"I don't want to be reincarnated," muttered Remo. "So there."
"Remo means that he does not wish to be reincarnated as a Christian," said Chiun.
"Bulldooky," said Remo. He got up to get a glass of water from the washroom sink. When he came back, both Kula and Lobsang looked at the paper cup in his hand with horrified expressions.
"What?" said Remo.
"You do not know enough not to drink water intended for washing the hands?" Kula said.
Remo emptied the paper cup in one satisfied gulp, saying, "Well water doesn't agree with me."
Chapter 7
On the morning of her sixtieth birthday, Squirrelly Chicane awoke, expecting wisdom.
She flung off her sleeping mask and blinked blue eyes at the California sunshine flooding in through the windows. Outside, the surging Pacific gnashed at her private Malibu beachfront.
"I'm sixty!" she cried, sitting up. Her hair was the color and texture of carrot shavings. "I'm a crone. The wisdom that comes to every woman in her rightful time is mine!"
There was no wisdom in the sunshine. It hurt her eyes. The pounding of the ocean made her head throb in sympathy.
"Gotta align my chakras," she muttered, closing her dancing blue eyes.
But her chakras wouldn't align. Especially the yellow one. It was being stubborn again.
The phone rang.
"Squid, baby-doll. How goes it?"
"Wonderfully, Julius."
"Great. Great. Listen, you read that Mamet script yet.
"Three pages of it. Gotta say no."
"No! Why not? It's perfect for you. Free-spirited woman decides to have a baby at fifty, goes to a spermbank and ten years later figures out it was her long-lost high school sweetheart's sperm. She sets out to find the brat's father, they fall in love, but something's not copacetic. Turns out it's the guy's twin brother, and the real guy, the father, he's been dead for years. So your character decides to raise the brat without a father. It's the perfect love story for the nineties woman. She gets laid all over the place and still has her freedom. It's very Bridges of Madison Countyish. "
"The clothes are the same as my last picture."
"Clothes-shmothes! We'll hold out for a bigger wardrobe budget, which you get to keep because, after all, it's you."
"That's sweet of you, Julius, but I'm turning a new leaf today. No more ditzy roles."
"But you're the queen of ditz. And glitz, of course."
"I'm sick of ditz. Just Re I got sick of being called kooky, loopy, daffy, dizzy, free spirited and every other ditz synonym the trades could think of. You know, they didn't stop calling me a gamin-faced starlet until I was past forty."
"Don't knock it. You project youth. That's very important in this biz."
"From now on, I project crone."
"Crone! Baby-cakes, I'm third generation. My Yiddish goes only skin-deep. What's this crone?"
"A crone is what I am-a vital, brilliant, mature sixty-year-old woman"
"Sixty! When'd you turn sixty?"
"This morning. I'm a new me, Julius. Throw out all the scripts the majors have been sending you. That's the old Squirrelly Chicane. Get me the kind of scripts that Jessica Tandy gets."
"Jessica Tandy! No offense to Jessica. A lovely woman. But I think she took advantage of a special discount on predeceased embalming. She looks positively pickled."
"Jessica Tandy. But I'll settle for Barbra Streisand."
"Squirrelly, doll. Listen, boobala. If you want to flush your career down the john, that's your business, but don't take your ever-loving agent with you. I got kids."
"My way or the highway, Julius. Get me all the crone scripts that are out there. Remember, I can always write another book."
"Okay, okay, I'll do what I can. But I'm not loving this. And this turning-sixty thing? Don't breathe it to anyone, not even your mother."
"I'm going to shout it from the rooftops. I'm sixty. I'm beyond men and sex and all those unevolved things."
Squirrelly hung up. Almost immediately she picked up the receiver and dialed a long-distance number.
"Hello, Bev. Squirrelly. Just great. It's my birthday! I'm sixty! Isn't that a kick? Listen, I just had a brainstorm. Another self-help book. Different angle this time. Here's the title-Squirrelly: Sixty and Sexellent. "
A prim voice at the other end said, "I don't think that's exactly what your readers want to read."
"Don't be silly. My readers will buy any book with my name on it. They always have."
"We need a media tie-in. Do you have anything happening?"
"You know I'm always happening."
There was a long silence at the other end of the line.
"I don't suppose you've uncovered any more past lives?"
"Did I tell you I was a scullery maid in the days of Henry VIII and he kept hitting on me?"
"Doesn't sound racy enough for a whole book."
"What do you want from a scullery maid? Upward mobility hadn't been invented back then."
"Well, if you get something publishable, give me a call."
The line went dead, and Squirrelly Chicane stared at the holes where the dial tone was coming from.
"What's with everybody today? You'd think I'd contracted the plague. I haven't had the plague since-well, whenever that awful time was."
Squirrelly lay back and stared at the ceiling. It was pink. So were the bedroom walls. Not to mention the bed, the covers and everything else that would take paint.
"Okay," she said slowly. "I'm having an off day." She corrected herself. "A bad birthday. It was bound to happen sometime. I've had such wonderful karma up till now. It'll pass."
She closed her eyes and focused on her chakras. Once she got them lined up, the day would fall into place.
But they refused to align, and the day wasn't getting any younger.
"What I need," she told herself, sitting up, "is a good old-fashioned past-life regression."
Scooting around on the spacious heart-shaped bed, Squirrelly took a pair of silver chopsticks from the night table and used them to extract a cake of brownish material from a turquoise box. She placed the cake in the brass bowl of the silver-filigreed hookah that dominated the night table. The cake crumbled to powder under the rapping of the chopsticks, and a Zippo brought the bit of coal under the bowl to smoldering.
The pipe began bubbling, and Squirrelly Chicane took up the pipe with its amber mouthpiece. She took a hit, held it in her lungs and exhaled it with studied langour.
It felt good. In fact, it felt great. She took another hit, slid back under the pink satin covers and smoked contentedly. It was good bhang. Very excellent. It mellowed her right out.
As she sank deeper into a fog of smoke, Squirrelly thought that she was a long way from the sleepy Virginia town where she had been born.
The bhang brought back her most treasured memories. It was hard to believe it was sixty years ago.
"Sixty years," she murmured. "Sixty years. Two hundred forty seasons. Forty-three pictures. Twenty-eight plays and musicals. Six autobiographies and one self-actualization book. Thirty-two past lives-so far. One flop TV comedy, true, but a gal's gotta eat."
It had, Squirrelly Chicane decided, been a very fulfilling sixty years. She had traveled everywhere. And everywhere she went, she was recognized and feted. It's true the Peruvian authorities had tossed her out of their country for insisting that saucer men had built the Inca pyramids. And there were those unfortunate run-ins with customs over some inconsequential amounts of recreational hallucinogens. But the best was yet to come. She could feel it in her bones. After all, she was a Taurus.
Once she felt loose and relaxed and ready to take on the world, Squirrelly laid aside the pipe and started to rise.
She got her head clear of the pillow when she heard a distinct crack in the area of her lower spine. Then she fell back.
"What's wrong with my back?" she muttered.