HOME MAID: A Super Pies Tale
VOLUME ONE—Origins of a Super Slut
2
Imagine Maddy’s surprise, then, to discover at the door of Esther’s old house, not a fresh-faced, hand-to-mouth, trust-fund bachelor or rough-and-tumble, ready-made, aging spinster-type, no, but a podgy, pimply, bespectacled and not in any way “cute” little old man. The unexpectedness of seeing one so very old moved into such a very old house that had just been emptied of such a very old lady, not to mention the fellow’s not saying a word at all of greeting but just, with a creepy leer, unabashedly staring at Maddy’s, “um, boobies”—all this caused Mrs. LaMode to visibly lose her train of thought for a good first minute of standing on her new neighbor’s doorstep.
The monogamous Maddy had certainly not dressed provocatively, but she felt all at once embarrassed all the same for her choice of clothes now the stranger was getting such an ardent eyeful of her in them. She wore a white, crew neck t-shirt with the recent-standard red-lettered logo of “Cherry Orchard” blazoning the front of it, the two words printed vertical and parallel, so the “C” and the red cherry that filled in for the “O” stood side-by-side each other, or “abreast”, if you will, effectively circling the location of Maddy’s either nipple (a coincidence that only struck her now, glancing down at what her new neighbor seemed to find so engrossing). And, of course, she wore blue jeans, as ever unremarkable in themselves, except, as these particular jeans were left to her from necessarily less curvy days pre-baby, she now felt strangely exposed in them, too. In short, she realized, if he were at all inclined to and had any imagination, the ogler might easily extrapolate from her clothes’ form-fitting capacity the basic drift of (gasp!) Maddy’s “birthday suit!”
“Um,” Maddy blushed and without thinking, shook the old guy a pie (cherry, fittingly enough).
“Why . . . Thanks a load!” the old weirdo positively gleamed at her, picking his eyes up off her chest a second to take in the pie. “Quite an eyeful!” added the creeper a second later, after a good stare at her eyes, to which, feeling even more flustered, Maddy was inclined almost at once to look away.
“Yeah . . . I brought two . . .”
“And what a pair they are!” As if only to bring home a point that was unmistakable even to “Ol’ Slaphappy Maddy”, the new neighbor not only glanced at her chest at the invocation but waved a hand that way, too.
Maddy blushed even worse. This wasn’t going at all like how she wanted. She really shouldn’t let him treat her so . . !
Maddy tried to rouse herself to anger with a passionate appeal to feminist principle: She had to DO something! She HAD to stick up for herself! That’s what HRC would do; that’s what that female superhero The Trixter would do! This sort of sexist “thingy” wasn’t okay anymore! You couldn’t treat a grown woman like he was treating her, not in “today’s day in age”—and certainly not a feminist! (To be fair, to Maddy, this word meant primarily she picked up any tabloid with the picture of her hero “HRC” on its cover.) In short, Maddy just about slapped the guy!
But . . .
Looking up at him for a split-second longer first, she had second thoughts. He was TOO old, podgy, pimply, frail, and bespectacled! It seemed particularly mean-spirited somehow to be out-and-out angry with such an obvious non-hardy old man. However, at the same time, she couldn’t deny he WAS asking for . . . something! The ex-lieutenant governor, at least, would never let anyone treat her like he was treating Maddy now, never mind he were Methuselah in a wheelchair and a veteran of foreign wars!
. . . But, finally, as even more seconds elapsed, the guy staring more and more frankly at her big boobs, Maddy just passively stood by and let him. She was too ladylike, perhaps, or too maternal in instinct, or (but this one’s for certain) too easily distracted.
A week from this Saturday, Maddy’s church would hold its annual Harvest Moon bake-off, usually an excuse for her to dish up the same pumpkin pie that had, two years running, snagged her the coveted “Closest To God” mini-plaque from the reverend’s wife and judge of the event, Sheila “Sugar” Butter. But this year, Maddy had learned at the hair salon just yesterday, Bonny from across the street—never mind she only went to church on Christmas and Easter and had never even boiled an egg!—was going to unveil at the bake-off a new kind of dessert the likes of which no one had ever tried before!
“And she promised Reba—who told me—that this new recipe is going to have all The Bush talking for weeks to come!” so had gossiped Maddy’s neighbor and strange-to-say “rival” Carlotta, while the latter was having her roots dyed blonder at the Fuzzy Peach Hair Salon in meager downtown B.B.
When Maddy pressed her for more intel, the firmly chubby dog-lover had shook her head, given an eloquent scowl, and said, merely, “I don’t know. Something with a ‘J’ in it.”
Maddy had been in a most anxious state of mind ever since this encounter. Why would Bonny—who didn’t know the difference between a colander and a strainer!—get it in her large-nosed, wide-lipped, blue-blood head to enter the church bake-off of all things? And what is more, why would she “up the ante” on what was customarily an event for traditional autumnal fare only, and produce something totally new and exciting for it? Maddy had gone to bed the night before determined not to let the news spoil her plan of submitting her famous pumpkin pie. She had woken up the present morning with the opposite conviction, however. Maddy knew if she wanted to remain the most talked-about “heroic” homemaker in B-Bush, she, too, must come up with a new, exciting, and winning recipe for the bake-off—and FAST!
Thus, without formulating the thought, she determined to suffer her new neighbor’s leers and innuendos, so as all the sooner to rush home and start planning her next baking tour de force. Clearly, her new neighbor was an “ingenerate”—that much was obvious—but for the time being Maddy would rather “constructively” keep alive the illusion of social grace than cause a scene and so only ostensibly drag out the present unpleasant one longer.
“W-Welcome to the neighbors!” she managed at last (THAT’s what she had come over to say!). She grinned her biggest “corndog smile” and once again handed out to her new neighbor the two pies she’d made for him (one in each hand, crowd-pleasing cherry and prize-winning berry).
“Gee, thanks, Miss . . .”
“Pies!” Maddy blushed somehow even redder, stammered a moment, then giggled in her embarrassment. “Um. [Snort!] No. I mean, these are my pies. That I’m giving you . . . You like pies?”
“Sure, Miss Pies,” and the old letch winked at her so, still blushing, Maddy had to look away again for confusion.
“No . . . I . . . Ha-ha!”
Laugh!, a voice in Maddy’s head advised her, Pretend it’s a joke, a joke you’re in on, too. Otherwise . . . what? The ramifications were too involved to ponder long on. And, anyway, she just wanted to get the “Fiddle-Faddle” out of there and back to her safe-haven kitchen.
Her new neighbor, however—poor Mrs. La Mode!—seemed perfectly content to let her dangle, quite literally, holding out her two pies till her arms were good and tired—“Golly! why doesn’t he just GRAB ’em!”
The answer was clear enough with a brief glance up again at the little guy’s bug-eyes. He stared once more overtly at her “boobies”—“Geez! Why’s he haffta keep doin’ that!”—only now (Maddy noted with another embarrassed glance downward), obviously for their generous heaving from the strain of her holding those chockful mouthfuls out for so long.
“Those sure look heavy!” Her new neighbor grinned to take the cake.
“I’ll say!” Maddy tittered, honestly just glad of the fact that the old guy had said SOMEthing, by which utterance she felt herself suddenly free to say something in response, and so she wouldn’t just be standing there silently leered at by a stranger. “Each’s stuffed with a full pound of fruits!”
Despite her general embarrassment, Mrs. LaMode beamed unmistakably proud of that discovery, and she even bobbled a little in that one kind of “implied giggle” some women do anytime they need to express vain satisfaction in anything, which even she realized not a second after performing it, only gave the little man a good deal more to ogle.
Then there passed a very awkward moment, to be sure, a moment in which Maddy grew convinced the stranger WOULD reach out with both hands while hers were so indisposed and candidly weigh her “melons” quite as if they were. Her neighbor’s hands even seemed to rise and twitch in anticipation of the act.
“Ha-ha!” Maddy laughed mechanically again, but it was clear from her face she felt anything but amused; scared, maybe; confused, definitely; but amused, how could she be? She barely understood what was going on!
However, her neighbor’s hands finally came to rest beneath each of her pies (her baked ones, of course, not her “fleshies”), and he took them from her.
“Thanks!” Mrs. LaMode breathed, sincerely grateful to the leerer in the first flush of relief he hadn’t groped her. “Um. I live across the street,” (she pointed with a reviving shake of her now free hand). “And . . . I’m married to Paul. My husband . . . He works for the Mayor . . .”
The old guy just stared at her. In fact, that’s all he did, just stared, not saying a word, holding her pies, and smiling. For some reason this response made it very hard for Maddy to begin walking away, which she had intended to do immediately after making the most inconsequential of small talk. But for that, didn’t he have to say something too first?
So, to entice the old guy to words, she kept right on talking: “In transportation, er, secretary. Me, as for me, I’m a homemaker . . .”
“And a fine home you must make, too, with these whopping pies o’ yours, fine enough for an old fellar’s . . .” The stranger DID speak up all of a sudden, but cut himself off by a laugh almost indistinguishable from a wheeze. “Say!, won’t you come in, Miss Pies? You can have a slice on me. I make it a habit never to eat a doll’s pie, you understand, ’less she chokes down a big gulp of my homegrown fruit-juice, too, first!”
Maddy had already half-turned to trot back down the broken cement walkway and toward her house when her neighbor’s proposition caused her to halt obligatorily.
“N-no-no-th-thank-you!” the words tumbled out of her mouth now, as though they had only awaited a word from the stranger to be released. Again she felt a wave of relief! Now she knew what to say next. “Gotta go! Tee-hee. Got to do . . . Thingies! Um. Some-thingies! Only came over to show you my pies . . .”
“I won’t let you go,” the old guy spoke this so earnestly it really did make Maddy stop and turn back toward him in surprise, as if for all the world his wish were her command, or less mystically, his was her wish, too. Then he smiled again and adopted a very different tone: “You don’t know how lonely it can get, being retired, single, and new in town. Besides, it’s no secret you like baking fruit pies . . .”
“Uh-huh,” Maddy agreed; it seemed she was expected to corroborate this, and she didn’t know how else this new neighbor of hers would ever give her permission to turn around and leave, except by agreeing with him.
“Well, then, you should take a full load of my wakka-wakka with you before you go.”
“Your wha—?” Maddy stared dumbly at the old man.
“Wakka-wakka. Never heard of it? Not surprised. It’s of a very obscure genus, grows only in the rain forest of the Bazungas Islands. Well, it used to. I don’t mind telling you, Miss Pies, it’s the most UNUSUAL fruit you’ll ever get your cute little lips around. Not sweet at all, and yet I’ve heard, very tasty in its way. No one’s ever baked with it before, though, to my knowledge. Why, you might be the FIRST!”
“Really!!!”
Maddy’s imagination took flight at this explicit cue: A new kind of fruit!, no one else had ever baked with!—now THAT was exciting! Why, perhaps she could develop her own recipe of pie with it and before the autumn bake-off; who knows, it might prove the next taste sensation—this year’s pomegranate or cherimoya!
But another thought occurred to Maddy at nearly the same second: how had this stranger guessed her passion for baking, and in particular, for baking with new fruits? But then she remembered (“Doy!”) she’d just brought him over two pies, and so snorted softly at what she esteemed her own inanity: “Okay!”
It might be correctly ascertained here that Maddy LaMode was not at all of a type adept at holding grudges for very short periods of time, even for wholly justifiable reasons. And one might go on to speculate in the present case that her having forgiven the lecher his open ogling of her with such uncritical swiftness indicated at the very least her having the true nature of a thoroughbred heifer; but the person who would jump to such uncharitable conclusion does a disservice to our heroine. First off, one must consider the aforesaid virulence of her solitary passion—the woman did earnestly love to bake! Second, what with Bonny’s posited new recipe, Maddy was in tight straits to come up with her own surprising new pie. Third, the old guy’s tone had changed significantly in the last two seconds or so, and in that time, too, she didn’t think he stared at her “boobies” near as much as before, or not so directly, at least; and anyway, wasn’t he so ve-e-ery old? And even frail, too? Maddy’s mother instinct kicked in again despite her better wisdom. This “poor little old man”, thought she, probably spending his days alone, doing Little Baby Jesus only knows what with himself, just surprised to see any woman at his doorstep, probably, let alone one with her “dimensions” (for despite her self-protested innocence of thought, Mrs. LaMode was well aware she had “dimensions”). It was amazing how quickly she could let bygones be that, if it meant an end to her previous discomfiture and the opportunity of a new fruit to be baked with. In short, if the woman was “loose”, she was so not at all because she was bred that way, obviously, but born that way, a subtle yet worthy distinction.
“By the way,” her new neighbor began, once Mrs. LaMode had stepped her white canvas slip-on shoe onto the ugly ecru shag carpeting of the ramshackle home’s make-do foyer (the carpet, which covered most of the house but the kitchen, was probably as old as the house), “don’t think I’ve introduced myself yet. Name’s Porter Mortarswan, but the lady-friends call me Pud.”
“Pud!” Mrs. LaMode snorted despite herself at that. She always snorted when something struck her off-guard as particularly weird or funny (an embarrassing trait, but one, like her curvy shape, somehow wholly suited her edgeless turn of mind)—it was such a strange and funny nickname, it made “Slaphappy Maddy” entirely overlook the old guy’s queer use of the term “lady-friends”; she as quickly remembered herself, though, and, blushing a little for her snort, remembered she still had rightly to introduce herself: “Um. Mr. Mustardseed, it’s nice to meet you. Only, I’m afraid you think of me as Pies now. That is, my name’s Pies.”
“I know it is, Pies, I know you are,” and Mr. Mortarswan gestured his lovely guest into the adjacent room, the living room, where besides an ugly yellowish-green couch, a tall ten-dollar lamp, a bulky glass coffee table, and a flat screen TV, there stood only a big, weird-looking tree in a pot by the window.
“But I made an accident,” Mrs. LaMode interjected confusedly (to be fair, it had always been hard for the woman to walk and think and talk at the same time). “Or I made a mistake, I mean. What I just said.”
“Of course it was. It always is with you, isn’t it, Pies? A mistake you say things?”
“Huh?” Maddy was more confused than ever, not least as the old man had taken to staring frankly at her breasts again, at least since she’d started walking. However, all the embarrassment and confusion she seemed to feel as a constant in the bold coot’s company was, for a fluke, eclipsed now by a successful, if much belated, burst of indignation: “I’d appreciate it, Mr. Mudders—!”
Maddy would surely have at last given the old guy a piece of her mind, but he interrupted her before she could find the words to fully start out.
“It’s ‘MORTARswan’, Pies, Porter Mortarswan. You said ‘Mudders’, like ‘udders’, an understandable slip, in your case, I grant you. But if it’s easier for a woman of your especial . . . palpabilities to remember, why not call me Pud? Sounds like cud, you know, like cows chew?”
“No—THANKS!” and Mrs. LaMode couldn’t help saying this not altogether apposite rejoinder in a way she feared moreover was “not at all nice”. It occurred to her, that is, that it would have been one thing to chew out the man on his doorstep—he had had that coming, maybe; but it was something far else to accept his invitation into his home (and only AFTER tacitly “accepting” his belittling treatment of her on the doorstep), and then, out of the blue, rebuke her host like the upstart teenage daughter he didn’t know he had. She felt at once tempted to extenuate the remark a little, perhaps by adding one of those occasional clueless giggles that did such a standout job convincing others she was harmless.
But somehow giggling didn’t seem to fit the weird occasion anymore than yelling at her host did, an occasion which involved, for instance, his eyeing her “boobies” and now her “tushy” with an avidity Maddy doubted was entirely healthy at his age. So, in lieu of a giggle, she opted rather to qualify her previous outburst: “I mean, ‘Mr. Marblescones’ will be just fine for me. ‘Mr. Middleshins’, I mean . . .”
“ ‘Mortarswan’, Pies, but never mind it—never YOU mind! Truth be told, I’m not at all surprised it slips your mind. Nah, with pies the size of those two you lugged over here today, I’d be more surprised to find you had one in ya’, truth be told!”
“One what?” Maddy had to ask, trying and failing to hide her renewed consternation under an indignation superannuated even before she’d worked herself up to it. But Mr. Mortarswan wasn’t listening to her, had redirected Maddy’s attention to the plant.
“The obscure wakka-wakka tree, Pies . . . By the way, what’s your first name?”
“Udders!” Mrs. LaMode tried, once more failed, to tell her own correct name to the stranger; she had just begun examining the tree and its many conspicuous pendent fruit with an acquisitive intensity, and so somehow missed for a second she had fudged her introduction yet again. “What?—Wait—NO! I mean, ‘Maddy’. ‘Maddy Udders’!”
“Maddy Udders-Pies? Weird name.”
“NO!” Despite having again shouted at her host rudely without meaning to, Maddy clearly wished now by raising her voice merely to protest her own confusion, no longer the letch’s company. She flashed “Pud” an at once apologetic and beseeching look, as if Mrs. “Udders-Pies” sought help from the stranger to tell her precisely who she was.
Because Maddy had all at once come under sway of a very odd impression, though an impression not unusual for people to feel who find themselves in similar yet distinctly new situations, an illusory déjà vu, which tempted her to be at her ease at the same time she sensed she should least allow herself to be. She had stood in this same house, with a same sort of elderly stranger, and had a similar kind of discombobulated introductory conversation once before. That other time, three years ago last December, her deceased neighbor Esther had quickly calmed her jitters by ignoring Maddy’s inevitable slips and helping her to finish her thoughts as the need arose. Esther had thus made Maddy feel unusually safe, warm and protected in her presence right from the start. Maddy remembered the feeling well, and experienced again in her mind the warm flush of security she had felt then, faced with that augur of aged domesticity and bourgeois cuisine. But now, in this new neighbor’s presence, she felt the reminiscence of “safe, warm” feelings weirdly conflated with something different, at once repulsive and . . . more interesting.
“You see, it’s always in fruit,” Mr. Mortarswan continued, overlooking, to Maddy’s relief, her blurted non sequitur. “That’s how it got its name. Wakka-wakka in Bazungasian means ‘eternal fountain’. It’s a myth they have about the beginning of the world, the world dripping into existence from an eternal spring, their goddess’s cunt. They’d administer it to a virgin’s cunt during weird wedding rites, if you want to know. Something about tapping into ‘the waking world’s imminent vaginality’. Shit, if I know the whole story; that was Trixi’s beat, what she was into before, all that anthropologic bullshit.”
Mrs. LaMode looked at the tree in good earnest now, partly not to have to look her new neighbor in the face, her cheeks burning red at the shock of hearing that many profanities in such a short space, and not just any profanities, but that worst of all, the “c-word”! Maddy, for her part, had never used a word worse than “golly” in all her life.
Lucky the tree was so intriguing, it was easy for Maddy to overlook her discomfort as she took it in. It certainly didn’t resemble any tree she’d ever seen. It wasn’t tall, but gangly, with lots of long thin and wiry branches spreading out here and there, many of which had grown so long in their own right, they needed separate supports or would’ve split down the middle or broken off the trunk. Her neighbor had foreseen the problem and propped these branches up by a series of forked metal mounting rods, which kept the branches in the air while allowing them to continue growing in their various directions. In this way the tree had grown to such a size laterally as almost to block out the light from the wide bay window (the sole architectural extravagance Esther’s old home boasted). And, to be sure, the tree was loaded with large purplish-green fruit, somewhat oblong shaped, and bumpy, a little smaller than eggplants at their fullest. And they smelled weird, too, that was something Mrs. LaMode noticed almost as soon as she’d walked into the room, pungent and off-putting at the same time she didn’t dislike the smell, exactly. It was hard to put her “finger in exactly what it . . . ON it,” she corrected herself, with another almost silent snort; hard to put her finger “ON what exactly it . . .”
“A bitch to move! And you gotta be real careful with a plant like that, too; it’s ancient and, believe it or not, the only one of its kind still in existence. There weren’t that many of them to begin with, mind you, because of how they grow. They take almost a century to fructify, and, more often than not, break in half before they get that old, on account of all the branches. Development on the Bazungas Islands wiped out what few of them remained. Contractors building cheap condominiums by the sea for Third-World tourists who would spend a month tops there once a year. So it goes, I suppose! The truly dumb thing though is those condos, only a few years later, they got destroyed in a tsunami, but those trees—the contractors could’ve made a fortune on one of them alone if they’d only known . . .”
“Known? Known what?” Mrs. LaMode was swept up in the particulars of the story behind the exotic fruit, and so disregarded a canny winking glance Mr. Mortarswan had just thrown at Maddy’s chest again in implication of something or other. “Do the fruits . . . Are they high in antioxidants, or something?” Maddy of course not so subtly wished they were; she might boast of that to Sugar at the Church Of The Fish And Loaf next Saturday, if that was the case.
“But of course! This fruit is the real deal, Maddy-my-doll, another fruit like it you’ll never find, a veritable fountain of youth. Why, it’s added years to my life, I can tell you, and what years they’ve been! The best! They could do the same for you, too—for anyone! All it takes is a little o’ this.” Her neighbor held up a small vial of very pink liquid he had just extracted from a pocket in his robe. “A supplement I’ve developed from the fruit, call it Vitamin-J. I’m willing to give you a sample, if you like. Gave one to that little dormouse Miss Nougat, down the street, just this morning—nice lady, if not exactly a stunner; still, there’s potential. Tell you the same thing I told her: first six vials are on the house, anymore you want, you gotta pay. The price I’ve settled on is five Benjamins per vial, but with a looker like you, I’d be willing to work out a ‘pay-for-play’ discount. Don’t mind telling you, you’re gettin’ it for a steal even at half-o’—G. Once everyone’s seen the effects my Vita-J’s had on What’s-her-face, your other neighbor, demand in Blueberry Bush is bound to skyrocket, and you know what that does to . . . ”
“ ‘Effects’? Wait! What!? What ‘other neighbor’?” Maddy shook her head in a sudden impatience with herself. “NO! Never mind all that! None of that’s what’s important! Um, sorry.” Maddy realized to her chagrin she had once more lost her temper ostensibly over nothing. “But I’m only here because of . . . you said, the fruits. They’re, um, eatable?”
“Edible? Surely! Granted, the only person to my knowledge who’s ’et ’em raw yet is Trixi, that is, Dr. Treatems, my old lab assistant. But she sure as shit never complained to me about the . . . uh, flavor, I guess you might call it. Naaah, she still swears by the stuff. Not a day goes by, as I understand, she doesn’t get her lips locked tight round one of this here tree’s fat salty gourds!”
For the first time since entering this strange man’s house, and really quite suddenly, Maddy felt something like a warning bell go off in her brain—like perhaps by her just being there in the house with him, she was in some sort of imminent peril. It wasn’t as though she couldn’t defend herself if he attacked her (if that had been the case she never would have agreed to come inside); for “golly-sake” the little guy barely came up to her “boobies”, never mind he was so very old and ostensibly weak, whereas Maddy, after running three hours daily for almost twenty years, had never been more at top of her topheavy form, so to speak. No, it was her new neighbor’s constant recourse to implication, which suddenly began to worry Maddy much more even than his openly leering at her had. What had dead Esther’s house become, anyway, some kind of illicit drug den? Was “Mr. Monkeyshines” some kind of antiquated “pusher”? Is that why he seemed so strangely confident—he was hopped up on the hard stuff! Only instead of crack, or whatever, he was selling . . . what had he called it? “Vitamin-J”? And, if so, how could any of this be happening on Cream Tart Lane, of all places—how could Whoeveritwas Wasincharge LET it happen! In the veritable epicenter of suburban heaven!
“Um,” Maddy struggled to find the words with which to interrogate this suspected evildoer. “Is this . . . legal?”
Mr. Mortarswan erupted in his abrupt, coarse, wheezing laugh at the question. “I’d say it’s everything but, if you know what I mean, Pies.”
Maddy didn’t.
“Well, then—No, strictly speaking, it’s NOT legal. Not yet. But I assure you, in the supplement form, it’s perfectly safe; I’d stake my reputation on it, if that weren’t already shot down the tubes. But, the point is, even if I have to technically sell Vita-J ‘under the counter’ for the time being, the stuff has proved benign, all in all, in something like eighty-nine percent of lab tests. So way more than half. But those tests don’t really matter for shit, because regardless of data, my vials will be available for purchase by prescription in less than a month. I’ve worked it all out with the feds this time around, well in advance. I’ve even taken out a few early ads to build up the buzz—the corporate guys I’m in talks with foresee a HUGE demand! You see, I don’t want a repeat of what happened last time; we were all set for the feds to sign off on it, Trixi and I; only, we forgot to grease the palm. Long story short, our application for a patent was denied and our lab shut down, all because of ONE measly incident, some pencil-pusher walks in on me shoving dollars down my lab ass’s cunt-cutters—‘unsanitary conditions’, I think they called it. A bunch of trumped up b.s., you ask me! Too bad about losing the lab, of course. Cost us our tenure at BMU, too. Not that it worked out bad in the long run. My current ‘occupation’ pays better than the grants I used to try to support my research on. And the money goes farther, too, that’s the even bigger thing; when you’re working in your basement, you don’t have near the proverbial ‘overhead’; there are none of them damned regulations to meet, hoops and hurdles to clear, inspectors to pay off so they don’t condemn your research out of hand as ‘unsafe’—And what does that even mean, ‘unsafe’? Well, first off, it means all labs gotta work the same goddamn way, even though what we were doing—the results were actually better when we went ‘rogue’, you know, didn’t wash every beaker, log every hour, lock every cabinet of highly flammable chemicals? Something about the looser regimen got me and Trixi thinking WAY outside the box! Since losing the lab, too, I have so much more time—I don’t have to teach, grade lame-ass dissertations or write grant proposals! Just jerk off all day and occasionally pick a damn fruit or two—I got a machine now that’ll practically ‘vitaminize’ the junk itself, automatic! Only downside is I have to keep a lower profile than before—there are THOSE who would put a stop once for all to my operation, if they could—and being always on the run, admittedly, can get kind of old; that was the best part of academia, if you want to know, gathering moss and getting my name out there while I was at it—getting attention! I miss that. Incidentally, it goes without saying, but don’t repeat any of this around, okay? I know you probably won’t remember half of it, but if anybody asks, as far as you’re concerned, I’m just a friendly old kook, a harmless retired ‘bird-watcher’ moved in across the street. Got it? Good. But I forgot to mention the best part of my new set up: the Vita-J itself, and as much of it as this old pecker can withstand! Ha! Ha! [WHEEZE!] O yeah, and my ex-lab-ass, Dr. Treatems? No need to worry about her, either; she’s set herself up real nice these days, too, got a career making . . . ’hem, ‘promotional’ videos for a company on the bay. You ever heard of ‘Trixi Treats’, star of such popular films as ‘Mans-Handle Park I’ and ‘II’ and ‘Mary Shelty’s Wankenstein’? Nah, I suppose a good girl like you wouldn’t have. Nice lady, all the same, Doctor Treatems, real friendly. You remind me of her a little, by the way. That’s a compliment, believe me: like you, she had huge tits even before . . .”
Maddy was once again struck dumb by this old man’s frank and jolly lecherousness—cunt-cutters! old pecker! huge tits! how could he be just saying THOSE kind of words, to HER, Maddy LaMode, graduate of the land-grant college, UBMS, and not to mention mother rolemodel to her own precious teenage daughter, “thank you very much”! But once again, for reasons beyond her, she refrained from setting him straight on the proper way to speak to a self-respecting, and anyhow, married (“if you don’t mind!”), woman.
She refrained, because, despite her faux-mental outrage at such salty language being freely expressed in her company, she felt in truth significantly cowed before this creepily cocky geezer. His periodic suggestions that they shared some secret together only made it worse, that he could trust her to lie for him, if the event arose—strange, but Maddy almost felt . . .
She shook her head to clear it of her thought. What difference did it make! The situation would never come up, right? Because, after all, they were only talking fruit, weren’t they? And as far as that pink stuff was concerned? It could be only lemonade, for all she knew; he could be pulling her leg or, worse, off his rocker. It was just too tempting for Maddy to trust to the surface appearance of relative, albeit seedy, normalcy in her surroundings, than to make the leap to believing meanings deeper and hidden from the waking eye—that the new weird neighbor of hers, older than time, was perhaps the scariest dope-dealer as ever set up shop in the state of Bain-Marie.
All this to say, Maddy LaMode had become more painfully aware than ever of having forfeited her right to leave in an uncomplicated huff back there at the door. No, if she were going to be mad at him for being a “total creep”, it would have made “way more” sense to do that ten minutes ago, is the point. And now that she had seen the tree, she was actually—though it did mortify her a little to admit—only MORE eager to get a few of those strange new fruits home alone with her!
And so, while she had definite doubts concerning Mr. Mortarswan’s qualifications—less, in truth, as a scientist than as a next-door neighbor—still her curiosity and passion for the “new” when it came to anything pastries was only piqued, it seemed, the more obscure, even slightly forbidden, the fruit, the tree, the old guy, and the whole sordid backstory of her anticipated next novel recipe proved! Stuffing dollars in his lab-assistant’s underwear, though? As her Clarabelle would say, “Guh-ross”! “Mr. Pinkorstink” had to be, “like, almost eighty!”
But on the other hand, so what?, Maddy couldn’t help herself but muse, coming to a jaunty stand after having bent over forward (much to her neighbor’s unhidden admiration) to examine closer the tree, and looking her neighbor full in the face now with an incipient cheeriness she hadn’t felt in that room since last she’d seen Esther—So what, if it was all a little risqué, making a pie from “fruits” she’d been sold by an old kook “under the counter”, as he’d put it? There was even something BETTER about it this way, wasn’t there, that is, even if she herself couldn’t quite say what? Why, this way, even if the pie turned out a complete disaster—which the veteran baker naturally assumed it would—wasn’t baking it guaranteed to prove an “experience”, in any event? And, very importantly, no one had to know, did he, if all her efforts went up in smoke? But, if this really WAS the only one of these trees in existence, and its fruit really DID have the sort of amazing healthful properties he’d boasted it did, and, of course, if it really DID turn out she could make a halfway decent pie with it (and if anybody could, she patted herself mentally on the back, it was she!)—Why, didn’t that mean she’d have a veritable “corner on the market” where “wakka-wakka pie” was concerned? (Maddy had no intention, incidentally, of selling her pies for personal profit—that wouldn’t be very heroic!—but the renown she might gain by her colorful charity was always foremost in her philanthropic thought, and the phrase “corner on the market” had popped in her mind likely as her husband had used it in reference to a commercial property in conversation the night before at the dinner table.)
More than another delicious pie that would only win her the hollow accolades of her family and friends, another mini-plaque bake-off award to be stuffed away in her walk-in closet, and all so the copious leftovers might the sooner be thrown down the garbage disposal or fed the family dog . . . More than all that, wasn’t it obvious?, chronically bored housewife Maddy LaMode craved nothing so much as a “new experience”, and though she had little inkling of what that might mean in the present case—a fruit forbidden by the FDA? wasn’t that dangerous?—she only desired the experience the more for its hint of danger.
“It’ll take at least ten for three, I suppose, if they’re going to be good sized pies,” she volunteered this calculation to her neighbor easily and with more confidence than she’d demonstrated in his presence up till that point. When talk came to pies, Mrs. LaMode was all business: “How much for a baker’s dozen?”