Her long hand taps at the dangling ink scrotum, the nearly invisible penis of the news vendor. “Characteristic of the fat-storing pattern in males,” she’s saying, “the belly seems to swallow the penis from the roots up, literally shortening it …”
“Disgusting!” snaps a voice behind me.
“Fuck off!” yells Miranda. The critic sniffs away toward the corner. Just a passerby. Miranda lays an arm over my hump to protect me. Pointing at the line depicting a rumpled buttock drooping from the stool, she giggles. “One of my teachers says I draw like a mass murderer. I hate that ditsy crap, though. Inchy little lines like the hesitation cuts on a suicide’s wrist.”
I loll in molten idiocy. All this time of not speaking I had figured her for silly, for toad-brained, because she is so near normal. All the years of watching have taught me nothing, and I laugh. Leaning back against her arm, tipping my head as the fat man’s head tips, laughing voicelessly and weak.
She grins at me. “That one works, doesn’t it?”
I’m laughing despite myself. “You seem such a nice girl, too.”
“Ho!” she barks. “Don’t be deceived. I’ve got a tail.”
Something in my face stops her. Her face is suddenly careful.
“That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about.” She watches me. “There’s a story, naturally a long one. But the first and last is that I was born with a tail, like a lot of people, but I didn’t get it nipped off when I was a baby. I still have it. It’s not a big tail, less than a foot long. But most people don’t have any bone in their tails. Mine is actually an extended spur of my spine. That’s why I always wear skirts.”
I am helpless, pinned by her arm and her eyes until she looks away.
“It’s going to rain,” she says. The air is heavy and grey. “Want to go? Come up to my place? I’ll give you lunch and draw you and bend your ear and beg advice.”
“O.K., of course.” I scrabble numbly for my briefcase.
She jounces up, arms wheeling against the sky. “All right.”
I would die to make her smile that way, would whittle my fingers and toes away if only it could make her long Binewski eyes light this way forever. I jump down to the pavement and dive after her through the swirling bodies. Her dark drawings are still in my fist. I stuff them into my briefcase with a pang. Hide them.
Turning the corner into our block Miranda skips once to keep in step. Across the street, high up in the third-story gable of the wood Victorian, a painter leaning off his scaffold to reach the trim watches us, freezing one hand to the wall, his brush hand poised against the blue air.
Am I contaminating her? Polluting my silence? Obliterating my anonymity? Dangling the ax of my identity over her whole idea of herself?
“You turn high RPMs,” she says, double-stepping beside me. “Slightly more than two to my one. But”—she laughs once, a fox bark against the mist—“I’m catching on.” My blankness shows and she tosses her shoulders and arms in a classic Binewski apology. “Strides,” she says.
Our old house, with its front steps propped like elbows on the sidewalk, looks warm for once. The bottom front windows, Lil’s, show a yellow glow. The fourth floor front, otherwise known as Number 41, or The Attic, is lit. Its small dusty window shields the Benedictine on his bed in solitary combat with the rule book. Miranda’s windows, third floor front, are white above the blank-eyed vacant room below her. My room on the second floor is at the back, invisible. My view is the dust-blind rear of the warehouse that squats across the alley. Just below my window, like an Oriental pond, the flat tar roof of the square garage is filled with water and moss because of blocked drains.
Lil is standing at attention in her doorway as we enter. Her old face tilts back to stare at our shadows. “Who is it?” she shrieks.
“Thirty-one,” yells Miranda. Then louder, “Thirty-one!” and Lil steps back to let us pass.
Miranda talks me past my room. I’m ready to panic and quit, dodge in through my door and apologize as I close her out. She is telling me we should go for walks together, that she often has to dance with shorter people and has no trouble adjusting the length of her stride.
It’s been three years since I saw her rooms. Before she came from the train station, still smelling of nuns, I cleaned. It took days, sponging the ceilings, the green wallpaper with its huge white roses like fetal aliens. These were her rooms long before she came here. The first time I visited the building with the fastidiously courteous agent, the big front room, twenty by forty feet, with its tall windows in a row, was marked for her. The bedroom was more normal. The windowless bathroom was claustrophobic. The kitchen was familiar, as though it had been surgically transplanted from a trailer house.
I scrubbed windows and woodwork and the endless cupboards built into the walls. I pounded and vacuumed the heavy stuffed furniture. Everything normal for the almost normal girl.
She was so tall, I thought, she wouldn’t mind the distance to the ceilings. With such long arms, I thought, she will like the big room to stretch in.
The day she arrived I stayed close to my spyhole all morning. It was nearly noon when she came, thundering with two other students up the stairs and past the door where my eye was fixed to the hole.
“You got the place free. Who cares what it looks like,” came a young voice. The jumbled baggage and bodies clattered upward. My ear flattened to the door, trying to sift out which voice was Miranda’s. If she hated the house, the smells, the soggy slump of the neighborhood, what would I do?
She didn’t have much. The three carried all she owned up the stairs in that one trip. All the evidence of her eighteen years on the planet. Twenty minutes later they rushed down again, to register for classes at the art school.
Now beside me in the gravy-dark hall she pushes the door away from her, open, and a soft white light sweeps out to swallow me. Her shadow blinks across me as she disappears into the light.
The room is gauze-bright from the four tall windows. The light comes through thin white curtains, cool onto grey walls, simple onto the dark gleam of the bare wood floor.
She tosses her purse, drops her sea-green coat, abandons her tall heels in the middle of the empty floor.
“There used to be furniture,” I say in shock. Where does she sit? eat? sleep? I thought I had provided for her.
“It was awful.” She pauses, arms half cocked above her head, pulling at her sweater. She disappears in a wrestling frenzy, reappears breathless, hurling the sweater at a distant empty corner. “It’s all scattered in other rooms in the building.”
The room is bare. Not a stick. Not a single nail protrudes from the grey walls. Only her clothes trail across the black floor like a love romp. Looking rail-thin in the blouse and skirt, she jerks open a white door hiding canvas chairs folded neatly against the back of the closet. A thin-legged folding table. She whips them out and up, furnishing the place. “Wait till you see my tea cabinet,” she says, slapping the swaying loop of canvas meant to cradle an ass. “I’ve been collecting for weeks.” Through another white door to the tiny kitchen stands the old refrigerator, no taller than I am.
“Vine leaves.” She snatches out jars and plastic dishes. “Artichoke hearts. Do you like olives?”
The kettle is on the stove, blue flame curling its bottom. She reaches, her long body high above me and her ribs sliding under thin cloth, upward. “Strawberry, jasmine, mint.” Tea boxes rain onto the counter. “This is all for you.” She is huge. Her heat beats through the inch of air between us. “I have no idea what you like so I’ve been on the watch for anything really special. Just in case you ever came to visit. Now I’m going to get you a dressing gown and you can change in the bathroom.”
The dream lasts only an instant, but in it I have fallen into the cat cage and the tigers are sliding by me, brushing their whole hot length against me. But it is this Miranda, moving liquid past me and out into the big room, miraculously whisking her dropped belongings out of sight, pulling out wh
ite painted drawers and doors, allowing glimpses of hidden paraphernalia as she skates, chattering about food, again and again to the resurrected table suddenly crowded with ominous delicacies heaped in small bowls.
A final armload slides onto the table, sketch pads, pencils, a sinister-looking camera. Then she takes half a step back and looks at me through half-closed eyes. A flicker of her father’s deliberate calculation passes across her face. An ice knife sticks in my chest.
“It’s not cold in here, is it?” she asks.
“No.”
“Good.” She moves to the drawers in the wall. “I’ll do some photos first, while you’re fresh, and then sketch until you get tired or fed up.” She flips her voice over her shoulder while bent, rummaging to avoid acknowledging my jitter of fear. She is holding me to my promise.
“The photos will make it easier on you. It hurts to hold a pose for a long time.”
She presents me with a green pajama top and, as I grasp it, she swings open the bathroom door, flicks the light switch, saying, “There are hooks on the door for your clothes … whoops! There’s the kettle boiling.”
In the tall bathroom I stand staring at the door. I can hear her moving on the other side. The pajama top trails on the floor beside me and she is whistling in the kitchen. Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass. She is manipulating me. Pushing me around as though I were nothing but a mobile stomach like the news vendor. She fancies she has me under control. Red anger blisters my guts. She doesn’t see me at all. She doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. I am the watcher, the mover, the maker. She is just like her father, casually, carelessly enslaving me with my love. She doesn’t know the powers that keep me here. She thinks it’s her charm and guile.
“Tea’s ready,” she calls.
I answer thinly, “Coming,” but whirl in a frenzy, shoving the grit of the green pajama into my mouth and biting down to keep from bellowing.
Her drawing is suddenly in front of me, framed and glassed on the grey wall beside the sink. The darkness is ink and the eyes and teeth come out of the dark and the screaming chicken is bulging vainly away, caught as the teeth close tearing into exploding feathers and black blood behind its desperate skull. Drawn with a bullwhip at thirty paces. Quietly, in the white at the bottom, her penciled hand has scrawled “Geek Love—by M. Barker.”
I take off my clothes. I can’t reach the hooks on the door. I drape the clothes over the toilet tank, drop the wig on top, and stand my shoes on the floor beside it. The pajama top hangs to my ankles.
• • •
I sit. She draws. Wearing only my blue glasses I am not cold but my skin rises against exposure, rough as a cow’s tongue. The cups steam upward into the pale air. Our island is the size of two canvas chairs and a small cluttered table. We are marooned in the breathing bareness of the room. Darkness rolls out around us, seeping into the distant softness of the grey walls. The curtains shift slowly in their own whiteness, as though the light pouring through them has a frail, moving substance.
She is gnawing an olive pit and frowning at the sketch pad in her lap. The wild hair torching out of the edges of her face mesmerizes me. The millions of hairs in a dozen smoldering tones are as alien as her size, the outrageous length of her. My mother, Lillian, is seventy inches high. I am thirty-six inches high.
“How tall are you, Miranda?”
She looks up to focus on my chin, frowning, and says, “Six feet,” mechanically before her eyes twitch back to the paper in front of her.
Watching her work is comfortable. I feel invisible again, as though she had never spoken to me beyond “Good morning.” She is not interested in my identity. She doesn’t notice it. Her eyes flick impatiently at me for a fast fix—a regenerative fusing of the image on her retina, the model she inflicts on the paper. I am merely a utensil, a temporary topic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand.
Downstairs in the first floor front, Crystal Lil sits sliding the magnifying glass back and forth in search of the focal point. The walls around her are slathered with the crumpled glitter of the old carny posters. A dozen glossy young Lilys smile, kick, and reach for the curving gold name, “Crystal Lily,” that arches against midway blue above her. Dressed in white, a paper Lil arches her back against a blue-green sky spangled with stars. Strips of arsenic-green wallpaper peep between the posters.
In my room everything is just as I found it when I moved in. The stuffed furniture molders against the cabbage wallpaper. My real life sits in boxes and suitcases behind cupboard doors. My real bed is not the creaking acre of springs in the corner, but the dark nest of blankets on the floor of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.
Miranda rips out the page she has been working on and absently sails it over her shoulder while she eyes a jar bristling with pens. The page settles, belly up on the dark floor, as she begins dashing ink at a fresh sheet of paper.
“What made you,” clearing my throat, “decide to be an artist?”
Her eyes flick at my feet under frowning brows. “No, no. A medical illustrator. For textbooks and manuals …” Her tongue sneaks out at a corner of her mouth as she slaps stroke after vicious stroke onto the defenseless page. “See, photographs can be confusing. A drawing can be more specific and informative. It gets pretty red in there. Pretty hot and thick. But the bastards claim I’m undisciplined, too flashy.…” Whatever she is doing to the innocent sheet has nothing to do with me. She rips it out and drops it, starting immediately on the page beneath.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.” She tries to make it casual.
The bite of fear—“She knows!”—grabs my chest and then relaxes. No. I’ve been sitting here bald and naked for an hour. Too late for that.
She stops chewing her thumb and asks, “Have you ever been to the Glass House?” At my nod she drops the pen, picks up her tame tool, the pencil, and begins work on a fresh sheet of paper.
“Then you know,” eyes on paper, “that the dancers, all of us, aren’t there for our dancing skills or even our looks, but …” rubbing her thumb vigorously across the page, “because we each have something odd. We call them our specialties.
“What the Glass House calls ‘Exotic Features’ are all in the back room. You know. Separate cover charges for private shows and private parties. Blondes with Dobermans. Group acts. They stage requests, too, for fancy prices. There are one-way mirrors in the peeper booths and special insurance policies for domination or S&M. That’s where the girls make money. The club too.”
Her mouth screws up tight as she squints at her sketch.
“Well, there’s a regular customer. Not frequent but regular. Once a month or so she comes in for one of the specialty shows. Maybe twice a year she’ll foot the bill for a request. At first I thought she was a standard S&M dyke. Now I think it’s not pain that she’s interested in. She’s interested in changing people.”
Something in Miranda’s tone catches me. A swirl of familiar fear starts in my gut. She feels it too. I see a bewilderment strange to her face.
“The lady’s rich. She pays. She likes transvestites if they want to become transsexuals. If they want to go all the way, she’ll pay for all treatments and the surgery. That’s how Paulette could finally afford it. He could have gone on strapping his balls up tight for the rest of his life if it wasn’t for her. The Glass House keeps hiring transvestites and she keeps shipping them off to get real. But she watches. That’s part of the deal. She goes along and watches the operation. And it isn’t just sex changes. She actually prefers other things.”
A cold thought sinks quietly through me. Again? Miranda draws and talks, looking at my elbows, forehead, knees, tits, anywhere but my eyes.
The long-haired blonde, Denise, who unfurled her pubic hair and danced on her head hair, had furnished one of the recent command performances. They stretched her out on a chrome table in one of the back rooms, and gave her local anesthetics while
they burned all her hair off. They set the fire and then ducked back into the glassed-in booths to escape the smell as the girl shrieked in fear if not pain, and the master of ceremonies, in a gas mask and flameproof suit, stood by with the fire extinguisher.
“The dame paid Denise’s hospital bills and went to visit her all the time. I went to see Denise the day before she got out. She looks bad. The roots were destroyed and the hair will never grow back. There are a lot of scars on her face. She’s not allowed to have any plastic surgery. That was in the contract she signed. You wouldn’t believe it but Denise is happy. She says Miss Lick, that’s the lady’s name, paid her so much she’ll never have to work again. Denise says there have been others from the Glass House. One redhead with enormous tits who had them amputated and went to college and is a doctor now!”
My daughter is staring at me. Her eyes are looking anxiously at my eyes. The point is coming. I feel it speeding toward me as she searches my face for a reaction. Any reaction.
“The reason I’m droning on with this silly stuff is that Miss Lick came back to the dressing room after the show last Friday night and asked to talk to me. She’s gruff and gross and when she isn’t being extremely dignified she’s being what she calls a ‘straight shooter.’ That means the first thing she said to me was, ‘Look, I’m not going to make a pass at you, so relax.’ Maybe it’s nuts but I liked her. She took me out for a fantastic dinner, though she didn’t eat. She drank the whole time. She pumped me for my life story and, being the shy, reserved type, I spilled the works. The poor orphan brought up in the convent school. The mysterious trust fund covering my art-school tuition and the permanent rent on this place. I had a glass of champagne and colored the whole yarn a glorious purple. She was fascinated. And what it comes down to is, she isn’t after my ass, she’s after my tail.”