Shockproof Sydney Skate

by Marijane Meaker

  “You know what she gave me for Christmas?”

  “No.”

  “A makeup kit. It’s so fucking fancy Emmett Kelly wouldn’t be able to figure it out.”

  “A Gucci?”

  “What?”

  “I said is it something like a Gucci makeup kit? They cost a lot.”

  “Who said anything about a Gucci makeup kit?”

  “No one did,” he said. “I’ve just got one in the trunk of my car, that’s all. I thought she might have given you one like the one I’ve got out in my car.”

  “It’s a theatrical makeup kit,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “I was in this play at school. Berkeley Square. I played Lady Anne Pettigrew,” she said, imitating an English dowager.

  “You were pretty good, hmmm?”

  “She said I was the only one with any talent, if you want to take the word of a knocked-up Reader’s Digest subscriber. She subscribes to Reader’s Digest.”

  “So does my father,” he said.

  “So she went out and bought me this professional makeup kit for Christmas; that’s the kind of an ass-licker she is.”

  “Maybe she means it, Stel.”

  “Oh fart. My knees knock on stage. You can hear my bones way back in the can with the toilet flushing.… And she says I ought to investigate places like Actors’ Studio. She gets all that crap from watching Johnny Carson. Actors’ Studio crap … She says maybe that’d be better for me than college.”

  “Maybe it would,” he said.

  “Anything to keep me from killing the kid after it comes down the chute,” she said. “I’m going to try out for Glass Menagerie in February. The tryouts are being held the first week in February.”

  “I hope you get the part, Estelle.”

  “Just about the time I get the curse they’re having try-outs!”

  “How come you call it that?” he said.

  “What am I supposed to call it?” she said.

  “I just thought only older women like my mother ever called it the curse. I thought you called it getting your period. Someone told me that once.”

  “Someone is full of shit, Sydney. It’s the curse. That’s the only name for it,” she said, “and after Glass Menagerie they’re doing Summer and Smoke.”

  “You’re going to be busy,” he said.

  “I’ll have to learn to pee standing up I’ll be so busy.”

  “Right,” he said. “White Christmas” was playing on Musak, the Bing Crosby recording. Sydney looked down and discovered that he had ripped out all the matchsticks from the Maxwell’s Plum folder and torn them in half.

  Estelle said, “Did you ever read anything by Tennessee Williams?”

  “This one play: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That’s all.”

  Estelle Kelly sighed. Then she said under her breath, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Nada,” she said.

  “I wish you could come back to my mother’s party with me,” he said.

  “Good-bye,” she said flatly.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Estelle.”

  “I don’t want to hang around in a screwing bar all night, anyway,” she said. “It makes me want to smoke.”

  “How come you don’t sneak one?” he said. “If you really wanted one, you’d sneak one.”

  “Please address all questions to Sarah Bernhardt, c/o Agatha Henry, Barnard College,” she said, climbing down off the barstool. “All correspondence will be promptly answered.”

  It was snowing outside. East End Avenue was lighted with blue, red, and green bulbs lined along terraces and up and down trees. Sydney felt a glimmering of sentimentality and was about to reach gently for her hand when Estelle Kelly said, “I hate Christmas, anyway. Everyone puts on a big act, including you and me.”

  “I’m not particularly acting,” Sydney said.

  “What do you call it then?”

  “Call what?” Sydney said.

  “Never mind,” she said. “All the world’s a stage we’re going through.”

  Sydney tried to think of some better note to end things on. Instead he could only feel relief that they were almost to her building. As a cover-up he decided to kiss her goodnight the old meaningful way, even if she detested it.

  There was a large family walking toward them, seven or eight children with a man and woman. “I can’t disappoint the kiddies,” Estelle said. She ran ahead of Sydney and began lurching into a litter basket, staggering into a fire hydrant, dragging through the snow in her Santa Claus suit, affecting a drunken slur as she cried out. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but she’s a souse!”

  At the entrance to her apartment building she turned and looked back at Sydney, who was hurrying to catch up with her. The cold wind was whipping their faces. Her eyes were teary and her nose was red.

  “Hey—if it’s a boy,” she shouted, “we’ll name him after you!”

  Then she ran inside.

  Sydney drove down Lexington Avenue, mindful that he had promised M.E. he would help clean up after the party. The party would still be going. By now they would all be high and dancing, and he did not feel like forcing smiles through duty dances with Loretta Willensky, Liz, Cappy, and Corita. His car wheels were spinning on the icy patches, his windshield wipers slowing up as the snow came down thicker. Christmas carols were being broadcast over WMCA along with weather bulletins and warnings to motorists that driving was unsafe.

  At Twenty-second Street, Sydney saw a parking spot near the hotel and pulled into it. For a moment he sat admiring the view he faced: Gramercy Park with the giant tree in the middle, the lights blinking on it, the snow blowing drifts along the branches.

  Then he locked the car and went into the hotel, headed for the bar to the right of the entrance, but turned left instead toward the phone booth.

  When he heard her voice he shut the door of the phone booth.

  “Is it you?” he said.

  “Sydney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sydney Skate?”

  “Is it you? I thought I’d get your mother.”

  “Oh wow. Sydney. I can’t believe this is you.”

  “I’ve got your makeup kit in my car. I was going to tell your mother I’d drop it off.”

  “They’re in Armonk.”

  “I’m right across the street.”

  “Do you have my makeup kit?”

  “Yes. I got your card.”

  “I really need it because I’m going to New Orleans for inter-session. God. I’ve never been to New Orleans. It’s gross. I’ve never even been South.”

  “Are you back in Bryn Mawr?”

  “Yes. I went back. I’m living in the men’s dorm at Haverford. I love it there. I really freaked out, though. It was bad mesc. It was cut with meth or something. I lost my fingers in the phone kind of thing. I still get afterimages. People’s faces turn into mosaics. They’re afterimages. But I’m past that scene now. I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Are you alone, Alison?”

  “I am sort of.”

  “Who’s there? Raoul?”

  “Raoul,” she said. “No. I’m way past that scene, too.”

  “I’m glad of that,” Sydney said.

  “People who seem super-important at a certain time make you wonder what you saw in them at all, later. You know, Sydney?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Then who’s there?”

  “No one, Sydney, but I’m sort of super-involved with someone. That’s why I’m going to New Orleans for intersession. His family lives there. He’s Wyatt Franklin’s son.”

  “Whose son?”

  “You don’t read Fortune magazine. There was an article in there about him. He owns the Eastern Seaboard Signal Company. Did you ever hear of it?”

  “No,” Sydney said. “Who exactly owns it? Him or his father?”

  “He doesn’t own it. He rooms right above me at Haverford. Wyatt Franklin owns it. They lease burglar alarms and fire alar
ms. He’s driving in from his uncle’s right now. He’s coming down from Hartford.”

  “Don’t count on it in this storm.”

  “Sydney? I really need my makeup kit.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you,” he said.

  She was wearing a long red velvet dress with a white lace collar, long sleeves, white lace cuffs, and nothing on underneath.

  “This is really gross,” she said. “I was dressed for him and now you’re here enjoying it.”

  “Poor Wyatt Franklin’s son,” Sydney said, “konked out on the Merritt Parkway.”

  “He’ll get here if he has to ski,” she said. “He said he’d get here and he will. He’s fantastically reliable. His father owns a seventeen-foot Boston whaler and he can run it without a crew or anything.”

  “Just kiss me the way you would him,” said Sydney.

  “I have been but God.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I mean talking to him on the phone with you right next to me like this.”

  “He didn’t know it.”

  “I don’t think he did, either.”

  “Alison, how would he know it?”

  “You always used to find things out, Sydney. You found out everything and it’s really embarrassing when I think about it.”

  “Then don’t think about it,” he said. “I can smell Y.”

  “Whatever happened to Dr. Teregram?” she said.

  Sydney told her. He had almost forgotten about the King, and now he remembered the day he had let the snake have her freedom. It was a short while after M.E. had stopped using code; it was when she was in St. Thomas with Liz. Had St. Thomas been the start of things with them, or had the start of things been much earlier that summer? He had always been able to chart M.E.’s affairs practically to the hour of inception, but not this new one. This new one was the first time he had been too involved with his own business to mind M.E.’s, beyond the point hers affected his. That was why he had been unable to trace the sequence of events leading up to the Thanksgiving postcard announcing: “Good news. Liz and I have decided to live together, and she’ll make the move next week.” It had caught him entirely by surprise.

  “Do you really think it was okay to set her loose like that?” Alison said.

  “She’s better off than she ever was before. She’s into her own thing now,” Sydney said. “She’s crawled into a fissure in an expanse of rock, and slithered inward and downward a long, long distance. Her temperature is one degree lower than that of air, which makes her practically dead until next spring.”

  “I wish I could say that about the other Dr. Teregram,” Alison said.

  “Alison, I don’t want to hear about the other Dr. Teregram. Please.”

  “She’s getting forty-five an hour now out of my father. Do you know how much that is a year?”

  “Alison,” he said, “let’s just do a lot of polymorphous-perverse things and stop sweating reality.”

  “Hey,” she said, “I like that, Sydney.”

  He thought of a small angler fish called Ceratias; the male was just a few inches long and the female nearly three feet. When the male mated with the female, he would attach himself to a part of her forehead and bite, and the moment he bit, there was never any way to leave. Alison held on to him. He sighed and shut his eyes. His mouth was welded to her flesh; his mouth, his jaws, his teeth, his digestive canal, his fins, his gulls, and even his heart were grafted to her. Soon he would be no more than a testicle masquerading as a tiny fish, his every function dominated by the female, whose only way of communicating with him was by means of her blood vessels. Eventually, other pygmy males would attach themselves to her.

  When Sydney woke it was three-thirty in the morning. Without disturbing Alison, he went into the kitchen and phoned M.E.

  “Sydney!” she said. “I’ve been worried about you! Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  M.E. began to talk very fast. “I’m sorry, Sydney, that we haven’t had much time together since you got home. Sydney? Liz and I’ve been talking and she might run down to Washington for a week or two. Then you and I can do some things together. I can pick up tickets or—”

  “I’m at Alison Gray’s,” he interrupted. “Right over on Gramercy Park. I dropped by to return her makeup kit and I lost track of the time.”

  For a few seconds M.E. didn’t say anything, so he said, “I’m just over here at Alison’s.”

  M.E. said, “Estelle Kelly called to apologize for forgetting to give you your Christmas gift. When she said you’d left about eleven-thirty, we couldn’t imagine what happened to you.”

  “I came over here.”

  “Why didn’t you just say you had a late date with Alison?”

  “I didn’t know I did,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was supposed to help you clean up.”

  “You can. Tomorrow. We haven’t been doing much cleaning over here, we’ve been worrying instead.”

  “I’ll clean up tomorrow,” he said. Then he said, “Why should Liz go to Washington?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said why should Liz have to go to Washington?”

  “She doesn’t have to go to Washington.”

  “We could all do something together.”

  “All right.”

  “Couldn’t we?”

  “Yes, we could.”

  “Anyway, I have things I have to do. I have to write this paper on myriapods, too.”

  “Fine,” M.E. said. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”

  “Are you all right?” He could not remember ever having put that question to M.E.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Of course … Thanks … Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I just thought I’d ask,” he said. “I’m on my way home.”

  “Better late than never, Sydney,” M.E. said.

  When he hung up, Alison rushed into the kitchen. “Sydney. God. Look at the time. We fell asleep. I can’t find my dress. Help me find my dress. You have to leave. You have to hurry, Sydney. He could be in the lobby right now. I’m super-scared. If I don’t get to go to New Orleans for intersession, it’ll be the absolute end of me.”

  “Oh, I doubt that it’ll be the absolute end of you, Alison,” he said, following her into the living room, picking his trousers up from the floor.

  “Where’s my dress?”

  “There.” He found it beside the couch and handed it to her. “Here.”

  “This is freaking me out. Your socks. Put your socks on.”

  “Why didn’t you set the alarm?” Sydney said, pushing his arms through the sleeves of his shirt, his feet into his shoes, pocketing the socks.

  “Set the alarm,” she said flatly.

  “Sometimes I think you want to be found out,” he said, pulling on his boots.

  “I can’t put this dress back on; this dress is all wrinkles!”

  “He can’t get here in this snow,” Sydney said. “Look out the window.”

  “Sydney, I don’t want to hurt you, but you can see why I’d be freaked out if anything were to happen, can’t you?”

  “Relax,” he said. “I’m dressed.”

  “I’m not. What am I going to do? What am I going to put on?”

  “Tell him you fell asleep in your dress waiting for him.”

  “Yes. Good. That’ll do for now.” She whipped it above her shoulders and Sydney helped her pull it down over her body.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Oh wow. I was freaking out for a second. You don’t know him. He could get here by helicopter.”

  Sydney buttoned his overcoat. “I wish I had something for you for Christmas,” he said.

  “Well, we didn’t know we were going to see each other.”

  “Have a good time in New Orleans,” he said.

  She put her arms around him. She whispered “Sydney? I’m really in love.”

  He trudged down Irving Place through the deep snow, remembering a biology film he had seen last fall. It wa
s a close-up, slow motion, of a male silkworm copulating with a female. The Bombyx mori. The female grew these minuscule yellow warts on her abdomen; the male responded to their aroma with a mad frenzy, his wings beating, whirring—his belly bending in an arc, feeling for the female opening with a wild, prancing, chaotic desire. When he found it, he held it in place with chitinous clamps, carefully, and next very gently, very softly, as the two bellies moved in together, the male became still. The beating wings fluttered down. There was no movement. Then gradually, in hard, wide beats the wings of the male flapped, for about eighty seconds, in regular cadence.

  Afterward, there was almost no motion: motion barely perceptible.

  Sydney turned down Nineteenth Street.

  Only a slight quiver of his antennae.

  The very feeblest ventral tremor.

  Still attached … but for the time being, finished.

  A Personal History by Marijane Meaker

  When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.

  My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.

  I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.