Geek Love

26. NOTES FOR NOW: The Swimmers

I, the dwarf whose ears are separated only by an oozing hemorrhoid, am now being punished for sentimental collapse during my swimming lesson. It was the soft flab over Miss Lick’s neck that broke me. The firm way she has of pushing her jaw down into the cushions of her multiple chins as she smiles at me in the water. I had set myself up with a splurge of vanity for my own malignant resolution. Then the mere sight of Miss Lick’s neck tipped me off my perch. I blubbered all the way down and damned near gave the show away.

There I am, soaking in the green air above the water, keeping tabs on the lifeguard who is fluttering winsomely at a golden-brown boy wearing, apparently, three pounds of grapes stuffed down the front of his wet swim trunks. The room echoes flatly, and four little girls are huddled in the water on the other side of the pool, swearing to each other in whispers that they have seen me in the dressing room without my swim cap and my green-tinted goggles. They are assuring each other that I am as bald as a baby’s ass and that my eyes are bright red.

With my eyes closed I can feel the children looking at me. They have stopped their games for a moment in the shallow end where they can watch me. I too am at the shallow end, sitting on the steps in water up to my nipples. Miss Lick is plowing up and down the pool in her ponderous and dutiful laps. The children’s eyes are crawling on me. If I opened my eyes they would smile at me and wave. They are just old enough to be embarrassed at their normality in front of me.

Because I am Olympia Binewski and am accustomed to the feel of eyes moving on me, I turn slightly on my submerged seat and reach down as though examining my toes under water. This angle will allow the children a clear profile view of my hump. I have never claimed that my hump is extraordinary in size or conformation, but it is a classic of its kind, rising in a clean arc and pulling my shoulders up, pinching my chest out in a narrow wedge. The top of the hump, if I bend at a certain angle, is as high as the back of my head. Now I will bring both hands out of the water and remove my goggles. There is some splashing from the children. They are impressed at the size of my hands on the ends of my short, thin arms. I smile and open my eyes so they can tell in the dapple reflections on the water that my eyes are a deep rose pink rather than red.

But Miss Lick is standing in the shallow end, glowering down at the children. I can hear her harshness. “Are you swimming laps or fooling around?” And four little creatures do not speak but kick off from the wall and chase each other down the far lane of the pool to escape.

The light is pale green and moves on Miss Lick’s enormous shoulders and chest. She turns and nods at me — a quick twitch of tension at her mouth that stands for a smile. She is telling me that she has saved me from the stares of idiots and that I am safe with her to guard me. Then she plunges back into the water and moves forward, beating the surface with the sound of a hiccuping cannon.

The children turn and come back but they won’t dare stop at this end again. Miss Lick doesn’t like children. She hates beautiful female children. These four ten-year-olds are long and absurdly slim, with clean faces. They are frightened of Miss Lick but not of me.

Maybe it’s because I am so old. They would worry if I was their age and they could imagine being me. They tell each other that I was “born that way,” which is reassurance for them and comfort for me. Nothing could make me hurt them.

But they are wise to fear Miss Lick. She could lose control for an instant and grind them to paste.

Miss Lick is giving me a swimming lesson. She holds me in her arms and mutters, “Tip your head back, arch your spine. Good. Now kick from the hip.”

Her face is big and serious, watching me carefully. Her arms and hands are warm beneath me. I lie on my back and squint up into her bulging face and know that she is the only friend I’ve ever had. We are in water that would be over my head if she let me go. I can hear the thrum of other swimmers beating the water around me. The light bounces off the walls and is broken by the water. Miss Lick holds me up. “Good, Oly,” she says, and she smiles at me.

Miss Lick is six feet two and a heavyweight athlete. She is not quite 40 years old and has 20-inch biceps. I have 7-inch biceps. I am 36 inches tall. I weigh 64 pounds and I am very old at 38. My arthritis is actually 110. But Miss Lick is even older because she is closer to death. Miss Lick has her arm around the bomb that will kill her and she is dickering to buy it.

“Kick!” she barks, grinning down at me. Suddenly the sting of grief spurts from my sinuses to my belly. This is all Miranda’s fault, I tell myself in rage. If my daughter weren’t such a fly-brained slut I wouldn’t be in this position. I could be a quiet, pleasant old dwarf, curling into a dry and sanitary death in my own blankets without ever having injured a soul. But here I am rocking in the arms of the creature I intend to slaughter. When I stop kicking and double up in pain, Miss Lick is worried.

“Water in your nose?” she asks, pumping her huge pillow hand gently against my hump. “Did you swallow some?”

Looking up through my smeared green lenses I see a roll of fat covering the artery in Miss Lick’s throat.

When I refuse to go to dinner at her house Miss Lick wants to carry me up to my apartment and tuck me into bed. “God, I’m so thoughtless!” she groans as she wheels the big sedan through the dark streets. “I act as though you’re a goddamned mountain like me!”

“Not at all,” I squawk, with my fingers clutching the soft leather of the front seat. “Not at all,” I repeat, grabbing with one hand at the dashboard and the other at the armrest to keep from hurtling into the dark well of legroom as Miss Lick stops for a light.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to come up with you? I could make you some soup. I know you don’t eat.”

“Not at all.” I fiddle with the door handle, and the door eases open at last and a crack of cool air slips in, dulling the hot reek of her chlorine flesh in the car. “I’m going to unplug the phone and crawl right into bed. I’m recording early tomorrow.”

Her big hand touches my hump as I slide toward the pavement. “Let me give you a lift to the radio station in the morning,” she urged.

“Not at all.” I can barely think anymore. If I don’t get away from her I will disintegrate and ruin everything.

“Thank you so much. I’ll see you in the pool tomorrow evening,” and I grab the car door with both hands and slam it on her goodnight and turn away, steering at top speed for the lobby entrance because she never pulls away from the curb until she sees me safe inside.

This building is new and Miss Lick could put a fist through my front door as easy as belching, which she does glibly. Miss Lick can belch every syllable of the name “Harry Houdini” on demand and enjoys being asked. Still, I lock the flimsy veneer behind me and then unplug the phone. I told her I was going to bed and I can’t risk a busy signal if she rings to check on me.

It is garbage night for Crystal Lil. I have to go home. Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous assassins. I use the footstool to stare into the mirror over the sink in the all-new bathroom. Straightening my wig, adjusting my glasses, I smirk snidely at myself because it serves me right for being such a flabby clot as to lose my nerve. Getting all choked up with sympathy for Miss L. A good two-mile walk in the dark and cold will teach my knees and ankles a little respect for discipline and self-control.

Fatigue makes me giddy. By the time I get to the alley behind Lily’s house, my head is floating several feet above my body and I have a bitter tendency to giggle. I can see myself and the view is pathetic. I don’t dare use the front door in case Miss Lick is pursuing her surveillance hobby.

The old dwarf rolls up the cat-shit dark stairs of the decrepit garage to get to the roof. Her feet hurt and her knees are pleading for a transfer to Bermuda. “Eeh,” grunts the frog-faced albino. Her hip joints have gone past red-hot to a temperature unfamiliar even to the flap-titted hunchback. “Hunh,” says the bald-headed mother of morons, as she stops to lean against the open door to the roof.

The air is grey, lit by a street lamp at the end of the alley. The garage roof is flat and attached at the rear to the tall wood house. The rain pops and silvers on the slimed pool of water that fills the center of the roof. The house fire escape sinks its feet in the roof tar. Miss Oly, the third or fourth Binewski child, depending on whether you count heads or asses, takes off her blue-tinted spectacles and rubs the sweat from under her bulging pink eyes and off the bridge of her wide, flat nose and then hooks the glasses back over her ears and settles them in place. Raising the entire flesh of her forehead and skull for lack of eyebrows, Ms. Binewski proceeds, with anxious care, to roll bowleggedly away from the cat stench of the stairway, around the edges of the rain pool, making for the first length of the cast-iron fire ladder. There she goes, humping up the damp, sooty rungs. She stops climbing and hooks her chin over the rung in front of her to rest for three breaths, thinking it may be time to get a cane. Or maybe a pair of canes hefty enough to help a burst toad of an elderly cretin up such flights of carpenterial fancy as those cat-slimed stairs in the garage without having to reach out and touch each sodden step with a hand.

She, this Oly, has reached the first slat landing of the fire escape and is hauling her thick carcass onto it with her spider arms and resting again — or, more accurately, peering through the dirt-fogged window of the room that looks out of this arse-alley backside of the noble West Hills, and, if those are tears puddling in the bottom of those wire-framed glasses she’s wearing, then this flabby old douche bag will be too blind to stay on the platform and will drop and crack like a beetle on the garage roof, next to the ornamental pool.

No, she claims she’s not crying, though her sinuses are trying to squeeze out through her eyeballs. She is, however, feeling sorry for herself because this is “her” window and the big dusty room on the other side is “her” room and Oly misses it and would like to crawl in and shut the window and never leave it again, but she cannot because instead of a brain she has been blessed with a flame-purple hemorrhoid and she is in miserable, though voluntary, exile until her little project is finished.

There, is she crying again? Or is she only realizing that if she had washed that smog-clogged hunk of glass anytime in the last three years she might actually see her reading chair and her hotplate sitting on the cupboard and the cupboard doors that open into the blanket nest where she sleeps with the doors snugged shut and her knees tucked up to her chin. This failure in the service of transparency is disheartening to the delicate mucous linings of the amphibious Miss Oly. Picturing her cranky joints curled in her own warm nest causes further heat and discharge from her cherry-pink eyeballs.

Quietly she slips the lock, pushes the window upward, snakes through into the warm dark, and feels the cushion-thick carpet beneath her brogans. She smiles her frog smile and considers calling a taxi for the trip back since surely she has punished herself sufficiently for what was, after all, an understandable weakness. Next time, she muses, I’ll simply stick my hand in boiling water.

I go downstairs and yell, “Garbage!” three times at Lil’s open door before she sits back from her magnifying-glass approach to the evening game show. Her white head moves, groping with ears and nose more than her sad, jellied remnants of eyes. Each time I look at her the white hair is paler and thinner, like spun glass above her mummy-grey scalp.

“Garbage?” she screams.

“Garbage!” I bellow.

She launches from her chair, leaping upward, neck extended, the tender underside of her jaw exposed in a flesh wedge aimed at heaven. Sailing the room, tacking from chair to table to cupboard, hand over hand, she locates her two wastebaskets and the tidy, plastic-wrapped bundle beneath the sink, clutches them to her breast, and turns toward the doorway, searching for me. I step in just far enough to grab the stuff. She opens her arms, letting it all go down to me. This is our Thursday ritual. To complete it, she will nod and turn away silently. I will lug the stuff to the junk closet at the end of the hall, where the big black bags of garbage from the roomers sit. Then I will drag all the bags out to the sidewalk, stacking them in the plastic barrels that sit there all week. That is all. We’ve done it this way for years. By the time I climb the stairs back to my room, Lil will be resubmerged in her struggle with the magnifying glass and the TV screen. Beyond the chant of “Garbage” we never speak. But tonight she cracks the mold. She follows me to the door of her room, leans there, waiting as I drag the big sacks past her. As I open the big front door onto the wet night, she calls out, “Thank you,” in a clear, unbroken voice.

I look back. She is poised, her milk-veiled eyes aimed in my general direction, her head tilted back, listening. “You’re welcome,” I say, and she goes back into her room.

I climb all the way up to Miranda’s door and knock. Then I hear a soft male voice laughing inside and turn away. She opens. “Miss McGurk!” smiling. “You’re sent by fate to try munching Gorgonzola and artichoke-heart salad while listening to …”

As she tries to pull me in, I try to pull her out into the hall. “Could I just speak to you for one moment?” She shrugs and steps out, folding her arms, looking down at me with her eyebrows pinched in concentration. “Something is wrong with Lily.”

Her eyes spring open and she sets to move quickly, “Is she hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?”

Gratified, I pat her arm, “No, no. She’s acting a little odd.”

Miranda hoots. “How can you tell?”

“No. She’s acting strangely. I can’t be here for a bit. I have to work. Could you keep an eye on her? Tonight? Just stroll down and listen for her breathing. You can hear her in the night if you put your ear to her door. She has a heavy sigh in her sleep. And if you can’t hear her, or if she sounds strange …”

Miranda hoists her eyebrows at me in surprise. “Sure. I’ll check on her. I’m not working tonight. Don’t worry.”

Nodding and waving, I retreat quickly. She stands looking after me. As I go down the stairs I hear the soft male voice call, “Miranda?” and then her door shuts quietly.

I stay in my room for a few hours, arranging the papers in the big trunk. At around eleven I hear Miranda on the stairs. Her footsteps pass down to the ground floor and pause for a while at Lily’s closed door. Then she goes back up. I find myself smiling as I listen.

I go down myself an hour later. The wheeze and bubble beyond Lil’s door is regular and strong. I use the wall phone to call for a cab and wait for it on the front steps.

I sulk all the way back to the tinhorn apartment. I want my own moldy room with its pale stench and its frail, maniac noise. The new building seems lifeless, incapable of decay. Its halls are narrow and pharmaceutically bright. Each floor is the same as all the rest. The only sound is the faint hum of the elevator. The orange carpet from the hall spills under my door, flooding the whole apartment. The rooms are low and square and it feels rented because I refuse to actually live here. In my home the air reeks of dust and jumbled layers of life, and it is dim unless you are right next to a window.

Here the telephone is white and has its own table. Where I live the phone is an ancient black-and-chrome wall box with coin slots and numbers scratched into its paint. It rings often but few people ever use it to call out. It is too exposed there in the grease-brown entryway. Whenever it rings, Lily answers, though it is never for her.

27. NOTES FOR NOW: Getting to Know You and Your.357 Magnum

What a bouncer she would have made! Shy as an egg, but so disguised. I can’t help it. She charms me. To see her hunched over her plastic tray — chin shoved straight at the big screen, her paw pokes a fork in the air, and she laughs, “Hu-hu-hu,” through her bulging cheeks.

“Smart little shit, I’m tellin’ ya!” she says after cleaning her cheeks with a gulp. “Lookit ’er drive that sucker!”

The young woman on the screen is bent over a complicated hunk of shiny machinery. The driving Miss Lick finds so admirable is a sure-fingered dial-twiddling and button-tapping.

Miss Lick scoots back in her chair and lunges for another flabby forkful of limp turkey from her compartmentalized supper.

She loves this — carrying our Lickety Split food trays back through the discreet door in the big bathroom to her home-movie theater, perching on straight chairs with the trays on our knees, watching the screen full of Miss Lick’s girls. She adores the reruns, and nearly cries at the “before” footage, angry grieving for the misery of their lives before she rescued them. She is hypnotized by the surgery or treatment flicks, chewing slowly, nudging me with an informative elbow and a nod when a particularly smooth bit of scissor or saw work is goring its way across the screen. Now that she allows me to see these segments, she is anxious to impress me. But her joy is in the work shots of the “successes.”

“Look at that! Know what she’s doing? Reading the rings of rat-assed Saturn! Can you imagine? Six years ago the only rings she knew were for slipping over limp cocks to make ’em rise!”

The young woman in the white coat reaches for the paper that is spewing from a printer. She turns toward us and the light to read. She smiles, a sudden grin of utterly cheerful mischief flashing out of her intense flesh.

I want to ask what it is that she hasn’t got anymore. The lab coat hides her chest. Was it breasts? Two new figures appear — a plain woman and a spavined boy, twenty or twenty-one years old. They stand at attention in front of Miss Lick’s girl as she speaks.

“Teaching ’em! See that? She’s got these fuckers trailing after her!”

Miss Lick’s big hand bunches and jabs my thigh sideways in hilarious friendship. “Eh? Eh?”

My tray flips forward, spewing goo, and she’s on her knees choking with apologies as she plucks up the gobs and wipes up the smears. “Creeping Christ! I’m such a clod! Are you all right? Hey, I’ll have a fresh new one for you in thirty seconds flat. Just sit. No, no, I’m going to.”

She tears me up. I sit here laughing at her. She is a galumphing dugong, an elvish ox, a sentimental rhino.

“They’re like my kids, all of them.” She sniffs, her thick forehead creasing, anxious that I should understand and approve.

“Did you, no offense now, but did you ever wish you’d had kids? Not the man bit, but the kid bit? No? Well, you’re right, I know it. You’re right. But you want to make a difference. A person wants to feel as though they’ve accomplished something.”

She mooches around for my approval. She’s a sullen buffalo with the world but she’s a child to me. She is bigger than Papa. She could break me with two fingers. But she can be small around me. She can chatter to me though she sticks to brusque efficiency with everybody else. Oh, she is solicitous and protective with her girls, but never childlike. It’s because I like her. Arty was right. She soaks it up like booze and it turns her to water, makes her defenseless.

Am I the first person who’s ever liked her? It makes me sad. She’s pretty lovable, after all. She knows how to enjoy things, and she’s so decent it’s scary.

There she sits, sprawled in a hard, straight chair, hour after hour. It never occurs to her to drag in a soft chair for herself. She thought about cushions for me, though. Draped my straight chair with towels from the bathroom because one day in the pool she saw red lines on my hump. I’d been leaning on a locker. She never forgot. She always makes sure I’m comfortable.

“So why don’t you bring in an armchair for yourself?” I asked her.

“What? Too much trouble. I don’t need it. I’m padded.”

She’s wearing flannel pajamas and a floppy bathrobe. Her potato feet stick out, the soles jammed against the tile floor, propping her in the chair as she reaches, sorting through the film disks. Her chubby toes sprout, wiggling, from the main tuber.

“Got a new scout flick today.” Her approach to the scouting tapes of potential recruits is different, intense, questioning, critical, analytical, running them again, backing them up to replay a gesture, a frown, a smile.

“This slut tried a one-handed pigeon drop on me. As soon as she discovered this bag, brown paper bag, under her ass on the park bench, I smelled old tuna. She screeches ‘For heaven’s sakes!’ I sat there watching the real goddamn pigeons crapping on the lawn, listening to her go on about ‘Where could all that money have possibly come from?’ and then finding a little brown envelope of snapshots. Twelve-year-old sucking a Doberman’s dick, and she’s miscarrying with righteous indignation and trying to get me to pay attention and all the time I’m thinking, ‘This is where I’ve got to at last. I’m looking like a gobbling pigeon, just like all the drooling biddies shuffling on the mall.’ It makes me bitter. I reached in my wallet and pulled out a hundred. ‘Now, honey,’ I says, and I hand it to her, watching her eyes freeze as she shuts up. ‘You take this so you don’t get your ass kicked when you get back to the slimy pimp that runs you. Save us all trouble and time.’ She starts up protesting, waving this lunch bag of funny money at me. ‘Believe me, sweetheart,’ I says, ‘you’re not cut out for this business.’ I went back to the office and crabbed at people all afternoon. Anyway, I saw her again in the Park Blocks while I had the equipment.”

The frail, colorless girl on the screen is far away and small on a park bench. She sits, twisting her shirttail edgily and looking nervously around. I can’t make her face out clearly.

“What do you think?”

I squint through my glasses, trying to see the wispy features. “Isn’t she like an ‘after’ already?”

Miss Lick slaps her knees. “True enough!”

“I mean,” I try to see the outline of the girl’s breasts under her shoddy shirt, “she’s got nothing to sell you.”

“Oly! What do you think I am?” Miss Lick is hurt. “She could use some schooling and a decent job. Those skinny mice have got nothing. All they can do is latch onto some man or die.”

“I didn’t mean …”

“Sure. Forget it. Here’s the bang-tail filly again. I’ll think about that con sharper. Maybe something can be done. The bang-tail has me flummoxed, though.”

I clench my teeth and telescope my head downward between my shoulders. The “bang-tail” is Miranda. I’ve already spent hours watching replays of Miranda lounging on the steps of the art school, eating ice cream as she walks down the street, waving her tail on a velvet-draped stage during one of the Glass House private showings. Here she is again, flirting with her Binewski eyes, stretching her wide Arturan mouth to loll a tongue suggestively around the ice-cream cone, alert to the effect she’s having on the guy in the coveralls waiting beside her for the traffic light to change. It screws me up totally to see Miss Lick’s films of Miranda.

“What’s she about? Hopeless, you think?” Miss Lick is sensitive to my moods. “Say it, Oly, is she useless?”

“No!” I snap and then wave my hand weakly, trying to soften it.

“I haven’t heard a peep out of her in weeks. There’s one month left to her school year. She’s supposed to go straight in to surgery the week after the semester ends. But you’d think she’d call. I have a bet with myself that she’ll hit me up to double my cash offer. The hell of it is, I don’t know if it’s worth it. Art types. But I made the offer and I’ll stick by my word. She’ll do the tail and then we’ll see. Thing is, she’s made the tail erotic rather than a disfigurement. Maybe I’ll stop with that. I’m soft but I’m not nuts. No use wasting money and time and energy on a stupid cow who can’t benefit …”

“She’s not stupid.” It slips out before I could stop it.

“Yeah, she is, but I can never resist …”

“Not stupid!” Miss Lick looks at me with her mouth poised for a word, her clever eyes calm on me, waiting. I feel everything slipping away from me, all the care and planning, and volunteer misery. “I don’t know! Don’t mind me. I feel sorry for her.”

Miss Lick always melts at “feeling sorry.” “Hey, don’t I know? Don’t I just know precisely?”

“I mean,” I dig my fingertips into my knees for control, “she’s already in school. Where’s the percentage?”

“The men like that tail. I could subtract that distraction for her as a start. That’s what I had in mind.”

I take a taxi back to my alien apartment, crawl under the bed with two blankets, and huddle there on the orange carpet.

• • •

“So the nutso wants to sell me a nine-millimeter full-auto with a clip as long as an elephant’s dong and he won’t let up. He’s revving his tonsils and I’m standing there staring at him, thinking what he’d look like with that clip rammed up his …”

Miss Lick is lolling on the fir-needle sponge beneath the trees. She stretches out on her belly, arms stuck out in front of her, hands clasped warmly around what looks like a small gun, just the tip of the barrel showing beyond her puffy knuckles. The thing blaps like a knife in the eye when she squeezes. A dark blotch appears on the sheet of typing paper tacked to the tree fifty feet away. She milks off four shots and then pushes up to her knees and breaks the pistol open, its barrel lifting at the root like a shotgun as she nips the casings out with a sturdy fingernail.

“Hot!” she winces. “Want to look?”

By the time I reach the shredded target paper, she’s reloaded and caught up with me, the ground snapping and hissing under her weight. She flicks the paper scraps away and fingers the yellow splinters that look as though somebody small and very rough had busted out of the old fir. “Nice tight pattern.” She looks at me for praise.

I nod, though it’s too high up for me to see inside the teacup-sized crater. I don’t tell her for fear she’ll lift me up to look.

“So I walked out,” she continues the tale. “If the silly sucker had just sold me what I wanted he could have made his money and saved his breath.”

She sticks the gun into the holster under her left arm. I hear a small snap as she buckles the gun nest closed.

“Ready for work?” she claps and grins and reaches for the heavy machete leaning at the foot of the tree.

She gives me thick gloves and I follow her all afternoon as she chops at the saplings and brush and blackberry vines that clog the back acres of “the homestead” as she calls it.

The big brick house with its turrets and diamond-paned windows sits close to the road, surrounded by civilized green and leased to the regional director of a major computer manufacturer. “He always invites me to his sociable dos on the terrace,” says Miss Lick, “and his wife tries to maroon me in the library with one of the firm’s middle-aged bachelors or get me drunk and show me pictures of starving babies to make me blubber before she tells me how much the firm contributes to famine relief. She’s inventive, I have to admit. And he’s subtle.”

The wooded acreage isn’t included in the lease. “I get my firewood here,” she explains. She just likes it out here. She wears boots and a wide tweed bag of a skirt with her hooded sweatshirt to wallop around in the woods. She calls it “tending the park” or “minding the homestead.”

She cuts brush and I drag it out and throw it on a heap that rises and spreads in the small clearing.

She’s rambling on about guns. “I used to carry my old man’s.45 but the bastard was built for a hip holster. Barrel was too long to be discreet in a lady’s suit. The poor broad that makes my clothes got old suddenly every time I walked through her door. So I got this little bitch of a COP. Stands for Compact Off-duty Police. Fires a.357 Magnum round. Has a rotary hammer like the old Sharps and Brownies. Guy, when I bought it, tried to sell me a little automatic. Told me a lady needed more than four shots. I says to him, Well, if I shoot some sonofabitch I’m not gonna miss, ya know. And he shuts up like a bank on Sunday. I think it’s a cute gun. I like those four big barrels looking down on anybody who’d give me a hard time. Little gun, big bite. Always liked a.45 though. Cut my teeth on them because my dad always had them. He taught me to shoot.”

She talks and swings the heavy blade, tearing the cuttings away with her gloved left hand and pushing them behind her to where I plod.

Thomas R. Lick seems to have been the only man in her life. Her tongue is modeled on his. Without ever having known him or heard him speak, I know she mimics him. She moves like him. She looks like him. Her politics and prejudices and pride are almost certainly his. And I look like Arty.

I am thinking about Arty and throwing an armload of spider-and-scratch onto the heap when she hollers, “Hey! Shit-for-brains!” in her jollying-the-help tone. “Boss is gone! Break time!” She comes red-faced from the dark of the trees. I sit down, suddenly nauseated.

“Hey! Don’t faint.” She is patting me clumsily, smoothing my hump, pressing my head down so my wig slides to my glasses. I start giggling helplessly and bat at her to get free. “I’m all right.”

“You were pink and sweaty and then boom, your face was …”

Laughing, I flop back on the heap so I can look up at her. “I had a brother who used to call me shit-for-brains.”

She grabs at the ancient wheelbarrow that lugs the tools and drags it toward me. “Brother? That’s something. Is he dead? You never mention family. Kind of figured you for an orphan. Born of joy and mirth, like. Something like that.”

She’s reaching under my arms to lift me like a child. I hate having her lift me. She does it too easily. She folds me up tidily in the wheelbarrow and I lean back, trying not to be angry. Her chin stretches like the prow of a Buick as she shakes her head. “Hang on for the ride!” and she runs, trundling me and the barrow, the branches whipping the sky above her and her pink and blinking face grinning like the hilarious moon, all the way to her car.

“If I could think of a way to seal her asshole, I’d do it. And maybe stitch her mouth shut and feed her with a tube going in under her chin.” Miss Lick is half-joking in the elevator. Her hands are shoved flat into the pockets of her suit jacket and she rocks back on the thick heels of her crocodile shoes and rolls a chuckle at the mirror-bronze ceiling of the rising cubicle. “You’ll see what I mean. This little broad hasn’t a hair left, bald as you are. A double mastectomy. And she’s still got that sex thing. If I let her walk from her room to the can, three men would climb out of the light sockets on the way and find holes in her to cram their dicks into.”

The elevator stops and the door sighs open. Miss Lick lowers her voice and mutters down at me, “I’ve been thinking testosterone. You’ll see what I mean.” A silvery grandma-nurse passes us in the hall, nodding her little grey bun and her perky white cap and twinkling, “Good afternoon, Miss Lick!” with only a slight hesitation in her smile for me.

We are visiting Miss Lick’s latest, a nineteen-year-old gymnast with a bent for engineering and a yen to get into the space program. Miss Lick likes the idea of producing an astronaut but is hampered in her efforts by the requirements of the work. “She’s got to be physically functional all the way. It’s a nuisance.”

Jessica H. is in Miss Lick’s favorite nursing home, recuperating from the relatively minor surgery that closed her vagina and removed her clitoris. The girl has pushed her sheets off and is languidly stroking her firm, golden belly with one finger. The bandages look like a diaper. Her chest is blank and nippleless but the scars are almost invisible.

“Jessica!” booms Miss Lick from the doorway. The girl’s smooth, oval head turns casually on the pillow and she looks at us with long, oval eyes, the lids as hairless as sea shells. Then her lush, wide mouth opens slightly in a smile and she is looking at me as Miss Lick bustles with the flowers and rumbles awkwardly, “Want you to meet Miss McGurk. Olympia McGurk. A good pal of mine.”

The girl is smiling gently with cheekbones that could cut your throat and a nose and chin from some old painting that I can’t quite remember. While this face is delicately smiling, the long throat and the flat muscular chest and the round shoulders begin to shake with laughter. With this laugh still going she says to me, “How much did she pay you? A few million, I hope!”

28. NOTES FOR NOW: One for the Road

Miss Lick watches me surface and blow. She grins as I scrabble for the guttered side of the pool. “It’s amazing that you and I are so much alike, isn’t it?” I kick off on my back, paddling away from her, grinning.

She’s right. We each appear totally alone in our lives. I’m the shy, isolated dwarf creeping in and out of my shabby room, living only through my throat and my inherited work. She is the muscular monolith, cut off by brass, stalking around in her old man’s ambition, too imposing in finance and physique for the regular commerce of talk and touch. We choose to seem barren, loveless orphans. We each have a secret family. Miss Lick has her darlings and I have mine. All we’ve really lacked is someone to tell. Now she tells me, and I tell all to these bland, indifferent sheets of paper. The only point where our narrow tracks converge is her bid to turn my darling into one of hers.

Does she lie to me? She keeps things from me. She wouldn’t let me watch the surgery or treatment sections of her home movies for a long time. Does she keep more aside? Hide more of herself? Horrors she doesn’t trust me with? Titillations she is ashamed of? I sail along thinking she is perfectly open. Her eyes are as wide as a child’s when she talks to me. But maybe I’m the fool. Maybe lying so constantly has burnt my view. Believing that she is fooled, I consider her too simple to lie.

We are alone in the pool. The lifeguard has gone for the night, trusting Miss Lick to lock up. Miss Lick sits on the side, her huge legs drooping into the water. She shudders as I stop to breathe at her end.

“Do you ever,” her eyes circle the echoing green of the big room, “do you ever get the feeling somebody’s watching us?”

My head swivels, searching automatically, though I know that the watcher is me. “You’re just tired and spooky. You need your supper.”

She shrugs it off. Forgets. But does she really know? Is she playing me while I play her?

It rains every night now and the air is soft in the morning. Almost warm. A faint haze, not quite green, softens the iron branches of the trees. Miranda’s anatomy drawings are finished. She has mounted them on cardboard and she stores them in a huge plastic binder.

“I want you to look at them.”

“I can’t.”

“All this time you’ve never looked.”

“Just not at the ones of me. I don’t want to see myself.”

“You look in mirrors. I’m better than any goddamned mirror.”

“It’s not your work. I like your other drawings. This just scares me.”

“I take it personally. This is my best work. The best I’ve ever done. I don’t see you as ugly. I see you as unique and wonderful.”

“It’s hard dealing with you seeing me at all.”

“Miss-fucking-steerious! I’m handing the whole mess in tomorrow morning. The competition results will come out in two weeks, the day before I go into the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Or whatever. I don’t know where Miss Lick has that work done.”

“I have to get back to work now.”

“The semester ends Friday.”

“Thank you so much for the tea.”

“I’m calling Miss Lick today to arrange things.”

“See you soon.”

“I may not come back here afterward.”

I trotted down the hall with her leaning out of her doorway to talk to my back.

“I’ll be in a nursing home for a while and then I’ll probably move away.”

I’m not even tempted to anger. Time is a rap on the ear with a brass knuckle. I’ve been letting it ride. Having my little cake — chummy with Miranda over tea, chummy with Miss Lick over home movies — snuggling down in a thick-headed fantasy that what little I was doing would make the difference, as if putting across the lie was success. All I had to do was accept mild discomfort in a strange room, sneak up the fire escape to visit Lily and Miranda, and this puny martyrdom would miraculously obliterate the problem.

The next morning I get to the club an hour before the lifeguard arrives and use the key Miss Lick has given me to get into the pool locker room. I lug two gallon jugs of concentrated ammonia in a shopping bag into the dressing room, stack the plastic bottles in my locker, and cover them with the bag.

The door from the locker room into the footbath is solid wood hung in a steel frame. The auger is an ancient handcrank from the landlord’s tool kit in Lily’s basement. On my knees on the cold tiles I open the door slightly to slide a single sheet of the Oregonian underneath. The door swings shut, leaving half the paper on each side to catch the wood dust. I drill the hole under the lowest hinge and within a quarter inch of the frame. The bigger bit enlarges the hole to a one-inch notch in the door’s edge. I wrap the dust in the paper, ready to carry away with the auger.

The clear plastic tubing slides easily through the hole. On the footbath side of the door a few inches of tubing droop toward the chlorine reek of the blue surface. I bend to suck air through it. The tube is clear, not pinched by the door closing. With the tube gone the hole is in the dark below the hinge, hardly visible unless you are on your hands and knees.

I work the narrow end of the funnel into the end of the tube, coil the arrangement tidily, and tuck it under the bag in my locker. As I walk out through the big glass doors in the front lobby I see the glossy young lifeguard putting her bicycle into a stanchion.

Miss Olympia Binewski McGurk, the albino dwarf, takes two steps to the average one because her mystic breastbone has spent thirty-eight years trying to increase its distance from her agnostic spine. Those two steps carry our Miss Oly, the hunchback, into the tidal stench of corned beef and cabbage filling the dim cove of McLarnin’s at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning when Jimmy McL. himself is steaming the wherewithal for the famous eleven-to-four buffet. The bar is clean. The glasses wait, glittering in their racks.

Miss Oly hoists her twisted frame onto the least spinnable bar stool and nods encouragingly at Jimmy. The mirror is obscured by bottlenecks, leaving shards in which Miss Oly catches a flicker of her blue-tinted spectacles and goat-grey wig bobbing over the waxy wood. Her big, soft voice is deeper than the tenor McLarnin’s.

“A shot of Jameson’s please, Jimmy,” she says, and McL. sways toward her, wrapped in cabbage mist from the kettles and flapping a bar towel in front of his red knob nose to clear the view.

“Celebrating, are we?” gurgles Jimmy in sympathy with the tall, tipping bottle.

“You too?” asks Miss Oly, squinting her rose-pink eyes behind the sapphire lenses.

“Thank you,” McL. deliberately misunderstands. “I’ll stick with Murphy’s though. I was weaned on it.”

“Is that so?” Miss Oly would like to know.

Jimmy gives a slow, thoughtful swipe at the bar with his towel and raises his crisp white eyebrows. “True enough. I was colicky as a babe and my mother’d send me off to sleep with a rag-tit tied up in thread and soaked in Murphy to suck on. She swore by it for a whole night’s rest.”

“I was thirty-eight years old,” muses Miss Oly, “before I ever felt the burn of whiskey on my lip. But I knew it right away for what it was.”

“The virgin’s arms,” nods Jimmy. “God’s breath.”

“I am amazed at all the years I spent without whiskey,” says Oly.

“Just as well. It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would hesitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn’t look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young.”

“Don’t tell me you look?”

The diplomat McLarnin senses a delicacy about mirrors in Miss Oly, and deftly switches his bulk to block her exposure to the jolt of her own image reflected in shreds behind the bar bottles.

“You’ve a voice like mulled toddy, Miss O,” grins Jimmy. “I cried like a busted banker at your story on the radio this morning.”

“Hush,” grunts Oly, ducking a peek into the empty darkness behind her. “The Story Lady of Station KBNK isn’t supposed to be boozing at ten A.M. Today’s show was an old tape. I called in sick. Besides, McLarnin, I have the voice of a baritone kazoo and your real name is Nelson. You were born in Nebraska. Admit it.”

“You’re bitter this morning, Miss O. And it leads you to grievous error. I was born up the street at Good Sam, fifty-six years ago, and I’ve lived in the sound of its sirens ever since. Not unlike yourself, I imagine.”

“I was born in a trailer. No idea where it was parked at the time. But I was conceived here.”

At 5:30 I am sitting on the windowsill of a deserted conference room on the fourth floor of the TAC Club, watching the circle drive inside the entrance gates. Miss Lick’s sedan blows in on time and the lackey in the club uniform opens her door for her. He takes her keys and tools the car out to her private parking space as she heads for the entrance. I get down off the sill and settle into an armchair to watch the wall clock.

I can feel her in the building. With my eyes closed I can see her crossing the lobby, nodding to the woman at the reception desk, clumping down the carpeted corridor to the elevator. I know exactly how she will stare at the elevator door, waiting for it to open, with her big hands folded in front of her to prevent fidgeting.

Usually I am in the locker room when she walks in. Today her face — ready to smile as she pushes through the door — will lift in puzzlement. She will skin down and get into her tank suit wondering about me. I can almost hear her splashing into the footbath and feel the air move as the locker door hisses closed behind her. I can smell her heat mingling with the metallic green fumes of the chlorine in the unventilated cubicle.

There is no bulb in the ceiling fixture of the footbath. The only light is the grey murk that comes through the small diamond-shaped window in the door to the pool. She will be standing there, ankle-deep in chlorine water, peering through the thick, wire-reinforced glass. She will be searching the pool for me.

She stands, rotating her big shoulders, her elbows flapping like wings. She bends, hiking a foot out of the blue water, running her fingers between her toes, trading feet for the same ritual.

Planting both feet in the soup again she takes the plastic quart jar of chlorine from its niche in the tiled wall, opens it, and, ignoring the measuring scoop, sprinkles a goodly pinch of the sea-green crystals over the surface of the water.

The plan is simple. She is always the last one out of the pool. The lifeguard locks up and leaves as Miss Lick begins her second mile of laps. The respected Miss Lick has her own keys and can come in to swim at 3 A.M. if she wants to. She can certainly swim alone with her dwarf pal and lock up behind herself.

I, pale thing, always climb out before Miss Lick, and have showered and dressed before her pork palms slap the pool deck to hoist her out. Sitting on the bench in the locker room, I can always hear her sighing and swishing for long peaceful minutes in the footbath before she comes in to scour herself under the shower. Miss Lick never gets enough of that chlorine footbath.

There is plenty of time to empty the full chlorine jar into the water of the footbath. It’s simple to close the footbath door to the locker room and turn its deadbolt, and then slip out to the corridor and down to the hall door opening onto the pool.

I stand, silent, behind the tall stack of paddleboards until Miss Lick emerges from the pool, cascading water, and stomps over to the footbath door. As the door wheezes closed behind her I am there to twist the deadbolt.

The monster is caught in the closet with her eyes stinging in the rising chlorine. She is pounding the sides of her fists on the door to the locker room as I scuttle for the hall, run the few silent yards to the other entrance, and gasp my way in with my heart screaming hide-and-seek in my ears.

Her pounding fills the room. I race to my locker, scatter it empty, an ammonia jug in each hand, dragging toward that little hole in the door.

“Oly!” she bellows beyond the wood slab. The name freezes my lungs. The skin all over my body rises in pimples of fear.

“Oly! Are you all right?”

Now she is pounding on the poolside door. The drum wave moves away from me as I shove the tip of the hose into the hole. The stink of chlorine is strong from the small hole and my eyes water from bending close to it.

“Ahoy!” she roars at the far door. The pounding wood is like the beat of fists on my spine. With the jug under one arm, I carefully pour ammonia down the mouth of the funnel, watch it sear downward through the clear plastic tubing and rush through the door, toward its mingling with the chlorine and a new toxic identity.

“Ahoy! Ahoy!!” Mary Lick would never yell “Help!”

A bubble of hysteria giggles up through me, rocking the jug tucked under my arm. A smack of ammonia fume hits my nose and the roof of my open mouth, burning. I turn my head, gasping. Almost spilling.

I hear splashes beyond the wood, and the pounding rips out again above my head. “Oly! Oly! Oly!” she screams. Her voice is harsh and ragged now. The ammonia jug is nearly empty. It’s taking too long. The pounding stops. In the silence I can hear the faint trickle of the last ammonia running out of the tube and into the chlorine water on the other side. A weight hits the door, inches away from me, and slides, squeaking downward. Silence. Then the whisper, “What the fuck?” The words rush out of the funnel into my face with a strange sick breath that sets me coughing. She’s found the tube. The funnel jerks from my hands, whips wildly through the air, smacks the wall, hops and twists on the floor. The funnel’s open mouth shrieks, “What the fuck?” in a whisper. The end of the tubing spurts out of the hole beneath the hinge. The tube and the funnel fall dead to the floor. The whisper comes from the hole, “Daddy?” as I scramble away from the hole on my knees, coughing as the whisper comes again. I choke and hold my breath to hear as the hole says, “Please … Please.”

I know her locker combination. Scuttling for the lock I can hear the hiss of the whisper but I can’t make out the words that press themselves through the hole. The dial sticks and clogs and I can hardly see through my tears. I miss and try again, with a high whine coming out of my own throat. The lock falls to the floor.

The holster is under her suit jacket, on the hook. I yank a bench close and climb to reach the gun. Jump back to the door on tiptoes with the fat gun heavy in one hand. I reach for the knob to twist open the deadbolt and dodge as the door gushes open against me. The gas comes out and I choke and fall to my knees with fire in my eyes and a rake in my nose and throat.

She is huge, lying across the doorway. Her breath sounds high and it bubbles. Her white arms have tumbled over her red bloated face. She moans, a small sound from the wet heap of her chest. I drop the gun and pull her long arm by its wrist, crying, “Mary! Help me. Mary, move. Come on, Mary. Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry.” And I am sorry and I don’t care if she wakes and kills me if only she will wake up and move. I never meant this. I never wanted to hurt her. I only needed for her to die. Not this pain. Not this fear.

“Mary!” I yell, yanking on the heavy arm. “I didn’t mean it like this.”

Miss Lick’s eyes pop open, staring upside-down and furious. Her wrist flicks loose from my hands, swatting me, groping for me as I fall clattering against the forgotten gun on the floor. Her hand snaps onto my throat, hot and hard. A white light comes on behind my eyes as she lifts me above her with my right hand fluttering at her fingers on my throat and my left hand heavy with the gun. I am rising, until my ears explode and I begin a long, slow fall at the end of her arm, toward the tile floor, watching the sudden black hole where her right eye was, her big legs flopping in the footbath and the sputtering roll at the crotch of her tank suit as a dark liquid runs onto the tile. Her hand is still huge on my throat, but she’s gone. I’m alone.

News article from the May 18 Portland Oregonian:

Two women whose bodies were found huddled in the footbath of the Thomas R. Lick indoor swimming pavilion of the Timber Athletic Club following a hazardous fume alarm this morning were apparently victims of murder and suicide. Portland Police Detective M. L. Zusman, directing the on-site investigation, told reporters that both women had apparently died of gunshot wounds and that a gun had been found at the scene. The exact cause of the deaths will not be confirmed until the completion of post-mortem examinations by the Multnomah County Medical Examiner.

Investigation at the scene was delayed by the presence of irritating fumes from an unidentified gas present in the pool and locker-room area. The gas is currently undergoing laboratory analysis for identification. Fumes were first noticed by a janitor who entered the pool area for regularly scheduled cleaning at 8

A.M

Firefighters who responded to the alarm discovered the two bodies.

“At first we didn’t know who did what to who,” said Detective Zusman. “But a note was found on the scene. Or rather a notebook which seems to give an account of the incident up to a certain point.” Contents of the note have not been revealed. The names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of their families. It is not known whether the victims were members of the prestigious private athletic and social club. TAC spokesmen refused to discuss the incident until more information is available. The Lick Pavilion will be closed until the police investigation is completed.

Earlier reports that one of the bodies was that of a handicapped child have since been contradicted. Police confirm that both victims were adults.

Delivered by regular mail, May 19:

My Dear Miranda,

Since you were a year old you’ve been told you were an orphan. This was not true. Your father died when you were very young but I, your mother, have been watching over you until now. I am your mother, I, the dwarf in Room #21.

Your name is not Miranda Barker but Miranda Binewski. Barker was the ironic label chosen by the Reverend Mother Aurora

when you were still in diapers and first entered the convent school.

You will have a lot of questions. Enclosed are two keys. The long key is to my room, #21. On the floor in the closet is a big leather trunk. The short key will open the trunk. The top tray inside is full of your school records, photographs, sixteen years’ worth of letters from Reverend Mother Aurora and Sister Lucy. They’re addressed to me and they report on you. That should be enough to convince you that I’m not imagining our relationship out of drugs or lunacy.

The big manila envelope in the top tray of the trunk contains the deed and tax records for the house and all my financial papers. The deed is in your name. You can withdraw from, or write checks on, the trust account. You will also find the papers for the vault where all the other Binewskis currently rest. Please note that cremation is a family tradition. Beneath the tray is all the record there is of my history and yours.

Please take care of Crystal Lil. Her medical records and prescriptions are in the white folder in the big envelope. The trash goes out on Thursday nights and her bills need to be paid on the fifth of each month. She is your grandmother.

After twenty careful years of not revealing myself to you, I find it hard to reverse the process. For all you lacked in a parent, I hope you can eventually forgive me. I can’t be sure what the trunk will mean to you, or the news that you aren’t alone, that you are one of us. Yet I hope that someday you’ll come to collect us all from the shelves of the vault. Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that’s left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.

With love,

Olympia Binewski

(Known as McGurk)