Romance:From Fat To Fatale(27)
I felt I was getting into my stride here. Once I'd unleashed the slavering legal beagles on Miclav's undeserving behalf, I immediately turned my attention to my chunky little sister, Mavenka, and to her precarious little predicament. On the surface, hers was definitely the more challenging problem to resolve. Larry suggested we just bust her out of the house and take her somewhere discrete where nature could take its course. But that's wasn't quite so easy.
Locked in her bedroom and kept under twenty-four hour supervision by Mama Bulgari, only released to shuffle sniffling and sobbing to the visit the bathroom whilst Mama kept guard on the door, her scandalous lapse in good conduct seemed to lie beyond the scope of my newly-developing power and influence. She was in complete and irretrievable disgrace and I wasn't even allowed to speak with her or to see her - for obvious fear of contamination.
The local priest had been called in to pray with her and hear her confession.
Poor guy. He was locked in there for two and half hours and looked drained and in need of a couple of shots of medicinal Bourbon when he finally emerged, pale, unsteady on his legs and mopping his saintly brow with an old handkerchief. He shook his head in front of Mama as if he'd just survived a close encounter with the personal handmaiden of Lucifer, made the sign of the cross with trembling fingers and beat a very hasty retreat to the nearest bar, in search of spiritual sustenance of the 40 proof variety. And the next morning, to everyone's obvious relief, the tide turned and Mavenka sheepishly announced that maybe she wasn't pregnant after all. OK. Not the sharpest chisel in the tool box. She hadn't thought of buying one of those testing kits at the local pharmacy to confirm her suspected condition. No discrete visit to the local doc for urine tests and an examination.
Nope. Just complete ignorance of the fact that her weight could occasionally play havoc with her hormones - and cancel her monthly enforced abstinence from playing the pit-stop polka in the back of some pick up truck. Once the crisis dissolved, the whole story of how she might've got pregnant in the first place was quietly erased from all future family conversations. The episode was being air-brushed out of the family history through a collective case of voluntary amnesia.
Papa heard the news, opened one drugged and bleary eye and made a swift and astonishing recovery now that the family honour had been miraculously restored. I even heard an interesting rumour in the swimming pool changing room that some of the pick-up truck guys had decided to risk a low-profile return to town, feeling reassured that the pruning shears were safely back in the gardening tool chest and that the dangers of a close encounter with a razor-sharpened vendetta had officially passed. I guess the honour of auditioning for the Viennese Boys' Choir would have to pass them by.
Chapter 18:
Some surprises are worth waiting for
I sat with Larry at the cafeteria and we laughed like a couple of drunks on their second bottle of budget embalming fluid. The Bulgaris had provided a lifetime of entertainment and we couldn't help ourselves from seeing every hysterical nuance and twist of the situation. We kept running the scenes on a permanent loop and I thought we were at risk of a full-blown coronary. Well I seriously thought I was at risk of a full blown coronary. My cheeks were red, I had little tears of laughter running down my face. And then, without warning, we were interrupted.
For the first time since I'd been hanging out with him, a couple of girls just walked up to our table and asked Larry if he wanted to go to a party. They were the kind of gals that I instantly loathed with blood-simmering, lop-off-their-heads-and-use-them-as-doorstops, poisonous venom. You know the kind I'm talking about. Lean and skinny, curvy in all the right places, perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect make-up, pouting lips, leaning in towards Larry with their backs towards me as if I didn't exist. Larry was leaning back in his chair now, getting a little distance between himself and those pumped-up, pointed bra cups that were aimed so purposefully at his chin, and he smiled. He nodded towards me and said he'd love to go to the party - as long as he could bring his girlfriend along too.
There was a moment of complete silence, a minor shock wave as the gals absorbed the news and my heart stopped a full beat to assess what Larry had just said. The glamour gals both turned slowly towards me as if they hadn't even seen me sitting there, larger than life, before Larry had nodded in my direction. They looked and they stared hard and they poured scorn with every disdainful bat of their eyelids. One of them turned back to Larry and made it abundantly clear that I was most
certainly not invited. It wasn't the annual Weight Watchers convention. It was a pure-blooded, exclusive, sorority bash and it was going to be fun with a capital F. Larry shook his head, still smiling, thanked them kindly and politely declined the offer.
They exchanged knowing looks and assumed that Larry had to be the kind of hot little gay muffin that hid behind friendly fat girls to disguise his real preferences for being man-handled by muscular, sweating cowpokes at the rear end of the ranch house. They stalked off in disgust and Larry carried on talking as if nothing had happened.
But something had happened. Larry had been the subject - or the victim, depending how you wanted to spin it - of a full-frontal pick-up attempt by two obviously attractive and eligible young women, two highly pneumatic young ladies who'd made it blindingly obvious that they weren't remotely interested in his potential as a source of polite and genteel conversation. He'd been selected to star in an orgiastic feast of the flesh, the kind of fantasy most guys would happily die for. And he'd looked at me with those beautiful, polar ice-cap-melting eyes and called me his girlfriend. Never mind the frigging polar ice caps. I have to tell you. I melted right then and there.