ten blocks of the bus station, “I love your hat, Vicky. Maybe I should go to the thrift store with you next time.” Minnie Beach reminded one of a roly-poly toy that uprights every time it is knocked over.
“You do that,” V said, balefully. “…and my name isn’t Vicky! Call me that again and I’ll flog you like a piñata!”
Minnie had an overblown desire to be quick-witted, though she would settle for funny, even amusing; however, she was regrettably disadvantaged by a shortsighted sense of humor. She did give the occasional dinner party designed to reinforce her friendship with others, although they never worked out quite the way she had planned. Her last dinner party resulted in four of her guests coming down with ptomaine poisoning from her matzo ball soup. “It wasn’t my fault. Queen Soopers sold me old rancid matzo meal.”
V rarely paid Minnie Beach much mind since the time Minnie tried to get away with claiming that that thing hanging from the second floor balustrade in her Georgian prefabrication was a rubbing of the Cardiff giant that she had rubbed in a circus sideshow tent a few years back. Pah-leez.Furthermore, Minnie went on to declare how she nearly got herself trampled, maimed and quite possibly killed when three bull elephants objected to her crossing the circus grounds in the dead of night while on her way to the egress along with three charcoaled bed sheets flapping in the wind of an impending tornado. Really! Too much?She was rescued, she claims, by a big, beautiful, blond, blue-eyed aerialist named Claus who happened along just in time to sweep her out from under Bosco the Brute, the biggest of the three bull elephants. “Bull” was the name for it, according to just about everybody. Although, all who knew the story thought it highly imaginative and somewhat revealing; still, nobody was about to believe a word of it. Lily Nettles almost did. Perhaps she wanted to believe. Yet even she, with her trusting nature, always trying to make the best of everything, soon thought better of it. Besides, the Cardiff giant had been discovered as a hoax a long time ago, so a rubbing of it is an irony twice removed. Minnie Beach refuses to change her tune, although Claus elicits a refrain of “the man on the flying trapeze” when her philandering husband is about.
Minnie Beach was made to suffer. No matter how painful the slings and arrows of her outrageous misfortunes she suffered them in silence. In silence she found a stronger self: a self who could manage her own reconstruction. Her friends would never know how deeply the stabs of their disbelief had penetrated. Minnie Beach could never, ever, take her friends, those doubting Thomases, too very much to heart again, but she did time and time again.
Minnie was made to suffer. She knew "friends" would only break her heart beyond complete repair one day; as if it were a piece of fine china, a teacup that once broken could never be all together mended. No matter how delicately adhered with unseeable fractures held tightly back together, Minnie would always know it was damaged. She could not help but feel guilt and shame every time she caught a glimpse of the blameless teacup. What a dreadful humiliation befalls her every time she serves that rehabilitated teacup. She did not much like her friends because time and time again they would chip or break her porcelain heart. Time and time again.
Sir Geoffrey Hemphill retired, but from what nobody knew, was on the bus. He was a natty man who suffered an aura of sadness and confusion. Geoffrey was amazingly short, a hundred pounds wet, dressed smartly in a safari suit with a pith helmet covering the combover that he dyed, along with his goatee, coal-black causing him to appear startlingly like a lawn gnome. (Parenthetically, lawn gnomes were a growing danger in Queen City. Since they lost their appetite for small furry things they began biting, bruising and eating people’s feet. The smart folk take along a baseball bat when going outside in the dark.)
Sir Geoffrey had tried to persuade the bus driver to go back to pick up “the girls” since, feared he, “…they were left waiting in the dust of the bus, rejected and forlorn.” Getting no satisfaction from the driver, Sir Geoffrey, in a fit of rage, withdrew his mighty Swiss Army knife and threatened the driver to within an inch of his life, so to speak, with the first blade he could manage to pull out which happened to be an inch long bottle opener; causing a bit of excitement and general chaos in his attempt to demonstrate his chivalry and the degree to which he was willing to go to retrieve V and her actress friend Lily, whom he saw as a barrier to V’s surrendering herself to him in his attempts to court her for her hand in marriage. He never got a clue from V and, for that matter, from himself. He wanted her as a beard and she wanted him to come out of the closet and be a honest friend.
When the bus pulled off and stopped along the side of the road, somewhere where one could look and see only miles of nothing and nowhere, the driver informed Sir Geoffrey that he was merely moonlighting as a bus driver on weekends and that he was a member of Queen City’s Finest. It took a bit of time for Sir Geoffrey to let that sink in, but by the time it did he was being handcuffed and informed of his rights. Coincidently, the driver/policeman mysteriously disappeared the following day; leaving behind a pregnant Chihuahua and a wife who never noticed him missing, although the dog seemed to, every now and again.
The chartered bus had finally come home to a full stop. All aboard were eager to disembark. Some were worried over the whereabouts of V and Lily. Some were not. Billy Butts was preoccupied with weightier matters such as himself and what wonderful company he must have been for all on the bus. Billy really should have been an entertainer; a talkshow host; a grifter. He had the gift of gab and a wealth of talent yet to be mined.
* * *
FEA field trip Saturday started on a high note and, by all accounts, it seemed a glorious morning.
“What a glorious morning,” Lily mused.
“Not so glorious, Lily. It’s hot and if Minnie Beach says one more word about my hat I am going to hand it to her!”
“So much for a glorious morning. I don’t see how that will gain you anything, V. You did buy that hat in a thrift store. I was with you,” glibly said.
“Get off it, Lily!” snapped V who had already moved on to visions of Minnie Beach getting run over by a shopping cart in Queen Soopers, although that might be an impossible given the size of Minnie vis-a-vie the cart’s wheels, or slipping on a jar of mayonnaise. Upon a second thought, came another vision where Minnie wouldn’t be hurt by any glass, or any other object; just her pride and her butt. V was a fair-minded person who simply wanted justice and little more, though it’s the little more that could get worrisome, yet deliciously satisfying.
“I’m sure she meant well,” said Lily, trying to comfort.
However, V took no comfort from Lily’s tone and simply said through an undignified sneer, “Meant well indeed, Lily.”
“You don’t really care about stuff like that,” Lily said, or asked——it seemed more a question than a statement, but too ambiguous to tell.
“What kind of stuff?”
“Revenge.”
"Revenge? What kind of revenge?"
"What other kind is there? The kind that hurts people, V."
“Of course I don’t really want revenge. And I certainly do not want to harm the poor soul. Nevertheless, I am not going to stifle my imagination from having visions designed to amuse myself. So I shop in thrift stores. Who doesn’t? Lily, you do not happen to know if mayonnaise comes in plastic or glass jars, do you?”
“I’d say some are and some aren’t, but I think more plastic than glass. There must be a glut of oil, or a shortness of sand. What do you think, V?”
V feigned a shudder, “I refuse to think about it.”
They
