XII
Flossie was outside waiting for me when the final bell rang.
“How did it go?” she asked when I got in the car.
“Fine,” I bluffed.
“I told you to change.” She called my bluff, and flicked a few paper wads from my hair.
Sigh. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“How bad?”
“I gave them the full Liza. The whole Minnelli. The varsity football team might never recover. Even the fat girls hate me.”
Flossie laughed, because really, when it comes right down to it, she hates me, too. Oh, yeah. Truly. Deeply. Just loathes me.
We drove in silence the rest of the way home. Never thought I would call it home, and never thought I’d be so excited to see it again.
But there you are, and there it was.
Yes, there! In the distance!
The house! The house!
My home!
A few words ought to be said about it. Yes, it’s time to tell you about the house now.
Tucked away in the tony South Summit part of town, at the end of a hidden cul-de-sac, on a little peninsula that juts out like a finger in the water. Yes, there! On the banks of the New River Canal, HOME! And its Gothic glamour never fails to surprise me.
It’s an estate, but of course we never call it that. That would be vulgar. No whimsical name for it, either. No “Riverbloom” or “Bloom’s Glory.” No, no, no. It’s always just “The House,” even though it actually consists of two houses and a gardener’s cottage. “The Compound” might be more apt, but no, that, too, would be trying too hard. Just THE HOUSE.
The first house past the gates is the spooky old guesthouse, long since abandoned. It’s built in the classic “haunted plantation” style—pillars, porticoes, gingerbread balconies, and verandas—you know: the works. It used to be the main house, back when my grandparents were alive. Back then, see, WE lived in the guesthouse, but as we continued to live there even after both grandparents died, and because we kept adding on various breakfast rooms and game rooms and Florida rooms and sundecks and so on and so forth, eventually IT became known as the main house, and the old main house was relegated to guesthouse status. Got that?
Our house, THE house, is farther down the drive, right around the bend, just up ahead. It rises forth like a mad LEGO experiment spun horribly out of control, or a giant human Habitrail. It’s a holy hodgepodge of conflicting periods and styles and colors. There’s a little bit of everything: Italian gazebos! Faux-Japanese gardens! An African tree house! There are imposing Corinthian columns up front, a couple of turrets up above, and over there, a great glassed patio.
Inside, it is a home without a center. To the first-time visitor it can seem like a mindless and frustrating maze. Rooms lead into other rooms that lead into forgotten little half-rooms, which might suddenly open up onto a hallway that goes nowhere. It’s a dizzying, disorienting place, and if you ever visit, leave bread crumbs.
There are several different “upstairs” areas. One is on the north side, where my father’s master bedroom is, as well as his gym, and the various guest rooms and other little dens and studies and blah blah blah. On the west side, there is another second floor, but that one is mostly just used for storage now, or as hiding places for visiting boogeymen. The last upstairs area is located in the south tower. That’s my bedroom.
It’s accessible only through a nondescript doorway in the back of the house, which is pretty far off the beaten track. You really have to go looking for it. Even if you do, odds are, you’ll get lost, or disoriented, or dehydrated, and miss the door altogether.
My room is my womb. A Look Factory! An International Style Laboratory, My Fortress of Attitude! It’s the secret lair where I cook up my new revolutionary styles to unleash on the world. . . .
Littered about: dozens of half-finished and forgotten experiments, loose ends, ideas that sounded good in theory but sucked out loud when stitched together.
On the bed: odds and ends and bits and bows and cuffs and capes and clogs and cocktail rings and helicopter hats and whore hose. Look—a basket of strudel-flutes. What do you suppose they are?
Costumes, my God, I’ve got your costumes right here! A quick inventory: I have a cocktail olive, a glittery green artichoke, a banana, a gay cockroach, a patent-leather mermaid, a couple of different chicken outfits, a can of Coke, as well as all the fixin’s for milkmaids, hula girls, geishas, and an eight-armed Vishnu.
Back in Connecticut, I would wear these costumes to the weekly surrealist parties my friends and I would give (where we feasted on barbecued baseballs, porcelain potato salad, and black button stew served on broken shards of glass). And—hoo doggy!—do I miss those days. Funny how a whole world can just slip down the drain, plip plop, like it never happened at all. My old friends don’t even return e-mails anymore.
(CHOKE.)
ANYWAY. Where were we? Oh yes, these costumes.
I doubt I’ll be getting much wear out of them here, but see, I’m stockpiling them for when I move to Manhattan and become an instant cult icon. I plan on wearing them all day, every day, as a matter of course. To the grocery store. The gym. The Department of Motor Vehicles. And why not? Who’s going to stop me? You?
By then, my fashion influence will be so great that it will kick-start a national craze for foam vegetable outfits. But by the time Old Navy co-opts it, with Morgan Fairchild in a beaded kumquat outfit for the commercial, I will be way beyond that, of course. I’ll be into the post-apocalyptic ragpicker look or whatever the well-dressed Martian microbes are wearing that year.
But whatever the inspiration, rest assured, I will be blazing my own fashion trail.
Skroddle ho!
