Dear Digby Read Free Page B

typewriter, where I write my letters. What else do I need? NOT SEMINAL FLUID!
    I wasn’t born yesterday! (Only the Born Again can say that!) I was born thirty-five years ago, and I know a gnocchi from an orange hat! Wait a minute—God’s talking to me. She says that I would be thumb-sucking, drooling insane to ever want to change my life by matrimony. So now you have it: I enjoy the occasional companionship of Basil Schrantz. Once in a while, I even shake up a mean martini, which I share with God, and most important, I stand up valiantly and alone against the threat of seminal fluid. Got it? That’s me in a nutshell!
    So marry? That would be dumb, wouldn’t it? The day I waltz down the aisle with some sperm-shooting yahoo, they can declare me a loony, put me in a hula skirt, and give me a free ride to the popcorn factory. I’m too far ahead of them all. I think of myself as a SIS cover: standing here in my room in full karate garb, the sun shining behind me, standing next to the warning on my door against the violators of my precious body—my beautiful eyes, hair, teeth, breasts, yes! yes!—IRIS MOSS, primo representative of the primo single state!
    Hoping to hear from you soon,
    Iris Moss
    I could see Iris on the cover of SIS myself, sitting in her lovely room with a pair of underpants over her head, waving the paneled radio on the shelf broadcasting from Pluto, plants percolating in their pots, the president’s goonish photo smirking out from the bulletin board tacked with Snoopy figures, withered balloons, a rain of construction paper exclamation points, yellowing articles clipped from SIS. Seminal fluid.
Dear Iris,
    SIS can’t help you. SIS has the utmost sympathy for most bodily secretions, but alas, little tradition of dealing with seminal fluid. I too know, as an individual, what it’s like to feel happy, fairly content with one’s life, independent, etc.—and still feel like one is getting secretly fucked over. That’s why I can’t really help you but can suggest only vigilance. Smoke a cigar after, smile enigmatically, stay awake. You can fight this, Iris.
    A large blue-and-green Nike, with a foot in it, appeared on my desk. The shoe and foot belonged to Minnie White-White-Goldfarb.
    “Editorial meeting, Willis.”
    I looked up at her, hunched worriedly over her raised bent knee, which was dimpled like a backside. She wrapped her arms around the knee, a large anxious Germanic woman with a big long nose and two huge yellow braids like a Wagnerian heroine.
    I felt great pity for Minnie White-White-Goldfarb because she had more names than anyone I’d ever known. In her heart, Minnie’d felt obligated to hyphenate herself and her spouse, each surname like a chapter of a mystery novel. She’s married a man named White—her own name had been White too. She could not bear the thought of “disappearing” into her husband’s Whiteness. “It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt,” she was fond of saying. “How did she know which Roosevelt she was? When people asked for Eleanor Roosevelt, how could she determine if they wanted the Eleanor Roosevelt she was before marrying FDR (and maybe secretly still was!) or the Eleanor Roosevelt she was after! How could anyone tell if she really changed her name?” It was a hard question to answer. Minnie had finally solved her dilemma by keeping both names, her own and her husband’s. She was Minnie White-White for a long while. Then her first husband was electrocuted in the bathtub when the answering machine fell into the bath water. “He’d put it right on the ledge above the tub,” Minnie recalled sadly. “So he could monitor calls and pick up if he wanted. It was terrible —when I came in, the machine was half-floating, half-submerged, and the recorded message kept repeating: “Greetings! This is Minnie White-White” ( “and her hubby, Endor L. White!”) “Guess what? We’re not available to answer your call right now. …” She said the beep sound, like a