DOG PENIS HAIRSPRAY OR THE SPIRIT OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT

By

Dawn Corrigan

Before I married, I thought it was sort of distasteful how many women badmouth their in-laws.

"They just want to separate their spouse from his tribe and make him part of their own," I thought. "So primitive."

Then I got engaged. My husband and I both lived thousands of miles from our parents, and I hadn't yet met his mom and dad when we made the decision to get married.

So I remained optimistic about the whole in-law thing.

I remained optimistic even though our first date consisted of my future husband and me sitting at a bar while he told me horror stories about his family for hours as we downed vodka Red Bulls.

By the end of the date, I was curled up in my chair with my hands over my ears, saying "Stop telling me things! Stop telling me things!"

I finally met his parents when they brought my husband's 15-year-old son to live with us. Prior to that, my future stepson had been living with his grandparents in Canada, and before that with his mother in California. But then they decided it was time for him to live with us.

I thought it was a little peculiar they wanted their grandson to live with a woman they, and he, had never met. But I was willing to give it a shot.

Living with my stepson was fine. The fact that my in-laws parked their RV a few blocks away and stuck around for months to observe our behavior, and to intervene whenever they felt we weren't doing things right, was not.

However, I've written about the Surveillance Van elsewhere, and that's not really the point of this story.

The point is, all of a sudden I was a woman who badmouthed her in-laws.

How embarrassing.

It was impossible not to, though. They were so vexing. Not to mention completely cuckoo. For instance, there was the matter of the Christmas gifts.

As Christmas approached, my mother-in-law announced we would do White Elephant gifts.

At first, I was disappointed. I like gift giving. I enjoy trying to figure out exactly what the right present might be. A White Elephant exchange doesn't give me a chance to show off my superior gift-selecting skills.

But then I embraced the spirit of the White Elephant. "They're just trying to give us a break," I thought. "They want to spare us the expense of buying a lot of presents."

Accordingly, I hunted around the house until I found six gifts that seemed not-crappy. To spice things up a bit, my husband and I wrote poems in the cards that accompanied the gifts. I wrapped them and set them aside.

Three days before Christmas, my mother-in-law called to review the plan, which my husband duly passed on to me: open house for two hours, then the White Elephant exchange, then dinner, then exchange of the real gifts.

"Real gifts?" I said. "When did that get added on?"

"I dunno," he said. "She seemed really confused."

"Well, except for Kody, they're not getting any real gifts," I declared. "Three weeks ago, I was dying to buy them real gifts. But I'm not going shopping three days before Christmas. That window has closed."

"Um, okay," he said. "I'll let her know."

"You do that," I said.

On Christmas we headed to his grandmother's house for the party. As we added our gifts to the White Elephant table, I noticed a bottle of my hairspray in the midst of the other packages.

My hairspray is described as "weightless." It's dispensed from a non-aerosol can. I think it might even be made of hemp. It's weightless, non-aerosol, hippie hairspray that doesn't do a goddamned thing to my hair, as anyone who has ever seen my hair can attest. But I feel better if I spray it in my hair every day.

The bottle my hairspray is packaged in is in the shape of a tall, narrow, bright red tube. This is not a bottle one sees in just anyone's home. But there it was, rising proudly from the center of the White Elephant table like some kind of... dog penis.

"Sweetie," I whispered. "Look! It's my hairspray!"

"Whoa," he whispered back. "Weird."

"How did it get here?"

My husband pondered this question. "They must have picked it up during the move," he said.

A week prior, my husband's family had packed us and all our possessions and moved us even closer to the Surveillance Van, because my stepson announced he wanted to attend school in its neighborhood.

When I was a girl, we had to go to school in the neighborhood where our parents already lived... but I digress.

"I'm sure you're right," I whispered. "But why didn't they just bring it in with the rest of our stuff?"

"I don't know. They must not have realized."

"I understand maybe they didn't realize the," I said. "But once they saw the bottle, couldn't they put it together?" Let's see: I've never seen this bottle before, but I just moved my son, grandson, and daughter-in-law from one apartment to another, including all their toiletries..."

I stopped then, because my husband gave me that look. It's the look that says, contrary to my hopes and expectations, sometimes logic is not my friend.

"You have to get it back for me," I said.

"Why can't you?"

"I don't know. I just can't."

"What id someone takes it away from me, during the swap part?"

"Believe me," I said, "they won't."

So when his turn came, my husband picked the dog penis hairspray as his White Elephant gift.

He's worth a thousand crazy in-laws, the dear man.

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