Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 27

aisy St. Patience only started Spitefield Park because her parents died. If it softens the blow, please know that they died in their sleep. Simply drifted away …sorry, Mom, sorry, Dad. The culprit was a faulty pilot light on their furnace. The first cold night of October, and the batteries in their smoke detector had long before preceded them in death. Nobody felt any pain except for Daisy, who knew exactly what words she wanted carved on their tombstone, but no cemetery would allow it. The inscription wasn’t even the worst message that sprang to mind. Go shopping for tombstones, and you, too, will be impressed by the limited selection.

Lady Daisy realized she wasn’t the only one of anything. Other like-minded bereaved must have had money to spend with mixed feelings. The land was cheap, and she was a gal with half a face for the sympathy vote. Daisy St. Patience, her least favorite movie was where Judy Garland does all of that full-color singing and dancing just to end up back in dreary black-and-white. Her dog is the only person who shows any gumption. Before the story even starts, he bites Margaret Hamilton off-screen. The dog rescues Jack Haley and draws the green curtain aside to expose the shenanigans of Frank Morgan. MGM spent a fortune. Yet after weeping buckets of glycerin and being clutched by winged monkeys Judy Garland is happy to wake up in a dirty bed surrounded by men. Nuh-uh. No way. To Daisy that didn’t read as enlightenment.

Daisy St. Patience fixed the pilot light. She sold her parents’ house and put the money toward a good surveyor to eyeball the plot lines. The long-term truth is that people’s hearts change across time. Not just the hearts of the wildly vindictive. Even the widower whose wife was laid to rest beneath a granite marker that said:

I couldn’t be bothered to shave my legs

A year later, even he phoned back to sheepishly inquire about the cost of a new stone.

Again, as Harriet Beecher Stowe asked, “Dude, why can’t you do both?” Why can’t a novel do this? You’re not dead until you’re dead.

What never failed to boggle Daisy was how Judy Garland had only just arrived in this glorious colorful place and she immediately wanted to run back to some boring pig farm. The fact that everyone else loved that film …what did that say about people? It says that most people can tolerate being over the rainbow for only about thirty seconds. Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn’t occasionally go too far, you weren’t going anywhere. It was the dog—smart dog! good boy!—who chased the Siamese cat and baited Judy Garland to leave that dumb hot-air balloon which was taking her home. Time and time again, that dog did everything in its power to give Judy a better life.

In the alternate version of that movie, the way Daisy remembered it, when Judy awoke in Kansas, all giddy to be home in that tiresome dust and dirt, in the Daisy St. Patience Preferred Text Director’s Cut, that little dog bit Judy Garland. It jumped into that windblown bed and sank its teeth right in her ingrate ass.