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2001-07-10 | 4:22 p.m.

The last time I saw Carmela I asked her if she wanted to talk to my sister about getting her house cleaned. Carmela doesn't trust her housekeeper anymore; my sister cleans houses for a living---"and she won't steal from you," I added crassly.

So today Diane came over to wash her car---formerly Bambi's car, but Bambi recently bought a '99 mini-van---and saw Carmela, so they talked about the housecleaning. When I first mentioned it to Diane, she told me firmly, "I won't do it for less than fifteen dollars an hour." Good, I said. That is a fair price, especially around here. But I wondered if she'd stick to it. Sure enough, when she came back in her lips were pursed. "What?" I said. "She didn't want to pay fifteen?"

"Nah," she said. "I said I'd do it for ten."

"Why??"

"Cause she hustled me. She's so nice."

She looked at the chicken salad I was making. "You can have some," I said.

She took a bite and then immediately started spitting it out into her hand.

"Euh! Cucumber!"

She spit more onto a paper plate, then grabbed a paper napkin and started scraping her tongue with it. "Oh, for heaven's sake!" I said, sounding like my mother. I looked around to make sure Jasper, my two-year-old son, couldn't see my 50-year-old sister acting like a two-year-old.

On her way out the door, she jerked her head in the direction of Carmela's house and said, "You know what it reminds me of, over there? An old W-H-O-R-E." She spelled it to prevent Jasper from repeating it.

"Oh, come on." I knew what she meant; the French Provincial furniture, marble fireplace surround, the abundance of silk flowers, porcelain and gold leaf, but I also know how much all that stuff means to Carmela, and it sounded disrespectful.

"Everything's so gaudy," Diane went on. "She has like 'The Blue Room,' and the pink bathtub�"

"At least the decor is consistent throughout."

"Yeah, she definitely stuck with the THEME."

The last time I was over there, Carmela told me how she tried to give something to her daughter, but her daughter said, "It doesn't match my things. It's not my style." And when she tried to give a grandfather clock to her son, he said, "You enjoy it for the time being. I'll get it later." Every time Carmela told me a story like this, she'd shrug and make a sad Pierrot face, as if to say, What can you do? She said she had decided to start giving things away to people she likes. She said she told her daughter, "Please don't sell my things at a garage sale."

I felt bad for Carmela. I wonder if her daughter would even go to the trouble of having a garage sale. Maybe she'd just call Goodwill and tell them to send out a truck.

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