.
Today
— 10
A.M
. or so — Jouncing Jenny, the redhead who complains about having to color her “honey-blond” hair, comes up the step with an armload of magazines and catalogues
.
“Ike, honey, these are for the twins. I got to deliver ’em,” she says. Ike, who is halfway through a self-help book promising him a method for making money in his spare time, stands up, embarrassed
.
“Nobody goes in, Jenny. That’s my orders.”
“These are catalogues that just got here in the mail bag. It’s just clothes and knickknacks. No harm. The twins want ’em to shop from.” Jenny is rolling her bare golden shoulder at Ike and being gently provocative. Ike is far from immune but locked into his duty
.
“Only ones can go in or out is Miss Oly and Mr. Arty. That’s my orders.”
“Well, Ike, you take ’em in. It don’t matter. The girls want them catalogues. Ordered ’em six weeks ago. You take ’em in.”
“Jenny, you’ll think I’m a fool but I can’t. I can’t go in myself.”
“You can’t knock on the door and stand outside and hand in a few catalogues?” Jenny’s eyebrows, plucked to whispers, are expressing delicate but scornful disbelief Ike takes offense
.
“Listen, you knock on Arty’s door and ask him.”
Jenny backs down immediately. “I’ll just leave ’em here, Ike. If Miss Oly goes in you ask her kindly would she take these catalogues to her sisters.”
2
P.M
. Midway swinging noisily in background
.
Crystal Lil trips eagerly out the door of the Big B van with a hunk of sea-green cloth in her hands. Lil has recently gone over to “sensible walking shoes” as part of her “Grandma” image but she hasn’t adjusted to the low heels and still tends to tiptoe. This is the first time I’ve seen her wear her spectacles out of the van. She looks energetic and cheery and has, no doubt, just popped an upper or two. She reaches to knock on the twins’ door and poor Ike, the guard, hauls himself out of his deck chair stuttering
.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am …” and the rest I can’t hear. It’s obvious he won’t let her in to see the twins. She’s incredulous. He’s embarrassed. It’s one thing to turn away a redhead and another thing entirely to refuse the Boss Mom. Her body stiffens as his message becomes real to her. She is suddenly very old, three hundred years’ worth of iron-spined Bostonian motherhood. He withers, shuffling, unable to look at her, apparently referring her to Arty. She marches to Arty’s door with the blue-green cloth trailing, revealing its form as it flaps behind her — a two-necked, four-armed maternity dress, its hem pinned sketchily in place, its seams unfinished. Arty’s door stays closed. No answer. Lil bunches the dress in her fists and lurches back to her own van. Her hair strikes me as grey today, rather than white.
22. Nose Spites Face, Lip Disappears
Arty ordered the twins’ tent broken down. Zephir McGurk set to figuring how to use the materials to enlarge Arty’s tent. The twins’ stage truck remained, closed up for travel. The big piano gathered dust.
Crystal Lil was upset. Papa spent hours trying to calm her. She said the twins had been “closed down.” He used the word “sabbatical.”
“They’ll have their hands full with the baby.” He’d say, “Remember how tired you got? They’re strong enough, but, Lily, they’re beginning to show. They can’t be on stage with a bulging belly. We’d have riots in the tents. Investigations.”
“Al, they’re not yet nineteen years old. If they stop working now, they’ll drift. They shouldn’t be idle. And why can’t I see them? They need me.”
“It’s an adjustment period for them. Settling to the idea of motherhood.”
“Sounds like something Arty would say.”
The security booth looking into Arty’s big room was my responsibility again. The cot had been moved out and only the tall stool and the gun occupied the bare cubicle. I could still smell the medicine and sweat and the faint reek of decay that the Bag Man had left behind. I arranged myself on the stool and stared through the one-way glass into Arty’s big room. Gradually my legs, in fact my whole ass, went to sleep. Numb and useless. But I was lucky. It was spewing rain outside and Arty’s cuddler for the evening was sitting on the propane tank under his window holding a soggy hunk of newspaper over her hair. By the time he let her in she would look like a smeared possum rather than the tight-bunned little cunt notcher she was. I forget her name. They were all Didi or Lisa or Suki in those days. He’d pick them out of the norm screamers at the gate when he came through after his show. They’d be jumping and howling for a look at him as he came out the back of the stage truck in his golf cart. He’d lean back, grin lots of teeth around the control bulb in his mouth, and drive past the chain-link fence to let them see him. If he stopped the cart I, or one of the security guards, would get his instructions.
“The one in the pink halter top,” he’d say. Or, “They’re all cows in this town. Where are we again?”
“Great Falls,” I’d say.
“Well, get me that rhino in the sequined jump suit and the ostrich in the red skirt.”
I’d stump over to the fence as he drove off to his van.
“Me?” they’d squeal when I waved for them to come up to the fence.
“Me?”
I’d leave them to wait, either in the “green room,” as Arty called McGurk’s station wagon, or on the propane tank outside Arty’s window. It was the only chore for Arty that I preferred letting someone else do.
This particular Lulu was stuck in a filthy January rainstorm for three hours by my reckoning, because Arty was in conference with his chief technical advisor, Doc Phyllis.
“What I’d really like …” Arty was wallowing on his satin bedspread, wearing only cotton briefs. His fins plucked and smoothed the satin. He rolled the bare skin of his head against the slick, warm fabric and arched his back, digging his shoulder blades into the softness.
“Do tell,” murmured Doc Phyllis. She lounged in her chair, one white-stockinged leg and her squeegee shoe flopped over the arm. Her glasses glittered between her white cap and her surgical mask. She had a straight shot at Arty and was probably dissecting his hip and shoulder joints in her head.
“I’m curious about the possibility of separating the twins,” Arty said. Dr. Phyllis grunted.
“Can’t be done. I told you that years ago.”
Arty yawned, wiggling. “Well, I thought you’d be keeping up with new techniques and developments.”
Doc P. was not to be goaded. “Nothing to do with technique. It’s the way they’re built.”
Arty flipped over on his belly and looked straight at her. “What if I was willing to sacrifice one twin to keep the other?”
“Which one?” inquired Dr. Phyllis sweetly.
Arty smiled. “It doesn’t matter.”
Miz Z. was leaving as I came into Arty’s place a few days later. She waved a folder at me by way of hello and I caught the words “Dime Box” on the fly. Arty was in his crisp young executive mode but I asked him about it when she was gone.