“Jessica!” booms Miss Lick from the doorway. The girl’s smooth, oval head turns casually on the pillow and she looks at us with long, oval eyes, the lids as hairless as sea shells. Then her lush, wide mouth opens slightly in a smile and she is looking at me as Miss Lick bustles with the flowers and rumbles awkwardly, “Want you to meet Miss McGurk. Olympia McGurk. A good pal of mine.”
The girl is smiling gently with cheekbones that could cut your throat and a nose and chin from some old painting that I can’t quite remember. While this face is delicately smiling, the long throat and the flat muscular chest and the round shoulders begin to shake with laughter. With this laugh still going she says to me, “How much did she pay you? A few million, I hope!”
28. NOTES FOR NOW: One for the Road
Miss Lick watches me surface and blow. She grins as I scrabble for the guttered side of the pool. “It’s amazing that you and I are so much alike, isn’t it?” I kick off on my back, paddling away from her, grinning.
She’s right. We each appear totally alone in our lives. I’m the shy, isolated dwarf creeping in and out of my shabby room, living only through my throat and my inherited work. She is the muscular monolith, cut off by brass, stalking around in her old man’s ambition, too imposing in finance and physique for the regular commerce of talk and touch. We choose to seem barren, loveless orphans. We each have a secret family. Miss Lick has her darlings and I have mine. All we’ve really lacked is someone to tell. Now she tells me, and I tell all to these bland, indifferent sheets of paper. The only point where our narrow tracks converge is her bid to turn my darling into one of hers.
Does she lie to me? She keeps things from me. She wouldn’t let me watch the surgery or treatment sections of her home movies for a long time. Does she keep more aside? Hide more of herself? Horrors she doesn’t trust me with? Titillations she is ashamed of? I sail along thinking she is perfectly open. Her eyes are as wide as a child’s when she talks to me. But maybe I’m the fool. Maybe lying so constantly has burnt my view. Believing that she is fooled, I consider her too simple to lie.
We are alone in the pool. The lifeguard has gone for the night, trusting Miss Lick to lock up. Miss Lick sits on the side, her huge legs drooping into the water. She shudders as I stop to breathe at her end.
“Do you ever,” her eyes circle the echoing green of the big room, “do you ever get the feeling somebody’s watching us?”
My head swivels, searching automatically, though I know that the watcher is me. “You’re just tired and spooky. You need your supper.”
She shrugs it off. Forgets. But does she really know? Is she playing me while I play her?
It rains every night now and the air is soft in the morning. Almost warm. A faint haze, not quite green, softens the iron branches of the trees. Miranda’s anatomy drawings are finished. She has mounted them on cardboard and she stores them in a huge plastic binder.
“I want you to look at them.”
“I can’t.”
“All this time you’ve never looked.”
“Just not at the ones of me. I don’t want to see myself.”
“You look in mirrors. I’m better than any goddamned mirror.”
“It’s not your work. I like your other drawings. This just scares me.”
“I take it personally. This is my best work. The best I’ve ever done. I don’t see you as ugly. I see you as unique and wonderful.”
“It’s hard dealing with you seeing me at all.”
“Miss-fucking-steerious! I’m handing the whole mess in tomorrow morning. The competition results will come out in two weeks, the day before I go into the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Or whatever. I don’t know where Miss Lick has that work done.”
“I have to get back to work now.”
“The semester ends Friday.”
“Thank you so much for the tea.”
“I’m calling Miss Lick today to arrange things.”
“See you soon.”
“I may not come back here afterward.”
I trotted down the hall with her leaning out of her doorway to talk to my back.
“I’ll be in a nursing home for a while and then I’ll probably move away.”
I’m not even tempted to anger. Time is a rap on the ear with a brass knuckle. I’ve been letting it ride. Having my little cake — chummy with Miranda over tea, chummy with Miss Lick over home movies — snuggling down in a thick-headed fantasy that what little I was doing would make the difference, as if putting across the lie was success. All I had to do was accept mild discomfort in a strange room, sneak up the fire escape to visit Lily and Miranda, and this puny martyrdom would miraculously obliterate the problem.
The next morning I get to the club an hour before the lifeguard arrives and use the key Miss Lick has given me to get into the pool locker room. I lug two gallon jugs of concentrated ammonia in a shopping bag into the dressing room, stack the plastic bottles in my locker, and cover them with the bag.
The door from the locker room into the footbath is solid wood hung in a steel frame. The auger is an ancient handcrank from the landlord’s tool kit in Lily’s basement. On my knees on the cold tiles I open the door slightly to slide a single sheet of the Oregonian underneath. The door swings shut, leaving half the paper on each side to catch the wood dust. I drill the hole under the lowest hinge and within a quarter inch of the frame. The bigger bit enlarges the hole to a one-inch notch in the door’s edge. I wrap the dust in the paper, ready to carry away with the auger.
The clear plastic tubing slides easily through the hole. On the footbath side of the door a few inches of tubing droop toward the chlorine reek of the blue surface. I bend to suck air through it. The tube is clear, not pinched by the door closing. With the tube gone the hole is in the dark below the hinge, hardly visible unless you are on your hands and knees.
I work the narrow end of the funnel into the end of the tube, coil the arrangement tidily, and tuck it under the bag in my locker. As I walk out through the big glass doors in the front lobby I see the glossy young lifeguard putting her bicycle into a stanchion.
Miss Olympia Binewski McGurk, the albino dwarf, takes two steps to the average one because her mystic breastbone has spent thirty-eight years trying to increase its distance from her agnostic spine. Those two steps carry our Miss Oly, the hunchback, into the tidal stench of corned beef and cabbage filling the dim cove of McLarnin’s at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning when Jimmy McL. himself is steaming the wherewithal for the famous eleven-to-four buffet. The bar is clean. The glasses wait, glittering in their racks.
Miss Oly hoists her twisted frame onto the least spinnable bar stool and nods encouragingly at Jimmy. The mirror is obscured by bottlenecks, leaving shards in which Miss Oly catches a flicker of her blue-tinted spectacles and goat-grey wig bobbing over the waxy wood. Her big, soft voice is deeper than the tenor McLarnin’s.
“A shot of Jameson’s please, Jimmy,” she says, and McL. sways toward her, wrapped in cabbage mist from the kettles and flapping a bar towel in front of his red knob nose to clear the view.
“Celebrating, are we?” gurgles Jimmy in sympathy with the tall, tipping bottle.
“You too?” asks Miss Oly, squinting her rose-pink eyes behind the sapphire lenses.