Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [31]
I’m willing to cut people a lot of slack, but I draw the line at a greasy coffee table. It was bad enough that she was going to be cleaning my apartment with condiments. I did not want my furniture slathered in salad dressing.
Still. With my jaw clenched, I bought almost everything on the list, including the cheapest white wine I could find. I even took the subway uptown and bought her a pair of cotton gloves for twelve dollars.
When I got home, I checked the paper to see what movies were playing the next day. Unlike Brad, I didn’t want to hang out in my apartment while my cleaning lady prepared lunch on my floor.
On Sunday at eleven, Debby arrived red-faced, and whether this was from climbing the stairs or from a morning Bloody Mary, it gave her a healthy glow. “You’re so on time,” I said with a fake smile, irritated that she had insisted on getting to my place before noon. On Sunday.
“Time is money,” she said.
Never would a cliché prove to be more prophetic.
“Well, I’m just gonna take off for the day. I figure I’ll see a movie and then go to the office and do some stuff there.”
She smiled. “Did you get the items on my list?” But her eyes were narrow, not the eyes that belonged with a smile.
I smiled back at her, but in a way that suggested I might be withholding something. “I sure did.”
“Everything?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, nodding my head.
She looked surprised. Apparently, she was accustomed to experiencing a certain percentage of rejection.
“Well, except the olive oil,” I said. “I just can’t, you know, have everything all sticky.”
She looked horrified. “Oh, no! But that’s the most important thing on the list! It’s wonderful. It’s not greasy or sticky or anything. You’ll love the way everything comes out, I promise.”
“Well,” I said, now with a little shrug and apologetic smile. “It sounds nice. But I didn’t pick it up.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I saw a little food store downstairs. I’ll just get some in there.”
I smiled. “That sounds fine.”
“But I’ll have to charge you for the time.”
“But it’s just downstairs,” I said, my smile frozen, now just the memory of a smile.
“I know that,” she said in the weary tone one might use with a telemarketer. “But it takes away from the cleaning. I have to stop everything I’m doing, then go downstairs, then select a brand of oil, then pay for it, then put my money away and come back upstairs. It’s not like Bewitched, where I can just wrinkle my nose.”
She wrinkled her nose, and it made her look like one of the singing Lollypop Guild munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.
I didn’t want to argue with her over fifty cents’ worth of her time. “Whatever you need is fine.”
“Great,” she said, suddenly, incredibly happy. It was unnerving the way she could go from cool efficiency to sarcastic to sweet within the space of thirty seconds. I found it very manipulative and controlling. It put the other person constantly on-guard. And it was extremely intimidating, because you never knew when she was going to snap.
I made a mental note to refine these skills within myself.
Six hours later, when I returned, I was greeted at the door—and this before it was even opened—by the overpowering smell of vinegar. What were my neighbors thinking? That a douche-obsessed woman with a gigantic, three-foot vagina lived next door?
I unlocked my apartment and stepped inside and was nearly knocked over by the stink. But when I turned on the light, I was pleasantly stunned. There was an actual luminosity to the room. I could tell, even from the distance of the doorway, that everything was utterly spotless. The floor, which was a standard-issue Manhattan-apartment parquet wood, glowed exotically. It was so generic, I’d never even noticed it before. And suddenly the grain of the wood seemed somehow illuminated.
It must have been her olive oil.
I walked through my small apartment and was impressed over and over by how immaculate everything was. Up to a certain point. Because as my eye traveled up from the lustrous