The winter had been long. With the steel-gray days, swirling snow, and terrorism on the news, it had seemed endless. It was always a mistake to wish one's life away, to yearn for the next season and ignore the present, but the desire for warmer weather was quite understandable.
Desire? Throughout the long winter months, Pippa had wished for a hard, long rain to come along and wash away all the snow, to clear away all the highway salt, and to give added promise to her dormant flowerbed. Yes, Pippa knew that her rain gutters were probably clogged with pine needles blown by the winter wind, but she had been filed with late winter ennui and had been putting off the chore. She would have farmed out the job, but she knew outsourcing was deflationary.
Pippa put down the leatherbound novel by Turgenev and glanced out the window. It was now spring, or almost. At night the trees still stood spectral and gray against the sky, but in the morning, Pippa ascertained through her own empirical research, the hillside was, in fact, dew-pearled, and the lark was indeed on the wing. Or, strictly speaking, the wing was on the lark.
Anyway, the air was burgeoning with scents of spring and new lingerie lines, and when the new lingerie catalogue arrived, she was sure the winter was over. The colors were like a South American carnivale float--tangerine dream, lemonade, Collette pink, mood indigo, chic violet... She studied them with anticipation, choosing carefully and checking the mailbox each day.
When her packages arrived, she tore them open, tossing tangas and thongs, chemises and slips like Daisy Buchanan sorting Gatsby's shirts. They came down onto her bed in a rainbow of silk and lace, and she plucked a Brazilian panty and balconette bra out of the heap with relish. "Brazilian panty," the very words provided a note of optimism. They formed a counterpoint to the dreary list of negative events recited by somber anchors on television news shows. She briefly imagined Dan Rather with a tangerine tanga hanging from one of his ears, but rejected the image as inappropriate. Tom Brokaw in a thong covering spring break for MTV's Most Wanted; however, that she could envision.
With her new lingerie on, she couldn't contain her joy and she twirled and spun in front of the mirror. She had taken to leaving the windows open, so she could watch the sheers sway in the cool breezes that came through the window. She imagined the pale spring sun on her skin. She'd already gotten a light tan, so the tangerine dream combination seemed almost iridescent against it. They did look delectable on her. The crunches were worth it, she thought, as she evaluated the effect. The crunches, the miles and miles logged in running, the arm lifts, all were not only gratifying exercises in themselves, but the results showed clearly in her taut abdomen, her firm thighs, and shapely triceps of which Elaine LaLanne (Jack's wife) would be proud.
With the year 2000, which Pippa thought of as "The Year of the Thong," she had decided to leave her old lingerie to the 20th Century. The moving lingerie pen had written and, having writ, moved on to the 21st Century. When making such a change, Pippa hadn't made any external change. Her professional colleagues were entirely unaware of the metamorphosis, but that was half the fun. Pippa resolved to remake herself all under, to restructure her life beginning with sensual lingerie. No, she didn't make dramatic changes such as installing a Sybian machine in her bedroom. Such devices seemed far too cold and industrial, and her tastes in sex toys ran more toward the mundane and conventional. Still, faced with the greater exposure of bathing suits such as her white crochet, Pippa did undergo laser treatments which rendered her form as smooth as a politician's justification.
She became aware of a sound outside. Glancing out, across the wide expanse of her own yard, she saw her neighbor, Spencer Hill, at his flower bed, garden hose in hand. It made her ponder. Who was the enigmatic Mr. Hill? What was his occupation? She knew not. Yes, she had seen him departing for work in the morning, three-piece suits in the winter, black wingtips gleaming in the pale light. And there had been that one time, when both had gone to get their mail at the same time, when their eyes met. He nodded politely. She did the same. And the moment was lost.
As she walked up the incline of her lane that day, Pippa thought of a book from college, David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. No, she hadn't been assigned the book, nor had she read it. But the title remained etched in her memory. Small towns still had main streets, but people seldom met their neighbors strolling down them. Neighbors met, if at all, in Walmarts on the edge of town. Sealed in their cars, neighbors often did not meet at all.
For his part, Spencer was lost in his own thoughts while manning -- or personing -- the garden hose. The prior night, while playing a trivia game, Spencer had gotten a question relating to Praxiteles. Unfortunately, Yahoo Chat being universally acknowledged as deeply defective, his text was invisible to other players and his answer was ignored. In his heart of hearts, Spencer knew that the opportunity for him to answer a sculpture question would occur only once in a lifetime given his ignorance of the subject.
Understandably morose, Spencer had been watering his flowers when what to his wondering eyes should appear but a faint glimpse of movement at the window of his neighbor, way off across the lawn. Ah yes, he recalled, the svelte one he'd seen that day at the mailbox. Spencer had noticed her sleek and graceful form on Thursday mornings. He would often see her lithe physique, encased in morning fog and little else, as she wheeled the trash toter down her lane to the curb.
Finishing the watering, Spencer went inside. He had binoculars to watch the birds at his feeder. That being so, it was not unusual for him to scan his yard for a black-capped chickadee, a snowbird, or the quirky little nuthatch. Winters were the best time to watch, but he kept the binocs handy in summer too. That day, as he used the binocs to see whether doves were again nesting in his huge white spruce trees, he caught a flash of movement farther out. The mercury had shot up on the thermometer that day, to a summery 70 degrees. He knew how it was with an April day--when the sun was out and the wind was still, he was one month on the the middle of May.
He adjusted the focus and gasped. It was the neighbor, the lady named Pippa. Yes, the one he usually saw in pin-striped business suits, the one with the intensely professional demeanor. Not a demeanor as ideologically intense as Ann Coulter, but a vocational commitment that showed her interest in making the world a better place. She had evidently decided to brave the uncertain spring sun and use her pool. He remembered her routine almost unconsciously from the previous summer.
She wrote. Yes, she wrote with the discipline and rigor of a prize-fighter in training, four hours each day and without interruption. He saw her writing, what he didn't know, but she wrote fluidly, easily. When she finished, she closed her laptop with a snap and immersed herself in the pool, emerging to lie on a float in the afternoon sun. He could almost see the satisfaction and the fatigue emanating from her. Even better, he could literally see the drops of water as they quivered on her light golden skin, much as he quivered at the image.
