After Claude by Iris Owens Read Free Book Online Page B

hatha-yoga class. It was madness in this heat. But you know, for an Indian it’s chilly out there. My teacher was so pleased with me today. He said I had the spine of a five-year-old, but I’m completely worn out.”
    She dropped her retarded spine into the wicker armchair, her stubby legs clearing the floor.
    “My lips shrivel up in the heat.” I watched as she applied yet another layer of lip gloss to lips greased thick enough to cause a major oil slick along the Atlantic coastline.
    “You’re lucky to have such a wonderful skin,” she crooned, but since she didn’t look up from her gold compact, I couldn’t tell which of us was supposed to be so lucky. She glanced up. “Not a wrinkle or a blemish. What do you use?”
    “Sperm,” I said, damned if I’d let her drag me into one of her beauty commercials that begin with compliments and finish with her imploring me to consider plastic surgery.
    “You’re terrible.” She giggled and fell back into her valise. She emerged holding up a small pink package. “I bought you the most fabulous moisturizer, guaranteed to banish those black pouches under your eyes in less than three weeks.”
    “How long are you planning to visit me?” I asked. “I have a lot of things to do.”
    “Just till I cool off,” she said and put a pack of kingsize Kools on the coffee table. She lit a cigarette with an efficient click of her gold Dupont lighter, her tiny, pointy fingers rigid with wedding bands. She was the most adorably married woman in the Western Hemisphere.
    Maxine was under the impression that since we had jumped rope together in Brooklyn, our insults were predicated on love. The real reasons that Maxine insisted on continuing to know me were one: to feel fortunate that instead of being me, she was her wonderful, eleven-room, married self, and two: in order to hear sex stories about Claude, since the mere mention of his uncircumcized name made her hysterical. To guarantee herself these pleasures, she harped on our historical and emotional bonds.
    “How are your parents?” Maxine never failed to ask.
    “Alive,” I said, in an attempt to cut that boring ritual to the bone.
    Anyway, it was all the information I had. Gorgeous George and his trainer had retired from the ring and weren’t giving out any interviews from their camp in Los Angeles. Whenever I called them, be it six in the morning or ten at night, or four in the afternoon, my call interrupted their napping tournament.
    “Hello Ma,” I’d say, after letting the phone ring a few dozen times, “this is your daughter Harriet.” Why turn a long-distance call into a quiz show?
    “Harriet?” I could feel her struggling to surface.
    “How are you, Ma?”
    “Fine, fine, the weather is beautiful here. I was just taking a little nap.”
    “How is Dad?”
    “Should I wake him?” she’d worry me. “He didn’t sleep a wink all night. I know, because he kept me up.”
    “Just say hello for me.”
    “Oh,” she’d groan, sinking back into dreamland, “he’ll be heartbroken that he missed your call.”
    “Do they like California?” Marine politely pursued the inquisition, her rosy face contorted with sincerity.
    “What do you want from me? What do they know, like, don’t like? When they’re not sleeping, they’re sitting in a kitchen a real-estate agent told them is located in California. If they went in for liking, they’d sign a suicide pact.”
    “You talk that way,” said the uncanny Jewish mind reader, “but I know you miss them.”
    “I miss them,” I informed her, “like I miss having the clap.”
    Maxine registered shock. From the day she had climbed the top of the mountain and married a Professional Man, our mutual parents had magically transformed into sacred beings. Forget the twenty-year poker hustle conducted around her mother’s formica dinette table. Forget everything that didn’t jive with being a periodontist’s wife. One of the major deletions I was asked to make in my