Douglas Soderberg

excerpt from

The Root of Chaos

from

The Best American Short Plays 1986

scene

The kitchen and dining area of the Cernikowski house in central Pennsylvania.

JOE [Father, forty.] Did it look like a giant woman? [. . .] It’s a family catchphrase. Goes back to your mother’s and my courtship. On our first date, I took her to see this movie called The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. It was our first date, see, and we were both a little nervous to begin with. We weren’t terribly involved in the movie. We weren’t scared by it, that is. Well, there came this one part where the mutant title character was, you know, sort of marauding over the countryside. Looking for some mate her own size, I think. You can just imagine why. Anyway, hot on her tail was this sheriff and his goofy deputy sidekick. The infamous tall gal had just terrorized some people parked in a lover’s lane, and the sheriff and his deputy come up and ask this teenaged boy and his chippie in a white convertible, “What happened?” Well, the girl is no help at all. She’s crying and carrying on and saying, “Oh, it was awful, it was awful!” And the sheriff’s asking, “What? What was?” But the girl won’t answer. So then the goofy deputy sidekick pipes in with this line: [Goofy voice.] “Did it look like a giant woman?” [. . .] Your mom and I just about died. Doublemint, you were conceived later that night. And now, whenever something is really obvious, we say that. A family has got to have catchphrases.