Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales Read Online Free PDF

hair—the only clue is the teeth. When a Filipino woman takes her teeth out and puts them in a cup of water, she’s over forty.
    An hour went by . . . then two . . . then three. I called my husband in a panic. “She’s been kidnapped!” I ran sweating up and down the stairs, balancing a breast pump and the phone. Like a Vietnam vet who hears a car backfire, I flashed back to the many babysitters from my youth and feared I was starting my own line of adventures in babysitting hell.
    Three and a half hours later, Lala came home with the sweaty and parched baby. Needless to say, she was fired immediately; a neighbor later told me they had seen her at the park canoodling with a man while the stroller sat there under a tree. SHE LEFT MY STARVING BABY FOR THREE HOURS DURING A HEAT WAVE! I spit on her name.
    After Lala’s one day of employment, we hired a baby nurse named Juju. My eldest is almost nine years old, and Juju still lives with us. I have no idea of her age, but she’s never abandoned my children out in a heatwave and she loves crabbing with raw chicken necks as much as me. As General Electric would say, “She brings good things to life.”
    And Juju will live with us forever—even if she sells dope out of the house!

Chapter Four
     
    Don’t Look Back
     
    W hen my older sister was seventeen, she underwent spinal fusion surgery. She had scoliosis from birth, and my parents had hoped a back brace would mend it. But she never wore her back brace. She would leave for school, sneak around the back of the house, stash the brace in the garage, and race onto the school bus. The surgical procedure fused her vertebrae together so her spine would be straight, and the brace could permanently live behind the pile of firewood and mice droppings.
    I was twelve years old the summer Sissy had surgery at Mass. General Hospital. It was a sweltering and sticky July in Boston, and I remember living on chips from a vending machine and lying on the plastic-tiled hospital floor talking to my sister while she was suspended upside down in a medieval bed contraption. At the time I didn’t realize the extent of such major surgery. (The only other time I had been in a hospital was when I was born, on a gurney in the hallway during a blizzard, so my initial reaction to being there was to feel cold and lonely.) Both my divorced parents were there, trading seats, conferring with doctors, and fetching coffee. Sometimes my sister would scream so loudly I could hear it down the hallway in the waiting room, where I’d be working on my Mad Libs. It was usually a sign the morphine drip had run dry.
    The hospital had a distinct smell, a combination of pudding, Lysol, and piss. (Do hospitals have a rule against potpourri?) My sister couldn’t move for weeks and had to poop in a bag, which was both fascinating and repulsive to me. For that reason alone I never wanted to have surgery. Although as a middle-aged woman, I might put up with pooping in a bag for a good face lift.
    W hen I wasn’t trying to amuse myself with popping rubber gloves and stacking pill cups at the nurses’ station, Fiona and I stayed in our house in Plymouth. The modest house, with a stunning view of the public beach, was just over an hour’s car ride from the hospital. Back then, Plymouth was a tiny village that survived off saltwater taffy sales and tours run by adults dressed up as pilgrims and Indians, who crushed corn and sharpened arrows with rocks. They weren’t allowed to break character, so if you asked a pilgrim where the gift shop was, she would answer, “Thou dost not know from what thou speakest.” (“Yes, but doesn’t thee drive a Pinto and babysitteth us sometimes?”) I still remember seeing an Indian Squanto complete with loincloth sharing a cigarette and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with Captain John Smith behind the Wampanoag barn.
    Fiona and I would spend the days in Plymouth with a mélange of long-haired, long-legged teenage babysitters in bikinis