#2. (On the list of “Things Most People Have Never Experienced or Could Have Even Possibly Imagined but That Totally Happened to Me,” in case you’ve forgotten what we were talking about because number one was way too long and needs to be edited or possibly burned.) Most people don’t have poisonous tap water in their house. Most people don’t get letters from the government telling them not to drink their poisonous tap water because dangerous radon has leaked into their well. In fact, most people don’t get their poisonous tap water from a well at all.
Concerned relatives would question my mother about the risks of my sister and me being exposed to all that radon, but she waved them off, saying, “Oh, they couldn’t swallow it even if they wanted to. They’d throw it up immediately. It’s that toxic. So, you know, no worries.” Then she’d send us off to brush our teeth with it and bathe in it. My mom was a big proponent of the “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” theory, almost to the point where she seemed to be daring the world to kill us. This theory worked well for my sister, who has never been sick a day in her life, and is one of those Amazonian women who could squat in a field to have a baby and then pick the baby up and keep on hoeing, except also the field would be on fire, and she’d be all, “Fuck you, fire!” and walk through it like that scary robot in The Terminator. And also her baby would be fire-resistant, and would be karate-chopping the flames like a tiny badass. I’ve tried to have this same level of pioneer toughness, but every couple of months I have a total breakdown or catch some kind of weird disease that only animals get. Like the time I got human parvo, which totally exists and is no fucking picnic. Or the time when I was brushing my hair and heard a pop in my neck, and I could barely even breathe it hurt so much. Then I drove myself to work and I almost passed out from a combination of the pain and the not-breathing, and when I got there I hurt so much I couldn’t even move my mouth to talk, so I wrote, “I HAVE BROKEN MY NECK,” on a Post-it, and my bewildered office mate drove me to the hospital. Turns out I’d herniated a disc, and the doctor gave me a pamphlet on domestic abuse and kept asking me whether someone was hurting me at home, because apparently most people don’t herniate their discs simply from brushing their hair too hard. I prefer to think that most people just don’t brush their hair as enthusiastically as I do.
#3. Most people have running water. I mean, we mostly had running water, except when we didn’t, which was often. As my sister and I would always say to each other, “You know, you never really appreciate your poisonous well water until it’s gone.” In the summer the water would occasionally stop for no reason whatsoever, and in the winter the pipes would freeze, and we’d be forced to fill up pots of water from our cistern, and then warm the icy water on the stove to bathe in. It’s even less glamorous than it sounds. I once pointed out to my mother that the water from the cistern was slightly brown, and that it didn’t really seem like the cleanest way to wash your hair, but she sighed at me in disappointment, saying, “It’s pronounced ‘beige.’” As if the pronunciation somehow made it fancier.
“Okay,” I capitulated grudgingly, “the cistern water seems slightly more beige than the water from the tap,” but my mom just shrugged it off, because apparently she didn’t trust water she couldn’t see.
#4. Most people don’t have a cistern or even know what a cistern is. Some of them say that they have a cistern, and then they politely add that the word is actually pronounced “sister,” and then I just nod, because I really don’t want to have to explain that a cistern is actually an enormous metal can that catches rainwater, sort of like an aboveground well for people who can’t actually afford a well. But no one wants to explain that, because honestly? Who’s going to admit they can’t afford a well? Not me, obviously, because we had a well. One that was filled with poisonous radon.
The back of this photo says, “1975—Jenny & her chickens. A dog killed them not long afterward.” Funny, I feel fine.
#5. Most people don’t have live raccoons in the house. My dad was always rescuing animals, and by “rescuing animals” I mean “killing the mother, and then discovering she had babies, and bringing the babies home to raise them in the bathtub.” Once, he brought home eight newborn raccoons in a bucket for us to raise. When the orphaned raccoons were little, my mom sewed tiny Jams for them to wear (because this was the eighties, and Jams were quite popular then), and they were adorable, but then the raccoons got big enough to climb out of the bathtub and pretty much destroyed the entire house. Raccoons are totally OCD and they are driven to wash everything that they see, which you’d think would make them smell better, but it doesn’t, because they smell all musky and vaguely sour, like one-night stands.