ESTHER SAID, “I loved that bit about ‘I’m pregnant and it didn’t even wake me up.’
“Uh-oh,” said Otto, “I think the conversation is going to take one of those anti-male turns.”
It might have, except that Clark, who may have had one too many, gave it an anti-isolationist turn instead.
“Jeez, I miss door-to-door salesmen,” he claimed. “It used to be kind of exciting when somebody would ring the doorbell, and you’d go there and it was somebody you didn’t know. Now you’d call the cops, you see somebody you don’t know going around the neighborhood. You’d press the panic button on your alarm system. It’s the fucking fortress mentality. The bomb-shelter mentality. We’ve all retreated into our little houses and our little neighborhoods, and we only open the door to people we know and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves, but not in my back yard. I’ve got my door locked, and I do not choose to know anybody I don’t already know, thank you. Who’s that knockin’ at my back door, somebody I don’t know, somebody not like me? Bringing me news of the world that lies beyond my little corner of it? No, thank you. Slam! Not interested. That’s why there aren’t any door-to-door salesmen anymore. No intrusions allowed. No interlopers. We don’t want the outside world worming its way into the isolated little nest we made for ourselves, you know what I mean? That’s what you’ve done here, isn’t it, Peter? Tried to do? Isolate yourself? Cut yourself off from the world? Does it work? Have you succeeded in keeping the world away?”
“No,” I said, and things might have gotten very gloomy indeed if Louise hadn’t struck up a boogie-woogie introduction to Miranda’s lively and hilarious improvised version of the Yummy Good Baked Goods jingle.
[to be continued]
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