“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.
When she was three, I would sit with Courtney for hours flipping through magazines and catalogs playing a game I had invented for her called Pick One. At every spread, she had to choose from the two pages the one she liked better. This task would make her confident and decisive, I told myself. Some choices were easy, like a page of dense women’s-magazine text opposite an advertisement for tampons. “This one,” she’d say, pointing to the tampon ad, because in it a woman smiled ear to ear while riding a bicycle. Tampons are fun! But some decisions were more difficult, like when it came to the Toys“R”Us catalog. On the left, an Easy-Bake Oven; on the right, a Barbie Townhouse.
“You can only pick one page,” I’d say. “You have to make your decision and live with it forever.” The pressure was for her own good.
“The Barbie house.” She looked up at me for signs of approval. I gave her a slight smile as if to say, Whatever you choose is the right choice. But in my heart, I was doing backflips in piles of glitter. Yes! The townhouse! An oven without a house attached? How stupid. And that stove is so old-fashioned. A townhouse would have a modern oven in it, something with a convection setting, plus lots more fun stuff, like a private elevator! And if you played your cards right—kept yourself thin, learned how to toss your hair at cocktail parties—you could probably marry a rich man and hire a servant to do all the cooking for you.
Another favorite game of ours was called Would You Rather, in which one of us would present two death-related scenarios and the other would choose the preferable demise. For example, I might ask my four-year-old sister: “Would you rather die being pecked to death by crows or drowning in a kiddie pool full of puke and orange soda?”
“Orange soda,” she’d answer. “Would you rather get shot in the head or stabbed in the heart?”
“In the head,” I’d say, “any day of the week.”
Courtney and I also spent a lot of time practicing cheerleading moves in the backyard. “When you jump, keep your elbows bent,” I’d tell her. “I’ll lift you up from there and then you can stand on my shoulders. Got it?” She would nod, her big green eyes unblinking. She looked like one of those paintings in our pediatrician’s office. “And what do you yell when you’re up there?”
“Go, defense!”