The Post Office Lady with the Dragon Tattoo
Laurie Notaro
PRAISE FOR LAURIE NOTARO
Spooky Little Girl
“A comedic killer … Notaro crafts a wondrously realistic afterlife.… She is able to make death laughable in a heartfelt way.”
—Bust
“A crazy, funny version of the afterlife.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A novel that is full of laughter … [Notaro] has a winner with this hilarious take on the joys and sorrows of the ‘surprised demised.’ ”
—ChronWatch
“A fun story that mixes [Notaro’s] unique humor with a sweet paranormal tale of friendship, family, and unfinished business.”
—BookBitch
“Pure, unexpurgated Notaro … Again [she] turns on the truth serum, and the results once more are riotously funny.… Spooky Little Girl is a great summer beach read. The freshness it brings to a tired idea in chick lit—girl loses everything and exacts revenge by making herself over—is, well, refreshing.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“An amazing story.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“We’re always thrilled to know that the prolific scribe of Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood and We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive will crack us the you-know-what up with a new book just when we’re casting about for something to read.”
—Phoenix New Times
The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death
“Hilarious.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“[Laurie Notaro] writes with a flair that leaves you knowing she would be a gal you could commiserate with over a bucket of longneck beers. If you need to laugh over the little annoyances of life, this is a book for you. If you need to cry over a few of them, Flaming Tantrum can fit that bill, too.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A double-handful of chuckle-worthy vignettes … Notaro blends sardonic, often self-deprecating comedy with disarming sincerity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“For pure laugh-out-loud, then read-out-loud fun, it’s hard to beat this humor writer.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might be Going to Hell
“[Notaro’s] quirky humor, which she’s previously showcased in her cult-classic essays on girly dorkdom, runs rampant.”
—Bust
“Notaro is a natural comic, a graduate of the Jennifer Weiner school of self-deprecation, but she’s best when she’s being nasty.”
—Houston Chronicle
I Love Everybody
“Notaro is everywoman. She is every woman who has ever made a bad judgment, overindulged (you pick the vice), been on a fad diet, been misunderstood at work, been at odds with her mother or been frustrated with her grandmother’s obsession with Lifetime TV, while somehow being a little too familiar with the conflicted, star-crossed personages of those movies.”
—San Antonio Express-News
Autobiography of a Fat Bride
“Notaro’s humor is self-deprecating, gorily specific, and raunchy.”
—A.V. Club (The Onion)
“[Notaro] may be the funniest writer in this solar system.”
—The Miami Herald
ALSO BY LAURIE NOTARO
It Looked Different on the Model
Spooky Little Girl
The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death
There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell
An Idiot Girl’s Christmas
We Thought You Would Be Prettier
I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)
Autobiography of a Fat Bride
The Idiot Girl’s Action-Adventure Club
The Post Office Lady with the Dragon Tattoo is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
A Villard eBook Original
Copyright © 2011 by Laurie Notaro
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
VILLARD BOOKS and VILLARD & “V” CIRCLED Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“The Post Office Lady with the Dragon Tattoo” is from It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro, published by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Cover design: Ben Wiseman
eISBN: 978-0-345-52907-7
www.villard.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
The Post Office Lady with the Dragon Tattoo
About the Author
The Post Office Lady with
the Dragon Tattoo
I had been dreading this day for more than a year.
I felt my heartbeat speed up as I took another step forward in line, one customer closer and a few feet nearer to the counter. I kept my eyes down, focusing on the scrape on the top of my boot or on the collection of measuring cups and kitchen accessories that lined the aisle where I was trapped. I didn’t want to look up. I couldn’t even bring myself to try.
The Mean Lady might be looking at me.
Typically I don’t have such anxiety while waiting in line at the post office, but, to tell the truth, I was on the verge of a panic attack. I was starting to sweat, and there was no doubt that I felt jittery to the point that I thought I might explode.
I cursed myself for not taking a Valium in preparation. I wasn’t supposed to be here.
And the Mean Lady knew that.
I looked up quickly. She had her eyes locked on me like the infrared laser beam of an unmanned drone.
A wave of trepidation swallowed my body, especially my GI tract, and I felt the smothering desire to flee. I was almost ready to turn on my heels and head back out the door when I remembered the package in my arms, and a bolt of bravery hit me. No, it said. You must stay. You have things to mail for your little nephew, your little nephew who will only wear something referred to as “unders” briefs from a kids’ store called Hanna Andersson, an outlet store of which just happens to be across the street from Jamie’s house.
Do it for the boy, the bolt of bravery said. Do it for the unders.
So I stayed, despite the terror, despite the laser eyes, despite the consequences. When I walked into the store, I already knew my chances of making it up to the counter were as slim as my mother making it through a pregnancy without smoking.
When we first moved in to our house in Eugene, I used to enjoy going to our little post office satellite station, located inside the drugstore and stocked to meet literally any human need you might have within the bounds of the law. It has a garden section, pet department, party-goods area, several rows of greeting cards—in essence, it’s a drugstore but with way more stuff hanging from the ceiling, stacked on the shelves, and popping out from the walls. It’s not a place you want to go if you’re averse to confined, cramped quarters or get easily embarrassed if you knock things down, because that’s just part of the experience. I’m not sure how many people with OCD have spontaneously combusted in that store, but I’m sure the number is not insignificant. You walk in, wander through the labyrinth of sparkly Hello-Kittied hologrammed trinkets, topple over end caps, get lost, suddenly find yourself examining a condom with a pirate on it, and then attempt to claw your way back out by following hints of daylight. The store has a whole lotion department, packages of fake poo, hillbillies you can grow from
a capsule, what some people would say is the largest collection of aging candy on the West Coast, and more Christmas villages than the European Union, including Turkey. It looks as if you took my bedroom in seventh grade and put price tags on everything. I truly am at a loss to explain it in all of its cataclysm, although my old friend Grace summed it up nicely by describing it as the “Best Place to Get Impaled by a Unicorn.”
But I loved the fact that it had a post office, because it was so close by. At the time, I was sending out a lot of mail—stickers and magnets that I shipped off to Idiot Girls around the country—and had a backlog I needed to conquer from the months my stuff was in storage.
Unfortunately, during that lapse, the post office had a two-cent rate hike, which meant that I needed to invest in additional postage. I headed off to my new satellite post office inside the drugstore and waited at the end of a long, long line.
When it was my turn at the counter, I stepped up and smiled at the lady behind it.
She smiled back.
I needed four hundred two-cent stamps. So I asked for four hundred two-cent stamps.
The post office lady looked at me like I had just asked her if she wanted to buy my sex tape. In fact, she actually gasped.
“Oh, no,” she told me, shaking her head vigorously. “I can’t give you that. Absolutely not.”
To be honest, I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t have anything to say. I did this all the time in Phoenix. One time I bought six hundred stamps, and the post office guy didn’t even look at me, let alone challenge me to a standoff and act as if I had pantomimed a lewd gesture.
“So, wait,” I replied, trying to process it, then a moment later arriving at the most obvious conclusion. “Oh, you don’t have four hundred?”
“Sure I have four hundred,” she replied. “But if I give you four hundred, then there won’t be as many left for the next person who wants two-cent stamps.”
Again, I stood there for a moment, attempting to act like a Bounty paper towel and absorb. But it wasn’t working. Asininity was puddling all around me in quantities too vast to soak up.
I tried to appeal to her work ethic as a government employee and replied, “Well, I have to mail out four hundred envelopes and I need four hundred stamps.”
Without missing a beat, she churlishly snapped, “Well, you can’t take them all for yourself! Someone else might need some, and if I give them all to you, then I have to order more from the post office.”
“But you are the post office,” I tried to reason, getting frustrated. “What does it matter if I take all four hundred or if I take two hundred and the guy behind me then asks for two hundred? You’ll still have to order them.”
Then the surly came out. “No,” she informed me firmly. “I won’t do it. I’ll give you two hundred and that’s all. You can’t have them all. No.”
Quickly I weighed my options, which I quickly discovered were none. Our negotiations had hit a wall, and I was well aware that I possessed less than no power in this situation. Suddenly, however, the dastardly department of my personality presented two plans, one of which involved dynamite, mustache wax, some rope, and train tracks (all found in aisle seven), which I rejected due to financial investment, and another, much more sinister option, which I accepted.
“Okay,” I said with a wide smile. “I’ll take two hundred. Thank you very much.”
The post office lady got a very satisfied look on her face, cooled her demeanor a bit, and slid the two hundred stamps across the counter as I, in turn, slid her my four dollars. I put my cache in my purse, smiled politely, and walked away. The wheels of the sinister plan moved forward. There was no turning back.
And then I returned the next day.
I boldly stood in line and waited my turn patiently, and when the time had come, I stepped up to the counter and said nicely, “I’d like two hundred two-cent stamps, please.”
I could actually see the anger in her face rolling to a boil.
I had her. She had to sell me the stamps. We both knew she had them. She knew I had her.
Her eyes narrowed, and her brow lowered.
“One hundred,” she said in a low voice, knowing very well that I did not have her. At all. To the contrary.
Then she pointed her finger at me and said, “Don’t you come back. Never come back!”
I was shocked. I couldn’t say anything. After closing my mouth, I gathered up my paltry one hundred stamps, turned around, and walked away.
Was I just banned from the post office? I asked myself in disbelief. Did she just ban me from the post office? She just banned me from the post office!
This is ridiculous, I thought, as I stopped myself in the aisle where all the candy that has lost its soul and turned white is kept. How can you ban me from a post office? I’m a taxpayer. I’m her boss! And I was going to march right back there and tell her that, but I immediately thought better of making a taxpayer proclamation and pulling a line from the Bill of Rights and distorting it like it was from the Bible or I was Rand Paul. I remembered the numerous times I had passed by this particular drugstore and seen police cars parked outside, making it clear that no one here hesitates to pick up that receiver and call 911. In fact, I think they have someone on the payroll whose job description is solely to “alert the authorities.” The store is right next to a bottle-and-can return center, meaning it’s a hobo and tweaker destination, full of savory smells and nonsensical muttering, and there’s always someone on the pay phone shouting some sort of obscenity to a dealer or a loved one. Not only had I seen cop cars haphazardly parked there, but I’d also had the vast misfortune of being in the drugstore’s checkout line when a scuffle erupted from the lotion department. Apparently, according to the person in question, some bath salts had “tumbled into his pocket.” The policemen, however, weren’t buying it, and instead of cooperating, the accused decided to struggle like he was a wild mustang being lassoed, which is never a good idea in a spot so tiny that bath salts could actually fall into an available opening in your clothing.
As I watched the cops question him, I immediately checked my own coat and pants for tubs of errant body butters.
After the first crash, the man began to scream for help, but I’ll be honest and admit I was not about to be the one who volunteered my services. The scuffle moved and ate up more space as the bath-salts plucker thrashed about and screamed louder.
“Call the police!” he demanded. “Somebody call the police!”
“We are the police,” one of the officers informed him, to which Mr. Salty replied, “I want my own police!”
But unfortunately, he was out of luck. Eugene doesn’t have that service.
Yet.
Within moments, the altercation had moved in front of the main and only entrance, which I guess was the objective, but it didn’t solve any problems for me. It was clear that the situation had the capacity to morph easily from someone who just forgot to take their meds to the headline on the next day’s paper that touted a body count. Who knew if Mr. Salty had just come from a knife store, where switchblades may have dropped into his socks, or the bow-and-arrow store, where some may have landed behind his ears; who knew where he had been and what had dropped on him. Bullets. Chain saws. Rope and train tracks. God forbid he had been at the fireworks stand at some point, because any single measure of friction would be enough set that place aglow, and I do not doubt that between the Yankee Candle display and the body-sized sheets of gauze, bottles of gasoline and/or oxygen are fully stocked.
I quickly abandoned my position in line and scurried to the party-plates aisle, in case the thrashing began to spread even farther, because, frankly, I’d rather be crushed by a party-hat tower than gored by a curio or a Department 56 North Pole candy cane.
So, with the memory in my head that when the police cross the store threshold they no longer work for me and the paltry hundred two-cent stamps in my purse, I left the store, mumbling, “Oh yeah? You’re not the only post office in town,
you know!” and then set out to discover if that was true.
Turns out it was, in fact, true, and I acted smug and felt like I had beaten the Mean Lady at her own game while standing in line at the post office downtown, despite the fact that it had taken me a half hour to snag one of the jumble of metered street spaces. Because this post office doesn’t have a parking lot. At all. And because the nineteen people in front of me in line, who had all probably been banned from the satellite station, had gotten there first.
Unlike at the drugstore post office, there is nothing to look at while you wait in line—no fake poo, no pirate condoms, no crime-scene action, nothing to distract you from the other Eugene residents and fellow post-office patrons and their packages. It was then that I saw some amazing things.
For example, I witnessed a lady trying to cram a pound of pistachios and a pound of corn nuts into one regular, letter-sized Priority Mail envelope. I couldn’t figure out where that lady could possibly be sending corn nuts where there aren’t corn nuts ALREADY, unless there was a corn-nut-less province that I was unaware of. And at two pounds in a Priority envelope, it was going to cost her more money to send corn nuts someplace than the corn nuts cost in the first place (unless she was sending them to a prison, but even then, I’ll bet corn nuts are a staple in the vending machines). She ripped through three Priority envelopes before the man behind her pointed out that a box would be a better fit and there were several options eight inches away from her right foot at the center counter, which she was leaning on. She tossed the envelope aside and went in for a box, which easily fit her snack foods, but her delight soon turned to unbridled horror when she attempted to close it. Immediately, she began to complain that the box, which was free, courtesy of the post office, was not equipped with “automatic tape,” which I think meant “adhesive strip” to those people who don’t buy corn nuts by the pound. I then saw two different women with the same unique bear-claw tattoo and a middle-aged woman with bangs cut from the middle of one ear to the middle of the next, who never closed her mouth the entire time she stood in line, which, by the way, was long enough to hatch an egg. From any species.
