It was not one of my better days. My lifelong hairdresser, Fredrico, had been whisked away to style the hair of one of those Rich Housewives of some city. It certainly wasn’t in my area. Everyone wore the Martha Stewart look. I had tried it myself but when I turned forty, I decided I was not a home enthusiast as Martha, but I was a self-absorbed woman. I also wanted to try my hand at “being a Chick” that I was always reading about in the most trendy magazines. I loved the idea of finding a “b f f”. If you don’t know what “b f f” means…then you are definitely not a chick.
I did not want to look like a forty-year-old who had no place to go but…UP!
First it would be forty-five and then fifty and then sixty! I was not going to become one of those rich old society women who had boyfriends younger than my own son, Herbert, who was quite happy to stay out of my life as long as I sent him a fat check each month.
How did I get my money? Page Six says I am worth millions, and that I married the Count only for his money.
That’s true but I was not always named Countess Dagmar von Schnopf. Earlier, I was a corn-fed Midwestern girl, named Tammy Taylor.
The dear Count was a wee bit older than myself and passed on after an unfortunate riding accident. I was in Amsterdam at the time, buying cheeses and tulips, and had absolutely nothing to do with his death.
Shopping was now the greatest pleasure in my life. It gave me the opportunity to touch the softness of a Gucci scarf or rub my hands over real pigskin driving gloves. Or maybe they were golfing clubs.
I never was much of a golfer although the Count expected me to hit the greens when he wanted to fleece some foreign billionaire out of money, oil or favors. What those favors were, I never asked.
Why should I? The Count never questioned my coming home “with the milkman”, so to speak. Why should he? I was the window dressing he needed for parties and the opera.
Unfortunately, the Count got caught up in the Wall Street hysteria, and although I do not believe he had any idea of the meaning of Hedge Fund, he was convicted of nineteen counts of this or that. He never served a day, maybe because of that unfortunate horse named Chance.
But today, I was just interested in buying a small diamond tiara.
The sales girl had waited on me once or twice before. So when she found me standing at her counter, she licked her lips and brought out a tray of diamond tiaras. The count had bought my first diamond tiara after our marriage. Oh, that marriage was beautiful. Everyone who was anyone or wanted to be someone was there.
After trying on a small tiara, a medium sized tiara and a rather large tiara, I decided on the small tiara. The sales girl was so flustered, she almost forgot to charge me for it.Its price tag of a million dollars would have cut badly into her paycheck.
“How much?” I suppose I was not a real “rich chick” if I asked that question. It could be a loaf of bread, and I would ask, “How much?”
Or it could be this small, but divine, diamond tiara. I would still ask,
"How much?”

(TO BE CONTINUED...)






© Betsy Knapp, 2010