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

blue-and-yellow canister of crêpe mix that bore a delightful flat pancake wearing a beret and a devilish little red neckerchief on the label.
    I went home with a Williams-Sonoma bag filled with Ultimate Fantasy components and systematically threw away every box of anything that could have been bought at Safeway and was visible, including Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Bertolli olive oil, Welch’s grape jelly, and Morton’s iodized salt.
    Peasant food.
    The people who live here, I told myself, do not ingest grape jelly on toast. They politely spread strawberry-rhubarb preserves on their croissants in the morning as they read The New York Times and admire the sunflowers fresh from the farmer’s market that sit in an antique pitcher in the middle of a table dressed with a crisp, white linen tablecloth. They do not read mass-market paperbacks with dog-eared puffy covers and Junior Mints melted over the spine; rather they enjoy hardback works of literature, both classic and modern. Needless to say, my husband was delighted to house his collection of Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Herman Melville, and Edna St. Vincent Millay in the bookcases that flanked the fireplace as if they were all illegitimate children he was finally encouraged to acknowledge.
    And so it was.
    It did not matter that the person who really lived there often ate frosting from the can with her finger as an after-dinner treat, owned Death to Smoochy on DVD, or had once fought a fire in her backyard, set by (a) a vagrant, (b) a Crip or Blood, (c) a prostitute, or (d) an itchy-fingered tweaker, in her underwear with a garden hose at three o’clock in the morning. Or that she wore that pair of underwear for so long it was returned to its primal state as a loincloth, with an inch of fabric attached to the waistband in the front and another piece in the back, and she found it one day, garishly displayed on her dresser with a note that said, “I have served you well. Please release me,” scrawled in her husband’s hand. It didn’t matter that while the person who lived there was packing, she moved an antique bench in her husband’s office and found an old issue of Premiere magazine stuffed behind it with Kate Winslet on it, her bosoms appearing to be heaving so heavily they were on the brink of explosion. It did not matter, because when prospective buyers came to this house, that person was not going to be there. The lady who made crêpes on Sunday morning and who cooked with thirty-six-dollar olive oil would be.
    The Fantasy Lady.
    I called her Veronica.
    Veronica was tall and slender, had beautiful, perfectly toned silver hair that she parted in the middle and tucked behind one ear. She wore sweater sets with the cardigan draped across her shoulders, and it never fell off. She had nicely defined upper arms and tapped a tiny silver spoon against the rim of her teacup when she was done stirring. She favored pale lipstick, and there was never dirt or traces of staph infections under her nails.
    In short, basically, Veronica was not me. She didn’t drink her tea out of a Bigfoot mug, eat dinner every night on the couch, or laugh when food fell out of her mouth. No one wanted to buy a house from a dirty pudgy girl.
    But everyone wanted Veronica’s house.
    And even though Veronica’s house was perfect in every way, from the matching white dishes that shone through the glass-fronted cabinet doors I had just finished putting up to the brand-new Roman shades I had installed in all bedrooms to the fresh sunflowers in an antique pitcher sitting on the dining room table, when the real estate agent saw it and agreed to put the house on the market the following Monday, I was still not prepared for what I saw on the front lawn the day the sign went up.
    Oh my God, I thought. My house. My house.
    In an instant, everything went blurry, my face got hot, and my throat closed up.
    What was I doing? Was I out of my mind? “This is crazy,” I said out loud. This is completely insane.