Theresa Lewis

I learned early on that when my friend Marlene and I go out in public, I have to make her swear that she will behave herself and not do anything to embarrass me. It is a painful oath for her to keep, but nevertheless a very necessary one for me to make her keep, if I going to be able to maintain some sense of dignity on my outings with her.

You have no idea what kind of nonsense she can think up. Marlene is truly a wonderful and unique individual whose mind is constantly raging with the kind of thoughts that most of the rest of humanity never have. She is a mature woman (I dare not call her a senior yet). She has tremendous poise (when she wants) however, most of the time it is too painful for her to continue and such was the case one day last week.

Our day started off nicely when she offered me to go to our friend’s office to see him while he was on his work break. With nothing better to do, I agreed to go with her and forgot to make her promise to behave herself. It didn’t really matter anyway since we were going to stay in the car while she asked him if he wanted her to go to the local doughnut shop to get him a tankard of coffee. Yes, Joe sure did want a jumbo coffee. He was working the night shift and needed it to keep himself awake and alert as he was already feeling tired.

My thought was that she going to go to the drive-through as usual, but she didn’t. She said she wanted a doughnut so she parked the car and we headed inside the doughnut shop where she ordered both of us a soft, fresh, sumptuous Boston cream doughnut.

The fellow behind the counter picked up a square of what looked like a very thin, almost transparent piece of waxed paper. He used it to pick up the doughnut and he passed it to us. The seating area was quite full but there were a few seats available in the middle of the crowd. We plunked ourselves down and I noticed that the paper had stuck to the chocolate icing on the doughnut. We both tried to remove the paper slowly and carefully, but no matter if we did do it slowly and carefully, about ninety percent of the icing remained stuck on the paper.

Personally, I was a little disappointed because I love that icing. However, being a mature woman myself, I was willing to suck up (no pun intended) that little disappointment because I knew that sometimes in life shit happens and I knew that in the grand scheme of life, losing a piece of icing didn’t really matter. Marlene, on the other hand, took it quite personally.

There, in front of everyone, she picked up the paper with the icing on it. She rolled back her lips and bared all her teeth in a most unflattering and unnatural grimace and began scraping the icing off with her teeth. Once that was done, she licked the paper clean. Perhaps she thought that with the sheet of paper held up in front of her face the other patrons wouldn’t know what she was doing. Oh, was she ever wrong.

I admit that the paper, if held at a distance of perhaps a yard away, it might have been a little hard to see through, but she had it scraping on her teeth. I could see everything she was doing.

Lord, how I was kicking myself for thinking I didn’t have to make her swear to behave herself that night. I was mortified. I was hoping that the floor would open up and swallow me.

When I asked her what she was doing, (as if I had to ask that when there was no doubt in my mind or in anyone else’s mind) Marlene replied that she paid for a doughnut with chocolate icing on it and by God, she intended to eat all the icing too.

As for me, I used my index finger to get some of my icing off the paper then I sucked it off my finger in as delicate and lady-like manner as I could.

The End