The Entire Predicament by Lucy Corin Read Free Book Online Page A

and then I am the one who calls the police. I am the bitch from hell and what I need is a good fuck. I have nothing better to do, no business of my own to mind, and I don’t shave.You can smell my bitterness, it’s so old. When Mr. Craven does not have a business trip, I crouch in my car and wait for Amie and Jeff to sneak out their windows and hop into a van that waits up the block with its lights off.Then I follow the van to a neighboring development, and when the block is lined with cars and the house is filled with kids, I call the police on my cell phone, which I bought for this purpose and this purpose exclusively, since, regardless of the fact that I am a young maid, and not an old maid, this is the business I mind.
    I wait until the police have come, dispersed the children, and vacated the premises.Then I wait for the kids to gather at the golf course because it is not raining, and once they have set up their keg in a thicket, I call the police again.They must think I’m having a good giggle, but I’m serious, in a dead sort
of way, because I have come to this, and of all things, in this I believe. I know what happened to me. I became crotchety. En route to wisdom, I wizened. I terrorize with my morality. But I do take pleasure as well.
    My neighbors to the other side are a homosexual couple about my age. They are graphic designers and work in a furnished garden shed in their backyard. In the morning, at eight o’clock, they walk out their front door with their briefcases, kiss like Europeans, and then one turns left and one turns right. Around the house they go, meet up at their shed, and shake hands. It’s such a good, old joke to them that they don’t have to laugh aloud for me to know how happy they are, how deep and ironic their ritual.When I go through my junk mail, I separate the good stuff, like “Herbal medicines enclosed” and “Check here for your free magazine.” I peel away my address and leave the fat envelopes in their mailbox. When their Dalmatian bitch Goody digs a hole in the Cravens’ yard, I fill it when no one is looking. I don’t want a spat raging across my yard. I don’t want the Cravens to have anything on the homosexuals.
    Also, I experience compassion in my distanced way. Across the street lives a woman who is older than me, although no one knows it because I have adopted the role I have adopted. I wear appropriate thick stockings and waistless housecoats. Vivian’s husband left her a year ago, and so eager was he to travel around the world without her that he allowed her the house and makes the payments, and took with him only his credit cards, their daughter, their pet cockatoo, and, it is evident from my observations, his wife’s will to survive. The bird died in the baggage compartment on a plane to Israel, but the
girl, who is eight and has yet to speak a word, flies in from places like Crete and Bangladesh for monthly visits, collecting exotic airline stickers on her suitcase. Various breeds of men hang around the house with Vivian, sometimes more than one at a time. They sit on her front porch in their boxer shorts. They play catch with the little girl in the dusk.
    One at a time, each man’s immoral afflictions are revealed to me. One spent an afternoon in the yard aiming a gun (not registered) at Goody, Spliff, and the front door of the homosexuals’ house. One broke a bedroom window when he was trying to open it, then told Vivian it had always been that way. One slapped the little girl when she threw a ball and it hit his crotch. One refused to use a condom. One pocketed the change from Vivian’s bedside table. It’s the sneaks I can’t stand. There are too many people in the world for me to allow for sneaks. If there weren’t so many people, the sneaks wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t get tangled up. The sneaks could sneak all by themselves. One of Vivian’s men, though, a man with a willowy body and big, marble eyes, shot up heroin on my side of Vivian’s