Part 15 - Madge Barkwell

Imogene’s decision to take the day off for her health had come about partly because Ricky stole her alarm clock. He was against things that made loud noises, and was not averse to taking vigilante measures against them. If she left her phone where he could get at it, she would invariably find that it had found its way under the couch or to the bottom of a pile of dog toys. In the case of the alarm clock, Ricky had a personal vendetta. He had been trying to drown it in his water dish for years.

On this particular day, the alarm clock had been knocked off the night stand when Imogene replaced the book she was reading, a history of vulcanized rubber. Ricky had been stealthy. There is no telling what had inspired him to change his tactics. But Imogene did not hear the alarm's wan ringing from the bottom of the toilet bowl until well after 10am.

By that time, she had missed half of her shift at the coffee shop. She put on her bathrobe and dug under the couch for her phone.

“The perfect crime…” she said, accusingly to Ricky, who was laying as flat as he could make himself and regarding her cautiously from the corner of his eye.

Imogene didn’t get sick leave, but she considered her tip money a sort of sick leave/vacation fund. Granted, the sock was close to empty, but she was faithful that it would eventually be bulging again.

As she gazed at the guilt stricken Ricky laying there in the filmy winter light, she decided that fate had brought her this day to explore her personal interest. So after listening to the six messages on her phone asking her where the hell she was, she reached into her coffee can of personal day excuses and drew out a small folded piece of paper. After dialing the coffee shop number, she put on a hushed voice and explained that she’d been in a coma caused by eating some chicken salad that had fermented. Yes, she had thought it smelled a little funny. No, she hadn’t stopped throwing up yet, but she was certain that she’d come through it okay.

Yes, technically, this was lying, but it was a dishonor in exchange for the dishonor of working for an employer who didn’t offer any benefits. Besides, it was an unspoken code between her and the other baristas. They all lied, because there just wasn’t any other choice. They couldn’t get away with truths like, “I just couldn’t stop crying after I watched Now Voyager last night, and now my eyes are much too puffy to be seen in public,” so instead, they said they made up plausible diseases.

After Imogene made ham porridge for Ricky and did the crossword from last week’s paper, she decided to become Madge Barkwell for the day. It would make an event of putting up her new flyers, and also protect her from being seen out and about while she was supposed to be throwing up rancid chicken.

She got out a pair of polyester slacks that she had purchased at the Senior Citizens hall fall festival rummage sale. They were the color of orange sherbet. They must have belonged to quite a thin little lady in their past life, because they hugged Imogene’s thighs in a rather comical way, and made her butt look much wider than she knew it to be. She liked the effect, though. She dug out a sheer blouse that was decorated with an olive green sprig and little orange polka dots and selected a scarf from the cardboard suitcase under her bed. She decided to go with a cream colored one, in order not to have too many shades of orange going at once.

There was a plastic shoebox full of cat-eye glasses on her dresser, and Imogene found a pair that didn’t obscure her vision too much. Then she plucked the Madge name tag from the dish on her dresser. Usually, when she started a new job, she closed her eyes and let fate choose the name by which she would be known, but in the case of Madge Barkwell, she had hand-picked. She had always wanted to use the Madge tag, and it had never come up by chance.

During her brief stint at the public library, she had been Juanita. Patrons at her waitress job at the Cowpuncher Diner had known her as Pearl. The great thing about the name tags was that none of the names were things like Brittany, or Heather. They were all 1940s names. At the laundromat, she has been Mildred.

Since the dog therapy job was more of an independent venture, though, Imogene figured that it made sense to hand select her identity. She could have gone by her own name, Imogene Gardner, but it just didn’t have the spunk she was looking for. Her name sounded way too much like a movie star for her taste. She preferred to sound like a character in a badly, but lovingly written novel.

Usually she didn’t go to the extent of creating a full character, but Madge was sort of a hobby she had been thinking of for a long time, so she had gathered bits and pieces of the Madge outfit, and even had a Madge wig. It was that short, curled all over do that only women over 50 get, in a rusty brown. It was actually a very good wig, so it looked like real hair when it was on. The final touch to her outfit was a clear raincoat.