rice and a mountain of grated cheese. "You're looking well, Aunt Lil," T.S. told her when she finally allowed him to stop for breath. "All this ordering me around certainly seems to agree with you."
"Of course I'm looking well. I keep active. You don't see me wasting any of my time in front of a television set." She marched across the room and corrected the placement of forks on a nearby table while the other volunteers watched in amusement.
The hungry hordes did not stampede in. They shuffled in slowly, almost shyly, the obvious regulars taking the time to show newcomers where to go. The line snaked obediently toward the cafeteria railing while the volunteers took their places behind the counter with practiced competence. T.S. wandered past them, searching for Auntie Lil but, as usual, she managed to outflank him. She gripped his elbow and steered him to a spot behind a huge pot of chili, abandoning him before he could protest. Naturally, it was the hottest spot in the room and it both smelled and felt like his imagined version of the darkest depths of Hell. The odor of fiery chili peppers tickled his nose and made his eyes water as he stepped into place. Fragrant steam instantly assaulted him, fogging up the reading glasses he wore. The very last thing he saw before his temporary blindness was Auntie Lil taking a place at the front of the line.
How typical. While he sweated in Hell, he could listen to her greeting each person as if this were an afternoon tea party and she were the proud hostess. He wiped his glasses with the edge of a potholder and they instantly steamed up again. Only this time— unnoticed by T.S.—a lone kidney bean clung to the exact center of his right lens like a dark and deformed eyeball.
"How nice of you to come today," he heard Auntie Lil tell an unseen person. "Please feel free to eat well. We have plenty." There was a murmuring and she began again with someone new, demonstrating that she had the unerring instincts of a successful dictator—stick to the public relations and let the others do the dirty work.
T.S. could feel his hair begin to curl from the dampness and his stomach took a peculiar dip in response to the spicy aroma. He kept waiting for his glasses to clear but the chili seemed to have taken on a life of its own, spewing up steamy cloud after cloud like an angry volcano about to erupt.
"Excuse me, sir, but I am hungry. Do I get to eat or do I simply stand here and smell it?" The new voice was seductively female, full of hidden meaning and ringing with inflection. The enunciation was perfect. Clearly, it was a voice trained for the theater.
T.S. picked the useless glasses from his face, sending the kidney bean flying onto his shoe. He kicked it off with as much dignity as he could muster and folded the glasses into his back pocket, assuring himself that he did not really need them. At least not much. In fact, he'd been hoping to keep their recent existence a secret from Aunt Lil anyway (who hid her own behind a cushion on her couch).
His vision cleared. He had expected a young woman, perhaps a beautiful actress down on her luck. He found a frail old lady instead. She was so thin and pale that she gave the impression of being translucent, at first. Blue veins glowed behind parchment-like skin and only her face seemed to be successfully holding back the pulsating emergence of inner organs and blood vessels. And this was only because she wore what looked to be a full pound of makeup, expertly applied but in far too heavy proportions for the daytime. Not to mention the current decade. Her eyebrows had been plucked and were heavily outlined into startling dark thin arches. Her lips were drawn too wide for her frail face and were filled in with a deep scarlet that made her mouth look more like a wound than a feature. Dark eyeliner outlined both the upper and lower lids of small black eyes, and her rouge was applied in tiny crab apples on either side of a patrician nose.
He blinked. She was a vision from a 1940s movie, with the barely contained, too desperate animation of a background extra hoping to catch the audience's eye. Even her seemingly calm waiting was imbued with an overly dramatic patience.