Bernice Zwerg fluffed the wiry bristles of her over-permed hair and smiled sourly. “Stow the flattery,” she snapped in her ex-smoker’s rasp. “I’m immune.”
“He didn’t mean it as a compliment,” deadpanned Lucille Rassmuson.
Dick Stolee let out a disgusted snort as he thrust an angry finger at Osmond. “He doesn’t care what the rest of us think anymore. He’s decided our opinions don’t have any value. He’s trashing the democratic process we’ve practiced all these years in favor of a dictatorship that lets him call all the shots. Do you know what this is a sign of ?”
“Maturity?” I suggested.
“Armageddon!” whooped Grace Stolee, whose glee at providing a likely answer quickly dissolved into worry. “Except it better not be Armageddon, because I have dry cleaning to pick up when we get home, and I’ll be slapped with a stupid handling fee if I leave it there for more than a month.”
“Voter suppression!” thundered Dick. “Osmond Chelsvig is guilty of the worst political dirty trick in the book. He’s denying us access to vote!”
More gasps.
George Farkas removed his Pioneer Seed Corn cap and rubbed his bald head. “I thought stuff like that only happened in places that are hotbeds of seething dissention and political unrest, like Egypt … or Florida.”
My grandmother, whose name tag identified her as Marion Sippel, slid her wirerims up her nose to better see our own homegrown political trickster. “Gee, playin’ fast and loose with votin’ rights don’t sound like Osmond.”
“It sure doesn’t,” he admitted. “Show of hands. How many people think I’m trying to suppress the vote?”
I checked my watch and smiled. Back to the old routine in under one minute. There really was an upside to short-term memory issues.
Osmond was exonerated in a classic squeaker—six votes to five. Bernice abstained on the grounds that voter suppression is a fiction invented by left-wing radical extremists and liberal morons, so she refused to vote on a flawed premise.
Tilly thumped the beach with her walking stick, sending up a geyser of fine-grained sand. “Normandy beaches are renowned for their twenty-foot tides,” she announced in her former professor’s voice.
“So we’re safe.” Grace Stolee exhaled a relieved breath. “The water’s out more than twenty feet, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it’s out about a hundred miles,” said Dick Teig, squinting toward the water’s edge.
“Good.” Grace kicked off her shoes and rolled up the hem of her pants. “I have an uncontrollable urge to dip my tootsies in the English Channel. Anyone else game?”
Graduating at the top of her class from Beginners Swim at the Senior Center pool had turned Grace into an unabashed daredevil.
The eleven nonswimmers in the group eyed her with various degrees of envy.
“Showoff,” teased Margi.
“I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near that muck,” whined Bernice as she positioned her foot like a ballerina modeling toe shoes. “Not in my new walking shoes.” She rotated her ankle to provide us with both left and right views. “Did I mention they were ridiculously expensive?”
Dick Stolee flung his hands palms up into the air. “That swimming certificate of yours has gone straight to your head, Grace. Where’s my wife? The one whose only uncontrollable urge is to put the toaster away before I’ve finishing using it?”
“Point of order,” Osmond spoke up. “Tides aren’t measured in distance. They’re measured in depth. Vertical depth. Kinda like what happens to the water level of a fish tank when you drain it.”