12-010
Affected by Side Effects
Next time my girlfriends invite me to lunch, I plan
to make an excuse. They're all using a beauty serum that's making their
eyelashes grow to the size of peacock's tails. To paraphrase an old saying: You
don’t realize how often someone blinks till it fans your bread bowl of clam
chowder. They bat their eyes and chat while I hunch like a cave dweller,
shielding my soup with my body, rushing to finish it before the gusts cool it
off; wishing for a bigger spoon. That eyelash potion was invented after a side
effect from a certain medication made patients’ eyelids turn fringier than
flapper dresses. Side effects are strange.
My mother once had a side effect from watching “The
French Chef.” She ended up dressing and sounding exactly like Julia Child. Her
cooking stayed the same. When I had kids, she warned me they’d learn more by
accident than by design.
Sure enough: After a certain uncle came for a
visit, our two-year-old daughter started grunting like an old man whenever she
got out of a chair, and talking out of one side of her mouth, like she was
smoking a cigar. We hope this fades. She’ll be nineteen next month.
I recently suffered a side effect from a magazine.
The article said every husband was waiting for his wife to unleash her inner
vixen.
I studied vixens in ads. They wore eye shadow and a
dazed expression like they had just been hit in the forehead by a ping-pong
ball fired from a slingshot. I practiced the expression, bought the eye shadow
and unleashed my inner vixen in our home office.
“Are you tired?” I asked coyly.
“A little,” My husband said, still looking at the
computer screen.
I gave him the dazed-by-a-ping-pong-ball stare and
ran my fingers through his hair.
He glanced up and said, “You’re sick.”
“When did you get so uptight?” I demanded.
“You haven’t looked this bad since you got food
poisoning on that cruise. You’ve got green circles around your eyes!”
Before I could explain, he ran to make me a cup of
tea, which he passed through the doorway on a tennis racquet, saying, “I don’t
want to catch it. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
I decided to consult the article, but it was buried
under a big pile of magazines about getting organized and busting clutter. Then
I got distracted by a “Stop Procrastinating” article and decided to look for it
later.
I settled into bed with my reading and tea. Nobody
to tell me to turn off the lamp, hog the covers or snore. I smiled like a fox.
Victoria has her secret. I have mine!
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