3: How Not to Shop With Crazy, Menopausal Women

In which clowns are traumatizing and there is shrubbery but no knights.

“The curb! There’s a curb, too!” I screamed back. I was clinging to the door handle with one hand and I knew without looking that my knuckles would be even whiter than my skim milk-coloured face, which is quite a feat. The car hadn’t been going long enough for the automatic locks to kick in, so when she almost bottomed out the car going over the curb and I instinctively pulled my arm inwards, the car door swung open, almost taking me with it. “Oh, God, no! I’m not ready to die!”

 

Some teeny tiny involuntary movement station in my brain was triggered and I managed to snap the door shut. Panting like a dog on a hot day, I slammed the lock in with both hands and kept them there until I was certain that it wouldn’t magically reopen itself and I wasn’t going to hyperventilate and die before my heart could restart itself. My mother was completely oblivious throughout my entire ordeal, so I shot her dirty looks while she continued to drive along at an agonizingly slow speed and sing along to a song that wasn’t even the one playing on the radio. This was particularly obvious seeing as the radio wasn’t on.

 

Cars raced past us, most of them blaring their horns, but Mom took no notice and kept her foot barely touching the gas petal. At this rate we’d be lucky to reach the mall before closing, and then I’d have to wait for her to actually get out of the car and into a store. We’d probably miss out on the Hannah Montana binder that Aaron had had his eye on. Not that he’d admit it to anyone, but I knew. Intuition they call it. And maybe just a smidgeon of malicious intent.

 

Resigned to my fate, I amused myself by watching the various cars lined up behind us, and, if the windows weren’t tinted and the sun wasn’t in the way, stared at the people in them. One by one, they slowly got fed up of being caught behind us as we were going about thirty kilometres an hour in an eighty zone until only one teeny tiny little lunchbox of a vehicle was left behind us. I jumped when I looked in the mirror and saw it. Framed by the windshield were a very large woman and a very small looking man who had the oddly elevated appearance of a child on a booster seat. Both of them had very frizzy hair even by my standards and they both had coon’s eye makeup to rival the ‘I’m not emo, I just look, act and follow the entire stereotype’ people at school. Her lips also looked as though a small child " her passenger, maybe " had coloured them in with red finger paint and hadn’t bothered to paint inside the lines. Clowns were officially following us.

 

I was three when I had my first mix-up with a clown. Some boy on my street was having a birthday party and there was a creepy old man, in hindsight he was probably some sort of pedophile with a big shoe fetish, and I had run head first into his big, hard container of helium (is it just me or does that sound like some sort of euphemism?) and split my head open. He’d offered me a blue balloon doggie. It didn’t help. He should have known I had wanted orange. My second one was when I was ten. It was a friend’s mother’s dinner party and she had invited her in-laws. Apparently, women in size fifteen shoes are considered normal in their house, as are men with big, baggy striped pants. So we had a bunch of drunken clown-like people running around. I am no longer friends with that girl. Though that may have to do with me accidentally on purpose positioning the fan so it happened to blow her skirt up after she’d insulted me.

 

All of those reasons and more made it very hard for me to decide between laughing and crying at the sight of the car. I decided on snorting and staring. Neither of them noticed me scrutinizing them in the side mirror. Which was probably a good thing, as I was making faces at them.

 

Eventually they got fed up and she slammed on the horn. It was one of those high-pitched novelty horns that plays a song. I was laughing so hard I was crying as they drove past.

 

I now have a new clown horror story to add to my collection. A clown has flipped me off.

 

We were almost at the mall in one piece, which would have been a record, if Mom hadn’t decided that the moment she saw the sign advertising the building that she was going to not only speed up but exceed the speed limit exponentially. I didn’t bother to bite back my scream and clung desperately to my seat.

 

“There,” said Mom happily, yanking on the emergency brake and raising her hands above the steering wheel like she didn’t want to touch it or was being told to keep her hands visible by the police. I’m voting for the second option. “Well, then.” She looked at me expectantly. I just stared unblinkingly back at her. Like a goldfish. Eventually she looked away and stretched between the seats to get her purse. I saw a little boy and his mother turn and stare, jaws gaping as they glanced through our windshield. I watched them for a few seconds before slowly turning my head to follow their gazes. Fortunately I was so damaged as a child that the sight before me didn’t cause any additional trauma. I turned my head back to the onlookers smiled like a psychopath and flashed them a thumbs up. They stared at me like I was crazy and walked away.

 

“Good God, woman!” I snapped as soon as they left and Mom sat back down. She turned her head to me with a look of dazed confusion at my outburst. “Wear a longer skirt or at least keep it pulled down.” In the back of my mind I was glad she was at least wearing underwear. The last thing I needed was for her to pull a Britney Spears. Or was it Lindsay Lohan? Oh, I don’t know, whoever seems to dislike wearing underwear. So, basically half of the girls at my school.

 

“Oh, stop being so dramatic, Ava,” she scolded, slowly opening the door and stepping out onto the pavement. Her heels wobbled and she had to hold on to the roof of the car to stay upright. She was acting as though she had been stuck in the car for hours and had stiff legs, when in reality it had barely been half an hour. It would have been even shorter if she had driven at the speed limit.

 

We walked towards the entrance doors. Well, I walked and she stumbled, apologizing to cars, signs, walls and people as she crashed into them. “Whoops,” she trilled, holding her forehead and pulling open the door she’d walked into with a flourish.

 

My head slowly sank lower and lower in both irritation and boredom. My tongue lolled out and seemed to be barely off the floor. Maybe a maintenance person would confuse me with a new sort of mopping machine! I’d be abducted and kept alive on cold coffee and bits of donut from the Tim Horton’s! My parents wouldn’t notice I was missing, Dad’d probably just think that something was different and get a new plant from a client for my mother to kill and think that that was all that was missing from his life! I was going to be replaced by shrubbery!

 

“Ava, stop looking doing that or your face will stick,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. Great, she was sober enough to still tell me I was doing something wrong. Mom reached behind her and grabbed my hand to pull me along beside her. How old did she think I was? Seven? “Let’s just grab that stuff for you before we hit the office supplies.”

 

“What stuff?”

 

“Tampons and whatnot, that sort of thing. You said you needed some, right?” she said in a very loud stage whisper.

 

My jaw hit the floor. Well, actually almost my collarbone but that was a stretch and it popped and hurt like hell. “Mom, shut up!” I snarled through the pain.

 

“Don’t you take that tone with me.” Her grip tightened on my wrist and she dragged me towards the back wall of the store and stopped in front of the shelves filled with feminine hygiene whatsits. “So what do you need?”

 

I was doing my best to ignore her and look at the hair scrunchies on the wall facing it, but she kept repeating her question. “Just get that,” I hissed, pointing at a random box.

 

“No, no, I think these would work better,” she continued in a loud voice. I could feel my face go red. If she kept this up people would think she was walking around the store with an oversized tomato. “Well, what do you think?” She was tapping her foot expectantly.

 

“I don’t care, just grab something so we can go.”

 

“Stop whining, you aren’t two,” scolded Mom. She tipped a few packages into the basket she was carrying and left the aisle. I slid in behind her, trying to hide and hoping nobody would see what she was carrying. Maybe the fact that I was taller than her and trying to hide behind her would draw the attention of the other nosy shoppers. My hypothesis was correct, as everyone walking by was giving me strange looks like I was crazy. Well, that shows how much they know about creepy, very loud mothers who can’t walk down a flight of stairs without downing several million Valiums. Which is why my parents’ bedroom is on the first floor of our house.

 

So far we had made it to the check out unscathed. I saw the nice little old lady who had been working at the store for as long as I could remember and smiled. Until she opened her big, probably false teeth ridden mouth and ruined everything. “I’ll just finish up with this customer and take my break,” she told the boy who came up behind her. He nodded and walked over to the next cash.

 

“I can take you folks over here.”

 

I stopped walked and made my goat sound. Why do all the hot checkout guys always have to be working when you’re with your mother buying stuff that nobody should see? Why? Does the world just hate me or something? Shoot me now. 

 

My mother chatted him up like the cougar she is and I saw a faint glow of pink rise in his cheeks. I couldn’t bear to look at him so I stared at the floor.

 

“Thank-you,” said Mom, grabbing the bag and starting to walk away.

 

There was a speck of dust that was moving my foot. In fact, it seemed to be climbing the side of my sandal. “Spider!” I shrieked, jumping up and down and shaking my foot. “Die, die, you stupid little thing!” The checkout boy stared at me, his embarrassed little smirk replaced by an amused grin that would have been quite sexy if I hadn’t been imitating a kangaroo on crack. “Just die!” Being slip-ons, my flip-flop flew off my foot and hit the wall, successfully sending the spider flying. Conscious that everyone behind me was watching my every move, I walked over and put it back on, glowing redder than a burnt albino in the arctic.

 

I caught up with Mom halfway down the hall towards an office supply store. Apparently she hadn’t realized that I was there and was prattling on about something, probably sex related, when I fell into step a foot behind her so people would have to look twice to determine that we were indeed together. Mom stopped moving and I accidentally wound up standing beside her, waiting impatiently while she rummaged through her purse. A wide assortment of things came up in her hand " toothpaste, a framed picture, a bra " before she found what she needed. “Aaron gave me a list, you didn’t make one, did you?”

 

“No. But why do you need a list? I’m sure Aaron’s hiding in there somewhere.” The child abuser proceeded to whap me over the head with the rolled up list and marched me into the store.

 

Mom threw a container of pens into a cart, then pencils, erasers, paper and any other number of school related things. It was nauseating to say the least.

 

“Can I get a new binder?” I asked as we walked past a display.

 

“I don’t know, can you?”

 

“Of course I can if I have your wallet.” I selected a multicoloured polka dot and another with flowers and bumblebees flying around and chucked them into the cart.

 

An hour or two later, Mom had finally stopped talking and was letting me eat the frozen yogurt I had…convinced her to buy me. “Oh, my God, that’s good stuff,” I moaned, sticking the spoon in my mouth for the billionth time. I adjusted my new backpack on my shoulder so I wouldn’t drip yogurt on it before eating my last spoonful and trying to throw the styrofoam cup in the garbage. I missed and had to pick it up, making my fingers all sticky and tried three more times before it made the mark.

 

“And they call me a klutz,” said Mom, her voice still giggly. I noticed that she was stuffing a Ziploc bag into her purse and guessed she had doped herself up again. Great, stoned again for the ride home.

 

We tossed the mountain of bags into the minuscule trunk and I had to sit on it to get it to shut properly. It took nearly five minutes before I could trick myself into getting into the passenger seat and then buckle myself in.

 

“So you’re all ready to go back to school,” stated Mom as she struggled to find the ignition.

 

“I don’t wanna go back,” I groaned, partially because of dreading going to school and partially because I really didn’t want to be driving with the madwoman next to me. I locked the door as a preventative measure. I didn’t want to be a flying squirrel again.

 

“Well, you don’t get a choice. Next Tuesday and you’re back.”

 

“Don’t sound so enthused,” I said through gritted teeth " she had started the car. I was thrown into my seatbelt when she slammed on the breaks after figuring out that she was driving in reverse.

 

“Oh, wow, that wasn’t the right way.”     

 

“No s**t Sherlock,” I muttered under my breath.

 

“What was that?”

 

“Nothing. Stop sign! Stop sign!”

Author's Note

Reviews are love. Or, well, something like love. Perhaps just Sharpies, although Sharpies are love, so one never knows.