The Baby Blue Rip-Off (2 page)

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, Sally was a dietician (pardon,
the
dietician; Sally would insist I make the distinction) at Port City General and was in the habit of frequently professing a belief in “getting involved.” She only became a dietician, she said, because it enabled her to “help people, in my small way,” though I didn’t ever see her donating her sizable paycheck to cancer research or anything.

“Mallory,” she said to me once, during foreplay, “do you have any idea why I decided to get involved with you?”

(See what I mean about Sally and “getting involved”? Shacked up is what we were.)

“Yes,” I said, wilting. “I’ve often wondered why you chose to give yourself to an undeserving wretch like me. Just this second I was wondering that.”

Sally didn’t much care for sarcastic remarks, unless she was the one making them, so she pushed me away and said, with no sense of irony whatsoever, “Screw you, Mallory.”

(Most persons of the female persuasion I’ve known—and I use “known” in several senses of the word, including biblical—have called me by the not unaffectionate diminutive “Mal.” They will say, “Screw you, Mal.” Not “Screw you, Mallory.” I tend to take the latter as an insult, though I may be playing at semantics.)

“Are you ready to listen?” she said.

That meant, was I ready to shut up. I nodded.

“I chose you,” she said, “because I thought you were an activist, like I am.”

She voted straight Democratic.

“I chose you,” she continued, “because you wear your hair rather long, by local standards, and of the men I’ve met in this lousy little town, you were the only one with long hair who wasn’t a high school kid.”

Ridiculous. First, my hair barely covered my ears, like an early Beatle. Second, even considering hair an issue, at this late date, branded Sally as the aging former hippie she was.

“Also,” she continued, “the doctors at the hospital are too old for me and, frankly, much too conservative for my tastes.”

The doctors were married.

“You, Mallory, are young.”

Thirty. So was she. Which is why she liked to think of it as young, of course.

“And you have money in the bank and aren’t just some grubby little leech wanting to suck up my paycheck.”

Power to the people.

“Also, these conservative upright Port City types just aren’t my cup of tea.”

Her cup of tea was another kind of tea altogether.

“But you,” she said, “you I thought were different. But no, you aren’t, not at all. You’re as conservative as the oldest old turd sitting on that bench in front of City Hall.”

She liked to say words like “turd” to shock me. Shall we all blush together?

“You don’t think you’re conservative, Mallory? Oh, but you are. If you weren’t conservative, Mallory, you’d get involved.”

“How?”

There was my mistake. Right there. Opening my mouth. Asking a question. Mistake.

So she told me how to get involved, and I did.

I sure did.

But I must admit that the eventual depth of my involvement didn’t have much to do with Sally. She’s just the person who bumped into me, knocking me off a cliff; I mean, she didn’t put the damn cliff there or anything—she just bumped into me.

You see, Sally is one of those persons for whom the term “lip service” was coined. (In more ways than one, but that’s another story.) Sally got involved in politics, for example, by saying “Right on!” while watching her candidate speak on TV. Sally got involved in ecology by putting a litter bag in the front seat of her oil-burning Pontiac. Sally got involved in bettering race relations by calling blacks “black” instead of “Negro” and by making sure to invite one to every party she threw. You’ve met her.

So Sally’s getting me involved was, initially, no great burden for me. And it was more worthwhile an involvement than the usual run of Sally’s lip-service mill.

What Sally wanted of me was a vested interest of hers, meaning it related to her job as dietician at the hospital more than her sense of humanitarian purpose. I was to take hot meals around to four old people during the supper hour, one evening a week. The service was provided at a nominal fee by the hospital so that old folks in the community who were living alone would be sure to get at least one hot meal a day. When Sally explained that this was what she wanted me to do, because one of the volunteers in the service had had to drop out for the summer months, I was relieved and glad to do it.

I was one of several dozen people in Port City who had taken on this particular good deed. Doing it once a week was no big strain, especially since it was summer and I wasn’t busy with a damn thing anyway, except taking a course in literature at the college two mornings a week and writing my latest mystery novel, which mostly ran to afternoons. I could spare the time.

There was only one irritating aspect to my getting involved with the hospital’s Hot Supper Service (as it was ingeniously titled), and that was that by the time I had done my duty for the first time, Sally and I had broken up.

As I promised earlier, Sally isn’t going to be in this story much longer, and I wouldn’t even mention her if she hadn’t been the prime mover for getting me into one of my larger messes, playing a peripheral Stan Laurel to my center-stage Oliver Hardy. And I think it’s interesting, if irrelevant, to note how a person out on the sidelines of a certain chain of events can make so great a dent in those events without even trying.

As far as our breakup scene goes, I’m not going into detail about it. I didn’t find her with another man; she didn’t find me with another woman. (I didn’t even find her with another woman, which would at least have been a change of pace.)

She just got tired of me.

And chose to tell me, of course, while we were in bed—and not sleeping, either; she had a bad habit of using that most inappropriate of occasions to bring up topics for discussion.

Well, I was tired, too, and told her so; told her we’d just been using each other, and a good time was had by all, but good-bye. And I moved back into my house trailer on East Hill.

But should you ever happen to pick up this book, Sally, keep reading; even though you aren’t in it anymore, stick around.

See all the trouble you caused me.

The bad thing, I thought, about my getting involved in the Hot Supper Service was the flock of old people I’d be serving. Four of them; four old ladies. God forbid I’d be asked in to chat with one of the tottering old relics. Who in hell wanted to watch the decaying creatures gumming their food, saliva and masticated glop dribbling all over their hairy-warted chins? Yuck. I accepted the Hot Supper Service as a good thing, theoretically, being a humanitarian at heart; but, like so many humanitarians, I harbored a secret dislike for humanity. Old people, particularly.

For example: I’d see some old guy driving in a car in front of me, going thirty in a sixty-five zone, and I’d say, “Why don’t they get those senile old bastards off the road?”

For example: I’d be in a hurry to get some money out of my bank account, and some old bag’d be ahead of me at the window, cashing her social security check and having the teller divide up the money and place it into envelopes marked “rent,” “groceries,” and so on, and I’d think, “Just pass away in your sleep, why don’t you, and save yourself the trouble.”

But I was signed on for the duration. So there I was in my blue Dodge van, setting out to feed the elderly multitudes, with four self-lidded Styrofoam plates of hot food sitting on the floor in back. I hadn’t got around yet to carpeting and fixing the thing up, so my Styrofoam passengers got a rough ride.

The hour or so a week I had to spend delivering the meals took me all over Port City. As a rule, Hot Supper volunteers had a single neighborhood to service, but no such luck for me. Apparently I’d been saddled with a grab-bag list of leftovers from the other routes, giving me the Port City grand tour, starting with Mrs. Fox on West Hill.

West Hill is steep, rising out of the downtown business district, looking out over the bend of the Mississippi along which Port City nestles like a rhinestone in the navel of the land. The hill’s view has been spoiled somewhat by the factories that crowd the river, cluttering the scenery and dirtying the water. None of that had particularly bothered the factory owners who built the luxurious gothic homes of West Hill, as they’d found that from their perch things looked sufficiently rosy, the distance blurring out unpleasantness the way a soft-focus camera does wonders for an aging movie queen. And many of those founders of local industry died before factories were considered eyesores, before the word pollution crept thoughtlessly into the national vocabulary; and these good city fathers left both wealth and a wealth of problems to their children. Those children, being from solid stock, rose to the challenge of the changing view from West Hill by moving into high-priced housing additions and condominiums, some of them in Port City.

Mrs. Fox, like the gray two-story nineteenth-century home she lived in, was a survivor of another time. The house had been a showplace once; now it was a paint-peeling, oversize embarrassment in a neighborhood still clinging to the vestiges of class.

The first night I delivered a meal to her, I had climbed the walk up the slanted, surprisingly well-kept lawn, feeling somewhat nervous. I half-expected to be met by an apparition, a
West Hill version of Gloria Swanson in a Port City Community Playhouse production of
Sunset Boulevard.

But the door opened to reveal a petite woman with a smooth, wise, quite pretty face. Her cheekbones were strong and high, her hair white and pulled back in a discreet bun; only the looseness of the flesh under those strong cheekbones gave a hint of her age, which had to be seventy at the very least. She wore a simple blue cotton dress, with a white cameo brooch at the neck. She walked with a cane—because of arthritis, I found out later.

“Mrs. Fox?”

“Young man?”

“I’m here with your food. From the hospital?”

“Oh! The Hot Supper man! Come in, come in. What happened to that nice couple that was bringing the meals around?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“No matter. Follow me, please.”

She led me from the entryway into a large living room, where an oriental rug of oranges and yellows and reds, a baby grand piano, a fireplace, and assorted obviously antique Louis XVI furniture were dominated by a light wood ceiling carved in wonderfully graceful rococo detail.

“A German fellow did that,” she said. “Many years ago. No one carves that way anymore.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose so.”

Still awestruck by the room, I somehow managed to hand her the Styrofoam plate of food and watched with some surprise as she pulled a TV tray from somewhere, set it up in front of an expensive-looking old lounge chair, and put the plate on the tray. The tray was out of place in that room, like a man arriving at a costume ball a week early.

“Unlike most living rooms,” she explained, smiling, “this one
is
lived in. The upstairs of the house is entirely closed off—has been for years—as is most of the downstairs; I only use the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Can I get you a lemonade, young man?”

I refused, and she went on to say, “Oh, I had so hoped I could connive some company out of you. This is a beautiful old house, but it’s a bit lonely for one.”

I explained to Mrs. Fox that I had three more stops to make on my route, but promised to make her last on my list the following week so I could stay and visit for a while. I kept my promise, and that next week she treated me to a memorable evening of reminiscences about earlier days in Port City. Seems her husband had been one of the men involved in initiating local pearl button manufacturing, which helped earn Port City the unofficial title “Pearl Button Capital of the World”; but in the days of plastic buttons, that came to mean little, and Mr. Fox had stubbornly clung to pearl when other Port City plants were converting to plastic. He had died bitter, and broken if not broke. Mrs. Fox felt lucky to still have the old house, one tangible memory of a more prosperous time.

“Our boy George, our only child George,” she said, “runs the Allstate insurance office here in town. And George has tried to get me to let go of this old house, but I won’t do it.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Oh, he’s been good about it, considering. Comes over and does the lawn for me, and once a week his wife helps me clean the old place. That son of mine is why you’re here tonight, young man, because he’s the one who got me into this Hot Supper business. Said he was afraid I wasn’t eating proper. And you
know something? He was right. Kind of lonely cooking for one in that big drafty kitchen.”

The thoughtful son was something of a running refrain along the old Hot Supper trail. Only in the case of the Cooper sisters, it was a thoughtful nephew.

The Cooper sisters were twins; whether they were identical twins or not, I couldn’t tell you. They were similarly built, being graceful, willowy old gals who must’ve been lookers in their day. I tend to think they
were
identical twins, though, as they both looked much the same. But then so do most eighty-year-old women.

They lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house; the upper floor they rented out to some college students, who played very loud rock music up there. Neither sister seemed to mind. Or hear, for that matter. The house was a pleasant old yellow clapboard, hardly a match for Mrs. Fox’s mansion on West Hill; just a sturdy, well-kept house in a neighborhood of similar houses. The neighborhood shared the valley between East and West Hills with the downtown area, a belt of churches and schools separating the business and residential districts.

The Cooper sisters had been living together for a long time—all their lives, I supposed—and probably in this same house; only in fairly recent years had they decided, for practical reasons (both monetary and physical), to rent out the upper floor, and to move all their furniture onto the lower floor. For that reason their living quarters tended to be cluttered; there were chairs enough to seat a meeting of the DAR, old photos of relatives and old paintings by relatives, tall cabinets brimming with china and bric-a-brac, and all the doilies and knickknacks in the world.