Free Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints by Simon Doonan Page A

Self-sacrificing, proud to be British, always ready for a verbal tussle, Phyllis was incapable of capitulating. Betty was similarly committed to her own worldview, and equally nationalistic and feisty. Every night, the two would argue intensely with each other—over a bottle or two of banana-peel Château Doonan—mostly about what the English, i.e., Phyllis, had supposedly done to the non-English, i.e., Betty.
    According to Betty, not only did the English lack a sense of fun but they were also completely and utterly devoid of imagination, flair, and originality. They were, without exception, small-minded and stingy, and knew nothing about glamour. When they were poor they were pathetic, bitter, and put-upon. Give them money or power and they became cruel, imperialist, hypocritical, and grandiose. And if you doubted it, which one tended not to with Betty, she had a million examples, historic and contemporary, to prove her theses. Phyllis had no recourse but to defend herself and her country against grievous charges.
    Their often incomprehensible and heated debates usually ended with Betty singing the national anthem and imitating the queen, while Phyllis screamed “Rubbish!” with extra rolled r ’s.
    *  *  *
    My sister and I would never have dreamt of fighting with Aunt Phyllis. We worshiped and revered her. Every evening, we would accompany her to the Slope, a sharply angled public meadow where Lassie could run free. Here we would walk for hours with our favorite lodger, guiding her around piles of other dogs’ poop. For some horrid reason, my memories of the dog poop on the Slope are very much intact. Much of it was white. I have no idea why. White dog poop seems to be a thing of the past. Maybe someday it will come back into style.
    It was while returning from the poop-covered Slope that I fractured Phyllis’s skull.
    I was leading her down the street. We were chatting. She was correcting my pronunciation. All the kids at my rough, tough little school dropped their h ’s and t ’s. I was picking up the habit.
    “You sound dreadfully common. There’s an h in front of horrible, you know!” said Phyllis, castigating me at the top of her voice, thereby unwittingly castigating anyone common who was within earshot.
    As we came toward a lamppost, I elected to skip around it, à la Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. I assumed that Phyllis would make a corresponding move in the opposite direction. We would rehook our arms as soon as the obstacle had passed between us and continue on our merry way.
    But Phyllis was blind.
    So Phyllis kept walking, and then Phyllis smashed straight into the lamppost.
    Her skull cracked into the forged steel post, making a sound which lives in the audio archives of my brain even unto this very day. It’s filed under “Cranial Destruction—Sound Effects.” If I were to Google the incident in my own brain, I would probably type in something like “horribly shameful guilty skull crunching.”
    The gonging noise echoed up and down the street. People stared at me reproachfully: “You’ve killed a blind woman,” they seemed to say.
    Phyllis swayed, groaning softly. I was about to ask her if she was “seeing stars.” Fortunately I thought better of it.
    I was dumbstruck with guilt and horror. My poor aunt Phyllis had dragged herself back from the brink—she had kicked purple hearts!—only to be murdered by her idiot nephew, who wasn’t even a real nephew. I was terrified. Gayelord Hauser could not help her now. Even Lassie looked worried. We both waited for Phyllis to collapse to the ground. She twitched. I twitched.
    I did not have the presence of mind to apologize. Since I had probably killed her, there did not really seem much point. It was too late for regrets.
    She broke the painful silence.
    “Not to worry!” said Phyllis, with the air of a woman who had slammed into worse things, and set off toward home.
    By the time we reached our house, a massive lump had appeared on