It just appears.
Very eventual, don’t you think?
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VI
I have never seen the cleaners, any more than I have ever seen the guy (or maybe it’s a gal) who delivers my seventy bucks every Thursday during As the World Turns. I never want to see them, either. I don’t need to, for one thing. For another, yes, okay, I’m afraid of them. Just like I was afraid of Mr. Sharpton in his big gray Mercedes on the night I went out to meet him. So sue me.
I don’t eat lunch in my house on Fridays. I watch As the World Turns, then jump in my car and drive into town. I get a burger at Mickey D’s, then go to a movie, then to the park if the weather is good. I like the park. It’s a good place to think, and these days I’ve got an awful lot to think about.
If the weather is bad, I go to the mall. Now that the days are beginning to shorten, I’m thinking about taking up bowling again. It’d be something to do on Friday afternoons, at least. I used to go now and then with Pug.
I sort of miss Pug. I wish I could call him, just shoot the shit, tell him some of the stuff that’s been going on. Like about that guy Neff, for instance.
Oh, well, spit in the ocean and see if it comes back.
While I’m away, the cleaners are doing my house from wall to wall and top to bottom—wash the dishes (although I’m pretty good about that myself), wash the floors, wash the dirty clothes, change the sheets, put out fresh towels, restock the fridge, get any of the inci-dentals that are written on the DAYBOARD. It’s like living in a hotel with the world’s most efficient (not to mention eventual) maid service.
The one place they don’t mess around with much is the study off the dining room. I keep that room fairly dark, the shades always pulled, and they have never raised them to let in so much as a crack of daylight, like they do in the rest of the house. It never smells of Lemon Pledge in there, either, although every other room just about reeks of 219
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it on Friday nights. Sometimes it’s so bad I have these sneezing fits.
It’s not an allergy; more like a nasal protest-demonstration.
Someone vacuums the floor in there, and they empty the waste-paper basket, but no one has ever moved any of the papers that I keep on the desk, no matter how cluttered-up and junky-looking they are.
Once I put a little piece of tape over where the drawer above the knee-hole opens, but it was still there, unbroken, when I got back home that night. I don’t keep anything top secret in that drawer, you under-stand; I just wanted to know.
Also, if the computer and modem are on when I leave, they’re still on when I come back, the VDT showing one of the screen-saver programs (usually the one of the people doing stuff behind their blinds in this high-rise building, because that’s my favorite). If my stuff was off when I left, it’s off when I come back. They don’t mess around in Dinky’s study.
Maybe the cleaners are a little afraid of me, too.
VII
I got the call that changed my life just when I thought the combi-nation of Ma and delivering for Pizza Roma was going to drive me crazy. I know how melodramatic that sounds, but in this case, it’s true.
The call came on my night off. Ma was out with her girlfriends, playing Bingo at the Reservation, all of them smoking up a storm and no doubt laughing every time the caller pulled B-12 out of the hopper and said, “All right, ladies, it’s time to take your vitamins.” Me, I was watching a Clint Eastwood movie on TNT and wishing I was anywhere else on Planet Earth. Saskatchewan, even.
The phone rings, and I think, oh good, it’s Pug, gotta be, and so when I pick it up I say in my smoothest voice, “You have reached the Church of Any Eventuality, Harkerville branch, Reverend Dink speaking.”