I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) by Laurie Notaro Page B

that stuff to me, too, but she’s sending it to me at work
and
at home. I’m getting double crap. It took me forty minutes to download a picture of Tweety Bird that someone made with all
V
’s and
M
’s. Did she send you that personality test?”
    “Oh yes,” I added. “According to Dr. BeanieQueenie, I’m frigid. I said ‘only when I’m drunk’ to ‘coffee.’         ”
    “I said ‘Smells good, but tastes bad,’         ” my sister added. “Where is she getting all of this stuff from?”
    “As far as I can tell,” I mentioned, “she’s being supplied by a user—or shall I say pusher—known as LadyDi. Apparently, she’s BeanieQueenie’s funnies connection.”
    “Did LadyDi also send her the one about how bad an egg’s life sucks?” my sister asked. “         ‘Because you only get laid once.’         ”
    “         ‘And the only girl that ever sits on you is your mom,’         ” I said. “BeanieQueenie is out of control. We can’t handle this on our own. I think we need to seek professional help.”
    So I took a big breath and did what I had to do. I called my mom, who was dealing with e-mail problems of her own after she somehow meandered into a chat room a couple of weeks ago.
    “I didn’t do any chatting,” she quickly assured me then. “I didn’t like any of the chatters’ names, they all sounded like prostitutes and truck drivers.”
    Nevertheless, she apparently didn’t leave the chat room unnoticed, because later that day she began being barraged with illustrated mail from assorted porno sites.
    “I didn’t know what it was. It said ‘Juicy Fruit’ at the top, so I opened it,” she explained. “I thought it was you trying to be funny. But what I saw was real sin, I tell you, real sin. People forget that God once destroyed the world because of that kind of sin, and they weren’t even taking pictures of it then! What I saw would
blind
a holy person.”
    But I didn’t even need to explain about the BeanieQueenie situation, because my mom was on that mailing list, too.
    “Oh, I don’t know why you two can’t get along,” my mother said. “Leave your sister alone. She is just sharing her joy with you!”
    “Mom,” I whined, “she’s not sharing joy. She sent me something nasty about an egg.”
    “I thought that was funny,” she replied. “         ‘You have to share a room with eleven guys!!’ But I didn’t understand the one about ‘sitting’ . . .”
    “The thing is,” I continued, “never once in, say, thirty years has she ever called me to tell me a joke. But put a ‘forward’ button in front of her and all of a sudden she becomes Lenny Bruce.”
    “Don’t you say anything mean to her!” my mother warned. “She was born tender, not with a rawhide heart like you!”
    “COFFEE!!” I shouted.
    “Never had it until I got married,” she replied before she hung up.
    I didn’t know what to do. I thought about calling my sensitive sister and telling her that if she didn’t stop the e-mails, I would wreak havoc by going in her room while she was away and touching EVERY SINGLE THING. To a girl that has her clothes arranged by the color order of the rainbow, that spelled Years of Intensive Therapy. If that didn’t work, I knew I could break her if I threatened to mutilate one Beanie Baby at a time by removing the protective tag cover with each crappy e-mail I got.
    I made the call.
    “Hello, BeanieQueenie?” I said into the phone. “It’s QueenieMeanie, and we need to talk about those e-mails.”
    “Aren’t they funny!” My sister giggled. “Did you get the one about the egg? ‘Five minutes to make one hard and two to make it soft!’ You work so hard all the time to make other people laugh that I just wanted to put a smile on your face. I was imagining you laughing when I sent it and it made me so happy!”
    “Oh” was all I could say as I felt my meanness level