Odyssey In A Teacup

by Paula Houseman

  As the concerned doctor, Ralph felt it was his duty to give Maxi a thorough physical, sans clothes. She had no problem with this; she’s always been comfortable with her body. And according to Ralph, a thorough physical included taking the patient’s temperature. Neither Maxi, Vette, nor I were aware that you could put a thermometer under the armpit or tongue (our mothers used to take our temperature rectally). Ralph knew about the alternative methods, but kept them to himself. We had a toy medical kit that was missing a thermometer, so Ralph improvised with a soursob stalk as a makeshift thermometer that he placed between Maxi’s butt cheeks.

  ‘Doesn’t the nurse usually take the temperature?’ Vette had asked Dr Ralph.

  ‘A good doctor is hands-on.’

  So, courtesy of Ralph, Maxi got the soursob stalk, and courtesy of Maxi, Ralph got wood.

  ‘Just as well you didn’t end up becoming a doctor,’ said Maxi. ‘You’d have been accused of sexual misconduct and struck off.’

  ‘We’re talking about a time when I was approaching puberty! I think with my head now.’

  ‘So ... what’s changed?’

  Vette groaned and picked up her magazine, leaving them to their thrusting and parrying. And I tuned them out, disappearing into memories.

  I’m glad Ralph didn’t become a doctor; I don’t like them. My aversion to doctors started when I was eight and Dr Patrick Bloody McGinty fouled up my chances of wearing red jelly sandals. Not that I ever had a chance; Sylvia wouldn’t buy them for me.

  ‘They’re too common!’ This, from a homogenised woman who worked hard at homogenising and producing a milky me.

  Seems Dr McGinty didn’t give two craps about ‘common’. He wore socks and sandals with his rumpled suit (maybe it was a trend in Ireland, his birthplace, but not here), so he would not have made poster boy for the medical profession. Dr McGinty also had a distinct appearance, and not one that he had much of a say in. He was kind of irregular looking: exceptionally tall and exceptionally skinny, with bouffant, messy, mousy hair; a narrow, crooked nose; thin ruby-red lips (I’m convinced he wore lipstick); ruddy, prominent cheeks (wore rouge, too); and droopy jowls. His mirror must have been forgiving, although it probably wouldn’t have been if it could have detected his halitosis. I mentioned Dr McGinty’s rotten breath to Sylvia once and she told me it was why he could not be a dentist.

  Sylvia has truly phenomenal powers of deductive reasoning. A dentist would never have bad breath, she said, which was the same as saying a beautician would never have a pimple. Based on this premise, I figured that a doctor might have bad breath, but he would never, ever get sick. Well that all went to shit a couple of months after that fateful day when Dr McGinty practically ruined my life.

  The only reason I had seen him was because he was serving as a locum for our regular doctor, Dr John Pearson, who was on holidays when Sylvia decided the growths on my feet needed attention. Dr Pearson, a kind and gentle man, had been the family GP since before I was born. I was relieved that he was back consulting when Sylvia took me to the surgery with a deeply cut finger. Dr Pearson stitched it up but a day later, he topped himself. I heard Sylvia whisper to Joe that he had slit his wrists. Made absolutely no sense to me. None. I cut myself because I was eight and ran with scissors. But never mind that a doctor wouldn’t get sick; if you’re handling sharp instruments all day, how could you possibly cut yourself?

  Eleven days later, when Sylvia took me back to the surgery for Dr McGinty to remove the stitches, she made me say ‘I’m sorry about Doctor Pearson’ to the receptionist. The receptionist smiled and thanked me but didn’t bother to tell me it wasn’t my fault. What could I have done that would cause him to cut himself and die? I was wracked with guilt. I believed that my appendicitis two years later was punishment for this.

  Given my experiences with doctors, it made little sense then that I would apply for that job in the medical practice years later. At the time, I put it down to a means of easing my guilt over Dr Pearson’s death. Ralph put it down to my ‘latent masochistic tendencies’ and suggested I was better off acting out those tendencies in the bedroom.

  ‘I should have listened to you.’

  ‘What?’ Ralph started. I’d roused him from his sun-worshipping catnap. Probably did him a favour—he’d been moaning lustfully. ‘You thinking out loud again?’ he asked, glibly.

  Really? This coming from you, making animal noises from the raw sex you’re not actually having!

  ‘I was thinking that you were right; I shouldn’t have taken that job with those doctors.’

  ‘Yeah ... you did it for the wrong reason.’

  Ralph and I hadn’t talked much about it or the way it had ended. I felt the need to now.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

  DROPPING(S)

  Doctors Dooley, McIntyre and Black had a busy practice. There had been twenty applicants for the job, but I got it because I was the only one who could decipher Dr Dooley’s illegible scrawl. As their new secretary, I was one of the three people manning the office. Maude was the office manager and Sandy was the receptionist. Sandy was a tall, plumpish, attractive girl who wore her long auburn hair in a neat ponytail. She was sweet-natured and bubbly, and was not long out of school. But Maude was very old—sixty to be exact. That’s not so old anymore, although at the time, it looked like one foot in the grave.

  Maude was a widow. She looked a bit like a horse, but nonetheless, a good-looking horse—a thoroughbred—stylish and ladylike in appearance. She also had a deep voice. On someone else, it might have been considered a smoky, Veronica Lake-like voice. On Maude, it sounded vulgar, because when she opened her mouth, this thoroughbred morphed into a nag. It felt like a home away from home.

  Maude was probably descended from the harpies (Mr Kosta had talked about them in one of his lessons). They had the body of a bird, but a human face. The great unwashed, literally, because they stunk to high heaven, these foul-tempered eyesores had appetites like Zelda’s—so hungry they could eat a horse. Instead, they gave birth to a couple of them (after having sex with the West Wind, Zephyros). Maybe out of a sense of loyalty, the harpies didn’t eat horses, but they swooped down on pretty much everything else. Mr Kosta had told us that the harpies snatched people and things away from earth, and did whoopsie on anything left behind (although, because they had a thing going on with the West Wind, they probably Whizzpopped first, but silently, seeing as westerlies are mild winds). Anyway, nice. Real nice.

  Mr Kosta interpreted the harpies’ MO symbolically. He said that it was about snatching a person’s soul. I didn’t give any thought to the idea of soul back then, but in hindsight, I could see how Maude tried to devour my soul, and Sandy’s, through constantly undermining us.

  In Maude’s favour, she was clean (but she stunk of perfume overload). Her ancestors might have been unsightly, but they had lovely hair, and Maude did have quite a mane on her. Her dressage was also very stylish. She loped in one morning wearing an elegant cream skirt and matching jacket over a plain cream blouse that tied at the neck. The suit had a nice pattern of woven red, navy and green widely spaced horizontal and vertical intersecting lines, and the jacket had gold buttons and a stitched navy trim. I told Maude that when she was at lunch the day before, a patient had come in wearing the exact same suit.

  ‘What!’ she shrieked (her ancestry got the better of her and she became flappable). ‘How d-hare you! This is Chanel haute couture. It’s a one off!’

  ‘Umm, she was a big woman, though.’

  ‘They do not make haute couture for fat people!’

  Maude spent the rest of the week and most of the following one educating me in the ways of the various designers to ensure that I didn’t d-hare make the same mistake again.

  ‘This is a Balenciaga,’ she pointed out on Wednesday. On Thursday, she wore Lagerfeld; Friday, de la Renta; Monday, Valentino; Tuesday, Dior; Wednesday, Versace; and Thursday was Yves Saint Laurent’s day. I pretended that I understood because I’d learned it didn’t ta
ke much to piss Maude off. But unless the tag was hanging out, I couldn’t pick the difference (Maxi and Vette would have been able to, but I just couldn’t). And I wasn’t too conversant with other things, either.

  Maude never, ever bought groceries—she bought ‘ingredients’. Dark mocha Java blend coffee beans were included in her list of ingredients.

  ‘How can a coffee bean be an ingredient if it’s not actually part of a recipe?’

  This made Maude’s hackles rise. ‘It qualifies as an ingredient because one must combine it with water, milk and sugar, so it is part of a recipe!’

  Maude taught me to grind the ‘ingredient’ that is the coffee bean, and infuse the coffee to perfection in a plunger. This plunged brew was only for her and the doctors; Sandy and I were unworthy of the recipe. We were only allowed instant coffee, which according to Maude was a grocery, not an ingredient. Sandy challenged Maude on this, saying it was as much an ingredient as dark mocha Java blend coffee beans because one does not consume it neat. Maude peered at her with sheer disgust. Not only did it take little to piss Maude off, one did not argue with her.

  The first time I ground and plunged Maude’s coffee, I served it to her in one of the Pyrex mugs in the cupboard. She gave it back to me.

  ‘I do not drink from Pyrex. And I do not drink from mugs.’ Maude only drank from a Fine Bone China teacup delicately perched on its saucer.

  On a frantically busy morning when Sandy had gone out to buy some more milk, and I was pouring Maude’s plunger coffee recipe into her Fine Bone China, I asked her to answer the phone.

  ‘I do not do phones.’

  Maude, it seems, had limited horsepower. She was only really window dressing. She also didn’t ‘do’ appointments, referral letters, orders, postage, errands or invoices. But Sandy and I strongly suspected she was doing one of the doctors.

  I think I stayed as long as I did because of Sandy. She reminded me of how I used to be—she often answered back. But there’s only so much crap you can take, and Sandy had had a gutful.

  ‘I’ve had enough of you. I quit!’ she yelled after Maude had befouled her once too often. ‘The children you never had are so lucky!’

  It wasn’t so much what Sandy had said (which was kind of laughable), as her defiant stance that had Maude cowering under her glare. Another confirmation: bully = coward.

  Sandy grabbed her bag and stormed out. ‘Good luck,’ she said to me.

  Maude’s eyes narrowed. She stood up, flicked her mane like a whip and scowled at me. ‘I suppose you intend to leave, also!’

  ‘Um, er, no.’ Another confirmation: coward = coward.

  Maude raised one eyebrow. ‘Good.’

  She made an effort after that to be nice to me. I started to relax around her, even felt confident.

  Until the day Baubo decided to make an appearance.

  Maude had started returning to her overbearing ways, and I felt a little intimidated early one morning as she was impatiently going through the patient list and my tasks for the day. Suddenly, the image from years earlier of Sylvia neighing popped into my head, but it was more animated. Maude’s mouth shape-shifted into a horse’s. Not just any horse’s, though: it was Mister Ed’s. As a child, Mister Ed was one of my favourite television shows. It was about a talking horse. Mister Ed had a raspy voice, a bit like Maude’s was today (occasionally hoarse from too much smoking and yelling). The show’s theme song was catchy and the first verse of it started playing in my head. It says you can’t talk to a horse, unless of course, it’s Mister Ed. Not true. You can talk to all horses, and they all ‘talk’ back. But I don’t know of any that actually express their thoughts and feelings in words. Except for Mister Ed.

  And it didn’t end there. I had a sense of Baubo smiling at me, her labia-lips parted to reveal one single, rotted tooth. I started to laugh. It didn’t end well. The next few months before I finally left the job became intolerable. Even armed with the knowledge that Maude was a bully, as long as my cojones remained undescended, I couldn’t muster the courage to take her on.

  ‘Still, the way you gave notice spoke volumes,’ Ralph reminded me. ‘Although ... maybe not as articulately as Mister Ed.’

  Maxi had been listening in, and laughed; I grimaced as I recalled the moment. I was nearing the end of my first trimester of pregnancy but I hadn’t told Maude or the doctors I was expecting. Reuben and I were in a good position financially and he wanted me to give up work sooner rather than later. Suited me; I didn’t feel so great. I’d been throwing up every morning when I got out of bed, then felt nauseous for the rest of the day. At the three-month mark, when it was just starting to let up, I resigned.

  Maude was outraged, appalled that I had the ‘sheer audacity’ to get pregnant. Her ranting was stomach churning; it felt like a kick in the gut. I could feel her hot breath on my face—she was the type who stands real close and invades your personal space. I felt squeamish, and unexpectedly projectile vomited all over her designer outfit.

  What had begun as a plain white ensemble became a collaboration in Haute Couture: Gold + Chanel / Balenciaga / Lagerfeld / de la Renta / Valentino / Dior / Versace / Saint Laurent ... who knew which? Didn’t matter. It was my Jackson Pollock splatter efforts down the side of the Centaur revisited. Only with a smaller ‘canvas’, it was more concentrated and more vibrant.

  ‘It was a good parting shot, but it was hardly courageous,’ I said.

  ‘Facing up to a bully is no mean feat.’ Ralph knew this well. ‘It takes time to get there; you’ve got to be grounded. It takes soul.’

  ‘Well, you’re in luck. It’s on the menu.’

  Huh?

  Both Ralph and I turned to look at Maxi.

  ‘Fillet of sole burger.’ She was holding up the lunch menu that the waiter had brought her.

  ‘Oh yes. Here we are ... grounded. Brought back down to earth with a thud.’ Ralph smiled and slowly shook his head. ‘Let’s just hope a harpy doesn’t do the same, and snatch the sole of your burger—’

  ‘And do whoopsie on what’s left on the plate,’ Maxi added.

  We all ordered the sole burgers and then chatted about other things. After the food arrived, Vette, who’d taken in the tail end of my conversation with Ralph, asked him, ‘Is there a difference between soul and spirit?’

  ‘Um-um-um. Yes and no. They’re not separate but they’re kind of hyped as if they are, as if spirit’s pure and perfect and up there above human life’—he pointed upwards—‘and soul is, well ... down here. Humanness in all its messiness. Our roots. Down there.’ He pointed downwards. ‘Our base impulses and dark emotions and thoughts are made to look bad. Modern spirituality wants us to rise above them and focus on the good ... you know, like that old song, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”.’

  Maxi started singing the song and we all joined in. Only the first verse, though. None of us knew the rest.

  Ralph continued, ‘I don’t have a problem with accentuating the positive. But that push to get rid of the negative ... that bothers me.’ He knitted his brow in concentration, and then his mouth curved into a small smile. He looked at me. ‘Remember that meditation night with Kishma, when someone farted and you cracked up?’ We all laughed at the memory. ‘She made the incident seem wrong and unspiritual. But the way I see it, fart plus laughter ... now there’s a great example of soul and spirit working together.’

  What he just said triggered something. ‘Ooh. Ooh! I feel a lightbulb moment coming on ... but the bloody filament’s flickering and blinking!’ I said in frustration, but excitedly.

  ‘Just throw some words out. What comes to mind?’

  ‘Er ... ancient mythology. Ah, yes! I remember Mr Kosta saying the ancient myths weren’t popular. Maybe ‘cause the gods were divine and dark.’

  Ralph nodded. ‘Yep. Just like humans. But the ancients gave equal value to both sides. Spirit and soul. We modern humans want the ideal, though—’

  ‘And God created man in His own image. Especially the fairy ta
le hero. No wonder these stories are popular.’ I looked at Vette. ‘No way would the hero scratch his nuts! He’s Godlike and flawless.’

  The penny dropped for her. ‘Oh. My. God—’

  ‘Yes indeedy!’

  ‘We’ve been so set up, haven’t we? From when we were little! Not just looking for “The One”; looking for The Perfect One.’

  We got lost in our thoughts for a few minutes; all reflecting on the implications of this in our own lives. Then Vette asked, ‘How can someone snatch someone else’s soul?’

  ‘They can’t. They can try to by controlling you and denying you your basic rights. But if you end up bending yourself out of shape to please them, you give it away. They haven’t taken it.’ Ralph eyed the fish scraps left on my plate. ‘Can I have the rest of your sole?’

  Why not ... I’ve given most of it away.

  I’d lost my appetite. Ralph had pretty much summed up the story of most of my adult life. I handed him my plate and left for my hair appointment.

  I had a lot to think about during my time at the salon. Fortunately, Helen and Troy worked silently, until two hours later when Troy exclaimed, ‘Voila!’ and removed the hairdressing cape. He told me I looked fifteen years younger and ‘totally rad’ (and even the mirror agreed). Feeling giddy with radness, I dropped into the boutique next door and bought myself a couple of things including a slammin’, phat, low-cut, tight, sleeveless emerald-green dress zippered from knockers to hem. I wore it back to the hotel.

  I found the three of them, still by the pool. The two fashionistas looked like beached whales—on their stomachs, fast asleep, legs and arms splayed out and hanging over the edge of their chairs. Both of them were snoring and dribbling. Ralph was semi-reclined in his chair and reading the paper. I snuck up and sat down on the chaise longue next to his.