by Sarah Bird
The stress of the past year along with an increasing reliance on my friend Code Warrior has turned me into the size zero all my former friends dream of becoming. Does it matter that what flesh there is on my body is pure fat? That I have the muscle tone of a tsetse fly and the cholesterol of a German butcher? That I haven’t had a period in months and my libido is a memory? No, none of that matters. I am a size zero teetering on the edge of disappearing from the face of the earth altogether.
“Better than that,” I exclaim. “I have this brilliant new nutrition program that will amp up your metabolism and cleanse your system. I would love to share it with you.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Blitz bounces about enthusiastically.
This causes Spree to grumble like a bull walrus intimidating a rival poaching on his harem. “Blitz,” she whispers, forcing her client to lean in close. “When working with pieces of this stature one has to consider one’s obligation to posterity. I’m beginning to wonder if the Victoria and Albert might not show more respect for the Ruhlmanns.”
I have to admire Spree. If a Swami has the cojones to pull it off nothing works better than a schoolmarmish knuckle rapping.
Blitz comes to heel immediately and with a new snap in her voice tells me, “Blythe, could you just zip up to the house and share your program with Jade?”
“Jade? Your personal chef?” Blitz Lord is handing me off to the cook?
I feel as if I am drowning and begin to tread water frantically. “I love those sandals!” I exclaim, pointing to Blitz’s Vera Wang ankle straps. “I saw them at Last Call for forty percent off.”
“You did? Did they have the ones with the cutouts?”
“I almost got them! Are they cute or what?”
Ah, yes, nothing the seriously rich like better than a bargain—nine-hundred-ninety-five-dollar sandals for six hundred dollars? Get two!
As I engage Blitz with other secrets of the discounted and knocked off, Spree begins to seriously worry me. From the way her eyes are twitching and the guttural clicks she is making deep in her throat, I fear that Spree is about to pounce, sink her incisors into my neck, and shake me until my neck breaks.
Did Spree’s hairline always hover that far above her ears? I remember then what I’d heard on the Swami grapevine: Spree has had some work done. That puts things in a different light entirely. It is no safer to come between a mother grizzly and her cubs than it is between a Swami trying to pay off a face-lift and her client-mark. I will have to step up the program. And fast. I pray that Blitz Lord has not heard that my White House connections have been cut off.
“You know who else loves Last Call?”
“Who?”
“Well, obviously, I can’t name names, but let’s just say they don’t have a Last Call in Washington, D.C.”
“No!”
“And let’s also just say that someone is coming to town very, very soon and wants to do a girlfriends’ day that includes some fun and fabulous new ladies in addition to the old standbys from Midland.”
What bigger jackpot could I dangle in front of a baby climber like Blitz than the opportunity, for the rest of her life, to offer firsthand opinions about how much work the First Lady has or has not had done? For Blitz this fantasy shopping trip would be the equivalent of a place on the steering committee of the Platinum Longhorns.
Catching on fast, Blitz asks, “And if these ‘new ladies’ are generous contributors?”
“A place could practically be guaranteed.”
“When? How?”
“Oh, it’ll have to be very last-minute, of course. Secret Service. Heightened security. Sweep the room. Secure the perimeter. All that.”
“Of course.”
“I mean, I probably won’t have much more than half an hour’s notice. If that. And, of course, the only way you can be included will be if you come with me. So that will mean that once I get word I’ll have to drive out here to pick you up, and by the time I drive all the way out here—”
“You’ve got to stay here! In the guesthouse!”
Jackpot! Five cherries in a row.
“Oh, well, I don’t know. This is my busy season and—”
“Please?” Blitz beseeches. I love being besought.
“I just don’t know. It might be a week before I hear from her. Maybe two. Even as long as a month. Month and a half.”
“We don’t care, do we, Spree?”
Spree? We? We Spree?
“Why, no,” Spree purrs in a voice like one of the perfidious Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. We are Siamese, if you please. We are Siamese, if you don’t please. “It’ll be a big slumber party.”
Blitz squeals, “Yes!” She claps her hands like the giddy Pi Phi she might have been had she gone to UT instead of doing the Personal Training Certification Program with graduate work in snaking Turk Lord away from his wife while helping him get his Dorito roll under control. “Yes! You and Spree can both stay in the guesthouse.”
“‘Both’?”
“Yes! Didn’t Spree tell you? She’s moving in. There’s plenty of room for both of you, though.”
“Spree is moving in?” I begin to recall word that Spree’s girlfriend of the past eight years had cleaned out their joint account, stolen their child-substitute dog, and left town with her qigong instructor. There is no way to parry that level of desperation. “To your guesthouse?”
“Yes! We’re doing a total rethink on the cabana area. Spree has some amazing contacts in Cuba. Great prerevolutionary pieces.”
There is not a hot chance in holy hell that Spree Winslow and I can ever share any space smaller than the Astrodome. Badgers in a box. I prefer my odds with the IRS.
“Yes, Blythe,” Spree says in her purring Siamese way. “Do join us. Blitz is really into the Beaux Arts influence on Cuban furniture makers of the late teens and twenties. She thinks they’re absolute Rembrandts of rattan.”
God, Spree is good. As far as Blitz knows, Rembrandt is a tooth-whitening product, but that doesn’t stop the little parvenu from beaming at this encomium to her taste.
With my ship sinking and the last lifeboat filling up fast, I panic and try a bold and innovative approach: the truth. I have no choice but to lay my cards on the table and make common cause with this sweet, middle-class girl who was a Swami herself not so long ago. “Blitz, I need a place to stay. A place all to myself for just a few days, a week, maybe, a month at the outside.”
Spree and Blitz are both speechless. Blitz blinks and her hand reaches out as if feeling for a bellpull that will summon the right servant to deal with the annoyance standing before her. Or to yank the lever of a trapdoor that will shoot me into oblivion.
A smile spreads across Spree’s tightened features, causing tension lines to tauten in the odd and unnatural places of the lifted.
Well, why shouldn’t she smile? Spree has beaten me and she knows it. In my desperation I have broken so many rules of Swamihood that I can barely count them all. But the number one precept of the Swami Code that I have violated, the bedrock that the whole house of cards is built on, is this: They must always believe that they need you more than you need them.
In the final sign of my total defeat, Blitz implores Spree with a glance to handle this icky situation.
“Blythe, come on,” Spree’s whisper is so low she looks like she’s lip-synching herself. “Blitz has so much on her plate now, what with positioning the Ruhlmanns and the cabana rethink—”
“And hosting Lance’s Livestrong fund-raiser.”
“That’s right.” Spree gives Blitz a comforting pat on the shoulder. “How could I have forgotten the Livestrong? Blitz has more on her plate than any human should ever have to deal with.”
“And,” Blitz adds in a tone of overwhelmed despair, “we still haven’t found the right couch.”
Finding the right couch. I am sunk; lives have been dedicated to the pursuit of finding the right couch.
“As you can see, Blythe, additional houseguests at this po
int are simply out of the question. I mean, how much can one human be expected to deal with? Right, Blitz?”
Blitz nods, sad but brave, all puppy dog eyes and burdened nobility.
“Spree, gosh, you know what? I think you and I just might be able to share the guesthouse after all.”
“Gosh, Blythe, you know what? I think I’m going to need a blank canvas mentally to really be able to work through all the major, major issues Blitz is facing here.”
At that moment Spree is doing what I have just failed to accomplish: maintaining the fiction that the only truly important problems in the world are the clients’ problems. Although Spree has just lost her girlfriend, her dog, and can’t pay off her plastic surgeon, she is pretending that the question of whether to position the Ruhlmann step cabinet on a plinth base in the conservatory or the library overshadows any trivial problem she could possibly be facing.
That is the Swami Code. And I have broken it.
April 3, 2003
5:45 P.M.
NUMBED BY my humiliating defeat, I ramble aimlessly through the swankier west hills neighborhoods until the quitting-time caravan of service vehicles sweeps me into their eastward migration back toward town.
I play Lakshmi’s tape again. Her serene, knowing voice soothes me. “Let worries, anxieties, melt away. If your child received a thin envelope rather than a fat one from the school of his or her choice, simply know that the universe has another, a better, path for your child. Also know that my partner, Dorsey Hedges, is available for consultation on college application essays.”
A pang of longing for the rarefied anxieties of the upper classes pierces me and I ache for the life of endless pampering I was once a part of, even if I was a part of it only in the way that ball moss is a part of a live oak tree.
“Let go of all appointments. Let go of all DIS-appointments. Let go of all stress. Let go of all DIS-stress. Float on a warm ocean of well-being. Allow a sense of serenity, of the rightness of your place in the universe, to flow over you.”
Why had I never noticed before how perfectly Lakshmi’s Om Shanti philosophy aligns with the Republican Party platform?
For one blissful moment, I imagine I am back at the ultraexclusive health club I used to belong to, AbsSolution, laid out on a sticky mat next to Kippie Lee, Bamsie, Cookie, and all the rest of le tout Austin.
Then I am rattled back to reality by trucks—lots of trucks—shaking the little minivan as they barrel past. Glaziers’ trucks with ziggurats of glistening glass. Landscapers’ trucks pulling trailers loaded with mowers, cans of gas. Remodelers’ trucks with ladders, red rags tied on the ends, hanging out the back. Chemical trucks hauling tanks of pesticide and fertilizer for the perfect green, chinch-bug-free lawn. There are vans, too. Carpet cleaner, mobile pet washer, chimney sweep, rain-gutter cleaner, FedEx, UPS.
From their perches in the beds of pickups the day laborers, mostly Mexican, mostly illegal, watch the exodus. As silent and accepting as brown Buddhas, they stare back at the caravan, monitoring it without ever making eye contact and drinking Lone Stars from an eighteen-pack.
Tiny vehicles advertising maids, both Merry and Molly, slide past. Saturns, Ford Festivas, they are stuffed like clown cars with impossible numbers of women, mostly brown, all exhausted.
A replacement army of vehicles many times stronger than the one heading east surges west toward home. The Lexi and Mercedes are piloted by crisp professionals who remove jackets, loosen ties, talk into phones. They are returning to homes where the beds have been made, toilets sanitized, carpets cleaned, lawns mowed, fire ants massacred, panes replaced, tile regrouted, express packages delivered, and dogs washed.
The purposeful energy of the homeward-bound depresses me as I meander back toward town. Then a true clown car zips past, a purple VW Beetle with a magnetic sign on the side reading OOPSY DAISY, CLASSY CLOWNS INC. BIRTHDAYS, SPECIAL OCCASIONS. Oopsy’s face is still painted geisha white with a tipsy, Joker smile in a toddler-terrifying shade of red. She pulls off a Raggedy Ann wig, scratches her head, sags back against the seat.
I wonder how much Molly Maids pays. How would I look in an orange wig? These dismal questions send me searching for the Code Warrior cup. One healthy slug and I snap back out of reality. With God as my witness, I vow, I will one day earn my rightful place again in the caravan. East or west, labor or management, I no longer care. Just, please God, not northeast to Huntsville Prison. This Gone with the Wind moment puts a bit of snap back in my garters but provides nothing in the way of an actual plan.
Think, think, think.
As I struggle to come up with a way to save myself, the rolling hills along 2222 flatten out and give way to the city. Instead of a plan, my old pal, bitter regrets, pays a call. When was the last time I had an actual friend rather than a client, a contact, or a connection? Someone I could go to now in my hour of need and say, “Hide me, I’m on the lam from the IRS, and the DEA is probably not far behind”? When did my entire life become one snarled web of networking, of cocktail chatter, and squealing at the well heeled about the weight they’d lost while shoving silver trays of hors d’oeuvres at them whether as the wife of Trey Dix the Third or the sole proprietor of Wretched Xcess? Even, or maybe especially, while married to Trey, I made no true friends. The women who’d welcomed me into their houses were never real friends any more than Trey turned out to be a real husband.
I already know the answer to my question, “When was the last time I had an actual friend?” I have known it for a long time: Millie Ott.
Oh God, no, not her, not that.
For Millie Ott means Seneca Falls Housing Co-op, the unthinkable boardinghouse where Millie and I were roommates when I was a UT coed ten years and several incarnations ago. Besides being a run-down dump, Seneca House has another fatal flaw. I struggle to recall what it was that I’d heard about the place, but I can’t pull anything up from the data files. Whatever the problem is, it has been caught by my mental spam filter. No matter, my Rolodex is a wonder of nature; I will I must think of something better than Seneca House.
Suddenly, I realize that I have been framing my quest entirely wrong. I’m not asking for a favor; I’m answering a prayer. The people I know live their lives for guests. Literally. They buy houses with guest rooms, great rooms, massive effing dining rooms. They all stand ready to extend hospitality to platoons—battalions!—of guests. Guests that, in almost all cases outside of the in-laws they don’t want anyway, never arrive. I, Blythe Young, will be the guest who will justify the tens of thousands of square feet they bought, clean, pay taxes on, and never use.
As I drive past the Pee Heights mansions, the names swirl through my brain: Kippie Lee Teeter, Cookie Mehan, Bamsie Beiver, Missy Quisinberry, Paige Oglesby, Morgan Whitlow, Cherise Tatum, Mimi McNaughton, Lulie Bingle, Fitzie Upchurch, Noodle Tiner. For various reasons—friend of Trey; does business with the Dixes; out of town; stopped payment on check; suffering from Rohypnol-induced comas—I have to eliminate them all.
I dig deeper, descending into the second tier of possibilities: the big-dog owners, the Volvo drivers, those with no live-in help whatsoever. As I am scraping the bottom of that barrel for candidates, the van sputters.
Grim reality intrudes. I have exactly enough fuel to get to one place and one place alone: Seneca House. This is a bitter pill. Once again, life is leaving me no way but the hard way. I wish I could remember what it was that I’d heard about the dump. Whatever it is, it couldn’t be worse than prison. Could it?
Though I really don’t want to face Millie again for a number of reasons—okay, I have snubbed my old roommate ruthlessly for more than a decade—I am starting to accept that Millie is my last hope. Or, at least, the only one I can reach on the teaspoon of gas I have left. Millie was never the grudge-holding type. In fact, Millie Ott was always relentlessly kind, thoughtful, and generous. (Also exceedingly overweight. The last time I saw her she must have been tipping close to two hundred pounds.) Millie will surely take me in. If I c
an make it to my old boardinghouse, I am certain she will let me lie low long enough to refuel and strike out for greener pastures.
I cross the Great Divide of Lamar Boulevard and enter the gravitational field of the Forty Acres, Longhornland, the University of Texas. Immediately, I am sucked into the land of the young, of those required to wear backpacks on the upper half of their bodies and some form of denim on the lower.
Coeds throw sticks for mutts romping about the leash-free zone of Pease Park that runs beside Shoal Creek. Bare-chested college boys, their shirts tucked into the back pockets of shorts hanging off hip bones and drooping down to calves, hurl Frisbees at chain-link cages. The streets become congested with cars, bikes, bodies as I approach the campus.
I turn off of Twenty-fourth onto Nueces Street. Not that I am in any position to pay the slightest bit of attention to omens and signs, but I do note the Spanish translation of nueces: “nuts.” I follow Nuts Street and glide on fumes to the front of Seneca House. Before I can switch off the ignition, the van shudders to a gas-starved dead stop. The place looks exactly the same as it did when I walked out ten years ago. Seneca House is a dowdy dowager painted the drabbest of olives, a home that had been regal at the turn of the last century, now fallen on hard times.
The prospect of throwing myself on the mercy of Millie Ott, a friend I lost touch with years ago, exhausts me. All right, “lost” touch might not be entirely accurate. I might have purposely buried touch. I might have never returned phone calls, never answered letters. I might even have pretended to be the maid once and told my old roommate that “Mees Joong” was out. It is possible that, over the years, I might even have walked out of a store or two if I saw anyone who remotely resembled Millie.
Maybe I am a social-climbing swine, but a person doesn’t move up from being Caterer to the Bubble Boys, to society photographer, to society event coordinator, and, finally, society wife, by playing Frisbee golf in Pease Park. That is never going to pay the bills. Social-climbing swine, yes, that is part of it. But with Millie, there was always something more. Something that has kept my old roommate in my dreams and my thoughts all these years. Something that still causes squirmy feelings of guilt whenever I think about her. I brush away such pointless reflections; they are sapping what precious little energy I have left.