The Trip to Katie's Party

This morning, I stood in the relentless rain, a half-eaten glazed donut in one hand, an inadequate umbrella in the other. Bosco, my dog, was out doing his business (the reason we were both getting drenched) when I dropped the slippery donut onto some newly erected condominiums of mushrooms. I had never seen this variety of mushroom, so I scooped a few up to make an omelet while my wife got ready for the party. 

With Bosco relieved, the omelet devoured, and the Sunday morning paper drying in the oven, I went to take a hot shower. We had a long trip ahead of us and my wife, Kaylee, harbors an anxious unease about arriving late to family functions. After showering, shaving, and dressing, I went back downstairs to throw the Sunday morning paper out into the rain. The damn thing had burnt to a flaky char and was smoldering. I’ll need to read Calvin and Hobbes online.

Forty-five minutes later, the wife appeared freshly painted like a Daliesque landscape, her hair coiffed to cascading snaky perfection, the fruity scent of her perfume scintillating to behold, her attire… well, casual—it was a casual party. She sipped her coffee, one orange eye watching me attempt to order pizza on a banana, the other eye reading the New York Times Book Review on her tablet. I hung up the banana and briefly considered writing a letter to my congressional representative over the skyrocketing price of Pez dispensers but was overtaken with an overwhelming desire to ski.

“Honey, where are my ski boots?” I said while trying not to use my tongue.

“Are you okay?” Kaylee said in a Liverpudlian accent, obviously trying to get my goat, which I had tethered to a 3-speed bicycle out back. “C’mon, get down from there; we’re leaving soon.” She went back upstairs to do whatever women do right before they leave the house. I picked up some of her perfume’s aroma wafting silently in the air and used it to make sandwiches with some all-natural peanut butter, but I ended up giving them to Bosco, who drove around the kitchen on the Roomba wearing an oversized sombrero.

The rain was worse than I thought. I had forgotten the umbrella, so I tap danced back to the house, the hard soles of my shoes clapping against the wet sidewalk like a plough horse on a flooded basketball court. Upon returning to the car, I noticed I was barefoot, and my toes had little top hats on them. The party was on the other side of the state, so I decided to walk. My wife called me “silly” and bulldozed me into the car. I took my jacket off and threw it on the passenger side of my 1967 canary-yellow Buick Skylark, a car I purchased from an aging rock star before he passed away backstage at a recent concert. Kaylee, who refused to admit she had a detachable jaw, didn’t appreciate me throwing my clothes on her and said so without moving her lips.

“Hey, watch it with your stinky sweater,” she said with the animus of a Japanese spider crab when you steal its peach cobbler. “I’m not your personal coat rack.” We both laughed heartily over the childish situation, and she rolled her window down, letting in copious amounts of the scalding March rain.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “By the way, you look stunning today.”

“Thanks. So do you, honey,” she said, which was pretty impressive for a blind woman. She then shouted, “Watch out!” when I almost struck an old lady who was pushing herself across the street in a wheelbarrow, obviously not understanding the laws of physics or small-town pedestrian etiquette. That was a close one, I thought, seeing she was only a quarter of a mile away. If I had hit the elderly woman, I would be required to attend her funeral on Friday, and everybody knows I play squash on Fridays—plus, I don’t have wheelbarrow insurance. I hoped the party fared better than the ride over.

“So your parents are throwing a surprise birthday party for your sister Katie?” I asked my beautiful wife as she picked at the numerous scabs on her face. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Katie planned the entire thing. It’s going to be so fun seeing her startled face when we all pop out. By the way, where’s her gift?”

“Ah, I know you think I’m a procrastinator, but I ordered it two months ago,” I said. “We should be getting it in a few weeks.” My wife smiled at me and patted my leg, which is difficult to do while riding a tandem bicycle. “I put it in the trunk with the umbrella.”

We arrived at Kaylee and Katie’s parents’ house at the scheduled time, even though we were two hours late. The expansive mansion glowed with a purple haze, sitting on two acres of farmland in the heart of the city. We waited at a traffic light to let a procession of elephants pass through, each one with its trunk holding the tail of the one in front. We parked the car near a pigsty, and I told the valet to not let anyone near it. He oinked at us, and my wife and I made our way to her childhood home while pretending we knew how to walk. 

“So how old is Katie? She’s your twin sister, right?” I asked Kaylee.

“Yes, she was born a few minutes after I was. She’s a couple of years older than me,” she said. I found this rather odd but didn’t say anything, and I acted like I had a scorpion in my eye. But Kaylee is a math teacher and a retired semiconductor, so she should know.

We had been walking for several miles when I noticed my wife was crying. I asked her if they were golden tears of joy or if she was still upset with me for putting hot sauce in her vegan bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit this morning. She explained that Katie, her twin sister, had always been her parents’ favorite, and they doted on her as if she were their own child, not some stranger born from her mother’s large intestine as Kaylee had been.

When we got to the house, Kaylee pulled herself together and put on a happy face, even though she knew we weren’t attending a costume party. The butler answered the door and asked whether we were friends of the bride or groom and quizzed us on the 1972 Baltimore Orioles starting lineup. I asked if this wasn’t the place for Katie Palmer’s surprise birthday party, and he called Katie on his phone to verify our story. Katie eventually came down to clear up the mess (my wife has IBS), and we gave her her Christmas present. She brought us inside, then out the rear of the house to show us where to hide and advised us to yell Surprise! very loudly since she was deaf. We wrote down the instructions on an old sheet of vellum we found, and I had it notarized.

“Should we yell Surprise or Surprised?” I asked my wife as we hid in an abandoned refrigerator in the backyard. It had started to rain heavily again, so I was thankful for the dry space next to the vegetable crisper. My wife looked at me as if I were insane. I remembered when we first met as roommates at the asylum, she had never looked at me in such a condescending way. I offered her a moldy nectarine to smooth things over, but she was already chewing on a barbecued muskrat kebab, which I found strange because she usually prefers muskrat on a heavily buttered Kaiser roll.

“You can yell whatever you want; Katie won’t be surprised,” Kaylee said. 

“What do you mean?” I asked. “And please answer in Portuguese.”

“Because they all had a rehearsal surprise party last night, so the jig is up.” I sensed a bit of sibling jealousy, so I told her to behave like an adult and to put the jig back down. “They yelled Supplies! to throw her off the scent, but Katie is smart. She didn’t graduate from Uncle Henry’s School for Deaf Girls on her looks alone, you know. She has the uncanny ability to listen to audio signals, and her brain processes them as speech and sounds.”

“So she can… hear?!”

“Well, yes, but she failed lip-reading miserably.”

After an hour of waiting, my back became a grandpa, so I had Kaylee go inside the house to get her old massage table, scented oils and candles, and to change into something sexier. She came back with all the necessary equipment and a see-through camisole, and we got everything in the fridge, but by the time we started the “therapeutic” session, the butler summoned us to the kitchen with a bullhorn. (The bull seemed extremely pissed.) Kaylee and I got dressed again and ran to the main house, getting soaked in the process. Damn sprinklers.

The butler, a Mister Finch, told us that the party plans had changed and everybody would be surprising Katie in the kitchen. It seems the birthday girl enjoys a vegetable smoothie every day at 2:13 in the afternoon. So we all hid in the main refrigerator, which was a lot roomier than our previous accommodations. Introductions were made all around, and we met some amazing people as well as some downright reprehensible characters and a circus chimp named Buster. I was about to introduce Kaylee and myself to the other partygoers when someone asked me to pass the mayo. We were all making turkey sandwiches, you see. 

A Professor Chatterwall was ecstatic over the fact that he finally had irrefutable proof that the refrigerator light does indeed go out after the door is shut. We heard Katie’s voice, and everybody fell silent. She was talking with Uncle Henry, whose job it was to open the fridge door at the most opportune time, signaling all of us to scramble out, preferably in a boy/girl/boy/chimp/girl rotation, and scream the required word. I consulted my notarized document. I felt Kaylee tense up in anticipation beside me, and I kissed her on the cheek, feeling it to be a bit more furry than usual. Uncle Henry opened the closet door, and we all tumbled out into the foyer in an expedient, but, dare I say, uncivilized fashion.

“Surprise!” “Surprised!” “Supplies!” We all used sign language, signing in Katie’s general direction. (Some of us were still rolling around the carpet.) Katie seemed to be genuinely surprised because she dropped her smoothie on the expensive-looking linoleum flooring as she directed her cousin Shirley to repeat the word, this time with more feeling. Uncle Henry and the chimp fought over the opportunity to clean up the spilled smoothie while grass started growing from the hardwood floors. Kaylee hugged her twin sister and wished her a happy anniversary. They certainly did look eerily alike, except for their hair and faces, and the body modifications, and the missing teeth, and the vast differences in height and weight, and the protruding eye on one sister, and the cavernous gape in the other sister’s chest, and all that twitching.

I noticed my in-laws entering the great room from a side hallway closet. Apparently, they had learned to levitate because there appeared to be a two-inch gap between their raw chicken breast feet and the honey-waxed floor. They looked disheveled and impeccably dressed in tartan kilts and Wonderbras, and they appeared to be confused at the festivities taking place at the same time their beloved Judge Judy was on. Their pet cat, Ophelia, flew by in a hot air balloon. She said I looked “snappy” today, but I couldn’t remember teaching her that particular word, having only previously gotten up to the letter G with the pretentious cat.

“What’s going on in here?” my father-in-law growled. His words sprang forth from his mouth in the form of charcoal briquettes, then turned to fine dust and reconstructed into the shape of funny man John Mulaney. The charcoal John Mulaney said hullo to me and gave me a flyer for his upcoming show at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. It had a coupon for Thin Mints on the back. 

“It’s my birthday, Daddy,” Katie said in Gaelic, twirling around in her party dress she just happened to be wearing. This got us all inspired to sing “It’s My Party” in 24-part harmony, but when we got to the “cry if I want to” part, my mother-in-law burst into bright orange flames. Unfortunately, Mister Finch doused her with the dish detergent and glycerin concoction from the bubble-making machine before we could even get our marshmallows on the tips of our sticks. Everybody thought it was quite humorous how her feet were now fully cooked, and we all laughed heartily and took a taste. I retrieved a bottle of honey mustard sauce from the fridge.

Kaylee came over to me with a concerned look on her face. I tried to rearrange her expression with my fingers, hoping for more of a Sydney Sweeney look but only succeeded in smearing sauce on her nose and cheeks.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re acting strangely.”

“You know full well I haven’t completed my acting studies,” I explained. “Acting Weird and Strangely 101 happened to be the only course open.” 

 “Well, I hope you’re not coming down with something,” she said. “C’mon, we’re about to serve the cake.” The entire assemblage moseyed on over to the dining room for birthday cake and molten-chocolate lava, except for Mister Finch, who sashayed, and Professor Chatterwall, who skipped to the loo. I gave Buster, the circus chimp, a ride on my back, but he refused to pay the $2.50 fare when we got to his station. I called the police on a banana that had been tied to a large, plastic bust of Anderson Cooper, but the chimp got off on a technicality. We’re still good friends, though. After a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday to You,” Katie stood on Uncle Henry’s detached prosthetic legs, using them as stilts, and gave a speech that nobody called for.

“The earth is a generous mother,” she began. “She will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.” I immediately recognized this word-for-word rendition of Winston Churchill’s “The Sinews of Peace” address of 1946. Everyone transformed into dancing penguins in fond remembrance, but I got bored, so the monkey and I started playing backgammon under the vast dining room table. My game is admittedly rusty, so I was thrilled to beat him in two out of five games. Okay, I cheated. I flipped the dice to a more advantageous number when he turned his head, but he’s a grandmaster, for chrissake.

The cake tasted so sweet, it reminded me of those bugs we used to all eat when we found them in the crawl space. Just me? Whatever. I wanted to hack it up like a furball, but I feared Ophelia would land her balloon and eat it. Also, my wife gave me one of those pointing two fingers at her eyes and then back at me gestures, so I swallowed the nauseating cake and went back for two more pieces. The coffee looked and tasted as if it came from a can of Valvoline motor oil, mainly because I saw Mister Finch pouring one into the percolator. Cousin Shirley came over and asked if I wanted to see her vacation photos from Bora Bora. I told her, “No, but my wife does,” and went to play Battleship with Buster.

An hour later, the party ended somewhat unceremoniously, with Katie stripped down to her underwear and Uncle Henry trying to play Pin the Tail on Katie with a paisley necktie and super glue. At some point, a rodeo clown appeared and ushered everybody to the exits, failing to validate our parking. Kaylee and I said our goodbyes to her family and friends, and we made our way back to the car. The rain still dripped pink acid from the clouds, so we ran to the car to fetch the umbrella, returned to the house, and walked back to the car in a more civilized manner. Halfway there, Kaylee suggested we open the umbrella.

The trip home proved uneventful. Kaylee insisted on driving, which gave me time to conduct the London Philharmonic from the passenger seat with my eighteen fingers. Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite sounds so much better while sitting next to the one you love. Unfortunately, Buster moved to the backseat to masturbate in peace, and Kaylee showed no appreciation for early 1900s punk rock, so I decided to make some spaghetti. I forgot the garlic bread, causing my wife to get into a little snit, but all three of us enjoyed the pasta with a nice Chardonnay, rolling down the undulating pavement of I-95.

We arrived home just as the rain minimized to a drizzle. Kaylee noted we should have driven home with the convertible roof up, but hindsight is wiser and all that crap. We made hot chocolate with miniature cotton balls and sat by the roaring fire to warm up. I asked Kaylee if she wanted me to make her a quiche with some of the mushrooms I had found earlier, but she declined, saying she still felt full from the road spaghetti. So I massaged the back of her neck with my fingersnails as Buster farted the national anthem. We all had a hearty laugh over the silliness of the entire day. After several minutes of cozy time, Kaylee and I realized that we didn’t have a fireplace. So I called the fire department on my banana.

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