There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (8 page)

“Yum-Yum, Peep-Bo, Pitti-Sing,” she said respectively, pointing to each girl and declaring her role. “Tonight, each of you must tell your mothers to buy you a shiny, long-sleeved robe that ties in the front, unless you already have one at home. And be warned: if you show up in a robe better suited to a cast member of
Three’s Company
, consequences will be dealt accordingly. I will not tolerate the appearance of any triangles below the hemlines of your kimonos. I will give your role to a more respectable blond girl, and the audience will just have to use their imagination by pretending that she’s not.”

All the dark-haired lassies nodded.

“And make sure you wash the kimono before you bring it in here,” Mrs. Gelding said, her eyes boring into Maureen, who then, openmouthed, coughed.

When Maye went home and told her mother she needed a robe that would cover her cookie, her mother momentarily excused herself from her telephone conversation, put down her coffee, and said, “You know, it would be so much easier for this family if you would just run, Mayebelline. I’d only have to watch a two-minute race and shorts are five dollars.”

Maye stomped off to her room, where she sulked for nine minutes, wept for three, and then perched her ear dangerously close to her turntable speaker and listened to the
Grease
soundtrack, as did every other drama club member that afternoon. Those who had broader educations in the art of smut or who had siblings in high school indeed gasped, but most, like Maye, were left to conclude in silence that “pushy wagon” was just another term for an aggressively fast car, and as mentioned in the chorus, “Chixel Creme” was probably some sort of fancy 1950s motor oil. Nothing dirty there.

Six weeks later, Maye was sitting in a chair in a barely-below-her-cookie robe after it shrunk in the wash as Mrs. Gelding slathered on white oil-based stage makeup with a makeshift spatula like it was icing out of a can. She had spent half of a semester trying to strike a fragile Pitti-Sing balance between Maureen and Dawn, being that she was the cold cut in the Three Little Maids sandwich, since their musical number required some distressingly close contact. Maye tried painstakingly to (1) remain a minimum of four to six inches away from Maureen’s mysterious universe of a head, where undocumented species were rumored to roam and multiply, and (2) muffle her screams of alarm when the choreography called for the maids to turn sideways and lean on one another, in which Dawn would, with her Green Bay Packer body, attempt to surround and entomb Maye in a tomboy cocoon. This was a situation in which Maye once caught her encapsulator sniffing at her hair and eliciting what she hoped was a gas bubble but was most likely, in hindsight, a gurgle of thrill. Maye heard the same sound once more during the first and last performance of the Gelding
Mikado
, as she tried to be a demure maiden while painted up like a Storyville harlot and, as if in confirmation, looked down after she had just sung to the audience that “‘Life is a joke that’s just begun,’” to see her robe swinging wide open as if she were Hugh Hefner and learned a hard lesson that cheap, shiny, laundered polyester cannot be counted on to hold a respectable and sturdy bow.

“All I can say,” Maye’s mother declared that night as she threw Maye’s costume into the trunk of the car, “is thank God you wear shorts under everything since you got that running rash.”

A couple of decades later, Maye sat in Cynthia’s living room calling up her
Mikado
memories as three of her neighbors—who were too old to be simply grandmothers without a multitude of “great”s being placed before that title, let alone schoolgirls—pranced and flounced with what marginal dexterity their Edwardian period limbs could permit without simply snapping off like dead twigs and fluttering to the ground.

“Three little maids who, all unwary, / Come from a ladies’ seminary, / Freed from its genius tutelary,” the trio squawked, their rice-paper-thin voices wavering frilly and wandering off, on, and beyond key like an elephant on the savannah hit with a tranquilizer dart. The remainder of the party guests looked on with as much merriment as if they had front-row seats at a Broadway show. “‘Three little maids from school!’”

The audience, whom Maye now considered hostages, clapped wildly and cooed at the talents of their hostess and her maiden friends.

“Wasn’t that fun?” Cynthia said to her cohorts, slapping her palms against her knees. “That was delightful!”

“Where IS ALMA?” Agnes finally demanded. “I want my bowl! I am tired of waiting for her to return it, and I want my bowl back! That was my favorite bowl!”

“Oh dear,” Elsie said quietly, then covered her mouth with her fingers as she shook her head. “No one has told her about Alma’s move to the…
other side
.”

“Listen, Agnes,” one of the scooter women hastily offered. “If you’re lucky, you can buy it back at the estate sale on Saturday. That is, if her vulture daughter hasn’t kept it for herself! I’m going to have to buy my salad spinner back and my favorite half-slip! I’m telling all of you right now if you show up to my house for bunko with static cling and wet lettuce, I cannot help you fight that battle! You are on your own! Fair warning!”

“It starts at seven A.M., so we all have to be there early so we can get first pick,” Elsie said. “I’m up at four, so that’s no problem for me.”

“I’m up at three,” another woman boasted. “Did you know they moved
The Rockford Files
to five A.M.? What am I supposed to do for two hours? Oh, I wrote the TV station a nasty letter, I certainly did.”

“I noticed that,” Maude said, shaking her head in sorrow. “Now
The Rockford Files
and
Matlock
are on at the same time. I can’t choose! How can I choose? Thank God they left
Columbo
alone. I have no problem choosing between that and
The View
.”

“Oh, I have an idea!” Cynthia sang, shaking her finger as she disappeared into the next room. Within a minute, she was back with a black vinyl disc in her hand.

Oh, please, God, Maye thought desperately as she tightly closed her eyes and crossed her fingers so hard they turned white. If you are a merciful and kind and loving God, the kind of God who invented cotton candy and Oreo O’s cereal and S’Mores Pop-Tarts and not the kind of God who invented osteoporosis and colostomy bags and transparent skin, please let it be
Grease
!
Grease
is the word, is the word, is the word!

Instead, in a moment, the sound of an orchestra filled the living room, blanketed by the echoing scratches of an excessively played record. Suddenly, Cynthia was pretending to pull a rope, Maude jumped to her side and coiled an imaginary line between her hand and elbow, and Maye heard the alarming hum of numerous battery packs thrown into action as all hands assembled on deck until she was the only guest who hadn’t boarded a make-believe ship, except for the woman next to her, whom Maye feared had chosen to run into the light as opposed to sitting through the impromptu matinee of
H.M.S. Pinafore
that was unfolding near the divan.

“‘We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship’s a beauty,’” the sailors sang heartily to the opening tune. “‘We’re sober men and true, and attentive to our duty!’”

“Do you know the lyrics, dear?” Cynthia called out to her in between verses as she tugged on her mime rope.

Maye shook her head, adding a small shrug, hoping to secure her release with lies but wanting to add that a small hand mirror might be helpful as she pointed to her couch mate. Things were moving quickly along, however, there is simply no time to check for vital signs when a saucy fantasy ship needs to be polished and swept.

“Then enjoy and clap along!” her host shouted buoyantly before she and her mates attacked the chorus.

So Maye sat in her neighbor’s living room and clapped until her hands were as red, chapped, and sore as her forehead, and until both sides of the record had been played. Finally, she managed to escape when the Senior Dial-A-Ride Service bus pulled up in front of Cynthia’s house, and she hunched down and scrambled out with a herd of Legend XLs. When she got to the safety of the other side of the street without looking back, she breathed a deep sigh of relief and then realized that she was still completely friendless.

How do I do this? Maye wondered.

I have been in this town for over a month, and so far, I have an enemy-combatant mailman, my husband’s entire department and his boss have seen my boobs shake like maracas in one of my oldest and least supportive bras, I’m pretty sure I watched an old woman die during an afternoon tea party, and the closest friend I have right now is my lawn guy, who has clearly inhaled more than his share of chemicals and believes that raccoons will pluck my eyeballs out and eat them like olives.

How do I make a friend? How does a childless woman in her mid-thirties who works at home meet people in a new town where she knows no one who actually likes her?

I just want one, Maye repeated over and over again in her head. Just one. One friend to go to lunch with, one friend to call when something funny happens, one friend to go shopping with. Maybe she was asking too much, she reminded herself. She had read once in a magazine that once you moved to a new place, it took three years to build a circle of friends. Still, that hadn’t stopped her from gently spying on other women’s grocery carts, taking inventory of their contents to see if they had anything in common. A bottle of decent-enough wine, a nice cheese, a baguette, and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s were to Maye sinful signals of definite friend potential, someone who wasn’t afraid to get tipsy on a Wednesday night, eat a little dairy fat spread on a carbohydrate, and had no fear of chocolate ice cream teamed with Marshmallow Fluff and graham cracker ribbons. Maye’s kinda girl. Anyone whose shopping cart contained juice boxes, diapers, yard-long family packs of chicken thighs, incense, and Tofurkys was immediately disqualified, because Maye knew that if you let those sorts of people in, the next thing you know, a dirty, hemp-cloaked two-year-old is throwing up soy milk on you at a patchouli-scented barbecue where you’re trying to eat a limp, flaccid, tasteless tofu dog on a spelt bun that weighs as much as an adult human head and is as dense as most, too.

During her spying, Maye had, indeed, found several promising friend candidates, and had softly stalked them in an effort that was not only fruitless but became somewhat awkward when one of them turned and flatly asked if Maye was the one having an affair with her husband. Another woman had sent what Maye interpreted as a signal when they both reached for the same lone bottle of extra-fat caesar dressing. Maye laughed girlishly as she let her potential new friend steal away with the salad dressing, then laughed again several minutes later when they bumped carts in produce, an incident that spawned not a lifelong friendship but nearly a throw-down when Miss I-Am-Nimble-Enough-to-Snatch-the-Last-Bottle-of-Extra-Fat-Caesar-Dressing-yet-Lack-the-Coordination-Skills-Necessary-to-Steer-My-Cart sent her girlfriend over to metaphorically claim her territory as Maye pretended to be mesmerized by carrots and tried her best to avoid a duel over the woman hiding behind the organic russet potatoes.

To amplify the situation to an eardrum-bursting level, Maye hadn’t been getting many freelance jobs, and she realized she had actually spent more time following dessert-loving women around Whole Foods than she had working. While she had ample contacts in Phoenix, it had proved a little harder than she’d thought it would be to secure employment long-distance. So far, she had taken what she could get, which was copyediting a medical-insurance manual, which could tuck any brain in good night more effectively than Ambien and a pint of whiskey in combination. After that, Maye’s days were essentially free for her to eat lunch alone, wander the public market by herself, and wait for her lawn man to show up and see if he had lost any teeth to decay and rot since the week before.

It was Charlie that broke Maye out of her fog of thought (not a second before it became a fully blown pity party with hats and horns) when he turned off the car and announced, “We’re here!” Maye looked up to see that they had arrived at the pet-food store, where Mickey’s obligatory obedience training class was held. Mickey, in the backseat, began to whine and pant with anticipation.

“He must recognize it from last week,” Maye said with a laugh as she got out of the car. “He’s so excited!”

Indeed, Mickey was. He barreled out of the car the moment Charlie opened the back door, and he charged toward the store with unbridled glee.

“At least someone’s excited about this,” Charlie spat out as Mickey dragged him along.

Unfortunately, Mickey’s community-service requirement was not a friendship well from which Maye wanted to drink. Before their first class began, several unruly dogs and their owners had sat in a circle of folding chairs in the center of the pet store, separated from shoppers merely by plastic mesh netting—and if Mickey had not been ordered by the government to attend Bad Dog School, she would have dragged him out of there as soon as she saw who their fellow classmates were. Mad Dog, a “lively” tiger-striped pit bull with yellow eyes, and his Hells Angel owner were the dog/human pair Maye and Charlie saw as they entered the mesh corral and sat down. The owner, who never made eye contact with anyone, either by choice or lack of available coordination, provided the instructor with a genuine court order from a judge, not a pansy-ass letter from the post office, due to Mad Dog’s midnight snack of a Domino’s delivery guy’s shin, which required not only a skin graft but allegedly a prosthetic. The Hells Angel now referred to the dog’s presence in the class as “doing time.” The realization that the only thing protecting an unsuspecting public from a dog that had digested a man’s leg was essentially a volleyball net was not only alarming but strangely exciting when Maye wondered innocently if her mailman ever shopped there. This clearly knocked Mickey right from the equivalent of the Charles Manson of dogs to something along the ranks of Ratso Rizzo, or a shady character out of
Lady and the Tramp
. Speaking of Lady, the dog class provided two: Lady One, as the class was required to call her, a Pomeranian terrified of people who spent the first class hiding underneath her owner’s shirt—which Maye assessed was certainly a more gruesome place than feeding time in a cell at the pound with Mad Dog—shaking and crying; and Lady Two, a decaying cocker spaniel whom the owner communicated with via baby talk and song. Next up was Grand Duchess Anastasia, a bichon frise show-dog hopeful who was not allowed near the other dogs per her uptight and Lincoln Continental–driving and BluBlocker-wearing owner. Then there was Sammy, Mickey’s favorite, a nice but excitable and wiry greyhound brought to class by his stripper mom, Pebbles, and her unfortunate eight-year-old son, who apparently was a product of a skinny dip in the shallow end of the gene pool or one egregiously faulty Friday-night judgment call—the child sported a large head and odd, bulging, Don Knotts eyes.