Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

“You look like you swallowed a bomb and your face froze a fraction of a second after it went off,” Amy told me.

The first time you put a new one in, your teeth say, and loudly, “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”

“What’s going on with these molars?” she asked, poking around toward the back of my mouth. “They seem to be awfully flat.” “Like a cow’s?”

“Now let me show you your ‘before’ pictures,” the dentist said. She pulled out her phone and I saw what looked to be the mouth of a hippo in attack mode.

The oxygen tube slips, and though you think of readjusting it, you don’t, because, well, it has snot on it.

My father, by contrast, insisted on what amounted to a three-part multistate death tour.

They could have easily driven to the service from their homes, but instead we all checked into a hotel, a very expensive one, in the town of Cary, and really pushed the boat out, charging everything to the estate: room service, drinks—the works. The staff thought we were attending a wedding, that’s how merry we seemed as we headed to the church in our dress clothes. “Can you take our picture?” Amy asked one of the doormen as she handed him her phone. She looked like she was going to a ball thrown by Satan.

And if Mom and I had twenty more years together, her being herself and me being, say, a deaf mouse who had to live in her underpants,

People who attended Harvard or Princeton or Yale are always maddeningly discreet about it. “I went to school in the Boston area,” they say, or, “I think I spent some time in New Jersey once.”

The circus would take to the road again, but not with this elephant.

I would be in precheck, not inconvenienced by the novices but incensed nevertheless.

Christian T-shirts I saw people wearing—among them ON MY BLESSED BEHAVIOR and LONG STORY SHORT: GOD SAVED MY LIFE—

From California I flew to Montana. Out of habit I wore a mask into the lobby of my hotel and received the sort of looks I might get had I sported a HILLARY CLINTON T-shirt at a Klan rally.

“You know you’re in a place that’s inhospitable to liberals when you see fireworks stores,”

Then the tallest of them wondered if Donna wanted anything. She was out in the car, perhaps bound and gagged in its trunk.