A View From a Broad (10 page)

Now I could go out and face those thundering, non-English-speaking Swedes. Let them walk out on me! Let them not understand! I had my friends! My family! I needed nothing more!

“Come, Miss Frank,” I bravely cried, flinging my split ends over my shoulder, “cinch me in! And make it tight! I’m going to go out there and turn that ice rink into a wading pool! . . . If I only knew a little more Swedish . . .”

G
ood Evening Ladies and Germs and welcome to another breathless evening of Tit and Wit! I stand before you nipples to the wind, ready to please you in every way you hoped I might and some you hoped I might not. . . . Am I talking too fast? Am I talking too slow? . . . In honor of my first trip to the North Countries, I come to you tonight mean as Scrooge and twice as horny, full of stories, songs and little pieces of exotic information you might not have known had you not bought a ticket to see this demented demiblonde. Ain’t that right, girls? How many of you think I’m still talking too fast? . . . How many vote for too slow? . . . How many of you think I should just shut up and go home? . . . Where was I? Oh, the girls. Look at those girls. The new lot. Each and every one of them a former Miss Matjes Herring. New girls, but the same old drag. You know me, honey, I
am
the Queen of Recycling! We didn’t have auditions to find these three —we had fittings . . . but I tell you, I am as proud as a peahen over these three yentas. Notice I did not say peacock. My consciousness has been raised. But I suggest you take notice of it right away, as there will be less and less evidence of it as the evening wears on. . . . Am I talking all right now? . . . Is everything okay? . . .

I
t all began reasonably enough. As there were only two flights out of Gothenburg to Stockholm, one at 8
A.M.
(too early) and one at 6
P.M
. (too late), a private plane was hired to take The Divine and Miss Frank to the distant Swedish capital. The plane, a Cessna six-seater, was scheduled to leave at noon, and at noon (thanks to some incredibly deft work on the part of Miss Frank in arousing The Divine at such an ungodly hour), the bedraggled twosome arrived at a small airport in the woods just north of Gothenburg.

Miss M took one look at the plane and swooned. She had heard that the Swedes were into suicide, but this was ridiculous. Still, there seemed to be no choice but to board the fragile aircraft. Wrapped to the point of suffocation in multifarious layers of unfamiliar animal skins, and still fighting off the effects of last night’s celebrations, Miss M was sullen but obedient as the pilot strapped her into her seat.

“Now, you realize,” the pilot said, “there will be some bumping about. Perhaps even some yawing. . . .”

“Yawing?” Miss M yawned in his face. “What’s yawing?”

“The unpredictable lurching of the aircraft from side to side,” the pilot explained. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”

Miss M regarded the pilot with his firm chin, his steel-blue eyes. She surveyed his immaculate blond hair, his strong, broad shoulders. And she was reassured.

And indeed, the flight began pleasantly enough. The lovely Swedish countryside swept by below them in all its fall grandeur: immense stands of dark-green firs, broken hither and thither by orange maples and pale-yellow aspens. And everywhere the lakes, like so many compact mirrors, reflected the afternoon sun. Miss M looked down on the endless stretches of the by-now familiar wilderness and felt the pressures of the tour slide off her back like a fine chinchilla stole. She snuggled back into her seat and closed her eyes.

She wasn’t asleep for long. The first hint of trouble was a sharp, definite yaw to the right as the plane flew into a line of mean-looking clouds dripping with rain.

“Just a bit of turbulence,” the tall, broad-shouldered pilot shouted to his passengers in the back.

But Miss M’s ears, sensitive as a hound’s, heard the trace of concern in the pilot’s voice. Still, he had such blond hair. Surely nothing could go wrong.

The second sharp lurch, however, was more than a yaw. The plane moved not only sideways, but definitely downwards as well. Miss Frank
looked angrily at Miss M and dolefully up to the Lord.

“It’s just a bit of turbulence,” said Miss M.

“It’s the engine,” the pilot called back. “I’m afraid we’ll have to land.”

Miss M looked out the window, her mind racing through every aviation movie she had ever seen. Land? There
was
no place to land. Only more of those endless pine trees and those goddamn maples.

“I’m going to try over there by that farmhouse,” the pilot said.

Miss M peered down intently. Not far below, she could make out a small wooden-frame house with a large open field behind it. How pitiful, Miss M. thought, that after blistering my heels so badly on the ladder of success, I should come to my end on this little plot of ground in the middle of nowhere. The headline she would never see danced before her eyes:

The pilot shouted back orders: “Fasten your seat belts tightly. Re move all sharp or breakable objects from anywhere around you. Bend your heads towards your knees. Wrap your arms around your heads. Above all, relax!”

T
he plane lurched about more helplessly than ever in the wind and rain. They descended rapidly toward the field below. When they were twenty feet above the ground, the pilot cut the engine completely. The silence was terrifying. But Miss Frank was brave. The pilot was brave and tall and broad-shouldered. Miss M was none of the above. The plane landed in a field of clover as if nothing were wrong.

“We are in Paradise,” Miss Frank announced. “Praise the Lord.”

“Actually,” the pilot said, “we’re in Weldmere. About one hundred miles southeast of Stockholm.”

“We’re up Shit’s Creek is where we are,” The Divine chimed in with her usual eloquence. “And what, may I ask, do we do now?”

The pilot was about to respond when a loud Hallo! drew everyone’s attention outside. Running toward them through the field was a wild-eyed, white-haired man accompanied by two beautiful young women and a gaffer. Waving what appeared to be a megaphone, the man and his companions approached the battered plane.

I
magine The Divine’s surprise when she saw that the man, whom she had taken to be some crazed pig farmer, was in fact the renowned film director Vilmos Angst. Imagine his surprise when he saw it was The Divine who had fallen out of the sky into the middle of his location. Miss M threw off her restraining straps, dashed out of the plane and embraced the genius madly.