How Perfect is That Read online

  “That,” Sanjeev says, his accent suddenly tilting more toward the England of boarding school canings than his melodious home-land. “That question is exactly what I find so objectionable about this person. That is demagoguery of the rankest order and I cannot countenance it. I vote no.”

  Okay, faulty intelligence. The guy is Gandhi and I missed the diaper. Four against. Three in favor. One vote to go.

  I am most definitely in a clinch now, the very place where I once believed myself to be so good. I have to have Millie’s vote to stay. I lock Millie in a gaze of sisterly pleading that speaks of our long history together.

  She looks away and says, “In my work, my life, the house has to come first. Not me, not my friendships, what is best for the house. Which is why I will have to—”

  No! No! No!

  “—abstain.”

  Abstain? Did not see that one coming.

  Four want me out. Three want me in. One won’t say. Millie hasn’t actually voted me out, but I am gone anyway. I can’t speak. Wind out of the sails. Horse latitudes. Utterly becalmed.

  “Yeah, well…” Juniper starts to say something, but a morning-after embarrassment overtakes her and the rest of the group. The show is over. They look away, stand, and begin to shuffle out.

  “Fuck it!” Juniper stops everyone in their tracks. “Shit, I can’t have this on my conscience. If she really doesn’t have anyplace else to go, I change my vote. She can stay.”

  Huh?

  Millie jumps up and wraps her arms around Juniper. “Oh, Juniper, that is wonderful! Thank you so much.” I am baffled, not only by Juniper changing her vote but by Millie’s reaction. She is genuinely, truly happy. “Blythe, I hope you appreciate Juniper’s incredible generosity.”

  I nod, too puzzled by Juniper’s action, too absorbed in trying to figure out what her secret agenda might be, to speak.

  “Of course,” Sanjeev says, “if she is to stay, appropriate boundaries must be set.”

  “Of course,” I croak out. Usually there is only one word I like less than “appropriate” and that is “boundaries.” Normally, both of them in the same sentence give me cramps. But next to the words “Sterno” and “hobo,” they make me positively ebullient. I will say anything, do anything, agree to anything, to keep from being thrown out.

  “Of course, there will be penance,” Millie says.

  I snort a bray of laughter, relieved that even Millie can mock the ridiculous Grand Inquisitorial aspect of this tribunal. She had me worried for a second. Penance?

  Too late, I notice that no one else is smiling. I stop laughing. I’ll have to keep the charade up for a bit longer. “Penance. Yes, of course, I agree.”

  I am proud of how sincere I sound.

  A Fallen Woman

  I SCRUB LASAGNA PANS the size of wading pools encrusted with galvanized soy cheese and lacquered with whole wheat noodles and wonder two things: First, why did NASA ever have heat shield problems when they simply could have shellacked their pods with Juniper’s foundry-fired vegan lasagna? Second, and much more troubling, is the question of why I wanted, no, why I struggled, to remain at Seneca House. Steam from the lava-hot water frizzes my hair until it resembles the Chore Boy in my hand. My fingers prune in the grease-and skin-dissolving acid-bath detergent. I feel as if I entered and won a contest where first prize is…A YEAR ON A CHAIN GANG!

  How much worse than a chain gang could life on Dog Crap Lane be?

  The answer keeps me scrubbing. It also keeps me sweeping, mopping, washing windows, vacuuming, disinfecting, and all the other “House Love” that Labor Czar Sanjeev piles on. I tried the corner-cutting technique popularized by all your more profitable maid services: Never use water when a swipe of baby oil will coat dirt and microbes much more efficiently. Some of the true waterless wizards can “mop” a kitchen with a moist towelette.

  Sanjeev does not turn out to be an admirer of efficiency. Nor was he taken in by my Pine-Sol in the teakettle trick. Son of a reformer-doctor, he swabbed and cultured the kitchen floor after I mist-mopped it. When strains of an Ebola-like virus appeared, he insisted that I use actual H2O.

  The one purely happy result of my labor is that I have scrubbed my way back into Millie’s heart. “Your boyfriend is a sadist,” I inform her, dropping onto my bed at the end of week three of my sentence.

  Startled, Millie looks up from her book, The Gospel of Judas. “Do you mean Sanjeev? He’s not my boyfriend.” She puts the book aside. “Why? Did he say something?”

  “No, but every time he looks at you he blinks out ‘I want to drink your bathwater’ in Morse code.”

  “He does? Really?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally dressing you in a sari.”

  Millie shakes her head, and says sternly, “That is not appropriate.”

  “Whatever, he’s a sadist. Look at my hands!” I hold up mitts an oyster shucker would have envied.

  “That was our agreement. If you stayed in the house, you had to make reparations.”

  “Yes, reparations, fine, but it’s not as if I bombed Pearl Harbor. Don’t you think my sentence or penance or whatever this is is a bit excessive? I feel like a fallen woman in a nunnery.”

  “That’s not a bad metaphor. Admit it, this is good for your soul.”

  “Look, metaphors don’t give a person dishpan hands and whatever else this might be it is not good for my soul.”

  “We don’t require belief. Just labor. The heart will follow where the hands lead.”

  Who is “we”? I want to ask, but, as usual, exhaustion overtakes me so suddenly that I don’t even have time to remember that I can’t fall asleep without a few of my friends from the Schedule IV controlled-drugs portion of the program.

  Millie is gone the next morning by the time I wake up reflecting upon how wonderful unaided sleep is. I slump back onto my little single bed, as virginal a plank as any novice ever rested upon between the evening self-flagellation and popping on the hair shirt the next morning before scuttling off to wash everyone’s feet in the convent refectory. Just as I am snuggling in, though, Sanjeev pounds at the door. He sticks a paint scraper in my flayed hand and points to the approximately three billion windows in the house. All of them painted shut by past residents.

  Sanjeev outlines my Sisyphean task: “Make them open.”

  Several mugs of powdered coffee slurry later, I stand in a bed of lantana frilled with newly blossomed yellow flowers. As I scrape away various geologic strata of paint, the house’s entire history is laid bare. Top coat is a ghastly Greenpeace sage applied by the current eco-warrior residents. Beneath that, my scraper uncovers the soul-scouring greed gray of the late nineties. A flash of tan appears, then it is on to the early nineties, where I hit the years of my earlier residency.

  Butterflies flutter into the air as Millie steps through the banks of golden yellow lantana and joins me. She plucks off the rubbery ribbon of violet that curls up over my scraper. “Oh my gosh, do you remember when we painted that?” The color is as fresh and vivid as the day we applied it.

  “We were such rebels.”

  “Purple trim. The house was abuzz. I loved it.”

  “Loved it for a week or so before Robin ordered us to paint over it with that hideous peanut butter color.”

  “She could be a bit of a martinet.”

  “‘Could be’? Oh, Dr. Dr. Robin can still handle a riding crop.”

  “Do you remember how we tied plastic bags filled with ice cubes to our heads?”

  Before I can process and contain the memory, a pang constricts my heart. I put it down to overconsumption of lentils, electrolyte imbalance, and a dangerous Code Warrior deficiency which I would have done anything at that moment to correct. I am certainly not going to connect the pang to its true source.

  Millie does it for me. “Actually, it was Danny’s idea. Remember?”

  Remember Danny Escovedo? Oh yes, I remember.

  Millie continues, “Then we started telling each other o
ur Coldest Ever stories. Danny won, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, Danny won.”

  “He told that hilarious story about the time his band got stranded hitchhiking outside of that little town in North Dakota.”

  “I believe Danny said it was Witch’s Tit, North Dakota.”

  “And he was in a heavy metal—”

  “Speed metal.”

  “—band and their van broke down and the whole band was wearing their ridiculous stage outfits.”

  “Spandex leggings, ladies’ rabbit fur jackets, platform boots. I think he called their look ‘hooker who’s watched Spinal Tap one too many times.’”

  Millie stops and looks at me. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you really laugh since you got here.”

  “It is?”

  “Danny could always make you laugh. Whatever happened with you and Danny?”

  Me and Danny?

  Before I can answer, Sanjeev appears. “Millie, a moment, if you will.”

  Millie hastens to the side of His Priggishness, and I go back to scraping and thinking about Danny. We met when I was working at the Kinko’s near the law school. Danny took a part-time job there, since being the reigning god of Austin’s indie rock scene, while highly remunerative romantically, didn’t actually pay his bills. In looking back, I realize that, from the first moment, we had chemistry to burn. Pipettes, beakers, volumetric flasks of chemistry. Our relationship was built on jokes, and the jokes were always about sex. Danny was three years younger than me, a gap that seemed unbreachable back in the days when three years represented roughly one-seventh of my entire life span. Now that it covers only one-eleventh of the too-rapidly-mounting total, I wonder why I ever cared.

  But back then, I was off-limits, hence safe, for many reasons. Because of the age difference. Because we worked together. Because Danny was fully booked tending to the flocks of groupie skanks who swarmed around him. For all those reasons, we could both pretend that the jokes were jokes.

  At work Danny constructed a parallel universe in which I was the sex slave of our manager, Templeton, a punctilious little fellow with tiny hands, tiny feet, and an unfortunate habit of twitching his nose when offended. In Danny’s alternate world, Templeton pawed me with those tiny hands in squeaking pink and gray frenzies of depraved mouse couplings.

  Danny grew quite elaborate in his tales of our forbidden, inter-species love: Templeton wooing me with nibbles of the potted-meat-product sandwiches he brought for lunch, holding them out to me in his wee mousie paws. Me, succumbing to the erotic twitching, then being forced to satisfy his depraved rodent desires.

  As a therapist might have said, Danny and I “led with sex.” It occurs to me that, in the beginning, Trey and I had the same sort of joking, frothy relationship. The instant I start thinking about Trey, a dozen fire ants bite my feet. I scream, jump out of the lantana bushes, and swat at the ants, but pearly blisters are already puffing up. Needle pricks continue until I dig the ants out from between my toes.

  I search through the lantana bushes for the paint scraper. At close range, the flower-frilled bushes smell like insecticide and sting like nettles. Also the “butterflies” looping above the flowers turn out to be creepy, bat-faced moths with the bodies of garden slugs.

  For the next week, I stay out of range of the fire ants and gouge at the paint, barely noticing as I strip away the layers of the house’s evolving identity. Midseventies avocado gives way to sixties psychedelic orange. Hours later, I reach all the way back to a time when people didn’t feel compelled to share their inner essence with the world via house-trim color. I arrive at white. Plain white. Decades and decades of just plain white follow until I am down to the bare wood hammered into place a century ago.

  The windows slide up and down. All three billion of them. And then I paint. Using the house’s vast store of leftover paint, I create a batch of a buttery cream color that glows like candlelight in the fading sun. It is the best color that has ever been applied to Seneca House and, day after day, I paint until there is not enough light left to see.

  At night, I take five Advil, drop like a stone into bed, and have whatever a girl’s equivalent of a wet dream is about Danny. The Merry Maid version, I suppose, since no fluids are involved. I wake up bemused by the novelty of sexual feeling. It is such a welcome change from brooding about precisely which inadequacies caused Peggy to dismiss me as summarily as a servant caught pocketing the family silver that I spend the next day thinking about Danny. And the next. And the one after that.

  The Transitoriness of Life

  WITH A CHARTREUSE FURZE of new growth feathering the trees, Austin wakes and remembers that it is a city of flip-flops and tank tops. Its brief flirtation with temperatures low enough to justify striped mufflers and knit caps is long over. Street gutters fill with a spongy mass of fallen live oak tassels. Outside our open window, a pair of hummingbirds darts about the coral vine twining there. A scent like old-lady talcum powder wafts in from the pale lilac blooms of the chinaberry tree reaching branches up to our second-story window. The blossoms’ sweet fragrance mingles with an even sweeter aroma exhaled by the banks of honeysuckle lying collapsed beside the house. The sweetest of them all, though, the mimosa trees, haven’t yet blossomed into pink clouds of candied blooms that can send a person into diabetic shock just from breathing. I love the extravagant excess of mimosas. I’m pretty sure that if I can hold on until the mimosas bloom, I will be all right.

  It has been weeks since I imbibed anything stronger than those Advil, and all visible twitching has stopped. Minutes, hours, maybe an entire day can pass without my thinking once about Code Warrior. Master Sanjeev, however, continues to display a thin-lipped missionary disdain toward me as he hands over jugs of bleach and sics me on the battalions of mildew occupying the bathrooms.

  At the end of week four, I step into the kitchen, which is now Ebola free thanks to me and Sanjeev’s petri dishes, and make a surprising discovery: I am hungry. My gut, tightened by Code Warrior, betrayal, divorce, bankruptcy, the IRS, and general existential terror, has repelled food for so long that it takes a minute or two for me to recognize the churning sensations as hunger along with its accompanying desire to do something tasty to remedy the situation.

  I inventory the comestibles and accept that the only possible way to disguise the disgusting collection of whole grains and soy abominations will be to go ethnic. I recall the contribution I made to the house when I lived here before and step into the backyard. The herb garden has survived. Every leaf I pinch—basil, thyme, parsley, cilantro, rosemary—releases the smell of summer. When I have filled a bag with the most tender leaves, I glance over at the co-op next door, New Guild, the mother ship. They seem to have, of all things, a freezer handily located on their back porch. Their unlocked back porch.

  That night we eat whole wheat capellini made edible by a pesto that contains as much olive oil and butter as I can incorporate into it accompanied by a carnivore’s platter of grilled sausages, pork chops, and T-bones topped with bacon for those who indulge. The viands are gone before Sanjeev and the vegans can protest the appearance of meat on Seneca’s high-minded table. Further questions about the source of all the inhaled animal protein are lost in the sounds of furious mastication as residents snorkel down the Chocolate Intemperance I place before them.

  The next night, it is on to a giant Jamaican hoedown, which, in spite of the country’s reliance upon jerked meats, turns out to be highly amenable to a vegetarian ornamentation. Of course, the Saperstein girls, Yay Bombah and Nazarite, are ecstatic about the gungo pea patties, johnnycakes, bammy, and callaloo, declaring each dish more “boonoonoonous” than the last. The dreadlocked duo’s two-fisted shoveling technique and the way their red, green, and gold stretch-waist pants strain around their middles are a testament to the appetite-stimulating properties of marijuana.

  The night after that, just because I am tired of Sanjeev treating me like an Untouchable, I make mangsho jhol, murgir jhol, Kosha Mang
sho, Channa Dhal pulao, and several other unpronounceable dishes swarming with turmeric and curry, cardamom and cumin. They bring tears to his velvety brown eyes, which makes Millie beam like a mother at a Christmas pageant. Everyone else is feeling so warm and tingly and pleased with themselves for accepting a dingy Third World cuisine that I think it best when vegans Presto and Clancy inquire about the wonderful, unplaceable flavor of the mattarwalli kheema to tell them that it is, yum-yum, fermented soybeans rather than, oops, ground lamb.

  As Yay Bombah and Nazarite are helping themselves to seconds and everyone else is finishing firsts, Millie jumps up and announces, “Oh, dear, I’m late!” Then, just as she does every evening, she rushes into the kitchen and emerges a few moments later carrying a clattering assortment of pots. Sanjeev pops up to help her and his hand brushes against hers. Millie blushes an atomic red at his touch. Sanjeev jerks his hand away as if he’d been burned.

  I am trying to puzzle out what is up with these crazy kids when Doug raises his glass of iced tea, clinks the rim with a spoon until all the other residents look up from the trough. “I would like to propose a toast to Blythe for the finest meals we’ve eaten since I’ve lived here.” Even Juniper clinks Doug’s glass.

  After dinner, feeling fairly certain that the young people of the tribe won’t be shoving me onto an ice floe, at least until they’ve finished digesting, I risk a public appearance in the living room. Sanjeev sits at the dining room table working on house accounts. Jerome sprawls on the armchair reading the Daily Texan. Doug stares into the homey glow of his laptop, taps a few keys, and music, very pleasant music, issues forth. From the kitchen come the soothing sounds of someone else cleaning up as Presto and Clancy clatter about.

  For one second, I feel I am exactly where I was intended to be. I am drug free, actually sleeping, and doing things for others. Atoning for past missteps. Paying my debt to society. Successfully evading the IRS. As if summoned simply by my thinking about the letters IRS, the ancient house phone rings for the first time since my arrival. A black film-noir-style instrument, it is wired, not plugged, into the wall. The phone was here when I moved into the house the first time and seems to have been preserved as a museum piece ever since. The receiver is actually dusty, since everyone owns a cell.