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| From afar, the fashion plate herself. |
"Sometimes I feel trapped. Trapped in a dream, not of my own volition..."
~Vicky Eydie (aka The Devine Miss M)
So the Cookie's made a trip into the Ohios - remember, it is not just one state, but one state with multiple personalities - last week to look at houses. Actually, Cookie took two three-day trips to Ohio to look at houses, with the husband making one trip to make sure I was right.
Oh, the sites we saw on that second trip! And that before we went to the first house!
The Husband and I were staying at our budget suite hotel of choice, which is nice but is not Grand Hotel. It puts us where we need to be, and gives us a kitchenette, and room if one of us (Cookie) wants to go to bed early, without forcing the husband to do the same. It also gives us the Waffle Breakfast option, which means you get to make your own Waffles at the comp breakfast.
And here our encounter starts, as Cookie is waiting on his make-it-yourself waffle. As it is the weekend, the place is crawling with guests and small children. I hear someone hacking up a lung and there to my right is an older woman, trying to look younger. Her hair is dyed so black it has a blue cast, and her skin is freckled from years of sunbathing. Clutched in her right hand is a plate holding a box of Kool cigarettes, and in her left, is a knotting wad of an old cotton white blanket in which she is bundled around her like a giant shell. Oddly, part of the blanket is between her legs, exposing gams that at one point must have been quite the sight in Myrtle Beach.
She looks like she is a giant egg.
Did I mention that it was 7:00 AM and 85 degrees outside?
I watch as she looks as carefully at the sterno trays holding pans of scrambled eggs, sliced kielbasa, turkey bacon, and sausage-like Holly Golightly examining the windows at Tiffany's. Her hand reaches out as Holly's would, to touch the window at Tiffany, so close, yet so far - but to this woman, it is to longingly touch the serving tongs of the breakfast meats. But like Holly, just before contact is made, she stops, and pulls back, as if an ancient voice says "No, this is not for you."
She sashays to the oatmeal pot, looking at the handle, repulsed by it and yet she takes a bowl and fills it with the glop.
Evidently, the ancient voice instructed her to take of the porridge: "You may have this."
After lingering over the gruel, she slowly slinks, sylphlike to my side, and browses the varieties of juices, as if they are rare gems. By this point, I and trying to wrestle my Golden Delicious Malt Waffle from the ancient waffle iron maiden, that is putting up a fight.
She clears her throat, I am about to say "I almost have it off..." when she says in a low seductive growl, "Isn't this a magnificent boofet?" She licks her lips, and at that moment, the plastic fork loosens the waffle and my hand jerks up sending said waffle up into the air like a flapjack in mid-air which I catch. The woman running the "boofet" appears and says "Nice catch."
I turn, quickly, lest she the look of horror on my face, and stare at a bowl of syrup cups, and when I turn around, I see the vamp slinking towards the seating area.
As I am gathering my wits about me, the vamp is evidently unfurling hers. And under that blanket? She has made a halter dress of her King bed flat sheet from her room. This is something that "a broad" would do in Harold Robbins' novel, after waking up in some strange stud's apartment in those novels of the sixties. I have never seen it in real life as the only Broads in my life have been my father's ex-wives.
My husband is eating at the high table, opposite her. She looks at us both and reaches her arms up over her head where they clasp, exposing her arms and her pits. She winks.
Cookie is torn. And I repelled, or am I about ready to take my plate over there and meet the creature from Room 313?
Thankfully my husband says "Let's go sit with Bill over there, and we get up and move to a table by the windows. Who is Bill? There is no Bill. It's "husband code" for let's get out of this place. As we ate, I watched her repeat the process with another man, then another. As she reaches for the ceiling in another stretch, the man's wife says they have to meet with the minister before the wedding, and she does so LOUDLY.
Finally, a leathered motorcyclist, one of several staying at the inn catches her eye.
We leave, but in my mind, she takes on three of the hog-riding men in her suite. She is a sassy pony for them, and they are her breakfast meats.
When we return to the Inn, there she is, out front. Lighting one cool off the dying stump of another, and chatting up a man in a wheelchair on oxygen who is smoking as well.
Part of me wonders if she really was able to find what she was obviously trying to find.
But part of me has made up my mind that thinking about it too hard ruins the moments at the "wonderful boofay."
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