Tell-All

condolences I’ve destroyed during the past few days.
    From the downstairs powder room, echoing up through the silence of the town house, the sounds of Miss Kathie’s gorge rises with beef Stroganoff and Queen Charlotte pears and veal Prince Orloff , heaving up from the depths of Miss Kathie, triggered by the tip of a silver spoon touching the back of her tongue, her gag reflex rejecting it all.
    “Fuck ’em,” Miss Kathie says between splashes, her movie-star voice hoarse with bile and stomach acid. “They don’t care,” she says, purging herself in great thunderous blasts.
    The infamous advice Busby Berkeley gave to Judy Garland , “If you’re still having bowel movements, you’re eating too much.”
    Upstairs, the shredded affections rise, about to spill out onto the bathroom floor. Spiraling upward toward disaster. At the last possible moment I drop to my knees on the pink marble tile. I plunge my hand into the churning mess, the cold water lapping around my elbow, then swirling about my shoulder as I burrow my hand deep into the toilet’s throat, clearing aside wet paper. Clawing, scratching a tunnel through the sodden, matted layer of endearments. The soft mass of sentiments I can’t see.
    Downstairs, Miss Kathie heaves out great mouthfuls of gâteau Pierre Rothschild . Bombe de Louise Grimaldi. Aunt Jemima syrup. Lady Baltimore cake. The wet, bubbling shouts of undigested Jimmy Dean sausage.
    The plumbing of this old town house shudders, the pipes banging and thudding to contain and channel this new burden of macerated secrets and gourmet vomit.
    A “Hollywood lifetime” later, the water in the toilet bowl begins to recede.
    The shredded scraps of love and caring, the kind regards sink from sight. Freshwater chases the final words of comfort into the sewers. Those lacy, embossed, engraved and perfumed fragments, the toilet gulps them down. The water swallows every last word of sympathy from Jeanne Crain , the florid handwriting of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret , from John Gilbert, Linus Pauling and Christiaan Barnard . In her bathroom, the purge of names and devotion signed, Brooks Atkinson, George Arliss and Jill Esmond , the spinning flood disappearing, disappearing, the water level drops until all the names and notes are sucked down. Drowned.
    Echoing from the downstairs powder room comes the hawk and spit sound of my Miss Kathie clearing the bile taste from her mouth. Her cough and belch. A final flush of the downstairs commode, followed by the rushing spray noise of aerosol room deodorant.
    A “New York second” goes by, and I stand. One step to the sink, and I calmly begin to scrub my dripping hands, careful to pick and scrape the words
sorrow
and
tragedy
from where they’re lodged beneath each fingernail. Already, the lovely bouquet of pink roses and yellow lilies poisoned with salt water, the petals begin to wither and brown.

ACT I, SCENE SIX
    The next sequence depicts a montage of flowers arriving at the town house. Deliverymen wearing jaunty, brimmed caps and polished shoes arrive to ring the front doorbell. Each man carries a long box of roses tied with a floppy velvet ribbon, tucked under one arm. Or a cellophane spill brimming full of roses cradled the way one would carry an infant. Each deliveryman’s opposite hand extends, ready to offer a clipboard and a pen, a receipt needing a signature. Billowing masses of white lilac. Delivery after delivery arrives. The doorbell ringing to announce yellow gladiolas and scarlet birds-of-paradise. Trembling pink branches of dogwood in full bloom. The chilled flesh of hothouse orchids. Camellias. Each new florist always stretches his neck to see past me, craning his head to see into the foyer for a glimpse of the famous Katherine Kenton .
    One frame too late, Miss Kathie’s voice calls from offscreen, “Who is it?” The moment after the deliveryman is gone.
    Me, always shouting in response, It’s the Fuller Brush man. A Jehovah’s Witness. A Girl Scout, selling cookies. The same
ding-dong
of the doorbell cueing the cut to another bouquet of honeysuckle or towering pink spears of flowering ginger.
    Me, shouting up the stairs to Miss Kathie, asking if she expects a gentleman caller.
    In response, Miss Kathie shouting, “No.” Shouting, less loudly, “No one in particular.”
    In the foyer and dining room and kitchen, the air swims with the scent of phantom flowers, shimmering with sweet, heavy mock orange. An invisible garden.