Plumage (11 page)

She blinked up at him without answering. Cute little face. Cute little pointed chin.

Racquel made himself sit down across from her again. “Look,” he said quietly, “here's what we're gonna do to get you feeling better about yourself and everything in general. Skin first. Some apricot scrub maybe, some shower gel, some body splash. Then the hair. Jesus, Sassy, white people can have any color hair they want and get away with it; why should you settle for gray? I got a hairdresser just waiting to get her hands on your hair. Then get your ears pierced—”

Sassy's head jerked up with the most spirit she'd shown all day, and her hands flew to her earlobes. “I am not!”

“Yes you are, so you can wear all kinds of earrings. You just wait, couple months you'll be going back for more holes. Then your nails, a manicure—”

“Who's supposed to be paying for all this?”

She meant that as an objection, and Racquel wasn't going to let it fly. “I can do your nails myself. Hell, Sass, I'll do them right now.” He shoved books to one side. “Where's a dish towel?” He grabbed one off a hook and laid it out. “Gimme your hands.”

“Racquel—”

“Give it a chance, Sassy.” He took one of her hands and started massaging her fingers.

Sassy's eyes widened. But the massage stopped her protests, as he knew it would. He knew it felt too good to pass up.

“Kick-ass little hands,” he told her, rubbing, ignoring her chapped skin for the time being. “Dainty. Sweet. I bet you got sweet little feet too. Stretch them out here.” She did, and he looked down past the edge of the table to study them, feeling genuine envy rising in his chest. “God, Sassy, your feet are
perfect
. Not a bunion on them, or a corn, or anything.” What a bite. She must have worn sensible shoes all her miserable life.

“Oh, that's good,” said Sassy in dulcet tones. “I know what I'll do. I'll just walk on my hands and wave my feet in the air.”

“I'm serious, woman.” Goofy little twit, she had no clue how sexy feet could be, but she was going to learn. Racquel went to the sink and ran water till he got just the right hot temperature, filled the dishpan and squirted some Dove in it, brought it over and set it on the floor by Sassy. “Soak.”

“Huh?”

“Stick your feet in there.”

While they were soaking, he found an emery board in his capacious handbag and shaped Sassy's fingernails, stroking the tips, never sawing at them. His own nails were French-tipped gels this week, but he figured Sassy wasn't ready for that, or for fiberglass or silks or all the rest of it. He stroked her natural nails into gently rounded ovals. These days most nails had shovel tips, but Racquel preferred the classic oval. Sassy's nails came out almost the shape of her face. Racquel massaged her hands again, with lotion this time, put extra lotion on her cuticles to soften them, pushed them back with a Q-Tip, then cleaned the lotion off her nails with polish remover and brought out undercoat and several colors of polish from his purse. Even though he had his nails professionally done, he still bought polish and carried it around for touch-ups and because he liked the colors. He carried extra jewelry in his purse too. Feathered earbobs, mostly. Just because.

“Iced Teal,” he read the nail polish color names off to her, “Malachite, White Jazz, Mango, Road Flare, Lagoon, Tropical Butterfly.”

“What ever happened to pink?” Sassy asked.

They settled on Lagoon, which was a sort of sky-blue-water color with a silvery sheen. As Racquel was stroking on the second coat, Sassy asked, “Racquel. You got anybody?”

“Huh?”

She spelled it out. “Do-you-have-a-sweetheart?”

“No.”

“A significant other?”

“No.”

“A relationship, a partner, a lover, a husband, a wife?”

“What are you, a thesaurus? No. None of the above.”

Silence while he completed the job. Then she asked, “Are you looking?”

“Sure.”

More silence. He moved his chair, laid the dish towel in his lap and said, “Put your feet up here.”

She did so. She asked, “Which gender?”

He looked her straight in the eye and told her the truth. “Any gender at all.”

SIX

Sassy found herself being surprised by a tiny prickle of pleasure every time she caught sight of her own wetly gleaming fingertips and toes. The fact that she was pleased by something so frivolous as a manicure and pedicure surprised her doubly. She had tried to make Racquel take the feathered baseball hat away, but he had insisted on leaving it, and the sight of it nesting on her kitchen table pleased her in some secret way she could not understand. She would never wear the thing, so what was the sense of keeping it? Such nonsense. Neither a useless hat nor an equally useless set of painted digits solved any of her problems, but—a sleekly plumaged canary-and-periwinkle baseball hat sectioned by rows of violet sequins—it was nice to look at, that was all. Who could resist just looking at it?

Greeting her budgie in the mirror the second morning after Racquel's visit, Sassy said “Hi, stupid,” smiled, and went to have her coffee. She gazed at her own hands as they curled around the mug; with enameled nails, her hands felt different, more substantial and significant. It wasn't like she had never worn nail polish before, but—jeez, she couldn't remember when. It must have been a long, long time ago.

She looked across the table and felt herself smiling at the hat too. She reached across the table and put it on, liking the way it hugged her head. Bet it looked cute on her too. She had almost forgotten how it felt to like hats. She wished she could look in a mirror and see—

No. Some hard, dark feeling in her gut gave her to know that hats were not for her. She took off the feathered cap and set it on the table.

The dark internal pressure formed into a memory: she and Frederick walking through Valu-Mart and she stops at the hats and reaches to try one on. Not to buy, she knows they can't afford to buy any, but Frederick says “NO” as if it's somehow disgusting that she wants to look. She grabs a hat anyway and smiles at him from under the brim, but he glowers as if the sight of her offends him.

It was obvious that she did not look good in hats. Or that hats were not right for her. Or that she was not a person who should wear hats.

Obvious. Yes.

She contemplated this for a moment, finishing her coffee, then went and looked in her closet and her dresser. Somehow something pretty should have been there, but she found nothing except sweatpants and elastic-waisted jeans.

She put on an ocean-blue sweat suit to match her water-colored nails, searched her supply of anorexic head scarves for one that had some faded blue flowers in it, and got her coat on. She knew she should be heading out to look for a job but she wasn't. Instead, she went to see Racquel.

When she got to the Sylvan Tower, no one looked at her. Good. That was the kind of person she was. Not the sort to attract attention.

Racquel was wearing a dress the same color and glare as the fog lights on some rich guy's BMW, and his grin when he saw her lit him up almost as bright. As she walked into PLUMAGE he called, “Hey, it's Sassy!
Sweet
!”

A lot went without saying. Sassy knew he knew that she was there partly to thank him for giving a damn about her. And partly because she hadn't been very “sweet” the last time she saw him.

But he also seemed to take it that she was there to continue an already-begun course of self-improvement. He showed her some new belts, gold chain with gilded feathers dangling from the links. He showed her the feather-tufted earrings she could look forward to wearing when she got her ears pierced. He showed her a silver-straw picture hat with a single black ostrich feather curled around the brim, rhinestones studding its vane. “Wouldn't you like to wear that?” he asked.

“No. Not really.”

“What is it with you and hats, Sassy? I
know
you like them.”

Sassy said, “I look ugly in hats.”

“You do not! Sez who?”

Frederick. But Sassy said only, “I just do.”

“Frederick told you that, right? What a turdball.”

“No, he didn't! He just—I don't know.”

Sassy studied her blue Lagoon fingernails, which Frederick probably would not have liked either. Meanwhile, she felt Racquel studying her.

Finally Sassy said, “He was just sort of negative in general about hats and stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“Like—I don't know. Boots, leggings, fancy belts, that sort of thing. Plumage.”

“What a snarf,” Racquel said.

Sassy shook her head. “He was just being a husband. Stuff like that costs money. He was good in lots of ways, he fixed stuff around the house, brought freebies home from the grocery, and there was never that much money, and he was the one who had to pay the bills—”

“He's still a jellosnarf. Didn't he want you to have
anything
nice?”

“I—I had my jewelry—”

“And nothing to wear it with.”

“It was me,” Sassy said. “Trying to look—” Feminine, attractive, sexy, all turned out to be words she could not quite say. “Trying to look that way, I couldn't carry it off. He just kind of let me know I couldn't do that.”

In a very low tone Racquel said something Sassy could not quite catch. Something that rhymed with duck. Then he asked, “You weren't supposed to wear anything you liked?”

“I think it was more—I wasn't supposed to wear anything that made me think I was attractive.”

“Good God.”

“I wasn't supposed to …” Sassy found that she could not quite conceptualize the way Frederick didn't want her to feel sexy. When she had started to look like her mother, that was it. He had made it quite plain that he detested her mother. “I don't know what he wanted,” Sassy said to her hands. “Mostly he obviously didn't want
me
.”

Racquel said softly but quite plainly, “Well, fuck him with a salty dick.”

This sentiment startled Sassy so badly that her head jerked up and she started to giggle.

“I mean it.” Racquel faced her steadily. “Fuck him. He made you feel like dog doo, Sassy.”

Racquel's wholehearted sympathy was making Sassy's eyes go hot and moist. She swallowed hard. “I—I thought it was just part of being a wife.”

“Oh. Uh-huh. Like a wife isn't a person?”

“Well, I felt like, as long as he was faithful …” Sassy turned away to look blindly at feathered chains, because even after a year she found herself still unable to comprehend Frederick's infidelity. After she had devoted her life to him—which, in hindsight, seemed like a pretty stupid sort of devotion, but she had been doing what she thought she was supposed to. He was supposed to be her prince. Even after she had slowly come to know that he was not a prince but a jackass, still, he was her very own jackass, and she was still willing to give everything she had to the covenant—but it didn't seem to matter to him. He went and tossed it off like—like spitting out a hawker. How could he do that?

Sassy still just couldn't understand.

Without looking at Racquel she said, “I think the man on horseback might have been King Arthur.” A hero and a faithful husband. “Who the lovers were I don't know.” But she expected they were faithful too, because she knew what she had lost.

If the forest was Paradise lost, then the shadowland beneath the trees was Perdition. The place where lost dreams dwelt.

Racquel said gently enough, “Sassy, stop it.”

“No. I can't. Racquel …” Sassy made herself turn to face the tall—woman, half the time she still couldn't help thinking of Racquel as a woman. A woman and her best friend. Almost her only friend. Looking up to meet his eyes, she asked him, “Are you going to get the mirror fixed?”

He pressed his lips together in a worried magenta line and shook his head.

“Get a new mirror put in the same frame, I mean?”

“Sassy, do you have any idea how much it costs to get an oval mirror cut?”

She stood looking at him.

“Anyway, I can't. The frame's broken. Sassy—let it go.”

But she couldn't. Somehow she had lost her self, and it had gone in there to join the other lost things.

“I've been thinking, it was probably some kind of chemical got in the ventilation system. Trippin' us. Doesn't it feel like that to you, too? A brain party? A freaky dream?”

She couldn't be angry at him, because he was right, it did. If it had not been for the goofy parakeet looking back at her from the mirror she wouldn't be here, begging him, because what had happened before did feel like a dream, fading day by day, some of the jewel-bright details dulled, turned to dust, lost, and—all the more reason she had to get back there soon, yesterday was not soon enough, or she would forget, it would all be lost to her.

Lost.

She could not face more loss. She turned away.

“Sassy, honey,” Racquel said, “you've got to get over it.”

There was so much warm concern in his voice that she couldn't speak or look at him; she could only flee.

“Sassy,” he called after her as she darted out of the shop, “let it go. Move on.”

Racquel checked his look in the plate-glass window of Food World. Hair, check. Lipstick, check. Boobs firmly in place, check. Face intact. Dress straight. Chartreuse looked marvelous against his skin. Scanning himself in the glass gave him confidence, and somebody had to do something, obviously, although Racquel had no idea what he expected to accomplish by going here; he just wanted a look at Sassy's toad of an ex, that was all. Shifting his bustard-trimmed shawl to a more becoming angle around his shoulders and twitching his fitted skirt down around his hips, he sashayed in.

It didn't take long to locate Frederick. A man with yam-colored hair was stationed at one of the cash registers. Racquel strolled around and took a look at the tabloids—
Boy in Coma Grows Wings, Jacko Nose Heartache, Diana Living in Barbados with Elvis
—also taking a couple of glances at the cashier. Freckled all over. Name tag said
FRED
. It had to be Mr. Hummel.