As Maye darted her eyes back and forth between Cynthia and the old photograph, she noted that her neighbor hadn’t changed much in all of those years. She was still tall and thin, and clearly stood out in the room as the only one who had drunk the necessary amount of milk during her calcium-needy years. Her complexion hadn’t grayed and her skin hadn’t dropped like a feed sack; it stayed high and firm on her cheekbones. Age hadn’t attacked Cynthia the way it had fought with the other ladies in the room; for a woman who was terrified of a dirty dog-food can, she must have had some pretty quick footing, Maye noted, and ducked each time the sandbag of time came hurtling at her, unlike most of her guests, who had not only gotten socked but stayed down for the count until the geriatric bell rang.
“You know, Elsie, we didn’t see you at the last Silver Songbird meeting,” Cynthia mentioned, nodding at the woman on the Renegade. “We missed you, but I’m sure we can find a place for you somewhere in the cast. Almost all of the men’s roles need filling. My husband can’t play every single male role, he’s getting a big head! It’s hard enough to find a man alive, but to get them to sing—”
“Was Alma there?” Agnes asked. “Has anyone seen Alma?”
“I was getting my colostomy bag replaced,” Elsie replied. “It leaked all over my good Sunday dress at the prayer circle! I’m so sorry I missed the auditions. Oh, our last show was so much fun!”
Ah, drama people, Maye thought with a sigh. Being bitten by the drama bug is every bit as dangerous as a nibble from a malaria-ridden mosquito; one person contracts it every thirty seconds, there’s always an abundance of excessive gasping and everyone around that person hopes they don’t catch it.
“‘Three little maids from school are we,’” sang Maude, in a high, wavery voice, her puckered hands cupped together under her chin. “‘Pert as a school-girl well can be!’”
“‘Filled to the brim with girlish glee,’” Elsie screeched, almost as if on cue.
“‘Three little maids from school!’” the remainder of the women warbled, in a broad variety of pitches.
“‘Everything is a source of fun,’” Cynthia crooned alone as she made her way to the front of the room in a short-stepped sort of shuffle.
“‘Nobody’s safe, for we care for none!’” Elsie sang, only overshadowed by the hum of her Renegade battery pack kicking into action as she parallel parked in the spot next to Cynthia.
“‘Life is a joke that’s just begun!’” Maude chirped, finding her way to the front of the room in little hops until she stopped next to her fellow cast members.
“‘Three little maids from school!’” all three sang in the best unison they could manage, smiling demurely behind their fan hands, now fully in their roles as Yum-Yum, Peep-Bo, and Pitti-Sing.
Now, if Maye had proven just to be minutely more talented in the area of recreational sports as a prepubescent lass, she would have been completely astounded and perhaps a bit alarmed by the instant production that was suddenly being staged in Cynthia’s living room, complete with drama faces. But Maye, at the age of twelve, had run a grueling and life-altering fifteen-minute mile in a PE class as her inner ice-white thighs were christened with flagellant red welts, thus beginning her initiation into the plague of Chub Rub. As a result she swore that if sports had this sort of consequence, she would be abstaining from such activity, due to either uterine cramping, common cafeteria corn-dog-induced nausea, a Bubble Yum–blocked esophagus, suspicion of catching an asthma bug from an unhygienic girl in third-period U.S. history, an occasion of sudden and unexpected partial blindness from looking at the sun for far too long, or the most predominant, a headache resulting from drinking an overly hot can of soda. And that is precisely how Maye joined the drama club and came to the acquaintance of Mrs. Gelding, drama instructor, who spoke in a falsetto, rolled her r’s, had a belly big enough to house a fifty-pound tumor that truly pushed the miracle stretch of her polyester slacks, and wore her hair in a tight little gray perm reminiscent of a young Roman boy. She was the director, choreographer, costume designer, hairstylist, makeup person, singing coach, and prop master for any and all theatrical productions at the bastion for the arts that was Maye’s suburban middle school. Mrs. Gelding, well into her sixties and unwilling to consider any production that she didn’t define as among “the classics,” ran the Drama Department on a shoestring budget, but given that her entire repertoire consisted of two alternating productions—H.M.S. Pinafore in the fall and The Pirates of Penzance in the spring—it was a rather easy swing. “The only difference between a sailor and a Keystone Kop,” she was fond of saying, “is the hat and a vice or two.” It was an easy sell, particularly since neither the students nor their parents ever truly understood the plays and thought they actually were the same production, year after year, as does a good percentage of suburban humanity, being that no one else really cares.
Maye’s mother had insisted that all of her children participate in at least one after-school activity for “socialization purposes” and, as Maye suspected, to extend her coffee-drinking-and-talking-on-the-phone-to-her-friends time for an extra hour. So instead of joining the basketball, softball, track, or any other kind of team that required sweating in private places, Maye signed up for drama. She was a sailor in the fall, a cop in the spring, and found out that the difference in the roles really was only a hat. She never had a line in either musical and blended in with all of the other eleven-and twelve-year-old girls who played sailors and cops and pirates with little tiny boobs when all each of them really wanted to do was wear a big frilly hoop skirt and sing a solo.
It was never to be.
Then, in the fall of her eighth-grade year, the drama club met to see which girl would be a pirate and which girl would be a cop, and an odd thing happened. The Drama Department received a windfall when the school budget was increased after the school won a lawsuit against the corn-dog distributor who had poisoned several seventh graders and the vice principal with rancid preformed and battered meat sticks. As Mrs. Gelding fought back tears of elation, she announced that instead of buying the sailors white costumes and the cops blackjacks, the money would be used to build a new set, since Pinafore and Penzance used the same one.
The drama club would embark on The Mikado, another musical by Gilbert and Sullivan, based in Japan but really a satire on the “notions and culture of Victorian England,” as Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia, will tell you. In other words, another production that seventh and eighth graders and their parents didn’t find entertaining, humorous, or in the least bit interesting and dreaded both performing and watching.
“Why can’t we do Grease?” asked a blond, petite girl with clear skin and a Pepsodent smile, an obvious first-draft pick for the role of Sandy. “Greenway Middle School got to do Grease! We want to do Grease!”
Mrs. Gelding’s tight little-boy perm visibly smoked with fury. “We will not do Grrrrrrease!” she said definitively and between clenched teeth. “I will not have that porrrrrnography on my stage. The lyrrrrrics to those ballads arrrrre filthy! We will do The Mikado. It’s a classic!”
And then Mrs. Gelding scanned the crop that lay before her and picked out the lassies with the darkest hair, because although she had a budget for a new set, there was no money for wigs and it was doubtful that any of the truly pretty girls would dye their flowing honey-blond hair Japanese black. “You,” she trilled, pointing to Maureen Zemora, a bespeckled chubby girl, the one Maye claimed to have caught asthma from. “Come, come. Up here. And you.” Mrs. Gelding pointed to Dawn Lee, who was taller than most boys in the school and had shoulders broader than the principal’s. “Come, come. And…and…and…you!” She pointed to Maye’s floppy, curly mass of dark brown hair that, in eighth grade, resembled the hind end of a labradoodle. “Come, come.”
“Yum-Yum, Peep-Bo, Pitti-Sing,” she said respectively, pointing to each girl and declaring her role. “Tonight, each of you must tell your mothers to buy you a shiny, long-sleeved robe that ties in
the front, unless you already have one at home. And be warned: if you show up in a robe better suited to a cast member of Three’s Company, consequences will be dealt accordingly. I will not tolerate the appearance of any triangles below the hemlines of your kimonos. I will give your role to a more respectable blond girl, and the audience will just have to use their imagination by pretending that she’s not.”
All the dark-haired lassies nodded.
“And make sure you wash the kimono before you bring it in here,” Mrs. Gelding said, her eyes boring into Maureen, who then, openmouthed, coughed.
When Maye went home and told her mother she needed a robe that would cover her cookie, her mother momentarily excused herself from her telephone conversation, put down her coffee, and said, “You know, it would be so much easier for this family if you would just run, Mayebelline. I’d only have to watch a two-minute race and shorts are five dollars.”
Maye stomped off to her room, where she sulked for nine minutes, wept for three, and then perched her ear dangerously close to her turntable speaker and listened to the Grease soundtrack, as did every other drama club member that afternoon. Those who had broader educations in the art of smut or who had siblings in high school indeed gasped, but most, like Maye, were left to conclude in silence that “pushy wagon” was just another term for an aggressively fast car, and as mentioned in the chorus, “Chixel Creme” was probably some sort of fancy 1950s motor oil. Nothing dirty there.
Six weeks later, Maye was sitting in a chair in a barely-below-her-cookie robe after it shrunk in the wash as Mrs. Gelding slathered on white oil-based stage makeup with a makeshift spatula like it was icing out of a can. She had spent half of a semester trying to strike a fragile Pitti-Sing balance between Maureen and Dawn, being that she was the cold cut in the Three Little Maids sandwich, since their musical number required some distressingly close contact. Maye tried painstakingly to (1) remain a minimum of four to six inches away from Maureen’s mysterious universe of a head, where undocumented species were rumored to roam and multiply, and (2) muffle her screams of alarm when the choreography called for the maids to turn sideways and lean on one another, in which Dawn would, with her Green Bay Packer body, attempt to surround and entomb Maye in a tomboy cocoon. This was a situation in which Maye once caught her encapsulator sniffing at her hair and eliciting what she hoped was a gas bubble but was most likely, in hindsight, a gurgle of thrill. Maye heard the same sound once more during the first and last performance of the Gelding Mikado, as she tried to be a demure maiden while painted up like a Storyville harlot and, as if in confirmation, looked down after she had just sung to the audience that “‘Life is a joke that’s just begun,’” to see her robe swinging wide open as if she were Hugh Hefner and learned a hard lesson that cheap, shiny, laundered polyester cannot be counted on to hold a respectable and sturdy bow.
“All I can say,” Maye’s mother declared that night as she threw Maye’s costume into the trunk of the car, “is thank God you wear shorts under everything since you got that running rash.”
A couple of decades later, Maye sat in Cynthia’s living room calling up her Mikado memories as three of her neighbors—who were too old to be simply grandmothers without a multitude of “great”s being placed before that title, let alone schoolgirls—pranced and flounced with what marginal dexterity their Edwardian period limbs could permit without simply snapping off like dead twigs and fluttering to the ground.
“Three little maids who, all unwary, / Come from a ladies’ seminary, / Freed from its genius tutelary,” the trio squawked, their rice-paper-thin voices wavering frilly and wandering off, on, and beyond key like an elephant on the savannah hit with a tranquilizer dart. The remainder of the party guests looked on with as much merriment as if they had front-row seats at a Broadway show. “‘Three little maids from school!’”
The audience, whom Maye now considered hostages, clapped wildly and cooed at the talents of their hostess and her maiden friends.
“Wasn’t that fun?” Cynthia said to her cohorts, slapping her palms against her knees. “That was delightful!”
“Where IS ALMA?” Agnes finally demanded. “I want my bowl! I am tired of waiting for her to return it, and I want my bowl back! That was my favorite bowl!”
“Oh dear,” Elsie said quietly, then covered her mouth with her fingers as she shook her head. “No one has told her about Alma’s move to the…other side.”
“Listen, Agnes,” one of the scooter women hastily offered. “If you’re lucky, you can buy it back at the estate sale on Saturday. That is, if her vulture daughter hasn’t kept it for herself! I’m going to have to buy my salad spinner back and my favorite half-slip! I’m telling all of you right now if you show up to my house for bunko with static cling and wet lettuce, I cannot help you fight that battle! You are on your own! Fair warning!”
“It starts at seven A.M., so we all have to be there early so we can get first pick,” Elsie said. “I’m up at four, so that’s no problem for me.”
“I’m up at three,” another woman boasted. “Did you know they moved The Rockford Files to five A.M.? What am I supposed to do for two hours? Oh, I wrote the TV station a nasty letter, I certainly did.”
“I noticed that,” Maude said, shaking her head in sorrow. “Now The Rockford Files and Matlock are on at the same time. I can’t choose! How can I choose? Thank God they left Columbo alone. I have no problem choosing between that and The View.”
“Oh, I have an idea!” Cynthia sang, shaking her finger as she disappeared into the next room. Within a minute, she was back with a black vinyl disc in her hand.
Oh, please, God, Maye thought desperately as she tightly closed her eyes and crossed her fingers so hard they turned white. If you are a merciful and kind and loving God, the kind of God who invented cotton candy and Oreo O’s cereal and S’Mores Pop-Tarts and not the kind of God who invented osteoporosis and colostomy bags and transparent skin, please let it be Grease! Grease is the word, is the word, is the word!
Instead, in a moment, the sound of an orchestra filled the living room, blanketed by the echoing scratches of an excessively played record. Suddenly, Cynthia was pretending to pull a rope, Maude jumped to her side and coiled an imaginary line between her hand and elbow, and Maye heard the alarming hum of numerous battery packs thrown into action as all hands assembled on deck until she was the only guest who hadn’t boarded a make-believe ship, except for the woman next to her, whom Maye feared had chosen to run into the light as opposed to sitting through the impromptu matinee of H.M.S. Pinafore that was unfolding near the divan.
“‘We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship’s a beauty,’” the sailors sang heartily to the opening tune. “‘We’re sober men and true, and attentive to our duty!’”
“Do you know the lyrics, dear?” Cynthia called out to her in between verses as she tugged on her mime rope.
Maye shook her head, adding a small shrug, hoping to secure her release with lies but wanting to add that a small hand mirror might be helpful as she pointed to her couch mate. Things were moving quickly along, however, there is simply no time to check for vital signs when a saucy fantasy ship needs to be polished and swept.
“Then enjoy and clap along!” her host shouted buoyantly before she and her mates attacked the chorus.
So Maye sat in her neighbor’s living room and clapped until her hands were as red, chapped, and sore as her forehead, and until both sides of the record had been played. Finally, she managed to escape when the Senior Dial-A-Ride Service bus pulled up in front of Cynthia’s house, and she hunched down and scrambled out with a herd of Legend XLs. When she got to the safety of the other side of the street without looking back, she breathed a deep sigh of relief and then realized that she was still completely friendless.
4
It’s Just a Thing I Do
How do I do this? Maye wondered.
I have been in this town for over a month, and so far, I have an enemy-combatant mailman, my husban
d’s entire department and his boss have seen my boobs shake like maracas in one of my oldest and least supportive bras, I’m pretty sure I watched an old woman die during an afternoon tea party, and the closest friend I have right now is my lawn guy, who has clearly inhaled more than his share of chemicals and believes that raccoons will pluck my eyeballs out and eat them like olives.
How do I make a friend? How does a childless woman in her mid-thirties who works at home meet people in a new town where she knows no one who actually likes her?
I just want one, Maye repeated over and over again in her head. Just one. One friend to go to lunch with, one friend to call when something funny happens, one friend to go shopping with. Maybe she was asking too much, she reminded herself. She had read once in a magazine that once you moved to a new place, it took three years to build a circle of friends. Still, that hadn’t stopped her from gently spying on other women’s grocery carts, taking inventory of their contents to see if they had anything in common. A bottle of decent-enough wine, a nice cheese, a baguette, and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s were to Maye sinful signals of definite friend potential, someone who wasn’t afraid to get tipsy on a Wednesday night, eat a little dairy fat spread on a carbohydrate, and had no fear of chocolate ice cream teamed with Marshmallow Fluff and graham cracker ribbons. Maye’s kinda girl. Anyone whose shopping cart contained juice boxes, diapers, yard-long family packs of chicken thighs, incense, and Tofurkys was immediately disqualified, because Maye knew that if you let those sorts of people in, the next thing you know, a dirty, hemp-cloaked two-year-old is throwing up soy milk on you at a patchouli-scented barbecue where you’re trying to eat a limp, flaccid, tasteless tofu dog on a spelt bun that weighs as much as an adult human head and is as dense as most, too.
There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 Page 6