“Smart little shit, I’m tellin’ ya!” she says after cleaning her cheeks with a gulp. “Lookit ’er drive that sucker!”
The young woman on the screen is bent over a complicated hunk of shiny machinery. The driving Miss Lick finds so admirable is a sure-fingered dial-twiddling and button-tapping.
Miss Lick scoots back in her chair and lunges for another flabby forkful of limp turkey from her compartmentalized supper.
She loves this — carrying our Lickety Split food trays back through the discreet door in the big bathroom to her home-movie theater, perching on straight chairs with the trays on our knees, watching the screen full of Miss Lick’s girls. She adores the reruns, and nearly cries at the “before” footage, angry grieving for the misery of their lives before she rescued them. She is hypnotized by the surgery or treatment flicks, chewing slowly, nudging me with an informative elbow and a nod when a particularly smooth bit of scissor or saw work is goring its way across the screen. Now that she allows me to see these segments, she is anxious to impress me. But her joy is in the work shots of the “successes.”
“Look at that! Know what she’s doing? Reading the rings of rat-assed Saturn! Can you imagine? Six years ago the only rings she knew were for slipping over limp cocks to make ’em rise!”
The young woman in the white coat reaches for the paper that is spewing from a printer. She turns toward us and the light to read. She smiles, a sudden grin of utterly cheerful mischief flashing out of her intense flesh.
I want to ask what it is that she hasn’t got anymore. The lab coat hides her chest. Was it breasts? Two new figures appear — a plain woman and a spavined boy, twenty or twenty-one years old. They stand at attention in front of Miss Lick’s girl as she speaks.
“Teaching ’em! See that? She’s got these fuckers trailing after her!”
Miss Lick’s big hand bunches and jabs my thigh sideways in hilarious friendship. “Eh? Eh?”
My tray flips forward, spewing goo, and she’s on her knees choking with apologies as she plucks up the gobs and wipes up the smears. “Creeping Christ! I’m such a clod! Are you all right? Hey, I’ll have a fresh new one for you in thirty seconds flat. Just sit. No, no, I’m going to.”
She tears me up. I sit here laughing at her. She is a galumphing dugong, an elvish ox, a sentimental rhino.
“They’re like my kids, all of them.” She sniffs, her thick forehead creasing, anxious that I should understand and approve.
“Did you, no offense now, but did you ever wish you’d had kids? Not the man bit, but the kid bit? No? Well, you’re right, I know it. You’re right. But you want to make a difference. A person wants to feel as though they’ve accomplished something.”
She mooches around for my approval. She’s a sullen buffalo with the world but she’s a child to me. She is bigger than Papa. She could break me with two fingers. But she can be small around me. She can chatter to me though she sticks to brusque efficiency with everybody else. Oh, she is solicitous and protective with her girls, but never childlike. It’s because I like her. Arty was right. She soaks it up like booze and it turns her to water, makes her defenseless.
Am I the first person who’s ever liked her? It makes me sad. She’s pretty lovable, after all. She knows how to enjoy things, and she’s so decent it’s scary.
There she sits, sprawled in a hard, straight chair, hour after hour. It never occurs to her to drag in a soft chair for herself. She thought about cushions for me, though. Draped my straight chair with towels from the bathroom because one day in the pool she saw red lines on my hump. I’d been leaning on a locker. She never forgot. She always makes sure I’m comfortable.
“So why don’t you bring in an armchair for yourself?” I asked her.
“What? Too much trouble. I don’t need it. I’m padded.”
She’s wearing flannel pajamas and a floppy bathrobe. Her potato feet stick out, the soles jammed against the tile floor, propping her in the chair as she reaches, sorting through the film disks. Her chubby toes sprout, wiggling, from the main tuber.
“Got a new scout flick today.” Her approach to the scouting tapes of potential recruits is different, intense, questioning, critical, analytical, running them again, backing them up to replay a gesture, a frown, a smile.
“This slut tried a one-handed pigeon drop on me. As soon as she discovered this bag, brown paper bag, under her ass on the park bench, I smelled old tuna. She screeches ‘For heaven’s sakes!’ I sat there watching the real goddamn pigeons crapping on the lawn, listening to her go on about ‘Where could all that money have possibly come from?’ and then finding a little brown envelope of snapshots. Twelve-year-old sucking a Doberman’s dick, and she’s miscarrying with righteous indignation and trying to get me to pay attention and all the time I’m thinking, ‘This is where I’ve got to at last. I’m looking like a gobbling pigeon, just like all the drooling biddies shuffling on the mall.’ It makes me bitter. I reached in my wallet and pulled out a hundred. ‘Now, honey,’ I says, and I hand it to her, watching her eyes freeze as she shuts up. ‘You take this so you don’t get your ass kicked when you get back to the slimy pimp that runs you. Save us all trouble and time.’ She starts up protesting, waving this lunch bag of funny money at me. ‘Believe me, sweetheart,’ I says, ‘you’re not cut out for this business.’ I went back to the office and crabbed at people all afternoon. Anyway, I saw her again in the Park Blocks while I had the equipment.”
The frail, colorless girl on the screen is far away and small on a park bench. She sits, twisting her shirttail edgily and looking nervously around. I can’t make her face out clearly.
“What do you think?”
I squint through my glasses, trying to see the wispy features. “Isn’t she like an ‘after’ already?”
Miss Lick slaps her knees. “True enough!”
“I mean,” I try to see the outline of the girl’s breasts under her shoddy shirt, “she’s got nothing to sell you.”
“Oly! What do you think I am?” Miss Lick is hurt. “She could use some schooling and a decent job. Those skinny mice have got nothing. All they can do is latch onto some man or die.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“Sure. Forget it. Here’s the bang-tail filly again. I’ll think about that con sharper. Maybe something can be done. The bang-tail has me flummoxed, though.”
I clench my teeth and telescope my head downward between my shoulders. The “bang-tail” is Miranda. I’ve already spent hours watching replays of Miranda lounging on the steps of the art school, eating ice cream as she walks down the street, waving her tail on a velvet-draped stage during one of the Glass House private showings. Here she is again, flirting with her Binewski eyes, stretching her wide Arturan mouth to loll a tongue suggestively around the ice-cream cone, alert to the effect she’s having on the guy in the coveralls waiting beside her for the traffic light to change. It screws me up totally to see Miss Lick’s films of Miranda.
“What’s she about? Hopeless, you think?” Miss Lick is sensitive to my moods. “Say it, Oly, is she useless?”
“No!” I snap and then wave my hand weakly, trying to soften it.
“I haven’t heard a peep out of her in weeks. There’s one month left to her school year. She’s supposed to go straight in to surgery the week after the semester ends. But you’d think she’d call. I have a bet with myself that she’ll hit me up to double my cash offer. The hell of it is, I don’t know if it’s worth it. Art types. But I made the offer and I’ll stick by my word. She’ll do the tail and then we’ll see. Thing is, she’s made the tail erotic rather than a disfigurement. Maybe I’ll stop with that. I’m soft but I’m not nuts. No use wasting money and time and energy on a stupid cow who can’t benefit …”