American Housewife: Stories Read online

  The super asked if you had gone to “Europe” as so many wives in this building do when their husbands desert them. “Europe” means plastic surgery, rehab, or agoraphobia. The last of these options is the most troubling because if your finances are strained, by say extra housing, divorce lawyers, and a neighbor’s impending lawsuit, psychiatrists and psychological drugs are unaffordable. And from what I understand about life coaches, they don’t cheer on crazy ladies who don’t pay their bills.

  Do you know what happens to a mentally unstable woman living alone in a two-bedroom apartment that could be sold in this housing boom for above market value? The co-op board gathers evidence that she is a danger to herself and evicts her.

  Mrs. Preston always said if you are going to be a shut-in, find something to do. Mrs. Preston fostered cats. The woman who lived in your apartment before her ran a doll hospital. The woman before her wrote erotic novels under a man’s name. Mrs. Preston and her predecessors did not leave your apartment for decades. Already, you have been missing for seventeen days. Seventeen years is just around the corner.

  And I know you are in there. I can hear you making a smoothie.

  My suggestion is that you overcome your debilitating depression by restoring our hallway decor. Gluing my vase back together should be fun, like a jigsaw puzzle. Trolling the Internet for duplicate out-of-print wallpaper to rehang, a scavenger hunt. Reweaving the wicker lid of my sewing machine table, meditative. And mending the paintings might make you feel like an artist yourself.

  As a compromise, I am willing to agree to hardwood floors. Refinishing them will give you even more to accomplish.

  Recovery is all about baby steps, Angela. Step into our hallway, you can step into the world.

  Gail

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Kudos to you on the hallway clean up

  Date: June 11, 2015 11:11 AM

  Dear Angela,

  I must admit that you have stripped the carpet and wallpaper better than any paid professional. There is not one dot of dried paste anywhere to be found, and believe me I checked with a magnifying glass and a flashlight. I assume that you have taken my antique sewing machine table, vase, and paintings into your apartment for repairs. You will need good strong sunlight for that and I will confess that in the past our hallway wall sconces have been a bit dim. But the current state is a safety hazard. Unlike Mrs. Preston’s foster cats, I cannot see in the dark. Please return the lightbulbs.

  Best,

  Gail

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Safety Measures

  Date: June 12, 2015 2:23 AM

  Hi Gail! Please be advised that I have sealed off your front door using duct tape and my cold marital bed sheets, which I stitched together using none other than your antique sewing machine. Brace yourself: what I’m about to do will be DIRTY and LOUD.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Wainscoting

  Date: June 14, 2015 8:04 PM

  Miss Chastain, I have heard of inflicting your bad taste on others, but to pry up our hallway floorboards and hammer them picket fence style into our walls to emulate wainscoting is absurd. You are deranged. I am releasing Mrs. Preston’s foster cats into the wilds of our common area. I will stop feeding them, but they are hunters. Push your dresser in front of your door, but the cats will get past it. Brace YOURSELF: I trust they will not starve.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Re: Wainscoting

  Date: June 15, 2015 4:21 AM

  You’re wrong, Gail. I am the hunter. Peek out your peephole and count how many of your beasts are left. ZERO. One at a time, they trespassed over my property line and into my apartment. I had to defend myself. And, as you know, it’s easier to fight one on one. I won’t have to buy groceries for months. By the way, my offer still stands for that drink and a tour. You’ll be amazed at what I’ve done with the place. I’ve repainted the New Beginnings wainscoting with what I’m calling “Tigers’ Blood.”

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Re: Wainscoting

  Date: June 15, 2015 6:25 AM

  I will meet you in the hallway at noon.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Welcome

  Date: December 9, 2015 3:36 PM

  Dear Ms. Mulligan-Kramer,

  I hope that you and your family appreciate the welcome pineapple basket I left outside your door last week. When I moved into the building, the former resident of your apartment, Mrs. Gail Montgomery, left the same welcome gift for me. Since I have not received an acknowledgment of my gift, I will assume you are a busy woman and will leave well enough alone. I will, however, use this as an opportunity to address the subject of our common hallway.

  Ours is a shared space and should be respected as such. When Mrs. Montgomery departed, she gave me permission to decorate our hallway as I saw fit. The wainscoting was put up at great personal expense. Twice already I have had to clean your bicycle scuff marks off the Benjamin Moore New Beginnings beige paint. The rug is one-of-a-kind, from a rare breed of wildcat, and should not be used as a drying pad for your open umbrellas.

  What you might not know is that I run a mail-order taxidermy shop out of my apartment. It affords me a comfortable lifestyle, which I appreciate even more after my divorce. My life coach says taxidermy is the new decoupage. Mrs. Montgomery would disagree.

  The former resident of your apartment disagreed with me about a lot of things, but learned to compromise. You can help by parking your bike in the bike room and by buying an umbrella stand. And please be mindful of the antique vase that sits upon our mail table. It is extremely fragile and nearly impossible to repair.

  Sincerely,

  Angela Chastain

  DUMPSTER DIVING

  WITH THE STARS

  I’m in Rhinebeck, New York, to compete on Dumpster Diving with the Stars. It was my best friend Amy Madeline’s idea. In the history of celebrity reality shows, there has never been a contestant who is famous for being an author. Between Amy Madeline and me, hers is the name everybody knows. Her books are pastel with shoes or purses on their covers. They are book club books. Beach books. Like some women produce babies, Amy Madeline has a book come out of her every year. I published one book, fifteen years ago, but it was a doozy. What they call a “cult classic.” Meaning the book was odd, but identifiable, and is now out of print.

  Amy Madeline said, “You get on the show, you get reprinted. You get readers interested in what you’re working on now.”

  I said, “But I’m not working on anything now.”

  She said, “But you will be.”

  Amy Madeline’s faith is unnerving. She’s like a double-D battery pack jammed in the Baby This ’n That doll that is me. As long as I keep writing, she doesn’t have to think about how hard the writing life can be. But it’s really not that hard. You just have to do it, get it published, and do it again. Problem is: my last three novels lie dead in a drawer. I’m forty-five. Maybe it’s not too late to find something else that I’m good at.

  When I arrive at the Beekman Arms, the front desk clerk hands over an actual brass key with a plastic number dangling from the chain, says she googled me and bought my book off of Amazon for ninety-nine cents, and then says she’s at the part where the main character purposely flunks out of school.

  She asks, “Why would she do that?”

  I have no idea why she would do that. It’s been so long since I wrote that novel I’m shocked I can remember the character’s name. I give the front desk clerk my
pat line to questions about my work that I don’t know the answer to.

  I say, “You’ll have to keep reading and see.”

  My roommate for Dumpster Diving with the Stars is Mitzy Rodgers, former Playboy playmate and live-in girlfriend of Hugh Hefner. On the show, there’s always a Miss Something-or-Other or a kicked-out girl group singer or an actress who’s known only for her hot tub scene. For Mitzy, this is the first time she’ll be separated from her identical twin, Bitzy. All their lives, they shared everything from string bikinis to an eighty-year-old Sweet’N Low daddy to a secret twin toddler language.

  Mitzy says, “Bitzy bah-knows bah-what I bah-feel before I bah-do.”

  I ask Mitzy if she and Bitzy believe in telepathy, but before she can answer, the cameraman and producer barrel in, apologize for being late, do not introduce themselves, clip wireless packs to my jeans and Mitzy’s two-hundred-dollar sweatpants, and a mic to my bra strap. They tape Mitzy’s mic to her skin because she is not wearing a bra. Her breasts sit on her torso like old-fashioned alarm clocks.

  The producer asks me to ask Mitzy my question again. Everyone stares as I brace myself on the edge of the floral bedspread. The last time I spoke publicly was nine years ago at Amy Madeline’s wedding. Then, I was told to “eat the mic.” I lower my head like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.

  “Mitzy, do you and Bitzy believe in telepathy?”

  Mitzy blows a grape bubble with her purple bubblegum, pops it with her finger, winds the gum around that finger, and then waggles it, play-admonishing me. “You know we’re not allowed to have smartphones.”

  The cameraman and producer do not react. They are seasoned professionals and are already making themselves invisible in this tiny room crowded with furniture. Cardinal Reality Rule #1: Behind-the-scenes people stay behind the scenes. They let that Survivor contestant fall face-first into his campfire. They let that America’s Next Top Model virgin get drunk and “lose” her virginity.

  What Mitzy is referring to is Cardinal Reality Rule #2: Nobody gets a cell phone. Technology makes games way too easy. We all remember how un-fun it was to watch the IBM computer wipe the floor with Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! Not to mention the fact that watching someone talk or text on TV is as boring as watching someone talk or text right in front of you.

  I notice the empty wall sockets. The room phone and TV are gone. For our month of filming, we’ll be entirely cut off from family, friends, and current events. I’m ashamed to admit that the last New York Times article I read was about bullfrogs. I regret that the last thing I said to my husband was: “You should read that piece about the bullfrogs.” I want to call him and say, “I love you and I miss you already,” but if I break my contract I’ll be sued.

  Mitzy confides in me (and the rest of the network affiliates) that Bitzy is in the hospital having corrective surgery for the reason their parents called her Bitzy to begin with. She whispers, “Navel enhancement.”

  “You mean,” I marvel at Mitzy’s breasts and plump lips, “now that’s supposed to be bigger, too?”

  “No, Hef wants her to have a pretty innie. Bitzy’s belly button is an ugly outie. It’s like a balled-up piece of rubber cement. When we did our centerfold, Hef made sure it was under a staple. At pool parties, he makes her cover it with one of those little round Band-Aids.”

  Mitzy, it turns out, always wanted to be a decorator. Her room at the mansion is minimalist. She explains, “No stuffed animals.” She pulls down her sweatpants to show me her vagina, which she bedazzled herself.

  Over the whir of zoom lenses, I tell her about my themed Christmas trees that, along with Amy Madeline’s hundred thousand Twitter followers and Facebook campaign, helped earn me a spot on Dumpster Diving with the Stars. Every year, my husband and I have a big blowout party based on a new Christmas tree theme that I create from used ornaments I buy off eBay. This year is Under the Big Top (all circus), last year was Motion in the Ocean (all sea life), and the year before that was Fat Hos (all Santas). As Mitzy’s eyes grow moist with amazement, I get that proud feeling I used to get when Amy Madeline drew a heart by a sentence in a first draft of one of my chapters.

  Mitzy bestows what I will come to learn is her highest compliment: “Cute!” Really, she coos it, so it sounds more like “Cooooot!” She asks if she can come to this year’s party, and when I say okay, Mitzy looks like she will burst out of her imaginary bra. She says she will wear her trapeze outfit for the occasion. She has a trapeze outfit. Mitzy herself looks like something I would hang on my tree. She is miniature, plastic, and kitschy. I wonder how someone so fake can be so pure. She might be the most undervalued thing I find on this show.

  ————

  At three o’clock, all eight contestants assemble on the front porch of the oldest inn in the Hudson Valley, where George Washington slept and if he were alive today would jail Mitzy for indecent exposure.

  Before us stands the host of Dumpster Diving with the Stars, Elvin Smalls, whom Amy Madeline and I call F’in Tiny because the camera never shows his feet. Like a toned, tanned, tinted troll under a bridge, F’in Tiny likes to point out competitors’ weaknesses. Last season, he told Cynthia Nixon her throat was splotchy. And then he told her those splotches were hives. F’in Tiny wears a safari hat and a canteen strapped to his belt.

  He asks us, “Are you ready to DUMPSTER DIVE?”

  Mario Batali shouts, “Yeah!” He jumps in place when he says it, so when he lands the only sound is the reverberation of his Crocs on 245-year-old porch planks.

  The rest of us aren’t sure how to behave. The married Scientologist actors want to remain respectable. The sports figure is, let’s face it, too cool. I assume Mitzy doesn’t jiggle unless she gets paid. Me, when was the last time I raised my voice? Sure, I shriek when the toast pops out of the toaster, but I am not a joiner-inner.

  F’in Tiny repeats, “I said, ‘Dumpster divers, are you READY?’ ”

  Behind F’in Tiny a producer resurrects the Arsenio Hall Show dog-pound fist spiral. Mitzy is too young for this reference and looks up because she thinks (as it happens on every episode of The Bachelor) that a helicopter is landing. Another producer mutely WOO-HOOs so the mics won’t pick up his sound interference. Eight cameramen look annoyed that our lack of over-the-top enthusiasm is going to make the day run long.

  So, I clap.

  And all the other contestants clap along with me.

  We are a mature, appropriately enthusiastic bunch.

  F’in Tiny says, “For your first challenge you will have TWO hours and TWO HUNDRED dollars to scour this small AMERICAN TOWN. The WINNER’s find will have the BIGGEST difference between what you pay for it and fair market value. With each challenge, these differences add up, and the contestant with the greatest overall difference wins the whole show. And, as always on Dumpster Diving with the Stars, you do not have to spend anything. The MORE you save, the MORE your find will be worth. Winning is a matter of pride. You keep what you find and those finds will be featured in a three-page spread in Better Homes and Gardens.”

  Last season’s winner, Diane Keaton, displayed her eighteenth-century bowling pins on her bathroom windowsill, in a triangle shape around her Annie Hall Oscar.

  Amy Madeline and I pored over the photo.

  She’d said, “Maybe you’ll find something worthy enough to be photographed next to a Pulitzer.”

  I’d said, “But I don’t have a Pulitzer.”

  She’d said, “Maybe you’ll find something that will inspire you to write something great.”

  F’in Tiny says, “ARE. YOU. READY? Dumpster divers?”

  “Yeah!” A few of us join Mario. Me included. Except, I raise my voice to say “Yesssss” instead of “Yeah” so it’s my ssss that lingers on the porch this time.

  F’in Tiny says, “For this challenge, you will pair yourselves into TEAMS of TWO. BUDDY UP for bargaining! Starting, NOW.”

  Part of me wants to jump on John Lithgow’s back and ride him like a bull into the anti
que china shop across the street. The man is well over six feet tall and built. He smiles down at the lot of us like the mother alien at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Verbena Barber, a wily woman from Nightcrawlers (a reality show about her husband and six earthworm-grubbing sons), grabs his wrist. Lithgow nods pleasantly at the brownness of her. Her shoes, skirt, and blouse, and her husband’s humongous jacket look residually damp from her hill country. I’ve seen Verbena’s show and know her teeth are rotten, but today her face is scrubbed and her long hair is parted down the middle. She beams at Lithgow and in that split second I see him recall what I recall from her show: her teapot collection. She inherited the teapots from a rich old lady she’d done the ironing for. When that rich old lady was dying, she told Verbena to pick any one thing out of her whole mansion as an inheritance. Verbena picked her teapots because they were painted with fairies and gnomes and one was shaped like a duck. Turns out they were by British artist Lucie Attwell and each worth a small mint. On Nightcrawlers Verbena’s always interviewed with the polished row of teapots sitting high on a shelf in the background of her log cabin. Lithgow knows she’s got a good eye. And now we all know it because the Emmy winner and Verbena take off running.

  Mitzy and I do too. I don’t know how long she’s been holding my hand, but she’s got me and we’re going. Looking over my shoulder, I see the other contestants, cameramen, and producers running away from us and into the center of town after Lithgow and Verbena, who are already out of sight and through the doors of that antique china shop I had my eye on. I hear the clap, clap, clap of Mario’s Crocs and the click, click, click of the stilettos on the size ten feet of the tennis player with whom he’s paired himself. They’re running toward another antique china shop. The married Scientologist actors are running toward something called an antique barn. F’in Tiny is left alone on the inn porch and lights a cigarette. The fiery dot grows dimmer as Mitzy drags our crew into a ravine.