“Maye!” the voice called out again. “Maye! I showed you thirty different houses before you finally bought one, the least you could do is stop running from me!”
“Patty?” Maye said as she stopped and turned around to see her Realtor almost jogging toward her with another woman Maye vaguely recognized. “Oh, thank goodness it’s you!”
“Why are you running?” Patty asked, panting. “Is it because of Bob’s little fit? He has those all the time! At the Spaulding Festival last year he saw a little girl eating a real hot dog, burst into tears, and then curled up into a fetal ball. People expect it from him.”
“Oh, you saw that?” Maye said wincing. “Is the whole town eating at this one restaurant tonight?”
Patty laughed. “It’s new, it’s in, and no one’s sick of it yet,” she said, and then turned to her friend. “You remember Louise? We looked at her house before you moved here.”
“Of course,” Maye said, shaking Louise’s hand. “The iris house! I loved your house! It’s nice to see you again.”
“Sorry to hear that your friend is under the weather,” Louise commented.
“You heard that, too, huh?” Maye asked.
“Well, let’s just say it was a little hard to ignore,” Patty said diplomatically.
“She’s not really my friend,” Maye explained. “I was hoping things would work out, but tonight was our first little ‘friend date,’ and as you saw and heard, it didn’t turn out so well. I simply cannot make a friend in this town. I have never had to actually go out and make friends before. Apparently, I’m not very good at it. It was easier for me to lasso a man, throw away all of his crappy furniture, and get him to marry me than it is to find someone just to have coffee with!”
“Ah, but there’s a magic way to make friends in Spaulding,” Louise said. “Plus you get to keep the crowns.”
“I remember your crowns in the bookcases!” Maye cried.
“You should run for Sewer Pipe Queen,” Louise and Patty said together.
“What?” she asked. “Why would I want to get into a sewer?”
“No, no, no,” Patty explained. “You don’t understand. The Spaulding Sewer Pipe Factory used to be the biggest one in the country. It built this town. A Sewer Pipe Queen is chosen every year and has been for almost a century to pay tribute to that accomplishment. Once you’re a Sewer Pipe Queen, you’re one for life. Those crowns are badges of honor. And Louise was one of Spaulding’s favorites. She joggled for her talent segment!”
“Joggled?” Maye asked.
“Juggling and jogging simultaneously,” Louise explained. “They don’t have joggling in Phoenix?”
“Not that I was aware of, no,” Maye replied carefully. “So the Sewer Pipe Queen is kind of like a ‘Miss Spaulding’?”
“In a way,” Patty answered. “But the rules have become pretty flexible. It’s not like it was when I was a kid. Nowadays anyone can enter the pageant. The City Council thought it was sexist to discriminate against men and ageist to discriminate against kids or the elderly. You just wait and see this spring. The Sewer Pipe Queen coronation kicks off the Spaulding Festival. The whole town comes. It’s a huge party for the entire weekend.”
“You win that thing and you’ll have friends for life. Everyone wants to know you. You’re the queen! I was the queen twenty years ago, and I still can’t shake Patty!” Louise laughed. “There are a couple of exceptions of course, but for the most part, a queen is the pride of the community. She’ll attract more friends than a barbecue does homeless people in a park.”
Maye’s mind suddenly rewound to Cynthia’s tea party, stocked heavily with friends, gathered in front of a fireplace with a portrait above it of the hostess being crowned, decades before.
“But I couldn’t do that,” Maye protested. “I couldn’t enter a beauty pageant.”
“It hasn’t been a beauty pageant for decades,” Louise informed her. “It’s more about being vibrant and eclectic, it’s about having a queen who’s as fun and endearing as Spaulding is. The queen reflects the town. It’s open to anybody willing to get on a stage and put on a good show in the name of amusement.”
“So it’s that easy? I just march up and join this pageant?” Maye asked skeptically.
“Well, not exactly,” Louise explained. “You need to have a coach, or what they call a sponsor. A sponsor has the rank of Old Queen, a former queen who knows the ins and outs of the competition and can tell you what to work on, guide you through your training.”
“Training?” Maye asked hesitantly.
“A person isn’t born a joggler,” Louise noted. “A good coach will bring out your natural talents and help you develop them.”
“Who are you coaching this year?” Maye asked slyly.
“I’m not coaching anyone this year,” Louise replied. “In the next pageant, I’m a celebrity judge!”
“Don’t you know any Old Queens?” Patty asked. “They’re all over the place.”
“I’m not saying that I’m doing this, but I do know someone who might have been a Sewer Pipe Queen who lives across the street from me,” Maye said. “Her name is Cynthia, but I don’t know her last name.”
Louise gasped. “Could it be Cynthia McMahon?” she asked.
Maye shrugged. “I don’t know,” Maye replied. “I just know her as Cynthia, my singing neighbor.”
“I bet it’s Cynthia McMahon,” Patty snapped. “She was in the Silver Songbirds’ production of The Mikado last year. That woman refuses to age!”
“That’s her!” Maye said excitedly. “That’s Cynthia! She was Pitti-Sing!”
“If I were you,” Louise advised, “I’d walk across the street tomorrow morning and talk to her—that is, if she hasn’t already taken someone on. Cynthia McMahon was one of the most elegant queens Spaulding has ever had. You’d be lucky to get her. She was very popular.”
“I gathered that.” Maye nodded and smiled.
“I think you should do it!” Patty exclaimed. “You’re a shoo-in! You said no to thirty houses and I still liked you!”
“I don’t know,” Maye said. “I’ll think about it.”
She said good night to Patty and Louise, and gave the parking lot a quick glance to make sure no one else she had met, stalked, or exposed her cans to was hiding in the shadows before she drove home.
7
Suddenly, She Found Herself There
A s soon as Maye heard the backyard gate close and knew that Charlie had bicycled off to work, she opened the front door and headed across the street.
She had been thinking all night about the pageant and decided it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Cynthia about it; besides, Maye was sure that she had probably taken on another contestant by now. She hadn’t really decided if it was something she was ready to commit to, anyway. Had she honestly reached the point where she needed to make friends by becoming the town queen and forcing people to befriend her? Like royalty? She reasoned that maybe she should just take a pottery class at the recreation center but then realized her established margin of error was far too high. Her companion quest required vast quantities of people—with any group of fewer than twenty, her chances of finding someone friendship-worthy was cut significantly, almost to a guaranteed zero. Look at what had happened so far, she thought. No, she needed to reach a large population; she needed to send her message far and wide. Spread it to the masses. There has to be someone in this town who is like me, she told herself; there has to be a Spaulding version of Kate or Sara, and if I have to comb through this entire town I will do it to find her—if only I knew my own mating call. On Maye’s own, it would take years, possibly decades; but if she presented herself to the whole town at once, her chances of remaining friendless and eating lunch alone would drop dramatically.
It wouldn’t hurt just to talk to Cynthia, Maye thought to herself as she stepped off the curb into the street. Just to see what would be required, what it was like, what it involved. She hoped there was no swimsuit competition; that
would nix the whole idea right there, unless she could show up wearing a swimsuit with a T-shirt and bike shorts over it. Maybe she could be convinced if she found a long-sleeved swimsuit. And if she had to dance and sing in a group opening number, she was definitely out. She could imagine herself dressed up like a flowing roll of toilet paper, a sequined toilet brush as scepter, and frankly, she would rather repeat her Charo dance in public than strut around onstage like a Ziegfeld Follies girl dressed as a glittery poop pipe.
Maye opened the gate of the cream-colored picket fence that fronted Cynthia’s yard and heard the hinges groan with age. Charlie, Maye knew, would be a hard sell, and truly, who could blame him? She had already mortified him in front of his entire department, and now she might do the same thing in front of the whole town (although at the competition, she’d have a sniper in the audience to pick her off immediately and put her out of her misery in case one of her bare-naked fat rolls exposed itself to strangers). But Charlie had friends, Maye argued to herself; he had built-in friends at the university, and he had gotten close to several of them, going fishing on the weekends and catching a beer or two after the workday was over. Charlie didn’t see an empty Spaulding the way she did. His days were filled with students, conferences, and university business. He had become one of the most popular professors on campus—not only with students but with faculty, too. Everywhere they went, they ran into people who knew him and liked him. Maye didn’t have that. She only had the hope of one day finding a pal who had the good sense to eat a little bread before downing a bottle of wine and discussing her flow with waitstaff and diners at every table of the “in” restaurants in town.
Maye walked up the front steps to Cynthia’s wide, wrap-around, tongue-and-groove porch. At the front door, she reached up and knocked, knowing if she hesitated, she would never make the move. Within moments, Cynthia swung open the front door, presented her perfectly coiffed self, and invited Maye in as the scent of pageant-strength hair spray swirled in the air. “It’s so good to see you!” she said warmly. “How did you know I was just about to take a trip over to your house?”
“Were you really?” Maye asked, surprised. “Were there dog-food cans in my trash again?”
“No, no, no,” Cynthia said, wagging an almost wrinkleless finger crowned with pale pink nail polish. “But close! You had Styrofoam! I saw some peeking out of the container lid on the last trash day.”
Maye didn’t know how to blame this on Charlie, but she quickly tried to come up with something—“Due to the lack of sensory neurons in his hands, all solid white things feel like potatoes to him” or “Perhaps his absence of depth perception led him to believe it was a brick of solidified cottage cheese that teetered on biohazard status and needed to be discarded immediately or risk quarantine”—but truly, she had lied to Cynthia enough. So she told the truth. “I thought I read that Styrofoam couldn’t be recycled,” Maye said, wincing. “I thought it wasn’t on the list of acceptable recyclable materials for our bins.”
“Oh, it’s not!” Cynthia said, nearly delightfully. “That’s why we have Styrofoam Day. Everyone saves it and on one special day of the year, you’re allowed to take it to the recycling center and they send it to a special Styrofoam-reuse plant!”
“You save your Styrofoam for a year?” Maye asked. “Packing materials, peanuts, the sheets of it you get in brand-new frames? All of it? You save it for a year?”
“Absolutely,” Cynthia confirmed. “I have a whole room upstairs devoted to it. But you have to get a good spot on Styrofoam Day. People line up early.”
“Like for Madonna tickets?” Maye asked. “Or a Star Wars movie?”
“Oh, no! You don’t have to sleep on the sidewalk for this!” Cynthia laughed. “Goodness, could you imagine sleeping outside in the winter with all of these bags of ghost poop around you? No, no, no. Everyone lines up in their cars. That’s where you sleep!”
“Wow,” Maye said, somewhat startled. “I had no idea.”
“Apparently,” Cynthia declared. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be throwing chunks of it away as you poison the earth. Now, Styrofoam Day is next Saturday, so make sure to mark your calendar and cancel any plans. Last year it took me seven hours to get to the front of the line! Would you like some organic donuts? I just came back from Hoo Doo Donuts, and they are truly outstanding. They only stay fresh for a day, and I have a whole dozen. After your first three, you literally buzz with delight.”
“That’s what I’ve heard. Thank you for asking, but I need to watch what I eat,” Maye replied. “Because I actually came over to ask you about the Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant.”
“It was a glorious time, glorious time,” Cynthia chanted. “What was it that you wanted to know?”
“Well,” Maye started, “I’m not exactly sure. Since we moved to Spaulding, I’ve had a hard time making friends, so my Realtor thinks it would be a good idea for me to compete so I can meet people and get more involved in the community.”
“That’s the perfect way to do it,” Cynthia agreed, then confirmed what Maye had suspected. “This is a hard town to break. People have lived here for generations and generations. Cliques get formed, and people are very happy with what they’ve already got. People in the earthworm-tea composting club socialize with other earthworm-tea people. People in the unicyclists group tend to be attracted to other unicyclists—they wouldn’t dare dream of becoming bi. The folks who are protesting field-burning pollution are consumed with that; you won’t see them cavorting with the greenhouse-gas people who look for Expeditions, Hummers, and Yukons so they can slap an I DRIVE AN OVERSIZED CAR BECAUSE MY IGNORANCE HAS TO FIT IN, TOO bumper sticker on them. Most aren’t looking to make new friends. Spaulding is a nice place, but it’s a tight little town with plenty of causes, plights, and principles. Have you tried joining any groups or clubs?”
Maye nodded. “I was banned from Vegging Out because I was exposed as a carnivore while chewing a filet mignon, and my book club wanted to dance around a fire with only coats on,” she said as simply as possible.
“Then, honestly speaking, my dear lonely neighbor, I think this may be your only shot,” Cynthia informed her. “At the very least, if you don’t win, you’ll probably meet some nice people.”
“But do you think I have a chance?” Maye asked. “I’m new, no one knows me here. I would think they’d want to pick a queen who has lived here for a while.”
“I thought that, too,” Cynthia said. “I was a very gawky girl growing up, didn’t have many friends at all. My father moved us here when he got a job rebuilding the pipe factory. I was a senior in high school. Didn’t know a soul. My mother saw how lonely I was, so she concocted a marvelous scheme. She said to me one day, ‘You’re going to enter that pageant, and you’re going to win!’ She was determined and sewed that dress you see right there in that picture by hand. Night after night with the needle and thread. After seeing her work so hard, there was no way I couldn’t compete, so I did, and I won. And the day after I was crowned, I knew everyone in town and everyone knew me. Like I said, it was a glorious time.”
“If I did enter, I would need a coach,” Maye said gingerly. “I would need a former queen as a sponsor, and I was wondering if…if you might be willing to take me on. Should I decide to do this. And if you haven’t already sponsored someone this year.”
“As luck would have it,” Cynthia said, smiling widely, “I was indeed supposed to sponsor Elsie’s granddaughter for this year’s competition after she returned from the Peace Corps. Between you and me, she would have been a shoo-in. She’s just returned from Cameroon, and was planning to do this wonderful native dance for her talent segment, and it’s performed almost in the nude! Apparently, it’s typically danced by a man and a woman and the woman spends most of the time nearly doubled in half as the man holds her waist from behind. It was banned from being performed in that country because it’s so provocative! She had to learn it in back alleys under the cover of night! Unfortunately, while she was ther
e, she also drank some dirty water or ate a dirty animal and they found a tapeworm in her the size of a sea serpent. I won’t tell you how they found it, either, except that you could see it at nighttime with a flashlight when it thought it was safe to come out by the back door.”
Maye cringed.
“As you might guess, her condition isn’t very conducive to dancing in the almost nude and bending over like that, lest her parasite should wiggle its head out. That could cause a stampede. So she decided to skip this competition until she can evict her visitor,” Cynthia continued. “So that means I am available!”
“That’s wonderful,” Maye blurted. “Thank you so much.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Cynthia warned, wagging her perfect pink-frosted finger again. “On one condition. I will need something from you.”
“You need a ride to Styrofoam Day?” Maye asked.
The former queen laughed. “No,” she said. “Elsie’s granddaughter also dropped out of our production of H.M.S. Pinafore because a rumor started that giant tapeworms are contagious, and you know how rumors go. Can’t put them out with a fire extinguisher! So I have an opening for the role of Dick Deadeye. It’s not a big part, only sings one song, but what do you say? Fair trade?”
Maye hadn’t bargained for this, and she desperately, desperately, didn’t want to do it. Desperately. But if Cynthia was willing to help her, she needed to be willing to help Cynthia. Plus, it was a step up from a chorus cop role. Fair was fair.
“I guess we have a deal.” Maye smiled, and they shook on it in front of the fireplace, trading an Old Queen for a Dick.
“I have something to tell you,” Maye said to Charlie that night when he came home from the university.
“I bet I have something worse to tell you,” Charlie lobbed back, and he looked grim. This was assuredly bad news.
Ooooh, Maye thought. Leverage. What has Charlie done? Had he been touching the pipes in the basement, willy-nilly, causing them to explode, flooding all of it, and affording them only enough time to grab Mickey and a light snack and flee? Was Charlie a CIA agent about to be outed by the vice president? Maye looked at Charlie, and still he didn’t say anything. This was worse than busted pipes. This was serious. “Charlie?” Maye began. “What is it?”