Comfort Lodge

Josey showers at night, whereas I shower in the morning. I was raised to do so, you see. There is not a single person in my family who showers at night. Lauren made me aware of a funny conversation that occured the first time Josey came to visit:

My mother entered my sister’s room in the morning, rousing her from a deep slumber to tell her, “Well, I was going to the bathroom last night and I noticed that Josey was taking a shower. It was TWO IN THE MORNING, LAUREN. You DO know what that means, don’t you?”
“No mom. I do not know what that means.”
“YOU KNOW!”
“Huh?”
“I DON’T WANNNA KNOW, I DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW.”
Apparently to my mother, night showering is not a preference one has but rather evidence of SEX. This conclusion was arrived upon in spite of the fact that we had just met in person for the first time two hours prior and were nearly too nervous to converse. “Ah yes,” we were thought to have said, “we don’t really know each other well at all, but let us push aside simple conversation for now and move on to our prime directive. CREATING CHILDREN.”

This morning I was sitting on the living room floor, reading the Chris Adrian book, “The Children’s Hospital” which, thus far, i think is great. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be able to read in the living room at eight in the morning. My father would be pacing around like a caged tiger, clanging pots and pans in the kitchen, swearing on the telephone, barging in to ask me, “DID YOU LEAVE AN EMPTY GLASS ON THE COUNTER?!” It’s insufferable.
But right now my parents are at charity bicycle race. As I write this, my father is riding 60 miles while my mother sits on the side-lines reading a James Paterson book with the same rapidity and focus with which my father rides his bike. Both of them keep their eyes on the prize. They are both doing this as a charity to support research for AIDS or CANCER or CANCER-AIDS. I can’t remember which it is.

My mother called to tell me, “Well, you’re father’s off!”
“Oh, that’s good. Good, good, good…” I say, putting a book-marker in the page.
“Yes. Also, I have to say, NEVER stay at a Comfort Lodge,” she said.
“Oh?” I say.
“Well, your father and I went into our room and I saw a tattooed man and a woman on the bed! I don’t know what they were doing! I just saw his tattoo and UGH. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW. I DON’T EVEN LIKE PORNOGRAPHY AND I HAVE TO LOOK AT THAT? UGH. So your father and I stayed at the Marriot, which is just lovely.”

When I hang up the phone, I don’t go back to reading right away. I lay on the carpet in the living room, thinking about my mother’s conversational aversion to sex. It’s odd to me because she was the same woman who sat my sister and I down at the age of eleven (I was eleven, that makes Lauren nine?) and told us about “THE BIRDS AND THE BEES”. To this day I don’t fully understand that phrase. I’m guessing that it’s a phrase that people use as a placeholder for the word “SEX” when they feel too awkward to say it. It’s an introduction to a speech that involves the phrases: “Making Whoopee” and “Then he, well…You know…”

But I was never subject to any of these things. My mother bluntly told us everything using the words “PENIS”, “VAGINA” and “HERPES SIMPLEX 2”. The woman had no need for innuendoes. She brought out an arsenal of charts, graphs, and puppets. She hired hobos to copulate on the coffee table so we’d “get the idea.” My mother sat backwards on a folding chair with a cigar in her mouth, elbowing us and saying, “Eh? Eh? You get it? Aha! That’s right!”

Alright, I’ve begun to lie. I’ll not tell you at what point. It was a slow and gradual slope at which I eased into full on fibbing.

Visual Aides for “Birds and Bees”:

(Two Hobos)