Horrible Imaginings

SKINNY’S WONDERFUL

I bet a lot of these lads beef to you about their wives… you must get sick of it… but not me. I think Skinny’s wonderful. It isn’t every man has a wife who is loving, hardworking, brainy as they make them, talented seventeen different ways, and a professional dancer. You could draw me another beer. Hot as the hinges, isn’t it? Thanks.

I started calling her Skinny because she wasn’t meaty like the other girls, though she could outlast any ten of them dancing. They has nice enough figures if you go for that sort of thing, but they were meaty… not in the old-time beef-trust class, but the grits and greens and side meat showed. You know how they round them up. Lad goes south and puts an ad in the country papers: Girls One Hundred Dollars a Week. Likely looking ones he asks to strip. If they will and the figure’s okay they’re in.

Skinny’s no stripper. They always try to have one real dancer in those shows so they can call them artistic and give the boobs’ libidos a rest. Of course Skinny always sheds a few clothes… that’s a must… but she never goes all the way. Shinny provides the touch of imagination. She’s an Aztec priestess with a glass knife or a Russian duchess with a whip. Once she was Joan of Arc holding a cross and her robe got burned off six times a night… quite a lighting effect… and she does a half-and-half apache dance where she throws herself all over the stage and kicks herself. She was going to be Queen Theodora once with blue and gold robes and a jeweled cross, but they told her the Irish boobs would think it was supposed to be the Virgin Mary.

No wonder she’s skinny the way she’s always worked on those routines. Rehearse, rehearse, over and over. All around the living room. Whew! You could draw me another and have one yourself this time. Okay, a shortie. Once before I knew her she was working a bog club date where the boobs sat at tables having dinner. Skinny was doing a slow backbend, bare middle, when one of the yells, “That girl looks starved, Let’s give her something to eat,” and he throws a roll. Right away hard rolls are skidding all over all over the stage and a few thudding on her ribs. She finished the act though. Some of those club dates are pretty terrible. They even expect the pianist to play naked. Can you imagine?

But Skinny’s no stripper and be damned to my mother for calling her one. Just after we got married Skinny gave a dance recital in our back garden for some of mother’s friends and a few of ours. Mother said afterwards she was trying to give Skinny every chance. It was very beautiful, blue spotlights, Greek robes; Isadora Duncan sort of thing, Skinny’s really an artist. But right in the middle of one number she popped a shoulder strap. I don’t see anything wrong about a breast, certainly not one of Skinny’s, it’s sort of tiny and tender, its makes you think of little kids. Naturally Skinny finished the act, she always does, but Mother thought, she should have stopped… made like September Morn I suppose… or worn a brassiere. Mother also said Shinny wasn’t careful about drawing the alcove curtains when she changed costumes and that she shouldn’t have stood on the alcove table to do it. She worries and fusses and criticizes all the time.

Skinny’s nothing like that. She has a wonderful disposition. That’s why I’m telling you about her. I wouldn’t want to bore you with my woes. Of course she screams at me sometimes and throws the soup, but it’s generally lukewarm soup, Skinny believes hot foods give you cancer… I’m a lucky man, wouldn’t you say? Once she did throw some paint at me, I mean trip me and shove me into a bog slopping puddle of it. She’d got me to help her paint the living room ceiling… she’s always redecorating the apartment… and I climbed on the stepladder and right away spilled a two-gallon can. She had justification that time, you must admit. It wasn’t anything like the night she got mad at me in the car and started stamping on my ankle and finally hit the gas pedal. We went off the road… no bones broken though the birdcage got knocked open and the white rats escaped out of it. But that night Skinny had been drinking and I must have been beefing to her. Normally she has a wonderful disposition, it’s just that she has all this energy and it has to find an outlet.

Skinny has energy enough for ten women. Did I say ten? I meant two hundred. By contrast I have what you might call a lethargic disposition, I need Skinny to balance me off.

It’s not only energy. Skinny has brains. You may think I’m exaggerating, you may think I’m just a lad mooning about his girl, but I actually believe Skinny has brains enough to be president of the United States, if we had women presidents. Something like a combination of Claire Booth Luce and Bridgitte Bardot. Once an intellectual lad told Skinny she had no brains at all, but she argued him down. She’s talented in all sorts of directions. Take interior decoration…

No, no, that’s all right. Go ahead and serve them, it’s your vocation. Hello, friend. Join me in a beer? Has it ever occurred to you, friend, that women have a nest-building instinct? Take my wife Skinny. Every six months, regular as clockwork, she has to rent a new apartment and redecorate it from vestibule to garbage can. If she doesn’t she starts brooding. She does a wonderful job… white woolly rugs, low tables, dramatic simplicity. My mother’s all wet when she says our places always look like night clubs when Skinny’s through with them. Mother’s never been inside a burlesque bar in her life.

Skinny’s awfully smart about figuring out stuff to use in decorating, stuff nobody else would think of, and finding places where you can pick it up for nothing or sort of snitch it. Driftwood, big branches with leaves on, travel posters, old spotlights and gelatin from the night clubs, wicker baskets a yard across, ten-gallon green glass carboys, bricks and tiles, you name it. We can’t drive past a house that’s being torn down but what we have to stop and rummage for old ironwork. We generally find it too and it’s always the biggest heaviest piece. She’s always calling me up at the last minute to tell me to stop off somewhere on the way and bring home the damndest things. She never stops hunting. Sometimes when it’s a snitch operation she gets caught, but she always has an explanation. One night when she was tearing down flowered branches in a private forest just off the highway a watchman yelled at her and started to come running, but she screamed back that she was only going to the powder room and what sort of a filthy old Peeping Tom was he, anyway? I’m generally along to carry the branches and tear down the bigger ones she points out.

But of course moving every six months is the real monster job. Especially lugging and repotting all these tremendous plants. Skinny hammers nails in the living room and drapes the vines around. Striped and spotted leaves bigger than your two hands. You felt you’re right in the jungle.

No, we haven’t any children. I suppose if we did she’d take out her nest-building instinct on them. Still, I don’t know. She has an awful lot of excess energy, there might still be some left over for plants and things. Besides, she likes to entertain. She lives for her parties.

Skinny’s a great little hostess. She knocks herself out getting ready for her parties… all sorts of smorgasbord spread out, a huge punchbowl with colored ice, the kitchen set up for making pizza. And she’s generally stayed up housecleaning the whole night before… those are the nights we get our complaints from the neighbors, not on the party nights. Our parties are pretty quite, even Skinny doesn’t have much energy left, and then our friends are an odd lot, they’re all sorts… show people, some of Mother’s friends. Skinny’s father’s social-minded characters, some of the people from the dime store, and now my securities lads… they don’t mix so well and Skinny always invites them all. You know, it’s only on party nights that Skinny gets even the teeniest bit rubber-kneed drunk… it’s simply that getting ready has taken it out of her. She knocks herself out giving us all a good time.

Skinny’s been a wonderful wife to me. Really. Of course she hasn’t been able to get along with Mother, especially when Mother didn’t pass on as we expected. Certainly you can’t blame Mother for that, I was happier than anybody two months ago when Mother hit eighty, but I do blame Mother for calling Skinny a communist. Unquestionably I shouldn’t have hit Mother, that was a contemptible and a big mistake that I’ll be paying for until I die, even if it was nothing more than an accidental flick and anyway Skinny always gets everybody around her terribly worked up. There was absolutely nothing to Mother’s suspicions. Skinny’s father had all sorts of upside down social ideas in the old days… as who didn’t, they tell me… but now the only subversive literature you’ll find in his place of business is on Russian wolfhounds. Supplying dogs and cats and birds to stabilize the American home is just about the most patriotic job a man can do, in a way, wouldn’t you say? Skinny’s own interest in Russia is strictly limited to music, ballet, and Orthodox Church decor. A balalaika hanging on the wall against jewel-crusted brocade, that about sums up the Soviets for Skinny, though it’s true she once had the ice in the punchbowl frozen in a big red star at one of the parties Mother came to, I don’t know why. Certainly the detective Mother hired to investigate Skinny never turned up anything except the lunch dates she was having with a mocky screenwriter, or so he claimed to be… but that’s another story. And in a way the trouble with Mother hasn’t turned out so badly. She and Skinny stay away from each other, which is a relief, and although I can’t expect any lump-sum money when Mother dies I’ll get something in trust… she’ll probably live to one hundred anyway… and meanwhile she puts up a little cash from time to time for me to study my new job of selling securities in preparation for getting a license to sell them. Buy you another beer?

I’ve been slow getting my license, I have to admit. There are all sorts of tests you have to pass and I don’t have Skinny’s kind of ambition though tries hard enough to give it to me. Maybe I should go back to an office job. Skinny herself is almost coming around to think there are advantages, even if no future, in a biweekly paycheck. I don’t know.

Skinny’s still terrifically ambitious, though. As always, not barring childhood. She ran off and got a job dancing with a carnival when she was fourteen. She looked older then, just as she looks younger now. The girls had to turn cartwheels in one number. Skinny swore she could though she knew she couldn’t. That night she went out to the park and practiced. When dawn came she could turn cartwheels. That’s how I sometimes think of Skinny… a little girl all alone in the park turning cartwheels at 3 A.M.

The carnival had its points, Skinny said. They had a pit of rattlesnakes in the sideshow and she got a kick out of looking down into it.

Her father wasn’t much help to her… that was before the pet shop and he was saving humanity and shifting around in these free-love situations. Skinny wanted to dance in ballet… she knew it was tops, her father did give her that scrap of information… but those were depression times and the big ballet troupes weren’t going strong yet. Skinny got a job dancing in the Palace lone. She held it for five years.

I imagine you’ve been to enough burlesque shows, friend, probably more than I have, but it was little Skinny who told me how hard those line-girls worked. Fours shows a day seven days a week and five on Saturdays. A day off when and if. Rehearsal every weekday morning, early on Fridays to fit costumes for the new show. Playing one show, rehearsing another, and learning routines for the third. Monotony for the headlined strippers, boredom for the stand-around showgirls, but those little line-dancers got their tails worked off. Because Skinny was the most active and ambitions, they put her on the end of the line where she had to dance twice as far… when the line danced off sideways into the wings she was the last to leave the stage. By the time they exited high-kicking into the other wing, the line was reversed and she was still at the on-stage end… they somehow arranged it that way, Skinny told me, though at one point she’d have to sprint from one end of the line to the other to make it come out right.

I can’t speak for the showgirls, friend, but I can assure you that the girls of the burlesque line were virtuous… those routines left them with no energy for anything else. Skinny told me she’d wake up nights counting five-six and she said that when the Midnight Shambles came along on Saturday it was just that.

Skinny rose to being a specialty dancer a few times at the Palace. Her high point was a poison dance as Lucretia Borgia… she carried a bottle of green dye and dripped it in the goblets of ten showgirls. But then stage burlesque faded and Skinny got started on club dates. She auditioned for ballet a few times, but it’s my honest opinion Skinny simply had more than ballet knew what to do with. Same with movies, the stage and now TV. Skinny’s an endless dynamo. Another beer would go fine. Thanks.

Club dates can be anything from a company dinner for the whole family to an army of drunken apes at a so-called hunting lodge in the middle of an impenetrable forest. Business men, lodge brothers, politicos, actual fishermen, or just plain boobs, Usually the show would carry a pianist or even a band but once they had to fall back on a member of the audience who could only play the first six bars of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”… two hours of that, over, and over, while different girls stripped, can you imagine? Sometimes they’d have an auditorium; sometimes the stage would be the back end of a panel truck. Once the apes got the idea they’d grab Skinny off the back of the truck and throw her around among them… she’d been doing her half-and-half apache number and the year before there’d been a little stripper who’d let the apes give her the pass-around treatment. Skinny had to climb to escape. She was marooned on the roof of that truck for half and hour, but every ape that grabbed at her ankle got his fingers stamped on. So Skinny says. Oh, those club dates! All those effing club dates! as one of Skinny’s earthier associates refers to them.

Sorry you have to go, friend. Gentlemen, may I buy us a beer around? I couldn’t help hearing the three of you discussing the perennial problem of how to make money. Now at a modest estimate my wife Skinny thinks up in a month more plans for making money than the four of us will in all our lives. That is, if you gentlemen are anything like me. Arabian restaurants where you sit on pillows, dog walking services that also change cat boxes and clean the birdcage, a chain of friendly American motels across Mexico that specialize in New England cooking, a shoppers’ escort and buying-guide service, a distressed party givers’ bureau that does everything from taking unruly drunks off your hands to emptying ashtrays the next morning… you name it, Skinny’s thought of it and threshed it all out… along with all the more conventional business enterprises. One new way a week of making a million dollars… that’s par for Skinny.

But you can’t understand how intense Skinny is about her ideas for making money unless you’ve seen her make a pitch. She gets some of us together, me and two or three other lads, and she hands us a drink around and then she gives us a half-hour sales talk, all about initiative and push and golden opportunity. The NAM should hire Skinny, they really should… you never heard anybody build up industry, advertising, and the rewards of success the way she does. Her face just glows. She generally tops it off with something like, “Gentlemen, I have given you your choice: sit around on your fannies all your lives in Noplace Alley or put a down payment on a five-figure address on Easy Street!” Sometimes she says six-figure.

Of course it turns out then that we all have to put up money or go out and start changing cat boxes, managing unruly drunks and transforming old grocery stores into Arabian restaurants. The other lads butter up Skinny and then back down, and I explain to her there isn’t much I can do all by myself, though she sometimes keeps after me for a while.

Nothing discourages her. She needs that million-dollar plan a week just like she needs to nest-build every six months.

The puzzling thing is that with all her brains and drive Skinny’s never been able to get a good job outside show business. I guess it’s the same way as with ballet… anybody who might hire Skinny is scared of her. Her drive shows through. They figure that if they gave her a toehold she’d own the business in a year. Just the same, She’s wonderful.

Right now she’s got a job as a demonstrator at the big dime store. That’s right, that red-head who’s always chopping up vegetables with a patent gadget, or putting a rainbow oil-slick in china, or sample-enameling a teenager’s nails ten different shades, or managing a tableful of tiny clockwork men in striped pants… that’s Skinny. She gets a chance to sales talk and explain and do something all day long, but it never uses up all her energy. They say they never had anybody like her. The manager sometimes brings her home.

You see, Skinny has the touch of imagination. Another demonstrator would never have thought of the ten-shades idea, which has become a high-school fad, she tells me. Or of having the little men march off a plank and drown in a sea of green cotton wool, She put live ants in a kaleidoscope, but they wouldn’t let her demonstrate that one at the store. She brought it home. It was quite weird to look into. Once she tried writing stories for Weird Tales but they all came back with the comment “Too horrible.” Or maybe it was “Needlessly horrible.” I never understood that. As that so-called screenwriter told Skinny, “Even Shakespeare got called too horrible.” By Lamb, I think. Something about putting someone’s eyes out on the stage. Which reminds me that one of the schemes Skinny keeps coming back to is starting an American Grand Guignol theater. She’s great at thinking up weird costumes… she still gets a club date once in a while, you know. She’s still got a terrific figure and she really takes care of it (it’s good for a woman to be proud of her figure, I think) though I guess even if she didn’t take care of it, all that energy of hers would keep her slimmed down anyway. And she’s great at thinking up weird costume accessories, like a gold wire handbag with white mice in it, or fireflies in cellophane pin-ons) that’s for garden parties, or having a real spider web between a tiara and a shoulder yoke, or using a live snake for a belt.

Skinny loves animals. Birds, mice, lizards and turtles, pythons (small ones), baby alligators. Right now it’s golden hamsters. Of course her father running a pet shop is a big help. Sometimes it builds way up and gets to be a sort of balanced economy… the mice ate the birdseed and the blacksnake ate the mice. Once Skinny had twenty-three birds. They were kind of enjoyable flying around, except when they buzzed you, but they started pulling off the wallpaper in little ribbons and they made everybody sort of uneasy about the smorgasbord. Eventually she cut down to seven parakeets.

Some animals she has no luck with. Twice she has cats but they got out fast. The spaniel slipped its leash and we never saw him again… that was my fault. Once she had two Samoyeds. They were just her style… big and white and woolly and fierce looking. She liked to walk them. But one got run over and the other bit some people. Skinny right away had me drive the dog into the next county and sell it. The people never found out who it belonged to.

We had the same trouble with the baby alligator. Skinny left it outside one night in a puddle under a washtub to give it a little nature and it worked its way out. It bit two neighbors who were weeding their gardens before we stopped hearing about it. It had bitten me too, before I found out how fast it could move. A baby alligator’s bite is the funniest thing when it’s fresh… a little crescent of red drops on your hand with two bigger drops for the eyeteeth.

The boa constrictor… it was only five feet long… just lost its appetite and sort of faded. Skinny thought a vacation in Mother’s garden would refresh it, but Mother refused.

Of course the animals are a lot of work, sometimes more than the plants. But Skinny gets a big kick out of them. Skinny’s wonderful. Why, she…

All right, gentlemen, I’ll subside. I can see that Skinny is too much for you. Especially Skinny and animals. That’s all right; She’s sometimes too much for me. I understand. I’ll just have one more beer at the end of the bar and quietly talk to myself.

Skinny loves me too. She really does. She tries to make something out of me and that’s the test. She’s done everything she could to give me ambition and sober me up. She’s had me take antabuse and join AA and her father gives me dianstic therapy. She’s really worked on me. She loves me, all right. Of course there was that screenwriter… he said… and the time she started to Constantinople with the Turkish medical student and those three months she just disappeared, but those were exceptions. And of course she gets mad at me sometimes and talks about murdering me, but I know it’s just a gag when she asks people at parties about undetectable poisons and how do you induce a heart attack in someone who refuses to exert himself.

Yes, that’s for me. I’ll take it. Hello, Skinny. Yes, I’m here. Well, I don’t know how long. All right, right away. I said right away. Yes, I’ll keep an eye out for golden hamsters the last couple of blocks. What? Look, Skinny, I can’t handle that slab all by myself… George and Fred were going to help, they said they would, remember? Well, that’s too bad. Yes, I suppose a taxi would help, but not enough and the driver probably wouldn’t allow it. You can still use the old coffee table top for the party tonight. I know the new one’s going to look nicer but you’ll have all the rest of your life to enjoy it. Well, it may be only three inches thick but that’s still damn heavy. I don’t care if the cutter has to get rid of all his samples. He can hold onto it a day longer… it isn’t the sort of thing a person can toss in the trashcan. I absolutely refuse… Oh I can, Can I? Well, you know where you can shove it!

Draw me one more beer, will you, one for the road? Yes, that was Skinny. Better give me a shot too, this time. I’m going to need it. On the way home I got to pick up a gravestone.