Vera presents Week #3 . . .the cast of "An Invitation to the Party:" Garnet's ex, Bowie, and her sister Ruby with an important concluding message from VeraQuoting brief excerpts from the novel, this week we meet Garnet's ex, Bowie, and her sister, Ruby.
Bowie: Garnet’s ex lives alone in a too-large, somewhat haphazardly rehabbed Victorian beauty with a wrap-around front porch, a porte cochere, and like many of his neighbors, a carriage house in back that has not held a carriage or a horse in almost a hundred years and presently shelters Bowie’s automobile. Today he sits in one of the porch’s four Cracker Barrel rocking chairs, bundled up in a filthy down jacket, its hood pulled up, his bible the Wall Street Journal in hand, getting his daily quota of fresh air. Though the March weather is being predictably execrable, a little adversity has not made him alter his routine. Morning means reading his WSJ on the front porch from vernal equinox through the cold, bitter end of fall, and his newspaper says spring has duly commenced. The Journal, fair, factual reportage unclouded by suspect opinion, unlike its sister New York paper which shall be nameless, that’s all he asks. And yes, he is capable of gratitude, despite claims to the contrary by Garnet. Thank the Almighty for down and fleece: how about that? Bowie knows what everyone in this place, his small town, thinks of him, not that he lets it bother him. Most people are fools, easily ignored by a man of substance like himself, a man who knows what’s what. He’s willing to admit having made the occasional miscalculation along the way—unwilling even now to call them mistakes—he’s always had his reasons. Sometimes though, watching his wife, of course he means ex-wife, her lined, set, pretty face looking straight ahead, walking his dog past the house he lives in now, he forgets what they were. And Bowie is not stupid. He may be slowly losing his mind, but he is not stupid he tells himself. Often. He does not quite understand now how he managed a law practice all those years. And some days it is an effort to make sure he has put on all the clothes necessary to appear in public without again being humiliatingly picked up on Main Street by that twerp, Officer Del Diller, and delivered in a squad car, lights flashing to Garnet, just because he’d remembered the socks but not the shoes on a rainy late February day. Some days Bowie argues with Colt, finding himself quite able to cite legal precedent. And once fairly recently they even discussed who actually gets to claim coverage under the Bill of Rights in present-day America. And who does not. But on other days Bowie is foggy on what it is a bill of rights might be, and the pursuit of happiness, cited in another founders’ document, sounds even to Colt like a race Bowie might have run as a much younger man. Ruby: Ruby is dress-up to Garnet’s dress-down. She is a kitsch-prone collector—Beanie Babies (remember them?), Hummel figurines, pewter tankards, you name it—and addicted to the shopping network. She favors pantyhose and outfits, to Garnet’s ad hoc socks and separates, and does not go out unless she has applied makeup and Giorgio. Each sister admiringly views the other as an exotic. However, Garnet sometimes regards Ruby’s Rolex and finds herself calculating the musk oxen, goats, and flocks of chickens, Heifer International could have provided third-world families. That’s what the timepiece represents to her. Then she is ashamed of herself. She loves her sister and is in no way perfect herself, in no way unsusceptible to the siren song of mammon and his baubles. Their baubles simply differ. Moreover, Garnet counts herself the lucky one in the name lottery, having never had someone she barely knows come up to her at a party and smirk drunkenly before warbling, “Garnet, it’s you” in a very bad imitation of Mr. Ray Charles. And no one has ever felt the slightest compulsion to request she refrain from taking her love to town. Then again, Thelonious Monk chose “Ruby, My Dear” rather than any less valuable alternative for the title of music that moves Garnet to tears every time she hears it. Coming next week: Meet the (other) dogs of "An Invitation to the Party" (Vera does NOT approve the coming week's subject and wishes to make it known that she strongly objected to the writer's insistence on additional canines in this manuscript. Vera says her presence was sufficient, nay, more than enough, and the reader will without doubt find the other dogs a most annoying distraction.) (She adds, it's fine with her if you skip next week. In fact, she recommends it.) "An Invitation to the Party" can be pre-ordered at: regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/an-invitation-to-the-party/
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April 2024
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