Episode Twenty-Six
Will It Ever End? Or Did it End and Nobody told Me?
It was Monday after next and I didn't even remember the Monday before then. I hated Mondays anyways and didn't care who knew it. Calendars were not my friends. The parrot volunteered to mark all the Mondays off my new ones with green markers if I let him read The New Yorker and besides he liked the color green. I usually let all the animals sleep in on Mondays so we could pretend that it never happened but, oh, boy, did they ever eat like pigs on Tuesdays! If Tom didn't supply me with leftovers, I don't know how I would have kept them fed. Of course with his menus offering the strange and exotic, there were usually a lot of leftovers. Some things even the dog wouldn't eat. I just told Tom Toulouse was finicky when he sniffed his full bowl and ran away. That really hurt Tom. Once, I saw a starving homeless man shake his head at an awful and unrecognizable concoction Tom tried to give him even though it smelled good. Tom had a big heart and he never stopped trying. Even though he should have. His bell pepper bamboo shoot biscotti was pretty good though. (If you ate it fast and with your eyes closed.) Even after he had attended three cooking schools he still put his special touch on just about everything he made. It was the clown in him, I guess as MiMi would say. Bless his heart....
Evidently, Mary Margaret had let a photo booth picture of the late Si and herself slip out of a pocket or purse and her widowed sister had seen it and gasped aloud. Her husband's cheek had been wearing her gaudy sister's red lipstick and Margaret Mary was aghast and had reached out to rub that awful red all across her dumb blonde sister's face. She also had pulled that tacky wig off because she wasn't really even a blonde. She was just dumb. The melee ended with tears and obscenities, torn clothes and cheering men. Lance, D'Sal and several bouncers and cops got close enough in the fray to hear Margaret Mary say "You fool! I was going to divorce that devil of a man so he could marry that rich Ethel broad he was always talking in his sleep about. I was sick and tired of his sorry no good shellacking ass! "
Mary Margaret collapsed on the floor between Big david and Little Guido's legs while clutching a fist full of her sister's hair. "Ethel?" "Ethel who?" she cried. "He told me he loved me! He was going to marry me one day! I suspected he was chasing after that Voo dame like Lance does. Oh, what have I done? I didn't mean to kill him! I loved him! He said you wouldn't give him a divorce! He said...Oh, my Lord! I didn't mean to! I loved him! I didn't mean to! Oh, yes, I did! I could kill him again, I could!" And as they cuffed her and dragged her away she was still alternating between loving him and killing him again. My knights in tarnished armor sighed huge sighs of relief and mopped their exhausted faces and ordered several rounds of anything wet to celebrate.
That is how I was rescued from my not quite hell hole jail cell at last. I must confess though, that when my mother came to pick me up and smuggle me away from society's prying eyes, chiding me non-stop like a human parrot, I begged her to let me stay just one more night and promised I would come home soon. I didn't tell her that Lance and I were spending the night in a discreet, non-disclosed location where we would slow dance to the radio, drink Gin Gimlets and run our fingers through each other's hair. I wanted to eat filet mignon, bathe in Chanel Number 5, try to erase the Surd family from my mind and most of all I never wanted to catch the slightest whiff of a banana again as long as I lived!
Things were going as planned and I was feeling as good as a newly freed incarcerated unfairly, homesick and hungry, innocent, well, almost innocent girl could, I suppose. But then as usual, things took a turn for the worse. Of course, they did. What did you expect? You know my history, right? As I stood in the shadows of my private prison waiting for Lance to whisk me away with champagne and roses, a dark car pulled up and a crazy woman jumped out screaming "You hussy! You think I didn't know about you and my husband? You think my stupid sister was the only hussy he was lying to? I made Ethel up! For my stupid sister! All he ever talked about in his sleep was you! You Aachoo Voo, you! You and Shellac and sand paper! Do you know what Shellac is made of? Do you? Bugs! Female bugs! Aachoo Voo! You and that stupid name of yours! What is wrong with your mother naming you that?!" "I'm going to kill you!"
And before I could make excuses for my mother (which was a very uncommon thing for me to do) and correct her on the origin of my name, Margaret Mary bopped me over the head with an industrial sized can of Shellac and I fell head first into a pile of police station rubbish, girly magazines and banana peels. Out cold. Or at least tepidly lukewarm but definitely out. Both of those sisters were as crazy as loons and both cold blooded killers I was sure of it but then too, I was familiar with Si and his slick and charmless charms. He could make any woman crazy. He could make you want to kill him over and over again in all kinds of inventive and creative ways. Even girls like me. Even Aachoo Voo, Private Eye...
If only in your mind.
For Your Information**
Shellac is a natural resin secreted by the female lac bug (Kerria lacca) on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is produced by harvesting the resin-encrusted branches (sticklac), refining it into flakes, and sometimes bleaching it. Chemically, it is composed of aleuritic acid, jalaric acid, shellolic acid, and natural waxes.
I had no idea. really