Read Online It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro - Free Book Online

been trying to yank from the claws of death only moments before, but I had to give the medical-supply place my credit card! I had to fill out a two-page questionnaire about who was going to use the wheelchair, where we were going with it, and who the primary caretaker of the wheelchair was going to be. I had to have the skill of a surgeon to evade their questions so they wouldn’t figure out I simply needed it as a prop for a costume. If it came back scuffed or scratched, that was one thing—old people fall out of stuff all the time—but if I brought this thing back with eau de Mama’s Booze Bag with a note of bile, I had just purchased a new mode of transportation.
    “How is this a surprise to anybody?” people would now say at my funeral. “One day, she’s walking; the next day, she won’t go anywhere without the wheelchair. She just gave up.”
    Suddenly, a little choking person I know popped up out of the wheelchair and ran to the bathroom, where she stayed for a long, long, long time, and when she came out, she was no longer the jolly drunk who had been stationed in the kitchen.
    “Are you all right?” I asked as she looked at me, clearly irritated. “I can’t believe a mini-quiche almost killed you.”
    Jamie shook her head, her eyes red and watery. “It wasn’t the quiche,” she slurred. “The water went down the wrong pipe. I just needed a minute to clear my throat, but I was stuck in that stupid thing. I couldn’t get away from you. You wouldn’t have been able to keep shaking me if I wasn’t in that chair.”
    “But you
were
in that chair,” I said quietly, not able to look at her. “You
were.
”
    Then she went off to bed, a full night’s excitement over by 9:15 P.M .
    When I woke up the next morning, Jamie was already downstairs, miraculously, drinking coffee with my husband.
    “Whatever happened last night, I’m sorry,” she began.
    “You don’t remember?” I asked quickly.
    “Not very much,” she admitted. “It’s all sort of a blur. A crazy black blur. Did we get on a trampoline?”
    “She Heimliched you!” my husband cried immediately, pointing at me. “While she was wearing her crazy Baby Jane Hudson outfit!”
    Jamie looked puzzled. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
    “I thought you were choking on a mini-quiche,” I explained. “So I tried to save you. Your eyes were all bulgy, you were turning red, it was terrifying. But look! You’re alive!”
    She shook her head. “Yeah, I guess,” she replied. “I don’t remember any of that. That must have been the part where I thought we were jumping. So that explains the smell and the taste in my mouth.”
    “Yep,” I said, nodding.
    “But I can’t move my arm,” she continued. “My back iskilling me. What did I do that I can’t move my arm? Or basically any of my torso?”
    I just shook my head and thanked God I’d hit her in a place where she couldn’t see the bruise.
    “No idea, but I’m starving!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go for biscuits and gravy. And make sure you grab your purse.”
    * Disclaimer: I can’t say for sure if I touched Jamie’s boobs or not. I think it is altogether possible though unlikely, due to the fact that I pride myself on having a built-in, natural “hot stove” mechanism to avoid that sort of thing and have been 100 percent successful in the past concerning such. In the case that there was a videotape of the whole event, however, and it was played for a jury during an assault trial or something along those lines, it might document the fact that I did, indeed, encounter her boobs in one manner or another. And I am sorry for that if my built-in mechanism of best-friend boob avoidance did not activate. But there was a flurry of activity exploding around me, not to mention the fireworks of survival egging me on, so I suppose the natural mechanism could have been overwritten and catastrophe experienced. Therefore, you should expect that if the Panic Level reaches Level Two, a side