You're Married to Her? Read Free Page B

while my mom prepared to remake me in the image of her favorite celebrity, an actor named George Hamilton, who had hair like Zorro and skin with the buffed polish of a goat-hide briefcase. As I more closely resembled Izak Perlman, it was to be a complicated makeover. A three-fold plan was devised. First, I needed a rich suntan. I also had to drop ten pounds, and lastly, my mom was going to straighten my hair.
    Although the Sunday of the awards ceremony was a blazing 94 degrees, it came after a week of sporadic rain and unyielding humidity that spun my hair into a ball of grade 4 steel wool. At sunrise I spread an old blanket on the hot tar roof of my apartment building in an attempt to coax a fast suntan. In order to make up for lost time, my mother’s brother Rudy, or The Idiot, as my father called him, also in on the project, provided me with a secret formula that he told me life guards used, a squeezer bottle with equal parts baby oil and iodine. Like a rotisserie chicken, I turned and basted myself
every half hour. I did not eat breakfast or go downstairs for lunch as I was fasting to take off extra pounds and I did not realize the effects of the secret formula until I saw my dad’s expression when he came up to the roof to get me.
    â€œThe Idiot told you to do that?” he said. My skin was scorched and raw to the touch, the approximate color of a red bliss potato. My mom led me directly to the bathroom where I sat on the toilet seat while she massaged hair-straightening mixture into my scalp. Then she wrapped my head in aluminum foil and moved me to the living room to watch the ball game while my hair relaxed. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee sportscaster, was swabbing his face with a handkerchief. The infield in the Bronx, he announced, had reached 97 degrees. Allison and her mom were to pick me up in a limousine at five. It was now four-fifteen. My dad plucked lint off the tuxedo he had rented at 50 percent off, a winter model made of mohair. My skin was beginning to blister. My mom unwrapped my head. “Oh, my,” she said with the expression of someone unpinning a diaper. “It must be the heat.” My hair had completely lost its texture and dribbled down my scalp like gravy.
    Half the building watched from the lobby when the limousine arrived. None of the children had ever seen a real chauffeur. An overly solicitous body builder in an ill-fitting double-breasted suit, he held open the door and softly said many things about my comfort. It did not register at first that he was mumbling apologies because
the air conditioning in the limo did not work. Allison was wearing a real ruby tiara and a shoulder-less pink satin gown that made crunching sounds as she slid over. Her mother was rattling the bottles of the limo bar and cursing the driver until he raised the divider to shut her out. I found that if I did not move, if I remained motionless and simply visualized, in this case a water moccasin sliding across my foot, I could ignore the fact that my body was covered with second-degree burns. Relief arrived with a sea breeze as we swung through empty streets and even Allison’s mother had gently succumbed to sleep. But soon we hit the Long Island Expressway, packed bumper to bumper with Sunday evening beach traffic.
    Enveloped in the exhaust of many thousands of cars headed back to Manhattan, the long black limousine did not move. Allison’s mother snored. My slacks, ordered a size too small at the waist to account for the weight I was supposed to lose, girded the soft flesh of my belly like piano wire. To our right a car full of teenage thugs in bathing suits, their bare feet sticking out the back window, drank beer and smoked pot and, laughing at the stiffs in formal dress, took turns spitting phlegm loogies at us. Closing our windows in this heat was not an option. I tried blocking them out with Sylva Mind Control. Think positively: Soon the traffic would budge. A loogie hit me in the neck.