The One and Only

Yesterday, I had just stepped into the shower for what was promising to be a magnificent post-workout rinse when my phone rang.

I smiled and picked it up, excited about who might be on the other line. 'Is he calling from his work line?' I thought. But instead of hearing a familiar, deep voice that sends shivers down my spine, I was surprised by a southern drawl that occupied the middle register.

"Is this my favorite aunt? Aunt Millie?" It was said with such gusto that my heart immediately expanded and felt warm.

I giggled. "No, I'm not Millie," I said with a big dumb grin on my face. "But I sure wish I was." It's funny how seconds earlier, I was content being HellCat--a HellCat who was sans clothes and only half-wet from the shower--but now a new desire crept into my heart. I wanted to be this man's favorite aunt.

He said that he was sorry and hung up. I stood in the shower, bewildered. What kind of fabulous, emotionally fulfilling life did Millie lead? What kinds of memories did this man have of his favorite aunt? Did she have a hot ass? Or did she just make hot, delicious buns for Thanksgiving?

The questions continued. Will I ever have a family of my own that loves me as much as this man loves Millie? Does anyone ever unknowingly call the wrong number and ask for their "favorite friend/fuck buddy/softball teammate/editor Grae?" I wondered. And I wondered. I rinsed. And repeated.

57 minutes later, I had given Millie backstory.

She was born in New Hampshire to Joeseph and Mary MacLastName on February 1, which made her an Aquarius and already positive she knew everything. She was teaching the other babies in the hospital nursery how to cry in order to get more attention, as well as how to wiggle their way out of those dreadful little hospital bracelets. Unbeknownst to Millie, this trick was so effective that two other babies were unidentifiable and went home with the wrong parents (luckily the Jones family had a successful dentistry, and Johnnie, the wrong baby, had a proclivity towards drills and pain. The other family, the Warwicks, took home little Tim. Tim would grow up and live in the basement, satisfying his mother's need for Swanson frozen dinners twice a day at noon and 5PM. His father had desire for nothing but his pipe, which Tim proudly cleaned and refilled for him, even years after his father's death in 1973).

Millie was a lovely little girl. She loved flirting with older men, much to Mary MacLast name's dismay. Millie adored frilly dresses, playing with her doll Sally, and making HAM radios for all the children in the neighborhood at rock-bottom prices. She used the money to feed her pink ceramic piggy she had named Party.

In her youth, Millie ran about the town like any child. She was mostly unnoticed by adults and would do normal things like eat ears of corn straight out of her neighbors' fields and then go to the picture show. No one in the town suspected that her smarts at acquiring monetary funds and her love of men were all means to an end, even at that tender age.

One day, when Millie was 16, she realized that the small town she lived in was no longer interesting to her. She had made all the radios she could stand, and the boys were no longer satisying her needs (and those were the only two things she did with her time). In order to feel like she spent her Friday nights well, she required dancing on country roads (with the car headlights on, of course) followed by heavy petting. Then, she needed french fries at the local hamburger stand.

Millie refused to compromise on the order in which those things came, and the boys nutritional peculiarities always ended up outweighing her needs. Her steady boyfriend of that fall, Howard, always insisted on the french fries first, because he said the starch helped his extremities get limber for all the dancing and necking. Millie, however, needed the starch to recover from all the activity.

It finally dawned on Millie as she was sitting in the backseat of Howard's car, wearing her now-rumpled cardigan sweater. She stuffed soggy fries in her mouth, and was saddened by the thought of those very same fried potatoes being new and warm just three hours before. She had betrayed them by letting them sit and rot. She was suppsoed to honor herself and the fries, and she had done neither.

Millie crammed the rest of the fries in her mouth with as much love as she could muster and demanded to be driven home. Of course, Howard couldn't understand a word she said because of all the food in her mouth, so she used sign language to convey her ideas and Howard eventually started the car. He drove her home, not because he had understood her motions to mean "Take me to my house," but rather because he was convinced that she had seen a large Jabberwocky-type creature somewhere (in the sky, perhaps?) and was convinced it was going to demolish the local library. As the car rambled towards their neighborhood, Howard was marvelling at the expressive qualities of Millie's hands while they were covered in french fry grease and Millie was busy planning her future (that did not include another french fry...ever).

She was going to leave Nebraska and go find some city men, who were surely more nutritionally advanced from these fly-over-state yokels. And maybe she would also find a job or something, perhaps as a UN leader. Or a model.

tomorrow! more Millie! g