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“No,” she said, looking in the direction of the front door. “I don’t think so.”
“Dad, how are you supposed to fit ‘I’m a Chelsea girl?’ on a thong?” my sister asked him once Whitefoot also realized it wasn’t the mailman and had quieted down.
“We’ll put it on the front.”
“And who’s going to run this company?” Sloane asked. “JLo?”
“Nah, I don’t like the stuff JLo’s coming out with. Too trashy. Something a little more sophisticated. You and your sisters will design the garments and I will make all the executive decisions.”
“Yeah, you seem to have created quite a prolific empire with your used-car company; the obvious next move would be to branch out into women’s lingerie,” I told him.
“There she goes again, beating up on her daddy. You hear this, Sylvia?” he yelled to my mother, who was standing three feet away, ironing a pair of my father’s sweatpants.
“What are you ironing, Mom?” Sloane asked her.
“Dad’s sweatpants,” my mother said with a groan.
“Well, for Christ’s sake, it’s not slave labor. She likes it when I have the creases in the front.”
“No, Melvin, I told you I would prefer you to wear slacks but you insist on wearing sweatpants, and if you’re going to wear them, I at least want them to be ironed.”
“I look good in sweats,” my father proclaimed. “Besides, I can’t keep my slacks on with this extra weight.” The “extra weight” my father was referring to has been there for thirty years.
My two-hundred-fifty-pound father then proceeded to try and get up off the couch, which took three false starts. When he did get up, he called out to Whitefoot. “Let’s go, Whitefoot, you wa
“Mom, I don’t want Charley to come over here if Dad is just going to pee anywhere he feels like it and then not wash his hands,” Sloane said.
“He’s got those bladder stones, Sloane. When he has to go, he has to go,” she said.
“I understand that, but it wouldn’t take him any longer to walk to the bathroom than it does to walk outside, Mom,” Sloane accurately pointed out. My father complains about these bladder stones on a regular basis but refuses to get the operation needed to remedy the situation because it involves sticking a small tube into his penis.
“Just be happy he’s not peeing in the driveway anymore, Sloane. It took me months to get him to go in the back. And to wear suspenders.”
“The suspenders are an improvement, Mom,” Sloane told her. “At least he doesn’t walk around holding his pants up with his hands anymore. You have to make sure he keeps wearing them.”
The problem with the suspenders my mother bought for him is that he hasn’t adjusted the straps since he got them. So instead of attaching somewhere around his midsection, the suspenders clip onto his pants three inches below his nipples. Now picture the suspenders attached to a pair of sweatpants. This vision is what first led me to coin the term “camel balls.”
My father came back inside and headed straight for Charley. “Hold up, Dad,” Sloane interceded. “You need to go wash your hands. Pronto.”
He looked at my sister as if she had asked him for heroin. My mother then took the spray water bottle she was using to iron and sprayed my father in the face. “Melvin, you know you have to wash your hands when the babies are here.”
My mother likes to pretend that she’s on top of the hygiene factor because my brothers and sisters are always dropping their kids off with her, but the truth of the matter is, my mother isn’t washing her hands all that much either. My mother is European and likes to remind us of that every time any of us ask her when she took her last shower.
My father returned from the bathroom holding up his hands to show us the water dripping. “All clean.” Then he came back and sat on the couch across from Charley, chanting her name but not pronouncing the letter r, so it sounded like “Chahley.” He does this slowly but loudly about fifteen times in a row at random intervals throughout the day while my sister sits with her eyes closed.
The phone rang and my mother looked around, startled, as if a helicopter had just landed on our roof. “Telephone!” my father yelled out. Not only can neither one of them ever find the actual phone, but on the rare occasion when they succeed, the battery is almost sure to be dead, or the answering machine has already picked up. I’ve never had a phone conversation with either one of my parents when the answering machine didn’t pick up or I didn’t hear static. “Where is the goddamned phone, Sylvia?” my father asked her.
“Look in between the cushions,” my mother said, as she ran around the room like she was trying to catch a mosquito. “Here it is,” she said, as she picked up at the same time as the answering machine. “Hold on,” she told the person as I got up and unplugged the answering machine. “It’s for you, Melvin; it’s the manager at Shop Rite.”
“Aha. This is Melvin… Yes, sir… Okay then. Very good.” Click. The dial tone is the only indication to any caller (myself included) that the phone call is over. “All right, everything’s all set. You have a book signing Monday morning at the Shop Rite,” he said, looking in my direction. My sister started to perk up-she found this new development very amusing. Her eyes were still closed, but a large smile had emerged on her face and her shoulders were shaking.
“Now, how are we go
“First of all, Dad, I’m not doing a book signing at a grocery store. Second, we can’t just have the publisher overnight us books; it takes a couple of days,” I told him.
“Well then, call Amazon,” he said.
“You can’t call Amazon, Dad, you have to order them online and it’s not like they just hot-air balloon them over. Furthermore, I’m not signing books at a grocery store. Who’s even going to show up?” I asked him.
“I’ll print up flyers,” he said, which caused my sister to spit up a little bit.
“Print up flyers?” Sloane asked him. “You can barely use the telephone.”
“Where am I going to sign the books, anyway?” I asked. “In the produce section?”
“Really, Melvin, I don’t know if that’s really Chelsea’s audience,” my mother chimed in.
“What about the car wash?”
“No,” I said.
“How about the deli?”
“No.”
“I sold three at the Starbucks the other day.”
“To who?” my sister asked.
“To customers, Sloane! Who do you think? I told them my daughter is a bestselling author and she’s a graduate from Livingston High School and they should buy the book. I’ve been a salesman for forty-some odd years. You don’t think I know how to move a couple of books?”
“Well, if you’re such a good salesman, why don’t you sell some of those cars in the driveway?” my mother chimed in.
My parents fight about two things: the ten to fifteen cars my father has had parked in the driveway for more than ten years, and his eating habits. My parents live in a nice neighborhood, and my father doesn’t seem to understand why our neighbors are continually calling the police to report him for having too many cars in our driveway.
“Oh, here she goes,” he says, looking at my sister and me. “Listen, right now my focus is on Chelsea and the book. I’ve got a lot of plans. How about doing a signing at Best Buy? God knows they’ve got the equipment for a speech.”
“I turned to Sloane and asked her if she wanted to see a movie.”
“Oh yeah,” said Sloane, immediately perking up. “Let’s go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
“Excuse me?” I replied disgustedly.
“I’m dying to see that movie.”
“If you think I’m going to go give those two homewreckers my money, you’ve completely lost your marbles. I will never go see another Angelina Jolie movie again.”