Some of the wild women I have known

My relationships with women as friends are not usually of the long-lasting variety. My mother was proud of being in a sorority at Temple University in the 1930s, a real achievement for a girl from Selbyville during the Great Depression. However, like most other things she wanted and held in high regard, it was not for me. She once asked, tilting her head back proudly and patting her chin, "You were never in a sorority in college, were you?" I shocked her by replying, "Oh, they asked me, but I thanked them and said no." Thinking this could never be true, she quickly retorted, "Which one was it?!" "Delta Zeta," I replied. "Oh, I've heard of them," she said, visibly shocked.

The main reason they asked me to join was that I had become known as the curandero (healer) of the dorm, diagnosing minor illnesses before the school nurse had to be consulted. I also did palm reading, Ouija board sessions and handwriting analysis! I liked being asked medical questions, but I did not want to join a group of girls.

After I married and moved upstate, I struck up a friendship with one woman when I learned I was expecting twins. She belonged to a group of women which was appropriately called The Twins Club. After our twins were delivered, I decided to take a much-deserved afternoon off and set up a playdate (just us two girls) with this woman I met who seemed somewhat irreverent and adventurous like me. All I can remember of that event 36 years ago was that as we made our way back down Kirkwood Highway after lunch, she pulled up at a liquor store, went in, came out and chugged down a bottle of booze, then drove me the (fortunately) short way back to my house without any vehicular incident, to my great relief. I wasn't that irreverent, and I never saw her again!

Another woman whom I met at the New Castle Farmers Market attracted my attention because she made beautiful handcrafted tote bags. A like-minded fellow crafter, I thought! We had lunch together in the Korean cafe there, enjoying the fried rice with cabbage and kimchi. She turned out to be OCD, scrubbing the street gutters and manholes in front of her house with a toothbrush! She carried a plastic bag full of washcloths and completely wiped down the stools before sitting on one at the sausage grille at Cowtown, across the Delaware River in New Jersey.

I once flopped down on the ground at a flea market near an anthill, and she scolded me, "You'd sit down anywhere, you sloppy thing!" She had a very nice ex-husband who rented a room from her in what once had been their home as a married couple. He was like the chauffeur husband married to the narcissistic silent film actress Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson) in the old “Sunset Boulevard” movie. He often sat at a table behind us at the Korean cafe saying nothing. She said, "Don't talk to him!" When I asked her who he was she said, "He's my ex-husband." Her first husband, a Bavarian car dealer, had once knocked out her front teeth with a giant decorative wooden fork from Indonesia.

She got a job driving airline pilots to the Philadelphia airport, and she dressed in a sexy chauffeur's uniform. She finally got fired for trying to proselytize them into her charismatic religion (and maybe more!). She told me that the Devil had once appeared to her in a puff of smoke at the foot of her bed, and that the world would end and Christian pilots would go to heaven out of the plane windows. Where the others would go was the question I was too afraid to ask her!

I went to her house once. She had a thousand-dollar iron for pressing the white ruffled blouses she wore for her chauffeur's costume! All of her furniture was covered in clear plastic. She insisted on showing me her basement, which of course was bare and gleaming. As I descended the stairs with her behind me, I wondered if this would be my last visit to anyone's house ever, and it was certainly my last visit to her house.

Another well-to-do woman I befriended lived in Chateau Country, but she invited me to go with her to Cowtown, which was known for hosting rodeos but also had a big flea market. I was afraid to drive there myself because it required traversing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. She had an irritating habit of borrowing cash money from me. Now, I admit that I have benefitted personally from this thing of girlfriends loaning one another money when one friend was short of cash and wanted to purchase one of my paintings. But I had never been on the loaning end of the bargain. This woman started with asking me for $25 the first time we went out. It kept escalating until it reached $450 at a jewelry store where she had an account anyway! She always paid me back when she got home, but her asking was clearly getting out of hand. The most I ever actually loaned her was $25, but I would tear out all of my checks from my checkbook so I could honestly say that my checkbook was empty.

The last of my wild women stories is about a couple we went out to dinner with at a restaurant called Capers & Lemons. My husband and her husband went back to our house to get something because we lived nearby. She said, "I have a little game I play. I want to pilfer that huge planter of petunias sitting there on the patio. Will you help me sneak it to my car?" I immediately knew where that caper would lead – to a lemon of an ending for sure, and I wasn't about to break my back, plus get arrested. Fortunately the two men came back before I had the chance to make my excuses.

So far, I have not met any wild women since moving back to Sussex County, but I know they must be somewhere waiting to meet me! I may call myself the Wild Woman of Art, but I have a strong sense of self-preservation that has kept me safe so far. However, these wild women were beyond the pale, even for me!