Lullaby

Chapter 20

The woman opens her front door, and here are Helen and I on her front porch, me carrying Helen's cosmetic case, standing a half-step behind her as Helen points the long pink nail of her index finger and says, «If you can give me fifteen minutes, I can give you a whole new you.»

Helen's suit is red, but not a strawberry red. It's more the red of a strawberry mousse, topped with whipped crème fraîche and served in a stemmed crystal compote. Inside her pink cloud of hair, her earrings sparkle pink and red in the sunlight.

The woman's drying her hands in a kitchen towel. She's wearing men's brown moccasins with no socks. A bib apron patterned with little yellow chickens covers her whole front, and some kind of machine-washable dress underneath. With the back of one hand, she pushes some hair off her forehead. The yellow chickens are all holding kitchen tools, ladles and spoons, in their beaks. Looking at us through the rusted screen door, the woman says, «Yes?»

Helen looks back at me standing behind her. She looks back over her shoulder at Mona and Oyster ducked down, hiding in the car parked at the curb. Oyster whispering into his phone, «Is the itching constant or intermittent?»

Helen Hoover Boyle brings the fingertips of one hand together at her chest, the mess of pink gems and pearls hiding her silk blouse underneath. She says, «Mrs. Pelson? We're here from Miracle Makeover.»

As she talks, Helen throws her closed hand open toward the woman, as if she's scattering the words.

Helen says, «My name is Mrs. Brenda Williams.» With her pink fingertips, she scatters the words back over her shoulder, saying, «And this is my husband, Robert Williams.» She says, «And we have a very special gift for you today.»

The woman inside the screen door looks down at the cosmetic case in my hand.

And Helen says, «May we come in?»

It was supposed to be easier than this.

This whole traveling around, just dropping into libraries, taking a book off the shelf, sitting on a toilet in the library bathroom and cutting out the page. Then, flush. It was supposed to be that quick.

The first couple libraries, no problem. The next, the book isn't on the shelf. In library whispers, Mona and I go to the checkout desk and ask. Helen's waiting in the car with Oyster.

The librarian's a guy with his long straight hair pulled back in a ponytail. He's got earrings in both ears, pirate loop earrings, and he's wearing a plaid sweater vest and says the book is—he scrolls up and down his computer screen—the book is checked out.

«It's really important,» Mona says. «I had it before that, and I left something between the pages.»

Sorry, the guy says.

«Can you tell us who has it?» Mona says.

And the guy says, sorry. No can do.

And I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 …

Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.

I'm counting 4, counting 5 …

A beat later, Helen Hoover Boyle's standing at the checkout desk. She smiles until the librarian looks up from his computer, and she spreads her hands, her rings bright and crowded on each finger.

She smiles and says, «Young man? My daughter left an old family photograph between the pages of a certain book.» She wiggles her fingers and says, «You can follow the rules, or you can do a good deed and take your pick.»

The librarian watches her fingers, the prism colors and stars of broken light dancing across his face. He licks his lips. Then he shakes his head no and says it's just not worth it. The person with the book will complain and he'll get fired.

«We promise,» Helen says, «we won't lose you your job.»

In the car, I waiting with Mona, counting 27, counting 28, counting 29 … , trying the only way I know not to kill everybody in the library and look up the address on the computer myself.

Helen comes out to the car with a sheet of paper in her hand. She leans in the open driver's-side window and says, «Good news and bad news.»

Mona and Oyster are lying across the backseat, and they sit up. I'm on the shotgun side of the front seat, counting.

And Mona says, «They have three copies, but they're all checked out.»

And Helen gets in behind the steering wheel and says, «I know a million ways to cold-call.»

And Oyster shakes the hair off his eyes and says, «Good job, Mom.»

The first house went easy enough. And the second.

In the car between house calls, Helen picks through the gold tubes and shiny boxes, her lipstick and makeup, her cosmetic case open in her lap. She twists a pink lipstick up and squints at it, saying, «I'm never using any of this again. If I'm not mistaken, that last woman had ringworm.»

Mona leans forward from the backseat, looking over Helen's shoulder, and says, «You're really good at this.»

Screwing open little round boxes of eye shadow, looking and sniffing at their tan or pink or peach insides, Helen says, «I've had a lot of practice.»

She looks at herself in the rearview mirror and pulls around a few strands of pink hair. She looks at her watch, pinching the face between a thumb and index finger, and she says, «I shouldn't tell you this, but this was my first real job.»

By now we're parked outside a rusted trailer house sitting in a square of dead grass scattered with children's plastic toys. Helen snaps her case shut. She looks at me sitting beside her and says, «You ready to try it again?»

Inside the trailer, talking to the woman in the apron covered with little chickens, Helen's saying, «There's absolutely no cost or obligation on your part,» and she backs the woman into the sofa.

Sitting across from the woman, the woman sitting so close their knees almost touch, Helen reaches toward her with a soft brush and says, «Suck in your cheeks, dear.»

With one hand, she grabs a handful of the woman's hair and pulls it straight up into the air. The woman's hair is blond with an inch of brown at the roots. With her other hand, Helen runs a comb down the hair in fast strokes, holding the longer strands up, and crushing the shorter brown ones down against the scalp. She grabs another handful and rats, teases, back-combs until all but the longest hairs are crushed and tangled against the scalp. With the comb, she smooths the long blond strands over the ratted short hairs until the woman's head is a huge fluffed bubble of blond hair.

And I say, so that's how you do that.

It's identical to Helen's hairdo only blond.

On the coffee table in front of the sofa is a big arrangement of roses and lilies, but wilted and brown, the flowers standing in a green-glass vase from a florist, with only a little black water in the bottom. On the dinette table in the kitchen are more big flower arrangements, just dead stalks in thick, stinking water. Lined up on the floor, against the back wall of the living room are more vases, each holding a block of green foam pincushioned with curled, wasted roses or black, spindly carnations growing gray mold. Stuck in with each bouquet is a little card saying: In Deepest Sympathy.

And Helen says, «Now put your hands over your face,» and she starts shaking a can of hair spray. She fogs the woman with hair spray.

The woman cowers blind, bent forward a little, with both hands pressed over her face.

And Helen jerks her head toward the rooms at the other end of the trailer.

And I go.

Pumping a mascara brush in its tube, she says, «You don't mind if my husband uses your bathroom, do you?» Helen says, «Now, look up at the ceiling, dear.»

In the bathroom, there are dirty clothes separated into different-colored piles on the floor. Whites. Darks. Somebody's jeans and shirts stained with oil. There's towels and sheets and bras. There's a red-checked tablecloth. I flush the toilet for the sound effect.

There's no diapers or children's clothes.

In the living room, the chicken woman is still looking at the ceiling, only now she's shaking with long, jerking breaths. Her chest, under the apron, shaking. Helen is touching the corner of a folded tissue to the watery makeup. The tissue is soaked and black with mascara, and Helen's saying, «It will be better someday, Rhonda. You can't see that, but it will.» Folding another tissue and daubing, she says, «What you have to do is make yourself hard. Think of yourself as something hard and sharp.»

She says, «You're still a young woman, Rhonda. You need to go back to school and turn this hurt into money.»

The chicken woman, Rhonda, is still crying with her head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.

Behind the bathroom, there's two bedrooms. One has a water bed. In the other bedroom is a crib and a hanging mobile of plastic daisies. There's a chest of drawers painted white. The crib is empty. The little plastic mattress is tied in a roll at one end. Near the crib is a stack of books on a stool. Poems and Rhymes is on top.

When I put the book on the dresser, it falls open to page 27.

I run the point of a baby pin down the inside edge of the page, tight in next to the binding, and the page pulls out. With the page folded in my pocket, I put the book back on the stack.

In the living room, the cosmetics are dumped in a heap on the floor.

Helen's pulled a false bottom out of the inside of her cosmetic case. Inside are layered necklaces and bracelets, heavy brooches and pairs of earrings clipped together, all of them crusted and dazzling with shattered red and green, yellow and blue lights. Jewels. Draped between Helen's hands is a long necklace of yellow and red stones larger than her polished, pink fingernails.

«In brilliant-cut diamonds,» she says, «look for no light leakage through the facets below the girdle of the stone.» She lays the necklace in the woman's hands, saying, «In rubies—aluminum oxide—foreign bits inside, called rutile inclusions, can give the stone a soft pinkish look unless the jeweler bakes the stone under high heat.»

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

The two women sit so close, their knees dovetail together. Their heads almost touch. The chicken woman isn't crying.

The chicken woman is wearing a jeweler's loupe in one eye.

The dead flowers are shoved aside, and scattered on the coffee table are clusters of sparkling pink and smooth gold, cool white pearls and carved blue lapis lazuli. Other clusters glow orange and yellow. Other piles shine silver and white.

And Helen cups a blazing green egg in her hand, so bright both women look green in the reflected light, and she says, «Do you see the kind of uniform veil-like inclusions in a synthetic emerald?»

Her eye clenched around the loupe, the woman nods.

And Helen says, «Remember this. I don't want you to get burned the way I was.» She reaches into the cosmetic case and lifts out a bright handful of yellow, saying, «This yellow sapphire brooch was owned by the movie star Natasha Wren.» With both hands, she takes out a sparkling pink heart, trailing a long chain of smaller diamonds, saying, «This seven-hundred-carat beryl pendant was once owned by Queen Marie of Romania.»

In this heap of jewels, Helen Hoover Boyle would say, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned them. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this jewelry was supposed to represent, it's all vanished.

With the same hairdo, the same makeup, leaning together so close, they could be sisters. They could be mother and daughter. Before and after. Past and future.

There's more, but that's when I go out to the car.

Sitting in the backseat, Mona says, «You find it?»

And I say yeah. Not that it does this woman any good.

The only thing we've given her is big hair and probably ringworm.

Oyster says, «Show us the song. Let's see what this trip is all about.»

And I tell him, no fucking way. I tuck the folded page in my mouth and chew and chew. My foot aches, and I take off my shoe. I chew and chew. Mona falls asleep. I chew and chew. Oyster looks out the window at some weeds in a ditch.

I swallow the page, and I fall asleep.

Later, sitting in the car, driving to the next town, the next library, maybe the next makeover, I wake up and Helen has been driving for almost three hundred miles.

It's almost dark, and just looking out the windshield, she says, «I'm keeping track of expenses.»

Mona sits up, scratching her scalp through her hair. She presses the finger next to her pinkie finger, she presses the pad of that finger into the inside corner of her eye and pulls it away, fast, with an eye goober stuck on it. She wipes the goober on her jeans and says, «Where are we going to eat?»

I tell Mona to buckle her seat belt.

Helen turns on the headlights. She opens one hand, wide, against the steering wheel and looks at the back of it, her rings, and says, «After we find the Book of Shadows, when we're the all-powerful leaders of the entire world, after we're immortal and we own everything on the planet and everyone loves us,» she says, «you'll still owe me for two hundred dollars' worth of cosmetics.»

She looks odd. Her hair looks wrong. It's her earrings, the heavy clumps of pink and red, pink sapphires and rubies. They're gone.