“Money isn’t even an issue. I’m on vacation. I have unlimited vacation time, nearly, in my career. Retail food prices aren’t expected to change in the next few weeks.”
“What a job. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe you do that.”
“….”
“Hey, do it again.”
“Not here, Candy.”
“Come on. It’s noisy, no one’ll hear. Please.”
“Honestly.”
“Please.”
“Totaclass="underline" seventeen-fifty. Cash: twenty dollars. Change due: two-fifty.”
“That’s just too super.”
“It gets less super as time goes on, believe me.”
“But so you’d only work at F and V to be near Andy.”
“Maybe in a way.”
“What way is that, if you don’t mind my asking? And why do you want another version of this dress? I don’t get it.”
“You are an inquisitive little thing.”
“You and I look enough alike as it is. Why do you want my dress?”
“That was the point, a minute ago. As you pointed out, it’s Lenore’s dress, not your dress.”
“All right, this is technically Lenore’s dress, if you want to get technical. And this is the dress she wore the time you met her.”
And the time Andy met her.“
“Right.”
“Right.”
“So what?”
“I know what I know.”
“How about letting me know a little of what you know, then?”
“Look, I know all about Andy and Lenore Beadsman. I know you’re her friend, and you can go ahead and tell her I know all about it.”
“What do you know?”
“Everything.”
“I mean what is there to know?”
“Listen, I know you two are friends, but if I’m going to be honest with you you can at least not insult my intelligence.”
“I’m not insulting anything, Mindy.”
“See, I can not only see what’s going on, but I have the advantage that I can also see why it’s going on.”
“Hey, Lenore doesn’t even like Andy very much, to tell the truth.”
“Frankly Lenore does not interest me. My husband, he interests me. And I can see why he’s doing what he’s doing.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Don’t you see why? Yes we’ve had a bad period, but you know all relationships go through bad periods. There are bad times in all relationships. But yes this was a bad period. And now Andy sees your little friend Lenore, in the middle of this admittedly bad period, and suddenly he feels he’s able to go back to a branch in the tree of his life, the branch nine years ago, when he met me and fell in love with me and started a relationship with me, but also, see, the exact same branch he met Lenore at, sitting in her little violet dress and being antisocial and throwing shoes at people, and so suddenly Andy feels as if maybe he can go back and just take a different path from the same branch, to—”
“She threw shoes?”
“Andy sees in this Lenore person a chance to change the past. Andy is always trying to change what he can’t change. He’s a silly. And remember there are two sides to every coin.”
“….”
“Always lots of branches in the same relationship-tree.”
“I don’t think this branch stuff is right, Mindy.”
“You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Lenore is pretty heavily involved with Mr. Vigorous, is the thing.”
“Ah, Mr. Vigorous.”
“Who was really your neighbor, in New York City, when he was married?”
“In Scarsdale he was, yes.”
“This whole thing is making me feel a little eerie.”
“Branches and trees, darling.”
“But they’re involved, Mindy. They have been for like a year and a half. Really involved.”
“Andy sometimes likes to hurt, too, when he’s not himself.”
“But I mean they’re really close. Lenore more or less lives over there with him a lot of the time. Mr. Vigorous is incredibly jealous.”
“Poor thing.”
“He even bought the bird for Lenore that’s on ‘The Partners With God Club’ right now.”
“ ‘The Partners With God Club’? On the evangelist network?”
“Didn’t you even see it when you went over to Gilligan’s Isle to see Andy?”
“I only saw him. I was only there to say hello, it turned out. I was only there a moment or two.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, I remember this, he said, ‘Guess how much shit I want out of you right now, Melinda-Sue.’ He says that sometimes.”
“Sheesh.”
“He calls me Melinda Sue.”
“….”
“But you say her bird is on the show?”
“Her bird more or less is the show right now. The bird, Vlad the Impaler, except on the show he’s got some weird Italian name that Reverend Sykes said Vlad the Impaler chose in a moment of ecstasy…”
“Hart Lee Sykes?”
“Yes. Vlad the Impaler is a cockatiel who can sort of talk, or at least repeat things so convincingly it’s apt to seem.like he’s talking, and the Reverend gets him to ask people in pathetic-Christian-TV- viewer-land to send money, and they do. Our landlady is with him in Atlanta, and our landlord says she says the money is supposedly tidal-waving in, right now.”
“I’ll have to watch this.”
“It’s on every night on cable at eight, on I think like channel ninety, one of those cable channels.”
“Hmmm.”
“Except now Rick’s being all spastic and weird about the bird, Lenore says. He has the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop, which if you do any time at the F and V board you’ll get to know really well, because our lines are like super fouled up and we get a lot of their calls, but anyway he has the receipt, and he says because Lenore didn’t give him this certain gift at Christmas, Vlad the Impaler is legally and emotionally his. That’s what Lenore says he says.”
“….”
“And maybe he’s really trying to get ahold of the royalties, because Vlad is apparently raking in a lot of royalties, from the tidal wave of money, but that just wouldn’t be like Rick. Rick is intensely weird, but he’s not weird about money. Money just isn’t very important to him.”
“But he legally owns the bird because Lenore didn’t give him something?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I really shouldn’t say.”
“I’ll pay for lunch. Including dessert.”
“A spanking. Rick supposedly wanted a spanking.”
“A spanking?”
“That’s really all I should say.”
“And he owns the bird, on the show.”
“Kind of hard to take a man seriously who wants a spanking for Christmas.”
“That doesn’t match my memory. My memory is of a nice man in a beret who spent a lot of time at his den window and helped get Daddy out of the lawn, sometimes. I guess we’ll see.”
“Your Daddy was in the lawn?”
“….”
“I think you’ve misjudged Lenore.”
“So I gather.”
“I think you’ve misjudged Andy, too, if you excuse my saying so. I don’t think you can expect to get him back by pretending to be a different violet branch of the same tree.”
“Shall we go?”
“Here’s the check, thanks a lot, Mooradian’s tends to get a little expensive.”
“God, you’re not kidding. This bill is obscene.”
“I think you and Andy just need to sit down and rap. You should try to go out of your way to see him tonight, straighten things out.”