Part 18 - First Customer

Imogene opened the trailer door. George did not raise his head from its rest on his front paws, but looked up at her.

“George, that must be you. How is your day going?” Imogene asked as she flipped on the light switch. She was at once taken aback by the décor of the trailer and by the absolute lack of any warmth. She was able to take in the living room and the kitchen at a glance from her place in the doorway.

The living room had heavy gold brocade drapes, in some type of polyester fabric. There was a couch and swivel chair, both, amazingly, with plastic covers. The carpet was immaculate.

The kitchen was brown and robin's egg blue. The sparles in the formica counter top glittered in the morning sun, which accessed the room through a small window above the sink. There were mushrooms, in olive green, on the turquoise curtains.

Imogene was transfixed by the perfection of it, yet disappointed that it was full of cardboard boxes. The kitchen was piled nearly to the ceiling with boxes, and the living room was practically filled with one huge box which was heavily reinforced with nylon straps.

Who lived here, and how could they expect a dog to be happy here? She wondered. Was this person a traveling magician, and that big box was the place where he sawed ladies in half?

“Okay, George, I don’t see how I can sing to you in this place. I just don’t feel like singing, surrounded by cardboard. There’s nothing fun or funny. First these boxes need unpacked, and you need a delicious snack.”

George, on hearing the word “snack” wagged the tip of his tail tentatively, three times.

“Yes, I like snacks, too.” Imogene agreed, as she opened the first box that was preventing her entry into the kitchen.

It was filled with sheet music. She flipped through one of the booklets and marveled at all of the black dots on the staffs. When Imogene was eight, she had taken piano lessons, but the music for Daffy Duck’s Parade Day had lots of white space in it, and the notes were simple black circles, for the most part. She had always imagined that they were little black beetles, climbing up the staff. This made it difficult to keep them straight, because she could never remember which beetle was which. Was it a different beetle, or was it just the same beetle, at a different point in time?

It worried her when the beetles started coming in pairs and formations. It made her feel like there was some kind of beetle war brewing, and that casualties were inevitable.

The music that she held in her hand looked like a full scale beetle holocaust, or perhaps beetles being attacked by aliens. The pages were nearly black with little dots, and they were all tied together in all sorts of strange contrivances. Dots and strange symbols littered the pages.

She closed the booklet and stuffed it back in the box, shuddering slightly.

“This doesn’t need to be in the kitchen,” she noted in George’s direction, and hefted the heavy box.

She looked down the hall to see if there were some less prominent place to put it.

The hall was just wide enough for her to walk down, carrying the box with her elbows out slightly. It was paneled with blond wood. The carpet in the hall was the same gold shag that was in the living room, except that it was covered by a ridged plastic runner that made zipping sounds under her feet.

At the end of the hall was a bedroom, which she assumed was the master.

Instead of intruding there, she turned toward her left, which ended up being a tiny bedroom with no furniture in it. It had nothing in it, actually. The fact that the person had not bothered to put the boxes in the empty room, rather than in the kitchen bothered her a little bit. It didn’t bode well. But her job was not to criticize her employer. It was to sing to dogs. And in order to do that, she needed reasonably happy surroundings. Therefore, it was part of her job to move these boxes.

She spent the rest of the morning carrying boxes. George stretched out comfortably and took a nap.