Free After Claude by Iris Owens Page B

lifeboat from the way she rationed the food. As a defender of women’s rights, she consistently boasted that she hated to cook. I, being practically European, love to cook, but not when I’m expected to rub two potatoes together and produce a banquet. Furthermore, everything they say about two women in a kitchen is true, which may be, women’s lib or no women’s lib, why all great chefs are men.
    So Rhoda did the cooking, and the shopping, since I’m no mind reader, and she would invariably try to squeeze a week’s dinner out of a barely adequate two-course meal. Since my sleeping habits were, by her standards, irregular, it follows that my eating habits were equally reprehensible. I admit right now, let me volunteer the information, I am not one of Pavlov’s dogs. I get hungry when I get hungry, not when someone rings a bell at me. True, I’ll eat just to be sociable, but acute low blood sugar is another matter. I dared to need nourishment when, according to Rhoda-Regina’s lights, I should have been out demonstrating, marching, protesting, anything, but not eating.
    Rhoda-Regina returned late one evening from her teaching sinecure, a cushy little setup where, for thirty-eight dollars of taxpayers’ money per day, she imparts to minority children the mysteries of the plastic ear lobe, information which undoubtedly propels them directly out of the ghetto into public office.
    She headed straight for the refrigerator like a dog obeying a supersonic whistle. At first I thought she was having an apoplectic fit because I hadn’t found the time to wash the bowl; inmates were expected to keep their utensils clean. It gradually dawned on me that she was flipping over a modest snack I had downed to combat protein starvation.
    “You have to be kidding, Rhoda,” I defended myself. I was reluctant to antagonize her, but just because someone is putting you up for a couple of days is no reason to become her whipping boy. I have learned the hard way when it’s appropriate to apologize. If it ever comes to pass that my behavior inconveniences anyone, I will be the first to say sorry, but I refuse to go around excusing myself for exercising normal functions. I include stemming severe malnutrition among the norms.
    “Have you no consideration at all?” She nestled the empty bowl against her broad, flat chest. “Couldn’t you leave a piece of the pot roast for me?”
    Now I employed what might seem a very strange, even dishonest tactic to anyone who was not looking into Rhoda-Regina’s severe eyes. I said, “What pot roast?”
    She gasped and loosened her grip on the bowl, causing me at first to believe she had broken it, until I identified the blood smeared over the front of her white crocheted shawl as good old American ketchup. Rhoda-Regina favored ponchos, shawls, capes, and bulky peon skirts, Communist disguises which she foolishly imagined minimized her bulk.
    “The pot roast that was in this bowl, pig.” Rhoda-Regina was someone who couldn’t afford, cosmetically speaking, to get angry. Her coloring went from cooked to raw, and her round, brown, doggie eyes, under heavy black brows, shriveled into burned meatballs.
    Rhoda-Regina looked down at her stained shawl. “Ketchup.” The word hissed out of her cooked head. “Where the hell did ketchup come from?” Needless to say, it came from the Heinz factory, but I didn’t think she was in the mood for lighthearted banter.
    “Oh, of course,” I solved the mystery, “Sidney drowns everything in ketchup.”
    “Sidney?” Her face resumed a more normal color, for her, that is. I had snapped the spine of her seizure.
    “He came by to see you this afternoon.” I continued to administer the successful treatment.
    She smelled a rat. “Sidney knows I work Tuesdays.” Oh, God, that madly jealous mind of hers was busy thinking the worst. In solving one crisis I had created another. As if I would touch that black pudding with a ten-foot fork. It never occurs to these