We used to think she was all right, but eventually we'd had enough. I say we, but my wife had the worst of it. I was mostly just an irritated spectator. She had been part of my wife's rock group, a rock group in this case being women, or mostly women, who get together to paint decorative designs on rocks and stones. The idea is that the stones are left hither and thither to be found by strangers in the hope of brightening someone's day. It's a random act of kindness.
Some of the rock group seemed decent people, but a few were problematic, tending towards gossip and fixating on things which wouldn't matter to anybody sane. I guess that's what happens when you hang out in a group. There's always one, sometimes two or three.
Anyway, we used to think she was all right, like I said. She was small, round, approximately Mexican, and always with a certain twinkle in her eye. She was distraught when her little dog died, and publicly so on facebook. I took pity and did a painting of the former pooch in the hope of providing some solace. She seemed to like that. I also painted a sign for her rock spot - a patch of garden in the grounds of her local library where people could leave rocks they had painted in exchange for any which took their liking. The sign was in acrylic paint on a large breeze block.
The pattern eventually emerged that she liked to get free stuff, which I only noticed as my wife became more and more irritable. The woman's facebook page was mostly sob stories, pleas for this or that, did anybody have such and such a thing she could borrow, or maybe just have? She had plenty of painted rocks from my wife, even a few of the old vinyl records which take my wife hours to decorate with elaborate mandalas. She added googly eyes and pipe cleaner legs to one of them and sent the photo back.
Look! I made a spider! Isn't he the cutest!
Others she embellished with bunny ears, or in one case, circular mouse ears so that he can be Mickey! My wife said nothing but I could tell she was upset, given all the work she'd put in. My own reaction was closer to nausea. I don't want anything to do with adults who are into Disney, particularly not anyone affecting to be on first name terms with the mouse. Life is too short.
My wife specifically became irritable, as I recall, following the death of the dog. It was perfectly natural that the woman should be distraught under the circumstances, but the figurative daily wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media seemed out of all proportion, and it felt as though she might be milking it somewhat. Personally, I tend to experience grief as a private thing. Wheeling it out on social media, day after day, month after month strikes me as odd, and I've never found heart-shaped emoticons much consolation.
Then there were the private messages, gossip about other rock group people, someone had done this or said that, and you know who has some weird, unsavoury kink, and that terrible woman never pays when you take her to lunch. She's so mean and greedy, and that son of hers, the retarded one, well...
This last accusation was what broke the camel's proverbial back. We knew for a fact that the supposedly terrible woman often paid for lunch, and the comments about her son, an entirely likable young man coping with certain learning difficulties, were simply too far over the line. My wife said so, then immediately became the person spreading hurtful lies about the woman who makes things into Mickey. The entire rock group rallied around, posting hilarious passive-aggressive messages on facebook about knowing who their real friends were, the sort of shite which your average fifteen-year old girl would regard as a bit self-involved. My wife no longer qualified as a real friend to women who make things into Mickey.
Then suddenly she had cancer. We felt sort of bad - or at least awkward - until her facebook page filled up with the gnashing and wailing of teeth, further requests for free stuff, and yet more hymns of praise to those real friends, the ones who had stood by her through thick and thin. It's hard to feel too sorry for someone with cancer when they not only continue to act like an asshole, but somehow get worse. Pity me for no longer do I know the joy of eating, the posts screamed in contradiction to pictures of the woman gleefully stuffing her face with the usual junk food. My wife used to work in cancer research. We've known plenty of people who've suffered and died. Somehow this just didn't sit right so we stopped thinking about it.
Then suddenly she's gone.
Both Bess and I are actually surprised, and yet somehow it doesn't change anything. The weekend comes and we meet up with Leslie and Ernest, another couple who fell out of favour with the rock group because of the woman who made things into Mickey.
Leslie makes a tray of cupcakes covered in fondant googly eyes. We're not actually meeting up to celebrate somebody's death, or at least we're trying not to think about the possibility that we may be, but we meet up nevertheless at the Longhorn Steakhouse. I drink beer and we eat Leslie's sarcastic cupcakes while laughing about the worst, most self-involved excesses of the woman who made things into Mickey. It feels a little as though we're skirting around the famed Mexican attitude to death. It's not so much that we're glad someone annoying is dead, but it's nice to move on with a bit of ceremony.
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