“Ah,” I say. My mouth stayed open.
Miranda leans forward, eager. “Yes. This is the tale of the tail that I threatened you with, and I figure you will understand what I’m talking about.”
The sketch pad lies unmolested across her knee. One long leg hooked over the chair arm, she looks at me. Her hands are still. Her face is just young now, all the cleverness washed away.
“I was ashamed of it. You know, as a kid. The nuns would tell me it was a cross to bear and a punishment for my mother’s sins. I want to just tell you the truth, not purple it up this time. The nuns were good to me. I loved them. In a funny way the fact that the religion never quite took in me has to do with the tail. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I don’t even understand it yet. My one prayer was that I’d wake up and my tail would be gone. My backside would be smooth like the others.”
My mouth twists wryly. “You hated it?”
“Sure.”
I sit, coolly naked, examining her racehorse legs and the jut of her calf out of incredibly thin ankles and remembering my first sight of her head, emerging blood-smeared and dark from between my legs. Her small rumpled face jerked to the side with a profile like a turtle.
And later, with Lil beside me, stretching out the tiny folded arms and legs by gently pulling on her hands and feet, and finding nothing. Nothing but that little pigtail coiled over her buttocks. And Lil’s voice, not broken or shrill in those days, saying, “Well, remember Chick. He didn’t look like much either. Go ahead and love her. We’ll see.”
Months later she was crawling and learning to stand up, and was getting too big to sleep in the cupboard beneath the sink with me. Her father, whose wide mouth and almond eyes are Miranda’s now, looked at her one day when she had tripped and fallen and split her lip on the floor of the trailer and was crying and bleeding, and he said, “Get rid of her.” And I cried and begged and yanked down her diapers to remind him of that tail, pink and charming, and he sneered and said, “Get rid of her or I’ll give her to Mumpo for supper, stuffed and roasted!”
Now, twenty years later, in this huge room, with Lil downstairs watching a TV screen through a magnifying glass, her mind steeped in the amnesiac vapor of her own decay, and Arty’s wonderful face gone to worms despite me, I sit here looking at the full, ripe flesh of this almost normal young female and for a single satisfying instant see her on a platter with a well-basted skin crackling to the touch.
“You say you hate your tail.”
“I did. Then I heard about the Glass House, where they weren’t interested if you were just pretty and could dance but wanted something spectacular. It was a joke to audition. Or an experiment. A different approach to my tail. But since I’ve been working there I don’t feel the same way about my tail. Now I think, in a way, it’s kind of marvelous.” Her eyes are questions. Is it sane to like my tail? she is asking.
I am too old for this roller coaster. This much anger and this much pleasure should not be crowded into two short hours. My liver, or whatever it is that’s trying to crowd its way into my left leg, can’t take it.
“This must bore you. It must seem pretty silly.”
“No, I’m just resting my eyes. What does she look like, Miss Lick?”
“Mary Lick. She’s forty or something, six feet two, maybe two hundred forty pounds. Short sandy hair. I wasn’t sure you were an albino until you took off your shades. This is the first time I’ve seen you without them. You have a fascinating orbital ridge; I’m just going to get a quick sketch. The deal is that Miss Lick has offered to pay me to have my tail amputated. She’ll pay all expenses, recovery as well as surgery. She swears the best surgeon. Plus she’ll pay me ten thousand dollars in cash. I don’t know what to do. Miss Lick isn’t what you’d think. She’s rough, but when I was telling her about being an orphan she kept saying, ‘Kee-rist,’ and I could tell she was wrapped up in it. When we left the restaurant, which is out of town a ways, she backed out of the parking lot and into a ditch. There we were with the rear wheels stuck in the mud. She sat there staring out the windshield in the dark. She said, “I’ve been here a hundred times and this never happened. I’m fucked up. But I’m not drunk. It’s that convent, your tail.” Then she got out to push and I steered and we got back up on the road. She drove me home and I felt right then that I’d give her my tail or anything else she asked for just because she cared.”
My eyes pop open to the sight of Miranda’s increasingly familiar frown. “Did you tell her that?”
“No. She wanted me to think about it. She’s going to stop by the Glass House tonight for my answer. She says if I decide to do it I should wait until school ends and I have the summer to recover from the surgery.”
“Very considerate.” The light is the color of dust now as it catches her hair and the side of her cheek. It leaves her dark eyes in shadow.
“Have you talked to your friends at the club?”
“They’re all wild about it. They’d jump at it … but they all hate their specialties. And I’m not sure I do anymore. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You understand living with a specialty. Better than any of us. I don’t know how old you are.…”
“Thirty-eight,” I say, and her face shows she thought I was older. I was barely seventeen when she was born. But dwarfs age quickly.
“What I’m asking is, am I crazy to have this liking for my tail? Am I just covering up something else? If I turn this chance down I’d probably regret it for the rest of my life. You must have wished a million times to be normal.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.”
“Not normal?”
“Never.”
“No shit! That’s astounding! Tell me …”
“I have to leave.” Reaching down for the pajama top, uncramping my legs to climb down to the floor, padding toward the bathroom door.
“Hey, I’m sorry, I’ve taken most of your afternoon, you must be beat.… You’ll come again, won’t you? How about tomorrow? I’ll work up some of these sketches and be ready for some more-developed stuff tomorrow.”
Alone in my room with the door finally closed I stand gaping blankly at the grimy window. I had no right to pretend surprise. The nun told me when I first took her there. Horst the Cat Man was leaning on the fender of his van at the gate and I was inside in the visitors’ room. I sat hugging Miranda, the toddler—not yet a year old—still in roomy diapers. Trying to talk through my tears to this clean-faced nun, who had seemed so warm and reassuring over the phone.
“What do you mean, a tail?” Her eyes cooled instantly. She tugged at the back of Miranda’s diaper. “Is she retarded?” Miranda clouded at the strange touch, looking anxiously at me. When the diaper dropped to her pudgy knees she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and began to cry.
“Just a little tail,” I was saying.
The nurse came in, chipper, with a clipboard full of forms. She held Miranda expertly, dancing her on a chair while I sniffed and scratched at the forms. The nun muttered softly to the nurse. The nurse sang “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Climbs Up the Water Spout” and peeked surreptitiously down the back of Miranda’s diaper.
We went to the infirmary, where the nurse chattered rhymes as she stripped the oblivious and chortling Miranda. Probing, listening, peering with tiny flashlights, counting digits, and finally tickling the curl in the tail until Miranda laughed out loud and I turned to grey stone.
“It is not simple surgery in her case, but it would make her life much easier,” the nurse was soothing me. “You must imagine what her life among normal children would be like. She will shower and dress and swim in a group setting where it will be impossible to hide. Children can be very cruel.”
“No,” I snapped. “She keeps it. You won’t touch it.”
They asked me again five years later as I stood watching Miranda through the window
of the visitors’ room.
“She prays to be rid of it. How can you deny your own child a chance at a happy, normal life?”
I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the playground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me. “She’s happy,” I said. “You’ve told me so and I see it. She keeps her tail.”
But she hated it.
I crawl into my cupboard, pull the door shut, and lie curled in the dark, thinking about Miss Lick. I’ve seen hobbies like hers before.
It is dark when I wake up. I stick my head under the cold-water tap for a while. Then I put a sweater on, then my coat, and a wool watch cap on over my wig, and stump out past the TV voice from Lily’s door to catch the Number 17 bus for downtown.
Huddled under the sick fluorescent glare of the empty bus, I stare at a cardboard warning tucked into the rack above the windows. It says, “Don’t get too comfortable.”
The doors sigh to let me out on the echoing mall. I head north toward Old Town and the Glass House. I make one stop in a phone booth. There are several Licks in the books but no Mary or M. It’s probably a fake name anyway. Nobody who can afford her kind of hobby could afford to have it known.
The neon clock in the window of the tattoo parlor says nine. Two blocks later I am scouting doorways across from the Glass House parking lot. A shut-down leather shop on the corner gives me a view of the parking lot and the side door as well as a long angle on the front entrance. A heap of garbage bags at the front waits for the morning pickup. Five steps lead up to the door. I sit on the top step and watch the lot fill up slowly. The cars spew out cheerful groups and giggling pairs. Mostly men. I count. Sixty going in before one comes out. None of them is Miss Lick.
The cold wraps me. It isn’t real rain, just the heavy mist that takes its time soaking through. The clouds hang low, picking up a dull bruise color from the lights of the city. The flesh-toned office tower known as Big Pink haunts the sky above the crabbed three-story horizon of Old Town. The tower disappears occasionally in a gust of darkness. My legs begin to ache.
Who do I think I am? What in the name of creeping Jesus am I going to do? The only answer is the sneer from the region of my hip sockets. I go on sitting, watching, feeling like a rat’s-ass fool.
Two hours later Miss Lick shows up. She’s easy to pick out. Six foot two and 240 pounds in a grey business suit. Her high heels are each big enough to bury an Egyptian in. She trots alone across the parking lot, hunched under an umbrella, and slides into the side door of the Glass House. My pulse whips high at the sight of her but drifts back down to a rhythmless funk as the door stays closed.
It’s another hour before she steps out into the harsh light of the parking lot. She looks up and decides against opening the umbrella. She lets the door sink back behind her and stands, head up, mouth open, fumbling in her pockets. I get up. My knees are stiff and unreliable. I shake my feet trying to get some juice into my joints. The blood begins its burn back to life as she starts her march across the lot. She is too discreet to leave her car that close to the place. She’s on the corner, turning. I trot down the dark side of the street. A small bar is evicting scum, and the drunken banter covers my shuffle briefly. Three blocks from the Glass House the big woman climbs into a sleek, dark machine parked in front of the blood bank. I write the license number on my wrist with a felt-tip pen and feel as though I’ve conquered Asia.
Miranda won’t get off work for another two hours. She’ll take a cab home. I stump over to the bus mall, so delirious with relief and cold that I hallucinate Miranda on every corner. Sitting by the glare-blackened window on the Number 17, I rewrite the license number on an old receipt from my purse. The figures on my wrist are already smearing blue from the mist and my sweat.
I go in to work early the next morning. As I climb onto the bus, a small genderless child lurches in its mother’s arms, pointing at me and crowing, “Little Mama!” The woman holding the child goes a sudden hot red and grabs at the tiny hand, shushing. I turn and hop back down the steps and wave the driver on. I walk to the radio station.
By the time I get there I’ve decided that the license number has nothing to do with Miranda’s Miss Lick. How many big women use the side door of the Glass House? I could be tagging lumpily after a convincing middle-aged transvestite. If Lick is a phony name for subterranean use, I could trail an irrelevant specimen for weeks and never know it.
I slide a license trace request into the newsroom, make two fifteen-second commercial spots for Stereo Heaven and Sun River lunchmeat, and then tape the third installment of Beowulf for the Blind. I wait until after the Story Hour to check my message slot, and find the computer printout of the trace. It is Mary T. Lick. She hasn’t changed her name for the Glass House. Her address is a tony high-rise condo in the West Hills, just below the Rose Garden.
In the elevator it occurs to me that Miranda might be waiting for me in the lobby, hoping to guile me into another drawing session. I hold my breath as the doors open, but she isn’t there.
I cross the bridge over the concrete river of the sunken highway and walk down to the library. Lincoln High School is directly behind the station and the students on their lunch hour crowd the sidewalks. Two shrill-voiced girls argue hideously on the Charles Dickens bench outside the library. I swim through the heavy doors and up the curving white marble stairs to the index files.
Mary T. Lick has a card of her own, just before Thomas R. Lick, her father. They are both buried in microfilm. I go up another two flights to the periodical room and stake out a viewing machine in the most obscure corner. I camp there with a stack of film reels of old newspapers.
There she is, not smiling, in the society columns. A younger Mary Lick is not smiling at the Hunt Club Opera Benefit. Mary Lick is trapped gloomily between two vivacious gargoyles at the City Club. Mary Lick, standing uncomfortably next to the deep V neckline of a Rose Princess, frowns at the crowning of the Rose Festival Queen. A much younger Mary Lick stands glumly, behind a bald and furious-faced man billed in the caption as Thomas R. Lick, at the ribbon cutting for the Thomas R. Lick Swimming Pool at the TAC Club.
The text skates over guest lists, wardrobes, and buffet menus. There is no comment on Mary’s wardrobe, which is the same in all cases, a dark featureless business suit.
Thomas R. is referred to variously as the Lickety Split Food king, mogul, or tycoon. The grimmest and most recent photo of Mary Lick shows her staring moodily at a Salvation Army truck loaded with cardboard boxes. “24 Lickety Split Thanksgiving Dinners.” The caption calls Mary “The Lickety Split Food Heiress,” suggesting that Thomas R. has passed on to the obituary page, probably with a “Lick Splits” headline.
There she is. The old man is spread out on the worm buffet and Daughter Mary is dumping hundreds of Lickety Split dinners into socially unacceptable hands. The seven-year-old item comments that this is the first contribution in the history of the Lickety Split Corporation, but says, coyly, that it might “signify a new role for the company in the future.”
I cram the copies into my bag and chug home. There’s a note under my door. A pencil smear from Miranda. “Come up and let me draw you.”
When I knock, her door explodes inward, her huge frame surrounded by light. “Finally.” Reaching for me.
“I can’t today. I have some work to do.” Her face falls into conventions masking disappointment. My chest lurches.
“But how did it go with that woman, about your tail?”
She flickers for the connection. Not thinking about it.
“Oh, there’s no hurry. She says it’s fine to wait until the semester ends.”
“To decide?”
“No. To do it. Have it done.”
“You decided.”
“What the hell. It’s silly not to.”
Her insolent look. The careless smirk. She is punishing me for being unavailable. I turn away, sick, and feel my way back down the hall.
She calls after me.
“When can you sit for me again? Tomorrow? The afternoon? Miss McGurk?”
I wave and go downstairs to my room and shut the door behind me and lock it.
Pacing and grinding my teeth. Throwing my wig on the floor and stamping. Why does she make me so angry? My rage terrifies me. I am a monster. I would rip her to shreds. I would swing her up by her round pink heels and snap her long body until that bright, hairy head smashed against the wall. Falling on my knees, shaking. Tangling my hands to keep from breaking something. Sudden gratitude for the nuns, realizing that if she had stayed with me all the years of her growing up I would have murdered her—the arrogant, imbecile bitch, my baby, beautiful Miranda.
I end up curled on the floor, blubbering and gasping. No one comes to comfort me. I lie there until I’m bored and embarrassed at having dried snot streaks crackling on my cheeks. I get angry so rarely. Now twice in two days at Miranda.
I take a shower, get into a flannel nightgown, make instant coffee with hot water from the sink, and push the window up so I can see through. The streak of sky visible above the alley is heavy. I sit on the sill drinking death’s-head brew and watching the shadow creep higher on the blind wall of the warehouse across the way. I can hear the pigeons fuddling in the eaves. Rain begins to splat a shine over the puddle on the garage roof below me.
Downstairs the phone rings and then stops. Lil’s voice comes, shrill up the staircase, “Forty Wuunnn,” and from far away a door slams and the redheaded defrocked Benedictine begins his desperate avalanche down the stairs. The pipes gurgle. The heat is coming on.
I drag the big old costume trunk out of the closet and open it. The Miranda Box I call it, though there is little enough of her in it. The shallow tray in the top of the trunk holds it all. School photos. The stack of report cards. The bundled letters from Sister T. that came four times a year for sixteen years. Progress reports: “Miranda is reading two years beyond her grade level. Her disposition is cheerful but marred by stubbornness and a disruptive tendency.” The test scores. The list of inoculations. The chicken pox report. An indignant letter folded around a printed form crawling with the results of a medical examination.