The Patron Saint of Ugly

by Marie Manilla

  I strapped the thing on, though I could barely see through the eyeholes as I made my way to my room and slid the key in the lock. I opened the door and found Yvette Guillaume in her underwear sitting on the twin bed where I had thrown my dirty clothes, which were now heaped on the floor.

  Her face was covered in white-white Kabuki paint, thick eyeliner, lethal eyebrows, little rosebud lips, much more dramatic than my own everyday makeup. I was trying to make sense of what she was doing with the length of Ace bandage unraveled on the bed. She was binding her right foot in a figure-eight pattern, looping the bandage around her toes and arch, then back around her heel. Over and over she crisscrossed until the bandage was used up and she secured the end with a safety pin. I wondered what her injury was until she pulled out another bandage from a silk bag beside her, unrolled it, and bound her left foot in the same fashion.

  Finally she gazed up at the ceiling. “Are you going to stand there all night?”

  I sputtered behind that Tricky Dick mask, trying to come up with a retort, but she shimmied under the covers without even removing her makeup and clicked off her lamp.

  Her bed was empty the next morning and I stared at garish makeup smears on her pillowcase. I was as alarmed as all my ex-roommates who had awoken to a similar spectacle had been.

  I didn’t want to return to my room that day after classes, so I holed up in the library, pretending to read. I kept thinking of Yvette in my room, perhaps scheming about how to indoctrinate me, but into what? The library closed and I was freezing as I crossed campus in the rain, my own Kabuki makeup running. I bolstered my nerve and slid my key in the door, wishing I had that Nixon mask to hide behind. I prepared for the traumatized look on Yvette’s face when she saw my dripping skin.

  Yvette was plopped on her bed in her underwear, and though she wasn’t wearing Kabuki makeup, she was again binding her feet. Afterward she slid beneath the covers and before clicking off her light she looked directly at me.

  Here it comes.

  She stared into my eyes and without a hint of revulsion, even with my face melting, said, “Are you going to stand there all night?”

  Again she was gone when I woke the next morning. I loitered around campus until midnight, but this time when I opened our door, I was confronted by a four-panel Chinese screen positioned around Yvette’s bed to offer privacy for her and whomever she was passionately embroiled with, she screaming, “Rebel! Oh, Rebel!” He grunting, both making so many sloshing/bumping/skin-slapping noises that I couldn’t move. Finally the climax, which rippled through me too. The mattress springs stopped creaking, the breathing settled, and Yvette called out, “Jesus Christ! Are you going to stand there all night?”

  A hand reached out and folded back one of the Chinese panels so that I could fully see Yvette, Kabuki makeup smeared, her mate yanking the sheet up to his waist. Rebel fumbled for a cigarette on the nightstand. Finally he looked at me. “The chick from the balcony! Far out.”

  I was stunned to see one of my art-house hippies in my room.

  “You know each other?” Yvette stood, impeccably nude, and slipped into a silk robe.

  “Yes, master,” we both said, which cracked us up.

  Yvette settled a pan of water on her contraband hot plate.

  Rebel pointed to my face. “You staging a paint-in too?”

  Yvette whipped around. “No! No, she’s . . .” She didn’t know how to finish, and from the look on her face, I could tell she’d heard the rumors surrounding me. I felt suddenly mythic, in the best possible way.

  “What’s a paint-in?” I wondered if this was a club I had already joined.

  “Well,” Yvette began. As she fixed us tea she revealed that her diplomat father had accompanied Nixon to China. Appalled by the treatment of Chinese women, Yvette began binding her feet and wearing Kabuki makeup in protest. Her father was so humiliated that he yanked her out of American University and flung her into our gulag, where he would continue to pay tuition if she stopped her antics. She gave up the makeup—except during Halloween and sex—and trussed her feet only in our room.

  Every night I was treated to Yvette’s rituals: bowls of oolong tea, x-ing another square on the calendar that counted down to her December graduation, and binding her feet before walking clumsily around our room on her heels to perfect the lotus gait, the hobbled step of foot-bound women that was supposedly an aphrodisiac. Neither Yvette nor I found anything sexy about taking away a woman’s ability to walk without pain. We understood the real aphrodisiac was utter dependence.

  Though I hate admitting this, given my burgeoning feminism, I began waking an hour earlier so that I could slather on makeup before Yvette emerged from behind her screen. I also bought seven pillowcases, not to wear as nun headgear, but to swiftly swap out so that Yvette wouldn’t see the remnants of my previous day’s face.

  Throughout the following weeks I stood at the back of Yvette’s rallies, where she whipped her followers into a radical frenzy. At night she made good use of her Chinese screen, whipping various partners into another kind of frenzy. Sometimes it was Rebel. Or that dude from the record store, or the anarchist from DC who had tracked her down, or Rosie the Brazilian exchange student. Though they seemed uninhibited by my presence on the other side of those papered panels, all that copulating only reminded me of my own longing, so I would grab my stargazing kit and head up to the roof.

  If Yvette wasn’t inciting a riot or engaged in sex, she would sink into a pool of despair. I often found her on her bed rifling through two decades’ worth of postcards from her divorced, jet-setting mother: Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. Or here. Or here. Yvette wishing she were there-there-there too.

  Worse still were the letters from her father, which held special powers. “Why would he say that to me? Why?” she muttered to herself over and over in tears. Given how much I longed for an accumulation of my father’s words to tuck into a certain box, I couldn’t imagine what Yvette’s father had written that could so crush his fearless daughter. I also couldn’t understand why she continued to pore over those pages that obviously caused her such pain. Countless times I considered wrapping my arms around her to offer solace, but I was too afraid it would make Yvette reel in the life preserver of friendship she had so recently cast.

  I was also too anxious to play my saw in her presence—Stop that racket!—so I performed that penance while she was in class. One afternoon, however, when I was perfecting “Is That All There Is?” I heard sniffing at the door. I swiveled around, ready to whip the saw behind my back and impulsively shout, Go away. This is private. Private!, but Yvette begged, “Please don’t stop.”

  I couldn’t refuse, and from then on, every night I serenaded Yvette, particularly when she was holding her father’s words to her chest. Though hall mates pounded walls and hammered fists against the door, Yvette would yell, “Shut up! This is beautiful!,” a word I never thought would genuinely be connected to me.

  On December eleventh, I prepared for Apollo 17, the last moon landing for who knew how long. Yvette was draping a silk scarf over her lamp and setting out massage oil for whoever would be arriving to offer a sensual diversion. I didn’t think she even noticed me gathering my gear, but as I opened the door to leave she said, “Plant a flag for me.”

  On the roof, I sat on a campstool and gazed through my telescope at the Taurus-Littrow region, where the astronauts had landed. Though the view was as stunning as always, my eyelids began to droop. I spread my unzipped sleeping bag beside the heat-emitting ductwork and folded myself inside, where I fell into a sound sleep bathed in moonbeams.

  Hours later I heard the door to the roof creak open. My heart thudded since I thought it might be campus police busting my ass yet again. A spectral figure bobbled toward me, closer and closer; my heart shuddered and then, sweet relief, I recognized the lotus gait.

  Yvette approached with no coat or proper shoes, just her bandaged feet without even socks to keep them warm, a bundle of her father’s
letters clutched to her stomach. Yvette’s paramour must have been a no-show.

  She hobbled toward me, hands out in anguish. “Why would he say that to me? Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I considered running downstairs for my saw, but the sight of our leader with no one to distract her made my heart ache.

  In one sweeping gesture, I flapped open my sleeping bag and invited Yvette into the warmth emanating from the ductwork, and from me, as I began my descent back to earth.

  Yvette did not hesitate; she knelt and slid deftly beneath the covers. I folded the sleeping bag over us both and she faced me. Our eyes locked as she put her hand in my hair to pull my mouth toward hers and then

  TAPE NINETEEN

  Three on a Match

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned:

  First of all, I am not a lesbian.

  Second, I know you’re feeling cheated by the abrupt ending of my last installment, but if Nixon can erase eighteen and a half minutes from his Watergate tapes, I can erase a segment of mine. I’m not even going to pretend it was Nonna performing an arthritic Rose Mary Stretch.

  Third, did I mention that I am not a lesbian?

  Okay, maybe I was, for thirteen days, but I chalk it up to those experimental college years, to six weeks of being a torqued-up, peeping Garnet to the calisthenics going on behind Yvette’s screen, but mostly I pin it on loneliness. On enduring a decade without a warm embrace or a kiss good night. That evening on the roof while I was swaddled in my sleeping bag, under Yvette’s well-practiced hands, nuts and bolts sprang free as my outer hull exploded. By morning I was a flesh-and-bone girl again, filled with carnal bliss and absolute terror, since I didn’t want Yvette to see my makeup-less face.

  Though it pained me to do it, as the morning sun crested, I unwrapped my arm from Yvette’s waist. She groaned as I stood, but I tiptoed across the roof and down to our room so I could apply fresh camouflage and return before Yvette knew I was gone.

  In the bathroom, I lined up the foundation and concealer as I had done for so many years. I held a steaming washcloth to my face to scrub off the previous day’s remnants, and when I looked in the mirror to check if I’d missed any spots, I saw Yvette standing behind me. I felt as exposed as I had in the Hall of Mirrors, my face gripped in Mom’s hands as she brutally put me on display.

  My eyes swiveled to Yvette’s reflection. “You weren’t supposed to see me!”

  I grabbed the foundation, the cotton balls, daubed like a maniac. Maybe if I applied it quickly enough, she would think it was all a dream.

  Yvette stepped forward and stilled my hand, the tinted cotton ball falling into the sink.

  We looked at each other in the mirror until I slumped over. “I didn’t want you to see me.”

  Instead of turning on her bound heels and retreating, Yvette cupped my face in her hand and lifted it up so that we again looked at each other’s reflections, my mulberry stains open for scrutiny. Rather than pronouncing, You’re beautiful just the way you are, which I would never have believed, Yvette uttered the honest truth: “You don’t have to hide anymore.”

  I broke under the weight of that statement, but instead of tumbling to my knees, I fell into Yvette’s arms and bawled like a twelve-year-old who had just lost her father and brother. I wailed for the fam-i-ly I had avoided grieving over by blasting into space. Even that Icelandic volcano erupted, and I cried for Nonna and Betty. For my regret at never telling my father I loved him. For those same words I would never hear from him again. Mostly, however, I wept for myself, and for my once staunchest ally—my mother, my mother, my mother.

  When I was wrung dry I glared at all those vials of makeup. Maybe they weren’t Dr. Trogdon’s pills, but suddenly they were poison to me.

  I swept the bottles and tubes into a hand towel. Yvette followed as I burst from our room and stalked down the hall, girls flattening themselves against the walls as we passed since they had never seen me without the clown paint. Instead of cowering, however, I lifted my chin and stared them straight in the eye.

  Outside, Yvette and I marched to the biggest trash receptacle on campus, next to the dining-hall picnic tables meant to catch our wrappers and soda bottles. I didn’t hesitate one second before tossing into this Freedom Trash Can, not a bra or girdle, but the goop that had been concealing me for years.

  The cherry on the sundae was that at that moment, Sister Joanie dashed out of the dining hall and galloped toward me, cheering, “It’s about time!”

  Yvette looked at me, a prideful spark in her eye, which bolstered my courage to bolster her nerve. “Go get your father’s letters.” Her eyes rounded, but she nodded, fetched them, and I applauded as she tossed his hurtful words into the trash one page at a time.

  From then on it was me behind Yvette’s Chinese screen. Since my face was just the tip of my secret, I slowly revealed my personal geography to her, my anxiety dissipating when she did not run away screaming as I exposed one shoulder, then the other. My chest, then stomach. Feet, ankles, knees, thighs. “You’re a work of art,” she said, surveying the full breadth of me at last, and for the first time in my life, I believed it.

  Yvette traced coastlines and minor continents with her fingertip. Landmasses that had not been altered since I’d left Sweetwater except for the occasional Vietnamese rash. Apparently La Strega or whoever had been tinkering with my mapped body had short-range powers. It became a game. “My mother has been there, and there, and there,” Yvette would say. “I’ve always wanted to visit the Balkans!”

  “Why don’t you ever go with her?” I finally asked.

  Yvette shook her head. “She never asked.” Another child banished from her mother’s world.

  Maybe Yvette longed to make a home with her mother, but for a brief spell, she staked a claim on me. She even made it official one night when she pulled a tiny American flag from her robe pocket, stuck its toothpick pole into a wad of chewing gum, and planted it on my solar plexus. “One small step for womankind,” she said, but it was a giant leap for me. Those were blissful days. Made even sweeter because we knew full well that when the semester ended, Yvette would snatch her diploma and disappear from my life just as quickly as she’d entered it.

  And that is exactly what happened.

  On December twenty-third, I watched Yvette bind her feet for the last time and apply the Kabuki makeup that she could once again wear publicly. I helped her carry her suitcase and folded Chinese screen to the train station, though the walk was excruciatingly slow, given her lotus gait. We arrived just in time for her to catch the train that would rumble her to San Francisco, where antiestablishment vibes lured her. Like the final scene in Cabaret, as Yvette hobbled down the platform in her Sally Bowles haircut, she raised her hand and wiggled her fingers as a final ta-ta.

  It was the loneliest Christmas of my life. Now that I was human again, and earthbound, I was forced to confront weighty matters, not only my longing for family, but the issue of where I would settle when I graduated in the spring.

  When the new semester began, I perused maps lining the geography department. I would close my eyes and jab my finger, hitting at various possibilities: Saskatchewan, Natchitoches, the Bermuda Triangle. As January bled into February, I finally admitted that the bump of ground I longed for was Sweetwater. But after years of no contact, I didn’t know if I could still consider it home or if the people there would consider me fam-i-ly.

  And then fate intervened.

  February fourteenth, on what would have been Nicky’s twenty-fourth birthday, while lovebirds crossed campus holding volumes of Keats, I was summoned to the dean of students’ office, where a bevy of suited men with briefcases were waiting. The dean was overly solicitous, offering me a breath mint, a bottle of Tab, both of which I declined.

  The six suited men took seats in the dean’s office on two couches that faced each other. The three men on the right were smiling; the three on the left were not. All six simultaneously set their briefcases on their laps and
flipped them open as if they’d choreographed that move.

  The man with Brezhnev eyebrows cleared his throat. “Miss Ferrari, Mr. Billheimer has a remarkable story to tell you, so I think you’d better sit down.” He waved his hand at a chair pulled up just for me. I sat, wondering if Grandma Iris was trying to program my post-college life. This time I was prepared for a fight.

  Mr. Billheimer was the senior-most member of the smiling group. “Miss Ferrari, I’m afraid we have both good news and bad.”

  Behold:

  Two Saturdays before that Valentine’s Day, back in Sweetwater, Radisson had clanked open the gate and then steered the Packard downhill, La Strega in the back encased in fur, since it was an especially frigid morning. Witnesses claimed that Radisson and La Strega were fighting, she leaning over the seat swatting him with a cane, he parrying her blows with his chauffeur’s cap, all while the Packard gained speed as it spiraled around and around the hill until it hit ice-coated No-Brakes Bend. The Packard flew over the curb and through the brick wall Mr. Dagostino had had built there ten years before, after our station wagon had flown over the curb in a similar manner. The Packard toppled the brick wall and then it, too, plunged through the garage.

  La Strega was killed on impact. Unconscious Radisson was rushed to Scourged Savior, where he died fifty-two minutes later.

  La Strega had left no children, so her three nephews, born to Le Baron’s sister, flew in for the funeral and, more important, the reading of the will. Though the nephews were indeed listed as heirs, they were contingent beneficiaries. The primary inheritor was the person who had known La Strega more intimately than anyone on the planet during her widow years: Radisson.

  Can you friggin’ believe that? The old bat had a soul after all.