Authors: Lucy Ellmann
“I boiled a baking potato, Bee.”
“How’s the foot?”
“Elevated. So is my thumb. And I’m wearing my sickbed hat. I look like some kind of crazed hitchhiker.”
“This would never have happened if you rode a bike, Harry.”
Cycling was Bee’s solution to everything, and she was the business: Lycra, latex, Playtex (who knows?), helmet, water bottle, pump, puncture-repair kit, banana, raisins, energy bar, GPS, the whole deal.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Those guys don’t last long in New York. They bus a new bunch in every day to make up for the ones that got flattened because they rode on the wrong side of the street and never used their lights. Anyway, it’s
snowing
outside, Bee! Heavily.”
“Where’s Gertrude? Hasn’t she turned the whole place into a sanatorium yet?”
“We broke up.”
“
When?!
”
“A few weeks ago. But I’ve been working on it for some time.”
“You
dumped
her?” she asked, struggling to picture my long-awaited rebellion.
“Dumped her, yes.”
“Wow. Great!”
“And now she wants to Talk About It. She wants to review all the ‘misunderstandings’. Ingratitude has been mentioned. Don’t you hate break-up lingo? At first, it’s all so merry: copping a feel, cutting me off a slice, perch and twirl, baby, bumping uglies, my main squeeze. Then all changes to: I’m dumping you. She’s history. Creep. Slut. Asshole. Slimeball.”
“Hey, does this mean
I
can call her an asshole now?” Bee asked sweetly. Bee had always been repulsed by Gertrude. And Bee was always right.
On hearing of my crippledom, Gertrude had indeed offered to desert her Connecticut crowd and come take care of me. But the fact that Claude, her son by parthenogenesis, had probably mastered English primarily in order to object to Gertrude’s perpetually proffered nipples made her offer to come “nurse” me somewhat unenticing. There was actually nothing she could say that would have induced me to see her again voluntarily: in my head was a list about a mile long of things that woman did that bugged me.
REASON NO. 1: She’s like a slug in your bed.
REASON NO. 2:
Those teeth! It’s like opening a freezer: you’re blinded and chilled at the same time. Nobody ever jokes around with Gertrude for fear of eliciting that smile.
REASON NO. 3:
That menagerie of hers. She’s got pets climbing on the counters, hauling themselves up curtains, throwing their weight against closed doors, cantering across the walls, hibernating in the toilet, hanging upside down from clothes rails—and that’s just the
goldfish
, desperate to escape their dank tank. Just think of the stink that emanates from a whole nuthouse on the Upper East Side stuffed with cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, marsupials, amphibians (and their accompanying microbes), all of whom would gladly eat
each other
if left alone for a single moment. (Probably had an iguana in there too somewhere, inching his way towards my neck with savage claws.) One maid was employed solely as zoo-keeper, mopping the vomit and shoveling up a vast variety of turds. It was like a safari, just going over there for lunch. I had to bring my own food, my own paper plates!
REASON NO. 4:
Her fake hips. You might see her from behind, as I did, sauntering up 42nd Street, and think she had magnificent womanly hips, but you’d be wrong. Check her out from the side, bud: there’s nothing there!
REASON NO. 5: Embroidery. There ain’t world enough nor time to embroider cushions, honey, especially ineptly. Gertrude adorns handkerchiefs with mottoes, sews garish flowers on pillowcases, and issues plaques to commemorate joyous American holidays and baby names. The worst was a heart-shaped pincushion she made me sporting the date of our first encounter—the fact that this occurred on
September 11th
(2005), didn’t deter her from celebrating it, but it did give me an excuse to hide the obscenity from public view. She also darns, and batiks without irony.
REASON NO. 6: She balls my socks, though I repeatedly
begged
her not to. Give the woman a sock and she’ll stretch and twist it within an inch of its life. Her sock balls gave me the heebie-jeebies.
REASON NO. 7: Gertrude as a mother. Poor Claude (her latest pet) would have been called
Sweet Pea
if I hadn’t intervened. But even I couldn’t save him from the maniacal breast-feeding. A fine 8 lb. baby at birth, but Gertrude was so worried he’d starve to death, she emergency-crocheted a sort of harness that positioned the kid firmly against her chest, and this she wore, nonstop, for months. Okay, I too spend most of my days staring at the breasts of rich Manhattanites, but that baby-bra seemed detrimental to Claude’s cognitive development. My opinion counted for nothing though—Gertrude was an expert on parenthood: she’d read an article in
Vogue
.
REASON NO. 8: Gertrude’s perforated eardrum, caused (in her opinion) by
me
, all because I phoned her one day when she was getting out of the shower and she ran to answer the phone with a Q-tip in her ear. Was it my fault she’d arranged a doggy play-date that day and the place was awash with even more hairy hounds than usual tearing from room to room? (I bet there was a chinchilla involved somehow too—those little guys get around!) So Gertrude fell, the Q-tip perforated her eardrum, and
I’m
in the doghouse, even though I rushed to her aid and got her the best
ent
guy in the business! Okay, it was painful, but that doesn’t entitle her to warn everyone who’ll listen: “Anybody dumb enough to be Harrison’s girlfriend shouldn’t use Q-tips.” It is not up to Gertrude to dissuade people from sleeping with me, nor from removing ear wax.
The final straw, REASON NO. 9: Her job as an arts administrator. Gertrude’s one of those rich women who suddenly decides she needs a job, so she steals one off somebody who really does need a job. Once installed high up in the New York arts hierarchy, she proceeded to exert unwarranted power over the lives and work of people she never undertook to comprehend. A staunch proponent of the caprice, Gertrude saw to it that handsome librettists had it made, while other, less “fabulous”, writers, musicians, composers, artists, and film makers had their progress slowed or halted—especially if they were female and no fun to flirt with. The woman sought power, and executed it, with philistine zeal.
So why did I ever suggest to my sister, a sculptor, that Gertrude might be able to help her? It was I who invited Bee up to Connecticut for one of our painful weekends. Bee had never been before and had never wanted to go, but came this once, to sleep an uncomfortable night in a pre-Revolution four-poster and endure the sight of Gertrude knee-deep in the ivy grove. Gertrude would always jump straight into a billowy dress as soon as we arrived and go get some grass stains on it to prove how in tune with nature she was. The whole place was maintained by a fleet of full-time gardeners but Gertrude always made a big show of wandering dreamily through the dawn to fetch me something “real” for breakfast, usually coming back with one malformed carrot she’d picked up somewhere. She wouldn’t have known where her fruit trees were if you asked her, and wouldn’t have been caught
dead
feeling for an egg under one of her prize hens. But she could talk burdock, dandelion, and lovage soup at you all day if you let her.
By the time Bee asked that evening about the possibility of any grants or public projects she could apply for, Gertrude had spent an ecstatic afternoon among the ferns and the fairies, and answered in full Marie Antoinette dairymaid mode: “But why do you need a grant, Bridget? Why not just live more simply? You could grow vegetables. . . Who needs fancy stores when you can grow your own asparagus? That grows really well, once you get it started, which only takes about five years. And flowers from the garden are just as good as florists flowers.”
“I don’t think buying flowers’ is Bee’s major concern, Gertrude.”
“We have everything we need here, don’t we, Harrison?” she went on.
“Huh?”
“Olallieberries, juniper berries, jicama, fiddlehead ferns. . .” (I think she might even have mentioned those chickens, the hypocrite.)
“Bee doesn’t own any land, Gertrude.”
“But even in an apartment, you could have a window box!” she told Bee delightedly.
Pushed near the limit of endurance, Bee replied, “How self-sufficient am I supposed to get with a window box?”
“In Queens?” I added.
“Oh, herbs grow really well in window boxes,” Gertrude assured us, and there followed an endless monologue on every herb Gertrude had ever grown, every wild flower she’d ever picked, watercress this and water mint that, and the infinite culinary uses to which they had been, or could have been, or should have been, put—except in dishes containing fish of course, for Gertrude had never really cared for fish. . . “I can eat a little tuna sometimes, if it’s cooked just right, but they so often overcook it! You wouldn’t dare overdo a steak in a good restaurant but there seems to be no consensus on how to cook tuna. It’s a real gamble.”
Was she being deliberately obtuse, or just plain dumb? I could never be sure.
REASON NO. 48: Gertrude’s efforts as a conversationalist (which at first I took as a sign of insecurity). Everything you say is just an excuse for Gertrude to issue some rambling amplification, meditation, or digression of her own. Mention coffee and she’ll give you a rundown of every cup she ever drank, and where. Her favorite conversational gambit is the foods she hates, and there are a million of them. But so what if Gertrude doesn’t like pot roast? (Who
likes
it?!) She also insists on reducing every topic to the most
banal
level: if somebody brings up Rembrandt, Gertrude will start jabbering on about some hat she once had that resembled Rembrandt’s in a self-portrait but she lent it to somebody who never returned it and therefore will never lend anything to anyone again or not a hat anyway. . . and other goofy ruminations
totally unconnected to Rembrandt
. She has no idea what conversation
is
, the give-and-take of it. She never listens to anyone else, in fact seems to think she’s doing everybody a favor by holding the floor. I tentatively suggested to her once, in private, that she should give no more than two opinions at a time before waiting to see if someone else had anything to add. But she never tried it—she probably never even heard me
say
it, she was too busy trying to find a way to interrupt me.
REASON NO. 49: Insecure, my ass! The woman has the ego of a colossus.
Later that night, you could have seen the berserk figure of my sister Bee running pell-mell from the house, screaming, “You idiot! You idiot!”—like Beethoven when some prince he was counting on suggested he might make do with two bassoons instead of three for a rehearsal of
Fidelio
. I think what finally flipped Bee over the edge was Gertrude’s bright idea that she should work smaller, do stuff in clay, use “inexpensive materials”, or maybe give up sculpture altogether and get a dog. Gertrude’s answer to everything is for people to become more like
Gertrude
: a nincompoop with a pumpkin patch who can speak coherently only about coffee and cat food. (REASON NO. 81.)
So Bee took up some dopey residency in England, and I, through superhuman efforts, finally extracted myself from Gertrude’s clutches, and thus was all alone on Christmas Day,
free at last
—to rearrange my
cd
s and
dvd
s. Not alphabetically, that’s for zhlubs. My
cd
s I effortfully shelved by composer, performer, and ensemble: solos, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, octets, small chamber groups, orchestras, jazz and. . . Bluegrass (my weak spot—not so much the yodeling as that “high lonesome sound”). Dewey wouldn’t have liked my system, but Dewey wasn’t
there
. The movies I did by era: the 1920s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, etc., each decade (after the ’40s) more redolent of cinematic decline. I never got to watch these movies when Gertrude was around. She was always jumping up and rushing around the room for no reason, or talking all the way through. So, examining them now was like retrieving a treasure trove. I turned out to have a whole bunch of Bette Davis movies! I decided I would revive my psyche, post-Gertrude, by watching Bette Davis—
her
weirdness would be
my
therapy.
But first I had to organize my cartoon collection, this time alphabetically: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Crusader Rabbit, Donald Duck, the Flintstones, Fritz the Cat, Goofy, Heckle and Jeckle, Hercules, Huckleberry Hound, the Jetsons, Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Mr Magoo, Penelope Pitstop, Pingu, Popeye, Porky Pig, Road Runner, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Screwball Squirrel, the Simpsons, Sylvester and Tweetie Pie, Tom and Jerry, Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, Top Cat, Wally Gator, Woody Woodpecker, and Yogi Bear. Well, what of it? What’s a plastic surgeon
supposed
to do after a hard day’s work realigning human flesh, if not chill out to scenes of imaginary animals getting punched, stretched, bounced up and down, steamrollered, blown to smithereens, and reborn good as new? Brutal, I know, but optimistic! Claude and I had bonded over episodes of
Yogi Bear
, and had watched Olive Oyl deliberate over which size roller skates to rent about a million times:
“I usually take a three but an eight feels sooo gooood!”