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After six days the Burger Derby manager Jerry Speller, this little twerp who believed that the responsibility of running a burger joint put you a heartbeat away from Emperor of the Universe, said I didn’t have the right attitude, and I told him he was exactly right. I said I had to confess I didn’t have the proper reverence for the Burger Derby institution, and to prove it I threw my hat into the Mighty Miser and turned it on. Sandi was so impressed she burned the trench fries twice in a row.

The fight had been about the Burger Derby uniform. The shorts weren’t actually plastic, it turned out, but cotton-polyester with some kind of shiny finish that had to be dry-cleaned. Three twenty-five an hour plus celery and you’re supposed to pay for dry-cleaning your own shorts.

My one regret was that I didn’t see much of Sandi anymore. Naturally I had to find a new place to eat breakfast. There were half a dozen coffee-shops in the area, and although I didn’t really feel at home in any of them I discovered a new resource: newspapers. On the tables, along with their gritty coffee cups and orange rinds and croissant crumbs, people often left behind the same day’s paper.

There was a lady named Jessie with wild white hair and floppy rainboots who would dash into the restaurants and scrounge the leftover fruit and melon rinds. “It’s not to eat,” she would explain to any- and everybody as she clumped along the sidewalk pushing an interesting-smelling shopping cart that had at some point in history belonged to Safeway. “It’s for still-lifes.” She told me she painted nothing but madonnas: Orange-peel madonna. Madonna and child with strawberries. Together we made a sort of mop-up team. I nabbed the newspapers, and she took the rest.

Looking through the want ads every day gave new meaning to my life. The For Rents, on the other hand, were a joke as far as I was concerned, but often there would be ads looking for roommates, a possibility I hadn’t considered. I would circle anything that looked promising, although people seemed unbelievably picky about who they intended to live with:

“Mature, responsible artist or grad student wanted for cooperative household; responsibilities shared, sensitivity a must.”

“Female vegetarian nonsmoker to share harmonious space with insightful Virgo and cat.”

I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona.

The main consideration, though, was whether or not I could locate the address on my Sun-Tran maps of all the various bus routes. At the end of the week I made up my mind to check out a couple of possibilities. One ad said, among other things, “Must be open to new ideas.” The other said, “New mom needs company. Own room, low rent, promise I won’t bother you. Kids ok.” The first sounded like an adventure, and the second sounded like I wouldn’t have to pass a test. I put on a pair of stiff, clean jeans and braided my hair and gave Turtle a bath in the sink. She had acquired clothes of her own by now, but just for old time’s sake I put her in my DAMN I’M GOOD T-shirt from Kentucky Lake. Just for luck.

Both places were near downtown. The first was a big old ramshackle house with about twelve kinds of wind chimes hanging on the front porch. One was made from the silver keys of some kind of musical instrument like a flute or clarinet, and even Turtle seemed interested in it. A woman came to the door before I even knocked.

She let me inside and called out, “The prospective’s here.” Three silver earrings-a half moon, a star, and a grinning sun-dangled from holes in her left ear so that she clinked when she walked like some human form of wind chime. She was barefoot and had on a skirt that reminded me of the curtains in my room at the Republic. There was no actual furniture in the room, only a colorful rug and piles of pillows here and there, so I waited to see what she would do. She nested herself into one of the piles, flouncing her skirt out over her knees. I noticed that she had thin silver rings on four of her toes.

Another woman came out of the kitchen door, through which I was relieved to see a table and chairs. A tall, thin guy with a hairless chest hunkered in another doorway for a minute, rubbing a head of orange hair that looked like a wet cat. He had on only those beachcomber-type pants held up by a fake rope. I really couldn’t tell how old these people were. I kept expecting a parent to show up in another doorway and tell Beach Blanket Bingo to put on his shirt, but then, they could have been older than me. We all settled down on the pillows.

“I’m Fay,” the toe-ring woman said, “spelled F-E-I, and this is La-Isha and that’s Timothy. You’ll have to excuse Timothy; he used caffeine yesterday and now his homeostasis is out of balance.” I presumed they were talking about his car, although I was not aware of any automotive uses for caffeine.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I wouldn’t do anything with caffeine but drink it.”

They all stared at me for a while.

“Oh. I’m Taylor. This is Turtle.”

“Turtle. Is that a spirit name?” La-Isha asked.

“Sure,” I said.

La-Isha was thick-bodied, with broad bare feet and round calves. Her dress was a sort of sarong, printed all over with black and orange elephants and giraffes, and she had a jungly-looking scarf wrapped around her head. And to think they used to stare at me for wearing red and turquoise together. Drop these three in Pittman County and people would run for cover.

F-E-I took charge of the investigation. “Would the child be living here too?”

“Right. We’re a set.”

“That’s cool, I have no problem with small people,” she said. “La-Isha, Timothy?”

“It’s not really what I was thinking in terms of, but I can see it happening. I’m flex on children,” La-Isha said, after giving it some thought. Timothy said he thought the baby was cute, asked if it was a boy or a girl.

“A girl,” I said, but I was drowned out by Fei saying, “Timothy, I really don’t see that that’s an issue here.” She said to me, “Gender is not an issue in this house.”

“Oh,” I said. “Whatever.”

“What does she eat?” La-Isha wanted to know.

“Mainly whatever she can get her hands on. She had half a hot dog with mustard for breakfast.”

There was another one of those blank spells in the conversation. Turtle was grumpily yanking at a jingle bell on the corner of a pillow, and I was beginning to feel edgy myself. All those knees and chins at the same level. It reminded me of an extremely long movie I had once seen about an Arabian sheik. Maybe La-Isha is Arabian, I thought, though she looked very white, with blond hair on her arms and pink rims around her eyes. Possibly an albino Arabian. I realized she was giving a lecture of some kind.

“At least four different kinds of toxins,” she was saying, more to the room in general than to me. Her pink-rimmed eyes were starting to look inflamed. “In a hot dog.” Now she was definitely talking to me. “Were you aware of that?”

“I would have guessed seven or eight,” I said.

“Nitrites,” said Timothy. He was gripping his head between his palms, one on the chin and one on top, and bending it from side to side until you could hear a little pop. I began to understand about the unbalanced homeostasis.

“We eat mainly soybean products here,” Fei said. “We’re just starting a soy-milk collective. A house requirement is that each person spend at least seven hours a week straining curd.”

“Straining curd,” I said. I wanted to say, Flaming nurd. Raining turds. It isn’t raining turds, you know, it’s raining violets.

“Yes,” Fei went on in this abnormally calm voice that made me want to throw a pillow at her. “I guess the child…”

“Turtle,” I said.

“I guess Turtle would be exempt. But we would have to make adjustments for that in the kitchen quota…”