I Hate Everyone, Except You(59)

“I can’t see anything except the ceiling!”

“Well, shut your eyes anyway.”

“Why do you get to have your eyes open?”

“How am I supposed to pull you out without looking?”

“Oh, I don’t even care at this point.”

“Believe me, it’s not like I want to see any of this.”

Now’s probably a good time for me to add that Lisa is not a small girl. And I’m not saying this with any judgment, because life happens and I adore her. But whenever I picture her in my head, I see her as she was when we were young, a little wisp of a thing, five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet. After thirty years, two kids, a bad marriage, and a decade of working overnights in a hospital, she’s put on some weight, much of it in the bust region. Lisa doesn’t say whether she minds it or not, though she will frequently note that many men are drawn to it. I, on the other hand, was doing everything in my power to avoid looking at it.

I propped my foot up on the tub, between where Lisa’s legs were dangling over the edge, and pulled as hard as I could.

“Puuuuuush!” I yelled.

“You’re hurting meeee!” she yelled.

I kept pulling and she kept falling back into the mud, again and again, until we were both laughing so hard we had to pause, twice, to catch our breath.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up,” I said after ten minutes.

“Let’s give it one more try. Really put your back into it this time.”

“You need to squeeze your abs more.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Like one of those mothers who summons enough adrenaline to lift a Volkswagen off her kid’s leg, I found the strength to pull Pawk from her bog. One might think I deserved a heartfelt thank-you from my oldest friend in the world. Instead, Lisa—covered in so much mud that only the whites of her eyes resembled human tissue—asked: “Do your balls always hang that low?”

“It’s hot in here,” I said, covering my junk.

“Because, wow. That’s . . . really something.”

“It’s not too late for me to drown you,” I said.

Back in the reception area, Britaney told us we looked refreshed. We thanked her and said we enjoyed ourselves. I was halfway out the door, when I stuck my head back in. “Don’t forget to nominate your mother for the show,” I said.

“I won’t!” she answered.

Pawk went back to our hotel, where we split a bottle of wine and fell asleep before sunset, our salad days far behind us.





RICH AND FAMOUS


A few years ago the principal of the high school I attended asked my sister Courtney, whom he knew through a friend of a friend, to ask me to deliver the commencement address. Whether intentional or not, taking this route was a smart move on his part. Courtney could basically ask for both my kidneys and I’d carve them out myself. Oh, you want to use them as bookends? In the guest bedroom? That’s cool. Would you also like my pancreas? It might make a good doorstop. No? OK. Just let me know if you change your mind.

But even coming from Courtney, this request seemed like a huge imposition. You see, I loathe teenagers. Can’t stand the sight of them. If you don’t count rapists, murderers, KKK members, terrorists, child molesters, religious extremists, animal abusers, most celebrity chefs, all Kardashians, bankers, career politicians, and people who market sugary breakfast foods to children, teenagers are hands down the worst humans on the planet. Being in the general vicinity of just one pimply-faced bag of hormones is enough to provoke stirrings of diarrhea in my lower intestine. Four hundred at once?

“No fucking way,” I told Courtney.

“What? Why not?” she asked, sounding more surprised than I would have expected.

“Because. I don’t want to go back there.”

“This again,” she said. I could feel her rolling her eyes on the other end of the telephone. “They’re not asking you to travel back in time and repeat puberty, just give an inspirational speech. ‘I’m Clinton Kelly. Congratulations. The best years of your life are ahead of you. Blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bye.’?”

“I don’t want to.” Wow, that sounded whiney even to me.

“Oh, my God,” she said with a laugh. “You’re being such a . . . dork.”

Perhaps, but that’s familiar territory.

*

When Courtney was born, I was thirteen and having a rough time in junior high. By the eighth grade I had neither mastered the social game of adolescence (destroy others lest you be destroyed) nor fully constructed the persona that would eventually allow me to cope with the horrors of high school (that I was a member of the upper-middle class who had somehow found himself, through no fault of his own, living in a squarely middle-class town). Mostly, I was horrified by the way kids my age behaved toward one another. Pushing, shoving, cursing, name-calling. It was all so vulgar. Once, a guy named Steve—in home economics, of all classes—whispered in my ear that he was going to rape my mother. I asked for a bathroom pass and cried in the boys’ room until the period ended, not because I thought he would actually do it, but because the kind of person who would say such a thing actually existed in the world.

The way I saw it, Courtney was an innocent soul entrusted into my care, at least when my parents left us home alone to meet friends for dinner. I was determined to construct for my baby sister a future free of humiliation and sadness.