It's a Wonderful Knife

by Elise Sax

  In the kitchen, Lucy, Bridget and her baby, and my grandmother were already assembled. I assumed that Matilda was still asleep in the guest room, if she had managed to fall asleep. “Happy day-before-your-wedding-day,” my friends announced.

  “We wanted to make sure that you were okay after the christening,” Bridget said. “Don’t worry about the naked pictures. No one will remember them.”

  I had the feeling that everyone in town would remember my nudie pictures, pretty much forever, and that it would be written down in the official lore of Cannes for eternity. Nevertheless, I was overcome with the kindness of their gesture. There was nothing better than having good friends.

  “I brought a gourmet breakfast,” Lucy announced. “But I’m going to call that chef, because the food tastes off to me.”

  “It tastes great to me,” Bridget said. “Maybe you’re still recovering from your food poisoning. Zelda, is the food safe?”

  “Totally safe, but I think that Lucy should probably get to a doctor soon. Or maybe just the pharmacy.”

  Lucy gasped. “Should I be afraid, Zelda?”

  “No, Lucy dear. Everything will be fine in the end. Nothing to worry about at all.”

  Lucy fanned herself and giggled slightly. “Oh, thank goodness. You had me worried. For a minute, I thought there was something wrong with me.”

  My grandmother caught my eye. If it had been serious, Grandma wouldn’t have hesitated to tell Lucy, but there was definitely something wrong.

  We sat at the table, drank coffee, and ate a variety of delicious breakfast pastries. We gossiped and talked about all the funny things that happened since I moved into town and we all became best friends.

  Most of the misadventures weren’t funny at the time, but now, looking back at it, we couldn’t help but laugh. For instance, there was the time that Spencer broke Lucy’s taillight and arrested me for it.

  “I bet he was in love with you even then,” Bridget said. “Even though he said you were a pain in the ass.”

  We talked about the cult that invaded the town, about the evil doctors at Westside Hospital, the airplane that crashed into my house, and of course, catching all the killers.

  “It’s a miracle you survived, Gladie,” Lucy said. “I’ve never been happier in my life since I got you as a friend, no matter how dangerous it’s been.”

  “Me, too,” Bridget said.

  I got up and went around the table, hugging my best friends. They had become more than just friends. They were my family. I was lucky to know that they would always be there for me, and I knew that I would be there for them, too.

  Lucy dabbed at her eyes. “Damn it. I’m messing up my makeup. I don’t know why I’m so emotional lately. I guess it’s the wedding.”

  “I’m emotional, too,” Bridget said, wiping her eyes under her glasses.

  “It’s an emotional time,” Grandma said. “Love is the queen of emotions. And it’s contagious.”

  I wondered if that was true about love. Was it catching? Was that why matchmaking was such a profitable business, because one love match sparked another?

  Grandma passed a piece of paper across the table to me. “Bird made an appointment for you at Muffy & Dicks today, dolly. You’re getting waxed and a deep conditioning treatment on your hair. I mean, the hair on your head. I don’t think you’ll have any other hair after they get done with you.”

  Ugh. Weddings were painful.

  “Would you pick me up a honey baked ham while you’re there?” Grandma asked. “I heard they sell humdingers.”

  Spencer walked in with Peter. They were both wearing jeans and Padres jerseys. Spencer’s hair was mussed for a change, and he was giddy with the surprise of his older brother’s visit. He looked five years younger and twenty times sexier.

  “I’m stealing Spencer away for the day and pretty much all the evening,” Peter announced. “I’ll try to return him in relatively good shape. Oh, who am I kidding? He’ll be in bad shape. But hopefully he won’t have spinal fractures or brain damage. Although, how could you tell if he had brain damage?”

  Spencer put Peter into a chokehold. Peter got out of it easily and threw Spencer down on the floor. They wrestled for another five minutes before they finally managed to leave.

  “Boys,” Grandma said, as if that said it all, and maybe it did.

  “Good morning,” Matilda said, meekly. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, too timid to walk in without an invitation. Grandma put her arms around her and brought her into the room. I introduced her to my friends, and again, I was struck by how much I liked Matilda. She was a lot like me, but she had had a rough time.

  And then there was her husband, Rockwell. It was still up in the air whether Rockwell was a good guy or a bad guy, but one thing I knew for certain: Rockwell was no Spencer.

  “I’m lucky,” I said, out loud. A heat crept up my face, and I was sure that I had turned crimson. I plopped down on my chair and stuffed a muffin in my face so that they wouldn’t notice my blush.

  Matilda seemed to notice my embarrassment and changed the subject. “I love this house,” she said. “So much history. So cozy.”

  “Did you sleep?” my grandmother asked.

  “I never sleep. Oh!” she exclaimed and checked the stove. “I turned it off,” she said with a mix of relief and surprise. “I used it in the middle of the night and remembered to turn it off. That’s great. I haven’t had any episode since I’ve been here. Do you think the therapy worked?”

  “No, I don’t think the therapy did anything,” I said.

  “What kind of episodes?” Bridget asked.

  “Forgetful episodes,” Matilda explained. “But since I’ve been here, I’ve been on top of light switches, the refrigerator, and the stove. I wonder if I’m cured.”

  I had my own theory about Matilda’s episodes, but I didn’t have proof, yet.

  “Sit down and have some breakfast,” my grandmother urged her. “The coffeemaker’s still hot. Drink a cup before it’s too late.”

  “What do you mean, too late?” I asked.

  All of a sudden, the refrigerator stopped making noise. The light over the stove turned off, and the coffeemaker clicked off, too.

  “Too late,” Grandma mumbled, taking a sip of her coffee.

  “Did the electricity go off?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes. We’ll be fine for a few hours, but it’s going to get hot later,” Grandma said.

  “It’s going to last that long?” Bridget asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Grandma said.

  “The town couldn’t take the extra power use because of the heatwave,” Bridget surmised. “It should go solar. Perhaps I should launch a renewable energy movement in Cannes.”

  I didn’t ask the question I wanted answered. Tomorrow was my wedding. I hadn’t been involved in the planning for it, but I was reasonably certain that we would need electricity.

  Someone knocked on the front door. I moved to answer it, but my grandmother stopped me. “It’s for Bridget,” she explained.

  Bridget left to answer it, and we finished breakfast. An hour later, my friends left. I got dressed in my dictator uniform and filled my pockets with official Fussia coins. The uniform was riper, and without the air conditioner, it was going to get worse.

  “One last day of hail the sovereign leader,” I reminded myself.

  The body waxing wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Luckily, the wax was already warm when the electricity went off. Melba the waxer woman used a new “painless” method, which wasn’t painless at all, but at least it was fast. The deep conditioning treatment, however, was orgasmic. Melba massaged hot oil into my scalp, and I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was completely relaxed, and my hair was silky soft.

  Melba was also a master butcher, it turned out, and when I left, she gave me a free rack of lamb. “It’s the wedding special,” she explained to me. “All brides get a rack of lamb with any waxing session.”

  Since the power was out, M
uffy & Dicks was having a half-off meat sale before her stock went bad. I got Grandma’s ham since it was already cooked, but I decided to gift Ruth the lamb because my grandmother’s old refrigerator wouldn’t keep it cold until the power came back on.

  Next door, Tea Time was dead. Nobody wanted to drink a hot beverage in a stifling hot room. And it was definitely stifling hot. I slapped my butcher package on the bar and mopped the sweat off my forehead under my military cap.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “A gift. You have a fancy freezer that stays cold, even when there’s a power outage, right?”

  “Seventy-two hours.”

  “Bon appétit. It’s a rack of lamb.”

  “You want coffee? I can make you a cup of slow drip on my gas burner.”

  “No, thank you. I’m going home and sticking my head under the sink.”

  I dripped sweat onto the bar, and I wiped my brow with my sleeve.

  “You’re still wearing the fascist outfit? Have you defected to Fussia?” Ruth asked.

  “No, but that reminds me,” I said and tossed a handful of Fussia coins onto the bar. “Hail to our sovereign leader.”

  “Gladie, at some point you’ll feel an irresistible urge to reflect on your life, but from me to you, when that happens, resist.”

  “I know. I try not to think too much about my life.”

  Ruth studied my face. After a moment, she scratched her nose. “You don’t have a bad life, actually. As husbands go, the cop will probably be one of the better ones. And he looks at you like you’re Princess Grace.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Read a book, girl. Read a damned book. It’s like you don’t care a whit that you’re a total ignoramus.”

  “Spencer’s got me watching a lot of Family Guy and The Simpsons.”

  Ruth rolled her eyes. “Despite that, you’ve got a good man. And you own that beautiful house now. Although it’s got some weird sex robot locked in it. When I walked by this morning, I could hear it trying to get out.”

  “It’s on a lease. At some point, someone’ll pick it up.” At least I hoped someone would. I didn’t know what Spencer had planned for the sex robot. We were moving tomorrow, and the robot was locked in our new house. The robot seemed very attached to Spencer, and I didn’t want to have to fight it for my husband. It would win, hands down.

  When I left Tea Time, I looked across the street at the two shops that were now the country of Fussia. The dictator wasn’t outside, yelling at people. Instead, his country was quiet, but I didn’t put it past him to be spying on me through the darkened windows to make sure that I was complying with our deal.

  I walked home, sweating gallons through the heavy, wool uniform. With the electricity out, the whole town was quiet. The townspeople were probably soaking in cold tubs or lying on their beds, praying for a breeze.

  The heatwave was getting worse. It was about five degrees hotter than it was yesterday. By the time I got home, I was already taking the uniform off, and as I walked in the door, I was quickly stripping down to my underwear and bra.

  I found my grandmother in the kitchen. “We’re all set for tomorrow,” she said, handling a pile of paper. The wedding plans. They were more detailed than D-Day.

  I sat next to her and took a deep breath. The house was warming up fast, but it was twenty degrees cooler than outside. “I’m so sorry, Grandma. I didn’t help at all. I put the whole wedding on you.”

  “No, you didn’t. I delegated. I know that you wanted a small wedding, but I turned it into the town’s wedding. I didn’t do a damned thing except to say no to the over the top stuff.”

  “Oh, please. It’s going to be the most over the top wedding in history.”

  Grandma had a twinkle in her eye. “There might be a few surprises.”

  The truth was that I hadn’t thought much about my wedding. I figured it would be a social obligation that I would have to get through and nothing more. It was the after-the-wedding part that I had focused on. Would marriage change my relationship with Spencer? Once I had committed to him in writing, would I want to escape, like I had escaped hundreds of jobs in my life?

  Would I fail Spencer?

  Would I want to fail Spencer?

  Even though I was in my bra and panties, worrying was making me sweat even more. “I’m going to take a nap,” I told her.

  Grandma squeezed my hand. “No, dolly. It’s time to deal with Matilda. It’s time to take her home.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  CHAPTER 16

  You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you get a prince. You’ve heard this bubbe-meise before. Right, dolly? I’ll tell you a little story. When I was a young woman, men were all over me. They wouldn’t leave me alone! I was a looker, you see, and I knew how to dress. The frogs and princes wanted me bad. One day, I was sitting at the Pietastic restaurant on Main Street where Saladz is now, and a real frog started to hit on me. “Hey, good lookin’,” he said. Oy! Such a frog you’ve never seen in your life. “I’m busy,” I spat back at him. He wouldn’t take the hint. “What’s a hot stuff cutie like you doing in a place like this?” he asked. It went on like that for a long time. The frog kept trying, and I kept pushing him away. You’ll never guess who that frog turned out to be, bubbeleh. Don’t guess. I’ll tell you who he was. Your grandpa! I bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? Yep, that frog turned out to be my frog. So, tell your matches not to hold out for a prince because sometimes a frog turns out to be a prince. And sometimes…a prince turns out to be a frog.

  Lesson 7, Matchmaking advice from your

  Grandma Zelda

  Matilda wasn’t thrilled to be returning home. “I don’t think Rockwell will make me go back to that place,” she said hopefully, chewing on a fingernail.

  “I’ll tell him what a nightmare it was,” I said. “You won’t have to go back.”

  “I’m thinking clearer. I haven’t had one episode all day. I feel sharp.”

  “We’ll explain that to him.”

  I adjusted the air conditioning vents in the car to blast on my face. The sweat was finally starting to dry, and I dreaded getting out of the car and back into Matilda’s furnace apartment. I brought a change of clothes with me, so that I could return the uniform on my way home after I dropped Matilda off. The thought of being free of the dictator uniform filled me with joy. At least the stress of that would be off me.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve gone a whole day without an episode,” Matilda continued. “I don’t feel confused at all. My disorientation is completely gone.”

  I hoped the dictator didn’t give me any grief about returning the uniform a couple hours early, but it was close enough. I had had enough. I had passed out all of the coins and told half of the town to hail the sovereign leader. My work for the land of Fussia was over, as far as I was concerned.

  “When I was home, it was one thing after another,” Matilda said. “I can’t tell you how many times Rockwell caught the oven on or the lights. Even Fanta would catch it for me. Practically every time she came over, she found something crazy that I had done. In fact, when Rockwell wasn’t there, she was the one to help me.”

  Matilda’s voice drifted off. I snapped out of my selfish thoughts about clothes.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “What’re you saying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re saying something.”

  “It’s like it’s at the outer edges of my brain, and I can’t reach it.”

  I parked in front of Matilda’s apartment building. As we walked inside, I put my arm around her. “When he sees the new you, it will all work out,” I told her. “You’re sharp. You’re in control. Just have a discussion with him as his equal. You two will make this right together. Happiness is just around the corner.”

  I had no idea who was talking. I mean, the words were coming out of my mouth, but they sounded way too mature to be from me.

  “I’m rea
dy,” Matilda said. “Whatever happens, I’ll deal with it. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I can handle anything.” She hugged me. “Thank you for everything. You’re a great friend.”

  Since she didn’t have her keys, Matilda knocked on the door, but Rockwell didn’t answer. “Maybe he’s out of town,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I can get us in.”

  I used my handy lock picks and opened the door. All of the windows were open for a change, but there was no breeze. “Are we in the right apartment?” I asked. It looked different, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  Matilda’s mouth had dropped open. “This isn’t my furniture. Some of it is, but most of it isn’t. Hold on a second. I recognize that couch. And that coffee table. They’re not mine, but I recognize them.”

  “I think Rockwell left the television on in the bedroom,” I said. “I hear something.”

  Matilda’s eyes grew wide, and she sucked in air. “We don’t have a television in the bedroom,” she hissed and marched to the bedroom, opened the door, and walked in.

  “Oh my God!” Matilda shrieked. “Are you fucking joking? Is this a motherfucking joke? How dare you? How…oh, my God!”

  I heard a crash as something hard hit the wall. Normally, I would have run in to see what was wrong, but something told me to give Matilda her privacy.

  “Matilda, you’re being irrational,” I heard Rockwell say.

  “Irrational?” Matilda shrieked. There was another loud crash against the wall. This time a woman screamed, and it wasn’t Matilda.

  As my grandmother would say: Oy vey.

  Matilda ran out of the bedroom, and Rockwell was close on her heels. He was buck naked, and his weenie was flapping as he ran after his wife.

  “You’re supposed to be at the psychiatric facility,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “Don’t you want to get better, my love?”

  “My… my… my?” she stuttered and exhaled in exasperation.