by Syd Moore
Didn’t wise up to my qualities – girls don’t – till freshman year when Joey McStride told me, square to my face.
‘Rita,’ he said. ‘Anyone ever told you, you got the eyes of Betty Grable? Lips too,’ he said and leant in to kiss them.
I ducked and swerved away from him. Now don’t get me wrong, I’d puckered up for boys of all sorts by then and Joey weren’t too bad. But it struck me that if this were true, then I could raise my game. And by quite a stride too. I mean, I knew I was pretty – but Betty Grable?
‘You’re just teasing me, Joey,’ I told him. ‘That ain’t fair.’
‘No way, Rita. Tommy said it just the other day. And Buzz said so too.’
‘They did?’
‘Sure. You’re our very own Swillen Valley pin-up.’
If I could have blushed I would. I didn’t kiss Joey back but I let him feel my brassiere. The boy had earned it.
Back home in the mirror that night I saw what he meant. There was something of the star in me. Though my hair let me down. Betty weren’t no mouse.
The very next afternoon I stopped by the drugstore and picked up a bottle of bleach.
Ain’t never looked back since then.
After the hair came the wardrobe. Some showy frocks and tailored suits. I had my nose seen to. And once that healed there was no stopping with the guys. They flocked to me in herds much the same as they did to Betty. I picked out the best to confer my favours. And when I say ‘best’ I mean those that could do the best for me, of course – the richest, the ones with spare apartments and maids for the picking. Soon I was dining in only the finest restaurants, spending my days in the beauty parlour and my nights in the swankiest of clubs. I went to the races regular, owned five gold rings and holidayed beside the ocean.
By twenty-six I was the only girl on the block to own her own condominium. Well, have it bought for me. It’s the same kind of thing.
You’d have thought I was as happy as Larry. But no, there was something that bugged me raw. See, I may have had the face of Grable but from the waist down things weren’t so fine.
It was the legs.
Some folk might have said Betty’s legs were a gift from God not to be coveted, just admired. But not I – the Devil was driving me remember – and he also desired Grable’s legs.
The early procedures were fine. I had surgeons work on my thighs: a mole removed from my left leg. Weren’t much of a mark but it was an imperfection, all the same. I knew it was there. Then a little shaping about the knees – some fat out of here, a squirt added there. My ankles were shaved down a touch to smooth the silhouette.
After my eighth operation I could boast Betty’s vitals – 18.5” thigh, 12” calf and a couple of dainty 7.5” ankles.
Thing was, I was damned if I could increase the length. Scores of surgeons had told me it couldn’t be done. Of course, there were ways, but these guys were too damn chicken shit to have a good go. ‘Not for cosmetic reasons,’ they whimpered like babies.
I needed someone who was willing to take a risk. Go the extra mile in pursuit of perfection.
But who?
It weren’t like that when me and Ron first met. Though I should say when I got hold of Ron, seeing as the poor fool had no choice in the matter. The word ‘met’ suggests we arrived in each other’s sphere purely by chance.
I’d always been the kind of gal who, once she knew what she wanted, didn’t let nothing, and I mean nothing, stand in her way. Not that there was much obstructing my advance on Ron, the like of whom I had seen off many times before. No competition at all.
When I spied Ron I had the world, an army of young men and two sugar daddies at my feet. It was a few months after the ankle procedure. At that time I was so proud of my balls of comely flesh I glowed all over. There was a tiny indentation a half-inch above the right talus: a little blotch formed by chance into the shape of a star. Now Betty, she didn’t have no flaws, it’s true, but this dainty nick of ruby red flesh pleased me. I saw it to be a reminder that my fortune, my destiny, my guiding star, was my legs. One day I would be rewarded for my investment, effort and pain. And then I would become another ascending star.
When I found out Ron was a surgeon, li’l tears of joy splashed over my cheeks.
I watched him twirl this dumb broad on the floor. She weren’t much to look at – some cheap Latino gold digger who made a thing of slamming shots in the piano bar. I liked the curl of Ron’s lip, the width of his wallet and his sleek Clark Gable looks.
Gable and Grable.
We was verging on poetry.
I had to have him.
And it didn’t take long for an obliging sailor friend to dispense of the gold digger so Lucky Boy Ron was freed up to receive my attentions.
Now I’d seen how the cleavage didn’t work on him, unlike most barflies that drooled in my direction. So I slit my skirt right up to the thigh, angled my butt against the piano and thrust out my legs. They soon caught his eye. Then his hand, then his legs.
‘Beautiful work,’ he whispered the first night he took me to his home, a pink rambling villa called Shangri-La. Then he walked his fingers up my thighs, skating over the fading ghost-lines and scars.
It was a powerful coupling, anyone could see. We pleasured ourselves for nights and days. I enchanted Ron. I made myself indispensable to him. I pandered to his every whim, and some weren’t so nice. But it came good: a few months on, he moved me out of the condo and into his mansion. After that it didn’t take much to convince him of the importance inherent in lengthening my calves.
My good husband found some Russian quack experimenting out in Siberia. So we sent out some dollars and invited him to visit Shangri-La. He was eager enough for the money and could not get over my presentation to him as a willing specimen for experimentation.
Not that he was convinced by the idea. Not at first. But after a while, when he realised it wasn’t a set-up, he agreed to start work. We sorted out a visa and, hey presto, within weeks he started breaking my bones.
I won’t be bothering you with the details.
Suffice it to say, for a long year of my life I was immobile – splintered, crushed, grafted, stretched. Finally, my legs were caged into submission. The following May I took a break from surgery so I could debut my works in progress at the White Tie society ball.
Now the smart ones amongst you might have figured something went wrong else I wouldn’t be sat here looking out at Ron scooting off with another cheap girlfriend.
Well, you could say it did. Though the work was priceless and awe-inspiring, some said, so too were those legs as brittle as a Ming vase.
I didn’t care. I was moving towards my prize. One inch more and I would be complete.
The night before the ball I was feeling a mite playful and chanced to fetch some liquor from the cellar. It was usually off limits: those steps being sharp-angled, but Ron weren’t back to watch over me, and I had a taste for it and what Rita wants, Rita gets.
I was usual so careful but as I touched the second stair my right knee locked and I tumbled down those thirteen stone mothers like a porcelain doll.
Screwed up my right leg so bad that, after he’d fixed the kneecap, even Ron could do no more.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Rita, you gonna have to leave it be now.’
I was beside myself.
Can you imagine? One inch off my goal.
I can tell you I bawled.
I can tell you I cried and shrieked.
But none of you could know how much I was twisted up inside. It was outrageously unfair.
I mean – one inch!
Tormented and sore as hell I retreated to the poolside. Spent long weeks on the day bed, refusing company, listening to the agonised moans of Garbo on the gramophone. There is something unutterably exquisite in the nuances of Greta’s melancholy. She provided some form of solace for Betty’s elusive dimensions.
Then, just when I think there ain’t anything left to hope for, God, or more likely
the other one, shines a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of the stinking Lucy-Mae.
She replied to a ‘Help Wanted’ sign we’d put up in the window of a store on the main drag of town. We didn’t want no paper trail. You’ll understand why.
Now I know the homeless kind are usually full of disease and lice but I could tell Lucy-Mae was only just coming on to the bum’s life. She stank like an alley-cat – piss and stale liquor, her teeth were going, her eyes were long weighed down by disappointment and wrinkled skin. Yet Lucy-Mae, tramp though she was, had the nearest damn proportions to Betty’s legs I had ever seen.
Once we’d had her cleaned up she looked almost human. Never could get her off the liquor, mind. And sometimes I wonder if that was the problem – all that whisky-drenched tissue.
I’ll never know for sure.
I made a big thing of measuring her statistics, for a uniform or such. She didn’t make a fuss. Desperate, she was, for work. That girl had a haunted look about her. Both me and Ron could see she was running from something.
She was perfect.
Took us some time to convince her of the deal. But I could be persuasive, and Ron? Well, the man was rich enough to offer up a very juicy carrot. In the end she yielded to the promise of a one-way ticket to Veracruz and enough cash to drown herself in a pool-sized vat of bourbon.
So when we tell Doctor Rusky the idea he nearly wets his pants. Does the usual sermon about ethics and moral responsibility, but we could tell the damn fool just wanted a higher fee.
Once he’d had his first payment there weren’t no issue ’bout getting him on board. He was as eager as me.
One dark night before Christmas he settled down to his final task. The sky was black and silent, the breeze whispering sweet nothings. I watched the baubles on the tree sparkle in the tinsel and thought of the wondrous gift that was coming, as pure and sweet as baby Jesus himself. Then I said goodbye to my darlin’ Ron and took the ether down into my lungs.
As I faded into darkness the doc sliced off Lucy-Mae’s legs and grafted them onto my stumps.
It was a long recovery but when I woke later I could see Santa had brought me the best present ever.
I had them. At last.
Couldn’t use them, but that was by the by. The thought of their perfection kept me buzzing through the pain. I finally had Betty Grable’s legs.
I watched them.
I stroked them.
I cleansed them.
Ron made love to them.
But.
Those damn legs, they didn’t want me.
They say mind rules over matter but that’s a God-awful lie. The harder I tried to keep them the more they rejected me.
Within weeks they were seeping pus from the scars. Putrefying under my very nose. The smell kept Ron away and soon the maid was refusing to dress the wounds. When Doctor Rusky got a whiff of septic flesh he shot off back home and sank back into obscurity in the Siberian plains.
I began fitting.
My temperature shot higher and higher.
Ron told me, most directly, ‘Rita, the legs just have to go.’
I knew it though I didn’t want it so.
Thing was, the whole Lucy-Mae thing hadn’t of course been completely above board. It was sticky, so to speak. But Ron couldn’t do no more on his own. We needed professional help.
That’s when we hit upon the idea of a crash. So late March, I doused myself with the last of Lucy-Mae’s stash, strapped on my seatbelt and drove to the garage at a speed fast enough to destroy the T-Bird.
And half of me.
There was a lot of weeping when I came round at the hospital.
None of it mine.
‘We had to amputate. I’m sorry, Rita,’ the doctor said, as pale as a scraped bone.
‘It’s all right, I know.’ I smiled at Ron.
He couldn’t meet my gaze; there was a hint of regret at his brow but then he pushed out his chin and looked at Mama. Resolve was written across his features for all to see.
‘You’re awful brave.’ The doctor regularly regarded me with awe.
‘There’s always hope,’ I replied to the poor man and patted his hand.
Ron coughed into his handkerchief and wiped his brow. We both knew it wouldn’t be long before I had another pair of perfect pins sewn on.
There were sacrifices to be made though, I knew that for sure. So it came as no surprise when, three months later, he told me he had to leave. Of course I could see he didn’t want to go, but I was healing. While I was confined to my wheelchair, only he could go out and find me new flesh. He had to get out into the world, of course. It was the price he had to pay – for the pursuit of my perfection.
There had been some horror shows over the past year. One girl, Italian I believe, had dark, swarthy skin. I said, ‘Ron, you can’t expect me to have mismatched legs. My face is white, Honey. I’d look like a keyboard and Betty certainly weren’t that.’
She didn’t last long after.
There was a stumpy brunette and a dwarf-like waitress who I gave short shrift. Don’t get me wrong – the girls were stunning. Like I said, Ron had acquired good taste. But the legs weren’t right: too short, too dark, not enough of the moon in the calf.
I had started to despair. Until today.
Ron had dropped by on the pretence of signing divorce papers.
‘I’m moving on, Rita,’ he said and purposefully patted my hand. ‘She’s outside.’
I’d winked at him. I understood.
And boy oh boy hadn’t he done well? The legs were practically perfect. I watched them hop into the sedan and cruise down the stretch onto the open boulevard.
I was starting to get excited again.
‘Mama!’ I called into the kitchen. She appeared at the door with a tea cloth in her hand. ‘Oh Ma, why don’t you call out for some champagne? I feel like celebrating!’
Mother narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better, love. It’s time. Not sure I can stretch to the proper stuff. But I can nip down and get some fizz from Tesco?’
For a moment the hard consonants of her last word jolted me back. I blinked. I hated it when she did that. And suddenly it was as if someone had wiped a stained cloth over my view, dirtying my vision. Before I realised what was going on in my brain, the purple bougainvillea warped and faded. Too soon came the toxic grey and, without so much as a doff of my pill-box hat, my beautiful dream dissolved.
For three, four awful seconds I registered the urine-stained entrance to the block opposite. Fag butts on the floor mingled with syringes. The junky in the stairwell moaning with the wind.
No way. Not me. I was never going back there. Not to the dirt and the grime and the depraved lies of reality. Such seedy hopelessness could not be countenanced in one so special as I. There was no satisfaction to be gained, no point to the recognition and acceptance thereof.
No.
That is, rather, no siree.
My life was not here.
It was back.
Back there, where the breeze and cocktails came at sunset, served beside a kidney-shaped pool.
And so I closed my eyes and wheeled away from the view.
With one deep breath I returned to the swing in the lilac-scented garden with the ferny shrubs, in the balmy breeze, beneath the Milky Way. And somewhere before me that white butterfly fluttered.
Hope, I believe, is its name.
DEATH BECOMES HER
In between the ebb and the flow, the ceaseless repetitions and rhythms of life, death and destiny stalk us. Scientists, priests, astrologers and mathematicians know this. Stacey Winters knew it too. Though, out of all the cops in the City of London, it would quite probably be true to say, she had the hardest time dealing with death.
Tonight, off-duty and off-guard, a little too stressed and a touch too garrulous, she had let this truth escape her lips at the station’s Social Club. So now she was being reassured that she wasn’t unique in her reaction to death and d
ecay; that none of her fellow officers had an easy time of it; that each and every policeman and woman, though they may appear untouched by the sight of a corpse, yes, each and every one of them was always shaken by the experience. They didn’t get used to it as such, her colleagues agreed, they just got wise to their reaction. Thus distress became more manageable. Smaller.
‘You see,’ said her sergeant, in a confidential whisper, ‘people say that it’s love that separates us from the animals, but it’s not. We can’t be sure of much in life, but we all know we’re going to die. No other species on the planet knows it, right? Dogs don’t. Cats don’t. Just us. And because we know it – we fear it. I don’t know why we’re afraid of a fact,’ her boss continued, ‘but I can give you some advice about what to do with fear. You control it, Stacey. That’s what you do.’
Sergeant Edwards tapped the side of his nose. ‘You can’t let death control you or you’ll be no good as a copper. No Stacey, you confront it, face it, stare it straight in the eyes. Overcome it. Not straight off, but gradual-like.’
But Stacey snorted. She meant to laugh, but it came out down her nose. Quickly she converted it into a cough to spare the sergeant’s blushes.
Thing was, you didn’t control Death by staring it in the eyes.
As if.
She should know: she’d stared it out more times than Sergeant Edwards had had cold shivers. She and The Reaper were practically on first name terms for God’s sake. Death, actually, was the reason she’d joined the Force in the first place – to try and foil it.
It wasn’t Edwards’ fault that he was oblivious to this, so Stacey shrugged her shoulders, took a large swig of her drink and grimaced, remembering the first time she’d seen Death, way back in the fifth form at High School. She was fifteen and studying Classics. Her teacher, an enthusiastic recent graduate prone to unusual teaching practices, would quite often bring such dusty subjects to life by acting out small tableaux, showing videos, doing quizzes and such. She was brilliant like that, Stacey recalled, quite different to the dry, didactic monologues they were used to. No, Ms Topping, it had to be said, was her favourite. On this particular day, she was instructing the class on Roman attitudes to life and death, describing, rather vividly, the glorious returns of triumphant generals to the city of Rome: ‘As they paraded into the city, waving to the cheering crowds from their glittering gold chariots, someone, wearing a death mask and costume, would stand by the generals’ shoulders whispering softly into their ears, “Man, remember you will die,” so that, even at moments of ecstasy, they should be aware of their mortality.’
