Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ I was married at nineteen,” said Fern, “and I’ve had twenty-one great years.”

      “You are so full of crap sometimes, Fern McGrew,” said Betty.

      Betty was big and muscular, and always wore lumberjack shirts. There was something in her attitude that reminded me slightly of my roommate Caroline. Caroline was smaller, a size sixteen, so she could buy her clothes off most racks. Betty only bought hers off the racks at Mr. Big ’n Tall, but when it came to tough-assdom, they could have been mother and daughter. Betty had been a sled-dog trainer in the Yukon before she got sick of the snow and moved down to Vancouver.

      Betty barged on, “‘Great years,’ says Fern. Miranda, get her to tell ya about the great time she had when her great husband goes and gets himself that stupid little slut on the side, and the great fights they has about it and the time he puts her in the hospital because he’s broke her cheekbone with his great big fat fist.”

      “Every couple has its little ups and downs,” said Fern, but she was looking at the floor.

      Betty leaned in to confide. “I gets the word about Fern here bein’ in hospital, gotta have surgery ’cause them little pieces of cheekbone is gonna get into her bloodstream otherwise and finish her off good-style once and fer all. So what does I do? I goes over to their place, and there’s old Cliff sittin’ on the couch swillin’ a beer and watchin’ football like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I hauls him up onto his feet and drags him out into the street. He’s wearing just his socks, no shoes, huh, and lookin’ pathetic. Then I lets the whole street know what he’s done, as if they doesn’t know already, and then I whacks him one across his cheekbone an’ I sends him flyin’ into somebody’s recyclin’ bin. The neighbors wasn’t too happy about that but they wasn’t gonna take me on neither. He never done it again, I can tell ya. Am I right, Fern?”

      Fern nodded and said, “He’s been a pussycat ever since.”

      Wow. Betty and her two meaty fists. Kurt would have to stay in line.

      Cora came out of her office. She was a petite woman with a mass of platinum, back-combed hair in a white hair band. That day she wore tight white pedal pushers and a white angora sweater. She was in her forties but so youthful you wouldn’t know it. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sandra Dee film. All she needed was a surfboard under her arm and she was complete.

      She grinned and said in a singsong voice, “Better get going, girls. This one’s a Special.”

      We all groaned.

      Betty grabbed her loyal Hoover while Fern and I loaded up our multipocketed aprons with our sprays and cloths. Fern was on dusting, I was on bathrooms and kitchens, and Betty was vacuuming. We were like soldiers going into battle.

      We hurried out to the company car, loaded the equipment into the back and climbed in. With Betty behind the wheel, we whizzed down to The Bachelor’s place on Burrard. He lived on the twenty-eighth floor of a twenty-nine-story steel-and-glass high-rise overlooking English Bay.

      We cleaned his place every week but today was a Special. Specials were more than just the regular Little Ladies cleaning job. They were expensive and meant we had to do anything that needed to be done. Within reason. As soon as we stepped inside his apartment, we knew The Bachelor hadn’t been operating within the confines of “reason.” He’d been partying.

      “So what would you say’s going on here?” I asked as we surveyed the scene.

      “Lazy drunken slob,” announced Fern.

      “Barnyard animal,” confirmed Betty.

      To start with, The Bachelor had a round bed and not-too-clean moss-green sheets twisted this way and that. At the chest of drawers, I imagined him emptying the contents of his pockets every night, since it was covered with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, sticky half-sucked peppermints, condoms still in their foil wrap but well past their expiry date, and numerous crumpled bits of paper with girls’ names and telephone numbers. Similar goodies sprinkled the brown-stained wall-to-wall carpet as well. The mirror tiles above the bed had some interesting spots on them, as though they’d been spritzed by quite a few bottles of fizzy stuff.

      Meanwhile, the fridge held about fifty bottles of beer and a block of mold. No doubt he ordered in whenever he didn’t eat out. Interesting encrustations covered most of the kitchen, detailing The Bachelor’s gastronomic history for the week.

      Back in the living room, there were suspicious-looking marks on his black couch. And his one weeping fig was half-dead. His shoes and socks were all over the place: on top of radiators, on the dining-room table, under the couch. One sock was stuffed into the weeping fig’s pot.

      In the bathroom, I figured he had a nightly struggle getting his willy to cooperate and aim into the toilet rather than all over the wall. It was probably the beer. I could be sympathetic and understanding though. Men and women have their own unique sets of problems. If I had the Curse of the Mammary Glands, why couldn’t The Bachelor have the Curse of the Maverick Member?

      Fern, Betty and I put our backs into the cleaning for two and a half hours, wondering the whole time how The Bachelor’s ancestors had ever made it out of the cave and into civilization.

      As we cleaned, the silence was broken every so often with Betty’s mutters of “Slob.”

      Fern said, “The poor man just needs a woman in his life. Someone to clean him up and organize him. You should have seen the way Cliff was living before we got married. He makes The Bachelor look like Mr. Neat. Now, Miranda, how about if you just add your phone number to that little pile on his dresser?”

      Betty barked, “Would ya quit with the lonely-hearts crap, Fern? Miranda’s doin’ fine. She’s gonna be an opera star and no man’s gonna get in her way.”

      I hoped Betty was a prophet and that her words would come true. I said, “Thanks for caring, Fern. If things don’t shape up by the time I’m thirty-nine, I’ll get you to do a little matchmaking, okay?”

      “Oh, you don’t want to wait that long, Miranda. Everybody needs a soul mate.”

      Betty said, “A soul mate, Fern, not a middle-aged preschooler who leaves his crap all over the joint. This guy’s mother has a lot to answer for.”

      Fern countered with, “Listen to you, Betty. You wouldn’t be talking like that if you’d just get a man by your side, yourself.”

      “Don’t need a man. Got ma dogs. And they’re as good as any man ya could know.”

      It was dangerous territory. We knew better than to touch on the subject of Betty’s dogs, or the rest of the canine kingdom, for that matter.

      As I brought The Bachelor’s stainless-steel fixtures back up to their original gleaming state, my imagination wandered to the life I would lead once I got to London.

      My father would probably put me up. I had an open invitation, after all. I pictured his house in South Kensington, solid and white, a small garden in the back, a nice garret room with a gas fire for me on the third floor. He’d coach me on my audition pieces, give me the kind of tips that only the big singers can give you. I’d be doing quite a bit of cleaning and redecorating at his house, too, because he’d been living like The Bachelor himself all these years. He’d told me so.

      He’d need me. He’d need СКАЧАТЬ