“The first two times my parents left for vacation, my sisters and I escorted them to the door and said that we would miss them terribly. It was just an act, designed to make us look sensitive and English, but on this occasion we meant it. ‘Oh, stop being such babies,’ our mother said. ‘It’s only a week.’ Then she gave Mrs. Peacock the look meaning, ‘Kids. What are you doing to do?’

There was a corresponding look that translated to ‘You tell me,’ but Mrs. Peacock didn’t need it, for she know exactly what she was going to do—enslave us. An hour after my parents left, she was lying face down on their bed, dressed in nothing but her slip. Like her skin, it was the color of Vaseline, an un-color really, that looked even worse with yellow hair. Add to this her great bare legs, which were dimpled at the inner knee, and streaked all over with angry purple veins.?

—David Sedaris, from The Understudy: The Week of Mrs. Peacock. The New Yorker, April 10, 2006.