Cheapskate in Love

by Booth, Skittle

  After a few chapters, she grew tired of the simplistic rules and clichés of the book and threw it aside. “No one’s going to become rich reading that,” she said aloud. “The only person who’s going to benefit from that book is the author.”

  For a while, she watched Bill sleep. There was a pained look on his face and in his posture from the accident, but she thought there was also a stillness, a greater appearance of relaxation than she had ever seen in him before. Perhaps, it was the effect of the codeine that he had taken. Perhaps, it was due to her presence. She preferred to think that the second explanation was the more accurate one. When she had seen him around other women or in one of his relationships that he told everyone about, bragging like a teenager, he always seemed to be acting a part. He never seemed emotionally involved with the woman. Most of the time, it appeared he was trying to manipulate those women into liking him, without truly liking them in return. He should feel more relaxed around me, Helen thought, because he’s certainly not trying to impress me. In fact, he doesn’t do anything for me at all, unless giving me a faded bouquet counts.

  Such a realization would prompt most people to do nothing for someone whom they thought was doing nothing for them, but Helen was magnanimous by nature. She didn’t want a man treating her like a relative of the queen of England, putting on an elaborate show to please her. She wasn’t insecure or self-centered, a fussy orchid that would expire without the perfect, coddling climate. She was more like an oak tree, sturdy and strong. She wanted to be appreciated for who she was and what she did. Since she was tired of sitting around being useless, she decided to wash the dirty dishes in Bill’s apartment. She simply had to do something, while she was there.

  That decision of small importance precipitated a sequence of related actions, and soon she was involved in a full-scale reorganization and cleaning of the apartment. While collecting the dirty dishes scattered around the studio, she discovered that the refrigerator contained spoiled food. Without much hesitation—who else was going to do this, she thought—she removed everything from the refrigerator and freezer. Then she cleaned the appliance’s inside surfaces, which probably had not been done for twenty years, and put back in only what was fresh. The kitchen cabinets received a similar treatment. All edibles for which the expiration date had passed were tossed out, and all dining and cooking wares were sorted and stored in an orderly fashion. The countertop, backsplash, and floor were thoroughly scoured and mopped. The kitchen was a vastly different place when she was done. Twenty years of use had been wiped clean.

  Surveying the rest of the apartment, Helen perceived a greater domain of dirt and disorganization than the kitchen had been. A weaker person would have picked up the bible, lowered herself or himself onto the couch and read, especially Psalms and its lamentations, until Bill awoke. Helen, however, took a deep breath and started to work. She could not sit and be idle, pretending to read in such an indoor wilderness, when she had just tamed the kitchen outback and returned it to a civilized form. “There is a time for everything,” she said wisely, paraphrasing the third chapter of Ecclesiastes and adding a new twist. “The time has come to clean this sty completely.”

  She collected the dirty clothing scattered around the studio and piled them near the door to take to the laundry room. Going through the items on the dining table and chairs, she found a better place for things she thought worth keeping in closets or kitchen cabinets. The things she thought were worthless, which was the majority of items, she put in the best place possible: The trash room in the hallway. She did the same with other objects that were scattered throughout the apartment. Even the contents in the closets were picked through. When she had finished sifting through almost everything in Bill’s apartment, the trash room was overflowing with empty boxes, worn out shoes, frayed clothing, parts of a bicycle, broken umbrellas, a defunct vacuum cleaner, burnt pans, junk mail, and an abundance of odds and ends of no clear value. She had discovered that he had a miser’s tendency for hoarding items, although she couldn’t understand how he thought that some of the stuff could ever be used again. He had an overwhelming inertia, she decided, when it came to personal tidiness. At first, she had been hesitant to toss items out, but the more she saw, the more certain she became that he had the habits of a pack rat and couldn’t do it himself. Ruthlessly, she rid the apartment of what she considered unnecessary. She then dusted, swept, and scrubbed all the surfaces in the apartment. The floor was parquet wood tiles, and she washed it on her hands and knees, changing the soapy water every ten square feet because it became so black so quickly.

  Bill’s apartment literally sparkled when she was done. She looked around in satisfaction at her efforts. The furniture, floors, bathroom, and windows all glowed with the removal of years of dust, dirt, scum, and grime. All the smaller objects in the space were now neat and tidy. She smiled at what she had accomplished, until her eyes turned toward the bed and its occupant, and then she frowned. One last project demanded her attention.

  Determined, she approached the bed. Bill was snoring heavily. Although there had been a few periods, while she scoured and straightened, in which his snoring had been replaced with quiet breathing, the sounds of a chainsaw had resumed. They would have unnerved a timid person, but they did not alarm her. With delicate hands, she unlaced Bill’s muddy shoes and pulled them off. Next, she took off his mud-splattered socks. Then she unbuckled his dirty pants and yanked those off, too. She decided to leave his soiled polo shirt on, because she thought he might be upset if she used a pair of scissors to remove it, but that was a difficult decision. The cheap shirt had made the bed dirty, and her hands were itching to rip it off him. Yet she knew that men can be childishly attached to old clothing for no good reason. Her deceased husband had been like that. To calm her offended sensibility, she pulled the top sheet and bedspread up to the chin of the sound sleeper. He had not moved during her disrobing operations.

  “As soon as you wake up,” she said to sleeping Bill, as she stood next to him, “I’m going to strip every piece of clothing from you. I want to shave your head, too. What did you do to it? It looks awful. You’re definitely no sleeping beauty with that hair. ”

  Since he was traveling far away in the land of Nod and couldn’t reply, her judgment went uncontested. She looked down upon him with the pleasure that comes from feeling indisputably in the right. Victory, however, did not make her proud, for immediately she went to the laundry room to wash his dirty clothes.

  Chapter 11

  Later on that evening around seven, after Helen had neatly stored away Bill’s now clean clothes in his closets and dresser, she brought bags of food supplies and the necessary cooking utensils to his apartment from hers to make chicken soup. She thought the soup would do him some good, when he woke up. While she chopped vegetables and cooked the meal, he continued to sleep and snore and didn’t appear to be any nearer to rising. She had worked hard cleaning his apartment and couldn’t postpone her dinner, so when the soup was ready, she sat down at the dining table and ate. It had been many, many years since a dinner had been eaten at that table.

  The aroma of well-made chicken soup filled the apartment. It was the finest smell of food to ever originate in that space since Bill had lived there, and he was drawn from unconsciousness by the delicious odor. His raucous snoring subsided to the quiet rise and fall of normal breathing. He was no longer sleeping, but he lay still with his eyes shut, sniffing like someone who lies in a meadow during spring, when wildflowers are blooming, and the air is rich with the scent of life and growing things. In his semi-conscious state, he associated the smell with Linda, who was an excellent cook, although she mostly made stir-fries. He could distinguish the sounds of someone in his apartment, and in his drowsiness he could not think of who else might be there. He opened his eyes. That was one of the few parts of his body that he could move easily and the only part he dared to move at the moment, so he lay looking blearily at the ceiling.

  “Linda, is that you?” he a
sked, in the smoothest voice his injured state allowed, hoping without any justification that she had come to look after him. In his poorly functioning brain, he thought that maybe his injury had triggered a delayed compassion on her part.

  “Bill, you’re awake,” Helen said in surprise. She quickly left the table and went to him. “How are you feeling?”

  He did not feel grateful. Immediately, he knew who was talking to him. He now became fully alert. “You’re still here?” he grumbled nastily. “I said you could go.”

  “How could I leave you all alone, when you’re paralyzed? I couldn’t leave a dog or cat alone in your condition.” Helen spoke to him firmly yet gently, like a nurse tending to a crotchety, old man, which Bill was well on his way to becoming.

  “I’m not paralyzed,” he argued. “I can get up. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need any babysitter. I’ll show you.” With an abundance of grunting, groaning, and gritting his teeth, Bill slowly succeeded in raising himself into a sitting position in bed. The codeine had made it possible for him to sit up, but movement was still painful, and he was sweating in agony from the exertion. “See. I’m fine,” he rasped.

  Helen could contain her laughter, but not her smiling. “Would you like to join me for dinner then?” she asked. “I’ll set a place on the table for you. While you were sleeping, I did a little cleaning, and there’s room now to eat.”

  She went to the kitchen to fetch another place setting for Bill, and he looked at the table. He couldn’t believe it was empty of everything except Helen’s dishes. It appeared to be a mirage to him. He had to confirm with his hands that the mound of clutter had been removed.

  With a vigorous sweep of his left arm, he threw off the bedspread and top sheet, and swung his legs over the side of the bed, as quickly as he could. He was about to push himself into a standing position, when Helen came from the kitchen, which was an enclosed space near the entrance to the apartment, and he realized he was not wearing any shoes, socks, or pants. Rapidly, he whipped the bed sheet back over his lower half. “What happened to my pants?” he exclaimed in surprise. He knew he had been wearing pants.

  “Oh, I washed them,” she said, as she set a place for him on the table. She didn’t think a man without pants, especially a man her age, a shocking novelty. She barely glanced at Bill in his boxer shorts and didn’t understand why he appeared to be so agitated. A long, happy married life does away with such prudery.

  “How did you do that?” he asked in exasperation.

  “With a washing machine,” she said matter-of-factly, “although I had to pre-scrub the dirt stains first. You went for some hike yesterday.”

  “How did my pants come off?” he insisted.

  “Oh, I took them off. Give me that shirt now. I wanted to cut it off while you slept. It’s so filthy. But I thought you would complain if I did that. I’ll take your underwear now, too.” Helen walked toward Bill to help him take off the last of his clothes.

  “No! Stay away!” he yelled. “You will not take my underwear. Don’t come near me. How can you barge into my apartment and take off my pants? Just like that? Without asking?”

  “How else could I wash them? You were asleep.”

  “Who asked you to wash them?” he replied. “Who asked you clean off the dining table?”

  “I cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, every part of your apartment. The floor in this place was black with grime. It must have been years since this place was totally cleaned.”

  “Who asked you to?” he huffed accusingly. “Who wanted you to come in here and do anything? Did I ask you? Did I tell you to make dinner?”

  “Is somebody else going to do it?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Bill spluttered with as much force as he could. “You have no right to be here, acting as if you own the place. You don’t own the place. I do.”

  “You’re a renter.”

  “I pay the rent,” he snapped.

  Helen thought that this conversation was ridiculous, but she smothered her smiles. She could see that he was obviously in a bad mood, because of the pain he suffered. She thought that the quickest way to bring him around to some common sense was to ask, “Would you like me to leave?”

  “Yes,” he affirmed loudly without hesitation.

  She went to collect her belongings, including the soup. While she was making preparations to go, Bill thought about what her leaving meant. The sound of the lid being slammed on the soup kettle helped facilitate his reflections, as she intended. In a more ingratiating voice than he had previously used, he said, “Wait a minute. You can go as soon as you bring me my food. Since I don’t have any pants on, I have to stay here.”

  She could have replied it wouldn’t matter what he had on or off, once she left, and he could eat whatever he pleased, except for her soup, but she was not a spiteful person. She had come to help him, and even if he was irritable and selfish, she would do what she could for him. However, she was going to have her way a little, too. “Certainly,” she replied. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to eat dinner here, too, while it’s still warm. Is that all right with you?”

  As much as he didn’t want to, he saw that he had to agree, if he wanted dinner. “This time. Never again.”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to eat after tonight, you can barely move,” she answered. She pulled out a tray from a kitchen cabinet to put his dinner on.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he grumbled. “I can manage.” From the kitchen, she heard him moaning and groaning, as he moved to sit in the bed with his back against the headboard.

  “Are you OK?” she asked, coming out of the kitchen. “You sound as if you were in a serious car accident. I think you should see a doctor.”

  “All I want is my dinner,” he shot back. “Then you can go. I’m fine. I don’t want any more medical advice.”

  You need more than advice, she thought to herself, going back into the kitchen. You need a good kick in the rear. But she said nothing to him. He had put her in a bad mood, too.

  Soon she brought him a tray of food. They ate in silence, she at the table and he in bed. They were so annoyed with each other that they tried to look anywhere in the apartment, except at each other. Still, from time to time, despite how angry they were, they glanced in the other’s direction, immediately looking away, if the other one noticed. Stealing such glances was the natural thing to do, and it probably meant nothing. After all, they were the only two people in the room.

  Chapter 12

  Dinner was not followed by dessert or anything sweet. Saying few words and receiving only silent gestures in return, Helen collected the food tray from Bill and carried it to the kitchen, where she left it on the counter. He could wash the dirty dishes when she was gone, she mused ironically, since he claimed to feel all right, and she had made dinner. Taking a more pragmatic view of the situation, she was sure he would let the dirty dishes pile up again as they had before, so what did it matter if she started the pile. Cockroaches would be feasting there soon enough. She packed her bags with the items she had brought, including the soup she had made, and walked with them to the door. There, a generous, spontaneous urge got hold of her once more, and she turned toward Bill, saying, “If you need anything, you can ask the front desk to call me. I’ll be glad to come back. It’s no problem.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he replied, breaking his surly wordlessness.

  “There’s not much codeine in that bottle, but I don’t have any more. Regular aspirin is all that I have in my apartment.”

  “It’ll be enough,” he said, nodding at the bottle on his dresser.

  “I’ll let the front desk know that they should check on you.”

  “That’s not necessary. I don’t need any help. I’m fine,” he assured her, although signs of pain were clearly visible in his face.

  She opened the door, and then turned back to him with a new thought. “Let me give you my number in case there’s an emergency.”
/>   “No, I don’t need it,” he replied.

  “Are you sure you don’t want my number? Your sister doesn’t live close by. I can be here in minutes.”

  “No. I don’t need your number. I’ll be all right. With a little more sleep, I’ll feel like myself again. I just had a slight fall, when I lost my footing on a trail,” he explained. He was becoming quite a talker.

  “OK, then. Goodnight.” She opened the door again.

  “Bye,” he said. Something like sadness or gratitude, or maybe it was only perfunctory politeness, seized him, and he added, “Thanks for cleaning the place. It looks better.”

  She smiled, turning toward him. She had some friendly advice to share. “You should have someone clean your apartment every week. You’re too old to live like a college student. It doesn’t cost much. The woman who comes to my apartment every other week would probably charge you fifty dollars. She asks more from me, but I have a two bedroom. Your place is small. Do you want her number?”

  The momentary improvement in Bill’s disposition disappeared. He felt insulted. It was more than he could stand, because she seemed to him entirely unconscious of her triple attack upon him. First—and most importantly—he was not old. Second, the maid was too expensive. Third, his apartment was large enough, more than large enough. His face froze into a mask of glaring granite, like the twisted grimace of an angry god carved by ancient Mayan sculptors. “No,” he rebuked her in a thundering voice with flashing eyes. “You can go now.” He motioned her out of his apartment, as if he were commanding a victim to ascend the steps of an Aztec temple to be sacrificed.

  “OK. It was just a suggestion,” she replied, unawed by his imperious manner and unsurprised by his response, since what she had suggested would be an expense, and she knew how he felt about spending. “I hope you feel better soon,” she said cheerfully. Those words placated the minor deity a little, but he was still glad to see her exit his apartment, taking all of her advice with her.