by John Domini
Didn’t Dory notice these faces? Suddenly the girl was everyone’s favorite. They tipped their heads, congratulations, attaway, and a man at the next table, a circuit-trainer Kath recognized from the Fitness Center, sent a runner their way with still more champagne. Kath kept her own look party-hearty.
“Well Dorr,” she said, “the woman came out a winner. Nowadays she’s got too much money to have hard feelings.”
Behind the girl, across the room, the Jean Seberg cut bobbed beside the boy who’d brought the receipt.
“Oh, Kath.” Dory’s mouth had gone square again. “Would you for once stop thinking about money?”
“Hey,” Leo put in. “What is it with this Glynde woman? What’s going on?”
“Hush now,” Kath said, “both of you. This next is mine.”
Actually she’d marked this a “Maybe.” She’d found it agreeably weird, a collage that combined shredded IBM discs with a straw doll dressed as the Flying Nun. But the design was like calendar blocks and it had a ponderous title: The Woman’s Point of View. Plus anything by this artist would cost. She was well connected, a Hewlett-Packard wife. The men at the collagist’s table were the most in-shape at the auction, and they settled back as the bidding began, sharps at the ball game.
Kath worked her paddle hotly. The auctioneer lead the crowd, pitch and yaw. She wound up ninety dollars over the minimum, duking it out with one of the wives at the artist’s table. When the thing was gaveled sold—“To the lady in black!”—the room burst into applause.
Dory kept her hands in her lap. She sat stiffly, and Kath could see every stud on her rodeo shirt.
“That’s what all this is about,” she said, “isn’t it?”
The kid with the receipt stood at Kath’s elbow, but Dory felt closer. “Hey, I mean,” she went on, “let’s give the little lady a big hand. That’s the whole point, right?”
“That’s enough, Dorr.” Kath tried to make it like Mother Knows Best. “We all know you don’t want to be here.”
“Oh, excuse me. I have some emotions, excuse me.”
Behind the girl, the miniaturist wore a dandy smirk, worth a wink in reply. Hi, again; hi. But then that woman and her husband once more faced the stage.
“I should have realized,” Dory said, “we have to forget all about my emotions. This is the Wicked Wick Show.”
At the edges of the girl’s sleeves, the torn threads were blue thorns. Kath was struggling for a comeback when Leo hooked her housemate by the elbow. The wine had threaded his cheeks but his eyes were purposeful. Did Dory have any idea, Leo asked, what Kath had been through when her marriage broke up?
“It was like a cyclone hit,” he said.
“Don’t give me that,” Dory said. “She had money. She had a place.”
Kath had more or less forgotten the old man was at the table. But he was wearing the girl down already; her cowboy buttons disappeared beneath her crossed arms. “Oh Do-ro-thy,” Leo chided, “oh now, I certainly don’t feel used.” Kath let him take over, reopening her checkbook. That Flying-Nun piece had busted her balance down so far that anything else would have to go on plastic. Meantime Leo’s tone grew warmer, more among-pals, and Kath understood that Dory didn’t want a scene either. The gray nap on these walls, this plastic-wood furniture—it must have reminded the girl of the whispering rooms at the clinic. Now Dory was the one with a hand at her mouth.
“Leo, you don’t know the whole story either. You’re part of her hocus pocus too.”
“Oh, what’s the harm done?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t the old gal go home with a few new friends?”
Dory shrank between them, her chin doubling against her collar, her looks briefly spoiled. Around their table erupted new laughter, the crowd was sensing success, and Kath brought up her head, open-mouthed. Oh, see. Numbers meant mercy. Besides her own, more than fifteen thousand homes had been mortgaged here, between the river and I-5, and given those numbers she was bound to find a few at least with whom she might laugh. Leo kept his eyes on the girl, his jowls limp. Not until the hubbub died did he reach for his paddle.
His paddle; right. After all, he’d come here looking to buy. Kath was watching Leo bid, his withered fingers ropy on the handle, when Dory angled towards her again.
“You know,” Dory said, “Ossaba can get me into art school in New York.”
The girl cleared out the night’s commotion. She was a portrait and the rest was wall.
“He’ll co-sign the papers for financial aid,” she said. “He’s already put down a deposit on a dorm room.”
“He told you this?” Kath asked.
“In his latest letter, he told me.” Thorns at her shoulders, studs across her chest. “I can move in the first of the year.”
“Well—well, Dory—he’d have all the money.”
“I’d have my own room, Kath. My own room, my own door.”
“But it would still be his turf. His world, Dory. And you didn’t even want the man’s picture around.”
“Oh, the picture. I mean, totally amateur work.”
Leo was motioning for his receipt. Somebody made a crack, Why don’t they just keep a runner at your table? Kath’s own two pink forms however seemed suddenly flimsy, way too few. “Dory,” she asked, “don’t you understand?” But she was head-down, talking to her receipts; in this noise she might as well have been speaking another language.
“The picture’s a separate question,” Dory said.
At the Clinic, Kath recalled, the girl’s story wasn’t so special. An affair during the first year of a residency was a natural hazard. Ossaba’s real problem had been that he lacked the necessary powerful insider to quiet the gossip. The man was black and Muslim, after all. But other doctors had seduced the occasional coed. In most cases the marriage survived, the rupture bridged with jewelry and trips abroad. Most households had the strength for only so much dislocation. Kath herself, just tonight, had lost a good half the wallop she’d come in with. It cost her to avoid Dory’s stare, she felt it in the neck, and she couldn’t believe the effort it took to finger together her receipts and weight them in place with the miniature. On an evening like this—cold and late in the year—that doll’s robe itself mocked her, more substantial than her whole rattling getup. At least the little gilded coverall didn’t pretend to be anything other than a toy, an Emperor’s new clothes.
“I can be out of here the first of the year,” Dory said.
What was the next item? A work in bright fiber, a picket fence and a peacock beyond…but what difference did it make? She’d given nothing here more than a Maybe anyway. Kath slung her paddle up in front of her face.
Afterwards, Leo offered to drive Dory home. Just as well; Kath couldn’t even see the girl. Once the last item was in the books (the only piece left not taken was the ominous view of Peoria Road), ten or a dozen in the audience closed around Kath, picking at their sweat-stuck clothes. The husband of the miniaturist settled behind her, his hands on her shoulders, his fingers greasy with chicken. Volunteers brought the credit-card machine to the table, and she punctuated her conversation with the clack of each imprint.
“What happened?” Kath asked, grinning. “At the bank they’re going to think a bomb hit.”
At last Leo eased through the knot around her chair, quieting the crowd. His smile had paled again.
“The gal would like to go,” he said.
Kath couldn’t see her. She tried to catch a glimpse through the pack of aging bodies, and found herself thinking: I had a family, I had a man who loved me—and now the girl wants to go? The girl too? Kath’s contact lenses couldn’t hold a focus. They needed a soak.
“These lenses,” Kath said, “are going to get a soak.”
And then, finding the old man’s face: “My hero.”
Her looks wouldn’t hold up much longer either. Just getting the receipts in her purse left her blinking, and it felt like her mascara had loosened. Her long coat, whew.
Outside in the parking
lot, the black and white leaden with rain, Kath almost walked right into the Glyndes.
Not that they noticed. In the farthest corner of the lot, half hidden behind a Volvo station wagon, the Glyndes were scuffling. Actually scuffling; Kath couldn’t help but stare. The couple staggered back and forth, their arms locked upright above them. Somehow, together, they’d hefted overhead the portrait of Dory’s surgeon. It was like a workout station at the Fitness Center, the extended straining arms, the ungainly square weight. Mrs. Glynde’s open overcoat had been forced back under her armpits, revealing a Gothic label stitched in golden thread. Now a word that might have been please came through the drizzle, now a grunted obscenity. What was going on? Who was trying to hit who? Kath couldn’t even see which of them had hold of the portrait. The art work jigged above the struggling husband and wife, neon exploding off its glass cover. And those colors sweeping that foreigner’s face—could this be a trick of the glare? For a moment those colors looked to Kath like Dory, Dory the way she’d been tonight. Kath saw Dory’s glimmering tornado, her up-a-tree staring and electric ruby skirt; she saw Dory’s bruised pearl, scrap blues, profound whites: the whole wizard’s wardrobe of the disappearing girl.
In the end she moved on without interfering, without lifting a finger. She kept to the hotel, the shadow. There the lights off the youngster’s painting couldn’t reach her.
Highway Trade
A SATURDAY MORNING when he came in, that alone made the guy look promising. Plus the day was so sunny for October that the taverns must have been slow all over the valley. Nellie saw no wedding ring. No signs of a real bender in progress either, bloody eyes or black veins. She shot Fitzie a look. Later on she more or less apologized: “I know you’d never mess with my game, Fitz.” But the other waitress had to remember—for weeks now Nellie had been worrying about how she was going to make ends meet till New Year’s.
He said he’d seen the satellite dish from the highway and he’d wanted to watch the Series. “It’s always something like that,” she told Fitzie later on. “Something a little herky-jerky-crazy that gets it started.” She gave away the secret deliberately, needing some support herself by then.
But when he first came in, all the standard openers seemed to be working. They seemed to be clicking. Nellie pooh-poohed the dish, cheap and black; the guy came right back with, yeah, looks like an umbrella got caught in a hailstorm. You didn’t usually get that kind of speed around the Drop By Cafe. She hung in—yeah, she said, and it’s about that flimsy—but when Nellie discovered he was rooting for the East Coast team she wasn’t surprised. She went for something fancier, she adjusted the dish so they could watch the World Series in Japanese. He loved it. He said he wanted to leave here knowing the Japanese for “foul ball.” Plenty of time, she said, on a Saturday morning.
“He told me he only got divorced this past summer,” she told Fitzie later. “So I think that would have kept it from getting complicated, between us. Also they never had kids. So I figured with my Wade, the disability, that gave me some leverage.”
Though of course when she told the story she came out tougher than she’d actually felt. Nellie Nails: she didn’t want anything to throw off the situation established between her and Fitzie. At the time, though, she’d found the man a rare one. When he shot her back a dime on the second draft, she’d noticed that even Ernie’s hands were the kind you thought of when you thought of New York. Interesting quick small hands. His lips were better still, when he grinned it was like he’d lost fifteen years. And he had his cagey side. She never picked up where he worked, though the hours made it sound like something over at Oregon State. In fact she found herself getting defensive. Never mind how slow the place looked now, she lied; most weeks she made as much as most of the girls over at the university.
Then she got to the point. Ernie was starting on his burger, he’d said he might as well make a day of it. But when he made some crack about the ballplayers’ uniforms she took the opportunity—with gestures, lip-action, the whole bit—to call attention to the tight red tops she and Fitzie had to wear. She added that some days she was in such a rush that she couldn’t be bothered with a bra. After that she just let him look. She enjoyed the way her breathing made the leotard shift, and she knew that in this light the smoker’s triangle round her mouth wasn’t so pronounced. Why wait? She was the fast one at the Drop By. Behind her the Japanese announcers were having a fit, strange words so short and yappy that they sounded like Nellie’s dog. And she became aware of the entire outsized room as well, bikini-beer ads up on one wall and the cigarette machine against the other, all of it falling into place around this one stretch of eye contact, altogether cool of course and yet sinking its weights through both of them, while she kept the rest of her face set in something a little mouthier than a smile. Fitzie minded her own business down by the grill. A few old lodge types had taken the tables with the best view of the TV. Looks like the game’s a lock, the old guys were saying. No way New York’s going to come back from this.
Except then the satellite hookup shorted out and the wiring caught fire. “I could just strangle that Richter,” she told Fitzie, ten or a dozen times over the next couple weeks. “Getting his brother in-law to do the wiring. He saves a few bucks, and I just may have lost my one chance to give Wade a half-decent Christmas.”
The screen went static, the sound turned to a shriek. Ernie wound up with ketchup in his eyes. The old-timers dropped from their chairs and backtracked gingerly, covering their ears, while Nellie opened the fridge and ducked behind the door. She heard the set pop, but it was a good several seconds more before she noticed the smell. By then the burning plastic overwhelmed even the fridge-stink. She came out of her crouch cupping her face. The old-timers were stumbling over each other at the door, shit noway, lemme out a here. The sunlight was painful off their wind-breakers and rain gear—though Nellie didn’t blink, she didn’t shade her eyes. The pain came out of nowhere so far as she could tell. A spasm, a pang. Something else stung her about all that flimsy look-alike gear, shiny and stitched with the names of factory teams, clubs and schools. Engine Co. #5, Elks, Sisters High. But what was she doing standing blinking at the ones who were already gone? “Help, Nellie for God’s sake help!” Fitzie was shouting. “The damn menu’s on fire!”
“He was nice about it,” she reminded Fitzie later. “At least he didn’t just duck and run with the herd.”
Much later: by now the fire was three weeks past. And Nellie didn’t like the way the other waitress nodded, tonight. It made her worry that she’d been talking too much. Granted, the man was a lost opportunity. He’d never returned. But guys like that had blown through her life before, more than once, more than a couple times. Plus this was after hours. When Nellie got this tired, she couldn’t be sure how she was coming across.
“Calling the fire department,” Fitzie said, “that was really very nice of him.” But she sipped her liquor flat-faced. “Though of course they already knew about it. I mean the guys from number five were sitting right behind him.”
Nellie tried to look like she was checking the place out. Not much to it: the busier ads had been switched off, the jukebox was dark.
“Didn’t that plastic stink, though?” Fitzie said. “Those little letters and numbers. I must’ve fitted them in that menu a thousand times, I never would have believed they’d stink so bad.”
“I could just strangle Richter. That guy was just what I needed.”
“Oh.” Nellie didn’t like the way Fitzie turned to look at her, either. “Forget him, would you? From where I sat he looked like a married man anyway. I know, I know.” Fitzie waved her cigarette. “He said he was divorced, I know. But you still can have that look, even if you’re divorced.”
Nellie waited till her whiskey was at her lips before she spoke. “Signing the papers don’t complete the deal.” She drained the rest of the shot.
“Right. Exactly. So what’re you getting all bent out of shape about, Nell? Social Security g
ave you that extension, didn’t they?”
“Two more weeks. Two weeks, and then they’re probably going to send someone out to the place to make sure I conform to all their piddly little regulations.”
“Can’t Wade help?”
“Fitzie. Wade isn’t even fourteen yet. This whole goddamn—this whole réévaluation bullshit only came up in the first place because he’s just started high school.” She got off her stool and went for the Johnny Walker. “No, what I need’s a goddamn professor. Somebody over at the university, he would have been perfect for them. He would have written them something on the fucking letterhead.”
Fitzie laughed. Nellie felt the payoff herself, familiar by now, a rush in her chest and a bite in her grin.
“Only thing better than a professor would be if I got myself a man in the state legislature.” She was twisting the pourer out of the scotch, working against the bind at the leotard’s armpits. “I mean, that’s what politics is all about, right? Just start messing round with some lightweight up in fucking Salem. Rig the whole damn game in my favor.”
The pourer came free and she drank from the bottle. Fitzie slapped a hand to her mouth, she loved it.
“Nellie Nails,” she said.
Nellie understood what the other waitress got out of the deal. Fitzie’s Jack was one of the few married men she’d known that long who’d never made a play for her. Nellie to them was the local exotica. She kept them feeling hip, a little bad themselves. Oh, Jack might try and tease Nellie. He might recite her two rules for handling men. One, if you’re sleeping with a guy never lie to him, and two, be sure to let him know from the start exactly what sort of a project he is. But when Jack had finished reciting his grin would be soft, impressed. Whoa Nellie, he’d say. It’s like you’ve got different muscles from the rest of us. She’d only shrug. Her main thing was simple after all: just, never let a guy feel like he’s settled in. If a guy’s a rehab case, tell him he’s a rehab case, and he’ll stay a case till he’s re-habbed enough to walk away on his own. If he’s a little boy who needs to do some growing up, tell him so even if he happens to be sitting with the gang from high school. That way—though this part of the system, she wasn’t so clear on—before the men moved on they always left her with something practical.
