The Audition Or The Widows’ Hour

When my mother Emma was alive and also young, she complained that Maggie was a little too “fetching.” Mother said that because Maggie was the only neighbor who always wore some sort of hat: the morning-trash “sombrero, “ the weeding “bonnet,” the rain “cap,” and the movie “beret,” - which must never be confused with her pride and joy the green velvet cape top ornament otherwise known as the theater “hood.” On the occasion of Maggie’s morbidly plump husband Fred passing over into the next life, Maggie eagerly adopted a new head covering for the purpose of obvious grieving – the black “babushka.”

Mother said, “If I die first, your father won’t have a chance against that woman. ‘Setting her cap’ will take on a diabolical meaning. And if she comes here wearing that green hunting cape, you may as well carry your father over to her frowsy house on Ashford Lane and hang him on a hook over the mantle.”

Unmarried Betsy was not fetching. Betsy was always cooking. If she was not cooking, she was serving. Mostly she served the men of other houses when they were mowing the grass, playing catch in the street with the kids or working on their cars in their own driveways. She got around. Dad let me work on the car with him, so I was often there when she showed up with her specialty – dessert. I had the job of spiriting a sample of the day’s goodies to Mother. Mother’s standard comment during an always vicious dissection of a raspberry tart, a mincemeat cookie, or a slice of “better than sex” cake was “If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, Betsy is in control of the whole neighborhood.” Mother once rudely asked Dad if the fact that Betsy always smelled like food did not ruin his appetite for the goodies. “It’s the smell of desperation! Heaven help your poor father if my place in the kitchen is ever empty. She’ll be looking to fill it up in a hurry.”

Mother’s most scathing observations were reserved for Hillary Johns. “There is something unsettling about a family where none of the children look like anybody else in the family. Those Johns children resemble every vacuum cleaner salesman that ever came through this town.” Which was not true. Except that some had red and some had blond hair, all the children looked like Mr. Johns or “Bud” as he was referred to as in: “Bud’s blowing the roof off the house again – he bet on the losing team.” Or, “Bud watches the Sports Channel with a hockey puck in his hand and that’s why they have a steel security door between the den and the hallway.” Mother resented the fact that Hillary John’s obsession with house cleaning made her overbearing in everyone else’s house. “Thinks you don’t see her scouring the room with  those hyper-optic  eyes of  hers.  If she catches  you catching her, she smiles.”

One afternoon, after losing the mortgage payment on a golf match bet, Bud Johns despairingly bashed out his brains with the hockey puck. It was the local constable who disclosed that the purpose of the legend multiple vacuum cleaners was not just to clean but – as stated to him by a tearful Hillary Johns – “to drown out the bellowed verbal execrations of Bud Johns’ ringside sports enthusiasm.” There was one in every room . . . just sitting there . . . running . . . making more noise together than Bud could make alone. Mother was unsympathetic. “The Lord God Almighty save a defenseless widowed man from a holier than thou cleaning woman. Whoever heard of having a vacuum cleaner in every room?”

Last Thursday, Mother died. It was unexpected and sudden. A heart attack. We buried her this morning. The house is now filled with family, friends and neighbors. The neighbors are mostly single women and widows I notice that my father is receiving all the consolation. Frequently I feel the hair rise on the back of my neck and I realize that it consistently happens when one of the many women is talking to my father. I think Mother may have established herself in the house as a silent poltergeist.

I am standing alone by the fireplace when Maggie, housed in her green hunting cape, swooshes by me to greet the sad faced widower. I must have blinked because one second Dad is there and the next he has disappeared into the folds of her cape. He is nose to nose with the hood.

From the imprisonment of the hood, Father’s nose is drawn by the aroma of Chicken Romanov hefted in a roasting pan by the brawny and buxom Betsy, who is hurtling toward the kitchen exclaiming, “My heavens. I don’t smell any food cooking. The poor man must be starving. What are you people trying to do? Put him in the grave with Emma?” For the second time today, I feel the earth move under my feet. The first time was on the porch when Hillary Johns drove up. She has a vacuum cleaner in the back of her station wagon.

Maggie, Hillary Johns, Father and I follow Betsy to the kitchen. It is astonishing how they preen and coo. Maggie is a humanized fly trap, wrapping her green cape leaves about my father, fanning his face with her hood, “setting her cap!” Suddenly the cape’s hem trips her and she reels backward.

As if this were her very own house, Betsy is rummaging through the cabinets for plates and utensils when an upper door inexplicably flies open and knocks her down.

After using separate fingers to test the stove top for grease and the purple glass canisters for dust, Hillary Johns wildly screams from the pain of a burn inflicted by an unplugged toaster where she has just found crumbs in the bottom.

They don’t give up. There is the wary eye of combat . . . the stealth of the hunt. They circle: Green Hood, Chicken Romanov and Vacuum Cleaner. I see that Dad is smiling, but not at Vacuum, Chicken or Hood. He is listening. Now I hear it.

“God save the poor man whose wife dies before he does!” Followed by three claps of thunder.

“Amen.”

(We Are Many - Is It Up or Down From Here?) Copyright © 2015 by Renee Foss