Read Online Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions by Bacon Press Books - Free Book Online Page A

attention
to you. I’m sorry for calling you selfish just because when the
burglar broke in you hid in the closet instead of attacking him
like a dog would have. “
    The sound of my own voice comforts me, makes
me less scared as I wait for him to die. But he opens his eyes.
Spirit in the dark.
    .
    The next morning he is in my bed, tail curled
around my wrist. The vet calls with what he thinks is bad news.
Spike’s tumor was big, and the cancer aggressive. He thinks Spike
won’t live much beyond three months, which is three months more
than I expected. I will have his company for one more summer. He
will see me through radiation. We can spend a whole summer napping
together.
    .
    What comes next is the mopping up operation.
Thirty-five hits of radiation, seven weeks of daily doctor visits.
Covering the face of death with a blanket of daily obligations so
the skull recedes. Cancer no longer a life threatening emergency,
has shrunk to the size of a second job. A crummy one with lousy
pay, but at the end I get my life back.
    “It’s like Spike for me, as though he took
the hit so I would live,”I tell Molly, something I’d never tell
Max, who has no patience or the willfully irrational.
    “It’s very Viking”, she says.
    “I didn’t know Vikings kept cats.”
    “Of course they did. All heroic people had
them”, she says.
    When a Viking dies, his warrior cat dies with
him. Together in the burning longboat they set out for
Valhalla.
    When her Norwegian grandfather died his cat
died the same day.
    “What’s so funny?” Molly asks.
    I haven’t laughed since May, and now I can’t
stop. For a moment I forget my favorable odds, so taken with the
image: Spike and me in our matching horned helmets, the burning
rowboat on the Potomac that bears us out to sea and off to
Valhalla, where we are welcomed by a blazing pantheon of glorious
Vikings and all their heroic cats.
     

 
The Ad Man’s Dutiful
Daughter
    The other night I dreamed I was a mail order
bride who hadn’t worked out, so I was returned, dishonored, to my
village, which was the Waiting Room at Grand Central Station. All
the familiar faces were there. The woman with the receding
hairline. The drunk one with the melting caramel eyes. The one with
invisible friends. With all that obvious symbolism, a perfect
offering for my analyst, Dr.
    Freundlicht.
    “You seem to be overly sensitive to
rejection,” was what he said.
    Was that the best he could do?
    “What the hell do you know about rejection?
The moment you got into Med School, you had it made in the shade.
And don’t give me that crap about penis envy, either.”
    .
    Desperatly seeking employment. Recent college
grad, class of ’69. Writes well under pressure. Clever with words .
. .
    .
    “Are you sure you’re wearing a strong enough
deodorant?” my mother used to say by way of encouragement when I
set out on job interviews.
    I almost landed an editorial assistant slot
at Casket and Sunnyside, the magazine of the funeral industry, but
was passed over at the last minute for a woman with 2/3 of a Ph.D.
in Linguistics from Harvard.
    According to my father, who worked on Madison
Avenue for twenty years before setting up his own shop, being in
advertising was like getting paid to play, and wasn’t I a lucky
girl to have a father with connections in the Business?
    He lined up interviews for me with his old
colleagues. I wore a navy blue interview dress, industrial strength
anti-perspirant, and carried writing samples, but failed to project
employability to these sleek men with their spacious offices and
lithe secretaries. Instead, they used the occasion to brag on
themselves, and asked to be remembered to my father.
    .
    “All our gals start out in the typing pool,”
said Frank Mambelli, Creative Director at Doyle Dane. He didn’t
even look at my writing samples.
    “Do guys have to start out in the typing pool
too?” I asked Cy Berman.
    Another friend of the family. I used to baby
sit for the Berman