Of course it turns out then that we all have to put up money or go out and start changing cat boxes, managing unruly drunks and transforming old grocery stores into Arabian restaurants. The other lads butter up Skinny and then back down, and I explain to her there isn’t much I can do all by myself, though she sometimes keeps after me for a while.
Nothing discourages her. She needs that million-dollar plan a week just like she needs to nest-build every six months.
The puzzling thing is that with all her brains and drive Skinny’s never been able to get a good job outside show business. I guess it’s the same way as with ballet… anybody who might hire Skinny is scared of her. Her drive shows through. They figure that if they gave her a toehold she’d own the business in a year. Just the same, She’s wonderful.
Right now she’s got a job as a demonstrator at the big dime store. That’s right, that red-head who’s always chopping up vegetables with a patent gadget, or putting a rainbow oil-slick in china, or sample-enameling a teenager’s nails ten different shades, or managing a tableful of tiny clockwork men in striped pants… that’s Skinny. She gets a chance to sales talk and explain and do something all day long, but it never uses up all her energy. They say they never had anybody like her. The manager sometimes brings her home.
You see, Skinny has the touch of imagination. Another demonstrator would never have thought of the ten-shades idea, which has become a high-school fad, she tells me. Or of having the little men march off a plank and drown in a sea of green cotton wool, She put live ants in a kaleidoscope, but they wouldn’t let her demonstrate that one at the store. She brought it home. It was quite weird to look into. Once she tried writing stories for Weird Tales but they all came back with the comment “Too horrible.” Or maybe it was “Needlessly horrible.” I never understood that. As that so-called screenwriter told Skinny, “Even Shakespeare got called too horrible.” By Lamb, I think. Something about putting someone’s eyes out on the stage. Which reminds me that one of the schemes Skinny keeps coming back to is starting an American Grand Guignol theater. She’s great at thinking up weird costumes… she still gets a club date once in a while, you know. She’s still got a terrific figure and she really takes care of it (it’s good for a woman to be proud of her figure, I think) though I guess even if she didn’t take care of it, all that energy of hers would keep her slimmed down anyway. And she’s great at thinking up weird costume accessories, like a gold wire handbag with white mice in it, or fireflies in cellophane pin-ons) that’s for garden parties, or having a real spider web between a tiara and a shoulder yoke, or using a live snake for a belt.
Skinny loves animals. Birds, mice, lizards and turtles, pythons (small ones), baby alligators. Right now it’s golden hamsters. Of course her father running a pet shop is a big help. Sometimes it builds way up and gets to be a sort of balanced economy… the mice ate the birdseed and the blacksnake ate the mice. Once Skinny had twenty-three birds. They were kind of enjoyable flying around, except when they buzzed you, but they started pulling off the wallpaper in little ribbons and they made everybody sort of uneasy about the smorgasbord. Eventually she cut down to seven parakeets.
Some animals she has no luck with. Twice she has cats but they got out fast. The spaniel slipped its leash and we never saw him again… that was my fault. Once she had two Samoyeds. They were just her style… big and white and woolly and fierce looking. She liked to walk them. But one got run over and the other bit some people. Skinny right away had me drive the dog into the next county and sell it. The people never found out who it belonged to.
We had the same trouble with the baby alligator. Skinny left it outside one night in a puddle under a washtub to give it a little nature and it worked its way out. It bit two neighbors who were weeding their gardens before we stopped hearing about it. It had bitten me too, before I found out how fast it could move. A baby alligator’s bite is the funniest thing when it’s fresh… a little crescent of red drops on your hand with two bigger drops for the eyeteeth.
The boa constrictor… it was only five feet long… just lost its appetite and sort of faded. Skinny thought a vacation in Mother’s garden would refresh it, but Mother refused.
Of course the animals are a lot of work, sometimes more than the plants. But Skinny gets a big kick out of them. Skinny’s wonderful. Why, she…
All right, gentlemen, I’ll subside. I can see that Skinny is too much for you. Especially Skinny and animals. That’s all right; She’s sometimes too much for me. I understand. I’ll just have one more beer at the end of the bar and quietly talk to myself.
Skinny loves me too. She really does. She tries to make something out of me and that’s the test. She’s done everything she could to give me ambition and sober me up. She’s had me take antabuse and join AA and her father gives me dianstic therapy. She’s really worked on me. She loves me, all right. Of course there was that screenwriter… he said… and the time she started to Constantinople with the Turkish medical student and those three months she just disappeared, but those were exceptions. And of course she gets mad at me sometimes and talks about murdering me, but I know it’s just a gag when she asks people at parties about undetectable poisons and how do you induce a heart attack in someone who refuses to exert himself.
Yes, that’s for me. I’ll take it. Hello, Skinny. Yes, I’m here. Well, I don’t know how long. All right, right away. I said right away. Yes, I’ll keep an eye out for golden hamsters the last couple of blocks. What? Look, Skinny, I can’t handle that slab all by myself… George and Fred were going to help, they said they would, remember? Well, that’s too bad. Yes, I suppose a taxi would help, but not enough and the driver probably wouldn’t allow it. You can still use the old coffee table top for the party tonight. I know the new one’s going to look nicer but you’ll have all the rest of your life to enjoy it. Well, it may be only three inches thick but that’s still damn heavy. I don’t care if the cutter has to get rid of all his samples. He can hold onto it a day longer… it isn’t the sort of thing a person can toss in the trashcan. I absolutely refuse… Oh I can, Can I? Well, you know where you can shove it!
Draw me one more beer, will you, one for the road? Yes, that was Skinny. Better give me a shot too, this time. I’m going to need it. On the way home I got to pick up a gravestone.
ANSWERING SERVICE
The oval bedroom and boudoir rocked with the wind and shook with the thunder. The curving, tempered glass of the continuous-view windows strained, relaxed, strained again. The lightning flashes showed outside only the lashing tops of the big pines against inky night. Inside they regularly drowned the clusters of rosy lights and blanched to bone the quilted, pearl-gray satin upholstery. At one end of the oval, the silvery, spiral stairway leading up to the flat roof and down to the elevator floor cast momentarily flaring, fantastic shadows across the tufted floor and the great central bed with its huge silk pillows and pearl-gray comforter.
The old lady occupying an edge of the bed looked like the bent-waist mummy of a girl freshly wrapped and hurriedly fitted with a shaggy blonde wig and blonde silk nightgown. But the brown human claw did not tremble, holding the antique-inspired, pearl-gray phone greedily close to ear and lips, while the wrinkle-webbed eye gleamed with the lightning and without it, like jewels of obsidian or black onyx.