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“That’s what I was thinking too. I have a first-aid kit I’ve never used.”
“I have to go,” she said hurriedly and hung up.
I looked around my apartment at all the possible things I could re-gift and was torn between a picture frame that held a picture of me and my sisters, and a candle that had only been lit once. My head bobbed back and forth between the candle and the picture frame, the same way it would if I were watching a te
“Well, that was a hard day of work you put in. It’s almost one p.m., you must be exhausted,” I said, rummaging through my fa
“Ugh, Aubrey is so a
“I’m giving her that candle,” I said, pointing at the candle I had placed on our coffee table right next to an old newspaper I was pla
She walked over to take a closer look at the candle. “It’s already been used.”
“I’m going to cut the wick off,” I told her.
“Then how is she going to light it?”
“Not my problem.”
“Chelsea,” Lydia said, in the same tone my gynecologist used when I told her I would need a month’s supply of morning-after pills. “I’m sure you can find something else. You can’t give her that.”
“Sure I can,” I said as I went over to my computer to check my e-mail, since that is primarily what takes up my day. I love e-mail and much prefer it to the telephone. I had two new e-mail messages. The first was from my brother, who sends me daily greeting cards from a site called gbehh.com. This one had a bu
The second e-mail I opened was from my friend Morgan who lives in San Diego. She e-mailed me a picture of her dog. Alone. Morgan is also the girl who gave Ivory a gold cross for her birthday one year. Contrary to her name, Ivory is the most Jewish person any of us know. She is constantly using Yiddish phrases, loves food more than anyone I know, and is my only Jewish friend who actually goes to temple.
I understand if people want to e-mail pictures of their babies by themselves, but there is no way I’m going to join Kodak’s photo gallery to look at a picture of someone’s pet standing by itself in front of Niagara Falls. This is not the first time this has happened to me, and I was actually pleased because I had gathered the materials necessary to respond appropriately. I clicked reply and sent Morgan a picture of my cleaning lady. Standing next to the toilet, alone. I attached a message that read, “Not interested? Me neither.”
“I’m not letting you give Aubrey that candle, Chelsea,” Lydia said as she put the candle back on the shelf where I found it.
“Well, I’ve spent the last hour trying to find something and I refuse to spend money on a present. Can’t we just buy her di
“Look in that closet, you have tons of shit in there. I’m sure you can find something,” she said, pointing to our hall closet the same way someone would yell “Sit” to a dog.
“I’m giving all that stuff to Fantasia,” I told her.
“Who is Fantasia?” Lydia asked me.
“Um, I don’t know, maybe the cleaning lady we’ve had for two years?” I reminded her.
“Her name is Florencia, Chelsea.”
I stared at her, wondering if this was true. Florencia did have a familiar ring to it. But I could have sworn Florencia was a name from my past.
“Well, whatever,” I said. “She’s been calling me Yelsea since she started working here and I go along with it. Every time I call her I have to say, ‘Hi, Fantasia, this is Yelsea.’”
I was looking through the closet when I found the present that Ivory bought me for my twenty-sixth birthday. Ivory had gone on and on about this present for months leading up to my birthday. “Chelsea, I can’t wait to give you this gift!” she kept telling me over and over again. “I know you so well, this is the perfect Chelsea gift.” With all the hype she gave it, you would have thought she had bought me a vibrator that could also make tacos.
After three months of enticing me with the “most amazing gift one person could buy another person,” she gave me a board game called Rehab. Not only do I make it a personal rule to never play organized games, if an occasion presents itself where I am forced to play one, I prefer it not to take place on a giant piece of paper. It’s called a board game because it’s supposed to be on a board. This game came with a giant piece of paper the consistency of loose-leaf that had different rehabilitation facilities spread over it, much in the same vein as Monopoly. It came with some wooden pieces that I actually burned one night when we ran out of firewood.
“I’ve got it!” I yelled to Lydia as I pulled out the Rehab game. Next, I opened up the Yahtzee box that was on top of the closet, stole three of the dice, and put them in the little plastic Rehab bags, along with a couple of the wooden pieces that were partially scorched.
Lydia walked over to the closet. “Oh my God, I forgot about that game. I actually played that one night.”
“You did?” I asked. “With who?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Were you alone?”
“I may have been,” she said as she opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Chardo
Luckily, the box the game came in looked like it could have been new. I wrapped it up in the newspaper I had set aside. Then I took a black Sharpie marker and wrote “To: Aubrey, From: Chelsea” directly on top of the newspaper.
“Wait, Chelsea.” Lydia laughed. “Ivory is coming tonight! She’ll see the game and realize what you did.”
“Oh, who cares?” I exclaimed, exhausted from the day’s shenanigans. I needed to burn off some steam. I walked into my bedroom and dropped to do a set of push-ups. After the third, I got up and walked back into the kitchen, where Lydia was sorting through our bills with a confused look on her face. She did this every month, questioning one bill after another, wondering aloud why we would be charged for electricity two consecutive months in a row.
“That’s usually how things work, Lydia.”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense. Last month we were charged $47.32, and this month we were charged $75.45.”
I then inspected the bill and explained to her that we never paid last month’s bill, and that was the reason for the increase.
“Still, it doesn’t make any sense,” she said, confused.
“It makes perfect sense,” I told her. “If someone’s pulling the wool over our eyes, I’m pretty sure it’s not Southern California Edison. This isn’t Erin Brockovich, Lydia. We’re talking about tens of dollars.”
Lydia is five years older than me and never has any money. In the entire time I lived with her, she never paid her rent on time. She’s the type of person who says, “I’m really broke right now,” and then takes off to Vegas for the weekend.
“Well, I’m really broke right now, so I hope this di
“Yeah, so do the rest of us, Lydia. No one wants to go. And why would anyone want to have a birthday di
“Chelsea, she has no friends.”
“Another red flag,” I reminded her.