Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,19
and I kept reading the same paragraph over and over again. So then I tried turning on the television and Dr Phil was on, who, I am reluctant to admit, is a special favorite of mine. Bald, ursine, mustachioed Dr Phil wears gray suits and pink shirts, invites fat ladies onto his show, and then tells them why they are fat. The ladies cry & agree with him mostly. Many of them have been molested or abused. Many of them have husbands who say terrible things to them about their weight. Dr Phil tells these husbands that they are no prizes either. I have a hopeless halfhearted fantasy of going on this show and receiving a benediction from Dr Phil, a hug, a promise of rescue and relief. You don’t deserve this, he says to the ladies. You deserve better than this.
I watched him for an hour. The story was a very pretty young woman and an ugly young man on the verge of divorce and disaster. They could not get along you see, and Dr Phil was finding out why not by watching the footage from hidden cameras that he had put all over their house.
O shut up, shut up, the woman was saying. On camera. And at one point her terrible husband took her by the shoulders and squeezed her, sort of, & Dr Phil paused the tape there, which is where I also would have paused the tape, and said What are you thinking.
Suddenly I realized I was hungry. It was past noon and I had not eaten for a couple of hours. But I did not want to eat when Yolanda was in the house because I did not want her to be disgusted by me. I was contemplating going into the kitchen to get the healthiest thing I could find when Yolanda’s phone rang. I heard it from inside her little black purse. It was some sort of high, high whine & a rumbling beat below. Rap music.
It was just out of my reach, on the floor between the couch and the front door. I scooted toward it. I waited to hear if she would come pounding down the stairs for it, but she didn’t. For reasons I can’t explain I rocked myself off the couch and timidly approached it, and then I reached down into her purse—the ringing had already stopped—and brought out the cell phone, which was pink and covered in rhinestones that looked as if they had been applied by Yolanda herself.
I flipped open her phone. There, in a bubble, it said 1 missed call: Junior Baby Love. 12:56 p.m.
Then I heard the sprightly Yolanda’s footfall on the stairs and I dropped the phone into her purse and hastened back to my place on the couch but I was breathing quite hard when I sat back down and I realized that I had forgotten to flip her phone shut.
She appeared very quickly, confirming my theory that I always have to be on my best behavior when Yolanda is in the house.
She looked at me suspiciously.
“My phone ring?” she asked.
“Is that what that noise was?” I asked. Innocently.
She went to her purse and took her phone out with two fingers, holding it up in its flipped-open state and looking at me.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, and she nodded.
“O Yolanda,” I said, to change the subject. “O Yolanda, I have never said this before, but please feel free to make yourself at home while you’re here. For example, would you like a glass of water?”
She considered my offer silently.
I looked at my watch. “I see it’s twelve fifty-six now,” I said. “Are you hungry?”
She nodded. And then she said, “Do you have any milk actually?”
“To drink?”
“Yeah.”
“I certainly do,” I said, & then I tried to get up off the couch as gracefully as I could but I failed & had to rock several times.
“I can get it,” said Yolanda, & I said “Nonsense nonsense. As a matter of fact I was going to make lunch & would you like some.” (At this point I had launched myself successfully and was standing on my own two feet.)
“What do you have?”
I paused. I wasn’t quite sure what to offer a girl like Yolanda. She herself was delicate and therefore deserved delicacies. But ideas for delicacies escaped me.
“Do you like sandwiches?” I asked, and she nodded.
“What kind? I should have . . .”
& then I realized that I had everything, almost everything anyone could dream of