Queen of the Oddballs (15 page)

• I take on another persona—Mindy Greenfield, co-creator of Cindy and Mindy’s Rent-A-Fan Club. We get loads of press, and everyone, including
  People
  magazine, thinks I’m really Mindy Greenfield.
  
 

• Go on the game show
  Sale of the Century
  , which I’m really good at when I watch at home. Except when taping the show, I suck. Luckily no one knows it’s me sucking because I appear as Mindy Greenfield—wig and all. (P.S. Mindy won a crystal punch bowl set.)
  
 

• Vera, one more alias I assume, gets her own show,
  Confidentially, Vera
  , on KCET, local public television.
  
 

• New York City drug dealers introduce crack cocaine to the streets, while Whitney Houston scores her first hit with “You Give Good Love.”
  
 

• Coke changes its original formula and introduces “New Coke.”
  
 

• I move into a 1910 Craftsman house with my manager, Sam, and his boyfriend, Ken. We lease-to-own, and in a matter of months we’re able to buy the house with money we make from renting it out as a location for film and TV shoots. Sylvester Stallone hawks ham in our living room, Keith Carradine is thrown through the glass of our porch window, and snow falls in our kitchen.
  
 

• Sam and I create a TV show called “It’s a Miracle,” which features true stories. Every network we pitch it to passes, saying “No one watches reality shows.”
  
 

• My brother meets the woman who will become his wife and the mother of his two children.
  
 

• I study the “Course in Miracles” with Marianne Williamson, am rebirthed underwater in a bathtub, perspire heavily in an hour-long Native American sweat lodge ritual, and take “Making Relationships Work” classes with Rev. Terry Cole-Whittaker.
  
 

D
espite my parents’ desperate attempts to break me from the habit, I’ve always had to sleep with a light on. When I’m sleeping with someone, then I’m okay turning it off, but not when I’m alone. This is probably one of the reasons I am a serial monogamist.

After my five-year relationship with Danielle ends—and she runs off to be with someone else
the day after we break up
—not much more than a month passes before I start seeing Nora. Two women together tend to become family—sisters, mothers, daughters, partners, best friends—so there is rarely a breakup that is clean. And my relationship with Danielle is no exception. Five months later we still desperately miss each other, weep on the phone when we speak, spend much of our time together, and she even sleeps over at my new house, though I won’t go near her new apartment, where she spends time with the “other” woman who I kindly refer to as “that bitch with the mole.”

I have been clear with Nora from the start, letting her know that I just want to date—my heart still broken, I’m in no position to be in any kind of committed relationship. And she doesn’t seem to mind, or at least she says she doesn’t.

Most of the time I feel confused, torn, and drained.

So when the phone wakes me at 8:00 a.m. on the day before my twenty-ninth birthday, I am annoyed that I have to start another listless day so early. I turn off the vintage cowboy lamp by my bed and answer.

“Is this Hillary?” a woman’s voice asks.

“Yes, who’s this?” I mutter.

“I’m calling to let you know you must pick up a package waiting at the Bullocks department store gift-wrapping counter at exactly four p.m. today. Ask for Mrs. Blanchford, and say the word
pistachio
.”

“What?”

“Four o’clock. Exactly.”

“Who’s the package from?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” the anonymous voice replies before swiftly hanging up.

Ever since my Girl from U.N.C.L.E. days I’ve remained a devout sleuth. Over the years, even well into my twenties, I have read and reread
Harriet the Spy
countless times, and solved every case in the
Encyclopedia Brown
boy detective books, cheating and peeking at the solutions in the back just once or twice, and only for the most complicated whodunits like “The Case of the Mysterious Tramp.”

Any good detective would shudder with excitement receiving a phone call like the one from Mrs. Blanchford. But not me. Not now. These days it takes everything in me just to drag my ass from the living room to the kitchen to retrieve a butterscotch Jell-O Pudding Pop.

For the rest of the day I use most of my energy avoiding work and debating whether or not the trip to Bullocks at “four o’clock exactly” is worth the effort. The only thing that finally propels me to climb in my car and drive to the department store is the thought that whatever awaits me might be from Danielle.

I arrive at the third-floor gift-wrapping section six minutes before the appointed time. An elderly, well-groomed man working behind the counter is the only person in sight.

“Is Mrs. Blanchford here, please?” I ask.

“Sorry Ma’am.” He looks up from curling a lavender ribbon with a scissors. “No one by that name works here.”

“Are you sure? A Mrs. Blanchford called me at the crack of dawn this morning. She said you were holding a package for me. Oh….” I suddenly remember. “PISTACHIO.”

“Ah,” he lays down his scissors. “You must be Hillary.”

He slips into the back and returns a few seconds later carrying a box. I look up at the board of samples above his head and note that my mystery sender opted for Gift Wrap C, the paper with a treasure map motif.

“Can you please tell me who this is from?”

“Sorry, my shift just began,” he says. “I haven’t a clue.”

I thank him and head to the ladies room. I’ve never been very good at receiving—much more comfortable giving. Whenever I’ve had a birthday party, I’ve insisted that no one bring gifts, and if people ignored my request, I couldn’t bear to open presents in front of them. I’d wait until they left and then send a note later: “Love the pixie salt and pepper shakers, thanks a mill!”

I know I will have privacy inside the ladies lounge. I walk onto a floor of tiny brown and beige tiles neatly arranged like candies in a sampler box. I sit down in a folding chair and tear open the package to find a white terrycloth robe so plush, just holding it in my lap is comforting. Under the robe I discover a small piece of fading yellow paper, with a note written in a scrawl that even an ace handwriting analyst couldn’t pin on anyone specific.

Clever. I walk over to the pay phone on the wall and beep into my messages, waiting to hear a familiar voice saying, “Surprise, the gift’s from me!” Instead my lone message is from an old black man with a throaty Louis Armstrong–like growl.

“Hey, yeah, I’m calling to give you your next destination.”

He rattles off an address that’s over a half hour drive towards downtown, then adds, “And Mama, bring that robe you holdin’ and hurry now. You got a six o’clock appointment. Don’t be late.”

I sit down on the tile floor, and for the first time in months, I start to laugh. Then come the questions. Should I actually run off to some mysterious unknown location just because an unidentified man told me to? What if this is some elaborate plot to harm me? Or worse, some lame practical joke? Maybe it’s a wild goose chase leading to nowhere, sent from someone I know in a misguided attempt to lure me out of my heartbroken funk?

Intrigued as I am, I’m not sure I’m up for this. Frankly at this point I’d prefer to put on my new robe, go to the bedding department, and cuddle up on a Serta floor model. But the sleuth in me wins out over the jilted ex-lover in me, and I decide to head downtown.

While driving south on the Hollywood freeway, I ponder “The Case of the Inexplicable Birthday Treasure Hunt.” Too bad I can’t just peek in the back of the book to solve this one.

It could be from Danielle. Even though she is involved with “mole bitch,” we still constantly talk about trying to see if we can make it work again. Maybe this is her way of taking the plunge, proving to me things could be different, that we don’t have to take each other for granted the way we had toward the end, that the future might hold exciting surprises….

On the other hand, it could also be from Nora. Sexy, fun, spiritual, creative, adventurous, and compassionate, Nora possesses every quality I ever dreamed of in a lover. Well, except for two: she isn’t Danielle, and I’m not in love with her.

It also could have been dreamed up by one of my many brilliant, supportive friends who all know it’s been a tough breakup for me. Maybe one of them is trying to cheer me up on my first birthday in five years without Danielle.

I head east on Beverly until I finally find the address on a nondescript cement building sandwiched between a hand car wash and a piñata outlet store. As I pull into the parking lot, I notice two children crossing the street. One is holding a set of bongos, the other an Ouija board. Everyone is suspect.

I carry my robe into the building, where scents of jasmine and lavender greet me. A sign behind the counter informs me that I am at a spa, one that features mineral hot springs. A perky Chinese woman in a white lab coat smiles. “Hello. Can I hep you?” she asks in a heavy accent.

“Uh, yeah, I think I might have a six o’clock appointment for something?”

“You name?”

“Hillary Carlip.”

“Oh, sure, sure. Come on. You got robe? Good, good.”

The woman leads me into a locker room. “You not have much time for soak. You scrub in fifteen minutes,” she says as she hands me a key to a locker and leaves.

I look around, hoping to find someone familiar lounging with a towel turban on her head, waiting to surprise me. But all I see are completely naked strangers. At least my mystery gift giver knows me well enough to realize I’m not going to parade around nude in front of anyone. I inconspicuously slip off my clothes, swaddle the terrycloth robe around me like a heliophobe on a trip to the beach, then venture out to find whatever it is I’m supposed to soak in.

Once I round the corner, I gasp at the sight. A stone cave with tropical plants growing inside, surrounds a pond of steaming mineral water. A small bridge crosses over the water, with vines clutching and twisting on it. Next to this glorious grotto I see two steam rooms—one featuring a thick foggy mist, the other dry and hot, smelling of eucalyptus. Several naked women sit soaking in the hot pond. I stand and watch as one climbs out, immerses herself in a smaller cold pool, and sighs with pleasure. The place is an Eden of steaming lushness. Checking to make sure no one is looking, I slip off my robe and ease into the near-boiling water. Thoughts give way to pure sensation and I soak in the nowness for what later feels like a long while. I am only startled back to my mind when an elderly Chinese woman calls my name, breaking the silence.

I climb out and follow the crone who is wearing a sheet wrapped around her waist and nothing on top—her large, sagging breasts flopping proudly as if they own the joint. She leads me through an arch-way of stone, part of the cave, to a large slab of granite, thigh high, and points for me to lie down on it. No talking here. Just dripping, splashing, lapping, quenching water. The woman applies a slimy, smooth grit of what feels like kelp and sand combined to my body and vigorously scrubs my skin with some sort of scouring pad. At first, losing an entire layer of my epidermis is painful. But as I literally shed my skin, I begin to feel free, more relaxed than I’ve felt in ages. I want to raise my head and say, “Thank you” to the old woman. Or, “This is great, you’re great”—anything to acknowledge her, but I know that would interrupt the very intentional silence.

After a thorough scrubbing from head to toe, front and back, the woman sprays me down with soothing warm water from a green garden hose wound up like a jealous snake until all that is left is a slippery smooth, glowing body. In a tranquil trance I can barely whisper, “Thank you,” but of course, I manage.

The woman smiles and winks at me. “Happy Birthday.”

What?! Does
everyone
know? This snaps me right back from my body into my mind. Who’s behind this? How? Why? This doesn’t seem like Danielle’s style—too thought-out and planned. But it’s not really like Nora, either—she’s far more understated.

Nora—shit! She’s coming to my house at 7:30, in thirty minutes. I’ll never make it home in time. I need to find a pay phone, and, despite being clad only in my robe, I dash from the grotto to the lobby packed with fully dressed men and women. I step into the phone booth and pull the door closed behind me. As I’m dialing Nora’s number, it occurs to me to check my messages first. What if there’s another “destination” that I’m being sent to tonight?

When I hear that I have one message, my heart beats quickly. Is it the excitement of the unknown, or is it, rather, the fact that I moved from pure relaxation to high panic in under thirty seconds?

“Hey it’s me,” Nora says on my machine. “Where are you?”

Like she doesn’t know—Ha!

“I’m stuck at work and won’t be able to get to your house till 8:30. Hope that’s okay. I’ll just pick up some food and bring it over and we’ll have a Birthday Eve celebration. If that’s not good, call me. Bye.”

Hmmm. She sounded awfully nonchalant for someone who just arranged a complex birthday gift. So maybe Danielle is the culprit after all? Time to investigate. I dial Danielle’s number.

“Hey,” I say, trying to be casual.

“Hi, Honey,” Danielle sounds excited. “What’re you up to?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“What am I supposed to know?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Know what? I might know if I knew what you were talking about.”

“Jesus, it sounds like we’re doing some vaudeville shtick.” I sit down on the plastic seat. “Well, I’m kind of being sent on a treasure hunt.”

“No way.”

She really does sound clueless. “You swear you don’t know anything about this?”

“Swear.”

Still, I think as I pick at the threads of my new robe, Danielle has lied to me before—on more than one occasion—and she’s good at it. She’s a casting director, so maybe it’s a skill developed from being around actors all day. So I don’t rule her out completely.

“It’s probably from
your new girlfriend
,” she says mockingly.

“She’s not my girlfriend. We’re just dating.”

“Yeah, right. So am I gonna see you tomorrow? Do I still have the three o’clock shift?” I smile when I realize it bothers her not to be the only one spending my birthday with me.

“Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me too.” She pauses. “Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“I wish it was from me.”

And so do I.

I hang up and return to the grotto. I wander into the steam room. Unable to see anyone in the thick mist, I hear deep exhales. I remember being twelve and going to the movies with my friend Diane Hutchings to see
Me, Natalie,
starring Patty Duke. Diane’s mother dropped us at the theater a few minutes late; onscreen it was nighttime, and the theater was pitch black. In the dark I found a seat but accidentally sat down in a woman’s lap. Throughout the rest of the movie Diane and I could not contain our laughter until, finally, the manager kicked us out. I don’t want to repeat my mistake, especially now that I am in a place with all
naked bodies
. So I stand still, breathing in the generous gift someone—
whoever it is—
has bestowed upon me.