Ms. Holly needed a ride. She had a car, but she didn’t care too much for driving. Even as a young woman there was something about it that made her nervous. Everyone went too fast and things jumped out in front of you, and people honked. It just wasn’t pleasant.
A few times a week, she called her favorite cab company to come and get her to take her out on her errands. She had to go to the doctor. It seemed she always had to go to the doctor. She was getting tired of all this business. They couldn’t seem to do anything to help her.
No amount of Vicodin would help the pain she had in her back. She ate the pills like popcorn, popping them into her mouth and biting them in half before she swallowed them without benefit of water.
“Don’t they make you constipated?” her neighbor asked her.
“I never have any problems with that. I just can’t seem to take enough of those things to get rid of the pain.”
“You should try smoking some weed,” the neighbor suggested and offered her a cone.
“That shit doesn’t do anything for me,” she insisted.
She took out her flip phone to make the call. She had important appointments to the “Sacred Triangle” as she called it, at least twice a week. “I get so sick of going to the doctor,” she said. ‘That’s why I always combine it with a stop at Pop’s (the neighborhood grocery) and Chink’s Palace for take-out. That way I get all my shit taken care of at once.”
Chinese food was the only thing that did it for her. She was sure that she had some Chinese in her somewhere. She didn’t drink, but she loved to smoke. “I’ve been smoking for sixty years, and I’m not about to stop now!” she proclaimed in defiance of the new “No Smoking” ordinances. “Let them come and get me. What are they gonna do, send the smoking police around to arrest me?”
She still liked to look at men, but she had no use for one personally. Iced tea, cigarettes, and old “B” movies were her favorite pastimes. She loved to look at old detective shows and she never got tired of Law and Order re-runs.
She kept her hair short and bathed regularly in a nice hot soapy tub. This worried her neighbor who was always afraid she would fall. She insisted that Ms. Holly keep a cell phone handy near the tub incase she got stuck or fell.
Her wardrobe on any given day was usually a thin worn faded house dress with cigarette holes burned into it in a couple of spots on the front. She wore a pair of old floppy slippers with her red polished nails sticking out through the worn spot at the toe. She insisted on fresh white cotton underwear everyday.
Since she was going out today, she was dressed in an older red suit with a black satin blouse that once had held her in high esteem. She had managed a big company and been in charge of a lot of people, paper work, and ordering. Now she was content to watch MeTV, eat her Chinese, and smoke up a chimney.
She got her flip phone out to call the cab. “Do you know what the number is? It’s real easy. It’s 777-7777.” She told everyone she met that number: the nurse who checked her in at the doctor’s office, the grocery clerk at Pop’s store, the waitress at Chink’s Palace. She even repeated it to the driver of the cab, “Sacred Triangle: Doc’s, Pop’s, and Chink’s Palace, please… 777-7777.”
(First published 9/29/13)
