Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Read online

The cards were drawing us to their collegiate siren song, and people started throwing out suggestions left and right, the beats of Keha blaring in the background.

  “Let’s play beer pong with GLASSES!”

  “No, no, let’s play flip cup!”

  “We should play kings!”

  You know kings, right? The game where you sit in a circle and every card picked out of the deck meant somebody drinks and everybody loses all sense of dignity? Brittanie and I shared a look of panic. Kings was not the direction we wanted this party to take. I was not going to spend thirty minutes arguing whether or not pulling a queen card meant we had to ask each other questions or take a shot. I had PTSD flashbacks of a rowdy game of “Never have I ever…” where everybody found out I had shaved my face because I heard that’s what exfoliated it just as well as expensive scrubs. However, kings was child’s play compared to the next suggestion:

  “How about strip poker?”

  …Because, clearly, that was the most mature thing we could surmise to do with the cards. Definitely worked with my party theme of “Ann Taylor Gets Her Groove Back.”

  Much to my chagrin, the crowd responded to this with a resounding chorus of “Yeaaahhhhhhhhhhhh, okay!” Enthusiasm! It shall be done!

  You know how everyone has one of those friends who has no problem walking around naked around the locker room? Yeah, that’s not me. I’ve never skinny-dipped, I don’t flash people for fun, and the only time I don’t wear a bra is when I’m wearing an incredibly sexy giant T-shirt with a dog on it. I am not uncomfortable with my body, but I’ve never reveled in it like a woman in a bodywash advertisement. However, on this night, with my stupid feather in my hair and my tequila drink in hand, I agreed to strip poker. Potential reasons why I agreed to abandon my strict antinakedness policies are as follows:

  I’m a complete egomaniac who thinks she can win every game she ever plays.

  If I was going to keep the last vestiges of hope that this was an adult party, strip poker seemed like the kind of thing that forty-year-old couples do on their trip to Bermuda when they are too scared to become swingers.

  I should also mention that I (of course) have absolutely no idea how to play poker. I think the only time I’ve ever been exposed to poker is that painting of those anthropomorphic, card-slinging dogs. Ironically, I had a strategy without even knowing it: I wear about thirty-five layers at all times, regardless of season, and on this particular night, it included tights, a vest, a tank top, and a high-waisted skirt. But layers work only so well if you know how to play the game, and I started to lose almost immediately. And as the following conversation illustrates, I am not very good at losing:

  Friend 1: “Alida, you lost. Take your top off.”

  Me: “I’d rather not. Let me go to my bedroom for a sec, I forgot to feed my bird.”

  Friend 2: “You don’t have a bird.”

  Me: “What? You know nothing about me.”

  (Goes to room, stands there a second, leaves room.)

  Friend 2 (eyes rolling): “You are now wearing socks over your stockings.”

  Me: “No, I always do this. This house is unseasonably cold for June.”

  Friends 1–10: “Come on! Take something off!”

  Me: “I will take off my stockings and leave the socks or my one of two hats. Your choice.”

  But it wasn’t just me. This particular game of strip poker was the most morose game of cards I ever played. Every card pulled was met with dead eyes. Shirts were taken off with a lack of enthusiasm seen only with golf audiences. Brittanie’s dress came off with the kind of “Fuck it, I knew this would happen anyway” attitude of a cynical divorcée after her first failed relationship. Why were we intent on playing? I’m not sure. But nobody wanted to be the nerd who ended the enlightened gathering of “adults.”

  As cards were thrown down and clothes were becoming scarcer and scarcer, people started to realize: Need. More. Booze. But because we had started the night off by drinking like wild animals, the supply was dwindling. My friend Ian began to swig Triple Sec from the bottle, frantically trying to get drunk on the sugar and minimal alcohol content. We all began pouring whatever liquor was left from the bottles straight into our mouths, perhaps contemplating if we should just smash them and lick the glass shards. The greatest fear among us was not being naked—it was the idea that we could become sober and clearly remember each other’s body parts.

  Do you know how weird it is to sit next to the guy who you really like as a friend, but who used to sleep with your best friend, so you kind of already know what he looks like naked, when he’s almost completely naked? Well, I kept side-eyeing him for one thing, because it’s not like my friend hadn’t described what he looked like. AWKWARD.

  There was a lot of silence in that room. Everybody was shrugging or frowning and desperately trying to avoid making accidental eye contact with any flaccid penises. This wasn’t fun, this was painful.

  Finally, I cleared my throat.

  “So…I’m not wearing any clothes, really. Does anybody even know how to fucking play poker? At all???” I was being honest.

  Brittanie started to laugh. Next, I started to laugh, mostly because I was still wearing a skirt and a bra, so there was victory on my end. Soon, everybody was laughing, their naked parts flapping around. This was when I decided to take off my bra.

  “You know,” I said, “just because we’re not in college anymore doesn’t mean we can’t get a little crazy!”

  Brittanie chimed in, “Yeah, I mean, I know we live in this fantastically clean apartment with all these Christmas lights…but your hosts know how to let loose!”

  I flung my sensible bra at her sensible head as we all sat around nodding about how we were so obviously adults now, but cool adults who could do wild things like take off their clothes at parties. We were cultured and smart, we agreed, but we knew how to keep our youth alive and our bodies visible while we still had them. Were we not just talking about health, vitality, and philosophy? Were we not just eating crudités and discussing various intelligent books? Of course we were! However, by no means were we straitlaced. We could really unstring the corsets, lest you forget it! Discussing this felt better for all of us, really, and our guests gathered their boxers and shirts and skirts and left me by my clean kitchen sink, the last gulps of Triple Sec dribbling from my chin onto the floor.

  “We promise never to talk about this again,” we all agreed as everyone left. Adults, after all, are the kind of people who keep quiet. Adults are the kind of people who have parties and never tell anybody of the slipups they made at them. We would only allude to this one night at future bar outings with tiny nods of acknowledgment. It was an unmarked day in history: the time we all grew up and became comfortable with our youthful nakedness. We would always remain silent.

  Until now. Sorry, guys.

  The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree

  When I called my mother to tell her I was moving home, it had been a long time coming. She knew it was going to happen. I knew it was going to happen. It was just a matter of me coming to terms with the inevitable, like someone receiving a prison sentence.

  “It will only be for a little while,” I told her. “Just until I get a job.” Everybody nodded and tried to cover up their hysterical laughter at the lie we all knew I was telling.

  I had been avoiding the inevitable by crafting the typical postcollege vision board, complete with a rapid timeline to success and the kind of delirious insanity that would have me owning a “starter home” with my “starter dog” by age twenty-eight. I kept telling everybody I was going to move to Austin, Texas, after graduation because of its cheap living, delicious Mexican food, and because I could wear sundresses all year-round. Never mind the fact that I had no money and no job there to speak of and that Austin was full of all the kinds of people I didn’t get along with: hippies, those heavily into vintage fashion, and people who cared about where their vegetables came from. Nah, I told everyone that I would rough i
t, live hard for a while, figure it out when I got there. My family and friends were gracious enough not to bring up how ridiculous this idea was, how I was not cut out for living hard. I mean, Christ, I’m the type of person who got stressed-out playing Monopoly. I’m not the hard-living type. So I was secretly a little relieved when I did the math and figured out my bank account couldn’t support a plane ticket, or a moving van, or the amount of breakfast burritos I would no doubt consume there. So, back to the burbs it was.

  Home, for me, is a suburban town in Westchester, New York. South Salem isn’t quaint—I didn’t know most of my neighbors’ business and we didn’t have some gentle town doctor who solved our maladies—it was just typical. These kinds of places have a reputation, and I can totally see why. It wasn’t until I started watching TV shows set in the suburbs that I realized these portrayals were right.

  Stereotypes of the Suburbs That Are Completely Correct

  There are a lot of white people. I was the only Puerto Rican (well, half) in a sea of people who were excited to tell you about their European heritage. Since I had a bit of ethnic blood in me, my history teachers would always ask me my “feelings” about parts of history they thought I might be invested in. (“And, Alida—what did you feel when you read about the Spanish-American War?” “Uh, bored? I’m not from Spain.”) Besides using ancestry Web sites to discover they were vaguely related to Charles Lindbergh, white people in the burbs love expensive Mexican restaurants, new issues of the Wall Street Journal, and hiring ethnic ladies to take care of their kids.

  Yes, there are a lot of nannies. My mom is all ethnic all of the time, and even she ended up taking care of some ginger kid for a couple of hours after her shifts at the dental office. When she married my super-white dad, people asked her how she handled a “mixed relationship.” She stared at them, pretending not to know English, because honestly, fuck them.

  They care about stupid white-people problems. The two biggest controversies of my hometown to date are (1) installing a cell-phone tower because service was terrible. People were worried about the “radiation” but mostly about how ugly the tower might look, and (2) this one girl performed a piece from the Vagina Monologues in our high school and got suspended because she (obviously) said the word vagina during it. In suburbia, there are no vaginas, only Cape Cod summer houses.

  People care about where their kids go to college way too much. Every WASP person who I went to high school with took thirty-five SAT prep courses to appease their polo-shirt-wearing-and-boutique-shopping parents. Ironically, a broad cross-section of these kids were the same ones who I witnessed chug gallons of milk in the parking lot of our high school. I don’t know how many SAT courses would help that sort of idiocy.

  Malls are a thing. What do you want to do this weekend, Katherine? Do you want to wander around and stare at monogrammed candles for three hours? You want a cinnamon pretzel? There you go, let’s just hang out and take sexy MySpace pictures with a bunch of headless mannequins. We’ll call it a Friday.

  “Responsible” parenting means being upstairs while they let their high school kids drink booze in their basement. At half of the parties I ever went to, the mom was right upstairs, reading the new Crate and Barrel catalog and reasoning that if she knew her kids were drinking the beer she bought downstairs, they wouldn’t go get it on their own. This reasoning, of course, is idiotic, but she still put her lavender body lotion on at night and fell asleep to the gentle aroma of being a good mother.

  A lot of kids were on Ritalin. Hey! I think my kid is coloring too much! And he’s not at the tippy-top of his fourth-grade class! Let’s drug him so much he is a robot! My brother’s guidance counselor told my mother that because he wasn’t “entirely into school,” he should be pumped up with prescription medication. My mom refused to do it, because he clearly didn’t have ADD. He now has a great job and a clear brain. That cannot be said about some of the other Ritalin-addled kids I grew up with.

  Everybody drives like a complete asshole. They have expensive cars and bumper stickers declaring where their kid goes to college and who they voted for. And they do not signal when they are changing lanes.

  As much as I like to rag on the suburbs, I had a perfectly idyllic childhood. There were swing sets and puppies and the kind of high school education where I had a guidance counselor who remembered my name. I just didn’t get why I was back. At eighteen, I had packed up my two suitcases and a couple of boxes, and promised myself I would be “puttin’ this whole fuckin’ town in my rearview” (Ben Affleck, The Town). Though there was nothing specifically wrong with my family or my home, I had created a life plan that involved “city living at twenty-one till I have to come home and do my laundry for the weekend.” Yet here I was, four years later, lugging those suitcases and the boxes back up to my childhood bedroom.

  * * *

  There are plenty of good things that happen when you move back to the place you grew up in, and those things last as long as you consider your move back to be a vacation. There were some luxurious accommodations in Hotel Nugent, and that included central air, a couch that didn’t have crumbs on it, and my parents—who, unlike most people, thought I was interesting and cute. And the fridge, the glorious fridge! I’d never been able to maintain a fridge that didn’t really act just like a pit that things would eventually rot in. My mother, however, didn’t just have a fridge, she kept a stocked fuckin’ fridge. There is nothing quite like the joy of opening it up to reveal three kinds of cheese, two kinds of hummus, various mustards, and leftover mashed potatoes I could nosh on in the middle of the night. There was fresh produce that wasn’t limp and dead! There was juice and soda and milk! I couldn’t believe my four eyes!

  Also, we had an actual liquor cabinet. To this day, I do not have a liquor cabinet because a liquor cabinet is also known as a half a bottle of vodka that I keep in my freezer. My parents had Amaretto! They had two different kinds of gin. I was in heaven. Of course, you have to be careful drinking in front of your parents, but after a couple of weeks of living at home, I mastered the art of it.

  HOW TO DRINK IN FRONT OF YOUR PARENTS

  At dinner, pour yourself a glass of wine. Then, when they turn around, guzzle that wine down and swiftly pour another. Pretend that never happened. Repeat.

  While watching television, loudly announce to your parents you need some juice. Say juice anywhere between three and four hundred times. Go to the fridge and pour some juice, and then add some liquor to it. Watch while your parents find amusement in your raucous laughter at The King of Queens. That Kevin James is just a riot! Why is his wife so mean?

  When your parents are sleeping, dreaming of sugar plums and the nonalcoholic child they once had, open the liquor cabinet like you are in high school again. Quietly. Carefully. Get drunk and watch HBO until it’s 3 A.M.

  Any function attended by more than five relatives from your extended family is a green light to get shockingly drunk. They will understand. Family makes you drink.

  And there were presents to be had, in the form of my own stuff that I rediscovered. Every time I opened up a drawer in my room, I was transported back to 2002, a relatively good year for capri pants, boy bands, and bangs. My room was a DeLorean time portal back to the old days. Coming across Britney Spears CDs in my drawer? You can’t even imagine how fast I downloaded that shit on to my computer and began jamming out to “Lucky.” She’s a star! But she’s tortured! It’s like Britney knew about the Real Housewives before they even knew about themselves! The CDs were lying next to the various pictures I had taken at assorted bat mitzvahs and sweet sixteens. I remembered what love was like in the time of braces and was supremely glad I had stopped wearing three-quarter-knit Old Navy performance fleeces everywhere.

  Eventually, though, the novelty of these things started to wear off. If anything, being around my old journals, riddled with dreams of both middle school boys and larger, worldly dreams, made me feel stagnant. Here, I was not living my dreams. It also didn’t help that I
was completely surrounded by pictures of myself as a child, a constant reminder of my arrested development. In fact, there are only two pictures that are prominent in my home from my college years—one of them was of me and my brother at my graduation, mid-ironic fist pump, the other of us at my cousin’s wedding, grinning widely because we could see the open bar. The rest of the photos were of me in all sorts of stages of my life, laid out like photos for somebody’s wake. Here I am being a two-year-old little shit sitting in a plastic pool. There I am at six—what you can’t see in this school photo is my hairy legs (PS, If I ever have a little girl, I’m going to make her wax her mustache at eight. Poor me looked like a prepubescent boy till I was eleven). Here’s me as a fourteen-year-old, posing with my grandmother by a Christmas tree, excited to wear a training bra for the holidays. (News flash: not real breasts, just baby fat.) Oh yeah, and right among them was my college degree my mother got framed and hung up over my old PC. The very PC where I played The Sims when I was a kid just so I could force the couples to make out (usually two guys). Right by the CD player that I listened to Kelly Clarkson on when I was sad about some guy whose name I can’t even remember. All of these were little reminders that hey, you were a person on a path to dreams and success, which definitely did not include living at home again.

  Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place to call home, but I didn’t like the feeling of stealing my parents food and being unable to tell them when I could ever afford my own. There were a lot of mixed signals about how I could be both Alida the child and Alida the adult. The weirdest thing about being home was living under the roof of the people who grew up telling me what to do yet being totally confused about what limits I now had. I was technically allowed to leave the house until all hours of the night, to go out drinking and not eat breakfast if I didn’t want to, to sit close to the television and not clean my room, but I felt bizarre doing these things brazenly. It was a strange tug-of-war of expectations. My folks tried to shut their mouth about my weird habits and respect my newfound quirks; meanwhile, I was looking for structure and comfort and familiarity in a time in my life where I had almost none. I wanted to have them tell me to get my ass into gear. To eat more protein. To cut back on the gin.