by Sarah Bird
Juniper is right. In the past I could have spun this somehow, usually with outright lies. But some essential component in the machinery that used to keep me running seems to be missing. I no longer have the special energy required to connive. It is time for me to hang it up.
“You’re right,” I admit. “Forget it.”
Alli bursts into sobs. Very little probing is required before the story of Ming Mei pours forth. “I don’t know if Blythe’s plan will work,” she tells the group damply, “but what other choice do we have? For me? For the house? I’d think all of you living here now would especially want to save it. I mean, where else are you going to live?”
In this, the second decade of Austin’s housing boom, with ever taller, ever pricier condo developments crowding West Campus, that is a very good point. Anyone who has the means moved out long ago. Lute, Presto, Clancy, Jerome, Doug, Sergio, Olga, even Juniper, weigh their options.
Yay Bombah speaks up and says something about not wanting the “boderation” of moving.
Nazarite, just as devoted as her sister to the fantasy that they are living in a Kingston slum, seconds the motion. “Seen, sistah.”
“So,” Juniper asks, her eyes narrowed into slits of hard suspicion, “what exactly would be involved?”
Nothing, really. A little Pledge, some Windex, we’re good to go.
That’s how I should answer. That’s how I would have answered in the past. I was the mistress of the lowball quote that I ooched up only after the commitment had been made; after money, lots of it, had been spent. Then came the “extras.” Oh you want actual napkins? The price quoted is for the basic package which comes with a very serviceable handful of leaves for each guest. But if you want actual napkins that will be extra. But I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t scam them.
“Again, Juniper is right. This idea is insane and I can’t begin to pull it off.” I abandon the podium.
“Wait!” Sanjeev leaps forward to stop me. His eyes are bugging out of his handsome head as they ricochet from me to Millie and back again. This is it. Sanjeev appears primed to get in some major licks. I brace myself for his attack, for the thorough psychic, spiritual, and moral pummeling he is about to deliver. Fair enough.
“Blythe’s plan is our only chance,” he states unequivocally.
Sanjeev’s death grip on my arm makes me wonder if he might be referring to their only chance to lynch me. But he is not directing his comment to the group. His gaze bores into Millie.
“Sometimes it is necessary to step beyond rigid ideas of what is right and proper in order to do that which is truly right and truly proper.”
Millie lifts her head, and all of Sanjeev’s twitches and tics are stilled. Calmly he speaks to her and her alone. “When that which is most precious in our lives, that which makes our very lives worth living, is threatened, then it becomes necessary to take bold and unprecedented action. Don’t you agree, Millie?”
Millie chews on her lower lip as her nostrils flare and her cheeks redden. Finally she says, “The answer to that question is that it depends on who the action taken will affect. Who will be hurt? We can never place our own desires above others.”
“Bosh!” Sanjeev explodes. “Never? You told me that your mother’s fondest desire was for you to live at home with her for the rest of your life. Did you not place your desire to live your own life above hers?”
“Yes, but her desire was unreasonable.”
“And so is that of my parents.”
Dr. Dr. Robin calls upon her years of training as a therapist to get the discussion back on track. “Huh?”
Staring at Millie with the heat of banked passion, Sanjeev makes his plea. “I believe in Blythe’s proposal. I believe that, with our help, it can succeed, and we can save our future here together. But are you ready to join me, Millie? Do you promise to stand by my side and declare what you want in this life and to fight for it?”
They all wait to hear what Millie, our moral arbiter, will say. “I don’t know, Sanjeev.” Then, for the first time in five long days, Millie’s gaze engages mine. “Do you really think this is possible?”
No one else besides Sanjeev knows what Millie is really asking. Not just is it possible to save the house, but is her love for Sanjeev possible. I take a moment before I answer, because I can never disappoint Millie again. Ever. “Yes, Millie, I really do.”
“And everything will be aboveboard? No corners cut? No playing fast and loose?”
They wait expectantly, all of them, for my response. I am the gunslinger forced out of retirement by the terrified townsfolk. In order to do the right thing, I will have to, once again, do the wrong thing. The first wrong thing I have to do is tell the terrified townsfolk the lie they need to hear. And so, I strap the trusty six-shooter back on and answer Millie in a dead-level voice, “Absolutely not. Everything will be perfectly aboveboard.”
“In that case, yes, Sanjeev, I promise to stand by your side and declare what I want in this life. I promise to fight for it. Yes, Sanjeev, I propose that with Blythe’s help we fight to save the house.”
Millie’s proposal is seconded and put up for a vote. The Old Girl board members who don’t want to be sued vote for it. The residents who have no place else to move vote for it. Only Jerome, who is always against everything, votes against it.
The proposal passes and I stop thinking of myself as a gunslinger in Western movies. Instead, I remember the Lethal Weapon movies. The ones where Danny Glover is always declaring that he is too old for this shit, then is dragged back into the fray the day before he is supposed to retire.
I try to recall if Danny gets killed in the end.
The Tee Town Trifecta
WHAT THE HELL is going on?” Kippie Lee asks as she stands on the walk in front of the Pi Phi house and beholds the devastation. The gracious Tara-like sorority house is completely wrapped in plastic. Workers in white hazmat suits, goggles, and respirators rip out slimy chunks of blackened wood. Alien invasion is not the vibe that the ladies had in mind when they signed on for the Platinum Longhorns Think Thin: A Week of Learning and Leaning.
“We can’t stay here.”
The princesses gather around Kippie Lee and mumble stunned agreement. Everyone on Alli’s list has shown up: Kippie Lee Teeter, Bamsie Beiver, Cookie Mehan, Blitz Lord, Missy Quisinberry, Paige Oglesby, Morgan Whitlow, Cherise Tatum, Mimi McNaughton, Lulie Bingle, Fitzie Upchurch, and Noodle Tiner.
I detect the hand of wardrobe consultant Willow O’Connor in the ladies’ attire. Willow seems to have settled on a Ranch Weekend theme. Kippie Lee is wearing a strapless goatskin minidress by Galliano. The getup is belted at the top and has three more belts at the hip that add some junk to the skeletal Teeter trunk. The rest of the ant colony wears some version of this leather-and-buckles prairie-bondage motif.
Alli scurries around them like a collie with ADD trying to herd sheep.
I take all this in from a hiding place in the Pi Phi shrubbery, since it was agreed that mine might not be the most welcome face when the ladies discovered that their Think Thin hideaway has turned into Area 51. It is unfortunate that I can’t be out there right now mind-controlling Kippie Lee & Co. into walking around the corner to Seneca House. I pray that Alli is up to that task. I worked for a long time with her on a script that combined elements of used-car sales and Scientology with heavy emphasis on closing the deal.
All Alli has to do is deliver the lines I’ve given her. It is essential that we get the ladies across the threshold and into Seneca House. Oh sure, the Plat Longs have an ironclad refund policy that requires sixty days’ advance notice in writing for even a fifty percent refund. But having been on the wrong end of a couple—okay, five—lawsuits with clients demanding refunds, I know that the Plat Longs’ contract won’t hold up in court. Not when you are baiting and switching down from a stately antebellum manse to a tenement crack house. Because I’ve looked a few judges in the eye, I know that when our case goes to trial—and to trial it most
certainly will go—it will be considerably stronger if we can get the Pemberton Princesses into the house for at least one night. Though two would be much better.
Alli bounces to the front of the group. I told her that the vibe she has to establish is haughty concierge. For reasons I can’t fathom, she translated my directive into a denim jumper. Consequently, she looks like a kindergarten teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“Hello, I’m Alli, program coordinator for the Platinum Longhorns, and I’ve got some good news and some better news!”
I could have sold that line, but Alli’s tense, high-pitched enthusiasm tries too hard. The women eye her suspiciously, mouths struggling against bone matrix filler to seam into tight lines of sales resistance as she continues, “The Pi Phi house is experiencing a sudden, literally overnight outbreak of the Ebola virus.”
The group levitates as one in their haste to move away from the house. Ebola might have been overkill, but I did want to both introduce the overnight aspect and preempt any further discussion.
“As you’ve probably guessed, we won’t be staying here.” Alli’s laugh is too hollow, begs too much for approval. She needs to be liked, and allowing the rich to know you need to be liked is fatal. I itch to get out there and show her what haughty looks like.
Alli lets the uncomfortable silence go on too long before diving in again. “Anyway, the great news is that we’ve found a fantastic venue just around the corner. Our valet staff is ready to help you with your bags.”
Alli executes a stilted Vanna White calling attention to the “valet staff”: Lute, Sergio, Jerome, and Doug, all dressed in matching shorts like the bellboys at the Four Seasons. The boys spring forward, grabbing suitcases and doing what I had ordered them to: fluff up the ladies.
Lute doesn’t have to do much more than look gorgeous and say anything in his Australian accent and he is charming.
Charm, however, is not Jerome’s strong suit. He grunts as he tries to lift Bamsie’s matching Vuitton cases. “What the hell you got in here? Anvils?”
“Why?” Bamsie snarls back. “You a blacksmith?”
“No, but I know where I’d stick a red-hot poker if I had one right now.”
I am making a note to myself to reassign Jerome to a noninter-face position when Bamsie starts giggling and swatting at Jerome’s shoulder. “And just exactly where would you stick your red-hot poker, mister?”
I recall that Jimmy Beiver, Bams’s husband, is a legendarily gruff—okay, borderline psychotic—owner of a national franchise that sucks used grease out of restaurant grease traps, then recycles it into something unspeakable. Chicken nuggets, maybe. Prickly Jerome is a pussycat compared with the Komodo dragon at home.
Doug is the big surprise, though. As directed, he flirts with Blitz Lord, hottie trophy wife and recently admitted delegate from the scary New Austin beyond the Zero Three zip code. The surprise is that Blitz flirts back.
This is going well, I observe from my hiding spot. The ladies are responding as planned to attention from young males with more hair on the top of their heads than sprouting from their ears.
I had assigned Sergio to focus on Kippie Lee. Kippie is our bell sheep. Where she goes, the rest of the flock will follow. Sergio, of course, is a pro. He takes off his sunglasses, bats his lashes a couple of times, and I assume that his work is done. I am wrong. Kippie Lee is proving resistant to Sergio’s gigolo charm. She is actually attempting to wrest her Vuitton—from the new Marc Jacobs collection with the gold clasps—out of Sergio’s grasp.
I had coached Alli on what to do should supple young flesh fail. If only she doesn’t panic and forget the magic words I’ve drilled into her. But, alas, Alli is panicking.
Say the words, I send my telepathic message. Alli’s eyes only open wider in dismay as the rest of the ladies follow K.L.’s lead and try to reclaim their luggage. Just as a couple of strays begin heading for the Rovers and the Lexi, Alli finally croaks out, “Gift bags.”
The stampede halts.
Yes!
“Complimentary gift bags for everyone! Please, let’s just adjourn to the new site and we’ll all collect our complimentary gift bags. It’s just around the corner. Okay?”
Start walking, Alli. That’s it. Good. Good. Don’t look back. Don’t wait for accession. And…we have liftoff!
As the ladies follow Alli, I cut through the alley and sprint into the house, bellowing, “Places, everyone! They’re coming!”
My “staff” bustles out to the porch and hits their marks like the trained actors I pray they can imitate long enough to get the women inside.
As far as the house itself, we’ve done what we could with the place: paint, throws, hosing the rugs down with muriatic acid. The plumbing still groans, and Seneca House is still, essentially, a pit, but there is no way around that. I had to borrow heavily just to stock the kind of food Tee Town women will eat. Expensive food: high-dollar protein, berries, no carbs, no filler, no additives, no antibiotics, no hormones.
“Millie, hit the smell machine!”
Millie dashes upstairs to crank up the fragrance blower my surprise supporter, Sanjeev, cobbled together. A fog of eucalyptus, bergamot, and lavender blankets the house, puffing out onto the front porch, where one shimmering gift bag, tongues of tissue poking out like spikes on an agave, waits.
I check my to-do list:
1. Get Hansel and Gretel into the candy house.
2. Avoid being shoved into the oven.
As the group rounds the corner, I install myself in the shrubbery. Alli leads the group up the walkway and they stop in front of our new sign, reading SENECA FALLS SPA CLINIC. When Tribe Tee Town realizes that they might actually be expected to enter the only tenement slum any of them has ever beheld in person, stupefaction quickly gives way to the all-too-familiar mutinous murmurs. Fortunately, I have the A-team prepped and ready to go on.
Olga saunters forward, a study in supermodel lankiness, all cheekbones and disdain. “Hello, lay tease.” Olga is so languorous she could make a tree sloth seem manic. She is my fantasy creation in a naughty nurse outfit that displays everything Tribe Tee Town dreams of: body fat in the single digits, baby blond hair, Slavic cheekbones, skin tight enough to bounce a quarter off of, acres of leg, and youth.
“Welcome to Spa Clinuck. I am mastair aesthetician. I am born in Moscow. My father work at Lenin’s Tomb. From him I learn all secret of presarvation. Every two month we are soakink Lenin in secret solution of glycerol and potassium acetate to mantan pliancy and freshness.
“You see me? Forty-two year old.” The group buzzes because, although Olga is really twenty-four, she doesn’t look a day over twenty-two. “For Platinoom Lonkhorn, I tell all secret of presarvation. Also, I leckchair on mastairpiece of Hermitage Museum in Sent Petersburk.
“Only one bat news. Because of clerical fock op, we overbook. One pairson has to leaf. You decide who cannut get in. We put hair on waitink list.”
The words “waiting list” conjure up all the ladies yearn for most, from the right schools for their children to an Hermès Birkin handbag. Those cursed mutinous murmurs stop dead once the ladies learn that they might not be able to have what they don’t want.
What genius to cast Olga as the doorman, the person to work the velvet rope, the one to create the illusion of exclusivity that is the very cornerstone of Tee Town life. Olga is perfect because she honestly doesn’t care if anyone comes or goes, lives or dies. This is a quality that can’t be faked, and these ladies can sense it like dogs sense fear. The princesses’ interest is piqued. A deal-with-the-devil beauty secret plus an art history lecture plus the opportunity to blackball a close friend? It is the Tee Town Trifecta.
“I introduce clinuck director, Sanjeev Chowdhury. Duktor C.”
Sanjeev steps forward. In another bit of inspired typecasting, I have made the prim, judgmental, officious Sanjeev Chowdhury into the prim, judgmental, officious Dr. Sanjeev Chowdhury. His manner goes perfectly with the stethoscope around
his neck, clipboard in his hand, and calipers peeking out of the pocket of his lab coat. I have done him up in all white like a cross between a plantation owner and Dr. Brinkley, 1920s creator of the goat gland operation.
I still can’t figure out why Sanjeev supported me. At first it seemed it was all about Millie. But they remain as distant as they’ve been since the day on the porch when I stated the obvious and blew their cover. Whatever Sanjeev’s reasons, though, I can’t pull this off without him.
Millie, standing next to him, looks smart in the outfit I concocted for her: the backward collar and chaplain’s stole embroidered with golden doves over one of DKNY’s signature jersey wraparounds that reveal her knockout figure. She is not a leggy android like Olga, but all that pining-for-lost-love gauntness, plus her milkmaid complexion, makes Millie one dishy minister. As Sanjeev begins speaking, she cannot hide her Nancy Reagan, spanielesque adoration.
Most of Sanjeev’s welcoming remarks have to do with agrarian reform in the Indian state of Karnataka. It doesn’t matter; it all sounds so smart in his high British-Brahman accent. He comes through at the end, though, and very clearly enunciates the vital words I scripted for him: “As most of you know, Seneca Falls Spa Clinic is renowned for being in the forefront of aesthetic technique. We work with Clinique d’Artagnan in Paris and the Instituten Krünk in Copenhagen. During your stay here we will have available several off-label uses of products not yet approved by the FDA which my colleagues in Europe have used safely off label and effectively off label for years. Again, I must emphasize that these uses are”—Sanjeev looks over at where I am rustling in the shrubbery, and his face pinches in disgust as he forces out the words I insisted he use as many times as possible—“off label.”
