Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (9 page)

Phyllis and Betty had only recently become friends. They had bonded while working for the same employers, a highly eccentric former White Russian prince and princess. This regal couple had been teenagers at the time of the revolution.
Back in Russia they had lived in a luxurious, magical world of tinkly sleigh rides, Fabergé eggs, gilded samovars, and fur-trimmed Dostoyevsky couture. And now, in an unbelievably perverse, excruciatingly cruel plot twist—probably one of the cruelest in the history of mankind—fate had plonked the royals down in Reading, our hometown, the least glamorous, dreariest place in the whole of Europe.

I have no idea how or why they ended up in the county of Berkshire, but I can tell you that the prince and princess faced the harsh economic realities of their new and appallingly lackluster life with verve and creativity. The one thing they knew about was dogs. They had grown up surrounded by snow-white borzois and perfumed Afghans. They utilized their canine familiarities in the worthy task of training guide dogs for the blind, gaining a considerable notoriety in this field.

The guide dog business boomed. Paperwork proliferated. They hired stenographers like Phyllis and Betty from the local temp agency, Phyllis first and then Betty.

Once the women were in their clutches, the White Russians commanded Betty and Phyllis to perform all kinds of nonsecretarial tasks, like hedge clipping, food serving, bath running, and toilet unblocking.

Adding to this eccentric working environment was the princess’s pet monkey, who swung from the light fixtures, pooping on Betty and Phyllis, and taunting the lovely Lassie.

Betty adored the insane diversity of this experience. She talked ceaselessly and hilariously of the trials and tribulations of working for “Ivan and Yvonne the Terrible.” She did a brilliant impersonation of the theatrical princess, duplicating a
tone of voice which quivered and shook with tortured regret: “I remember vashink my hairs wiz tventy-four eggs effry mornink while ze peasants outside ze palace were starfink.”

Phyllis’s situation was far more complex. She was lodging full-time with the deposed nobles. Out of the blue, she developed a schoolgirl crush on the handsome prince. She became lovesick and wan. Her doctor—eager to write prescriptions for the latest antidepressants—prescribed purple hearts and more purple hearts. By the time Betty arrived, Phyllis was already knocking them back à la Neely O’Hara.
2

One day the princess smelled a rat and gave Phyllis her marching orders. Distraught, Phyllis threw herself on Betty’s mercy. Before you could sing “Come On-a My House,” Betty had offered her beleaguered pal a room chez nous.

Aunt Phyllis was installed in the one remaining space in our rambling, leaky red-brick Edwardian house. Her room was a windowless garret with a sloping ceiling on the top floor. It was freezing in the winter and boiling hot in the summer. Features included a nonopening skylight, a nonfunctioning fireplace, and an appropriately rock-bottom rent.

Despite her grim accommodations, Phyllis flourished. Under Betty’s supervision, she put on weight, kicked the purple hearts, and learned to laugh again. A vigorous and not unattractive brunette rose from the ashes. It was a symbiotic arrangement: Betty now enjoyed the benefits of a live-in best friend and coconspirator.

The 1960s arrived, and Phyllis and Betty embraced the
concept of health food. They became ardent followers of the world’s first granola guru, a Swiss bloke named Gayelord Hauser. Henceforth, every phrase uttered by Betty and Phyllis invariably contained the words
Gayelord Hauser.

“Well, according to Gayelord Hauser, white sugar is white death.”

“Some chocolate cake? Just a thin slice. Don’t tell Gayelord Hauser!”

On Saturdays, Phyllis and Betty would set out for the local health food store—improbably named The High—and stock up on wheat germ, molasses, brewer’s yeast, and anything else Gayelord Hauser was endorsing that particular week in his syndicated column.

An employee at The High convinced Betty that the key to health was growing your own greenery. In no time we had large plastic trays of sprouting bean shoots covering the sideboard in our dining room. Betty often tended them while enjoying a cigarette.

Thanks to Betty and Gayelord, the crumpled, depressed Phyllis morphed into a healthy, vibrant, singular being. She turned out to be more like a naughty big sister than an aunt.

The new Phyllis was an eccentric, courageous woman who made a mockery of her congenital handicap. Phyllis laughed when she walked into doorframes or stepped in Lassie’s poo. Blindness was a total gas! She loved to tell us about the time she exited a train on the wrong side, falling onto the tracks in a heap, avec chien.

The new Phyllis was also wildly unconventional. Her handicap afforded her a marginalized status, of which she now
took full advantage. One day she came home in fits of laughter: she had, she explained, just returned from a very conventional tea party. One of the ladies present had an unruly dog. Exasperated, Phyllis had grabbed the dog and bitten it on the snout. With one nip she had subdued the dog and scared the hell out of the refined attendees.

Betty loved the new Phyllis. She was in heaven. She now had a chum with whom to cackle, someone to offset the psychotic ravings of our other lodgers.

The relationship between Betty and Phyllis was far more than that of landlady and lodger: they were two wildly opinionated broads who loved nothing more than an emotionally charged debate. Self-sacrificing, proud to be British, always ready for a verbal tussle, Phyllis was incapable of capitulating. Betty was similarly committed to her own worldview, and equally nationalistic and feisty. Every night, the two would argue intensely with each other—over a bottle or two of banana-peel Château Doonan—mostly about what the English, i.e., Phyllis, had supposedly done to the non-English, i.e., Betty.

According to Betty, not only did the English lack a sense of fun but they were also completely and utterly devoid of imagination, flair, and originality. They were, without exception, small-minded and stingy, and knew nothing about glamour. When they were poor they were pathetic, bitter, and put-upon. Give them money or power and they became cruel, imperialist, hypocritical, and grandiose. And if you doubted it, which one tended not to with Betty, she had a million examples, historic and contemporary, to prove her theses. Phyllis had no recourse but to defend herself and her country against grievous charges.

Their often incomprehensible and heated debates usually ended with Betty singing the national anthem and imitating the queen, while Phyllis screamed “Rubbish!” with extra rolled
r
’s.

*  *  *

My sister and I would never have dreamt of fighting with Aunt Phyllis. We worshiped and revered her. Every evening, we would accompany her to the Slope, a sharply angled public meadow where Lassie could run free. Here we would walk for hours with our favorite lodger, guiding her around piles of other dogs’ poop. For some horrid reason, my memories of the dog poop on the Slope are very much intact. Much of it was white. I have no idea why. White dog poop seems to be a thing of the past. Maybe someday it will come back into style.

It was while returning from the poop-covered Slope that I fractured Phyllis’s skull.

I was leading her down the street. We were chatting. She was correcting my pronunciation. All the kids at my rough, tough little school dropped their
h
’s and
t
’s. I was picking up the habit.

“You sound dreadfully common. There’s an
h
in front of
horrible,
you know!” said Phyllis, castigating me at the top of her voice, thereby unwittingly castigating anyone common who was within earshot.

As we came toward a lamppost, I elected to skip around it, à la Gene Kelly in
Singin’ in the Rain.
I assumed that Phyllis would make a corresponding move in the opposite direction. We would rehook our arms as soon as the obstacle had passed between us and continue on our merry way.

But Phyllis was blind.

So Phyllis kept walking, and then Phyllis smashed straight into the lamppost.

Her skull cracked into the forged steel post, making a sound which lives in the audio archives of my brain even unto this very day. It’s filed under “Cranial Destruction—Sound Effects.” If I were to Google the incident in my own brain, I would probably type in something like “horribly shameful guilty skull crunching.”

The gonging noise echoed up and down the street. People stared at me reproachfully: “You’ve killed a blind woman,” they seemed to say.

Phyllis swayed, groaning softly. I was about to ask her if she was “seeing stars.” Fortunately I thought better of it.

I was dumbstruck with guilt and horror. My poor aunt Phyllis had dragged herself back from the brink—she had kicked purple hearts!—only to be murdered by her idiot nephew, who wasn’t even a real nephew. I was terrified. Gayelord Hauser could not help her now. Even Lassie looked worried. We both waited for Phyllis to collapse to the ground. She twitched. I twitched.

I did not have the presence of mind to apologize. Since I had probably killed her, there did not really seem much point. It was too late for regrets.

She broke the painful silence.

“Not to worry!” said Phyllis, with the air of a woman who had slammed into worse things, and set off toward home.

By the time we reached our house, a massive lump had appeared on the front of her head, giving her the appearance of an exotic, prize-winning gourd.

“Oh maaay Goahwd!” said Betty, whose Belfast accent tended to resurface during times of stress.

“It’s really nothing. I walked into a lamppost,” said Phyllis, not wanting to get me into trouble. “I think I might just pop upstairs to the attic and lie down for a bit.”

Phyllis slept until the next morning. When she came down for her Gayelord Hauser–recommended breakfast, we all tried hard not to look at the gourd. Occasionally Phyllis would touch it and emit an “Oooh!” of surprise. It was slightly larger than before.

The damage was never officially assessed. No doctors were ever consulted. A week later the gourd began to shrink. Six months later it was all but gone, leaving only a three-inch-long indentation.

*  *  *

Our forays to the Slope continued, but not without incident.

On more than one occasion, raincoat-wearing flashers ogled us from the bushes, taking cruel advantage of Aunt Phyllis’s handicap.

“Lassie, whatever are you growling at?” Phyllis would say as the horrid, grinning men waved their rhubarb-colored offerings in our direction.

My sister and I never said anything to Phyllis about these perverts. Why spoil a lovely evening?

At least the raincoat brigade kept their paws to themselves. The same cannot be said of the horny hounds who regularly launched themselves at Lassie with such relentless fervor. Phyllis took great pride in the fact that she had always successfully managed to defend Lassie against these would-be rapists.

On one vile and memorable occasion, she lost the battle.

One sunny evening a demonic black Baskerville hound leapt from the bushes. He fixed his gaze on the alluring Lassie and licked his lips. He then bounded toward us and jumped onto Lassie’s back without so much as a “Lovely weather we’re having!” or a “Do you come here often?”

We whacked the violator with tree branches and pelted him with conkers and insults. He began to jiggle his nasty jiggle. We screamed. Phyllis used bad language and thrashed him with Lassie’s harness. Nothing could dislodge him. He looked quite happy. To make matters worse, so did Lassie.

“Run home and get your father, and don’t stop at the sweetshop. Hurry!” commanded Phyllis.

I barreled through the streets of Reading like a Pamplona person and burst into the living room.

“Dad! Lassie is—”

“Shhhhhhh! As soon as this is over.”

Terry was engrossed in watching
Z Cars,
a biweekly cop drama which held the whole of early 1960s England in its thrall. As per his edict, I waited patiently until the program had finished. But it was already too late. As the credits rolled, Shelagh and Aunt Phyllis were hurrying in through the front gate, dragging Lassie, who was dragging her new boyfriend. This tableau vivant relieved me of the need to explain the unexplainable.

Terry rushed outside and turned the hose on the persistent fornicator. This made no difference. He kept on doing his horrid jiggle.

Eventually fatigue set in, and probably hunger. Lassie’s
lover jiggled to a stop and slid off her back. He then loped off down the street without so much as a “We really must do this more often,” or even a “Thanks, luv!”

Terry was suitably mortified. He apologized profusely for stifling my attempts to communicate and for privileging his TV watching over defending Lassie against rape.

Nobody seemed inclined to discuss that horrid jiggling. Nobody seemed to have the right words to describe what had occurred. Or the inclination. Jiggling was embarrassing and animalistic and strange. Jiggling involved violence, chaos, and mayhem. No wonder ladies like Phyllis chose not to jiggle.

*  *  *

Years passed. Phyllis thrived. Lassie died and was succeeded by various less glamorous varmints. Eventually, Betty decided to give all the lodgers their marching orders. She needed a break from washing people’s undies and cutting up Phyllis’s food into bite-size morsels, which she did religiously and uncomplainingly for years.

When Betty gave Phyllis notice to move out, the latter dissolved into tears and hid in her garret. Half a bottle of turnip wine later, she had adjusted to the idea.

Within a matter of weeks, Phyllis relocated to an asbestos bungalow—with no ill effects—where we and other members of her family were regular visitors.

She never married or jiggled with anyone, as far as I know. Her dogs were the loves of her life. Whenever one of them died, it sent her into a spiral of grief which I have yet to witness in any human bereavement. Fortunately, her last dog—a black Lab called Barney, named after my employer—outlived
her. At the time of her death, aged eighty-nine, she was the oldest living guide dog owner on record.