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

engine turned over.
    “It’s really green here,” I replied.
    “There isn’t a gray cloud of pollution sitting on the city like a hat,” he added. “I can’t believe how many stars we saw last night.”
    “When we passed that community garden, I swear I could smell the onions,” I offered.
    “I’m pretty sure that was the BO wafting from the stinky hippie who was checking his pot plants,” he informed me. “You should have lived here in your twenties. You could have dated a different retarded boy every night.”
    “Trees line every street,” I realized aloud. “It’s like a movie set. I think I might like it here.”
    “Are you sure you can do this?” my husband asked. “It’s a big thing.”
    “My body hasn’t emitted a single drop of unsolicited perspiration in three days, and in the same amount of time, we drove around and never got flipped off once,” I concluded. “There’s no decision to be made.”
     

     
    O ver the next couple of months, I hired electricians, carpenters, roofers, painters, and plumbers to finish up every project I had started during the eight years we had lived in the house so it would be perfect when we put it on the market. I figured out which days the nearby Starbucks and Einstein Bagels got their deliveries and fished their perfect-sized boxes out of the dumpster in the blistering heat of summer. Every week, I packed ten of those boxes and sent them with my husband to the storage unit we had rented. We had it down to a science.
    We were really moving.
    I couldn’t wait to get out of the heat. That last summer was the worst one I could remember. Things like taking a simple trip up to Safeway required monumental proportions of stamina, a will to live, and at least one bottle of water, lest you got stuck at a red light during the four-block ride. You’ve never wanted to get out and literally rip the skin off the head of someone so bad as you did the asshole in front of you who stopped on the yellow. People say it’s a dry heat, like that erases the fact that it’s entirely within the realm of possibilities of desert life that a body can become mummified without even dying first and if you go on a lunchtime hike in the middle of the city and only bring one bottle of water, you’ll be coming back down that mountain in a metal basket at the end of a rope attached to a medivac helicopter. I myself was once teetering on the precipice of spending eternity as a grimacing, angry piece of limbed leather before I spotted a Sonic and the treasure of cherry limeade just in the nick of time. I now have a yellow, desiccated pinkie with an excessively long fingernail as a result of my jeopardy, but I live to tell the tale. You don’t understand 114 degrees, day in and day out, until you live in it and feel the life being roasted out of you, droplet by droplet. To me, walking outside in July, even at 7 A.M ., is like getting slapped in the face with the hot hand of my mother the first time she caught me smoking one of her cigarettes.
    Once all of the projects were completed in the house and I had filled up the storage unit with things my husband said I didn’t need but I decided to keep out of spite, I set out to conquer the biggest project of all: Creating the Ultimate Fantasy. Now, for some people, the Ultimate Fantasy might consist of water-balloon boobs on a faux blonde who has a mouth that opens but never says anything, or a diamond ring so big it can fry ants with a glint of its reflection, but for me, the Ultimate Fantasy meant something altogether different. It came to life in a thirty-six-dollar bottle of olive oil packaged in a stoneware crock with an olive tree, a scroll, and an address in France printed in dark green and was sealed with a bubble of red wax I spotted on a shelf in Williams-Sonoma.
    And in an eighteen-dollar aluminum-and-pine box of gourmet salt tied with rustic twine; in a large, squat glass jar of strawberry-rhubarb preserves; and in a French