Vanity Insanity Read Online Free PDF

the side, raised one eyebrow each, and looked away. Almost mirror images.
    While Lucy’s world was focused on her First-Communion hairstyle and POW bracelets, Octavia was dealing with the recent death of her husband of forty-two years. At sixty-six, she was learning to drive herself to new places and praying for the souls of all she knew at daily Mass at Saint Patrick’s in Fremont. Warren Buffett was keeping an eye on the American economy as it was experiencing current account deficits, which led to the Dollar Crisis in 1971. Later that year, the Nebraska Cornhuskers would win the game of the century on Thanksgiving Day, a game that went up and down with more thrills than a roller coaster. Johnny “the Jet” Rodgers played in that game. On the other side of a big ocean, young Gordon Sumner was training to become an English teacher at Northern Counties Teacher Training College in England.
    And a strong little girl and a strong older woman made great efforts to look good in my mother’s basement.

4
    Evelyn Perelman: Jerry Curl, Relaxer
    Friday night, October 20
    1972
    W hat I remember more than anything else was how she smelled.
    Mrs. Perelman, the mother of my best friend, A.C., would enter a room and fill my head with a beautiful scent that triggered the pleasure center in my brain. Of course, it made me feel very uncomfortable as an eleven-year-old in the presence of his best friend’s mother, feeling so strange. I always squirmed and found a reason to leave whenever I saw her. Later I realized on a date in college that the fragrance she always wore was White Shoulders. I couldn’t date that girl again because of the strong smell association. Dating my best friend’s mother? Just weird.
    Evelyn Perelman was an anomaly. And not just to me. Something of a mystery always hung around her. She was tall and beautiful. She was a black woman in the white side of town. She was quiet, intelligent, and serious. Few people knew her well, yet she was very warm and approachable ifyou were ever able to engage in a conversation with her. My mom was one of those lucky ones, or perhaps one of the few who did not look critically upon a black Catholic woman married to a white Jewish man, living on the west side of Omaha in the late sixties and early seventies.
    That cool Friday night in October of 1972, Evelyn and A.C. Perelman showed up at the front door of our little, white house. Few if any clients that I remember ever entered the front door except for Grandpa Mac. Evelyn Perelman had a standing appointment with my mother one Friday night a month. Because of her heavy schedule as a microbiologist at the Med Center, Evelyn was unable to have her hair done during the workweek. I suppose she could have come on Mom’s busy Saturday shift, but I always assumed that she preferred not to be around the other women. My mom, an oddity herself as the only single parent that I was aware of, and Evelyn Perelman found an ally in each other, I guessed. More than likely the two enjoyed their girls’ night, and I know A.C. and I never complained about it. A.C. Perelman could hang out as long as our mothers talked; we always hoped they would get into a long, serious, and deep discussion.
    This week, when the doorbell rang, I raced to the front door as always. As I turned the knob, A.C. exploded into our tiny living room doing his best imitation of our most recent hero, the one and only Flip Wilson. “Hey, what you see is what you get!” The eleven-year-old, imitating Flip Wilson’s Geraldine persona, wiggled his body as he walked in the room and flashed his lashes up and down at me. “Heya, Killer. This pink dress I’m wearing? The devil made me do it!”
    I snorted and hit him. Mrs. Perelman darted a disapproving glance at A.C. as she greeted my mother. A.C. was notorious for his silly imitations and stupid antics, but I think the black accent and extreme cultural stereotype, more than the feminine whiles, perturbed Evelyn. A.C. and I were