The neon clock in the window of the tattoo parlor says nine. Two blocks later I am scouting doorways across from the Glass House parking lot. A shut-down leather shop on the corner gives me a view of the parking lot and the side door as well as a long angle on the front entrance. A heap of garbage bags at the front waits for the morning pickup. Five steps lead up to the door. I sit on the top step and watch the lot fill up slowly. The cars spew out cheerful groups and giggling pairs. Mostly men. I count. Sixty going in before one comes out. None of them is Miss Lick.
The cold wraps me. It isn’t real rain, just the heavy mist that takes its time soaking through. The clouds hang low, picking up a dull bruise color from the lights of the city. The flesh-toned office tower known as Big Pink haunts the sky above the crabbed three-story horizon of Old Town. The tower disappears occasionally in a gust of darkness. My legs begin to ache.
Who do I think I am? What in the name of creeping Jesus am I going to do? The only answer is the sneer from the region of my hip sockets. I go on sitting, watching, feeling like a rat’s-ass fool.
Two hours later Miss Lick shows up. She’s easy to pick out. Six foot two and 240 pounds in a grey business suit. Her high heels are each big enough to bury an Egyptian in. She trots alone across the parking lot, hunched under an umbrella, and slides into the side door of the Glass House. My pulse whips high at the sight of her but drifts back down to a rhythmless funk as the door stays closed.
It’s another hour before she steps out into the harsh light of the parking lot. She looks up and decides against opening the umbrella. She lets the door sink back behind her and stands, head up, mouth open, fumbling in her pockets. I get up. My knees are stiff and unreliable. I shake my feet trying to get some juice into my joints. The blood begins its burn back to life as she starts her march across the lot. She is too discreet to leave her car that close to the place. She’s on the corner, turning. I trot down the dark side of the street. A small bar is evicting scum, and the drunken banter covers my shuffle briefly. Three blocks from the Glass House the big woman climbs into a sleek, dark machine parked in front of the blood bank. I write the license number on my wrist with a felt-tip pen and feel as though I’ve conquered Asia.
Miranda won’t get off work for another two hours. She’ll take a cab home. I stump over to the bus mall, so delirious with relief and cold that I hallucinate Miranda on every corner. Sitting by the glare-blackened window on the Number 17, I rewrite the license number on an old receipt from my purse. The figures on my wrist are already smearing blue from the mist and my sweat.
I go in to work early the next morning. As I climb onto the bus, a small genderless child lurches in its mother’s arms, pointing at me and crowing, “Little Mama!” The woman holding the child goes a sudden hot red and grabs at the tiny hand, shushing. I turn and hop back down the steps and wave the driver on. I walk to the radio station.
By the time I get there I’ve decided that the license number has nothing to do with Miranda’s Miss Lick. How many big women use the side door of the Glass House? I could be tagging lumpily after a convincing middle-aged transvestite. If Lick is a phony name for subterranean use, I could trail an irrelevant specimen for weeks and never know it.
I slide a license trace request into the newsroom, make two fifteen-second commercial spots for Stereo Heaven and Sun River lunchmeat, and then tape the third installment of Beowulf for the Blind. I wait until after the Story Hour to check my message slot, and find the computer printout of the trace. It is Mary T. Lick. She hasn’t changed her name for the Glass House. Her address is a tony high-rise condo in the West Hills, just below the Rose Garden.
In the elevator it occurs to me that Miranda might be waiting for me in the lobby, hoping to guile me into another drawing session. I hold my breath as the doors open, but she isn’t there.
I cross the bridge over the concrete river of the sunken highway and walk down to the library. Lincoln High School is directly behind the station and the students on their lunch hour crowd the sidewalks. Two shrill-voiced girls argue hideously on the Charles Dickens bench outside the library. I swim through the heavy doors and up the curving white marble stairs to the index files.
Mary T. Lick has a card of her own, just before Thomas R. Lick, her father. They are both buried in microfilm. I go up another two flights to the periodical room and stake out a viewing machine in the most obscure corner. I camp there with a stack of film reels of old newspapers.
There she is, not smiling, in the society columns. A younger Mary Lick is not smiling at the Hunt Club Opera Benefit. Mary Lick is trapped gloomily between two vivacious gargoyles at the City Club. Mary Lick, standing uncomfortably next to the deep V neckline of a Rose Princess, frowns at the crowning of the Rose Festival Queen. A much younger Mary Lick stands glumly, behind a bald and furious-faced man billed in the caption as Thomas R. Lick, at the ribbon cutting for the Thomas R. Lick Swimming Pool at the TAC Club.
The text skates over guest lists, wardrobes, and buffet menus. There is no comment on Mary’s wardrobe, which is the same in all cases, a dark featureless business suit.
Thomas R. is referred to variously as the Lickety Split Food king, mogul, or tycoon. The grimmest and most recent photo of Mary Lick shows her staring moodily at a Salvation Army truck loaded with cardboard boxes. “24 Lickety Split Thanksgiving Dinners.” The caption calls Mary “The Lickety Split Food Heiress,” suggesting that Thomas R. has passed on to the obituary page, probably with a “Lick Splits” headline.
There she is. The old man is spread out on the worm buffet and Daughter Mary is dumping hundreds of Lickety Split dinners into socially unacceptable hands. The seven-year-old item comments that this is the first contribution in the history of the Lickety Split Corporation, but says, coyly, that it might “signify a new role for the company in the future.”
I cram the copies into my bag and chug home. There’s a note under my door. A pencil smear from Miranda. “Come up and let me draw you.”
When I knock, her door explodes inward, her huge frame surrounded by light. “Finally.” Reaching for me.
“I can’t today. I have some work to do.” Her face falls into conventions masking disappointment. My chest lurches.
“But how did it go with that woman, about your tail?”
She flickers for the connection. Not thinking about it.
“Oh, there’s no hurry. She says it’s fine to wait until the semester ends.”
“To decide?”
“No. To do it. Have it done.”
“You decided.”
“What the hell. It’s silly not to.”
Her insolent look. The careless smirk. She is punishing me for being unavailable. I turn away, sick, and feel my way back down the hall.
She calls after me.
“When can you sit for me again? Tomorrow? The afternoon? Miss McGurk?”
I wave and go downstairs to my room and shut the door behind me and lock it.
Pacing and grinding my teeth. Throwing my wig on the floor and stamping. Why does she make me so angry? My rage terrifies me. I am a monster. I would rip her to shreds. I would swing her up by her round pink heels and snap her long body until that bright, hairy head smashed against the wall. Falling on my knees, shaking. Tangling my hands to keep from breaking something. Sudden gratitude for the nuns, realizing that if she had stayed with me all the years of her growing up I would have murdered her — the arrogant, imbecile bitch, my baby, beautiful Miranda.
I end up curled on the floor, blubbering and gasping. No one comes to comfort me. I lie there until I’m bored and embarrassed at having dried snot streaks crackling on my cheeks. I get angry so rarely. Now twice in two days at Miranda.