Free It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro Page A

seemed that her son Nicholas, who at the time was about nine, had just gotten into honors math, which was exciting because now someone in our family besides my father could dofractions, and having an understudy would come in very handy when cutting birthday cake. She told me that he had also joined band and had taken up the clarinet, which we were less excited about. Not that playing a clarinet is a bad thing, but in a year, when the kid got braces, if he was walking down the street wearing a Mathletes shirt and carrying a clarinet, even
I
would have to beat him up.
    Apparently, however, Nicholas, who is a perfectionist, was a little upset that his mother only rented the instrument and didn’t buy it. But clarinets ran about $450, so to buy something we were hoping he’d suck at was out of the question.
    “At least he hadn’t figured out yet that a shitload of other kids already had their mouths all over it before he did,” I relayed as I started laughing. “My sister said he’s trying so hard to play it right, but he’s shoving the damned mouthpiece in so far he’s making himself gag on it.”
    I thought at least my husband would laugh, but, instead, the two of them stood there smiling very nicely, which wasn’t the response I expected at all. I mean, my nephew is gagging himself on a member of the woodwinds family, and
that is hilarious
. I decided I must not be explaining it very well, so I added, “Not a good look for fifth grade.”
    Again, nothing but stiff smiles, and I didn’t get it. It was a funny story; what was missing, what hadn’t I said?
    Then I did the unthinkable, just to make sure I drove that punch line home, deep, deep, deep into the ground so no one could miss it: I very quickly, although apparently quite accurately, imitated a little boy gagging on a clarinet.
    And I wasn’t even done with my imitation, I was still in the middle of it when I realized that I was doing something highly regrettable, and my mouthful of pretend clarinet sort of melted away with any chance of humor the story might have had.
    When I looked at my husband, his lips were tight across his face in a frown, and he said simply, “Wow, that’s quite a story, Laurie. Are you ready, Bennet?”
    I was pretty sure that, in one swipe of unintentional pornographic charades, I had ruined everything. My first introduction to one of my husband’s colleagues and that’s what I did. I mean, tell that story to an undergrad, sure, no problem, but to a nineteenth grader, a Shakespeare scholar no less? I once fell asleep at a performance of
Macbeth
I was so bored, and I was playing one of the witches. All I could do was hope that my husband and Bennet got seats behind home plate and that some freak fly ball would boomerang and bounce off Bennet’s head, creating no physical marks or lasting effects but memory loss from an hour prior to the game.
    At least I was on my own when I destroyed the dreams of innocent children of Eugene during a potluck at my neighbor’s house last summer. I mean, if you were invited to a gathering and it was going to be full of kids, what would you bring? You would bring cupcakes, right? Homemade, straight-from-the-box cupcakes with thick, swirly chocolate frosting and sprinkles on them. Right? Isn’t that what you would bring?
    So that’s how I arrived, with a tray full of cupcakes that I spent the morning making and decorating, thirty cupcakes in all, which, honestly, I felt wouldn’t be enough. I was already down for three of them, so that left twenty-seven for everyone else, and if there were even ten kids there at three apiece, supply was short.
    I placed them on the table, carefully took the tinfoil off, and exposed the bounty of the little round cakes of heaven below. And the children gathered, glowing at the sight of the shiny frosting and the happy rainbow sprinkles. They crowded all around the tray, each deciding on which was going to be theirs.One girl, who looked to be about eight, was the