Free After Claude by Iris Owens Page A

Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
    With that discreet hello, my Calvary began. At first Rhoda-Regina was genuinely grateful for my company, but it soon became clear to me that she wanted all the advantages of my stimulating personality with none of the inevitable dues. After all, when two individuals live together, regardless of sex, they must consider the differences in taste, or those two persons will begin to feel like a Calcutta family of fifteen packed into a drainage pipe. It was as if Rhoda was refusing to acknowledge my corporeal existence. I am not a genie. I do not vanish into a bottle upon solving my master’s problems. Just because I happen to have uncanny insight does not mean that I am other than a flesh-and-blood woman with normal appetites. I admit right now, a confession to all the world, I need a place to sleep, a quiet, private place, not a mattress in some crank’s studio. I never could communicate this simple truth to Rhoda-Regina. For a one hundred percent revolutionary, which she claims to be, defender of women’s rights, black rights, prisoners’ rights, Puerto Rican, gay, and Vietnamese rights, when it came to my rights, the good old capitalist line was drawn. In short, Rhoda-Regina refused to give up the bedroom, the only logical division of space, since she expected me to remove myself from her studio whenever she felt the slightest urge to create more of those ridiculous plastic torsos. I am not a machine. I am not an automaton. I cannot be turned on and off. Excuse me. I’m only human. I’m affected by my physical and mental state.
    I admit I needed a great deal of sleep upon my return to America. It also happened, due to five years spent in another time zone, plus jet lag, which is an established scientific fact, that I slept at unpredictable hours. Shoot me, or, better yet, give me the bedroom and ignore me.
    It was not as though she needed her bedroom for romantic purposes. Never. You could conclude, as R.-R.’s houseguest, that the entire white male population had been wiped out by infectious hepatitis.
    Rhoda’s so-called sculpture made sleeping in the studio a wide-eyed nightmare of being laid to rest in a communal grave. As I may have mentioned, she called herself an artist. Why not? Old maid was never anyone’s most flattering self-image. Being a Boy Scout, she couldn’t simply call herself an artist. Oh, no, she felt obligated to make things in order to merit the title. What she made were these plastic body fragments. Thumbs five feet tall. Lips you could walk through. Ears you could swim in, and then, tipping the other side of the scale, full figures four inches tall, legs you could wear on a thin gold chain, microscopic hands you could sit on the head of a pin. These plastic amputations filled the room, because needless to say, crowds were not rushing to her door to snatch up her productions. You didn’t exactly have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out her size fixation. A person of Rhoda-Regina’s proportions must have fluctuated between feeling she was a captive in the land of pygmies or a giant who could hang us all from her charm bracelet. How often I used to tell her, “Rhoda, stop brooding about your size. Having a perfect figure may be a blessing, but believe me, it’s not the only thing in life. A saint may come along who is not primarily concerned with proportions, but when he does, if you drag him in here, be prepared to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
    That great liberal wanted me awake, alert, available, job hunting, shopping, cleaning at all times, except—important exception—at mealtimes. Then, she wished me dead. From the way she carried on, you would think that throwing an extra cup of water in the soup was going to make Rhoda-Regina a pauper. Truly it hurts me to make petty accusations. Mine is a large, a generous nature, and it’s therefore not like me to notice how base practically everyone is. My God, you would think we were lost in a