“It’s like being a big tipper,” Chase said, noticing that Bud had now grabbed a handful of spinach. She must be getting hungry, she noted.
“Why doesn’t he just buy whatever one he wants instead of waiting for someone to give it to him?” Gitana asked.
“He has a purchasing phobia,” Donna said.
“A what?” Gitana said.
“He doesn’t like to buy things himself, rather he picks them out and has a neutral party purchase them,” Donna said.
“Is he a tightwad?” Gitana asked.
“No. Phobias don’t operate like that. He just finds money distasteful,” Donna said.
“How do you know all this?” Gitana asked.
Chase started the eggs and pulled the shredded potatoes from the freezer. “His receptionist told us.”
“You know about this too?” Gitana said.
“Always go to the little people, they know everything. We bring her chocolate-covered orange Frangos,” Chase said.
“Oh, Great God in heaven. You’re all corrupt.”
Bud piped in, “Puy!”
“What did she say?” Gitana asked.
“She concurs.” Chase was setting the table. “Staying for dinner?” she asked Donna as she pulled out plates.
“Sure.”
Gitana stirred the potatoes into the eggs. “I feel out of the loop.”
“I’ve got files on everyone we have to deal with. I’ll make you copies and then you’ll be up to speed,” Donna said.
Gitana groaned.
Chapter Two—In the Desert
Life! What art thou without love?—E. Moore
Chase held the dustpan while one of her writing cohorts, Alma Lucero, her lovely wrinkled face and spiky white hair catching the sun, swept up the remnants of an entire china dinner set. The set had been pretty—gold trimmed with tiny pink roses. They were standing in the driveway of Mrs. Givens, Alma’s next-door neighbor.
“It was his mother’s. He loved it, every fucking piece of it,” Mrs. Givens said, leaning over with great difficulty and picking up a piece. “Stupid pink roses.”
“It’s all right, Evelyn. It’s only crockery,” Alma said soothingly.
“I suppose you think I’m a horrible person,” Mrs. Givens said to Chase. “But then I don’t care anyhow, now do I? I suppose I should, but two fits of bad temper in seventy-four years isn’t so terrible. I could’ve been a murderess.”
Chase gazed up from the broken crockery and the dustpan to the woman. “No, I think it’s the right kind of wickedness, in the sense of being quite correct—thus your behavior is most sensible.”
“Are you still reading Dickens?” Alma said.
“Just finished reading Oliver Twist to Bud. She loved it.”
“Dickens! I stand by Hard Times as one of his best,” said Mrs. Givens, “or the one I like best. My husband, that miserable little pompous ass, is like Thomas Gradgrind. Do you know what started all this?” She put her arms out expansively, but before she could answer her own question, she caught sight of the fluttering curtain across the street. “That’s right, stare away—like I care. You haven’t spoken to me in fifteen years, what does it matter now? I can’t help it I’m hideous. Don’t you think I know I only have four good teeth and I have to strap up and wrap up and hunch over just to get through the fucking day? Do you know what that’s like?” She was screaming now.
Chase glanced across the street to see who Mrs. Givens was shouting at, but the curtain had closed. She looked at Alma inquiringly.
“It’s Mrs. Bell. They’ve hated each other for years—something about the theft of tulip bulbs,” Alma explained.
Goodness, Chase thought. My neighbors are looking better all the time—though it does help that there’s ten acres between us.
“Well, back at it. Do you know how long it took me to do all this, piece by piece in fond remembrance of what each cup, saucer, plate, dessert plate, gravy boat, sugar and cream set and graceful teacups meant to me as I washed and carefully stacked them after each holiday? Those were hard, I liked the tea set, but it had to be done, and now it’s all gone.”
Chase decided that “Do you know” was Mrs. Givens’ way of starting all her tirades. Chase rather liked it. Her mother, Stella, would hate it. Just as she had hated Chase’s habit of saying “excuse me” when she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She cured Chase of that. It was a tough love episode, but it had worked. Mrs. Givens and her speech were straight out of Dickens. A character sketch to be dreamed of—a gift from on high. Alma raised her eyebrows as if sensing Chase’s brainwave patterns. “I can’t help myself.”
“So how did it happen, my dear?” Alma asked gently.
Chase hurriedly put the trash can on the side of the garage where she had found it and scurried back so as not to miss any of the story.
“It’s the Republicans—those damn miscreants.”
“What did they do?” Chase said, wondering how a political party could facilitate the divorce of two elderly people and the destruction of a dinner set.
“Why that bastard, my husband, soon to be ex-husband, is a Republican and it’s his fault and you know what he did?”
“No, Evelyn, we don’t,” Alma said.
“I had the audacity to ask the bastard, that would be Eugene, to go out to the mailbox and post a letter—a letter to my poor sister. She’s married to a worthless, shifty, ‘maybe I’ll get a job when one comes along that pays six figures…’ Six figures, my ass. I wouldn’t pay that low-life six cents. I send my sister, her name is Marge, encouragement. I go to Smith’s and steal quotes from the damn Hallmark cards. Sis thinks I’m a literary genius. I send her checks. Small amounts, mind you, I’ve got to squeeze it out of Mr. Tightwad, which I do by watering down his soup. He has soup every day, every damn day. I put in twice as much water as is required and he has one can for two days and the stupid bastard doesn’t even notice. Ha!”
Chase was mesmerized. Mrs. Givens’ tirades didn’t exactly make sense or follow proper semantics but they were priceless. She wondered if she’d ever get to this stage of convoluted sentence structure.
Alma looked over her shoulder as Bo’s bright green Pacer pulled up in her drive. When he got out she motioned him to go in the house. He nodded.
Good going, Chase thought. Mrs. Givens wouldn’t take kindly to a set of balls coming over right now. Bo went inside before Mrs. Givens could see him.
“As I was saying, the Republicans did it. Mr. Pompous Ass thinks all the country’s woes are the Democrats’ fault. I say now how can that be when the Bushies, that’s what I call them, they’re just like a bunch of Moonies, exchanging those silly orange sheets for a blue blazer and a red-striped tie, have had their filthy greedy paws on the purse strings and the deregulation schemes for eight fucking years.”
Alma and Chase both nodded. They were Democrats. It wasn’t like they didn’t know that both sides were a bunch of crooks, but Democrats seemed less likely to round up dissidents and put them in camps than the talk-radio-listening Republican freaks. Besides it was sort of assumed that most creative people were Democrats. Chase wasn’t excited about being a donkey. It didn’t seem a good choice for a mascot—an armadillo would be better perhaps, so the NRA would have more difficulty killing it.
“So that was it?” Alma asked.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back. He won’t speak to me and my kids don’t speak to me either but that’s been going on for a couple of years. I’m kind of used to it, but children really should respect their elders.” She pointed a bony, horribly gnarled finger at Chase. “Do you respect your elders?”
“Right down to word choice,” Chase replied, fascinated with the finger. How did she even write a check with a forefinger like that?
“Good.”
“Why don’t your kids speak to you?” Chase asked. Alma gave her an almost imperceptible headshake. Chase knew what it meant, but she couldn’t help herself. She just wanted one more story.
“Why not?” Alma asked.
Ha! Chase thought, she’s just as engrossed as I am. Chase couldn’t believe Alma had never told her about Mrs. Givens. She was fabulous.
“They’re trying to kill me—all of them, the doctors, the specialists and my ungrateful children and to think, I lay in agony thrusting those little squish-faced bastards out of my vagina—it’s like a Saint Bernard trying to get out a cat door. It’s not pretty.”
Chase winced, having been banished from the delivery room because she was so stressed out before the whole thing got started that now she could only imagine the pain and agony that Gitana had gone through as Bud came out the cat door.
“That’s right, little missy,” she said, pointing the gnarled finger at Chase. “It’s not pretty, remember that.”
“So how are they trying to kill you?” Chase said.
“With medication.”
“Medication?” Chase said.
“For my rheumatoid arthritis. I’ve been like this for years. I take care of myself. I don’t want their pills. That is what killed my friend—the only friend I had,” she looked over at Alma, “Except for you.”
Alma touched her arm. “And I am your friend.”
“I wouldn’t mind being one,” Chase said, surprising even herself with her forwardness. It wasn’t just curiosity or her endless search for fodder, it was something more. Mrs. Givens was honest.
Mrs. Givens smiled at her. She did only have about four teeth, but Chase didn’t care. “Come for tea on Friday and bring that little urchin of yours. Alma told me about you being a parent and I like to frighten little children.”
Chase laughed. “Oh, I don’t think you’ll scare this one. I think you will fascinate her with your stories.”
“All right then, it seems the rest of your artistic miscreants are arriving—go and write something subversive that’ll piss off the Republicans. Tell that spiky-haired one that her web stories make the good people apoplectic and I heartily enjoy the stories.”
Jasmine and Delia, two more members of the writing group, stood in the driveway waiting for them. Chase practically skipped over to Alma’s house.
“That was very nice of you,” Alma said. “You will show?”
“Of course. I’d cancel anything to have tea with her and I promise I shan’t ever write anything bad about her. In fact, I might try to keep her out of my stories out of respect.”
“Oh, don’t do that. She’d be pleased if she were in one.”
“Really?” Chase was delighted.
Delia and Jasmine watched them as they came over and Mrs. Givens slowly made her way back to her front door.
“Who’s she?” Jasmine asked, eyeing Mrs. Givens.
Chase thought she saw something like greed in her countenance. Jasmine’s lesbian detective series, thanks to Chase’s intervention with the publisher, had come along nicely. She was now one of Sappho Sisters’ best selling authors. “She’s mine.”
Jasmine pouted. “She’s so perfect. Can’t I just use part of her?”
Alma frowned at them and then smiled. “I’m sure Mrs. Givens would be quite pleased to have you both over for tea. However, I do not approve of the two of you acting like she is some kind of prize to be apportioned out and stuck in a manuscript.” She opened the front door and they went inside.
Chase smelt coffee. Bo had been busy in their absence. “You’re correct. It’s downright shameful,” Chase said, looking contrite for all of five seconds. “What are you going to do with her?” she inquired of Jasmine.
“Oh, I have the perfect spot for her. I needed someone like her, but I couldn’t get the character right until now. And you?” Jasmine asked.
“Future reference. I’m taking Bud over for tea.”
Jasmine flounced down on Alma’s distressed, greatly distressed from years of use, brown leather couch. “I wish I could go.”
Jasmine had picked up the art of flouncing from Lacey, her “life partner” as they called themselves, who also happened to be Chase’s best friend. She now knew three flouncers, she realized, as Bo came in and flounced down next to her. He was a good-looking guy with his cleft chin and aquiline nose.
“I think she’s really creepy,” Delia said.
Alma smacked her with the manuscript copy that Delia had been passing out. “That’s not nice.”
“She reminds me of my Aunt Edna,” Bo said, glancing over the copy.
Finding the couch too crowded, Chase went to sit in the burnt orange-colored easy chair that was no longer easy as the leaning back mechanism was broken and had been broken for years. Alma’s idea of decorating was comfortable old furniture, a few water color paintings of aspen trees in fall, a portrait of a Hopi Indian in full dance dress and an oil painting of Chaco Canyon with an amazing thundercloud sky. Chase liked that one the best. When Bud got longer legs she planned to take her there and hike around the ruins.
Delia brought out the coffee on a tray and set it on the badly watermarked oval coffee table. She sat down next to Bo and retied her shoulder-length hair with a woven hemp and bead hair band. She looked like Violet Baudelaire preparing for an invention, thought Chase. Chase was reading the entire Lemony Snicket series to Bud as bedtime stories. Gitana didn’t necessarily approve so they pretended to be reading Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery. They’d already finished it, but Gitana wasn’t one for counting pages.
It still blew Chase’s mind that Delia had gone from philandering butch to monogamous femme. She’d grown out her spiky-hair, although as Mrs. Givens had mentioned, she’d not changed her Facebook photo as she thought her butch image sold better. Now, she wore wide-legged organic cotton trousers and girlie tops as Chase called them, fitted things with hip lines. She still didn’t have good manners, but Chase was certain they would eventually show up. At least Graciela, Delia’s live-in girlfriend and Gitana’s sister, was still mostly the same except that she was entirely devoted to Delia in a way that Chase had never thought she’d see. The former Lothario was now the picture-perfect monogamous partner with a real job. She sold real estate to gay couples and did quite well at it. “How’s the husband?”
Delia smiled. “Wonderful as ever.”
“They don’t even fight,” Bo said. He’d recently broken up with Boyfriend 103.
“You’re just bitter,” Delia said, handing him a cup of coffee.
“That’s all right. Mr. Right will be coming along shortly. Besides, I write better when I’m single,” Bo said.
For Chase it was the opposite. She couldn’t write if there was domestic strife in the house.
“How is E-rotic Editions coming along?” Alma said. She took the cup of coffee Delia handed her.
“Fucking great! We just signed the hottest new erotica writer on the web so far. She was doing her own stuff, but we convinced her that all of us banding together will give us more exposure.”
Delia and Bo did a high-five. They had had the wild idea to start an e-press and market erotica. Bo had the computer skills and Delia was the sales person. She could talk anyone into anything. It reminded Chase of that Pet Shop Boys’ song, “You’ve got the looks, I’ve got the brains, let’s make lots of money.”
“What’s her name?” Jasmine asked.
“Get this, Lolita Loveheart,” Delia said.
Bo rolled his eyes.
“It’s better than Hard N. Fast,” Delia said.
“Are those their real names?” Jasmine said.
Alma’s jaw dropped, her usual savoir-faire shattered by Jasmine’s naiveté.
“Have you been doing your assignments?” Delia snapped.
“Diligently,” Jasmine said, holding up two fingers declaring her oath. “Lacey is delighted with my progress.”
“Then you should know better,” Delia said sharply, like she was reprimanding a silly child.
“What assignments?” Chase said.
“I’m proofreading all the incoming erotica.
Then Lacey and I practice the logistics to see if they’re physically possible. It’s a win-win situation.”
“Are you paying her for that?” Chase said.
“Of course. She gets fifty bucks a story, more if it’s a longer one, plus the fringe benefits of the research,” Delia said.
Chase suddenly wondered if she was old school. Did Lacey and Jasmine, newbies to the fold, know more about sex than she and Gitana? She might need to pilfer some of their stash.
“That appears to be a fair proposition,” Alma said. She circled a few words in the manuscript that Delia had given them all. Delia and Bo were the editors for a printed volume of erotica that was coming out and the group was dealing with some of the more troublesome stories. Those stories, once they got them straightened out, had taught Chase a thing or two, but as yet she hadn’t had had the courage to try out any of the moves on Gitana.
“You should know a pen name when you see one,” Delia continued to upbraid Jasmine.
“I never really look at the cover page,” Jasmine said.
“Which might be an asset,” Alma suggested.
“Why’s that?” Bo said, pouring himself more coffee from the carafe.
“Hard N. Fast already sets the reader up for a certain kind of story and if it doesn’t live up to the preconceived notion of the reader it could be a letdown,” Alma said.
This sent Bo and Delia into spasms of laughter. “Letdown,” they gasped.
Alma exchanged looks with Chase.
“Why is it that erotica can be so absurd sometimes? It’s like dirty jokes. Sex should be sacred and special,” Chase said. “Not something to be hurled about like a sweat-befouled jock strap.”
“That’s really beautiful,” Jasmine said, reaching over to pat Chase’s hand.
“Good thing you’re not writing the introduction,” Delia said, once she’d composed herself. “You’re getting kind of prudish in your old age.”
“No, I think she’s getting more Proustian,” Alma said, circling another word in the manuscript whose title’s meaning still eluded Chase. It had something to do with bumping donuts.
Chase Banter [02] Marching to a Different Accordion Page 2
