With my eyes closed I can feel the children looking at me. They have stopped their games for a moment in the shallow end where they can watch me. I too am at the shallow end, sitting on the steps in water up to my nipples. Miss Lick is plowing up and down the pool in her ponderous and dutiful laps. The children’s eyes are crawling on me. If I opened my eyes they would smile at me and wave. They are just old enough to be embarrassed at their normality in front of me.
Because I am Olympia Binewski and am accustomed to the feel of eyes moving on me, I turn slightly on my submerged seat and reach down as though examining my toes under water. This angle will allow the children a clear profile view of my hump. I have never claimed that my hump is extraordinary in size or conformation, but it is a classic of its kind, rising in a clean arc and pulling my shoulders up, pinching my chest out in a narrow wedge. The top of the hump, if I bend at a certain angle, is as high as the back of my head. Now I will bring both hands out of the water and remove my goggles. There is some splashing from the children. They are impressed at the size of my hands on the ends of my short, thin arms. I smile and open my eyes so they can tell in the dapple reflections on the water that my eyes are a deep rose pink rather than red.
But Miss Lick is standing in the shallow end, glowering down at the children. I can hear her harshness. “Are you swimming laps or fooling around?” And four little creatures do not speak but kick off from the wall and chase each other down the far lane of the pool to escape.
The light is pale green and moves on Miss Lick’s enormous shoulders and chest. She turns and nods at me — a quick twitch of tension at her mouth that stands for a smile. She is telling me that she has saved me from the stares of idiots and that I am safe with her to guard me. Then she plunges back into the water and moves forward, beating the surface with the sound of a hiccuping cannon.
The children turn and come back but they won’t dare stop at this end again. Miss Lick doesn’t like children. She hates beautiful female children. These four ten-year-olds are long and absurdly slim, with clean faces. They are frightened of Miss Lick but not of me.
Maybe it’s because I am so old. They would worry if I was their age and they could imagine being me. They tell each other that I was “born that way,” which is reassurance for them and comfort for me. Nothing could make me hurt them.
But they are wise to fear Miss Lick. She could lose control for an instant and grind them to paste.
Miss Lick is giving me a swimming lesson. She holds me in her arms and mutters, “Tip your head back, arch your spine. Good. Now kick from the hip.”
Her face is big and serious, watching me carefully. Her arms and hands are warm beneath me. I lie on my back and squint up into her bulging face and know that she is the only friend I’ve ever had. We are in water that would be over my head if she let me go. I can hear the thrum of other swimmers beating the water around me. The light bounces off the walls and is broken by the water. Miss Lick holds me up. “Good, Oly,” she says, and she smiles at me.
Miss Lick is six feet two and a heavyweight athlete. She is not quite 40 years old and has 20-inch biceps. I have 7-inch biceps. I am 36 inches tall. I weigh 64 pounds and I am very old at 38. My arthritis is actually 110. But Miss Lick is even older because she is closer to death. Miss Lick has her arm around the bomb that will kill her and she is dickering to buy it.
“Kick!” she barks, grinning down at me. Suddenly the sting of grief spurts from my sinuses to my belly. This is all Miranda’s fault, I tell myself in rage. If my daughter weren’t such a fly-brained slut I wouldn’t be in this position. I could be a quiet, pleasant old dwarf, curling into a dry and sanitary death in my own blankets without ever having injured a soul. But here I am rocking in the arms of the creature I intend to slaughter. When I stop kicking and double up in pain, Miss Lick is worried.
“Water in your nose?” she asks, pumping her huge pillow hand gently against my hump. “Did you swallow some?”
Looking up through my smeared green lenses I see a roll of fat covering the artery in Miss Lick’s throat.
When I refuse to go to dinner at her house Miss Lick wants to carry me up to my apartment and tuck me into bed. “God, I’m so thoughtless!” she groans as she wheels the big sedan through the dark streets. “I act as though you’re a goddamned mountain like me!”
“Not at all,” I squawk, with my fingers clutching the soft leather of the front seat. “Not at all,” I repeat, grabbing with one hand at the dashboard and the other at the armrest to keep from hurtling into the dark well of legroom as Miss Lick stops for a light.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to come up with you? I could make you some soup. I know you don’t eat.”
“Not at all.” I fiddle with the door handle, and the door eases open at last and a crack of cool air slips in, dulling the hot reek of her chlorine flesh in the car. “I’m going to unplug the phone and crawl right into bed. I’m recording early tomorrow.”
Her big hand touches my hump as I slide toward the pavement. “Let me give you a lift to the radio station in the morning,” she urged.
“Not at all.” I can barely think anymore. If I don’t get away from her I will disintegrate and ruin everything.
“Thank you so much. I’ll see you in the pool tomorrow evening,” and I grab the car door with both hands and slam it on her goodnight and turn away, steering at top speed for the lobby entrance because she never pulls away from the curb until she sees me safe inside.
This building is new and Miss Lick could put a fist through my front door as easy as belching, which she does glibly. Miss Lick can belch every syllable of the name “Harry Houdini” on demand and enjoys being asked. Still, I lock the flimsy veneer behind me and then unplug the phone. I told her I was going to bed and I can’t risk a busy signal if she rings to check on me.
It is garbage night for Crystal Lil. I have to go home. Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous assassins. I use the footstool to stare into the mirror over the sink in the all-new bathroom. Straightening my wig, adjusting my glasses, I smirk snidely at myself because it serves me right for being such a flabby clot as to lose my nerve. Getting all choked up with sympathy for Miss L. A good two-mile walk in the dark and cold will teach my knees and ankles a little respect for discipline and self-control.
Fatigue makes me giddy. By the time I get to the alley behind Lily’s house, my head is floating several feet above my body and I have a bitter tendency to giggle. I can see myself and the view is pathetic. I don’t dare use the front door in case Miss Lick is pursuing her surveillance hobby.
The old dwarf rolls up the cat-shit dark stairs of the decrepit garage to get to the roof. Her feet hurt and her knees are pleading for a transfer to Bermuda. “Eeh,” grunts the frog-faced albino. Her hip joints have gone past red-hot to a temperature unfamiliar even to the flap-titted hunchback. “Hunh,” says the bald-headed mother of morons, as she stops to lean against the open door to the roof.
The air is grey, lit by a street lamp at the end of the alley. The garage roof is flat and attached at the rear to the tall wood house. The rain pops and silvers on the slimed pool of water that fills the center of the roof. The house fire escape sinks its feet in the roof tar. Miss Oly, the third or fourth Binewski child, depending on whether you count heads or asses, takes off her blue-tinted spectacles and rubs the sweat from under her bulging pink eyes and off the bridge of her wide, flat nose and then hooks the glasses back over her ears and settles them in place. Raising the entire flesh of her forehead and skull for lack of eyebrows, Ms. Binewski proceeds, with anxious care, to roll bowleggedly away from the cat stench of the stairway, around the edges of the rain pool, making for the first length of the cast-iron fire ladder. There she goes, humping up the damp, sooty rungs. She stops climbing and hooks her chin over the rung in front of her to rest for three breaths, thinking it may be time to get a cane. Or maybe a pair of canes hefty enough to help a burst toad of an elderly cretin up such flights of carpenterial fancy as those cat-slimed stairs in the garage without having to reach out and touch each sodden step with a hand.