The Idiot Girls'' Action-Adventure Club

  It was a dead woman.

  Or, more correctly, the mortal remains of a dead woman.

  Apparently, the woman had lived at a resort where the former roommate in question used to work as some sort of servant, and the two became friendly. The woman, who was very wealthy, died, however, and had no family to speak of, so her estate was left to a charity or something like that. A short time after she died, the former roommate found a box bearing her name in the hotel trash, while the label on the box read “Valley of the Sun Funeral Services.” The former roommate, in the single act of compassion of his entire life, took the box home with him that night.

  And now it was in my Scary Room.

  I was raised a Catholic. We bury our dead people. Whole. I had no idea what I should do with the box. I couldn’t call my mother. She’d have the Pope over to my house in fifteen minutes, armed with a cooler of holy water and an economy-sized crucifix. Whatever the right thing to do with the box was, I knew that the wrong thing was to let my house become its final resting place.

  I couldn’t throw it away with the rest of the stuff; it was bad enough that someone had thrown her away once already. My sister suggested that we hide the box in a drawer of a dresser that we were going to sell at a garage sale the next weekend, but that didn’t work, because nobody bought it. My friend Jamie mentioned that we should slip the box in with the stuff that was going to be picked up by Goodwill the weekend after the garage sale, but I decided that that would be a bad idea. The box was too easily traceable back to me, and the last thing I needed was the Boomerang Box of the Dead popping up in all areas of my life.

  So the box, now known and referred to as “Evelyn,” remained on my kitchen counter in a very literal state of limbo. It was suggested that we bury her in the cat cemetery part of the backyard, but the thought of my dog having a strained movement over poor Evelyn seemed a fate worse than the Scary Room.

  I thought about spreading her someplace, but I had no idea where. Where do you sprinkle a dead rich lady? At Tiffany? A nice lunch place? The shoe department at Neiman Marcus? Her cosmetic surgeon’s office?

  And besides, who was going to spread Evelyn? Did a priest, rabbi, or pastor need to spread her? Did we need a permit or license to do it? Were there fines for illegally dumping human remains, and how much were they? Could I do jail time?

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do or who to ask. All I knew was that I was trapped in a very dead version of a Woody Allen movie.

  This went on for weeks, and I asked every person that I came in contact with what they thought I should do. My mother found out about it and disgustedly mentioned, “You know, things like this don’t happen to normal people. That’s what you get for letting weirdos live off you. It’s just not normal.”

  And then I met Mary, the clairvoyant, at a coffee shop, while I was with my friend Michelle.

  What the hell, I figured.

  I told her I had a problem.

  I told that I needed help.

  I told her about Evelyn.

  Mary nodded her head, took a breath, and said, “Well, what do you think the box wants you to do with it?”

  I had no idea. I had held the box on several occasions, and I hadn’t received a message from Evelyn in any of those situations.

  Since Evelyn hadn’t expressed to me what she wanted done, Mary asked what I wanted to do with the box.

  I knew what I wanted to do. “I want to mail it back to the bastard who brought it to my house in the first place,” I replied.

  “That’s exactly what you should do, then,” Mary agreed.

  “But I don’t know if it’s legal to mail the dead,” I answered, and Michelle mentioned that she’d check it out with a lawyer friend of hers.

  “But there’s one thing,” Mary added. “It’s very important that you tell the box what you’re doing and why. You have to tell her that it’s not because you don’t want her, it’s because she needs to be where she belongs.”

  “Okay,” I nodded, a little hesitantly, trying to picture the scenario and trying even harder not to laugh.

  “Then as soon as you have the talk, get that thing the hell out of your house. You’re playing with cosmic fire.”

  So the next day, while I was waiting for Michelle’s phone call to see if I could slap a stamp on Evelyn, I put her box back on the kitchen counter.

  I made some coffee and pulled up a stool.

  We had ourselves a nice talk.

  “You know, Evelyn,” I started. “I like you and everything, and I’ve never charged you rent for the year and a half that you’ve been here, but—”

  Then I noticed it. That’s when I noticed that the Valley of the Sun Funeral Services label had been slit on either side of the box. I picked Evelyn up. I looked closer. The lid wasn’t on so tight.

  I had to do it.

  I shook her. God forgive me, but I shook a dead woman. I shook her a lot.

  And I didn’t hear a thing.

  Now, I know that ashes don’t weigh much—in fact, they weigh close to nothing at all—but I knew damn well if the ashes of a whole, entire Evelyn were in there, I would have heard them settle somewhat.

  It made perfect sense.

  The former roommate found the box in the trash. Evelyn had been gone long before that, maybe floating in a clean, blue lake, or tangled up in a gust of wind that charged through the branches of a pine tree, but most likely lying in a big, fancy urn. Everyone knows that no matter how big of an asshole you are, you’ll go to hell for throwing away a dead person.

  But you won’t go to hell for throwing away the box that the dead person was in just before their ashes were spread somewhere. If Evelyn was indeed a wealthy woman, I’ll bet money that she had an expensive lawyer that made out a fancy will, complete with instructions on what to do with her remains, which were probably sitting in a porcelain urn on a marble mantel with a spotlight on it at the headquarters of her favorite charity.

  I’ll betcha a million dollars.

  I didn’t wait for Michelle’s phone call; I didn’t need to. Evelyn was going to where she belonged: back to the bastard who brought her to my house in the first place.

  I just put the box in another box, wrote down the address, and gave it to the mailman.

  What the former roommate didn’t know—and didn’t figure out when he got what he thought was Evelyn—wasn’t gonna hurt him.

  But I know one thing for sure.

  Eight stamps never made me laugh so hard that I’d tinkled a little in my pants before.

  I hope they never will again.

  How Much It Costs

  for a Room

  of One’s Own

  Martha Stewart told me that I needed my own space.

  She insisted that in a single afternoon, I could create a private and productive environment for myself by picking a spot somewhere in my house and tailoring it to fit my needs. She showed me how by transforming a mud room off her kitchen into a spectacular office, and, in a single afternoon, she painted the office, stenciled it with gold leaf, refinished the floor, and built a wooden wall unit from trees she had planted that morning.

  I’m not a fool; I realize that Martha Stewart has the magic of television on her side, but in a quiet turn of contempt, I decided that I could do whatever she did. She wasn’t better than me. I could create an office in a single afternoon, too. If I felt like it, I could make window shades from twigs and canvas. If I had a chainsaw, I could also sculpt a Nativity scene from a block of ice and make a delectable strawberry shortcake out of sawdust and a pound of confectioners’ sugar.

  Competition is healthy, as is jealousy to a certain extent, but it wasn’t that as much as it was Martha’s overall tone of voice. It was a tone of condescending perfection, almost to the point of mockery. She seemed concerned, but was she really? Did she really feel that it was important for me to weave a carpet from my dog’s fur, or was she just being a show-off? Would my self-esteem really rise if I rented a steamroller and pave
d my own driveway, or was she just being a know-it-all? Why was I watching her show, anyway?

  Well, I knew why I was watching her show: I was out of work, and I have cable. That wasn’t the only reason, however, there was more to it than that. I was connected to her. Believe it or not, I’m almost related to her.

  It’s true, by an odd and disturbing set of circumstances. You see, I have a distant cousin who was the niece of the husband of my father’s sister whom I have never met. In fact, I’m not even sure if she is my cousin, but it enhances the story better than if I just said “some girl I heard of.” In any case, this cousin graduated from Vassar with some degree and then became employed as Martha Stewart’s personal assistant. Now, if you think I’m about to expose some horrible disfigurement about Martha’s personality—like maybe that she picks her nose when she drives or leaves skid marks in the toilet—you’re wrong. Nope. What I’m about to expose is that this distant cousin of mine allegedly became romantically entangled with not Martha but Martha’s husband, a dead ringer for an ugly Aristotle Onassis. If that wasn’t bad enough, Martha’s husband left Martha, divorced her, and then allegedly married this distant cousin of mine, after which they honeymooned in Europe for three months.

  Now, my aunt, the one who told me this story, is known to exaggerate a bit, but I’m fairly sure that it’s true. Sometimes I don’t even care if it’s true. I just feel lucky that I can pity Martha on some level.

  And that’s what I kept in the back of my mind when I decided in a single afternoon that the former Scary Room was the perfect spot for my new office, as I tore up the shag carpeting, swept away the spiderwebs, and threw away the dead lady I had recently found in there. I slapped the first coat of periwinkle-blue paint on the wall and it splashed back into my eye, causing temporary blindness. After an hour of flushing my eye with warm water, I went back into the new office, ready to resume my work, but it was dark outside. The sun had set. The single afternoon was over. Oh well, I figured, does it really matter? So I couldn’t pull it off in a single afternoon, so what? Martha Stewart is still divorced.

  The next day I finished painting and started on the floor, pouring adhesive remover gel on the concrete to eat away at the remaining carpet glue. However, what Martha didn’t mention was that it was pretty necessary to wear the proper attire, like a NASA space suit, when using such chemicals, because the remover was equally effective at dissolving flesh as it was at dissolving glue. This was apparent when I noticed, out of my remaining good eye, that the gel had eaten a quarter-sized hole in my pants and was now gnawing through my calf muscles. Oh well, so what, I figured. So what if I had chemical burns that really demanded medical attention, if not a skin graft, did it really matter? Martha Stewart was still divorced.

  After the floor was done, I set out to find office furniture, especially a great big desk. At the first place I went to, a man with a huge scab on his head led me through a maze of warehouses filled with rusted and dusty cabinets and tables. The first desk he showed me was it; a huge, 1930’s golden-oak detective’s desk big enough to sleep on. I loved it, and when I voiced my concerns about fitting it through the doorway of my new office, Scab Head told me not to worry. He assured me that his delivery men were experts at this sort of thing. They could fit anything anywhere.

  I bought the desk.

  Two days later, a delivery truck pulled into my driveway, and the two “experts” got out. They didn’t look like experts to me as much as they did convicts out on work furlough. I swore I heard the theme to Sanford and Son drifting through the air. They unloaded the desk, grunting and moaning, and carried it to the front door, where they rammed the corner of the desk into the door jamb and gashed it.

  After fifteen minutes, and with the use of pen and paper, the experts finally figured out how to get the desk through the front door. My faith in Scab Head’s men was definitely waning as they carried it down the hall and toward the new office. I already knew what was about to happen.

  They turned the desk on its side and tried to slide it in. Didn’t work. They moved the desk upright and tried to bring it in at an angle. Didn’t work. They took the door off its hinges and tried to bring it in again. I knew that this maneuver wasn’t going to work when one of them asked me if I had a saw.

  “Where is your second choice to put the desk?” the other one said.

  I took a deep breath. “There is no second choice,” I answered. “This room is my personal space.”

  “We don’t have the authorization to help you any further,” one of them said. “We don’t have the allowance from our boss.”

  I was getting mad. “It was your boss that told me not to worry about this,” I mentioned. “He said you were experts.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have the authorization,” he said again, as if that explained everything.

  “Oh. Well, how am I supposed to get this in there?” I asked them as they began to put the door back.

  They shrugged. “See, we’d have to call and get the authorization, you know, so we could spend the extra time to get it in there, but we just don’t have it,” the expert explained to me.

  “Have what?” I asked.

  “The authorization,” they said together.

  “Stop saying that and go. I’m giving you the authorization to get out of my house. Just go,” I almost screamed. “You know where the front door is. It’s the first big wooden thing you put a dent in.”

  And they left, and I watched them go as I stood next to the desk in the hallway.

  I knew what Martha would do.

  I took the door back off the hinges.

  I took out the drawers and used a screwdriver to pry off the top of the desk.

  I turned the desk on its side and pushed and wiggled and pushed and wiggled until the desk was in my office underneath the window, and my spine was popped so far out of alignment that it nearly broke the skin.

  Hunched over, I put the top back on and screwed it in place. So what if I couldn’t stand up straight? Who cared if I couldn’t walk anymore? Big deal if I was in agonizing pain.

  I know what Martha would have done.

  She would have bought herself a truckload of painkillers with her big, fat alimony check and drunk gin until she passed out, like any sensible divorced woman.

  I wish I had an alimony check.

  For the Birds

  The truth was that I felt sorry for the two little girls from down the street, Casey and Staci.

  I don’t know, maybe I’m a sucker; maybe I’m just too gullible. Nevertheless, I must still hold tight to the theory that a six-year-old child at my front door asking me to feed her because her mother hasn’t gotten out of bed in two days qualifies for a Sally Struthers kind of tragedy.

  I had met the girls a couple of months ago when they, one of them fully dressed as a ballerina, wanted me to pay them to cut my bushes, though I politely declined. My regular gardener was a forty-year-old man who equates a properly trimmed bush to a stump, and I knew I wouldn’t have much more luck with an eight-year-old and a six-year-old.

  After the bush incident, the kids started coming around in the afternoon, and, within a week of our meeting, it had become a daily ritual. The chimes would be tinkling, yet no one was visible through the front-door window. That’s when I knew the midgets, as I started to call them, were getting hungry.

  But soon, feeding them simply wasn’t enough. They started bringing their dog to my house for Snausages and dinners of Kibbles and Chunks. Every time they set foot through the front door, one of them would spot something she liked, pick it up, and ask, “Can I have this when you die?”

  This begging thing was obviously either a genetic trait or a habit picked up from their mother’s fourth husband. One day, while disposing of all the unnecessary items in our house, I came upon the dusty, 1973ish fakewood headboard that had belonged to my sister’s old boss. Somehow, after the boss’s father had died in the bed, we assumed possession of it. I was quite ready to get rid of it, so I drag
ged it out to the front yard, slapped a huge FREE sign on it, and waited for someone to pick it up.

  Within a half hour, the headboard was spied by the fourth husband, whom I call “Jethro,” while en route to dropping both Casey and Staci off at their natural fathers’ homes for the weekend. He sent the midgets up to the door to tell me to take the sign off the headboard while he smoked a cigarette at the end of my driveway.

  After that, I came up with a whole bunch of ideas to trick Jethro. I toyed with the idea of dragging all of my trash, lawn clippings, and broken appliances to the curb and taping free signs to them so I wouldn’t have to take them all the way to the Dumpster in the alley. Jethro, however, had beat me to the punch by hauling a plaid burlap love seat with missing cushions out to the dirt plot that was his front yard, appropriately accompanied by a broken dryer. As a matter of fact, Staci had been missing for several hours one afternoon until I saw her older brother open the door to the dryer and yank her out.

  I bet, I thought to myself while driving past their house, that if I moved the dryer and the love seat to my yard and put free signs on them, the fourth husband would take them back inside the house.

  I just hoped that they’d move soon, but they couldn’t have moved soon enough. Last Sunday morning, the doorbell rang, and as I peered from the hallway to the front door, no one was visible. It was the midgets, probably wanting breakfast.

  Despite the fact that I was still in my pajamas, I opened the door, hoping to get rid of Casey and Staci quickly, but as I did so, I knew I had been trapped.

  There they were, dressed in the same clothes as the day before, but this time, on top of Staci’s right shoulder was perched a big, fat, filthy, dirty pigeon.

  I shuddered immediately. I avoid birds, I avoid them at all costs. I’ve never had a simple, noneventful encounter with a bird and never will because of karma. I killed a bird with my car several years ago, and since then, birds have been shitting on my head, getting trapped in my air-conditioning vents, and being generally bothersome. To me, seeing a bird is like seeing the Antichrist appear before my eyes.