Me Talk Pretty One Day

  I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and came upon my twelve-year-old sister propositioning our father with lines she’d collected from Guiding Light. “I think we’ve both seen this coming for a long … time. The only question left is… what are we going to do about it? Oh, baby, let’s run wild.”

  This is what my mother meant when she accused people of playing a dangerous game. Were our father to accept Penny’s offer, Amy would have known him as a philanderer and wondered who else he might have slept with. Everything he’d ever said would be shaded by doubt and called into question. Was that really a business trip, or had he snuck off to Myrtle Beach with one of the Strivides twins? Who was this man?

  Amy studied her reflection in the oven door, arranging her white bangs and liking what she saw. “All I’m saying is that I find you to be a very attractive… man. Is that such… a crime?”

  It is to his credit that our father was such a gentleman. Stammering that he was very flattered to be asked, he let Penny down as gently as possible. After offering to set her up with some available bachelors from his office and country club, he told my sister to take care of herself, adding that she was a very special woman who deserved to be happy.

  It was years before Amy finally admitted what she had done. They were relatively uneventful years for our family but, I imagine, a very confusing period of time for poor Penny Midland, who was frequently visited at the art gallery by my father and any number of his divorced associates. “Here’s the gal I was telling you about,” he’d say. “Why don’t I just take a look around and give you two a chance to talk.”

  The passage of time has not altered my father’s obsessive attention to my sisters’ weight and appearance. He wonders why the girls don’t drop by more often, and then when they do, he opens the door asking, “Is it just my imagination, or have you put on a few pounds?”

  Because she has maintained her beautiful skin and enviable figure, Amy remains my father’s greatest treasure. She is by far the most attractive member of the family, yet she spends most of her time and money disguising herself beneath prosthetic humps and appliquéd skin diseases. She’s got more neck braces and false teeth than she knows what to do with, and her drawers and closets overflow with human hair. Having dreamt of one for years, she finally broke down and bought half of a padded, custom-made “fatty suit,” which she enjoys wearing beneath dirty sweatpants as tight and uninviting as sausage casings. Unable to afford the suit’s matching top, she’s been reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort of cruel experiment. From the waist up she’s slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by a wide, dimpled bottom so thick that she could sit on a knitting needle and never feel a thing.

  She wore the fatty suit home one Christmas, and our father met us at the Raleigh airport. Visibly shaken, he managed to say nothing on the short ride to the house, but the moment Amy stepped into the bathroom he turned to me, shouting, “What the hell happened to her? Christ almighty, this is killing me! I’m in real pain here.”

  “What?”

  “Your sister, that’s what. I just saw her six months ago, and now the girl’s the size of a tank! I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her.”

  I begged him to lower his voice. “Please, Dad, don’t mention it in front of her. Amy’s very sensitive about her … you know.”

  “Her what? Go ahead and say it: her big, fat ass. That’s what she’s ashamed of, and she should be! You could land a chopper on an ass like that.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “Don’t try to defend her, wiseguy. She’s a single woman, and the clock is ticking away. Who’s going to love her, who’s going to marry her with an ass like that?”

  “Well,” I said, “from what I’ve been told, a lot of men prefer rear ends like that.”

  He looked at me with great pity, his heart breaking for the second time that day. “Man, what you don’t know could fill a book.”

  My father composed himself when Amy reentered the room, but when she turned to open the refrigerator door, he acted as though she were tossing a lit match into the gas tank of his Porsche. “What in God’s name are you doing? Look at you — you’re killing yourself.”

  Amy stuck a tablespoon into an economy-size vat of mayonnaise.

  “Your problem is that you’re bored,” my father said. “You’re bored and lonely and you’re eating garbage to fill the void. I know what you’re going through, but believe me, you can beat this.”

  Amy denied that she was bored and lonely. The problem, she said, was that she was hungry. “All I had on the plane were a couple of Danish. Can we go out for pancakes?”

  She kept it up until our father, his voice cracking with pain, offered to find her some professional help. He mentioned camps and personal trainers, offering to loan — no, give — her the money, “And on top of that, I’ll pay you for every pound you take off.”

  When Amy rejected his offer, he attempted to set an example. His Christmas dinner was gone in three bites, and dessert was skipped in favor of a brisk two-mile run. “Anyone want to join me? Amy?” He extended his age-old exercise regimen from ten minutes to an hour and trotted in place while speaking on the telephone.

  Amy kept to her fatty suit until her legs were chafed and pimpled. It was on the morning of our return flight that she finally revealed her joke, and our father wept with relief. “Ha-ha, you really had me going. I should have known you’d never do that to yourself. And it’s really fake? Ha-ha.”

  He reflected upon the fatty suit for the next several months. “She had me fooled for a minute there, but even with a big, fat ass she can’t disguise the fact that she’s a beautiful person, both inside and out, and that’s what really matters.” His epiphany was short-lived, and as the photo shoot approached, he began calling me with technical questions. “Do you happen to know if this magazine will be hiring a professional beautician? I sure as hell hope so, because her hair is getting awfully thin. And what are they going to do about lighting? Can we trust the photographer to do a first-class job, or should we call and see if they can’t come up with someone better?

  There’s a lot I don’t tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn’t understand that she has no interest in getting married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky.

  The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, “Thanks for asking, but I’m really not into white guys right now.”

  That alone would have stopped my father’s heartbeat. “The clock is ticking,” he says. “If she waits much longer, she’ll be alone for the rest of her life.”

  This appears to suit Amy just fine.

  When my father phoned asking about the photo shoot, I pretended to know nothing. I didn’t tell him that, at the scheduled time, my sister arrived at the studio with unwashed hair and took a seat beside the dozen other New York women selected by the magazine. She complimented them on their flattering, carefully chosen outfits and waited as they had their hair fashioned, their eyebrows trained, and their slight imperfections masked by powder.

  When it was her turn at the styling table, Amy said, “I want to look like someone has beaten the shit out of me.”

  The makeup artist did a fine job. The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by an arrangement of scratch marks on her forehead. Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.

  Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, “I’m in love. Can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and I feel great.”

  Nutcracker.com

  IT WAS MY FAT
HER’S DREAM that one day the people of the world would be connected to one another through a network of blocky, refrigerator-size computers, much like those he was helping develop at IBM. He envisioned families of the future gathered around their mammoth terminals, ordering groceries and paying their taxes from the comfort of their own homes. A person could compose music, design a doghouse, and … something more, something even better. “A person could … he could …”

  When predicting this Utopia, he would eventually reach a point where words failed him. His eyes would widen and sparkle at the thought of this indescribable something more. “I mean, my God,” he’d say, “just think about it.”

  My sisters and I preferred not to. I didn’t know about them, but I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead. Unfortunately, my father’s team won, so computers it is. My only regret is that this had to happen during my lifetime.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind is a dim memory of standing in some line holding a perforated card. I remember the cheap, slightly clinical feeling it gave me, and recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross. My father saw it coming, but this was a future that took me completely by surprise. There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten. I wasn’t really aware of computers until the mid-1980s. For some reason, I seemed to know quite a few graphic designers whose homes and offices pleasantly stank of Spray Mount. Their floors were always collaged with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops. I had always counted on these friends to loan me the adhesive of my choice, but then, seemingly overnight, their Scotch tape and rubber cement were gone, replaced with odorless computers and spongy mouse pads. They had nothing left that I wanted to borrow, and so I dropped them and fell in with a group of typesetters who ultimately betrayed me as well.

  Thanks to my complete lack of office skills, I found it fairly easy to avoid direct contact with the new technology. The indirect contact was disturbing enough. I was still living in Chicago when I began to receive creepy Christmas newsletters designed to look like tabloids and annual reports. Word processors made writing fun. They did not, however, make reading fun, a point made painfully evident by such publications as The Herald Family Tribune and Wossup with the Wexlers!

  Friends who had previously expressed no interest in torture began sending letters composed to resemble Chinese take-out menus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Everybody had a font, and I was told that I should get one, too. The authors of these letters shared an enthusiasm with the sort of people who now arrived at dinner parties hoisting expensive new video cameras and suggesting that, after dessert, we all sit down and replay the evening on TV. We, the regular people of the world, now had access to the means of production, but still I failed to see what all the fuss was about. A dopey letter is still a dopey letter, no matter how you dress it up; and there’s a reason regular people don’t appear on TV: we’re boring.

  By the early 1990s I was living in New York and working for a housecleaning company. My job taught me that regardless of their purported virtues, computers are a pain in the ass to keep clean. The pebbled surface is a magnet for grease and dirt, and you can pretty much forget about reaming out the gaps in the keyboard. More than once I accidentally pushed a button and recoiled in terror as the blank screen came to life with exotic tropical fish or swarms of flying toasters. Equally distressing was the way people used the slanted roofs of their terminals to display framed photographs and great populations of plush and plastic creatures, which would fall behind the desk the moment I began cleaning the screen. There was never any place to plug in the vacuum, as every outlet was occupied by some member of the computer family. Cords ran wild, and everyone seemed to own one of those ominous foot-long power strips with the blinking red light that sends the message YOU MUST LEAVE US ALONE. I was more than happy to comply, and the complaints came rolling in.

  Due to my general aversion to machines and a few pronounced episodes of screaming, I was labeled a technophobe, a term that ranks fairly low on my scale of fightin’ words. The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing between these two very different emotions. I fear snakes. I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

  I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one. Each tiresome new thriller includes a scene in which the hero, trapped by some version of the enemy, runs for his desk in a desperate race against time. Music swells and droplets of sweat rain down onto the keyboard as he sits at his laptop, frantically pawing for answers. It might be different if he were flagging down a passing car or trying to phone for help, but typing, in and of itself, is not an inherently dramatic activity.

  I hate computers for any number of reasons, but I despise them most for what they’ve done to my friend the typewriter. In a democratic country you’d think there would be room for both of them, but computers won’t rest until I’m making my ribbons from torn shirts and brewing Wite-Out in my bathtub. Their goal is to place the IBM Selectric II beside the feather quill and chisel in the museum of antiquated writing implements. They’re power hungry, and someone needs to stop them.

  When told I’m like the guy still pining for his eight-track tapes, I say, “You have eight-tracks? Where?” In reality I know nothing about them, yet I feel it’s important to express some solidarity with others who have had the rug pulled out from beneath them. I don’t care if it can count words or rearrange paragraphs at the push of a button, I don’t want a computer. Unlike the faint scurry raised by fingers against a plastic computer keyboard, the smack and clatter of a typewriter suggests that you’re actually building something. At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

  When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

  “It’s a typewriter,” I say. “You use it to write angry letters to airport authorities.”

  The keys are then slapped and pounded, and I’m forced to explain that if you want the words to appear, you first have to plug it in and insert a sheet of paper.

  The goons shake their heads and tell me I really should be using a computer. That’s their job, to stand around in an ill-fitting uniform and tell you how you should lead your life.
I’m told the exact same thing later in the evening when the bellhop knocks on my hotel door. The people whose televisions I can hear have complained about my typing, and he has come to make me stop. To hear him talk, you’d think I’d been playing the kettledrum. In the great scheme of things, the typewriter is not nearly as loud as he makes it out to be, but there’s no use arguing with him. “You know,” he says, “you really should be using a computer.”

  You have to wonder where you’ve gone wrong when twice a day you’re offered writing advice from men in funny hats. The harder I’m pressured to use a computer, the harder I resist. One by one, all of my friends have deserted me and fled to the dark side. “How can I write you if you don’t have an e-mail address?” they ask. They talk of their B-trees and Disk Doctors and then have the nerve to complain when I discuss bowel obstructions at the dinner table.

  Who needs them? I think. I figured I’d always have my family and was devastated when my sister Amy brought home a candy-colored laptop. “I only use it for e-mail,” she said. Coming from her, these words made me physically ill. “It’s fun,” she said. “People send you things. Look at this.” She pushed a button, and there, on the screen, was a naked man lying facedown on a carpet. His hair was graying and his hands were cuffed behind his doughy back. A woman entered the room. You couldn’t see her face, just her legs and feet, which were big and mean-looking, forced into sharp-toed shoes with high, pencil-thin heels. The man on the carpet shifted position, and when his testicles came into view, the woman reacted as if she had seen an old balding mouse, one that she had been trying to kill for a long time. She stomped on the man’s testicles with the toes of her shoes and then she turned around and stomped on them with the heels. She kicked them mercilessly and, just when I thought she’d finished, she got her second wind and started all over again.