The Baby Blue Rip-Off

2

It didn’t start with people hurting other people, stealing from them, killing them. That came later. It started with kindness, the kindness of four old women.

But I suppose it started even before that.

With Sally.

Sally wasn’t an old woman, and she wasn’t much on kindness, either. What Sally was was young and slender and pretty, her hair natural blonde (that one I can swear to under oath) and her legs-to whom cellulite was a stranger-long and slender. Overall, there wasn’t a thing wrong with Sally that a new personality wouldn’t have cured.

She was the sort of woman who uses her good looks as a form of blackmail when she’s in a good mood, and for revenge when she’s in a bad one. Which didn’t stop me from gratefully shacking up with her early that summer. Even if she did make me “share” the housework and cooking (meaning I did most of it). Sally was a liberated woman who did whatever Ms. magazine told her to, and I put up with all the emasculation quite cheerfully. We all have our masochistic moments, and in my case, remember, those moments were a prelude to long legs and natural blonde hair.

Sally isn’t going to be in this story much longer, so I’ll get to the point, which is that she worked at the local hospital as a dietician. She insisted the job at the hospital was “temporary,” as she wasn’t long for a little hick town of twenty thousand like Port City (she hailed from Burlington, after all)-and in fact wasn’t going to be long at all for a little state like Iowa if she could help it. Mid-summer a job application came through for her, and she kept her word and is now in New Jersey somewhere, at another, bigger hospital, putting together menus for sick people.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, Sally was a dietician (pardon, the dietician; Sally would insist I make the distinction) at Port City General and was in the habit of frequently professing a belief in “getting involved.” She only became a dietician, she said, because it enabled her to “help people, in my small way,” though I didn’t ever see her donating her sizable paycheck to cancer research or anything.

“Mallory,” she said to me once, during foreplay, “do you have any idea why I decided to get involved with you?”

(See what I mean about Sally and “getting involved”? Shacked up is what we were.)

“Yes,” I said, wilting. “I’ve often wondered why you chose to give yourself to an undeserving wretch like me. Just this second I was wondering that.”

Sally didn’t much care for sarcastic remarks, unless she was the one making them, so she pushed me away and said, with no sense of irony whatsoever, “Screw you, Mallory.”

(Most persons of the female persuasion I’ve known-and I use “known” in several senses of the word, including biblical-have called me by the not unaffectionate diminutive “Mal.” They will say, “Screw you, Mal.” Not “Screw you, Mallory.” I tend to take the latter as an insult, though I may be playing at semantics.)

“Are you ready to listen?” she said.

That meant, was I ready to shut up. I nodded.

“I chose you,” she said, “because I thought you were an activist, like I am.”

She voted straight Democratic.

“I chose you,” she continued, “because you wear your hair rather long, by local standards, and of the men I’ve met in this lousy little town, you were the only one with long hair who wasn’t a high school kid.”

Ridiculous. First, my hair barely covered my ears, like an early Beatle. Second, even considering hair an issue, at this late date, branded Sally as the aging former hippie she was.

“Also,” she continued, “the doctors at the hospital are too old for me and, frankly, much too conservative for my tastes.”

The doctors were married.

“You, Mallory, are young.”

Thirty. So was she. Which is why she liked to think of it as young, of course.

“And you have money in the bank and aren’t just some grubby little leech wanting to suck up my paycheck.”

Power to the people.

“Also, these conservative upright Port City types just aren’t my cup of tea.”

Her cup of tea was another kind of tea altogether.

“But you,” she said, “you I thought were different. But no, you aren’t, not at all. You’re as conservative as the oldest old turd sitting on that bench in front of City Hall.”

She liked to say words like “turd” to shock me. Shall we all blush together?

“You don’t think you’re conservative, Mallory? Oh, but you are. If you weren’t conservative, Mallory, you’d get involved.”

“How?”

There was my mistake. Right there. Opening my mouth. Asking a question. Mistake.

So she told me how to get involved, and I did.

I sure did.

But I must admit that the eventual depth of my involvement didn’t have much to do with Sally. She’s just the person who bumped into me, knocking me off a cliff; I mean, she didn’t put the damn cliff there or anything-she just bumped into me.

You see, Sally is one of those persons for whom the term “lip service” was coined. (In more ways than one, but that’s another story.) Sally got involved in politics, for example, by saying “Right on!” while watching her candidate speak on TV. Sally got involved in ecology by putting a litter bag in the front seat of her oil-burning Pontiac. Sally got involved in bettering race relations by calling blacks “black” instead of “Negro” and by making sure to invite one to every party she threw. You’ve met her.

So Sally’s getting me involved was, initially, no great burden for me. And it was more worthwhile an involvement than the usual run of Sally’s lip-service mill.

What Sally wanted of me was a vested interest of hers, meaning it related to her job as dietician at the hospital more than her sense of humanitarian purpose. I was to take hot meals around to four old people during the supper hour, one evening a week. The service was provided at a nominal fee by the hospital so that old folks in the community who were living alone would be sure to get at least one hot meal a day. When Sally explained that this was what she wanted me to do, because one of the volunteers in the service had had to drop out for the summer months, I was relieved and glad to do it.

I was one of several dozen people in Port City who had taken on this particular good deed. Doing it once a week was no big strain, especially since it was summer and I wasn’t busy with a damn thing anyway, except taking a course in literature at the college two mornings a week and writing my latest mystery novel, which mostly ran to afternoons. I could spare the time.

There was only one irritating aspect to my getting involved with the hospital’s Hot Supper Service (as it was ingeniously titled), and that was that by the time I had done my duty for the first time, Sally and I had broken up.

As I promised earlier, Sally isn’t going to be in this story much longer, and I wouldn’t even mention her if she hadn’t been the prime mover for getting me into one of my larger messes, playing a peripheral Stan Laurel to my center-stage Oliver Hardy. And I think it’s interesting, if irrelevant, to note how a person out on the sidelines of a certain chain of events can make so great a dent in those events without even trying.

As far as our breakup scene goes, I’m not going into detail about it. I didn’t find her with another man; she didn’t find me with another woman. (I didn’t even find her with another woman, which would at least have been a change of pace.)

She just got tired of me.

And chose to tell me, of course, while we were in bed-and not sleeping, either; she had a bad habit of using that most inappropriate of occasions to bring up topics for discussion.

Well, I was tired, too, and told her so; told her we’d just been using each other, and a good time was had by all, but good-bye. And I moved back into my house trailer on East Hill.

But should you ever happen to pick up this book, Sally, keep reading; even though you aren’t in it anymore, stick around.

See all the trouble you caused me.