Read Online God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne - Free Book Online Page B

was mortified and her discomfiture was exacerbated by our hooting and howling over it. Add to that the irritating look of smugness on Jim’s face—well, it just was not to be borne is all you can say. Mr. Jim was pleased with himself and his little joke for about a week, and Janet let him have his little moment and be lulled into a false sense of security by the absence of swift retribution. That’s just the way she wanted him—lulled. Oh, she nailed him all right. He just lulled himself to sleep one night, the night before a big board meeting at which he had to make a major presentation, and he awoke to find himself the proud owner of a hickey the shape and nearly the size of Texas, directly beneath his left ear. Katharine Hepburn doesn’t have a turtleneck high enough to hide this thing. I would score that one: Battle, Jim; War, Janet.
    Not too long after Janet had married Jim, she was trying to impress him with an act of wifely Suzy Homemakerishness by sewing a button on his shirt. She had made sort of a big deal out of it, implying possibly that he was too big a simpleton to sew on a shirt button. Anyway, she got so carried away with her own wifely Suzy Homemakerishness that she didn’t think about what she was doing, and when she reached for the scissors to cut her thread, she stuck the needle in the bed. Ordinarily this would have been fine except that it was a water bed. She wanted to wriggle under the thing and hide, knowing the major ribbing she would have to endure for her stupid mistake. And so she did the only thing she could do under the circumstances: nothing. She just got up (from his side of the water bed) and hung up his newly rebuttoned shirt. When no raging torrent of water appeared, she crawled into her side of the bed and went to sleep, and she let him do the same on his side of the bed, right on top of what would become, by about three A.M. , Old Faithful. He woke up, soaked to the skin, thinking that he had wet the bed and was desperately trying to figure out how he was going to hide it. It is a major disappointment to me that she did not let him go to his grave believing himself to be the oldest living bed wetter. Who knows when again in this life she will be presented with such an opportunity?
    But enough hearsay, you say. What about action undertaken and dished out by the actual Queens themselves? Well, there was this one time that some of us kinda sorta did a fairly mean and dastardly thing. One of the Queens, Tammy, had gotten a d-i-v-o-r-c-e, but she had not retrieved all of the stuff that was rightfully hers from one of her and her ex’s several residences. Thinking that it might be a painful and traumatic experience for her to go into that house among all those memories by herself, we decided that we should help her out. It was a good thing, too. No sooner had we gotten in the front door and quickly surveyed the contents of every room than we found just what we had feared the most: evidence of other women. Oh! It just cut us like a knife and we weren’t even ever married to him, so imagine the mental suffering of our poor Tammy. We just looked at one another, knowingly, and sent one of the other Tammys out for cigarettes. Oh, not for us—we don’t smoke, even though we would look so grown up doing it—we needed them for his closet. The former Mr. Tammy is not a smoker either; on the contrary, he is one of the most avid nonsmokers you will ever encounter. Did I say avid? I meant rabid. So, I ask you, what else could we do but sit in his closet, smoke cigarettes, and blow smoke up the sleeves of all his fresh-from-the-cleaners shirts? We must have been in there for an hour or more, laughing fit to kill, about to puke from the smoke. I’ve heard it said that revenge is sweet, but it sho’ do stink.
    And then there was the little anniversary celebration the Queens put on for one of our friends—not a Wannabe exactly, more of a hanger-on, but a friend nonetheless. By chance, what would