my trailer all eight of them midgets scurry like rats. They hide behind the hot water heater. Can’t nobody find them. It’s a mess, honey. Why don’t you come on over and run ’em off for me?’”
“How did that story come out?” the reporter asked, exhaling what sounded like cigarette smoke.
“I called the sheriff and they told me not to worry. There wasn’t really a ring of midget prostitutes living in her underpinning and that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s.”
“Wow. That is so interesting.” The reporter’s voice had that edge to it that all but says, “You’re more nuts than the people you write about.”
I could have stopped right then. The writer had plenty for her article about why my columns were favored over Hooch’s and Hildebrand’s, but I was bored and hungry and my husband would be playing pinball for several more hours so he wouldn’t have to deal with my vicious placenta-ruled self. Might as well humor us both for a while longer.
“There was also a woman up in Yancey County who got kicked out of the VFW dance hall for dirty dancing. She was sixty years old, for goodness’ sake. She said her husband had lost a leg and wanted her to enjoy going out dancing so he didn’t mind when she put on her miniskirt and hit the dance halls. It was the other women who minded and got her kicked out. She sued the town and won. She got on Inside Edition, too. I talked to her one day and she said, ‘Honey, I wasn’t dirty dancing. I like to shake and throw my body around a bit, sort of an odd Elvis style, and then I just shimmy all over but I wear underwear. Ain’t nobody seen my cat for nothing. I know women are jealous. Some old biddy got green as a frog and this is how all this got started. I don’t do no grinding. We may bump a little bit but I don’t make like I’m having no intercourse. Like I told you I’s married to a one-legged guy they called Stumpy. He had the gangrene. He likes his TV and I like my dancing.’
“You may remember all this,” I told the reporter, “because the Star had a big write-up and picture of her.”
As I talked I wasn’t sure anyone was still on the other line. I heard the occasional peck of a worn-out reporter’s keystrokes and what sounded like someone blowing smoke rings, but figured as I rattled on, she was more than likely working on another story or e-mailing her boyfriend. I didn’t care. When you’re confined to bed trying to hold back a birth, you’ll talk to anybody, even a dead phone.
“There was an old lady, probably about ninety-eight, I met in a nursing home and we got to talking about marriage and she told me her husband had no interest in sex. She was so well spoken, and beautifully dressed, an accomplished woman, and I felt so honored to be in her company. All was going great as she spoke of her life and works, then she started back on her husband and how he never met her needs. If you’re still on the phone, I’d like to add at this point in the interview that for some reason people tell me things I’d rather not hear. Or, well, I do like to hear them, but I’m not asking for such information. This woman tells me she was a real beauty, stunningly gorgeous, but her husband had no interest. She said, ‘Some days I’d get so burning up hot I’d have to go off by myself and make things right.’ I was shocked because she held up her third middle finger for me to see exactly what she was talking about and kept waving that finger at me. I wanted to run away. I was like, ‘Way too much information, lady.’”
I heard the phone click. “Mrs. Reinhardt? Are you still there? Sorry, I was on another call, were you saying something?”
“No. Not really. Just eating my lunch, trying to keep my stomach calm.”
“What’s wrong with it? Do you have the stomach flu?”
“No, I’m eight months pregnant and doctors have me confined to bed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, exhaustion in her voice. “Why can’t you get up?”
“They call it an irritable uterus. Irritable uterus syndrome. It just won’t behave.”
We said our good-byes and one month later, on my way to the pediatrician’s office for my brand-new daughter’s first checkup, I picked up a copy of the magazine with our interview. There was the picture, an innocent motherly photo of me and my oldest, underneath which blazed a sentence I will never forget: FAVORITE COLUMNIST SUSAN REINHARDT MANAGES TO SPIN YARNS DESPITE BEING CONFINED TO BED WITH A GRUMPY VAGINA.
Oh my Lord. I have never in my life laughed and cried so hard at the same time as I stared at that headline and wondered what my boss at the paper was going to think.
That afternoon the phone rang while I was tending my new baby. “How ya doing, honey?” my husband, who never calls me “honey,” asked. “You want some loving tonight, or is it true you’re suffering from a grumpy vagina?”
For years it’s been hard to live that one down. But it does come in handy when looking for an excuse to avoid sex on the nights I’m too tired.
“Oh, not tonight, honey,” I’ll say. “I have a grumpy vagina.”
Looking for Some Hot Stuff
Mama caught my sister and me dancing one Sunday afternoon on the carport and rushed out spewing Bible verses about the sins of our ways. This was the early ’70s and thank God she’s not like that anymore.
“Sabbath dancing will lead to nothing but a bad reputation,” she said, cutting off the stereo and Partridge Family album, David Cassidy’s voice extinguished and replaced with an echo of silent scorn. “First this. Then blue eye shadow. Next comes French kissing and ear blowing.”
Sometimes children have to break their mothers in like saddles. After a couple of years of junior high and the screeching emotions of our puberty, my own Southern Baptist mama had whipped a 180 and was wearing half-tops, hitting the Moose Lodge and Country Club and dancing with my daddy after imbibing in a couple of bourbon and waters.
“It’s OK as long as you don’t slow-dance,” she said, amending the rules of How Not to Sully Your Good Name and Ruin Chances for a Rich Husband. “But if you do slow-dance, make sure the boy does more than stand there and press into you. Make sure his feet are moving and his hands aren’t sliding to your fanny. That looks hussified. Remember, slow-dancing leads to other things.”
Yes, Lord, it does.
And I’m here to tell you about them.
In fact, the dance floor has led to the downfall of many a woman—and a man or two along the way.
Back when I was a bit of a boozer and young enough to have Farrah hair and Locklear thighs, the dance floor was where love sparked, lust ignited, and the hearts of many a young man or woman fell to the wood floors and bled to death under a disco ball.
Mama told us to be agreeable if a boy asked us to dance. It takes a lot for them to get up their courage and it’s rude to say no or even no, thank you. My sister and I knew the pain of being uglyish in junior high and standing in a clump of girls, watching the popular sultresses being asked to dance as we leaned against walls and pretended not to care.
But my mama had no idea of the weirdo magnet implanted in our bodies, a microchip that drew hordes of duds, creeps, latent pedophiles, personality-maimed fellows, and future serial killers toward us—guys who would spot our Farrah hair from across the pulsating room and slide over to our table.
“Wanna dance?” a yuckster would ask, and a picture of my mother shaking her finger in warning flashed. “Better dance with him. If you don’t, it will come back and haunt you. Remember, they’re humans with hearts, too. Just God’s Unclaimed Blessings.”
So my sister Sandy and I danced with the eyesores of the world, the prisoners on work release and weekend furloughs, and the deranged or homeless who’d collected enough in their cups to dance in a bar and have a draft or two. Most of them were nice enough to share a single dance with. No harm done. But if one of them kept asking us over and over to repeat the mercy move, we had to take care of matters best we knew how.
And that is where the Howdy