Carol Colin
 
 

 

INTERVIEW QUESTION NUMBER NINE:
HOW COME NO WOMEN ARE ON THE LIST HERE?

There are no women on the list here because they are all busy baking rhubarb pies.  The women are all out shopping at swap meets, looking for the perfect Father’s Day gift.  Some of them will end up buying battery-powered glass globes in which sand blows in a perpetual storm around a small plastic golfer.

There are no women on the list here because they are all reading the paper. They are all scanning the Thursday Food Section for the best buys in frozen diet dinners and vitamin-balanced dog food.  They are all clipping coupons for money-saving nights out at the all-new Sizzler Buffet Court.  The women are all going to choose the chicken, or, maybe, just the salad bar.

The women are all looking for work, just divorced, just out of beauty school, art school, Harvard.  They are all a little worried about the job situation.

The women are all needed at home to take the kids to Summer Bible Camp, to take their mothers to the Social Security Office.  The women are all at a meeting of the Neighborhood Association trying to form a committee for safer streets and more regular trash pick-up.

The women are all in bed dreaming that they are in a car with their husbands or lovers behind the wheel.  They are both naked and the women are all worried about how they’re going to get from the car to the house.

There are no women on the list here because the women are all deciding it’s time for a change.  They are all going to get a total makeover, or at least go to one of those photo studios where you get made over just to see what you’ll look like, and they give you a five-by-seven glossy to remind you later, after you’ve washed it all off. The women are all ordering a small acupressure device that will fit almost invisibly inside their right ears.  They are convinced it will work by the instructions, which warn:  SHOULD YOU LOSE TOO MUCH WEIGHT, DISCONTINUE USE AT ONCE. The women are all ripping the designer mini-blinds from their windows because they no longer have anything to hide.

The women are all under the influence of solar flares and lunar cycles. They are all spending every moment of their free time in video arcades, usually when they tell you they’re going mall walking.  They’re in there pounding hell out of those joysticks.  They’re all better than their kids but they’ll never admit it and you’ll never catch them.

The women are all taking lessons.  They are all learning to belly dance and to protect themselves from would-be rapists with one well-placed kick, or is it by weeping and vomiting, or is it mace. The women are all learning to use guns.

The women are all practicing freezer voodoo:  When somebody gets in their hair a carefully worded hex is committed to paper and placed in a tuna can full of water next to the ice trays. Let it freeze. Leave it there.  This really works.

There are no women on the list here because it was too hard to keep their looks living on the street in a cardboard box; because they all cried at the press conference, they tore at the prying cameras with their Press-on Nails, which broke. There are no women on the list here because Tammy Wynette wrote "Stand By Your Man" because Reba McIntire wailed about the babies dow-un the hall because Patsy Cline died too soon and because K.D. Lang won’t eat meat and talked about it in Montana.  There are no women on the list here because a Roche Sister was willing to get down on her knees to scrub behind the steam table.  There are no women on the list here because Frank Sinatra was so skinny and cute and because Elvis worshipped his mother and because Mariel Hemingway walked away from Woody Allen in Manhattan. There are no women on the list here because they were all late with last month’s MasterCard payment and when the operator told the clerk the charge was declined the women all buckled en masse like six square blocks of unreinforced brick in the big one. There are no women on the list here because the women were all thrown for a loop. Their cars wouldn’t start, the train was derailed, the rain wouldn’t stop, the only Volvo they would ever own was totaled, and the insurance wouldn’t pay.

   

Copyright © 2002 Carol Colin.  All Rights Reserved.

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