Free Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane Williams Page A

die.”
    I’ve got that confident feeling.
    Then we hear the toilet bowl water.
    “Go away!” I said to Mother.
    Everybody in the original cast appears at my door—my father who was the President of the United States; Mother, who was also a President of the United States. I was a President of the United States. My two children are here who have been Presidents of the United States. My neighbor Gary Dossey who was in my high-school graduating class was a President of the United States.

GLEE
    We have a drink of coffee and a Danish and it has this, what we call—grandmother cough-up—a bright yellow filling. The project is to resurrect glee. This is the explicit reason I get on a bus and go to an area where I do this and have a black coffee.
    I emphasize, I confess, as well, that last night I came into a room, smiled a while and my laughter was like a hand on my own shoulder. As I opened up the volume of the television set, I saw a television beauty and a man wants to marry her and she says, “I don’t do that sort of thing.”
    While in their company, the woman changes her clothing and puts down an article of clothing and folds it. How finely she shows us her efforts. Even as we have that behind us,
the man speaks. His side-locks are worn next to his chin and his hair is marred by bright lights. The woman’s head is set against a dark-purple shield of drapery. But when something momentous occurs, I am glad to say there is a sense of crisis.
    And for Vera and me—we are no exception. I’ve lived for years. In Chicago our sunsets are red creases and purple bulges and we can amuse ourselves with them.

MY FIRST REAL HOME
    In there, there was this man who developed a habit of sharpening knives. You know he had a house and a yard, so he had a lawnmower and several axes and he had a hedge shears and, of course, he had kitchen knives and scissors, and he and his wife lived in comfort.
    Within a relatively short time he had spent half of his fortune on sharpening equipment and they were gracing his basement on every available table and bench and he added special stands for the equipment.
    He would end up with knives or shears that were so sharp they just had to come near something and it would cut itself.
It’s the kind of sharpening that goes beyond comprehension. You just lean the knife against a piece of paper.
    Tommy used to use him. Ernie’d do his chain saws.
    So, I take my knives under my arm and I drive off to Ernie’s and he and I became friends and we’d talk about everything.
    “I don’t sharpen things right away. You leave it—and see that white box over there?” he’d said. That was his office. It was a little white box attached to the house with a lid you could open and inside there were a couple of ballpoint pens. There was a glass jar with change. There were tags with rubber bands and there was an order form that you filled out in case he wasn’t there.
    He wasn’t there the first time I came back, at least I didn’t see him.
    I went up to the box and those knives were transformed.
    As I was closing the lid, he came up through the basement door that was right there and we started to chat and he has to show me something in the garden, so he takes me to where he has his plantings. It’s as if the dirt was all sorted and arranged, and then, when I said he had cut his lawn so nice, he was shining like a plug bayonet.
    All the little straws and grass were pointing in one direction.
    “I don’t mow like my neighbor,” he said.
    Oh, and then he also had a nice touch—for every packet he had completed there was a Band-Aid included. Just a man after my own heart. He died.
    I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.

BROOM
    I felt, off the start, right at home with him in this gorgeous New England spread-out home with a fantastic lawn and a pond with an island on it where Olivia de Havilland had gotten married and a tennis court and vegetable garden and a rose garden and what time of the