American Housewife by Helen Ellis Read Free Book Online

composed it she pretended not to hear her husband cry out from a maid’s room for his epilepsy pills. Mario loses a ceramic soup tureen shaped like a pumpkin because Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III used it to mask the lime green hue of the vichyssoise she poisoned when her husband gave her HPV for Thanksgiving. Suffocating needlepoint pillows, bludgeoning candelabras, and a fountain pen used to fake a suicide note are all lost (along with three-fourths of the lots) because bidders with more money to bid with than us want to own something that belonged to an eccentric.
    F’in Tiny demands the producers give us bigger allowances. He says, “I’ll dub over the intro in post. You know: ‘ UNLIMITED TIME and FOUR THOUSAND dollars.’ Give it to them.”
    The producers agree.
    Four grand opens up more of the small remainder of the catalog. We flip through the back quarter-inch of stiff high-quality gloss pages we hadn’t dog-eared. We sneak peeks at what other contestants are pausing to look at. The auctioneer never stops auctioning. The rest of the audience never stops raising their paddles. We are awash in the anxiety of new possibilities. But these possibilities grow fewer and farther between and with every passing moment they are going, going, gone!
    We squirm in our seats. F’in Tiny paces behind us. A potbellied cameraman tries to keep up with him. Other cameramen circle the room. Producers grip and gripe into iPhones. Their finale is more frenzied than they’d expected. Only Mitzy is as motionless as she’s been since the start.
    I slide my catalog onto her lap. I flip and lift photos of jewelry. See? Here’s a ladybug ring that can hold a teaspoon of cyanide. See? Here’s a charm bracelet of lab test subjects, or as the lady of the house called them, her babies (gigantic cats). It kills me that Mitzy doesn’t respond. There are so many things that should make her say, “Cooooot!”
    F’in Tiny leans over her and lifts her paddle from her lap. He says, “Your arms don’t work, Mitzy? There’s nothing you want of Mrs. the Third’s?”
    John Lithgow says, “Let the poor girl alone. So what if she doesn’t bid?”
    F’in Tiny says, “This is a game, John. Mitzy signed a contract for the love of the thrift. She needs to participate. She needs to be
active.
The game’s almost over. She plays, and
then
she gets to go home.”
    John Lithgow says, “And what exactly will she find when she gets home, sir? Will she find everything as she left it?”
    “Her room at the mansion is waiting for her.”
    “And will
everyone
be there waiting for her?”
    “What do you think, John? It’s a twenty-room mansion with a hundred birds on the property.”
    I say, “Birds aren’t family.”
    “That’s right,” says John Lithgow. “What’s important is
family.
”
    F’in Tiny says, “Mitzy’s
family
needs her to win.”
    A teardrop appears in the corner of Mitzy’s eye, and that teardrop is shinier than any sequin she’s ever affixed to her body.
    F’in Tiny offers her a handkerchief, pulled out of his pocket like a magician’s bottomless supply.
    Mitzy won’t take it. She doesn’t want anything more to do with him or this show. She shakes her head and her teardrop plummets.
    F’in Tiny presses in. The velvet knot of his smoking jacket rubs against the back of her head.
    I cringe because I can feel his fingers sinking into her shoulders. I want his hands off of her. And so my hand, gripping my paddle, shoots up and sideswipes his ear.
    The auctioneer says, “One thousand dollars from the lady in the cardigan!”
    I have no idea what I’m bidding for, but it must be good because F’in Tiny ignores the blood pulsing out of his ear.
    He says, “Mitzy, you’re going to let her get away with it? The
writer
?” He says the word with such venom that he draws everyone’s attention.
    I say, “I’m a Dumpster diver. And I’m on to you. You only want Mitzy to win so Bitzy’s surgery will sell your show. If