A vomitorium has nothing to do with vomit. If you’ve been to a baseball game, then you’ve probably been in a vomitorium. The word comes from the Latin vomō, which means to “spew forth.” And as a baseball fan, once the game is over, you spew forth through the vomitorium to get back to the parking lot.
Some dumbshit got the meaning wrong once, and for all time, we think it’s about some gastrointestinal bug that made Caesar hurl in a vomitorium. The irony is fine, but it still doesn’t mean that people go there to vomit.
I hate when people think they know a thing they never even thought about. I have to deal with this every single night in the ER. People hit the Internet for medical advice and suddenly they’re diagnosticians. Last night it was a guy convinced he had gallstones but had indigestion, another one with assumed throat cancer who really just had postnasal drip, and a woman who was convinced she had a tapeworm. She actually did have a tapeworm. Did you know they poke their heads out of the anus at night? True story. If you want to be in medicine, remember—you might one day see a tapeworm wave at you.
I don’t know what Chet sees in his cubicle during the day, but it’s nothing compared to what I see. Whatever he sees, he’s always taken it out on the kids. Poor Chet. That’s what he should call his memoir. Poor Chet. Except his memoir wouldn’t be all that long. All he does is go to work, shrug, and eat vendor hot dogs on the way home because I refuse to buy hot dogs. Nitrites. Avoid ingesting them. Trust me.
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You probably think I’m being hard on Chet. I am. Life is hard. Marriage is hard. Parenthood is hard and if you add all three up, it’s harder. Chet’s still acting like he’s at home with his mother. He treats me the way his mother treated me when she was still alive. Mean. Like it’s my problem that he doesn’t do things right.
I’ll own my problem. My problem is that Chet doesn’t do things right and it makes more work for me. When the kids were little and I went to work seven-to-seven, Chet called his time with them “babysitting.” I’d come home at seven thirty in the morning, and the dinner dishes would still be in the sink, the house was a mess, and the kids would be late for school, homework undone. That’s not even babysitting.
Remember this. If you plan to get married and have kids, find someone who will never say they are “babysitting” their own kids. They’ll expect trophies for just being there and by the time the kids grow up and leave the house, you’ll have nothing but contempt for all of them.
The time in Mexico when he yelled at Sarah because she’d played with the bidet and cleaned up her mess, I took Bruce and Sarah out to the beach. Bruce didn’t say much. I told Sarah I was proud of her for cleaning up the mess with the towel.
“It shows real independence that you cleaned up after yourself,” I said.
All she could see was that her daddy was mad at her.
Vodka Cranberry
On Sunday morning Mom comes home from her seven-to-seven shift and makes herself dinner-for-breakfast. She has a vodka and cranberry, a rare steak, a baked potato, and carrots, and she blasts Rage Against the Machine in her headphones while she cooks. She sings every word out loud, though, especially the “Fuck you” parts.
Dad stays in bed even though he can’t be sleeping through this. I pour myself a bowl of cereal. Mom takes off her headphones, turns off the music, and gestures to me to join her for dinner-breakfast.
“It was a good night,” she says. “Nearly cleared the whole ER before I left. That never happens.”
I crunch on my cereal.
“Three days off,” she says.
“Awesome,” I say.
She taps me on the shoulder. It snaps me out of an early-morning stare-at-my-cereal daze. She’s smiling at me with her head cocked to one side. Rage Against the Machine always makes her this sort of aggressive-happy. She says, “You want to do something fun?”
I want to say What happened to you? because Mom has never asked me to do something fun since I turned thirteen, but I just say, “Depends.”
“You’re dropping out of high school at sixteen. It’s not like you have anything to do, right?”
I can hear my cereal go soggy as I look at her with my confused face.
“Well?”
“You’re okay with me leaving school?” I say.
“I’m okay with anything,” she says. “I just want to have fun.”
“This is new.”
She looks at me with her confused face. Then she takes a bite of steak. “So you don’t want to have fun with your mom. I get it,” she says. “What do you plan to do, then?”
“I’m sixteen. I can get a job or something.”