Cheapskate in Love by Skittle Booth Page A

vacuum
cleaner, burnt pans, junk mail, and an abundance of odds and ends of no clear
value. She had discovered that he had a miser’s tendency for hoarding items,
although she couldn’t understand how he thought that some of the stuff could
ever be used again. He had an overwhelming inertia, she decided, when it came
to personal tidiness. At first, she had been hesitant to toss items out, but
the more she saw, the more certain she became that he had the habits of a pack
rat and couldn’t do it himself. Ruthlessly, she rid the apartment of what she
considered unnecessary. She then dusted, swept, and scrubbed all the surfaces
in the apartment. The floor was parquet wood tiles ,
and she washed it on her hands and knees, changing the soapy water every ten
square feet because it became so black so quickly.
    Bill’s apartment literally sparkled when she was done. She
looked around in satisfaction at her efforts. The furniture, floors, bathroom,
and windows all glowed with the removal of years of dust, dirt, scum, and
grime. All the smaller objects in the space were now neat and tidy. She smiled
at what she had accomplished, until her eyes turned toward the bed and its
occupant, and then she frowned. One last project demanded her attention.
    Determined, she approached the bed. Bill was snoring
heavily. Although there had been a few periods, while she scoured and
straightened, in which his snoring had been replaced with quiet breathing, the
sounds of a chainsaw had resumed. They would have unnerved a timid person, but
they did not alarm her. With delicate hands, she unlaced Bill’s muddy shoes and
pulled them off. Next, she took off his mud-splattered socks. Then she
unbuckled his dirty pants and yanked those off, too. She decided to leave his
soiled polo shirt on, because she thought he might be upset if she used a pair
of scissors to remove it, but that was a difficult decision. The cheap shirt
had made the bed dirty, and her hands were itching to rip it off him. Yet she
knew that men can be childishly attached to old
clothing for no good reason. Her deceased husband had been like that. To calm
her offended sensibility, she pulled the top sheet and bedspread up to the chin
of the sound sleeper. He had not moved during her disrobing operations.
    “As soon as you wake up,” she said to sleeping Bill, as she
stood next to him, “I’m going to strip every piece of clothing from you. I want
to shave your head, too. What did you do to it? It looks awful. You’re
definitely no sleeping beauty with that hair. ”
    Since he was traveling far away in the land of Nod and
couldn’t reply, her judgment went uncontested. She looked down upon him with
the pleasure that comes from feeling indisputably in the right. Victory,
however, did not make her proud, for immediately she went to the laundry room
to wash his dirty clothes.

 

Chapter 11

 
 
    Later on that evening around seven, after Helen had neatly
stored away Bill’s now clean clothes in his closets and dresser, she brought
bags of food supplies and the necessary cooking utensils to his apartment from
hers to make chicken soup. She thought the soup would do him some good, when he
woke up. While she chopped vegetables and cooked the meal, he continued to
sleep and snore and didn’t appear to be any nearer to rising. She had worked
hard cleaning his apartment and couldn’t postpone her dinner, so when the soup
was ready, she sat down at the dining table and ate. It had been many, many
years since a dinner had been eaten at that table.
    The aroma of well-made chicken soup filled the apartment. It
was the finest smell of food to ever originate in that space since Bill had
lived there, and he was drawn from unconsciousness by the delicious odor. His
raucous snoring subsided to the quiet rise and fall of normal breathing. He was
no longer sleeping, but he lay still with his eyes shut, sniffing like someone
who lies in a meadow during spring, when wildflowers are blooming, and