Philo’s embittered grandmother, Charlene, sat in her leather wing chair wearing a long-practiced look of distaste. She was not the sort of woman who would ever give birth to puppies, no matter how lonely her life.

She was reading a Harlequin Romance. Television no longer appealed to her. She read two of the books a day, snorting at the smutty parts. They helped keep her mind off her problems, which were legion.

Her son was an effeminate tree climber. His gender confusion was so severe that it had led to a drug problem—she was sure of it. She suspected him of shooting heroin into his neck veins. Even worse, despite her vehement objections he had married an impoverished hippie harlot, a certain Miss Potty-Mouth who was constantly showing off her braless bosom. Together, they had spawned a son, a boy who often ran amok for no comprehensible reason.
If she could just ignore Harley’s drug addiction, ignore his hussy of a wife and the asinine antics of his delinquent son, she would no doubt be much better off. But she was Harley’s mother and she couldn’t help but be concerned.

Charlene was also quite concerned by what nature had done to her over the years. She had once been quite beautiful—regal, even, if the truth were told. The Lions Club had chosen her as their representative in the Helldorado Parade when she was nineteen years old and she’d won, been crowned Helldorado Queen, even though she was married to Roy at the time and that should have disqualified her. But now she could hardly recognize herself as that young girl. Her bottom was at least a yard wide. The folds of flesh hanging from her jowls were like turkey wattles. Her bosom, still ample, was wrinkled and flabby beyond belief. She had liver spots everywhere. Sometimes she thought the spots might even be on her bones.

As if the grotesqueries of aging weren’t enough, she was also subject to a peculiar fungus or rash, which at first had been diagnosed as ringworm, but had turned out to be something far worse. It itched like the dickens. She kept her thighs and shins wrapped with duct tape, so she wouldn’t scratch. Her doctor prescribed prednisone for her, which she took at three times a day at twice the recommended dosage. It made the itching not quite so unbearable. It also made her stronger and gave her an appetite like a horse.

Charlene bit into a Hostess Twinkee with a savagery that belied her age and infirmities.
As the creamy white filling oozed across her tongue, she recalled her dreams from the previous night: Dark, hairy things under the bed; a moment of levitation; some man’s wiener tickling her earlobe…. Maybe it was Harold Jenkins, editor of the Pine Bluff Times. She used to sneak out the window to see him when Roy fell asleep in front of the radio. Harold, her hot lover. Having his way with her, bending her over the linotype machine, talking dirty to her. He was as cheeky as an Army mule, that Harold. Later, they’d make up tiny news stories about insanity, violent death, unrequited love, and public drunkenness. Harold printed them in the next day’s edition:

Negro Somnambulist Sets Fire To Courthouse, Pig, Self
Butcher Dead of Heartbreak; Manhood in the Meat Grinder
Ossified Child Found in Haystack; Docs Battled
Our Sisters of Temperance: In League with the Devil?

It was great fun until Roy found out about the affair and did their tiny news stories one better. He dug a hole in the turnip patch and threw in a few sticks of dynamite. He was a mineworker, like most fellows back then. Knew all there was to know about cinnibar. Roy touched off the fuse while Charlene watched from a distance. He waved his hat at her and laid down with his head over the hole, exclaiming, “Here I go and the Lord go with me.” Then there was a huge explosion of brains and turnip greens.

Charlene found Christianity after that one.

So much tragedy in her life…. Charlene wondered how she’d had the gumption to survive. Her brother Balmeister was an alcoholic. They’d been constantly fighting since the time they were children. He had no backbone, and she was the only one in the family with enough honesty to tell him. Bal was worthless and weak—there’d never been a doubt in her mind. So what if he’d made millions in real estate?

Then there was The Scandal. After Harley was grown and had a boy of his own, she took up with Ned O’Malley, a married man. One day, Ned’s wife, Pamela, discovered them engaged in a brisk bout of coitus on the kitchen floor. Pam couldn’t admit it was her own fault Ned had strayed. Sex just wasn’t fresh with her, Ned said. He cursed the mercurial nature of matrimonial affection, cursed his own naked, unbounded, goat-like lust.

Pam said she intended to buy a gun.

“She just can’t understand my deeper needs,” Ned lamented.

Charlene understood. Then in her late-forties, she was still a passionate woman. Nothing in the Bible could replace the gratification of the sexual embrace. It couldn’t possibly be a sin, provided she didn’t have an orgasm—which never, ever did. But Pam just couldn’t be content with that knowledge. She had to go and rest her head on a pillow in the oven, where she went off to that kind of sleep from which a person never wakes.

That was twice Charlene’s fooling around had killed someone. She could tell the people of Pine Bluff were looking down their noses at her. Some were even angry. It was getting time to leave.

She and Ned packed up their bags and moved to Los Angeles, taking Ned’s eight-year-old daughter, Mickelodia, along with them. They got married there, thinking it would clear them in the eyes of the Lord. Charlene decided to keep the marriage a secret. She never told Harley or Balmeister. Whenever she chose to visit, she always went alone.

Ned lasted about a year. His end was unseemly. A prostitute convinced him to ingest some fabled drug during the climax to a bit of nastiness involving leather, chains, Cool Whip, and two obedient cocker spaniels named Spic and Span. The drug turned out to be the pesticide DDT. The dose was so toxic to Ned’s system that he died of a heart attack within the hour. Charlene had him buried at Forest Lawn and that was that. His life insurance policy paid off handsomely.

So she found herself rich at the age of 50. She also found herself a single mother again. Mickelodia fell into her custody. It turned out to be a convenient arrangement. Since the girl wasn’t her own flesh and blood, Charlene felt no urge to coddle her. For the past ten years, Mickelodia had done all the cooking and cleaning in exchange for room and board. Any nonsense from her and Charlene took away her library card, sometimes for as long as a week.

That library card was all Mickelodia seemed to care about. At that moment, her bedroom was full of books by Hermann Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, Tom Robbins, and Marcel Proust.

Proust! That book of his was at least three thousand pages long!

“Silly little bitch,” Charlene muttered to herself as her fat fingers groped for another Harlequin Romance. “Wait until she discovers boys.”