I saw something on my friends website about writing a story using a list of random words. The random words for this piece were: practical, shaggy, porcelain, dragon, approximate, explain,
narrower, fountain, gyrate, exhaling, off-balance, angels, exaggerate, cotton, incriminate, afterward, moon, terror, ruptured, sickly.
One word was shoe-horned in. The others I think are more or less natural.
Harold’s not one to mince words. He speaks in a concise sort of way that comes across as terse at times. Those that really enjoy carrying on blathering about nothing at all do not consider Harold a nice person to keep around.
I hate him.
I say that, but really, he is a good friend. He tends to be the level headed one in any circumstance. He is deliberate in speech, practical in thought and efficient in manner. When things go haywire, he is the one the entire family depends on.
This is a good thing. Especially with the situation the family is dealing with now.
Let me explain. The family has a tendency to embellish certain aspects of their history. Normally, this sort of thing is fun at parties and enlivens conversation. It’s not like the rest of us don’t already know that there’s a bit of ‘creative license’ in regaling these tales. It’s just fun to hear most of them. Other times, when Nadine or Harold’s brother Randy starts into some of the symbolism, my mind becomes numb.
The last time Randy started going on about the phases of the moon juxtaposed with the house of Jupiter, I just stood up and left. Afterward, He yelled at me for leaving. He said that there was no need to publicly embarrass him at a good party. I told him, “I’m not the one with the ungodly urge to exaggerate everything. You’re the one that has a fleeting grasp of what the rest of us call reality.”
I was one to talk. I’m off-balance in a few ways that are socially unacceptable. I can admit some of my faults. The others are just new social conventions of the future. I like to think that I am ahead of my time in some ways.
As I was saying, when Nadine or Randy start talking about the weird symbolism of their family history, the mild terror descends on me like that feeling I left the stove on at home. When Nadine is ‘in her element’, I usually convince myself that I not only left the stove on, but a curling iron, the washing machine, five or six televisions and the Christmas lights.
Yes, I have Christmas lights in July. As I said earlier, I’m ahead of my time.
Nadine is not the astrologer, she is the failed actress trying to compensate for lack of talent. When she talks about Uncle Charles being chased by Aunt Ruth’s father with a shotgun, she gyrates about the room in her effort to ‘heighten the tension’. I understand that shots were fired and that Uncle Charles discovered his sprinting abilities that night, but it’s too much. The last time she told that story, she knocked over a couple of tables and shelf of porcelain figurines on the wall. (You know how much some of those Lladro pieces cost?)
I say the last time, it is actually this time. Everyone left pretty quickly. Maybe it’s like watching a car accident, I forgot about the curling iron I left on at home and stayed to see what happened next. I surveyed the damage while waiting for Harold to show up. The dragon was Misty’s favorite. The cheap dollar-store angles, though, are remarkably intact. I think you could shoot those at point blank range and still only manage to scratch them.
I knew that Misty was going to be really upset. I had this image of the police searching her apartment for clues.
“When was the approximate time of the incident in question?”
“About 1:30 pm,” I’d say.
“Was there alcohol involved?”
“No, at least not for those of us under 21?” I’d say to the imaginary cop.
When she finally found us crossing the state line into Connecticut, she had only ruptured a blood vessel or two. I’ll get to that, hold on.
Harold show up about half an hour later. He just calmly strolled in and began to assess the damage. I think he’s become really comfortable handling a crisis. I don’t think he raised his voice even once.
“Tell me what happened,” he said to Nadine. She said that she was talking about how Uncle Charles met Aunt Ruth. He asked if she mentioned the ‘stumbling through the bushes part’. She said that she did. He asked if she mentioned that it was midnight and pitch black. She said that she did. He asked if she mentioned the shotgun and again she said yes.
After a bit of a groan, he asked Randy about what happened. He was curled up in a corner turning a sickly shade of green. He didn’t handle a crisis very well. His usual method involves throwing up, something he hadn’t bothered to do, yet.
Harold went back to Nadine and gave a glare that said, “I can’t believe you mentioned the shotgun again. Can’t you tell this story like a normal person?”. His eyes locked on to his sister as he asked the obvious question, “Who broke Misty’s stuff?”
Nadine said that if the party hadn’t been so crowded, she would have had the room to tell the story properly. She talked about how she stumbled over two or three people. She talked about trying to avoid everyone’s drink and that she thought the living room was plenty big enough…
Harold’s gaze got narrower. Nadine was trying really hard to blame everyone else for knowing over Misty’s collection. I thought she had a good point or two, just Harold wasn’t in a place to put up with it. “Nadine,” he said after a long pause, “Misty is going to blame you, not the folks at the party. Besides, they weren’t supposed to be here in the first place. You told her that the party was at our house.”
“But she won’t know it was me, the only two people that saw it that are still here are Randy and Gladys. She won’t say anything, she’s my best friend.”
Gladys. I’d rather be named after my Uncle Charles.
“Nadine,” he said too calmly, “there’s more than enough evidence to incriminate you. It’s not an issue of covering it up. We need to replace some of these things and apologize to her.”
“We could go to Woburn Mall,” she offered.
Ignoring her, he told Randy that he should stay behind and clean up the apartment. Harold didn’t want the inside of his car ruined when Randy finally decided to throw-up. Besides, Harold has those thick shaggy seat covers that never come clean. When Randy finally did the deed a half hour later, he went to great pains to describe the “fountain of bile jettisoned into the bathtub.” I just shrugged and said, “whatever.”. Who needs to hear about all of that?
Harold, Nadine, and I got into Harold’s car that’s about as large as a postage stamp. Nadine and I got our big butts in the backseat and Harold sped off to Woburn Mall at break-neck speed.
We got to the mall and found the place that had Lladro stuff. They had everything but the dragon, so we bought what we could. The woman behind the counter said that there was a dragon like the one we were looking for in a store in Hartford. She called and had it reserved for us. I thought that we were in for smooth sailing. That was the time that Nadine remembered that she hadn’t called Misty, yet. This was also the time when Nadine told us that the $20 she thought she had must be in another purse. This presented a problem to us because now we’d have enough money for the trip as long as we didn’t stop.
I was already hungry.
Here we are on a trip to Hartford that will take a few hours, we might not get to the store before they close, we’re paying for stuff until she can pay us back, and NOW we find out that there’s no money for food?
Harold yelled at us from the front seat to stop goofing around. He said that he was having trouble driving with all the movement. Nadine croaked that she was having trouble keeping me from tearing her favorite cotton blouse.
About then Misty called as sure enough, she was really mad. I mean really really mad. After we told her that we were going to Hartford to replace her dragon, she got really quiet on the other end of the phone. Before she was growling while exhaling. Now she was not making much noise at all.
Then she started laughing really really hard. I was worried about her. These mood swings aren’t healthy for anyone, you know. Maybe she broke something inside with all that anger switching to laughing really quickly. It’s just a theory.
When she could speak, she asked, “The two of you in Harold’s backseat?” She kept going, “Has Gladys killed you, yet?” She kept laughing to the point that I was still pretty worried about her. “I find Randy, passed out and asleep in my unlocked apartment. My stuff is broken and the furniture is scattered around. I thought someone broke in and killed Randy.” After that, she started laughing again. “You know I’m going to kill you when you get home?”
Nadine was laughing with her at this point. She said that she was ready to face the firing squad when she got back. The two of them descended into best friend chattering. Misty saw some cute guy, Nadine was talking about something she saw at the shoe store in the mall while Harold and I were trying to match phone pictures of broken figurines to a catalog. They kept going on for awhile until Misty asked,
“Were you telling the story about Uncle Charles?”