n Chapter 4, my Lady Friend suggested that Anna, our cleaning lady, might have stolen my favorite bra, which disappeared shortly after I moved in with my Lady Friend. If you missed the first four chapters of this riveting whodunit, you can read them on my web site: www.jenniferparello.com )
Shortly after I moved in with my Lady Friend, we were at dinner with a group of friends and the subject of cleaning ladies came up. I was horrified to discover that no one at the table knew the first name of their cleaning lady.
'There haven't been this many bourgeois in one room since the Bolsheviks stormed the White Palace!,' I exclaimed in Marxist outrage.
'I told you last week that you are not allowed to use that word until you learn how to spell it,' my Lady Friend said.
'Which word? Bourgeois or Bolshevik?' I asked.
'Both,' she said.
'All I'm saying is that your days of exploiting the working class are over. The so-called lesbian elite had better watch out because the proletariat is about to rise up!,' I said.
'Spell proletariat,' my Lady Friend said with a yawn.
I tried to bluff my way through the spelling test, but I gave up after hitting the wall of vowels in 'bourgeois.' Instead, I vowed to correct the collective wrongs of my fat cat friends by befriending our cleaning lady.
Our cleaning lady usually arrived for work hours after we left the house, so she screamed in surprise when she found me sitting at the kitchen table, smiling a warm greeting at her. I introduced myself and asked her name. She smiled in confusion and made some vague gestures to indicate that she didn't speak English. I nodded in understanding and repeated myself loudly. I did this several times at increasing volume until she finally understood what I was asking her. She told me in a thick Polish accent that her name was Anna.
I followed Anna around all day, but she didn't seem to appreciate my offers to help her with her chores. Instead, she regarded me with suspicion, like I was a store detective who suspected she was up to no good. It left me feeling frustrated at my inability to force my friendship on her.
When my Lady Friend suggested that Anna stole my favorite bra, I was thrilled that I might have found a way to help Anna. That's what socialism is all about-spreading the wealth. I laid out several expensive bras around the condo in anticipation of Anna's next visit. Losing my bras to Anna would help ease the guilt I felt for my lackadaisical commitment to liberal politics and the oppressed. It was the same guilt that made me boycott certain brands of beer and to not wear my mother's old mink-lined raincoat, even though it was the warmest, most comfortable piece of clothing I owned, and, as my mother liked to remind me, the animals were killed long before I grew a social consciousness.
But when I arrived home that day, all my bras were neatly stacked on my dresser. Based on this evidence, it was obvious that Anna had not stolen my favorite bra.
Next time-Chapter 6: Mystery solved!
Do you know what happened to my bra? Send your theory to jen6jen@aol.com . If you guess correctly before the mystery is solved in Chapter 6, I'll send you an excellent prize.