Claire opened her eyes with a start. What had she been thinking?! She was here to divorce Ollie, not have happily ever after with her!
To take her mind off Ollie, Claire opened the goody bag the Christians had given her and looked inside. There was a pocket-sized New Testament with the words of Jesus printed in red. There was a cartoon pamphlet entitled, “Jesus is coming again.” That made Claire think sexual thoughts and then she thought she was probably going to hell for thinking sexual thoughts about Jesus. But now that she was already going to hell for those thoughts, she allowed herself to acknowledge that she had always had a thing for Jesus. He was a little on the feminine side. Long hair, nice complexion, big sorrowful eyes. He resembled her first crush, Roseanna Funghini, in the eleventh grade. Roseanna was Italian and Jesus was some kind of Middle Eastern but their skin tones matched and they both had facial hair.
She pulled out the next item. Score! It was chocolate. A milk chocolate figurine of Jesus on the cross. She hurriedly unwrapped it and bit off Jesus’s feet. She immediately felt better. She nibbled at his ears and then nipped off his hands. This was how she always ate the chocolate bunnies at Easter. First the extremities, saving the body for last.
She heard a car door slam and looked up to see Ollie sprinting across the road toward her.
“Hi, Ollie!” Claire said brightly. Chocolate had that effect on her.
Ollie tripped up the broken sidewalk and stood panting in front of her. “You’re okay? Those Stepford people didn’t do anything to you?”
Claire shook her head and said, “Want some Jesus?”
“Oh my God, they brainwashed you,” Ollie uttered. “They turned you into a Christian.”
Claire laughed and held out the chocolate. “I meant my chocolate. I saved his torso for you. There’s almonds in it.”
“No, thanks,” Ollie said. She watched Claire nibble at the candy for a moment, wondering if she really did save the middle of Jesus for her. “I thought you were allergic to nuts.”
“I’m not eating his nuts,” Claire quipped. “That would be sacrilegious.”
Ollie laughed. Very few people in this world could make Ollie laugh like Claire did. The old Claire anyway. This new Scarlet-improved-uptight-and-prissy Claire was a stranger to her.
“So…I see you found the place with no trouble,” Ollie said for lack of anything better to say.
Claire nodded. “Yup. I remembered the address.” She tapped her temple. “I never forget numbers, remember? I can recite every telephone number that I’ve ever dialed.”
“Even mine?” Ollie said, before she could stop herself.
“Even yours.” They looked at each other.
“Been inside yet?” Ollie said, breaking the spell.
“I don’t have a key.”
Ollie walked over to the front door, turned the knob and the door swung open with an ominous creak.
Hawkeyes and Hedgehogs
Ollie tied Oscar to the porch railing by his leash. “Stay there, Oscar, until I check things out.”
G-Ray and a wide-awake EZ joined Ollie and Claire on the front porch. The group peered through the doorway into the dark bowels of the house.
“What do we really know about this house?” Claire asked in a shaky voice. “This could be the Amityville Horror house for all we know.”
“Or it could be like one of those Scooby-Doo houses,” G-Ray added.
They looked at G-Ray with puzzled expressions. He explained further, “You know, in the cartoon there were always these haunted mansions and bleep. The meddling kids were always solving ghostly mysteries in houses just like this one.”
“Well, I think it’s the perfect backdrop for our film,” EZ said.
Ollie tried to put a good spin on the situation. “It is a nice neighborhood.” That came out sounding more fake than sincere, but she couldn’t help it. What did they really know about this woman who owned it? First off, not to be ageist and sexist, but when G-Ray had said he’d gotten a house-sitting gig from a film professor at the college, she’d envisioned a hipster thirty-something man with a goatee and long hair. Like a really hip Robbie Benson, actor turned professor. Not a crazy cat lady living in a haunted crap hole.
“Who wants to go in first?” Claire asked.
“Not me,” G-Ray said. “I turn all Don Knottsy when I come face to face with my own mortality.”
EZ shook her head. “I have to stay un-stressed or I’ll fall asleep. If I fall asleep in there I might get eaten alive by feral cats.”
Ollie reached one arm through the doorway and groped around until she found a light switch and flipped it on.
They gasped in unison. It was decidedly worse in the light. Newspapers and magazines were stacked floor to ceiling. Sofas and chairs were buried under the papers with only their legs and arms visible. Wallpaper was peeling. Cobwebs dangled from the overhead light and were draped in the ceilings corners. And Ollie wasn’t sure, but that looked like a dead cat in the corner. It was all very Grey Gardens.
“Let’s get a hotel room,” Claire said.
“We don’t all have fat bank accounts,” Ollie said testily.
“And that’s my fault? You’re the one who wanted to paint crabs for a living,” Claire said back twice as testily.
“We can’t go to a hotel, man. I promised to take care of the place,” G-Ray said.
“Forget it. I’ll go in,” Claire said much more bravely than she actually felt. “If I don’t come back tell Scarlet I love her.”
G-Ray saluted her. Ollie watched Claire step inside the house and weave around the stacks of papers. After a minute, she was gone from view.
“Maybe we should’ve given her some breadcrumbs so she could leave a trail,” Ollie said.
“Wouldn’t work,” EZ countered. “The rats would just eat them.”
“We could poison the breadcrumbs. Then she could follow the trail of dead rats back to us,” G-Ray said.
Claire screamed from somewhere in back of the house. It wasn’t a little girlie scream either. This was a full-throated I-just-saw-Freddy-Krueger type of scream.
Ollie didn’t think twice. She charged into the house full-steam ahead. “I’m coming, Claire! I’ll save you!” she said as she darted around the stacks of papers.
*
As it turned out, Claire didn’t need saving. What she needed was to stop screaming. Ollie was damn near deaf by the time she arrived in the kitchen to find Claire doing a great impersonation of the Home Alone kid. Ollie struck a threatening pose – hands fisted and raised, her feet shoulder-width apart just like her dad taught her. Ollie looked around the kitchen but didn’t see anything except a sink full of dirty dishes and the grossest room she had ever personally witnessed. True, that was enough to frighten your average person, but to actually make them scream?
Claire pointed at the thing that had made her go all bat shit. Ollie saw a tiny furry butt sticking out of a tipped-over box of Captain Crunch cereal.
“What is that thing?” Ollie asked. “Is it a rat?”
Claire didn’t answer. She was too busy re-filling her lungs for the next scream.
“Please don’t scream,” Ollie said. “My ears are ringing.”
Claire pointed one finger at the furry thing and said, “It’s a rodent.”
G-Ray and EZ appeared in the kitchen. G-Ray’s helmet cam was on. “Check it, Doods. That must be the elusive hawkeye.”
“What’s a hawkeye?” EZ asked.
“It’s the Iowa state rodent,” G-Ray said. “At least I think it is.”
The furry critter backed out of the cereal box, turned around and looked at them. He had a pointed nose and longish whiskers and was absolutely adorable.
“Awwww,” EZ said. “He’s a cutie patootie.”
“You won’t think he’s so cute when he’s chewing on your toes in the middle of the night,” Claire said.
“You know what that is?” Ollie said. “It’s a hedgehog.”
“Hedgehog?” Claire
said.
Ollie nodded. “They’re domesticated. They won’t eat you.”
G-Ray spoke next, “I dunno. I’ve heard stories about pet dogs eating babies. They’re supposedly domesticated, too.”
EZ reached out and picked up the hedgehog. She nestled him to her chest and tickled his whiskers with a finger. “He’s so tiny. No way he could eat a whole baby.”
“Sssshhhh,” Claire said. “Listen.”
They all cocked their ears. Sure enough, they heard what sounded like the front door squeak. Shuffling feet. Heavy breathing. Rhythmic tapping. As if on cue, they all dove under the table and huddled together.
The noises stopped. After a moment of silence, Ollie whispered, “Why are we hiding?”
“Because that was the noise of an intruder. Or a ghost. This house gives me the creeps,” Claire answered. “It’s haunted and or it could be a hideout for a band of killers.”
A shadow appeared through the kitchen doorway and loomed over the table. It was the shadow of a tall, skinny maniacal killer with Einstein-esque hair.
Ollie held her breath.
The shadow moved further into the room. And was slowly followed by a small, wrinkled woman with gray, unbrushed hair, holding a white cane.
Ollie could breathe again. Unless this eighty-pound old lady had an AK-47 hidden in the waistband of her Depends, she didn’t think she was going to turn out to be a maniacal killer.
All four watched closely as the old woman shuffled into the kitchen. She tapped her cane lightly in front of her as she moved. It dawned on Ollie that the woman was blind. They watched the woman move around the kitchen with her cane. She bent, opened a cupboard, and reached inside.
Claire elbowed Ollie in the ribs and whispered. “Say something to her.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Introduce us or something.”
“How do I explain us being under the table?”
Claire rolled her eyes. “She’s blind. She doesn’t know we’re under the table.”
Claire had a point. Ollie cleared her throat to get the woman’s attention. The last thing she wanted to do was scare the woman into a heart attack. Or make her bleep her support hose. “Hello, ma’am? My name’s Ollie. And this is Claire, G-Ray and EZ. We’re the house sitters.”
The blind woman didn’t acknowledge Ollie’s introduction. Ollie spoke louder in case she was hard of hearing. “Hello? Ma’am? Did you hear me?”
There was no response. The blind woman opened a bag of dried cat food. She filled a bowl with Kit-n-Kaboodle and set it on the floor.
“Ma’am?” Ollie said, again.
The old woman tapped out of the kitchen and back the way she came.
“She didn’t hear me,” Ollie said. “She must be deaf, too.”
“What should we do?” EZ said.
“My tocks are cramping,” G-Ray said. “Can we get out from under the table now?”
“Oh, yeah,” EZ said. “Good idea.”
They climbed out from under the table and brushed off their hands and knees. As soon as the front door squeaked shut, Ollie looked out the side window and narrated like a sports commentator: “I see the blind deaf lady. She’s cutting across the yard. She’s walking up the neighbor’s sidewalk to the house. She’s opening the front door. She’s going inside. She’s gone.”
EZ snapped her fingers. “Aha! That means one of two things. She’s either the neighbor lady or she’s a serial cat feeder that roams the neighborhood pouring kibble into bowls.”
“Your deductive reasoning powers are stupendous,” G-Ray said.
“Thank you,” EZ replied.
“Blind and deaf,” Ollie said. “What’re the odds? How do we tell her that we’re here now and she can stop feeding the cats?”
“I’m glad you asked that,” Claire said. “I once played Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker at Eastman Junior High. What we need to do is learn the deaf alphabet and spell it into her hand.”
They mulled that over. Finally, Ollie said, “Or we could ignore her and let her continue feeding the cats.”
“I vote for that,” G-Ray said.
“Me, too,” EZ said.
“What cats?” Claire asked.
They looked around. Claire was right, there were no cats to be seen.
“There is a bowl of kibble and no cats. Either they’re hiding or they’re… gone,” Claire said.
“By gone do you mean…?” EZ asked.
Claire nodded and whispered ominously, “Over the Rainbow Bridge.”
“Then who’s eating all the cat food that the blind lady dishes out every day?” Ollie asked.
“See, man, I knew there was a Scooby Doo mystery in this house,” G-Ray said.
At that moment, the hedgehog spied the cat food and leapt from EZ’s arms to the floor. With his nose quivering and his whiskers twitching, he ran to the kibble bowl and dove in face first.
“Mystery solved,” Claire said.
EZ Speaks
EZ was not only wide-awake but she was in hyper-drive. She looked at the camera and talked quickly like her tongue had trouble forming the words as fast as her brain could think them. “Sixteen Candles is perhaps the greatest movie ever made. It has everything. Coming of age, romance, mystery. John Hughes is a genius. He’s my idol. I hope to someday make a film as great as Sixteen Candles. I’ll get Bananarama and the Bangles and the Go-Gos to do the soundtrack. It’ll be about lesbians, though, a lesbian Sixteen Candles. Can’t you see it?”
G-Ray’s voice came from behind the camera lens, “Tell us about your sleeping, man. People are going to want to know about your sleeping all the time.”
“Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” EZ asked, doing a pretty good impersonation of Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes.
“The way you fall asleep, man, all of sudden like,” G-Ray said.
“Oh, that. Well…,” EZ hemmed, “it’s not that big of a deal. It’s a minor, really minor, tiny really, problem. A couple months ago, I went to a Bananrama concert with my girlfriend and caught her in the bathroom sucking face with this other girl. Gag me with a spoon! And it was right in the middle of the encore of “Venus.” I booked it out of there and hitched a ride home. Mary, that was my girlfriend’s name, was already there because she had the car. She brought the skag with her. And they were making out in my bed. I kinda freaked, I’m not proud to say, and started screaming and shi… bleep. Sorry. I screamed and bleep. Then Mary picked up the clock from the nightstand and threw it at me. It clipped me on the side of the head and I looked down and the clock was broken. Shattered. It had those digital numbers that flapped over and over to different times, but it was stopped. And a drop of blood from my tattered ear splatted on the clock face and that’s the last thing I remember.”
G-Ray said, “So time stopped for you? Literally and figuratively?”
“When I woke up Mary had taken everything in the apartment. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to jet. I’m writing my screenplay and I’m at a really crucial part.”
“You’re working on the lesbian Sixteen Candles?”
“Yeah, but it’s more like Sixteen Candles meets The Facts of Life. Totally outer limits, right? Except in this one the character of Jo falls in love with Blair and they ride into the sunset on Jo’s Harley. Won’t that be the bomb? I call it The Burning Vulva. That’s just a working title. I want to cast Kristy McNichol in the Jo part and Molly Ringwald as Blair. I’ve already written like a hundred letters to Molly and Kristy, but haven’t heard back yet. I might have to cast Melissa Gilbert and Valerie Bertinelli if they don’t get back to me.”
“Good luck with that,” G-Ray said.
“Thanks.” EZ left, shutting the door behind her.
The camera turned until G-Ray’s face filled the tiny screen. He whispered, “She still thinks it’s 1987.”
Whoopsy
The good thing about having a roommate who was a narcoleptic was that when she was awake she stayed awake for a long time. While
the rest of the crew staked out bedrooms upstairs and slept through the night, EZ cleaned the entire house, top to bottom.
Claire had chosen her room because it had a Murphy bed. The bed was built into the wall and folded and unfolded. You could put it up when you wanted more floor space and bring it down when you wanted to sleep. There was also a dresser and a small nightstand with a reading lamp. It was sparse, but that appealed to her sense of order and simplicity.
When Claire padded down the stairs in her stocking feet the next morning she felt like Dorothy seeing colorful Munchkinland for the first time. With the stacks of newspapers gone, the place looked totally different. And it was so clean! You could see where the house had been lived in, and lived in hard, but the bones were good and it was quite comfortable.
Sunlight streamed through the open drapes and what had been spooky yesterday looked quite cheerful today. There was a marble fireplace in the living room and a set of leather furniture. Oil paintings of cows and ducks and black and white framed photographs of long-dead people hung from the walls. Even the hardwood floors were gleaming.
Claire followed her nose to the kitchen where EZ was cooking pancakes and bacon. “Did I die in the middle of the night?” Claire asked. “Because I think I’m in heaven.”
“I know, right?” Ollie said from her seat at the table. “EZ not only cleaned the entire house, but she went grocery shopping and made a delicious breakfast.”
Claire accepted a cup of coffee from Ollie. Claire sipped and smiled. “You remembered how I like it.”
She sat down at the table across from Ollie. EZ put a heaping plate of food in front of her. “You’re going to make somebody a good wife, EZ.”
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