The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death by Laurie Notaro Page A

setting in about an hour. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
    To be honest, anything sounded better than scouring my chest for a follicular Jamestown, and we still had several hours until our dinner reservation, so I made the better choice of catching a tiny little birthday buzz over scouring my body for age spots. To put it lightly, it was not an ordinary birthday, it was one of those Milestone Years in which you do not only investigate every visible inch of yourself (and would fully attempt, if possible, to search your own cavities to see how those areas were holding up as well), but go to the secret, bad place and open the Dusty Vault of Youth. That’s where you keep the photos of yourself taken in the precipice of your vitality that you hold next to your current hag face to tally up how much damage has been incurred. It’s also the place where you keep the last bra you owned that required no lowered tone when telling a Victoria’s Secret salesperson the size, the last thing you owned that bore horizontal stripes, and an ashtray that you, while inebriated, pried out of a cab with a butter knife when it was still cute and “unpredictable” to do those sorts of things. Should I attempt that same act of taxi unpredictability at my current age, I’d be shot in the ass with a heavy dose of lithium by county health services and then either get dropped off by the train tracks or given a free bowl of soup and a bed at the Mission if I agreed to let someone ramble some gospel at me from the good book. While the trauma of discovering three-inch-long stealth hairs that had been flourishing long enough that I could have knit a hat out of them was enough to push me to the brink of considering skin grafts from a Norwegian, I was in need of something now .
    So vino it was.
    “You know, the only benefit to being this old,” I told my husband as we got into the car, “is that the likelihood of a barren psychopath mistaking my girth for a ripe pregnancy, following me home, forcing me inside at gunpoint, and slicing open my belly only to discover that the baby is actually a ham-and-cheese sandwich with a side of potato salad has just dropped dramatically.”
    “See?” my husband said as he backed out of the driveway. “Now, that’s the kind of birthday spirit I wanna hear!”
    At the grocery store, we picked out a decent wine and then presented it to the cashier, who looked at the bottle, then looked back at us. Then she cleared her throat and made history as the Person Who Took Bumper Sticker Wisdom Far Too Literally.
    “I need to see your IDs,” she said quietly, practicing a random act of kindness.
    I choked on my own spit.
    Now, true, since we live in a university town, I am sure the manager at Safeway insists that all of his cashiers are diligent about carding, but I suspected a different motivation altogether.
    In my head, I assembled the options quickly:
    a. She’d just taken her last hit of Ecstasy before her shift, sniffed some paint, or had a tooth pulled and is high on some top-quality pharmaceuticals.
    b. She believes my husband to not be my partner for life but my underaged offspring.
    c. She’s a barren psychopath who is trying to determine if I’m still of childbearing age and if my paunch is an indication of a yawning fetus or simply decades of bad living and poor choices.
    d. Bribing the cashier is my birthday present from my spouse and we’re not going to dinner after all. And nothing makes me angrier than hunger.
    But my husband, on the other hand, thought nothing of it, mainly because he doesn’t hold a photo of himself at twenty up to his reflection every five years to assess road wear, and he can still fit into the pants he wore when we were dating, although he, too, keeps an old 34C bra of mine in his sock drawer to remind himself why he married a woman who now has black yarn growing out of her neck. He pulled his wallet from his pocket without a second thought and handed his driver’s license over. The