

And that was the moment I realized TLK and my brother were the same person.

A Not Unpleasant Puke

The Lady-Killer is a pro at puking. (See also: Steph's wedding.) Well, he puked again last night, and this was a fact I did not learn until this morning, when we woke at 11:53 AM, which was long after he'd slipped into bed after getting home and kissed me several thousand times.

"Gross!" I said. "You VOMITED last night and then came home and made out with me?!"

"Hey," he said, "I brushed my teeth!"

That, at least, was true. The first thing he did when he came through the door was take off his clothes. TLK prefers nudity or almost-nudity whenever he is lounging around our apartment. If it were up to him, every day would be a no-pants party.

The second thing he did was teeter into the bathroom, where he commenced brushing his teeth vigorously (TLK is very serious about dental hygiene). He even gargled with Scope. When he got back to bed, he breathed his minty breath onto me.

"So," I said as the mint washed over my body, "you spent the night drinking peppermint Schnapps and now came home to wash it away with minty toothpaste? You're minted up."

Of course what he neglected to tell me was that he'd spent part of the night vomiting up the half bottle of peppermint Schnapps he drank (straight) before being driven back to our place, where he promptly tried to smooch me up.

"You're gross," I told him this morning.

"Well, let me tell you this," he said. "That was a not-unpleasant puke experience. Seriously! Peppermint schanpps is the way to go! It came up tasting just as minty as it went down! It's nothing like what I usually puke up."

"Ew."

"Jagermeister," he said, "usually comes up really sour. And that night at Steph's wedding? That was just a mishmash of drinks, so it was really gross. But peppermint schnapps? It's the ideal puke."

This, my friends, is handy information to have.

One of These People Puked in the Bushes Outside a Wedding Reception (Hint: It Wasn't Me)

Hey! I'm home for the next big Pink Torpedo weekend, which took place this weekend. I brought The Lady-Killer home with me for the event, and when he wasn't busy using my father's label maker to print off such gems as BUTT MUNCH and SHIT ASS and I HEART WIENER, he got to meet my friends and family. He also got to vomit up an open bar rainbow of wine, champagne, espresso vodka, Sex-on-the-Beach, and rum-and-coke. This was after I gave my brother, who was picking us up from the wedding, a no-puke guarantee.

I never thought I'd say this, but cleaning vomit out of a car in high heels and a strapless dress at 1:00 AM is a pretty interesting way to end an evening. Especially after peeling a boy who is murmuring, "Baby, I'm so sorry! I love you! You know I love you, right? I love you! I puked in my crotch!" out of his clothes and putting him in the shower, then to bed.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. Both of us--the late-night puke-cleaner and the passed-out vomitter--looked pretty good when the night started.

Soiled

Sitting in the backseat of my father's car, on the way home from a day in Ontario, my brother leans to one side, lifts a cheek, and farts in the direction of his girlfriend.

She does not seem fazed.

I am in the front seat. I turn around and stare at him. "Adam!" I said. "Don't fart on your girlfriend! That's not nice!"

He farts again.

"You should be careful with that," I say. "You seem like you're pushing a little too much."

"He always does," his girlfriend says. "I'm always telling him 'Don't push! DO NOT PUSH!'"

"That's because I've pooped my pants three times in the last year," Adam says.

"What now?" my father says.

"Oh my God," I say.

"It's true," my brother says. He's delighted with the sudden turn in the conversation. Moments before he'd been sulking because he had gone off on an angry rant about some of his friends who were getting married, and the rest of us in the car had told him to shut the hell up, to stop getting so angry, to stop getting so worked up because he was going to have a heart attack. What bothered him the most was that we didn't agree with him, and he kept trying to make his point by raising his voice and repeating exactly what he'd already said.

"Okay, George Edward," my father said, invoking my grandfather's name. It's well known that my brother is my grandfather in lots of ways, both physical (looking at a picture of them at the same age is downright eerie) and emotional (neither can control their outrage, which they simmer in often).

"Yeah, George," I said. "Zip it back there. Enough out of you."

And then my brother really became our grandfather. He huffed and sighed and thrashed a little in the backseat, even when his girlfriend reached over to soothe him. He had himself a twenty second tantrum and then threw himself into the sulking. And this wasn't the first time. Half an hour earlier, he'd gone through the same cycle when he breathlessly transitioned from a lecture on how to make French onion soup into a lecture on gay men and how he's okay with gay men, how he's on their side, how he's in their corner--unless they're "gross about it"--and this, of course, prompted me and my father and Adam's girlfriend to tell him that was a bit homophobic and he better evaluate his attitude. Then he Georged us, yelled, huffed, thrashed, and sulked.

But now--now!--there is finally something on the table he's ready to talk about again, and that something is poop. He sits up a little straighter, squares his shoulders. "Want to hear how I did it?" he asks. "Want to hear how I pooped my pants three separate times this year?"

"No," I say.

"Yes," my father says.

"Okay." Adam cracks his knuckles. "So, the first time I was at work. I was closing up for the night, and I was sweeping the aisles, and I decided to let one go. I had really bad gas that day, and I needed to let some out. So I relaxed and just went for it. I blew out a really long, really loud fart. But at the end, there was a little surprise waiting for me."

"Oh my God," I say. "You pooped your pants at work!"

My father is laughing. He is bent over the steering wheel and laughing.

"One of the other times was just ridiculous," Adam's girlfriend says.

"How was it ridiculous?" Adam asks.

"You were standing three feet from the toilet when it happened!"

Adam grins. He laughs. "Oh," he says. "That time. Yeah." He pokes his girlfriend in the side. "I was in the bathroom getting ready for the day, and I was firing one off at her, but things got a little out of hand. I pooped my pants so bad there was no saving them."

"Good thing your mother doesn't do your laundry anymore," my father says.

Adam chuckles. "Oh yeah," he says. "That's true. She'd be finding little stink pickles all over the place."

"So was it anything like what you found in the bathroom today?" I ask.

It had been an eventful day in the public bathrooms in Port Dover. Early in the afternoon when my brother and father went in for a bathroom break, Adam came out real excited, real would up.

"You will NOT believe what I just saw in there!" he said.

My father started laughing. "Hush," he said. "Be quiet. Say it quietly. You don't know who it was."

"BE QUIET?!" my brother shouted. "BE QUIET?! DAD! SOME GUY SHIT HIS PANTS SO BAD HE HAD TO LEAVE THEM BEHIND IN THE STALL! THAT'S F-ING HILARIOUS!"

"What?!" I said.

"You're kidding!" Adam's girlfriend said.

"No," he said. He pointed back at the door. "Some guy shit himself so bad, it was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And his jeans were there, wadded up on the floor of the stall. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine pooping your pants that bad and abandoning ship?"

Of course, that wasn't the end of the story. Hours later, after we'd finished our buttery perch dinners at a picnic table on the beach, my brother went back to the bathroom. When he came out again, he was shaking his head.

"Jesus," I said. "Now what?"

He made a face. "Someone put his hands in the shit," he said, "and spread it all over the walls in there."

But now, my brother is telling his own story, his own pooped-his-pants-unexpectedly story, and I want to know if it is anything the same, if it was of the magnitude of what happened in the public beach bathrooms.

"No way," he says. "It was gross, but it wasn't THAT gross."

And then he turns his head toward the window, stares out into the Canadian fields that are still dotted with long-abandoned tobacco drying houses. A dreamy expression settles on his face, and it's easy to tell that he's thinking about his lack of bowel control and how it isn't as bad as the guy who cut loose in the public bathrooms, but there's a glimmer of something else there in his look--it's a little like he's impressed, a little like he's jealous that he doesn't have that story to tell the next time we're all gathered around a dinner table.

Man Pole

You'd think penis would be sufficient. Or cock or dick or wang. But it's not. Not for my brother, at least. When my brother wants to gross me out--when he really wants to get me going, to get me shrieking and fake-puking and saying, Adam! Stop it! Stop it! You're disgusting! You're a freak! Ew!--he will roll out other words for penis.

I know this because he and my father were here for the last four days, and for those four days my brother taunted me incessantly. And my father wasn't exactly any great help. After all, he thinks my brother's just oh-so-funny, and whenever my brother rolled out another gross phrase, my father would double over and laugh-laugh-laugh.

I should've known things would devolve into this just as soon as my brother got in my car on the first night. He lifted one butt cheek and rattled out a fart that smelled like death.

"What the hell?!" I said. I fanned my hands in front of my nose. "Adam! JESUS!"

He laughed. "It's from what I ate last night," he said. "Fried peppers." And then he farted again.

Then, hours later, the boy got to riffing on penises. "Want to talk about man poles?" he asked me. He leaned over and punched me in the arm. "Want to talk about zipper snakes?"

I narrowed my eyes at him.

"How about purple-headed yogurt slingers? No? Don't want to talk about those? How about balls? Want to talk about nubs? Nubbers? Want to talk about hairy balls?"

This went on for days. And it didn't get any better after he'd met my friend Christine, who is tall and curly-haired and very pretty. In short, she's right up my brother's alley.

We had ice cream with Christine right before we headed down to Portland so that Adam could spend hours combing through tourist traps, looking for the perfect souvenir for his girlfriend. He'd already gotten her a shirt and a hat and a mug (he gets her a shirt, a hat, and a mug everywhere he goes, so she's positively laden with shirts and hats and mugs, and when they finally get their own place together, they're going to have to devote an entire room to the shirts and hats and mugs they've amassed over their relationship) but he wanted to get her something else too, something with pizazz. But we couldn't do that before we had a snack, and ice cream it was.

Driving away from the ice cream stand, Adam blew a gust of air between his lips. "That Christine," he said. "She sure is cute."

She'd won him over in the first five minutes, probably when she told him there was a place in state that made lobster ice cream--actual lobster ice cream, not just the kind he was eating (Lobster Tracks, which featured red-tinted chocolate swirls)--and he decided that if there was a woman who could enable his lobster fix by giving him a way to eat it in dessert too, well, she was really special.

"Yes, she's adorable," I said. "There's no doubt about it."

"Do you think she'd like to talk about man poles?" he asked. "Do you think there'd ever be a day when she'd touch my man pole?"

I plugged my ears. He started to sing a little song about man poles, about purple-headed yogurt slingers, and my dad almost drove off the road.

~~~

I figured it might be more vivid if I showed it to you in cartoon format, so here you go. And, yes, I made us British.

And Now a Story that Involves Wine, Vomit, and My Brother

Let me brief and honest: My last full day of spring break was not awesome.

At first it seemed promising. It went a little something like this: Broadway Market for pierogi and placek and rye bread and pounds of sponge candy, and then the whole world fell off its axis and went spinning off into space.

There was some family drama, and after that family drama unfolded my mother was left teary-eyed and demanding to know where we'd put the fucking wine. She went into the bathroom to cry for a little bit, and I stood in the kitchen with forty dollars of Chinese food still sitting untouched and pristine in its take out containers. My mother was upset and crying in her bathroom, and I was trying to yank a stuck cork from a stubborn bottle of wine.

This called for reinforcements.

HOLY SHIT, I texted my brother. YOU NEED TO COME HOME NOW. I NEED BACKUP.

It's not that I needed help with the cork--eventually I bashed that thing out of the neck of the wine and poured two glasses (a giant one for my mother, a small one for me)--but it was that I needed help with the drama. I am not very good at handling my mother's sadness. It's true. I've handled it poorly all my life--especially after my parents' divorce. Back then, I adopted the attitude that it was her own fault, she'd made her choice, now she had to live with it. Sometimes I looked at my mother and thought SUCK IT UP.

On my last full day of spring break, though, I was not thinking SUCK IT UP; I was thinking THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD I CAN DO TO MAKE MY MOTHER FEEL LESS SHITTY RIGHT NOW. I knew I would eventually need help and that I wouldn't be able to be a clown for long enough to make her forget her problems.

Thus the text to my brother.

He arrived three hours into my crisis control--which, it should be noted, is not very smooth or sophisticated. If anyone is ever hurt or sad, this is what I will do to try to soothe them: I will park it on the couch, mix a drink or pour some wine, and I will pat a knee or a shoulder or a head until it seems lame to continue to do so, and then I will mix another drink or pour some more wine, and then I will say something stupid and silly and inappropriate in hopes that the person I am getting drunk will laugh and forget, for just a second, whatever is making them sad.

But the family drama on this particular Saturday had made me sad, too, and I needed someone to come refresh me, too. If we were going to make it through this, we all needed to be at our best. And that was where Adam came in.

"So," he said, after arriving and sitting himself in front of me and my mother, "how drunk are you? I saw the two wine bottles on the counter."

"I'm not drunk," my mother said.

That was a lie.

"She's pretty drunk," I said.

"How much did she drink?" Adam asked.

"Well, I only had one glass," I said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh."

"I'm not that drunk," my mother said.

"Are you going to puke?" my brother said. He wrinkled his nose, thinking about the possibility. "What I'm saying is I don't really want to wake up in the middle of the night to hear you barfing into the toilet. It is right next to my room, you know."

"Adam," I said, "shut up. She can puke if she wants to puke. She's a grown woman."

"I don't want to hear it!" he said. "That's gross!"

"Oh, like you've never done it," my mother said.

My brother grinned and sat back in the chair. He cracked his knuckles and surveyed the floor of the living room. "Oh, I've done it before," he said.

"I know," my mother said. "You've had parties. You've had them here!"

"It's true."

"Gross," I said.

"Whatever," he said. "Have I ever told you two the story about the rug?"

"What rug?" my mother asked.

"The rug that is missing from this room."

"There's a rug missing from this room?" my mother asked.

"Yes. For, like, years."

"Liar!" she said. "There's no rug missing."

"Mother," Adam said, "do you mean to tell me you've never noticed that one of your runners is missing from the living room?"

She took a long sip from her wine.

"I puked on it," my brother said. "I was having a party, and the boys were here, and we were drinking, and I'd had a lot, and I couldn't make it to the bathroom, so I just leaned forward, opened my mouth, and vomited out a neat little pile of puke. RIGHT. ONTO. THE. RUNNER."

"You are vile," I said.

My mother started giggling.

"We were too drunk to do much of anything about it," my brother said, "so I told the boys to just leave it, and we'd worry about it the next morning."

"OH MY GOD!" I said. "You left puke sit over night!"

"I was trashed, Jess," my brother said. "What did you think I was going to do?"

My mother giggled harder. "What did you do with it?" she asked.

"In the morning, I rolled the rug up, put it in a bag, and we put it in the car and took it to the car wash."

"Holy shit," I said. "You took a puked-on runner to the CAR WASH?"

"Listen," he said, "it was a good idea. You know how they have the clips for the car mats? Well, I took the rug out of the bag, clipped it up, and then blasted the shit out of it."

"You sprayed vomit with a pressure washer," I said. "That's smart. Vomit everywhere!"

My brother nodded. "Yes," he said. "But it got clean, okay? And I rolled it up and put it back in the bag--"

"The puke bag?!" I asked.

He glared.

"Fine," I said. "Continue."

"I put it back in the bag, and I took it home, dragged it into the garage, and then I forgot about it," he said. "A few days later I was out there, and I realized I'd forgotten the rug. And there it was, in a dark corner, and the bag was really condensated. So I knew there were really only two possibilities now: That I'd open that bag, and I would find the rug all moldy and disgusting; or, alternatively, I'd open the bag and smell the worst old vomit smell that ever existed. So I just took that bag and threw it into the garbage can and buried it."

"My rug!" my mother said.

"You're disgusting," I said. "You threw out MOM'S RUG."

But my mother was laughing and spilling her wine and mopping it up and laughing some more. She was denying that there was a rug missing. She was saying she'd never noticed its absence. She was saying it wasn't true.

And what she wasn't saying was everything else that was in her mind at that moment--all the bad stuff--and at that moment, for that reason, I loved my brother very, very much.

The Mourning

So, back when I had moved home for that year between grad school and Maine, I had quite the impressive little string of vehicular bird homicides. Now, it's not like I wanted to kill those birds, and it's not like I tried to kill those birds--I certainly didn't swerve to ping them, to clip them out of orbit--but it happened anyway, and I always ended up shrieking as I heard the thunk and saw the feathers fly. For a while, my car even drove around with a little feather headdress sticking out of the grill on the front because I couldn't bring myself to clean up the evidence.

And I wasn't the only one on a bird-killing streak that year. My father was too. The worst--the one I'll never, ever forget--was the mourning dove.

It was early evening. My father and I were on our way to town to get some dinner, and we were sailing along the back country roads, the ones cutting through long, tilled-up corn fields, and that's when the fattest mourning dove I had ever seen flapped its way into our path. You could tell this dove was exhausted from hauling its fat bulk around. His flight path was ragged. He appeared drunk and belligerent. Maybe he was a little suicidal. His wings gave out and he sagged near the road, hitting the hood of the car.

And then he exploded.

I am not kidding. I am not exaggerating. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen. That bird hit the car and exploded like a water balloon. A great gush of liquid--water, blood--washed over the windshield, and my father and I screamed. And then my father turned on the windshield wipers because there was just so much liquid.

And so, now, whenever I see a mourning dove, I can't help but insert sound effects when I watch it waddle around on its toothpick legs. Slosh, slosh, slosh, I think as the fat bird thumps around the deck. I picture its stomach like a mini-washing machine, just without clothes, the water swirling in a perpetually full cycle.

Now, here at home--I drove back to Buffalo a few days ago for spring break--there are mourning doves everywhere. There are a few that like to perch on the back porch, where my father, who, after he turned fifty, decided to take up one of his mother's favorite hobbies (feeding and acquiring certain level of inside information about birds, their habits, and their preferences in suet), puts out many different feeders. This hasn't always gone well for my father. He's battling certain tricky elements--two of which are Fat Squirrel and Fat Raccoon.

Fat Squirrel is fat because he simply climbs up into the bird feeder and parks it there while he fills his stomach with seed. Fat Raccoon does the same thing, just with a little more violence. He's been known to break the feeder, knock it over, kick it off the deck so that it falls and splits in two on the ground.

But sometimes actual birds dine at the feeders, and this afternoon those birds included two huge black birds and one fat mourning dove. You know who's particularly interested in this, in what's going on on the back porch? My cat. Abbey. She's obsessed with these birds. She will sit in front of the back door for hours, her eyes as big as saucers, her limbs tense with the desire to spring through the screen door.

It doesn't make it any better that the birds taunt her. The black birds tittered at her and bounced around on the floor of the deck just so she could get a better look, just so they could say, Fuck you, cat. You can't get out of there!

And then there was the mourning dove. She waited and waited and waited for the black birds to be done with their feeding so she could get in on the free food, but she got tired of waiting and she drifted down to the floor of the deck and planted it there. She folded her legs underneath her and nestled down, turning squarely so that she faced Abbey. The two of them were separated by a few feet and a screen door, and they would stay that way--just staring at each other--for hours. I'd never seen a more lazy (stubborn? cruel? taunting?) bird. She just locked eyes and gazed upon my cat until she finally tired and got up, turned a circle, squatted low, and shit out one tiny pellet onto the deck.

Abbey looked back at me and whined. She wanted me to open the door. Of course she did. I'm just not sure why. I don't know whether she wanted to be let out to make friends with the bird or to eat the bird, but either way I was half tempted to do it, to see what would happen if Abbey decided to leap into the afternoon sun and land on the bird. I wanted to see if it would explode instantly, leaving my cat standing on nothing but a pile of moist feathers. But I didn't. I figured that was probably too much trauma for any one cat to handle. After all, I know it was a little too much for me.

Perv.

This week I read an article about some high school teacher/coach who called a girl into his office before laying a hundred dollar bill on the desk in front of him and saying, "I'll give you that if you take your clothes off slowly."

My first thought was ew, and then my second thought was wait a second. That sounds familiar.

Back in high school, one of our history teachers was a notorious pervert. He'd been around for a while. In fact, he'd also been my mother's history teacher back when she was in high school. In her old yearbooks, there he is, a younger version of himself with wet-looking hair and a thick mustache. The look he is giving the camera makes it seem as if he's counting the minutes until he can go home, slip into his smoking jacket, light a cigar, and put on some Burt Bacharach. In short, he looks like a big, fat pervert.

"Oh, he was a big, fat pervert," my mother told me when she found out I'd be having him for a teacher. "He wasn't even sneaky about it. He announced at the beginning of the semester that he was going to put all the most attractive girls in the front row. The so-so girls went in the middle, and then the guys got stuck in the back of the room."

"Oh my God!" I said. "That's disgusting!" Then I paused. "Okay, where were you?"

My mother? She was in the front row.

I was fairly certain Mr. Hardy wouldn't still have such a blatant ranking policy anymore--tenure or not, that was the type of thing to get a man fired from teaching honors history in the 90s--but that didn't stop me from spreading the gossip to my friends, and we all laughed when Mr. Hardy organized the seating chart so that the class outcast and one of the smartest boys got placed directly in front of him.

"Maybe Mr. Hardy's tastes have changed over the years," we joked.

But, really, they hadn't.

One afternoon I dropped by his classroom during a planning period to hand in a short essay extra credit assignment he'd circulated to the class.

"I'll read this while you're right here," he said. "We'll take care of the grade right now."

I stood behind his desk, next to him. I read my words over his shoulder. It was a dynamite little essay, and I was proud of it. I waited patiently for him to finish it and praise me.

And when he finished, he took up his pen and he hovered it right above the paper. "This was good," he said.

"Thank you," I said. I watched his pen very closely. I was waiting to see the good grade he was going to trace on the paper. But the pen just hung in the midair.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll give you a choice."

I turned my eyes from the pen to his face. His hair and mustache were the same as they'd been in my mother's yearbook, but they were gray now. He still looked like he couldn't wait for a patterned silk jacket, a cigar in his fist. He looked like the type of old man who would say to a girl, "Hi there, Kitten. Why don't you come sit on my lap?"

"A choice?" I said. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I could give you a hundred points," he said, "or I could give you a hundred dollars because you're wearing that skirt."

I looked down at my outfit. I was wearing one of those numbers that was popular in the early 90s: plaid school girl skirt, navy knee-highs, chunky Mary Janes. It was my favorite outfit, and I always felt pretty good about myself when I wore it. The boys on the bus--the only boys who had crushes on me--went crazy for that outfit.

"Uhm, I'll take the points," I said.

"Okay." Mr. Hardy laughed and finally put his pen to the paper. He scratched a 100 at the top of my essay and handed it back. He made a notation in his grade book. "You're all set," he said. "I'll see you in class."

I wanted to tell him, "Listen, buddy, you're disgusting." I wanted to say, "Get a grip, pervert." But there was another part of me that wanted to thank him. I was not a pretty girl. I wasn't like the popular girls in our grade, the ones with high, perfect pony-tails and mega-watt smiles. I'd just recently stopped perming my hair, and I had a wardrobe filled with crocheted sweater vests. My nickname was "Chassie," short for "Chastity." The boy I loved most dated the skinniest cheerleaders at school, and I would eventually join the squad for two months in an effort to make him look at me. He never did. It would be years before I got my shit together.

Beyond my parents, not many people stopped me to tell me I looked nice, looked good, looked pretty. And I knew having a fifty-something history teacher tell me I was pretty wasn't going to solve any of my problems, and I knew there was something really disgusting about what he was doing, but for just a few seconds that day I let myself feel a little bit less like I was doomed to be a girl on the periphery forever. And then, minutes later, I hated myself for thinking like that because a teacher had just vaguely hit on me. I knew I should be more scandalized than I was, but at fourteen I was looking for anything to hang my hopes on, and I needed to take whatever I got. And what I got was Mr. Hardy, who never again said anything inappropriate to me. We made it through the rest of the year discussing world history, and I got my good grades, and I sat in the second row, and I tried not to think about what a horrible pervert was standing at the front of the room, smoothing his mustache and looking out at the girls in his class and thinking, Yes, yes. If only.

I Know Better

A conversation with Josh:

Josh: I want to go back to school. What should I go for?

Me: Maybe you should go to bartending school.

Josh: Maybe I should. But that doesn't seem important enough.

Me: You could be a fancy bartender. You know, the type that makes up famous drinks and gets profiled in Bon Appetit.

Josh: Hmm. Maybe.

Me: You'd get a lot of pussy.

Josh: Yes. Wait. Wait just a minute. What did you say? Did you just say pussy?

Me: Yes.

Josh: Don't ever say that again. Like, ever.

Me: Fair enough.

The King of Romance

My friend Josh left over Christmas vacation to go out to Colorado. Colorado sounded good to him, and he likes to snowboard, and he thought he could probably get a job somewhere, he could probably find a place to live for a few months, and if he couldn't, well, he knew a few people out there and he could crash on couches and figure something out.

He called tonight to tell me he signed a lease today, and that means he's staying in Colorado for at least nine months. He got an apartment with some of his friends, and he got a job as a ski lift attendant, and at night he and his friends climb up the mountain they live on and they snowboard down in the pitch black.

But that's not all that is going on in Josh's life. On his way to Colorado, he stopped in to Wisconsin and had some times with some friends, and one night all of those friends--there were, like, fifteen of them--got a hotel room. And they went out and danced on bars and got drunk, and that's when Josh decided there was a pretty girl he wanted to hook up with. But fifteen is a lot of people to cram into a hotel room--so little privacy!--and he knew he needed to have an alternate plan if he wanted to get some.

So Josh turned to this girl and said, "So. On a scale of one to five, how bad do you want to fool around in a handicapped bathroom stall?"

And this girl looked up at Josh, and she smiled. "Five!" she said.

This, of course, was after Josh had strolled into the lobby of their hotel--a Holiday Inn--and asked the guy behind the counter if he could rent a room for maybe just an hour and a half.

"I've got this girl I want to hook up with," Josh explained. "Can I get a hotel room for that long?"

The guy said he'd have to ask his manager, but the news wasn't good. The Holiday Inn was not in the business of renting rooms by the hour so that a kid from New York could show off his best moves for this girl who was eager, who was ready.

So Josh had to improvise. And he remembered the handicapped bathroom on their floor. It was across from the vending machines.

So now he had the green light from his girl. She was excited. She was going to show him a good time. And she started tugging him toward the bathroom.

"Wait," Josh said. "Shouldn't we get a blanket or something?"

But the blanket was too much to maneuver, so they settled on a lone white towel that they spread out before having sex right there in the locked handicapped bathroom, while across the way the vending machine full of Twix and Lifesavers and Doritos and Wrigleys hummed and hummed and hummed.

The next morning Josh woke up nervous. Scared. He and this girl hadn't used a condom, and in the morning Josh suddenly realized that was a horrible, horrible idea. He started to feel a little like he did for the span of years he refused to have sex with girls--he was convinced he was going to knock someone up, no matter how safe he was--which is why he tried to convince every girl he got naked to do some anal. Real sex was too dangerous. And the morning after the handicapped bathroom, he remembered just how dangerous.

This is why Josh went straight to Target, walked up to the pharmacy counter, and asked for a pack of the morning after pill. Then he took that out to the parking lot, where his girl was standing with their friends, and he handed her the pack.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

She looked at the package. She looked at him.

"Will you take this pill?"

When she didn't say anything, Josh reached over and popped the pill out of its package. "Can you take it?" he asked. "And can I watch?"

And you know what? All of this happened even though there was a surplus of condoms hanging around. I know there was. In fact, the world knows there was. Why? Because they did this:



And let me put that in perspective for you. The British one? Yeah, he's the guy I got detained with at the border this summer.

Disgusting little felons.

Marvel at the Glory

Here's what I was greeted with bright and early on Christmas morning. The robe:



And if you're wondering if that's vodka-tea in that glass my brother's holding, you'd be right. He left it out overnight, and when he scuffed into the kitchen on Christmas morning he said, "I wonder how this tastes now. Want some?" And when I said I really did not want some he tried it himself. And that face he's making tells us it wasn't that great.

The Rot

Let me tell you about maggots.

Maggots are gross. Maggots are foul. Maggots are things that crawl around my grandfather's kitchen because he has stopped cleaning. The man can get up, shuffle across the living room, put a porno in the VCR, and then shuffle back to his easy chair to do God knows what in, but he doesn't feel capable of going into the kitchen to run a rag across the counter. And so? Maggots.

And, sure, good old George Edward can summon maggots like no one's business, but his oldest granddaughter--and, yeah, that's me--also knows how to bring them about, apparently.

Remember when I told you about the fruit flies? Remember when I blamed them on that night Emily came over and we got drunk and very seriously discussed over fifty rounds of bellinis the boringness of this season's Project Runway contestants? Remember how I said I left all the food out and then the next morning--poof!--the fruit flies had arrived in my apartment, which was now their own miniature Boca Raton? Yeah, well, they were probably there for a while, just out of my view.

Tonight I bent down to grab a book out of my school bag--a multi-compartment green croc number--and I reeled backward after breathing in the air around the bag. It was rank. It was rotten. It was everything bad in the world.

"What the hell?" I said.

Abbey, who was sitting a few feet away, looked up at me and blinked. Duh, she said.

I reached into the bag--a mistake!--and rooted around in the front section I don't really use. At the bottom, my fingers sunk into sponge. Dark, fragrant sponge. I yanked the bag open and held it up to the light. And there it was: a completely rotted banana tucked deep into the folds of my bag. It was studded with maggots--mostly dead, but some not completely.

I reacted the way most people would if they'd just gone ahead and stuck their finger into a nest of maggots and moldy banana: I shrieked and tossed that bag. A cloud of fruit flies fluttered out from it.

Immediately, Abbey lost her mind. The flies had hightailed it to the nearest surface--which happened to be the mirrored doors that close my washer and dryer off from the rest of the apartment--and Abbey lunged at the doors. When the flies scattered farther up, she pinned her ears back and chattered at them before leaping up far enough to pin a few under her paw.

I was busy standing very still and hating myself. I had let a banana rot in my bag. I had been carrying maggots around with me everywhere I went for God knows how long. When I got into my car in the morning? Maggots. When I set my bag down in the corner of the office? Maggots. When I stepped into my creative writing class ready to discuss metaphor? Maggots. Maggots and rot everywhere I went.

What kind of girl was I becoming? A girl who lets rot descend on her life, that's who.

While Abbey continued her tactical assault on the fruit flies, I took everything out of the bag and sprayed it down with cleanser and scrubbed-scrubbed-scrubbed. I set out new dishes of balsamic vinegar. I got so disgusted at myself and at the bag that I opened the door to my patio and tossed it outside. The door hadn't been open more than five seconds, but in those five seconds Abbey had decided to abandon her plan to stalk and kill the flies that had been coughed out of the bag, and she shot through the open door. She wedged herself between slats on the deck and she stared out into the night, out into the dark, and she raised her nose to smell the cold in the air. I bent to get her and hugged her against my chest, and for a minute we stood out on the porch, next to a recently de-wormed bag, and we listened to absolutely nothing.

Let's not lie: Symbolically, this does not bode well.

Fruit, Not Fire

It's hard to think of what to say these days. I'm in the middle of something ugly, I know that, and it's hard for me to think in full thoughts. If I tried to write about what was going on lately, I wouldn't even know where to start. Each day seems to be pieced together out of random happenings that have no link, no common thread, like these:

1.

My kitchen is covered in flies--fruit, not fire or anything else interesting. They arrived one morning after my friend Emily and I had another Martini Sleepover. We got drunk on raspberry bellinis. We stayed up late watching Project Runway and talking about ex-boyfriends who got fat. I didn't clean up any of our sticky cups or empty champagne bottles or bowls of apple crisp. When we woke up the next morning, there were flies bring their luggage into the kitchen, setting up house in the caps still sweet with vodka, the glasses still red with raspberries. They haven't left since. I've tried different things to kill them. I've tried to kill them by clapping them between my hands--I'm surprisingly good at this, and it's surprisingly satisfying to see the crooked wings flat against my palms--but that's slow-going, and they're reproducing faster than I can kill them. I've put out saucers of sweet-smelling soap, hoping they'll get stuck in the thick liquid. I've chased them down with a bottle of hairspray, releasing long streams that make them slow and dopey, but not dead.


2.

I drove the two hours down to Boston on Monday night to get Josh. He'd been in France, teaching English and missing America, and he came home because he couldn't stand it anymore. He'd taken to buying beer and standing on the urine-soaked corner the bums gathered on. He'd been eating a lot of French hotdogs and drinking a lot of cheap wine. He couldn't find a second job that would bolster his meager finances--after all, a guy doesn't make too much teaching English to fifteen year old French girls who use their English to ask, "Can you take us home with you?"--and he was sick of being stuck in the middle of nowhere, his only friend an Irish guy who'd knocked up a French girl and was thus stuck in France with his own bunch of students.

So he came home. And as I rode the escalator down to the International Arrivals section of Logan Airport, I felt like I was in the opening scene of Love Actually. I scanned the crowds of people tugging suitcases through the gate, and on the other side of the room I saw Josh, the boy who, when I dream of him, arrives as Conan O'Brien ("Seriously, that kid looks just like Conan!" Emily's brother said after we'd all had martinis at the darkest basement bar in all of Portland, the best place to carry on illicit love affairs), and I started running toward him. We hugged.

"I love America!" he said.

For the next few days, I'd spend my time trying to entertain him. I handed him the pack of sex flashcards Diana had sent me. "These are stupid," he said, but when he got to MISSIONARY POSITION he laughed and turned the card toward me. On the front a man in a tuxedo was leaning close to a woman with close-set curls. The caption said Let's start with the missionary position and go from there. He also liked FELLATIO (After fellatio, he was putty in my hands!) and CUNNILINGUS (You may have heard about me--I specialize in cunnilingus).

The next day I handed him The Pop-Up Book of Sex, another gift from Diana, and he said, "This is ridiculous," but then he spent the next fifteen minutes using the tabs to rock the pop-up characters back in forth in different sexual situations. His favorite was the spread of pages that explained the Mile High Club. He made the male passenger's hips batter the stewardess, who was wearing fishnet stockings and too-red lipstick, over and over and over and over. "Ha," he said.

"When was the last time I told you how much I love America?" he asked.

"Five minutes ago," I said.

"Well, it's time again. I love America. I love it a lot."

I made him omelets. I brought him beer. I poured him wine. He did his laundry and watched French television and soccer. We got drunk and watched So You Think You Can Dance, and I tried to explain to him that this was the second time that SYTYCD had a contestant who looks like a boy from my past. This season, every time Legacy steps onto stage my head feels like it's going to fall off because he reminds me so much of this boy it's overwhelming.

"What do you think of his partner?" I asked. "Do you think she's pretty cute? Would you do her?"

"Does she have a pulse?" Josh asked.

Later, he downloaded the new Bone Thugs song and played it over and over and over. He played it on our way to the Chinese restaurant, on the way to Freeport, where he wanted to buy new pants, and on our way to Portland.

"How much do you love this song?" he asked.

I liked it okay, so I told him so.

"Will you listen to it after I leave?" he asked. "Will you listen to it every five minutes? Hey, Jess, have I told you about America and how I love it?"

We got into debates about everything. Josh was argumentative ("I'm not argumentative!" he insisted. "I'M NOT!") and he wanted to debate the word "nice" I used to describe him when he asked me to list his good qualities. He wanted to debate formal grammar instruction.

"YOU ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY!" I told him. "WHY ARE YOU BEING LIKE THIS?!"

"THIS IS WHAT I AM LIKE! YOU JUST DON'T KNOW ME!" he said.

"You're right," I said. "Sure, yeah, absolutely. That's it. I don't know you at all. I haven't been your friend for NINE YEARS."

Josh tried to love Abbey. It looked promising at first. He walked through the door on Monday night, let her smell his hand, and then he scooped her up. She let him kiss and hug her, and when he let her down she threaded through his legs. After that, though, things got rough. There was hissing. There was growling. There was swatting.

"This kitten is a bitch," Josh said. "I hate her. She's cute. Why doesn't she like me?"

And the thing is, I don't know.


3.

My mother, my brother, and my brother's girlfriend are coming to Maine for Thanksgiving. I'm throwing the celebration. This makes my brother pleased and excited. He's been promised lots of Freeport outlet shopping on Black Friday, and he's been promised unlimited lobster rolls.

Today I texted him--you don't ever call my brother because he's bad about both answering the phone when he sees it's someone other than his girlfriend, and he's equally bad about returning phone calls that were placed by anyone other than his girlfriend--and I asked him if he wouldn't mind so much going to the liquor store and bringing me a whole bunch of New York state wines when he comes.

Sure, he texted back. I'll do that. So, what's new? How's the man situation?

Ish, I said. Well, I mean, I don't know. I've been on a few dates with one guy. He's nice. He's a singer.

Woah boy, my brother said. My gaydar just went off. And does he love Will and Grace too?

Very helpful, I said.

What Kind of Semester It's Been

(1.)

I caught five plagiarizers in the last batch of essays I read. Five. One of the students, I guess somehow thinking I wouldn't notice that overnight his writing turned from what I would loosely describe as "bad" into something of witty, charming, and publishable quality, copied (WORD FOR WORD) several sections of a book into a blank Word document, slapped his name on it, and turned it in.

"I'm bad at acknowledging sources I've used," the student said. "I'm a bad paraphraser."

I narrowed my eyes. "Rule one," I said. "Don't copy and paste an entire book and hand it in with your name on top."


(2.)

You know it's bad when I call the Wily Republican and say, "Can I ask you a question?"

You know it's bad when that question is, "Did I ever teach you anything? Like, anything at all? Did I teach you anything about writing that will remain with you for the rest of your life? Did I in any small way help you?"

You know it's bad when he says, "Yes! Yes, of course!" and I say, "Okay. Fine. Thanks. That's all. I just needed to remind myself it's possible. Goodnight."


(3.)

This semester I've been utilizing electronic discussion boards an awful lot. And my students? They've been abusing them. Here's a sentence that represents the content they'll slap online:

i think my farther is won of the greatest people ever,,, i want to write a profilee on hym. im going to concentreat on dyfficultes he.

That makes my eyes want to bleed. That makes my brain turn to liquid and quiver near the edge of my skull, poised and ready to leak out my nose and ears.

Still, still, still I started the semester giving my students polite reminders about the professionalism of their prose--even the prose they are creating for online discussion boards.

"Treat this as seriously as you treat the essays," I said. (Of course, this motivational speech was flawed on my part; see also: #1.) When that didn't work, I sent out a stern e-mail reminding them that their grades--which were poor to say the least--were reflecting the level of attention they gave to the discussion board posts. And when that didn't work, I sat them down and had a Come to Jesus talk with them. And yet the two discussion boards I read this weekend showed absolutely no capitalization (which we learn in elementary school), no apostrophes (which we learn in middle school; which I re-taught in college), and no end punctuation (which we learn in elementary school).

I decided to try one more (one last) technique to get them to take this seriously. I enacted the "Automatic F Policy," which states that if a student's post features even one sentence without a capital letter at its beginning, one sentence that doesn't have end punctuation, one sentence that has a lowercase "I," that discussion board post is going to fail--no matter how good its ideas might be.

"Holy shit," one of my students said. "You're mean."

"You're right," I said. "I am mean. I am the meanest girl who ever lived."


(4.)

I want to save these kids.

I can't save these kids.

I can't even come close.


(5.)

Today in class I was talking about how to bring source material into an essay in an elegant and smooth manner. We were discussing quotation and summary and paraphrase, and I was reminding students that changing one or two words in an original source and passing it off as a paraphrase is actually plagiarism.

"Yeah, but how would you ever know that we'd done that?" one of my students asked.

"Because," I said, "I know what you guys are capable of. I know your styles. I know you how punctuate and structure sentences. When your style and structure and punctuation is suddenly completely different--and generally perfect--what do you think my first thought is?"

"And what's the penalty for plagiarizing in a paper?" this same student asked. Maybe he was weighing his options. Maybe he was wondering if he should take the chance, give it a go, see if I could really suss the plagiarism out, and if I did, well, then so be it, and he'd take the penalty, but only if it was something reasonable. And he wanted to check on it.

"You tell me," I said. "It's on your syllabus."

"YOU FAIL," another of the students (bright, sweet, kind) said. Her tone suggested that she was as tired of this line of discussion as I was.

"I fail the course?!" the first student asked, horrified.

"THE PAPER," the second student said. "YOU FAIL THE PAPER. WHICH, YOU KNOW, IS STILL BAD."

"Right," I said, "but if it were up to me, any student would fail the class if he turned something in that wasn't his own."

"That's totally harsh," the first student said.

"That's how it was when I was in school," I said. "I was in an English class with a kid who plagiarized, and he got hauled in front of a committee, then he got tossed out of school."

"And where did you go to school?" my student asked. "A community college?"

"No."

"Yeah, well, there you go," my student said. "Students at community college shouldn't be kicked out for plagiarism. I mean, it's only community college."

"NO!" I said. "COLLEGE IS COLLEGE. You shouldn't be able to plagiarize just because you're in community college!"

"Should too," he said.

"Oh my God," I said. "I think I am going to have a stroke."

A Conversation with Josh

A few weeks ago my friend Josh left for France, where he will be teaching English for almost a year. Today I got this report from Boulogne Sur Mer:

Josh: So, I've never met my housemate, but he left me a note over the toilet today.

Me: What did it say?

Josh: Merci de nettoyer le wc apres votre passage. Sounds elegant, huh?

Me: What does that mean?

Josh: It means thanks (in advance) for cleaning your leftovers from inside of the toilet after your passage.

Me: DID YOU LEAVE POOP IN THE TOILET, JOSH?

Josh: Well, there was like a tiny bit of a poop mark on the outside and that was it. Nothing more.

Me: That's gross!

Josh: Whatever. This guy's a total d-bag. I want to come home.

Family Pack

Worrying about offloading Myrtle the Turtle via Craiglist isn't the only thing on my brother's mind these days. He's also thinking about sex. He's thinking about sex a lot.

That's probably not that shocking. After all, he's a 22 year old boy, and 22 year old boys love sex. They love thinking about it, watching it, engaging it, or trying to engage in it.

But what is shocking about this is how he goes about preparing for sex. He and his girlfriend--a tough Buffalo girl who has a freckled Irish face that at times bears resemblance to the pink-nosed dwarf rabbits the two of them were plotting to buy before they got Myrtle--well, my brother and his girlfriend aren't very sneaky about keeping their sexual habits under wraps.

My brother's girlfriend routinely comes over to my mother's house and slaps her things on the counter. She doesn't always carry a purse, and if she doesn't, the important stuff just gets toted around in her hands and then eventually deposited onto my mother's kitchen counter. Keys, lip gloss, and birth control. That's what's usually waiting to greet my mother when she comes through the door.

"It makes me want to vomit," she says.

But she doesn't have the worst of it. The worst of it belongs to my father, who once made the mistake of giving his BJ's card to my brother when Adam asked for it. Then my father made an even graver mistake when he asked Adam, who was then returning the card, what he'd needed so desperately to buy in large quantities from BJ's.

"Condoms," my brother said. He waggled his eyebrows. "I need a few family packs."

That's bad enough, but it's not the end of the story. It's not the real problem. The real problem is that he keeps coming back for that card over and over and over. And by "over and over and over" I mean "often." I mean "too often." I mean "disgustingly often." I mean "gross."

"How many packs of condoms does he need?" my father asked me. "Really! How many?"

I wasn't exactly sure how to answer that, but I was sure about one thing: I was sure that if we kept track, we'd all be more nauseous than we'd been in years.

The Rise and Fall of Myrtle

You might recall that recently my brother took up with a turtle. He named that turtle Myrtle, even though that turtle was a boy, and he said he was going to love that turtle forever--or at least a long time, since it was a distinct possibility that this turtle was going to grow to be very big and very old.

"Isn't he sweet?" my brother asked. "Isn't Myrtle awesome?"

Last week when I called home, though, things had taken a decidedly less awesome turn.

"How's the turtle?" I asked my mother.

"Oh," she said. "Yeah. The turtle. It smells."

Turns out my brother liked the idea of a turtle more than the turtle itself. At first he was good about caring for Myrtle. Adam cleaned his cage and gave him regular salamander treats and spoke in loving, caring, nurturing tones to the turtle until he reached the end of his rope. The turtle, after all, didn't do much of anything. A turtle is not one of those interactive pets my brother favors--like the dwarf rabbits he went crazy for prior to going crazy for turtles--and a twenty-two year old boy can only take so much tank cleaning for an animal that spends its days sitting on a rock instead of doing something productive like hopping or fetching sticks.

Therefore, he started letting things slide. The tank cleaning became lackadaisical and then it became nonexistent, and my mother, after several failed attempts at reminding him--gently, in a motherly way--to get off his ass and clean Myrtle's tank, had to resort to sending threatening text messages that said CLEAN THE TURTLE'S CAGE TONIGHT OR ELSE!

"Well, this isn't a big surprise, is it?" I asked my mother.

"No," she said. "Not a surprise at all. Also, there have been some... complications."

Not long after Adam brought Myrtle home, the turtle became sluggish. Unresponsive. Lethargic. The turtle seemed even turtle-ier than normal. And his shell started changing color.

"This is bullshit!" my brother said. He thought that pet store in Erie, Pennsylvania--the town of his dreams--sold him a defective turtle. He thought he'd been duped. He thought he'd been conned into becoming the owner of a sick, defective, possibly dying turtle. So he and his girlfriend packed Myrtle up and got in the car and drove back to Pennsylvania, where they demanded to get a refund on their turtle.

"He's sick!" my brother insisted.

Well, actually, no, Myrtle wasn't sick. This was normal, the pet store employee said. This was all very normal. He gave them some basic information on the turtle's behavior and what to expect and then he said, "You know, that turtle isn't a boy. It's a girl."

So Adam took the turtle--once a boy with an unfortunate girl's name, now a girl with an unfortunate girl's name--and drove back to Buffalo. He put the turtle back in her cage and then began the process of ignoring her. Of course, ignoring turned into scheming. After all, Adam was so over being a turtle owner, and he needed to get rid of Myrtle somehow. My mother was on his case now, and so was his roommate. Several nights a week, Adam shares his room and his bunk bed with my mother's boyfriend's son, who is not so fond of spending time in a room that smells like moldy turtle shell and old water.

So Adam devised a plan. He would get rid of his turtle. He was confident he could do it.

"How?" I asked my mother.

"He's putting it on Craigslist," my mother said.

"He's putting his turtle on Craigslist?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"And has he had any luck with that?" I asked.

"No," she said. "He's going to be stuck with that thing forever. FOREVER."

And the way I figure it, that just about serves him right.

Here's What I Can Tell You About Getting Your Purse Stolen

It sucks. It sucks big time.

I'm a Virgo. I'm anal. I'm organized. Everything at my apartment (and car and office) has its own place, and if it's not in that place I'm likely to feel a little like the world might end, that it might just crack in two and dissolve in a hot wave of volcanic ash and magma. I like my things. I like my things where I put them.

And last Saturday night I went to a party, and where I put my things was upstairs, on a chair in the kitchen, out of everyone's way. Most people--me included--were in the basement, after all, because there was a game of beer pong going on and that game of beer pong would soon turn into a string of flip cup challenges that would occupy everyone for a good long time. After that--after I'd played games I hadn't played since college, after I enjoyed the thrill of feeling again like I did when I was in college--and after I'd consumed an awful lot of beer, more beer than I've drunk in two years (because I hate it), I realized I had to go to the bathroom.

This was unfortunate news since, as is inevitable at a party where there are twenty or so drunk boys, boys who like beer, boys who like to show off how much beer they can drink in a short span of time, there was one boy who had taken up permanent residence in the only bathroom. His head was hung over the lip of the toilet bowl, and it was clear he wasn't going to be summoning the strength to move any time soon.

So I tried to wait him out. I figured someone would move him eventually--not me, but someone--and then all would be well. But, again, this was a party populated mostly by boys who didn't so much care about trotting out into the woods to take care of business. And since I didn't know most of these boys, I wasn't thrilled with the idea of picking through the backyard to find my own spot.

This probably won't come as a surprise, but I'm not the type of girl who enjoys dropping her pants to pee in the wilderness. It's not that I haven't done it--I have, many times; I grew up in the country, after all, and we had a cabin, and instead of a bathroom that cabin had a roll of toilet paper near the door and you tucked it into your back pocket before clomping out into the ferns--but I didn't want to do that now. I was the new girl at the party, and I was wearing a cute outfit, and the only shoes I had with me were my tall boots with the spiked heels. None of that was the right gear with which to pee in the woods.

And so I held it as long as I possibly could, but when one of the other girls at the party came over to where I was sitting, wedged into a recliner with a boy who was talking to me about writing and how much he loved to write, and told me that she'd waited as long as she could and that we should go out there together, as a united front. She had a wad of paper towel in her hands.

"Okay," I said. I reluctantly squeezed out of the chair. I got my own paper towels and headed for the door. There was a small group of boys gathered in the kitchen. They were discussing beer and what beer was gross and what beer was best. They were slightly older, slightly drunker versions of my brother.

I tucked my paper towels into my pocket and bent to start the process of putting on my boots.

"Woah," one of the boys said.

They are some serious boots.

"I know," I said. "Not exactly going-into-the-woods material, huh?"

Another of the boys shook his head. "No," he said. "Hang on. Wait. Don't go yet. I'll go move him for you. I'll get him out of the bathroom."

"It's a pretty serious situation now," I said, "and it might take you a bit to get him into his room without him throwing up all over everything."

"True," the boy agreed. "I'll still try, though. So you guys can use the bathroom later."

I nodded, smiled, said thanks. I zipped my boots up and followed the other girl--who was wearing sneakers, like a normal human being--into the night.

"Anywhere?" I asked. She wasn't new, and I figured she might know the girls-peeing-outside protocol.

"I guess," she said. "I'm sticking close to the house."

I went around to the other side and tried to determine if I was hidden enough by trees and bushes that a passing car wouldn't shine its headlights on me as it passed, giving its passengers a fine look at a New York girl who was, for the first time, peeing outside in Maine.

I squatted and prayed. When I was a little girl, there was nothing I hated more than being made to pee outside when we were camping or back at the cabin. For one thing, it seemed fraught with disaster. You could step in or on something unpleasant. You could brush against the wrong leaf and get a rash. For another thing, I wasn't very good at it. I often ended up peeing on my pants. So I prayed and prayed and prayed that in the years since I'd last tried it, I'd somehow mastered it, learned the techniques by silent osmosis, become a pro.

And, luckily, I had.

When I went back inside and scraped the mud off my heels and washed my hands, I went immediately for my purse, which was still out of the way, on a chair in the corner of the kitchen. I checked my phone to see if anyone had called or texted. I considered texting Amy or Katy or Diana to tell them, Hey. Guess what I just did! because I figured they'd get a kick out of imagining me struggling through the muddy backyard in my Nine West boots with a few sheets of Bounty clutched in my palm. But I didn't. I thought better of it. I had other things on my mind at that point, so I slid my phone back in my purse and went back into the living room.

An hour later, when I wanted to check what time it was, I went back into the kitchen for my purse, for my phone. That's when I realized it was missing.

At first I thought someone was playing a joke on me. I thought one of the boys I'd just met had been thinking, Let's have some fun with this girl. I thought maybe they were doing it to put the cherry on top after the whole peeing outside incident. But after a few minutes it became incredibly clear that no one knew where my purse was. No one remembered seeing it, no one remembered anyone else touching it, no one remembered anything.

And so I began rooting around the house. I looked everywhere. Under sofas. In bags of dog food. In cabinets. In breadboxes. In the fridge and freezer. In the basement. In the trash. In the bathroom closet. In the shower. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

That's when the panic set in. My entire world was in that purse. I mean entire world. Everything good that I love was inside: iPod Touch, camera, car keys, spare car keys, phone, cash, credit cards, glasses, and some really good makeup.

With all that missing, I was stranded. Extremely stranded. Everyone around me was drunk, so there was no way I was getting a ride home--and even if anyone had been sober and able to drive me back home, it would be pointless because my house keys were gone. I could've spent the night slumped outside my apartment door, listening to Abbey cry inside.

So I spent the night there, but "spent the night" implies there was sleeping done, and if there was--at least on my part--there was very little of it because there were still a lot of boys downstairs blaring Rage Against the Machine and, eventually, after the sun had come up and the radio had gone off, I kept jolting awake thinking I heard someone outside the room, maybe hanging my found purse on the doorknob. I was hallucinating. I was on the edge of insanity. I don't lose things. Ever. I wasn't used to the unpleasant feeling of having lost things that were essential to my existence.

The next day we tore the house apart again. Several times. It was a group effort--everyone pitched in, even the feet-dragging, head-hanging hungover boys--but there was nothing anyone could do. My purse was gone.

It wasn't--and still isn't--easy to get things back together after you've lost, well, everything. I had to make a million panicked calls while I was around a phone because once I went back home later that night, I would no longer have a way to contact anyone. In addition to the panicked phone calls, I wrote several panicked e-mails, one to my office-mate--SUBJECT: HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!--that explained the situation and asked if he could come get me and take me to school the next morning because my car was going to have to stay where it was, half an hour away from my town.

Being a Virgo requires that, in addition to being anal and obsessive, you are certain that you are in control at all times and that is the best way to make it through the day. Well, it is considerably more difficult to be in control when you don't have money, a car, a phone, or keys to all the places that can give you shelter.

And now, a full week later, I'm still finding it difficult. Slowly, things are starting to come back together. I'm making lists of things, big and small, that were in my purse, and I'm trying to get them back. The big things were the easiest--getting my car towed to a dealership that could make me a new set of keys for my car; replacing my apartment keys; canceling my credit cards--but it's the small things now that are waking me up in the middle of the night. Jesus! I'll think as I bolt up in bed. I'll need to replace my library card! My faculty card! My VIP sponge candy buyer's card!

There are a million things in my wallet that I took for granted, and, yes, I realize that those aren't important and they're very small and silly, but it makes me feel raw and exposed to know that someone picked through that purse and saw all those things, gained some small insight into the type of girl I am. It bothers me that that person will see the pictures and videos on my camera, the music I love on my iPod, the texts I'd been sending before I went to the party that night. It bothers me that this person will form some sort of opinion about me and then take only the things he wants--the camera, the iPod, the phone, anything worth a good chunk of money--and then throw all the rest away like it doesn't matter in the slightest.

Difficult: Four About My Grandfather

(1.)

This weekend at my cousin's graduation party my grandfather tried to explain where he got another of my cousin's nicknames from. He calls her "Schwartzy"--short for Schwarzenegger because, apparently, he had predicted that she will marry someone with a very long name.

"You can predict who we're going to marry, huh?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he said.

"Okay," I said. "Go ahead. Who am I going to marry?"

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. "A monkey," he said.

"A monkey?"

"Bozo the Baboon," he said. "You're going to marry Bozo the Baboon."


(2.)

At the same party, my aunt told us this story:

One day after work she picked up my grandfather after work and took him to dinner. At dinner, he was unable to concentrate on his food because he was too distracted by the girl--"She couldn't have been more than fourteen," my aunt said. "I swear!"--who was leaning over into the cooler to scoop ice cream.

"That's right," my grandfather muttered under his breath. "Keep leaning. Keep going. Farther over. Oh yeah, that's good. That's right."

Later, after dinner, he mentioned he'd recently seen a nice Jeep for sale over on the Indian reservation and he was wondering if my aunt might take him over there. She said fine, she'd take him. She was tired and she hadn't yet been home that day, but she wanted to make the old man happy--she hasn't been around him all her life, considering she married my uncle maybe only 10 years ago, and she hasn't hit her limit yet--so she asked him if he was certain he knew the way to where they were going because she didn't.

He said sure.

He lied.

He got them lost.

She stopped for directions, and the man in the gas station said it would take another forty minutes to get where they needed to go. Still, she took him.

When they arrived at the reservation, my grandfather found the Jeep he was interested in--why? Because he wants one, but only to use in the field; he swears only the field (yeah right)--and he toddled over to it and started touching it.

"There's not a for sale sign on it," my aunt said. "You're sure it's for sale?"

"No," my grandfather said. "I guess I was wrong. I guess it's just someone's Jeep."

And then he tried to lift the hood to look at the engine.


(3.)

He wants a Jeep. He wants wheels bad. But he has had a stroke. His vision is iffy. His doctor wrote a letter that revoked his license. Still, still, still, that man swears he is fine, he is good, he can drive, he wants something he can pilot. He says he's in the market for a Jeep, as if we could forget the three flat-tired ones that have sunk into the ground behind his house. These are the Jeeps he drove near the end of his career as a driver, and each is busted in a unique way from his string of "minor accidents." He routinely drove into the picnic bench outside his favorite diner. He routinely clipped passing mail trucks or concrete mixers or Mazdas.

And if no one is willing to get him a Jeep, he's ready to compromise. He'll take a motorized bike.

"That way," he says, "if I have an accident, I'll only end up killing myself."


(4.)

"You know," my mother said at the family party, "when people at work ask me to describe my father, I just say, 'He's difficult.'"