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“I can see what you think, you got faces like sieves. No, I’m not the Hoor of Babylon, nor the Tart from Le Petit Trianon, which, incidentally, is not a movie-house. I am a traveling Jungle Gym, first cousin to a sideshow, never a beauty, almost a freak. But one day years back, I decided not to make one man sad but a handful happy! I found I was trying to win all the time, which is an error beyond most women’s imagination. If you make a man lose all the time, hell, he’ll go play golf or handball and lose right. At least he can add it up! So I started out, two years in Placerville, three in Tallahassee and Kankakee until I ran out of steam or my rolling stock rusted. What was my great secret? Not playing Parcheesi, or Uncle Wiggily says jump back three hops to the henhouse, no. It was losing. Don’t you see? I learned how to cheat and lose. Men like that. They know what you’re up to, sure, but pretend not to notice and the more you lose the more they love. Next thing you know you got ‘em bound head and foot with just plain old self-destruction pinochle or I’m-dead-send-flowers hopscotch. You can get a man to jump rope if you convince him he’s the greatest jumper since the Indian rope trick. So you go on losing and find you’ve won all along as the men tip their hat to you at breakfast, put down the stock-market quotes and talk!
“Stop fidgeting! I’m almost out of gas. Will you get your halfway loved ones back? Mebbe. Mebbe not. A year from now I’ll check to see if you’ve watched and learned from my show-and-tell. I’ll give you the loan of those lost but now found souls and once a year after that bus back through to see if you’re losing proper in order to learn to laugh. Meanwhile, there’s nothing you can do, starting this very second. Now, consider I’ve just fired off a gun. Go home. Bake pies. Make meatballs. But it won’t work. The pies will fall flat and the meatballs? Dead on arrival. Because you arm-wrestle them to the table and spoil men’s appetites. And don’t lock your doors. Let the poor beasts run. Like you’ve excused.”
“We’ve just begun to fight!” cried all three and then, confused at their echoes, almost fell down the porch stairs.
Well, that was the true end. There was no war, not even a battle or half a skirmish. Every time the ladies glanced around they found empty rooms and quietly shut on tiptoes front doors.
But what really scalded the cat and killed the dog was when three strange men showed up half-seen in the twilight one late afternoon and caused the wives to pull back, double-lock their doors, and peer through their lace curtains.
“Okay, open up!” the three men cried.
And hearing voices from today’s breakfast, the wives unlocked the doors to squint out.
“Henry Tiece?”
“Robert Joe Clements, what—?”
“William Ralph Cole, is that you?”
“Who the hell do you think it is!”
Their wives stood back to watch the almost hairless wonders pass.
“My God,” said Mrs. Tiece.
“What?” said Mrs. Clements.
“What have you done to your hair?”
“Nothing,” said all three husbands. “She did.”
The wives circled their relatives by marriage.
“I didn’t recognize you,” gasped Mrs. Tiece.
“You weren’t supposed to!”
And so said all the rest.
Adding, “How you like it?”
“It’s not the man I married,” they said.
“Damn tootin’!”
And at last, almost in chorus, though in separate houses:
“You going to change your name to fit the haircut?”
The last night of the month, Mr. Tiece was found in his upper-stairs bedroom packing a grip. Mrs. Tiece clutched a doorknob and held on. “Where you going?”
“Business.”
“Where?”
“A ways.”
“Going to be gone long?”
