Service

A dozen times that week Sheila had warned herself to listen for a change when the alarm rang at 9.00, at least on Tuesdays and Fridays when the cleaning girl came. Now there was the Service bus down the street already, and here she was just pulling herself out of bed again. Not that she really blamed herself. Harry was up and out by 7.00 to find his breakfast in the city, and the kids preferred messing around in the kitchen on their own before school. It was her Puritan upbringing, she supposed, that made her feel at all guilty about it. The TV commercials, too, those gay breakfast scenes with supercharged cereals and morning mouthwash.

Pulling on her woolen wrapper, she began to brush her fine, blond hair for her beauty parlor appointment this afternoon. Mr. Tony had absolute fits if she came in looking shabby–a personal insult to his integrity and his art, he always said. He was funny and faggoty that way, but she couldn’t help admiring him for sounding as though he really cared about it, that it was a genuine affront to him, as he said, if his “do’s were unduly undone.”