The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club (10 page)

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I can almost handle going to the gynecologist because, supposedly, like every other female, I’m only supposed to go once a year.

Supposedly.

Well, as luck
and
my cervix would have it, I got to see a whole lot of my gynecologist this year, though she got to see a whole lot more of me.

In any case, I know better than to expect that anything connected with me would ever go smoothly or be considered routine. If things didn’t happen that way, it would make me
normal.
The life of a freak, on the other hand, is filled with snags, bitter disappointments, and calamities, and no matter how hard I try, that’s where I consistently find myself, ass-down in a puddle of freak mud.

Or legs-up on an examining table.

During my visit to my doctor last year, a vital torturing device was missing, the little toy called the Speculum. For those of you not familiar with OB-GYN lingo, I will explain. The speculum is a medieval invention with two halves that, when closed, form a conical shape. That’s the part they shove into your privates. Then I guess there’s some sort of handle, and behind the handle is a big crank that, when the doctor turns it, opens the conical part to an unnatural spread resembling the jaws of an infuriated crocodile. It is made out of metal, and I’m pretty sure that my doctor keeps hers in the freezer.

During my exam, my doctor didn’t find out that the speculum was missing until I was naked and already had my feet up higher in the air than an adult entertainer. She searched frantically for the instrument through the cabinet below me, but to no avail. It simply wasn’t there. I thought I might have been off the hook.

Instead, she raised her head through the valley of my legs.

“Barbara!” she yelled to her assistant at the front desk. “Where’s the speculum?”

“It’s in the cabinet!” I heard Barbara yell back, to which my doctor responded that it just wasn’t there.

Then the door flew open, and there was Barbara, entering the room to join my doctor in the search for the tool.

“I don’t understand it,” Barbara said. “I know I saw it here.”

I couldn’t see what was going on. I was still on my back, with my unsheathed lower appendages up in the air, my privacy covered with nothing but an enlarged two-ply paper towel.

“It’s not here,” I heard them agree. “Jeanie!”

And then the door opened again, and there was Jeanie, the girl in charge of the urine samples. She also joined the party that was currently being hosted by my now-public vagina.

“Look,” I expected my doctor to say to her little friends as she elbowed Barbara and Jeanie and pointed at me, giggling. “I
told
you this one has seen a lot of action.”

I felt like someone who had been abducted by a UFO, and aliens were handling me very improperly. “You people aren’t supposed to be down there!” the little voice in my head yelled. “This is private property! Do you see an open house sign?!!”

No one even offered to cover me up. I had no recourse; I just lay there, shaking my head. So far, I had my doctor, her receptionist, and the urine girl gathered in front of my very visible biblical parts. That included two people who had no business being there in the first place, both of whom I was going to have to look in the face later when I paid for this brief visit to Magic Mortification Mountain. What’s next, I thought, a knock at the door and a voice that cracked, “Did anybody order a pizza?”

“Come on in!” the three women would chorus. “We’re in here!”

Hell, let’s send out invitations! Why stop with the office personnel? Let’s have the whole building over for lunch!

Finally, my doctor sent Jeanie to the other examining room to fetch the speculum from that freezer, and the search was over. The examination proceeded, thankfully after Barbara and Jeanie went back to their desks.

So, you see, I’m wary of going to the gynecologist; I can handle it, but I’m cautious. But when I went back again this year, despite the public viewing I had last year, there was no way that I could have been prepared for what happened.

I went in, got the Pap smear/examination thing done, and it was over. Everything went fine, no one walked in on me, no one strange poked at my private parts, and I didn’t have to charge admission.

A week or two passed, and I hadn’t heard from the doctor’s office about the test results, so finally, I called them.

“Oh, Laurie Notaro, yes, we have your results back,” Barbara said to me. “We lost your file, but we would have caught up with you by the end of the month.”

Very reassuring.

“You need to come back in,” she said. “When can we schedule a biopsy?”

“A biopsy?” I asked. “For what?”

“The test results are not okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “You have abnormal cells, and we need to check them at the lab. It could be cancer.”

Cancer?
The word my family only whispers because it’s too horrible to say?

Cancer?

Suddenly, I felt very mortal.

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“How about next Tuesday at 2:30 P.M.?”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Yeah. Fine,” I responded.

I hung up the phone.

This is wrong, I thought, this is
wrong.
I’m still a kid. I just turned twenty-two—okay, so that was seven years ago, but, still, I’m not that old.

Until I remembered that my cousin had a double mastectomy at twenty-five and that a friend of mine had developed lung cancer at twenty-four.

I had the biopsy done—which pretty much meant that my doctor cut a piece of meat out of me the size of a New York strip—and waited for Barbara to call with the results.

I started making plans.

If I’m going to die, I thought, I’m going on a shopping spree on my mother’s credit cards, I’m going to Europe on pity money I can suck out of my dad, I’m going to eat Hostess Nutty Ho Hos for every meal and lose weight at the same time, I’m going to drink Hershey’s chocolate syrup right out of the can, I’m going to smoke three packs a day and drink whiskey until I pee blood. Plain and simple, I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN.

Then Barbara called, and Europe was off. I didn’t have cancer. It turns out that my cervix was just pissed off because I’d spent my prime childbearing years hanging out in bars, falling down, and vomiting on myself instead of making my womb ripe with baby fruit.

And, oh, by the way, I needed surgery, too, to get rid of the renegade cells.

Was next Tuesday fine?

Yeah, sure, fine, okay.

I went back to the doctor’s office again to have cryosurgery, which meant that the bad cells were going to be frozen and killed, as Barbara had already explained it to me.

What I didn’t expect was to see a huge iron tank set up next to the examination table that looked like my doctor was going to fill me up with enough helium to fly me over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as the Jolly Vagina Float.

Instead, the doctor explained that it wasn’t a helium tank but a liquid-nitrogen tank, which is what she was going to use during the surgery.

Oh, great, I thought. What happens if she’s had too much coffee, or has a hangover and her shaking hand slips and then all of a sudden I have a freeze-dried uterus that shatters as soon as something comes into contact with it?

“Just relax,” the doctor said.

I tried.

She turned on the tank, and I didn’t want to do anything but snap my legs shut,
fast.

She started the surgery, I heard the whirl of the machinery, and then I heard

BOOM!

from the tank.

Oh-my-God! My mind snapped into alarm mode. Frozen Uterus! Frozen Uterus! It didn’t shatter, it blew up! My uterus has exploded!

“Ooops!” the doctor said.

That was NOT what I wanted to hear.

“It broke,” she said simply.

“Which part?” I asked, meaning my fallopian tubes, the cervix, a vulva or two, which part was probably hanging out of me, dripping my eggs onto the floor?

“Which part?”
I demanded again.

“This thing,” she said as she showed me a circular piece of black rubber.

“That’s not mine,” I assured her, shaking my head. “It’s not mine. I’ve never stuck anything that looks remotely like that up there.”

“It’s a part of the tank,” she informed me.

Thank God, I thought, that my innards hadn’t rotted to that sort of blackened stage just yet.

“We may have to reschedule,” she sighed. “I don’t think I have an extra part, but let me find out.”

I nodded.

“Barbara!” she shouted.

Dead in a Box

To say that the middle bedroom in my house was messy was putting it mildly.

Some people called it the Scary Room.

Some people said it made a midwestern trailer park after a tornado look like a parking lot fair.

Some people said that they were sure that I hid dead bodies in there.

Those people weren’t all that wrong.

The Scary Room came into existence the minute I moved into the house almost eight years ago. It was the first place that I put all the stuff that didn’t have a rightful place already. It was the home for all of my orphaned possessions: the stuffed animals mummified with drool and snot from my childhood, the new wave albums from my teenage years, and all of the things my cat had ruined by peeing on them.

The Scary Room also became a storage facility for my two sisters, friends, and various roommates as well. The room became so full that movement within it was simply impossible; you could open the door, step inside, and look around. Anything else wasn’t feasible.

Then, after seven years, the unthinkable happened: A lightbulb blew out, and the orphaned crap became nothing but towering, spooky shadows. Unless I had an out-of-body experience or suddenly learned how to fly, there was no way that I could get to the fixture, which was in the center of the ceiling, to change it.

It wasn’t until I was fired from my job that I decided I had enough time to tackle the project of changing the lightbulb. I started on a Saturday, fully determined to have an empty room by Sunday night.

Each box that I opened, looked through, and put in the trash pile was another voyage for the Ghost of Laurie Past. Sometimes it was downright horrifying. In one box alone, I found an old pair of my underwear, a former boyfriend’s GED diploma, a petrified cat turd, and a bunch of bounced checks.

I started running into the old, crappy furniture part of the Scary Room, so I dragged it outside and taped free signs all over it. Within an hour, the Dad-of-the-Month family down the street had this month’s dad drive his truck two houses down to load up all the stuff and drive it back two houses to unload it.

After the furniture had been disposed of, I hit a crap pocket filled with all of the abandoned remnants of the last roommate. As I was dragging the boxes to the trash pile, I noticed one little brown box that looked familiar. I remembered what it was and hoped that I was wrong, but I knew I wasn’t.

It was a dead woman.

Or, more correctly, the mortal remains of a dead woman.

Apparently, the woman had lived at a resort where the former roommate in question used to work as some sort of servant, and the two became friendly. The woman, who was very wealthy, died, however, and had no family to speak of, so her estate was left to a charity or something like that. A short time after she died, the former roommate found a box bearing her name in the hotel trash, while the label on the box read “Valley of the Sun Funeral Services.” The former roommate, in the single act of compassion of his entire life, took the box home with him that night.

And now it was in my Scary Room.

I was raised a Catholic. We bury our dead people.
Whole.
I had no idea what I should do with the box. I couldn’t call my mother. She’d have the Pope over to my house in fifteen minutes, armed with a cooler of holy water and an economy-sized crucifix. Whatever the right thing to do with the box was, I knew that the wrong thing was to let my house become its final resting place.

I couldn’t throw it away with the rest of the stuff; it was bad enough that someone had thrown her away once already. My sister suggested that we hide the box in a drawer of a dresser that we were going to sell at a garage sale the next weekend, but that didn’t work, because nobody bought it. My friend Jamie mentioned that we should slip the box in with the stuff that was going to be picked up by Goodwill the weekend after the garage sale, but I decided that that would be a bad idea. The box was too easily traceable back to me, and the last thing I needed was the Boomerang Box of the Dead popping up in all areas of my life.

So the box, now known and referred to as “Evelyn,” remained on my kitchen counter in a very literal state of limbo. It was suggested that we bury her in the cat cemetery part of the backyard, but the thought of my dog having a strained movement over poor Evelyn seemed a fate worse than the Scary Room.

I thought about spreading her someplace, but I had no idea where. Where do you sprinkle a dead rich lady? At Tiffany? A nice lunch place? The shoe department at Neiman Marcus? Her cosmetic surgeon’s office?

And besides,
who
was going to spread Evelyn? Did a priest, rabbi, or pastor need to spread her? Did we need a permit or license to do it? Were there fines for illegally dumping human remains, and how much were they? Could I do jail time?

I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do or who to ask. All I knew was that I was trapped in a very dead version of a Woody Allen movie.

This went on for weeks, and I asked every person that I came in contact with what they thought I should do. My mother found out about it and disgustedly mentioned, “You know, things like this don’t happen to normal people. That’s what you get for letting weirdos live off you. It’s just not normal.”

And then I met Mary, the clairvoyant, at a coffee shop, while I was with my friend Michelle.

What the hell, I figured.

I told her I had a problem.

I told that I needed help.

I told her about Evelyn.

Mary nodded her head, took a breath, and said, “Well, what do you think the box wants you to do with it?”

I had no idea. I had held the box on several occasions, and I hadn’t received a message from Evelyn in any of those situations.

Since Evelyn hadn’t expressed to me what she wanted done, Mary asked what
I
wanted to do with the box.

I knew what I wanted to do. “I want to mail it back to the bastard who brought it to my house in the first place,” I replied.

“That’s exactly what you should do, then,” Mary agreed.

“But I don’t know if it’s legal to mail the dead,” I answered, and Michelle mentioned that she’d check it out with a lawyer friend of hers.

“But there’s one thing,” Mary added. “It’s very important that you tell the box what you’re doing and why. You have to tell her that it’s not because you don’t want her, it’s because she needs to be where she belongs.”

“Okay,” I nodded, a little hesitantly, trying to picture the scenario and trying even harder not to laugh.

“Then as soon as you have the talk, get that thing the hell out of your house. You’re playing with cosmic fire.”

So the next day, while I was waiting for Michelle’s phone call to see if I could slap a stamp on Evelyn, I put her box back on the kitchen counter.

I made some coffee and pulled up a stool.

We had ourselves a nice talk.

“You know, Evelyn,” I started. “I like you and everything, and I’ve never charged you rent for the year and a half that you’ve been here, but—”

Then I noticed it. That’s when I noticed that the Valley of the Sun Funeral Services label had been slit on either side of the box. I picked Evelyn up. I looked closer. The lid wasn’t on so tight.

I had to do it.

I shook her. God forgive me, but I shook a dead woman. I shook her a lot.

And I didn’t hear a thing.

Now, I know that ashes don’t weigh much—in fact, they weigh close to nothing at all—but I knew damn well if the ashes of a whole, entire Evelyn were in there, I would have heard them settle somewhat.

It made perfect sense.

The former roommate found the box in the trash. Evelyn had been gone long before that, maybe floating in a clean, blue lake, or tangled up in a gust of wind that charged through the branches of a pine tree, but most likely lying in a big, fancy urn. Everyone knows that no matter how big of an asshole you are, you’ll go to hell for throwing away a dead person.

But you
won’t
go to hell for throwing away
the box
that the dead person was in just before their ashes were spread somewhere. If Evelyn was indeed a wealthy woman, I’ll bet money that she had an expensive lawyer that made out a fancy will, complete with instructions on what to do with her remains, which were probably sitting in a porcelain urn on a marble mantel with a spotlight on it at the headquarters of her favorite charity.

I’ll betcha a million dollars.

I didn’t wait for Michelle’s phone call; I didn’t need to. Evelyn was going to where she belonged: back to the bastard who brought her to my house in the first place.

I just put the box in another box, wrote down the address, and gave it to the mailman.

What the former roommate didn’t know—and didn’t figure out when he got what he thought was Evelyn—wasn’t gonna hurt him.

But I know one thing for sure.

Eight stamps never made me laugh so hard that I’d tinkled a little in my pants before.

I hope they never will again.