THE LADY WHO LIKED CLEAN REST ROOMS

W

ITH EVERYONE REACTING

to and following trends and fashions you never know what’s going to happen next in and around New York and especially in suburban climes like Scarsdale. But what worried her more than anything was that she might sink down so deep into the doldrums that back up out of them she might never again get.

On the day she felt this most acutely it was her forty-third birthday. She got a bottle of Polish vodka, chilled it ice cold, frosting the glass of a decanter and while listening to Fauré’s Requiem, spent a couple of hours knocking it back with a sardine paste she made with garlic and cream cheese and spread on pumpernickel bread. But she got so drunk she found herself sitting at midnight with a loaded shotgun across her lap, after she thought she had heard funny noises outside around the house. Then watching a bunch of glad facing so called celebrities spout their bullshit on a T.V. talk show and remembering that once someone told her how, when having quaffed many a dram, they turned off T.V. sets in the remote highlands of Scotland, she clicked off the safety, aimed the Purdey at mid-screen and let off the no. 4 cartridges in both barrels. And she said to herself over and over again as the sparks and flames erupted from the smoke.

‘Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.’

Her analyst said everybody was blasting the shit out of their T.V. sets all over New York and described her new behaviour of following trends as good news. For in the wake of her divorce from her strong silent husband, who wasn’t so strong nor silent, but at least never beat her up, she had become a T.V. addict and virtual recluse. And as her bank balance declined, she let the grass grow long in summer and the leaves pile up in winter. But she kept herself in shape with an exercise bicycle and a lady’s set of weights and ate mostly salad and fruit. She felt she owed her spiritual survival so far to a twice monthly visit to antique auctions and the art galleries downtown and to watching the local squirrels romping all over the place and their clever antics in preserving food for the winter.

There was also the strange incarcerated girl who maybe had something wrong in the brain and lived next door and who through the tree branches appeared in varying stages of undress waving at her at least a couple of times a day from her bedroom window and she waved encouragingly back. But the joy of that doubtful human contact with this otherwise attractive creature with a macabre sense of humour didn’t last too long when one day the girl raised both her hands together and there were handcuffs on her wrists. When she went finally to knock on this neighbour’s door, whom she’d never met, the door it was hardly opened and then slammed shut with a voice growling.

‘Mind your own god damn business.’

The only thing she thought that was saving her from an overdose of sleeping tablets were her own unexpurgated cogitations going through her head, which she thought must surely be going through the minds of a hell of a lot of other people all over Scarsdale. Especially when she’d see some of them close up on the train station on the mornings of her gallery visiting days. When it seemed the game they were all playing was to appear important. But not to let people know what you were really thinking, that you were really a horse’s ass. Her analyst said when you did let people know you really were a horse’s ass, that was when you really were emotionally disturbed.

She was, as she told the analyst, Mayflowered and in fact half assed socially registered, since her mother who grew up on a southern plantation was, but whose marriage to a socially unacceptable father got her kicked out of the society books. But this remnant of superiority, wrest away before she was even born, she always felt had left her with a mind of her own and to also go and marry someone unacceptable. Which, in her presently deserted state, she was really regretting now with her two grown up and alienated children at college. And she was smitten when overhearing her son say to her daughter on their permanently last visit.

‘Pop at least got some fun going on now in his life.’

She shrunk away like a leper upon hearing this and cried herself despairingly to sleep. Her marriage had come to an end when her television executive husband, showing signs of getting bald and overweight, had invented a laugh-a-second game show and started to get ideas about a helicopter pad on the front lawn. However, he started landing somewhere else when he met a young associate producer who according to society column gossip was not only an ex college football cheer-leader from down Mississippi way but was also Phi Beta Kappa and who at twenty five years of age still sported firm tits, big bright teeth and an ass and legs to match.

After being away nearly two months of nights on a shoot as he called it, Steve merely waltzed in one evening and with too much to drink, had hit her between the eyes with the revelation that he had taken an apartment downtown on West Sixty Seventh Street and was in love and wanted a divorce. And she got down to brass tacks right away, making sure that along with her reasonableness she’d give him a bolo or two to the plexus.

‘Steve, don’t look all annoyed and hurt that you’re hurting me. You want some fresh young flesh. It’s normal. I’m not going to complain. Nor take you to the cleaners for everything you’ve got.’

‘Hey honey, gee whiz, you know anyway I ain’t got that much.’

‘You’ve already got the children eating out of your hand. Just pay all the bills till the end of this month and give me one hundred and sixty five thousand dollars in cash, and the house with the rest of the mortgage paid off, and except for your personal stuff, all the furniture in it. Of course the Edward Hicks’s and the objects d’art my grandmother gave me, and the silverware, were always mine. And you Steve can go have all the fresh flesh you want so long as you and she never show your faces at the country club while I remain a member and where I may want to go play bridge to live out my sag tit old age respectably. O but you can also have your tank full of piranha fish I’ve been feeding.’

She took off her rings and threw them at him across the room. Steve sat like he had been electrocuted on the spot, and suddenly turned to look around at something that would remind him he was still alive, and he saw the silver framed pictures of the children on the piano flanking either side of their wedding photograph and Steve put his hands up to his face and broke sobbing into tears. Then as if seeking comfort he got up, crossed the carpet she was also going to keep, and as he bent over to kiss her, she let go with another bolo.

‘Keep your dirty filthy hands off me.’

She always thought that emotional high temperatures led to foolish assertions, which now started to come out of Steve’s, instead of her mouth. Making the accusation that her mother who never thought he was good enough for her and was trying to get her family reinstated in the Social Register. And that nobody from her side of the tracks liked hearing where he’d gone to college.

Of course to her who’d been at Bryn Mawr founded on that premise that intelligent women deserve an education as rigorous and stimulating as that offered to men, nothing could be so ridiculous. And who these days could give a flea’s fart