Me
and
Fat Glenda
Me
and
Fat Glenda
Lila Perl
Brooklyn, New York
Copyright © 1972 by Lila Perl.
All rights reserved.
Reissue Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.
Please direct inquiries to:
Lizzie Skurnick Books
an imprint of Ig Publishing
392 Clinton Avenue #1S
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-939601-10-0
Contents
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
In my family I’m always the last person to find out anything. For instance, the way I found out we were moving from California to New York was by overhearing Mrs. Hinkle and Mrs. Brantley talking in the supermarket. In other words, I was eavesdropping. Only those two always talked so loud you didn’t have to feel the least bit sneaky about listening.
“Just this morning it was, she told me,” Mrs. Hinkle was saying. “Came and stood in the doorway as I was sweeping the front walk. Yessiree, there she stood in one of those black spider outfits of hers with her hair hanging down like drapery tassels all over her face.
“ ‘We’ll be vacating at the end of the month, Mrs. Hinkle,’ says she. ‘Drew has a teaching job at a college in New York State.’ ”
That was my mother Mrs. Hinkle was talking about. Mom does wear a black leotard most of the time with a short smock or a sleeveless tunic over it made out of some kind of hand-blocked material in bright, contrasty colors. And she does wear her hair long and fringelike, with chopped-off clumps here and there around her face.
But so what?
Drew, the man my mother mentioned, he’s my father. And, oh, I should explain that Mrs. Hinkle was our landlady. We had been renting out the right-hand side of her double-size frame house on a shady side street not far from the college for about a year and a half now.
I sort of snuggled up against the cat food in Aisle 3 and kept right on listening. Hinkle and Brantley were standing in Aisle 4.
“Well, won’t you be happy to see them go?” Mrs. Brantley asked in a loud whisper. “All those parties with the dancing and the blinking lights. They must’ve ruined your floorboards.”
I got a little mad at that one because the truth was Mrs. Hinkle’s floorboards weren’t much to begin with. The whole house was so infested with termites that a piece of it seemed to break off nearly every other day. Besides, the house had mice—and Mrs. Hinkle knew it. There were nests of field mice under the porch foundation and under the broken back steps and even behind the wooden boards under the kitchen sink. Not many people in California would be caught living in a dilapidated old house like that anymore.
Mrs. Hinkle, who was probably feeling bad about the house and wondering whom she would ever find to rent it to next, said, “Well, all of these college people, professors and the like, are a little pixilated these days.”
But Mrs. Bruntley kept right on telling Mrs. Hinkle what was wrong with us Mayberrys. (Me—by the way—I’m Sara Mayberry.)
“Now you know very well, La Verne, that those Mayberrys are the most pixilated you ever had in that house of yours. Him with that beard and those sandals and all that junk piled up and nailed together in the backyard that’s supposed to be art or sculpture or heaven-only-knows-what. And that high-school boy of theirs is just as bad. The spitting image of the father except no beard—yet. Of course I do feel just a wee bit sorry for that girl of theirs. She seems normal. Can’t think why.”
“Yeah,” Mrs. H. agreed. “Too bad about that. Nice little thing. Not too pixilated. Well, I have to be getting on.”
I had to be getting on, too, so I waved good-bye to Hinkle and Bruntley even though they couldn’t see me. I did peek around Aisle 4 though just in time to catch a last glimpse of them in their hairnets and their brown walking oxfords and flower-print dresses fading away in the direction of CANNED SOUPS and SOAPS AND DETERGENTS.
I was shaken up, of course, by the news. But for the moment I had to concentrate on my shopping, too. It was the day for D-burgers and I still didn’t know what D was going to stand for.
I guess I should explain about the alphabet-burgers. It was an idea Toby and I had cooked up. (Toby is the “spitting image” high-school boy without the “beard—yet,” and he also happens to be my brother.) Since Inez and Drew (Mom and Pop) had come off their Mexican-food kick—which was mostly guacamole, a sloshy avocado mash, and refried beans—they were on a raw-food kick and that was really rough. Raw mushrooms, raw cauliflower, raw zucchini, and—worst of all—raw fish.
“After it’s taken a bath in lime juice, of course,” Inez had said the first time she tried to get me to taste it. According to my mother the lime juice really “cooked” the fish. It was an old South Seas recipe. But the fish still tasted raw and slimy to me.
So what with all that, and some of the other sickening food kicks they’d been on, I’d gotten hit with doing most of the cooking for Toby and me for a couple of years now. Only what did I know about cooking? Hamburgers. Those were my big specialty. And could they ever get monotonous!
So that was why we invented the alphabet-burger. We had only just started on it the week before. A was apple-burgers. Fried apple slices, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, slapped on top of the hamburgers and eaten on toasted buns. Not bad.
Toby liked the apple-burgers so much he thought B should be banana-burgers. But I didn’t go for that at all, so we had bean-burgers. Baked beans where the fried apples had been the time before.
C was easy—cheeseburgers. It was so easy I felt guilty. I figured we would go through the alphabet twice just to make it harder. I wasn’t even thinking of letters such as X, Y, and Z at the time.
D was really hard, even the first time around. D, D, D . . . I could see I’d be wandering up and down the aisles of that supermarket for a long, long time.
By the time I got home it was nearly suppertime because I hadn’t even begun my supermarket shopping until after school. Mom was already packing her leotards and Pop was in the backyard dismantling the largest and most gruesome of his junk sculptures.