Taking Care of Terrific Read Online Free PDF Page B

liked it. So now she uses the same stuff, once a month, and dyes her hair blue.
    Her skin is sort of yellow-gray. Her nose is bright red, and the whites of her eyes are pink. Through her support stockings, you can see that her legs are crisscrossed with knotted purple veins.
    She's an honest-to-God human rainbow.
    My mother says that with the exception of the blue hair, which is just an idiotic idiosyncrasy, everything else is a visible symptom of a serious illness. I heard her tell Mrs. Kolodny that once. She wanted her to make an appointment with an internist.
    "You have visible symptoms," I heard my mother say, "of liver damage, high blood pressure, and inefficacy of the peripheral vascular
system. I want you to go to Dr. Goldberg for a complete check-up. You are a seriously ill woman."
    "Dr. Crowley," Mrs. Kolodny said huffily, "do I get the housework done to your satisfaction?"
    "Yes," said my mother.
    "Then you and I got no problem. The housework you can complain about if you want. My body, that's
my
problem, not yours."
    "But—" said my mother.
    "Butt out," said Mrs. Kolodny.
    If I ever told my mother to butt out, she would hustle me off to Wilma Sandroff's office for intensive therapy, and I would have "hostile interpersonal relationships" stamped forever on a chart.
    But nobody hustles Mrs. Kolodny.
    "No," I said to her, licking frosting off my fingers, "I never read
Jane Airy.
I never heard of it. Lend it to me if it's any good. Listen, I want to ask you a personal question."
    She tensed up. She doesn't like personal questions. Her bloodshot eyes narrowed to slits and she looked at me very suspiciously.
    "How much does my father pay you?" I asked. "Just in general terms. Do you consider yourself well paid?"
    She relaxed. She didn't consider money too personal. "Yeah," she said. "He pays me enough."
    "Well," I asked, "what if he didn't? What would you do if you thought he wasn't paying you enough? Or if you didn't like the working conditions?"
    She shrugged and began licking frosting off her own fingers. "I'd tell him so," she said. "Listen, in that
Jane Airy
book—"
    "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "What if you told him so and he said, 'Tough'? Then you'd be out of a job, right?"
    "I suppose," she said with a sigh. The sigh meant: so what?
    I was getting excited. "You'd be out of a job because they could get another housekeeper, right? But what if they
couldn't?
What if every housekeeper on Marlborough Street—no; every housekeeper in
Boston
—got together, and they all said they wouldn't work unless everybody's pay was raised?"
    Now she looked suspicious again. "Look, Enid, if you're trying to get me to join some
club—
"
    (Notice that name,
Enid?
The sound of it? How it has the same ending as
stupid?
)
    "No." I sighed. "It was just hypothetical. I've
just been thinking about something. About the power that people have if they band together."
    Mrs. Kolodny heaved herself to her feet. "I'm not the banding-together sort. You want to band me together with someone, it better be tall, dark and handsome. Listen, in
Jane Airy,
she goes to work for this guy named Mr. Rochester. Now this Mr. Rochester, he—"
    "You mean
Jane Eyre!
" I said. "Sure, I read that in school! That's a pretty good book!"
    "Don't tell me how it comes out," she warned. "I'm just getting to the good part now. But listen, if I ever want a different job, that's the kind of job I want, with a guy like Mr. Rochester."
    I got up and headed toward the kitchen door. I could tell she was dying to turn all her machinery back on. "I wasn't really talking about jobs, anyway," I said. "I was sort of talking about root beer Popsicles."
    But she didn't hear me. All the engines were chugging away again, and she was humming at the top of her voice. A love song. Mrs. Kolodny, the Technicolor lady, is a real romantic at heart. Wait till she reads further and finds out what Mr. Rochester has locked away upstairs.

Chapter 8
    Bearable would be