Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  As Racquel turned to see what Sassy was gawking at, he caught the edge of his gold strappy sandal on something and lost his balance. Automatically Sassy grabbed for his hand to help him, and as he fell backward through a flat place in the air, he pulled her with him.

  After four days had gone by and he hadn’t heard from Sassy, Racquel went to see her.

  He took something new from the stock, a feathered and sequined baseball cap, to try to make her laugh. Racquel had a feeling it was going to be hard to get Sassy to smile. Not that it hadn’t been pretty damn funny when they came back, landing practically on top of the cop, who was there with his ever-loving warrant searching the place. But then the cop was so shook up he’d blundered into the mirror and knocked it over. And it broke. Broke to smithereens. And Sassy just stood there and cried.

  Getting out of a taxi in front of Sassy’s apartment building, Racquel sighed, because he was breaking a promise to himself. He had sworn he was going to stay away from Sassy from here on out. But God damn, she had turned to him and cried in his arms. Sobbing against his artificial bosom. He swallowed hard just thinking about it.

  He went in.

  Damn, how can people live in these places? It’s not as bad as where I grew up, Racquel reminded himself, waiting for the elevator. No dark broken steps, no winos, no smell of urine. But the cinder-block walls painted institutional beige, the mustard-brown vinyl flooring, the low acoustic-tile ceiling, the posterboard signs No Soliciting No Loitering No Recreational Wheeled Conveyances No Public Displays Of Affection—might as well say No Living. Racquel wore fuchsia to defy places like this. Specifically, in this instance, he was wearing a fuchsia tunic fringed with dip-dyed cassowary over a bias-draped plum skirt. And a touch of cassowary at the neck. The right accessories meant everything.

  No functioning security system in this place, either, he noticed as he knocked at Sassy’s door.

  “It’s open.” Her voice sounded wan.

  He went in, walking through a front room piled with books to find her sitting at her kitchen table amid more books, mostly about birds. She did not get up to meet him. She barely looked at him.

  “Hey, woman.” He slapped the glittery baseball hat onto her head. She did smile, and she took it off to see what it was, but she did not show enough interest to head for a mirror and admire how it looked. And she was cute as hell in that hat, dammit, with her heart-shaped face, her big eyes and her little pointed chin. Even her big honkin’ glasses were cute under that hat. But she did not put it back on, just laid it aside.

  “I haven’t seen you around.” Racquel sat down at another chair at the table, which was one of those tasteless aluminum-tubing-and-plastic laminate kitchenette affairs, with aluminum-and-plastic chairs to match. Heinous.

  “I lost my job,” Sassy said.

  “I know. Doesn’t mean you can’t come see me.”

  “I haven’t felt like going anywhere.”

  Racquel moved a pile of books to the floor and studied her. Sassy looked like she didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything. No makeup—of course, when had he ever seen Sassy in makeup? How long had she been letting herself go? Since he had known her, anyway. There she sat all slumped, with her hair not combed. Wearing sweatshirt, sweatpants, and they didn’t even match.

  “I’m almost sure it was ivory-billed woodpeckers I saw,” Sassy said.

  “Huh?”

  Sassy pressed her hands on the large book lying open before her as if pressing flowers. A bird book, of course, with big colorful pictures. “Ivory-billed woodpeckers,” said Sassy. “And Hawaiian honeycreepers. And a moa. I saw a moa. And those were passenger pigeons I saw flying over.” She spoke in a monotone, like a grieving person telling the story of how it happened, the cancer, the motorcycle accident, whatever it was. “And those weren’t hyacinth macaws. They were Spik’s macaws. There’s only one left alive in the wild. I saw two.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Sassy closed her book softly, as if putting a baby down to sleep, and turned the cover toward him so that he could see the title: Rare, Endangered, and Forever Gone.

  “The last ivorybill anybody’s seen was in Cuba in 1988,” she said. “But I saw a pair.”

  “Where?”

  “You know where.”

  Faced with her steady gaze, Racquel started to babble. “Sassy, that—it can’t be real. We just think we’re remembering the same thing. It’s like when people drop acid together—”

  She gave him a look so flat and weary it hushed him. “That parakeet,” she said. “The one that was in the hotel. It’s not an escapee from some pet store. It’s a Carolina parakeet.” She showed him the picture. Green body, yellow head, orange eye patch. Blue primaries on the wings. Yellow rump patch. Yep.

  “So?”

  “They’re extinct.”

  Racquel pressed his lips together and looked at the linoleum floor, against which Sassy’s bare feet curled together like white, shivering puppies.

  Sassy said, very low, “The voice said that what I found would depend on what I’d lost.”

  “Voice?”

  “Voice from—wild, from the treetops. Near the waterfall.”

  Racquel was sorry he had asked. He didn’t want to know any more, and it was no damn good for Sassy to keep brooding about it and grieving about it. The mirror was broken. She couldn’t go back there, and it was a damn good thing, because “there” was insane. He looked up at her and said, careful to keep his voice gentle, “Sassy, you’ve got to come out of it. Think about living in this world.”

  She did not reply immediately. He could see that his words made little impression on her. But finally she said, “What for? So I can go back to cleaning hotel rooms?”

  “You can get a better job.” With a Vanna White gesture Racquel indicated the stacks of books. “Look at all the stuff you know. You ought to be one of those ortho-knowledge-ists.”

  Sassy barely smiled.

  Racquel let himself get serious. “Damn it, Sassy, what you’ve lost, you’ve lost here, not in some freaky fairyland. Here. Now. But you gotta fight back. Put that hat on, woman.”

  She looked at it, but did not make a move toward it. She said, “I don’t wear hats.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t. They’re not who I am.”

  She sounded quite sure. Racquel studied her almost in admiration; she knew who she was, weirdness and all? There was only one of her?

  “It’s a pretty hat,” Sassy added as a polite afterthought.

  Racquel asked, “So who are you?”

  “Huh?”

  Jeez. She was the one who had brought it up. “Why don’t you wear hats?”

  “I’m too old.”

  “Since when?”

  “And I’m too plain.”

  “Sassy—”

  “Just let me alone, Racquel, would you?”

  “No.” He sat back in his chair staring at her. God, she’d lost even more than he had thought. “How are you going to get it back if I let you alone?” He could help her; he knew he could.

  “Get back what? My husband?” Sassy soured her mouth to show that she was bitterly joking. “No, thank you.”

  “Not your damn husband! I’m talking about you, Sassy! I’m talking about being a woman.” Racquel’s passion jarred him to his feet; he couldn’t help it. Jesus, being a woman—it was the biggest, best, most beautiful project anybody could undertake, worth devoting a lifetime to, which is what it usually took, what with foundation garments and cosmetics and depilatories and everything you had to know, yet there sat Sassy born with the gender he had always wanted, and—how had she lost that sense of herself? How had it happened that she just didn’t care anymore? Racquel blurted, “You got so much going for you, Sassy, I just want to shake you! Don’t you sometimes, just sometimes, want to wear something besides sweatpants?”

  She blinked up at him without answering. Cute little face. Cute little pointed chin.

  Racquel m
ade himself sit down across from her again. “Look,” he said quietly, “here’s what we’re gonna do to get you feeling better about yourself and everything in general. Skin first. Some apricot scrub maybe, some shower gel, some body splash. Then the hair. Jesus, Sassy, white people can have any color hair they want and get away with it; why should you settle for gray? I got a hairdresser just waiting to get her hands on your hair. Then get your ears pierced—”

  Sassy’s head jerked up with the most spirit she’d shown all day, and her hands flew to her earlobes. “I am not!”

  “Yes you are, so you can wear all kinds of earrings. You just wait, couple months you’ll be going back for more holes. Then your nails, a manicure—”

  “Who’s supposed to be paying for all this?”

  She meant that as an objection, and Racquel wasn’t going to let it fly. “I can do your nails myself. Hell, Sass, I’ll do them right now.” He shoved books to one side. “Where’s a dish towel?” He grabbed one off a hook and laid it out. “Gimme your hands.”

  “Racquel—”

  “Give it a chance, Sassy.” He took one of her hands and started massaging her fingers.

  Sassy’s eyes widened. But the massage stopped her protests, as he knew it would. He knew it felt too good to pass up.

  “Kick-ass little hands,” he told her, rubbing, ignoring her chapped skin for the time being. “Dainty. Sweet. I bet you got sweet little feet too. Stretch them out here.” She did, and he looked down past the edge of the table to study them, feeling genuine envy rising in his chest. “God, Sassy, your feet are perfect. Not a bunion on them, or a corn, or anything.” What a bite. She must have worn sensible shoes all her miserable life.

  “Oh, that’s good,” said Sassy in dulcet tones. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll just walk on my hands and wave my feet in the air.”

  “I’m serious, woman.” Goofy little twit, she had no clue how sexy feet could be, but she was going to learn. Racquel went to the sink and ran water till he got just the right hot temperature, filled the dishpan and squirted some Dove in it, brought it over and set it on the floor by Sassy. “Soak.”

  “Huh?”

  “Stick your feet in there.”

  While they were soaking, he found an emery board in his capacious handbag and shaped Sassy’s fingernails, stroking the tips, never sawing at them. His own nails were French-tipped gels this week, but he figured Sassy wasn’t ready for that, or for fiberglass or silks or all the rest of it. He stroked her natural nails into gently rounded ovals. These days most nails had shovel tips, but Racquel preferred the classic oval. Sassy’s nails came out almost the shape of her face. Racquel massaged her hands again, with lotion this time, put extra lotion on her cuticles to soften them, pushed them back with a Q-Tip, then cleaned the lotion off her nails with polish remover and brought out undercoat and several colors of polish from his purse. Even though he had his nails professionally done, he still bought polish and carried it around for touch-ups and because he liked the colors. He carried extra jewelry in his purse too. Feathered earbobs, mostly. Just because.

  “Iced Teal,” he read the nail polish color names off to her, “Malachite, White Jazz, Mango, Road Flare, Lagoon, Tropical Butterfly.”

  “What ever happened to pink?” Sassy asked.

  They settled on Lagoon, which was a sort of sky-blue-water color with a silvery sheen. As Racquel was stroking on the second coat, Sassy asked, “Racquel. You got anybody?”

  “Huh?”

  She spelled it out. “Do-you-have-a-sweetheart?”

  “No.”

  “A significant other?”

  “No.”

  “A relationship, a partner, a lover, a husband, a wife?”

  “What are you, a thesaurus? No. None of the above.”

  Silence while he completed the job. Then she asked, “Are you looking?”

  “Sure.”

  More silence. He moved his chair, laid the dish towel in his lap and said, “Put your feet up here.”

  She did so. She asked, “Which gender?”

  He looked her straight in the eye and told her the truth. “Any gender at all.”

  SIX

  Sassy found herself being surprised by a tiny prickle of pleasure every time she caught sight of her own wetly gleaming fingertips and toes. The fact that she was pleased by something so frivolous as a manicure and pedicure surprised her doubly. She had tried to make Racquel take the feathered baseball hat away, but he had insisted on leaving it, and the sight of it nesting on her kitchen table pleased her in some secret way she could not understand. She would never wear the thing, so what was the sense of keeping it? Such nonsense. Neither a useless hat nor an equally useless set of painted digits solved any of her problems, but—a sleekly plumaged canary-and-periwinkle baseball hat sectioned by rows of violet sequins—it was nice to look at, that was all. Who could resist just looking at it?

  Greeting her budgie in the mirror the second morning after Racquel’s visit, Sassy said “Hi, stupid,” smiled, and went to have her coffee. She gazed at her own hands as they curled around the mug; with enameled nails, her hands felt different, more substantial and significant. It wasn’t like she had never worn nail polish before, but—jeez, she couldn’t remember when. It must have been a long, long time ago.

  She looked across the table and felt herself smiling at the hat too. She reached across the table and put it on, liking the way it hugged her head. Bet it looked cute on her too. She had almost forgotten how it felt to like hats. She wished she could look in a mirror and see—

  No. Some hard, dark feeling in her gut gave her to know that hats were not for her. She took off the feathered cap and set it on the table.

  The dark internal pressure formed into a memory: she and Frederick walking through Valu-Mart and she stops at the hats and reaches to try one on. Not to buy, she knows they can’t afford to buy any, but Frederick says “NO” as if it’s somehow disgusting that she wants to look. She grabs a hat anyway and smiles at him from under the brim, but he glowers as if the sight of her offends him.

  It was obvious that she did not look good in hats. Or that hats were not right for her. Or that she was not a person who should wear hats.

  Obvious. Yes.

  She contemplated this for a moment, finishing her coffee, then went and looked in her closet and her dresser. Somehow something pretty should have been there, but she found nothing except sweatpants and elastic-waisted jeans.

  She put on an ocean-blue sweat suit to match her water-colored nails, searched her supply of anorexic head scarves for one that had some faded blue flowers in it, and got her coat on. She knew she should be heading out to look for a job but she wasn’t. Instead, she went to see Racquel.

  When she got to the Sylvan Tower, no one looked at her. Good. That was the kind of person she was. Not the sort to attract attention.

  Racquel was wearing a dress the same color and glare as the fog lights on some rich guy’s BMW, and his grin when he saw her lit him up almost as bright. As she walked into PLUMAGE he called, “Hey, it’s Sassy! Sweet!”

  A lot went without saying. Sassy knew he knew that she was there partly to thank him for giving a damn about her. And partly because she hadn’t been very “sweet” the last time she saw him.

  But he also seemed to take it that she was there to continue an already-begun course of self-improvement. He showed her some new belts, gold chain with gilded feathers dangling from the links. He showed her the feather-tufted earrings she could look forward to wearing when she got her ears pierced. He showed her a silver-straw picture hat with a single black ostrich feather curled around the brim, rhinestones studding its vane. “Wouldn’t you like to wear that?” he asked.

  “No. Not really.”

  “What is it with you and hats, Sassy? I know you like them.”

  Sassy said, “I look ugly in hats.”

  “You do not! Sez who?”

  Frederick. But Sassy said only, “I just do.”

  “Fre
derick told you that, right? What a turdball.”

  “No, he didn’t! He just—I don’t know.”

  Sassy studied her blue Lagoon fingernails, which Frederick probably would not have liked either. Meanwhile, she felt Racquel studying her.

  Finally Sassy said, “He was just sort of negative in general about hats and stuff.”

  “And stuff?”

  “Like—I don’t know. Boots, leggings, fancy belts, that sort of thing. Plumage.”

  “What a snarf,” Racquel said.

  Sassy shook her head. “He was just being a husband. Stuff like that costs money. He was good in lots of ways, he fixed stuff around the house, brought freebies home from the grocery, and there was never that much money, and he was the one who had to pay the bills—”

  “He’s still a jellosnarf. Didn’t he want you to have anything nice?”

  “I—I had my jewelry—”

  “And nothing to wear it with.”

  “It was me,” Sassy said. “Trying to look—” Feminine, attractive, sexy, all turned out to be words she could not quite say. “Trying to look that way, I couldn’t carry it off. He just kind of let me know I couldn’t do that.”

  In a very low tone Racquel said something Sassy could not quite catch. Something that rhymed with duck. Then he asked, “You weren’t supposed to wear anything you liked?”

  “I think it was more—I wasn’t supposed to wear anything that made me think I was attractive.”

  “Good God.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to …” Sassy found that she could not quite conceptualize the way Frederick didn’t want her to feel sexy. When she had started to look like her mother, that was it. He had made it quite plain that he detested her mother. “I don’t know what he wanted,” Sassy said to her hands. “Mostly he obviously didn’t want me.”