Saturday, December 22, 2007

Happy Holidays

Yesterday was the last day of school before Christmas, and Juice had entered yet another phase. I was in the middle of asking her “Juice, why are you dressed like that?” when the short guy in our class who always wears an orange shirt and green sweatpants ran right between us, pushing her back against the wall. “Take that!” he shouted.

“I told him I wasn’t really from Star Trek,” Juice said. “Sheesh!”

“Stupid Trekkiephobe,” I sighed, looking up into my empty locker. “I’ve tried to come up with dogs and cataclysms to attack him in my dreams, but I think I’ve got a better chance of carving a picture in my nose.”

“Who cares if he raids your locker?” Juice asked. “At least he does your homework for you. He made fun of my haircut, and he cut it for me! Male haircutters are all a hundred percent jerks.”

“He’s the one who threatened me to wear this hat or marry him,” I said, holding up a large white puffball I had cast onto the floor of my locker. “And so many people laugh at me when I wear this hat that sometimes I wish I had married him. I just wish I knew his name.”

“But he hung your sock on the office bulletin board!” Juice exclaimed.

“And he knows I’m afraid of bulletin boards,” I whined. “I’ll never get it back, and that was my favorite sock.”

“Mine too.”

“I wish I didn’t have to share socks with you, especially when we have to wear them at the same time.”

“It’s sort of hard to walk that way, klutz,” Juice said, drinking out of the water fountain with the words “Drink me” graffitied on it. “But that’s what happens when friends combine their money to buy clothes that neither of them can afford by themselves.” Suddenly she turned toward me and stuffed quick-drying plaster in my mouth. When I asked her why she did that, I don’t think she understood what I was saying.

“Face it,” she said, “you hate me, not him. Good. The truth is, I’ve hired him as my temporary twin. We must persecute you until you say ‘Merry Christmas.’”

“In a public school? I’ll stick with the plaster in my mouth, thanks,” I said. Unfortunately Juice still couldn’t understand what I was saying.

Mphwy Cwphmph.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Christmas cookies!

This week I went to the doctor’s office for a checkup after that unusual bowel movement, but all my doctor told me was that I would probably go blind if I kept calling her Snigglefritz. Rather than change my ways and thus limit my enjoyment of life, I've decided to learn Braille while I can still see.

“Does that say ‘The fish can flee the country?’” I was asking yesterday with my eyes closed while I was practicing my Braille reading at Juice’s house.

“No,” said Juice’s little sister, who was sitting on my left thigh, sandwiching me between Juice and herself on the couch. I felt and probably looked like a hot orange. “It says ‘See Spot run.’ You gotta try harder, Jolly. You’ve been reading the same sentence for four hours straight. I’ve learned the entire Braille alphabet and I’m only five!”

“Jolly, you have to feel the bumps with your fingers to read it,” said Juice. She held her happy-face mug up to the book. “Look. My mug is reading Braille. Isn’t that adorable?”

“Just great,” I said, reaching forward to grab one of Juice’s mom’s freshly-baked cookies from the Antarctica-shaped platter on the coffee table. No sooner had I taken my first bite than someone suddenly turned out the lights, or so I thought for a few moments.

“Golly, I guess I’m blind now,” I said, not quite grasping the reality of the situation. “Oh well. At least I have this booze-infested cookie.”

“Nothing makes Jolly giggle more than booze cookies,” said Juice. “Don’t tell her the recipe, Mom; it’s all mine! What is it?”

“Well, you’ll never guess what my secret is,” I heard her mom say.

“Booze?”

“Nope. No booze. I grind up these Christmas tree strings of beads and mix them in. The chemicals give people an intoxicated feeling without bad breath. Of course, there are side effects, like diarrhea, temporary blindness, and blackheads.”

“Is that why everyone in your family has a black head, Juice?” I asked, my vision already beginning to clear. “Because you eat too many of these cookies?”

“Yup. But our bodies are black because of Mom’s chocolate salad,” Juice said between bites of cookie.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

what's wrong:

I did end up talking to Dad about my problem, and we agreed to take Mom out to dinner at Gimmiquelesse yesterday before breaking the news to her. That evening I wore another empire-waist dress, and I could tell by the expression on Mom’s face that she had noticed the dress and the enlarged stomach beneath it. The dinner went well for the most part aside from the tomato dessert thing we got, but towards the end Mom suddenly grabbed one of the pink linen napkins to cover over her right wrist stump.

After a few unrepeatable exclamations, she said calmly, with half a smile, “As soon as I realized that Jolly was pregnant, my hand fell off in shock.”

“Stop punching my shoulder, Dad,” I said.

Dad bent down to reach under the table and sat back up again, saying to Mom, “Here’s your hand back.” He and I proceeded to help Mom out of her seat the way Dad had helped me out of my seat the week before.

“But it’s holding someone else’s purse,” Mom said, staring at the hand shyly.

“Never mind that. It might have money in it,” I said, pulling her out of the restaurant to a shop directly across from it in the mall.

“Why are we heading toward the Purple Portrait Studio?” Mom asked.

“I wanted to get a picture of myself in this condition,” I said, my voice shaking and crumbling more with every syllable. I led her away from the Purple Portrait Studio and into Keystone Plumbing, the store with everything and a whole bunch of toilets.

“Look, strangers!” Mom exclaimed, spotting two elderly, unfashionably-dressed women. She was as easily distracted as Dad and I hoped she would be. Mom loves strangers. “Let’s clap our hand and sway with them.”

“Quick! Group hug before I fall over!” I said, delighted at Mom’s pleasant shift of mind. “What’s more, I’m not really pregnant. I just ate most of your Aegean sea sponge collection!”

“So that’s where they went!” Mom said, resting her reattached hand on her cheek and shaking her head. "I could have sworn I had more than that one Calthropella stelligera sample on my dresser."

“Can I join you guys?” asked some thirtyish lady stranger with big hair and big earrings. “I’m lonely.”

Mom, the two old, acceptable strangers and I turned away from her while Dad took care of her. We tried to carry on our conversation but the lady stranger interrupted us again, saying, “Hey, why is he flushing me down the toilet?”

“Because you’re invading our conversation,” I said through my clenched-teeth grin.

“Jolly, I’m so glad I’ve finally found people who wear white bead necklaces like me,” Mom said, resting her reattached hand on my shoulder and her eyes beneath her eyelids.

“It’s a relief,” added one of the acceptable strangers, who wore large glasses made out of red licorice.

“I thought I was the only one,” added the other, shorter, and more decrepit old stranger.

“You’re all a bunch of Wilma Flintstone wannabees,” I told them. “What I don’t understand is where Dad disappeared to, and why you’re getting out a hankie.”

“I’ll show you in a minute,” Mom said. She put her arms around me and added, “I’m so happy and full of red hearts that my hand fell off again!”
She held her hankie-covered stump to her cheek until Dad mysteriously reappeared and fetched her hand for her. Then Mom let go of me, and I had a tremendous urge to let go of some huge bodily waste. Fortunately I had my pick of toilets, and my parents and the strangers waited patiently as I tried them all, successfully releasing what was left of Mom's sponge collection into a bright turquoise model. A salesperson--a guy-girl or a girl-guy, I forget which--ushered me out once he/she/it realized that I was not in labor. Dad followed with the sponge remains. Mom followed with my undies. The strangers followed the salesperson.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Stop asking me!

I'll talk about what's wrong when I'm good and ready. For right now I need all of you to leave me alone and let me deal with this problem my own way.

Man, it took me forever to type that. Today I tried on my cat’s eyes to see how they looked, and they're really funky.

So yesterday, Dad and I went to the Bamboo Panda Restaurant, where the waitresses take bets on Chinese racehorses. Dad bet two hundred on the second horse in the second race. He let me wear onion rings on my ears provided that I promised not to eat the menu, so I just licked it.

When we got our food and started eating amongst the buzz of other gamblers, Dad kept pointing at the way I ate and laughing. Then he ran out of the restaurant, shaved off his mustache, and went to the Kiononia Coffee House to listen in disguise while Mom played hippie gospel tunes in imitation hippie clothes. He later told me that Mom figured out it was him and made him go to the library with her to study with her, just for old times sake. When he finally made his way back to me at our table hours after the restaurant was supposed to close, I was still paused in midthought while picking food out of my dimples. I kept accidentally shoving forkfuls of roast cherries against my neck instead of into my mouth, and then of course the cherries fell into my dress. Dad made a grimace for whatever reason and said, “If you keep shoveling in food that way, you’re going to get fat. You’ve already grown a little potbelly lately, and today you’re even wearing an empire-waist dress, which you swore you would never wear until you were pregnant.”

I shuddered inwardly. He’s noticed the change, but I wonder if he might really suspect.
After he said that, his collar began to extend like an unraveling roll of paper towels, and I asked if I could have just a little piece of it to wipe my hands on.

Dad said, “In your bloated condition, you can wipe your hands on my jacket sleeve if you like, and hold onto it while we walk out of here.” With that, he helped me up, grabbed the tips from several other deserted tables, used the tips to win back the two hundred he lost, and led me outside. I couldn’t stop smiling. Even if Dad does suspect, my secret’s safe with him.

I kind of like using my cat’s eyes, but they make me feel hot and sweaty somehow. My picture of Dad and Mom, the one with the commandment “Love Dad & Mom” written above it, is beginning to blurr.

Please post non-"what's wrong?" comments only. Thanks.