Are You There, Vodka, It's Me Chelsea

“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 gonna get the books?” he asked.

“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.”

“Oh, please,” she said, groaning.

“Oh, please, nothing!” I told her. “I will not support the two of them. The only temptation, obviously, would be a third installment of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. But I think I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Please,” she begged, “I really want to see it.”

“Absolutely not,” I told her. “It’s either happy hour, or we can go see Herbie Fully Loaded.”

“I’m not going to happy hour,” Sloane said. “I have a baby.”

My sister had been using this baby excuse ever since she had the kid, and it was starting to get on my nerves. “Oh, would you shut up with the baby already?” I said. “That’s all you ever say anymore, as if you’re the only one in the world who’s ever had a baby. I could have a baby too…if I had gone through with any of my pregnancies.”

“Chelsea,” my mother said, with the same look she reserves for me whenever I tell my sister that the back of her baby’s head is flat.

“I’ll take a baked potato,” my father blurted out, the same way an attorney would yell “objection” in a courtroom.

“Here, Melvin,” my mother said as she handed my dad his freshly ironed yellow sweatpants. “Please put these on.”

“And not out here,” Sloane added.

“Aren’t there any regular pants you can put on?” I asked my dad. “I really don’t think sweatpants are a good look for the outdoors. Especially on you.”

“They’re the only thing I can fit into right now, love; why can’t you just accept your daddy the way he is?”

“Because, you’re not the biggest man on the planet, Dad. There are other men who seem to find pants that fit them.”

“What if I wear a tie?” he asked.

“Sloane, dear, how about some fresh grapes?” my mother asked in a voice more appropriate for a six-year-old.

“I’ll take some grapes,” my father called out. You’d think my father was stapled to the couch the way he barks out orders, but the simple truth of the matter is that he’s entirely too top-heavy to make a clean sweep from the sofa to the kitchen without knocking something over.

My mother walked over with a bowl full of grapes and handed a bunch to my sister, who then inspected them like she does every piece of food-as if there’s anything that could stop her from inhaling it.

“What is it?” my mom asked, as Sloane made a face at her grapes.

“Nothing,” Sloane said, pulling what looked like a dog hair off the top of her bunch with disgust and then popping one after another into her mouth.

In between bites of his own, my father plucked a grape and attempted to throw it into Whitefoot’s mouth. Instead, the grape hit the sideboard, ricocheted and bounced off the side of Charley’s head and right into Sloane’s eye.

“Ow! Dad!” Sloane yelled out.

My mother once again reacted like there had been gunfire and dropped the bowl of grapes on the floor. “Melvin, what the hell is the matter with you?” she said in her feeble version of yelling as she hurried over to my sister’s rescue.

“Bad doggie!” my father yelled, as Whitefoot ran over to eat all the grapes that had just fallen to the floor.

“Sorry about that, Sloane. I was just trying to give Whitefoot a grape,” my father said as he winced at his misfire. “Goddammit, Whitefoot, why didn’t you catch that grape?”

“Are you okay, darling?” my mother asked, cuddling Sloane like she had just fallen off the monkey bars at the playground.

“Look at that faggot,” my dad motioned as some guy promoting exercise equipment came on the television screen.

Whitefoot started barking again.

“Sylvia, look and see if that’s the mailman.”

She walked from the kitchen into the living room and looked out the front door again. “Yes, I think so.”

“Okay, I gotta go talk to him about Sloane’s diet,” he said as he got up and almost fell over.

“Is the mailman moonlighting as a nutritionist?” I asked Sloane, who was now eating grapes with one eye shut.

“You’re gonna like this one. Dad told me that he would pay for me to go on NutriSystem. He said it would be my birthday gift because it’s kind of expensive. So, after he convinced me to do it, which I wasn’t all that excited about in the first place, I went online, picked out thirty days’ worth of meals, which took about an hour. Then I punched in Dad’s credit card number. And it was declined.”

“What does that have to do with the mailman?” I asked her.

“His theory,” my sister explained, “is that the mailman’s mad because Whitefoot barks at him, and so in retaliation, he takes some of his mail and throws it in the Dumpster at the post office. That’s why the credit card company didn’t get his payment.”

“Well, that seems like a logical explanation. Is that where you think the rest of the bills he never pays on time are?”

“Dad is very good at paying his bills,” my mother added. “Sometimes they’re late, but he always sends them.”

“I don’t doubt that he sends them, Mom,” I explained. “My point is that there usually has to be money in the account for the check to clear.”

My father walked back in the living room and sat down. “Guy’s a deadbeat. Sylvia, remind me to go down to see the postmaster tomorrow.”

“I’m going home,” Sloane said, shaking her head.

“Well, I’m coming with you,” I said. I needed some one-on-one time with my niece to ensure that my sister Sidney did not secure the favorite aunt position. All my brothers and sisters live in New