Months later she was crawling and learning to stand up, and was getting too big to sleep in the cupboard beneath the sink with me. Her father, whose wide mouth and almond eyes are Miranda’s now, looked at her one day when she had tripped and fallen and split her lip on the floor of the trailer and was crying and bleeding, and he said, “Get rid of her.” And I cried and begged and yanked down her diapers to remind him of that tail, pink and charming, and he sneered and said, “Get rid of her or I’ll give her to Mumpo for supper, stuffed and roasted!”
Now, twenty years later, in this huge room, with Lil downstairs watching a TV screen through a magnifying glass, her mind steeped in the amnesiac vapor of her own decay, and Arty’s wonderful face gone to worms despite me, I sit here looking at the full, ripe flesh of this almost normal young female and for a single satisfying instant see her on a platter with a well-basted skin crackling to the touch.
“You say you hate your tail.”
“I did. Then I heard about the Glass House, where they weren’t interested if you were just pretty and could dance but wanted something spectacular. It was a joke to audition. Or an experiment. A different approach to my tail. But since I’ve been working there I don’t feel the same way about my tail. Now I think, in a way, it’s kind of marvelous.” Her eyes are questions. Is it sane to like my tail? she is asking.
I am too old for this roller coaster. This much anger and this much pleasure should not be crowded into two short hours. My liver, or whatever it is that’s trying to crowd its way into my left leg, can’t take it.
“This must bore you. It must seem pretty silly.”
“No, I’m just resting my eyes. What does she look like, Miss Lick?”
“Mary Lick. She’s forty or something, six feet two, maybe two hundred forty pounds. Short sandy hair. I wasn’t sure you were an albino until you took off your shades. This is the first time I’ve seen you without them. You have a fascinating orbital ridge; I’m just going to get a quick sketch. The deal is that Miss Lick has offered to pay me to have my tail amputated. She’ll pay all expenses, recovery as well as surgery. She swears the best surgeon. Plus she’ll pay me ten thousand dollars in cash. I don’t know what to do. Miss Lick isn’t what you’d think. She’s rough, but when I was telling her about being an orphan she kept saying, ‘Kee-rist,’ and I could tell she was wrapped up in it. When we left the restaurant, which is out of town a ways, she backed out of the parking lot and into a ditch. There we were with the rear wheels stuck in the mud. She sat there staring out the windshield in the dark. She said, “I’ve been here a hundred times and this never happened. I’m fucked up. But I’m not drunk. It’s that convent, your tail.” Then she got out to push and I steered and we got back up on the road. She drove me home and I felt right then that I’d give her my tail or anything else she asked for just because she cared.”
My eyes pop open to the sight of Miranda’s increasingly familiar frown. “Did you tell her that?”
“No. She wanted me to think about it. She’s going to stop by the Glass House tonight for my answer. She says if I decide to do it I should wait until school ends and I have the summer to recover from the surgery.”
“Very considerate.” The light is the color of dust now as it catches her hair and the side of her cheek. It leaves her dark eyes in shadow.
“Have you talked to your friends at the club?”
“They’re all wild about it. They’d jump at it … but they all hate their specialties. And I’m not sure I do anymore. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You understand living with a specialty. Better than any of us. I don’t know how old you are.…”
“Thirty-eight,” I say, and her face shows she thought I was older. I was barely seventeen when she was born. But dwarfs age quickly.
“What I’m asking is, am I crazy to have this liking for my tail? Am I just covering up something else? If I turn this chance down I’d probably regret it for the rest of my life. You must have wished a million times to be normal.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.”
“Not normal?”
“Never.”
“No shit! That’s astounding! Tell me …”
“I have to leave.” Reaching down for the pajama top, uncramping my legs to climb down to the floor, padding toward the bathroom door.
“Hey, I’m sorry, I’ve taken most of your afternoon, you must be beat.… You’ll come again, won’t you? How about tomorrow? I’ll work up some of these sketches and be ready for some more-developed stuff tomorrow.”
Alone in my room with the door finally closed I stand gaping blankly at the grimy window. I had no right to pretend surprise. The nun told me when I first took her there. Horst the Cat Man was leaning on the fender of his van at the gate and I was inside in the visitors’ room. I sat hugging Miranda, the toddler — not yet a year old — still in roomy diapers. Trying to talk through my tears to this clean-faced nun, who had seemed so warm and reassuring over the phone.
“What do you mean, a tail?” Her eyes cooled instantly. She tugged at the back of Miranda’s diaper. “Is she retarded?” Miranda clouded at the strange touch, looking anxiously at me. When the diaper dropped to her pudgy knees she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and began to cry.
“Just a little tail,” I was saying.
The nurse came in, chipper, with a clipboard full of forms. She held Miranda expertly, dancing her on a chair while I sniffed and scratched at the forms. The nun muttered softly to the nurse. The nurse sang “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Climbs Up the Water Spout” and peeked surreptitiously down the back of Miranda’s diaper.
We went to the infirmary, where the nurse chattered rhymes as she stripped the oblivious and chortling Miranda. Probing, listening, peering with tiny flashlights, counting digits, and finally tickling the curl in the tail until Miranda laughed out loud and I turned to grey stone.
“It is not simple surgery in her case, but it would make her life much easier,” the nurse was soothing me. “You must imagine what her life among normal children would be like. She will shower and dress and swim in a group setting where it will be impossible to hide. Children can be very cruel.”
“No,” I snapped. “She keeps it. You won’t touch it.”
They asked me again five years later as I stood watching Miranda through the window of the visitors’ room.
“She prays to be rid of it. How can you deny your own child a chance at a happy, normal life?”
I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the playground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me. “She’s happy,” I said. “You’ve told me so and I see it. She keeps her tail.”
But she hated it.
I crawl into my cupboard, pull the door shut, and lie curled in the dark, thinking about Miss Lick. I’ve seen hobbies like hers before.
It is dark when I wake up. I stick my head under the cold-water tap for a while. Then I put a sweater on, then my coat, and a wool watch cap on over my wig, and stump out past the TV voice from Lily’s door to catch the Number 17 bus for downtown.
Huddled under the sick fluorescent glare of the empty bus, I stare at a cardboard warning tucked into the rack above the windows. It says, “Don’t get too comfortable.”
The doors sigh to let me out on the echoing mall. I head north toward Old Town and the Glass House. I make one stop in a phone booth. There are several Licks in the books but no Mary or M. It’s probably a fake name anyway. Nobody who can afford her kind of hobby could afford to have it known.