Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea Read online

  “Listen, I feel bad for her too, but I can’t stomach an entire dinner with her. Those stories are just too boring. Plus, I don’t have a present for her, and I’m certainly not buying one.”

  “Just get her something cheap; it’s not like you have anything to do today,” Lydia said.

  That annoyed me. “Listen, you have no idea what I have planned for my day,” I said as I put my vibrator down. “Where are you anyway? You sound like you’re in a washing machine.”

  “I’m in the bathroom, because I didn’t want Aubrey to hear me calling you. She thought you were serious about the diarrhea and I told her you were just kidding.”

  “I was serious about the diarrhea.”

  “Chelsea, stop it! You need to do me this favor tonight and come. How many of your stand-up shows have I been to?” This was true. Lydia was pretty loyal and she would come to show after show of mine and laugh riotously after every punch line despite the fact that she’d heard it a million times before, even when the jokes were about her.

  “Oh, fine! But if my eyes don’t clear up, I may have to wear a patch.”

  “Good, I hope you do.”

  “I hate you,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  I needed a gift. I went into my closet and looked for something I hadn’t worn yet, or maybe something I hadn’t worn in awhile that looked new. I looked at an old pair of boots and wondered if I could pass them off as vintage. I had never re-gifted before and didn’t know what the guidelines were. I decided to call Ivory, who, incidentally, had a job that she went to on a daily basis.

  “Can you believe this?” I asked her when she picked up the phone.

  “No, actually, I can’t. Can Aubrey tell if I’ve viewed the Evite?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “And Lydia says we all have to go.”

  “I know. She’s instant messaging me right now, saying you’re going.”

  “Apparently I am.”

  “Well, maybe it will be fun if we all go,” Ivory said.

  “No, it won’t be fun. Can you get her a gift from us?” I asked.

  “Chelsea, I’m at work, I don’t have time to go out and get her a gift. I’ll probably give her something someone gave me. I barely know the girl,” she told me.

  “That’s what I was thinking too. I have a first-aid kit I’ve never used.”

  “I have to go,” she said hurriedly and hung up.

  I looked around my apartment at all the possible things I could re-gift and was torn between a picture frame that held a picture of me and my sisters, and a candle that had only been lit once. My head bobbed back and forth between the candle and the picture frame, the same way it would if I were watching a tennis match. After what seemed like a long period of time, I finally decided I really liked the picture frame, and I would just cut the top part of the candle wick off. Lydia walked in the door as I was looking for my pocketknife.

  “Well, that was a hard day of work you put in. It’s almost one p.m., you must be exhausted,” I said, rummaging through my fanny pack.

  “Ugh, Aubrey is so annoying. She’s been crying all day, going on and on about turning thirty; it is so fucking depressing. I had to get out of there.”

  “I’m giving her that candle,” I said, pointing at the candle I had placed on our coffee table right next to an old newspaper I was planning on wrapping it in.

  She walked over to take a closer look at the candle. “It’s already been used.”

  “I’m going to cut the wick off,” I told her.

  “Then how is she going to light it?”

  “Not my problem.”

  “Chelsea,” Lydia said, in the same tone my gynecologist used when I told her I would need a month’s supply of morning-after pills. “I’m sure you can find something else. You can’t give her that.”

  “Sure I can,” I said as I went over to my computer to check my e-mail, since that is primarily what takes up my day. I love e-mail and much prefer it to the telephone. I had two new e-mail messages. The first was from my brother, who sends me daily greeting cards from a site called gbehh.com. This one had a bunny rabbit holding a piece of paper that read, “You’re a fag!” There was a personal message from him underneath that said, “Chelsea, I just finished Melvin’s taxes, and according to my calculations, last year our father raked in a grand total of $7,300.62!” My brother Greg is an accountant and is constantly updating me regarding our father’s finances and tax evasions. None of my brothers or sisters has any idea how our father supports himself, and my brother Greg thinks it’s hilarious.

  The second e-mail I opened was from my friend Morgan who lives in San Diego. She e-mailed me a picture of her dog. Alone. Morgan is also the girl who gave Ivory a gold cross for her birthday one year. Contrary to her name, Ivory is the most Jewish person any of us know. She is constantly using Yiddish phrases, loves food more than anyone I know, and is my only Jewish friend who actually goes to temple.

  I understand if people want to e-mail pictures of their babies by themselves, but there is no way I’m going to join Kodak’s photo gallery to look at a picture of someone’s pet standing by itself in front of Niagara Falls. This is not the first time this has happened to me, and I was actually pleased because I had gathered the materials necessary to respond appropriately. I clicked reply and sent Morgan a picture of my cleaning lady. Standing next to the toilet, alone. I attached a message that read, “Not interested? Me neither.”

  “I’m not letting you give Aubrey that candle, Chelsea,” Lydia said as she put the candle back on the shelf where I found it.

  “Well, I’ve spent the last hour trying to find something and I refuse to spend money on a present. Can’t we just buy her dinner?”

  “Look in that closet, you have tons of shit in there. I’m sure you can find something,” she said, pointing to our hall closet the same way someone would yell “Sit” to a dog.

  “I’m giving all that stuff to Fantasia,” I told her.

  “Who is Fantasia?” Lydia asked me.

  “Um, I don’t know, maybe the cleaning lady we’ve had for two years?” I reminded her.

  “Her name is Florencia, Chelsea.”

  I stared at her, wondering if this was true. Florencia did have a familiar ring to it. But I could have sworn Florencia was a name from my past.

  “Well, whatever,” I said. “She’s been calling me Yelsea since she started working here and I go along with it. Every time I call her I have to say, ‘Hi, Fantasia, this is Yelsea.’”

  I was looking through the closet when I found the present that Ivory bought me for my twenty-sixth birthday. Ivory had gone on and on about this present for months leading up to my birthday. “Chelsea, I can’t wait to give you this gift!” she kept telling me over and over again. “I know you so well, this is the perfect Chelsea gift.” With all the hype she gave it, you would have thought she had bought me a vibrator that could also make tacos.

  After three months of enticing me with the “most amazing gift one person could buy another person,” she gave me a board game called Rehab. Not only do I make it a personal rule to never play organized games, if an occasion presents itself where I am forced to play one, I prefer it not to take place on a giant piece of paper. It’s called a board game because it’s supposed to be on a board. This game came with a giant piece of paper the consistency of loose-leaf that had different rehabilitation facilities spread over it, much in the same vein as Monopoly. It came with some wooden pieces that I actually burned one night when we ran out of firewood.

  “I’ve got it!” I yelled to Lydia as I pulled out the Rehab game. Next, I opened up the Yahtzee box that was on top of the closet, stole three of the dice, and put them in the little plastic Rehab bags, along with a couple of the wooden pieces that were partially scorched.

  Lydia walked over to the closet. “Oh my God, I forgot about that game. I actually played that one night.”

  “You did?” I asked. “With who?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t re