I’m S’now Angel
Pumpkin bread; Pee the bed
At 17, I took my first airplane ride. I was flying alone to Chicago, to visit my boyfriend and his mother for Thanksgiving. My boyfriend was way, way, way too old for me but we’d already been dating for two years so it was time to meet his mom. Next stop, marriage, right?!
He’d flown ahead for a reason I can’t remember. Probably a shitty reason. Frankly, he was a pretty gross person who’d entrapped a rebellious teenager before she was old enough to realize how uncool he was. I got on the plane, a window seat, and a skinny dude got in right next to me. Right up next to me. I didn’t look at him or talk to him because I’d read all the articles about how annoying it is when someone talks to you on a plane.
This guy didn’t read any articles like that, though, because he looked out the window, leaning over me, then rotated just his head, like an owl, locked eyes with me and said,
There’s ice on the wings. That’s bad.
Then he leaned back into his middle seat and closed his eyes.
This is my first flight,
I mumbled to him, to god, to whoever’s in charge of making sure the fucking plane doesn’t fall out of the sky.
I watched the wing the rest of the flight. Not sure what I was watching for but if it looked like it was about to fall off, I was gonna hit the stewardess button.
They picked me up at the airport. I carried a suitcase and a loaf of pumpkin bread, my great-grandma’s recipe, wrapped in foil. This was pre-9/11 when you could bring cakes and shit on planes, no problemo. No one even asked me to unwrap it. The security guys were just like, what’s that? And I was like, pumpkin bread. And they were like, oooh sounds good.
His mom’s house was cute. Perhaps typical of Chicago. I don’t know. Kind of tall and thin as I remember, with a basement room and two floors above. He’d take his old bedroom — just like you left it when you graduated high school! SIX YEARS AGO— and I’d take the couch in the basement — since I was a nubile young eleventh-grader whose spine wouldn’t complain about couches for many more years, I guess? It sort of made sense. To myself, though, I thought it was kind of shitty that they didn’t offer the bed to the guest because at my mom’s house, a guest would always get the full guest treatment but, whatever.
I had heard that Chicago people didn’t have the best manners.
There was at least a foot of new, fluffy snow outside. Being a Texas filly, I’d only seen snow twice in my life and only one of those times was it enough to make a snowman. So I was stoked. I put on the puffy winter coat that I’d had to buy just for this trip. Went straight out the back door and made a real fucking snowball, one that was all snow and not some rocks and sticks stuck together with icy chunks. I threw it and watched it explode softly against a fence like a white puffball mushroom.
They watched me from the covered porch as I lay down, on the ground, to make a snow angel, then stand up to realize that snow melts when you lay on it and my winter coat was not waterproof and I was soaked to my skin with ice water. My boyfriend thought that was hilarious. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would get wet. I really felt one of the adults should have warned me when they saw what I was about to do.
I changed clothes and we ate dinner. Some kind of Italian meat sandwiches that are a thing up there. You can buy a plastic bucket (reusable, with a handle!) full of what looks like Steak-Umms mixed with peppers and onions and you heat it up and put it on hoagie rolls. I thought it smelled like farts but they all loved it so I ate one.
I ate a fart to fit in, basically.
That night, sleeping on the basement couch, I had a dream. I dreamed that I had to pee really, really bad and I’m sure you already see where this is going.
I peed on the couch.
Just a little.
A few milliliters.
I woke up right away.
And I wanted to die.
Peeing the bed was not my style. I hadn’t peed in a bed, like, ever. Must have been nerves? Or maybe the basement was haunted.
It was still early — like 3 am — and the house was silent. There was a laundry room down there so I rinsed out my underwear and pajamas in a sink and then put them in the dryer. Thankfully the handmade afghan hadn’t gotten wet. Who the fuck gives someone an actual afghan to keep warm, though? I should have peed on it.
The couch, what do I do? I padded up as much moisture as I was able to with a bath towel. Very fine bath towels, she had, the fluffy ones that hold a ton of liquid so the towel still felt pretty much dry and I hung it back up.
Then I flipped the couch cushion over and to my great relief, they were identical on both sides. It’s like they were designed to get dirty and then just be flipped over. Thank you, couch manufacturers of America (or China).
When my clothes were dry I got dressed again and went upstairs to the kitchen like nothing had happened.
We had breakfast. His mom cut open my pumpkin bread with great fanfare only to find that it was very undercooked, borderline raw, in the center. I was crestfallen. My crest fell right off. We ate a bunch of donuts and pastries instead and then went to a boring-ass museum.
A couple months later, his mom came to visit Austin for the first time and I got the last laugh when she asked me about the “hot springs” and could we go visit them? And I was like, what hot springs? And she was like, Barton Springs. And I was like, you’re crazy lady; that is a cold-ass fucking spring. And she was like, they said it’s 64º all year! And I was like, hahaha, that’s cold here, you dumb Chicago lady.
That summer I broke up with him while he was at work by skipping class to move all my stuff out and back into my parent’s house. Then I ran away to Boston with another dude who was also eight years older than me but at least by then I was 18 and legally old enough to make those kinds of bad decisions.
