Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen (12 page)

“Incest set to music,” she observes.

It's smooth driving now, and the music in this act is beautiful beyond belief. It's probably a good thing that Act Two, with Brunnhilde and the walküres riding through the sky, is loud, rousing music, or we'd both be falling asleep.

“Are we getting close to Vancouver?” she asks as the tape goes silent, switching to the other side.

“That was Abbotsford we just passed. Less than an hour now.”

How many years is it since I first drove this road? That summer — 1959? 1960? — when I bought my first Buick and I drove Mama to the coast for a holiday. The year before she died. That was before they built the Coquihalla, and we'd driven the Fraser Canyon road to get to this stretch.

In a way, my fingers itch to feel the arc of the steering wheel beneath them. The power of metal churned to life, the exhilaration of hurtling over asphalt. Mama loved it, too. I think both of us made some little walküre cries as we careened along cliffs, and Hell's Gate boiled below us.

The Wrinkle Queen's gone off her rocker, doing little whoopee singalongs to the
walküres'
shrieks as they gallop — get this — through the sky. The last time she saw the Ring, she tells me, they were on plastic horses suspended by superstrength fishing line, breezing across the Seattle stage.

How did I manage to end up driving along the road from hell with a madwoman?

My own private Miss Havisham.

She's lost in thought now as the skyline of Vancouver appears.

“Do we have to go through Vancouver? Couldn't we go around it somehow?”

“I always go through Vancouver on my way to Seattle,” she snaps. “It's how I always go.”

So there are other roads, I think. But it's probably too late now.

“Have you got your map?” I ask her.

“You just need to follow the highway signs,” she says. But she does pull a map out of the glove compartment.

In a few minutes we're on a gigantic bridge with wall-to-wall traffic, never mind that it's not rush hour. It's traffic that's rushing somewhere, all going way too fast.

“You need to be in the curb lane to exit,” the Wrinkle Queen says.

“How can I get over there if there's no break in the traffic?”

“Turn your bloody blinker on!”

She rolls down her window, sticks her scrawny arm out and begins frantically waving her hand. About twenty cars are honking their horns at us.

“There's a break,” she screeches. “That minivan is letting us in.”

I move over.

We're off the bridge but I think we're going north. Toward the mountains.

“Isn't Seattle south?” I say. We're on another bridge now.
“For God's sake, weren't you watching the signs? We need to get over to Number 99.”

“Pardon me, but I was watching the road.” We're on a highway that makes you drive a long way before you can turn around. About half an hour later we're on the same bridge going south.

“There's the highway sign,” the Wrinkle Queen says. “Just stay on this until we get to the Lougheed...”

It takes about an hour to get through Vancouver. We even have to go through a tunnel that seems to go under the city forever.

“Keep your left blinker on!” she yells at me. “That way people can tell where the edge of your car is.”

They still honk their horns at me, though. Maybe it's a B.C. thing.

When we get through the tunnel and outside Vancouver, she tells me to find a place to gas up where there's a restaurant. After what we've been through so far today, I feel like I might need a sugar fix, but I order a Perrier. Once we've told the waitress what we want to eat, the Wrinkle Queen makes a beeline for the bathroom, and she's in there so long I finally go looking for her. I can see her red shoes in the crack beneath a cubicle door.

“Miss Barclay?”

“Thought I'd better have a couple of sips of brandy,”
she says, banging her walker into the stall door as she comes out. “It's going to be me driving for a while until we cross the border.”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not,” she snaps. “I don't even know if they allow fifteen-year-olds to drive in the state of Washington. We can't take any chances.”

So there she is with her claws glued to the steering wheel as we pass the Peace Arch. She barely comes up as high as the dash, and the official at the crossing booth looks down at her in amazement. She gives him one of her big lipsticked smiles and hands over her passport.

“Purpose of your visit?” he says.

“Pleasure,” she croons. “I'm taking my granddaughter to see the Ring Cycle of operas in Seattle.”

He's not happy that I don't have a passport, but he waves us through.

We drive a few miles past the crossing booths and she pulls over, groaning.

“I hate my legs,” she cries. “Just reaching the pedals has given me pain I didn't know was possible.”

I help her around the car to the passenger seat and, when she gets settled, she drains the last of her mickey of Courvoisier and pops some Tylenol.

Needless to say, she's asleep before we reach Bellingham, the first big town on the road. In fact she
sleeps all the way to Seattle. When we reach the outskirts, though, I pull into a gas station. You'd think this would wake her up but it doesn't. I still have to pat her hand a couple of times.

“Where are we?” she croaks, her eyes suddenly wide and frightened.

“Seattle. But we need to look at the map to figure out where we're going.”

The gas station has a cafe, and we spread the map out on one of the tables.

“We're here.” The Wrinkle Queen taps one of her scarlet nails on the map. “And we're staying at Pagliacci's Bed and Breakfast.” She flags the waitress and asks to borrow her pen. “It's not hard to get to.” She traces the route. Her hand isn't very steady and the line looks like wool that's unraveled.

I memorize the places I need to turn.

“Okay, test me,” I say. “I don't want Vancouver happening all over again.”

“I told you to follow the signs.”

“Yeah. That really worked.”

I only make one wrong turn, and it's easy to go into a keyhole, turn around and get back onto the right road.

The Wrinkle Queen seems to be sucking in energy from Seattle. No chance of her drifting off to sleep. Her
head with its smushed black hairdo is turning this way and that, and she's chattering like one of those talking dolls.

“Yes. We're getting close now. There's the Space Needle. And the opera house. Just a block or two now.”

When I find the bed and breakfast, she's practically leaping out of her seat. We're on a semicircular driveway in front of what looks like an old walk-up apartment building. It's covered with pink stucco and looks like a dried-up birthday cake. It even has those little white Christmas lights on a kind of fancy iron fence on the top of the building.

There's a man at the front door waving at us. His bald head shines beneath the porch light. He's wearing a shirt that looks like it's covered with big red poppies, some cut-off jeans and sandals.

Maybe when you have a beer belly that big, you quit worrying about what you look like.

Miss Barclay has the window rolled down.

“Ricardo!” she calls out. “We're here!”

“Ricardo!”

“Jean!” he says and stoops to give me a hug. He's wearing some kind of after-shave that smells like vanilla, and I remember it, the vanilla.

“Where's Bernard?” There were always the two of them. Ricardo trying his best to look like a Mexican houseboy, Bernard looking like he'd just put aside his newspaper at some posh men's club.

“He's gone.” Ricardo clasps my hand. “We lost him last November.”

I give his hand a squeeze. “I'm sorry.”

Skinnybones is standing at the back of the Buick, trying to disappear into the shadows of a holly hedge.

“Meet my companion.” I beckon to her. “Tamara, this is Ricardo. Runs the best bed and breakfast in Seattle.”

Ricardo is a hugger, and he enfolds Skinnybones.

“Hardly anything to hang onto here. We'll remedy that with a few good Pagliacci breakfasts.”

Tamara mumbles something, but I don't think it's actually words.

“I've saved the Butterfly Room for you,” Ricardo says as he helps me in. “When you told me about your surgeries, I thought — something on the main floor. I know you used to prefer the Parcival Parlor on the third but, as you know, we don't have an elevator. I was always after Bernard to get one installed. Now maybe I'll just do it myself and, if you come next year, you can be back there with the swords and the grail.”

“The Butterfly Room will be just fine,” I tell him.

Of course, it's more than fine with its little Japanese lamps, decorative fans on the walls, some pieces of antique, lacquered oriental furniture, and bedspreads that look like they've been fashioned from the kimonos of geishas.

Ricardo pushes a button on the radio, and the flower duet from
Madame Butterfly
fills the room like filtered light. I grab his arm, and he helps me to a chair.

Skinnybones has headed out for the rest of the bags.

“How would you and Tamara like a bite of supper?” he says. “I know this is a bed and breakfast, but for special guests I've been known to put together a suppertray.
Some pâté, pickled artichokes, fruit. Coffee. It would be my pleasure.”

Ricardo, Ricardo, I think we need you at the Triple S ranch.

“Do you have any Courvoisier?”

“All this and Courvoisier, too!” He laughs as he leaves.

“He's a bit...gay,” Skinnybones says, dragging in her suitcase.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well...you know...”

I can't help laughing. “Tamara, my dear, are you really thinking of knocking on the doors of the world of high fashion?”

She blushes and begins unpacking.

“His name's not really Ricardo,” I tell her. “He told me once he felt there was a Latin trapped inside him, so he had it legally changed.”

Along with the Courvoisier, Ricardo brings a bottle of wine and a soda spritzer. He takes over the little table in the room, pulling up chairs, moving aside the bonsai tree in a porcelain pot, unfolding cloth napkins.

“I'll join you if you don't mind,” he says.

“Mind!” I give his hand a pat.

Tamara eases a couple of pieces of artichoke and some crackers and cheese onto her plate. Ricardo
spritzes some soda into a glass, adds a cordial and a slice of lemon for her. I can see she's enchanted with these maneuvers. With her fork, she spears an artichoke, tastes it very tentatively and then looks to see if we're watching. A bit of the marinade slicks her smile. Ricardo catches my eye and winks.

“Have you heard anything about the cycle yet?” I ask him between nibbles of baguette slathered with Cognac pâté and sips of a very good California red.

“They're calling this one a Green Ring. Earthy with lots of light and greenery.” Ricardo swirls the wine in his glass. “We already had our tickets reserved before Bernard passed on, so a good friend of ours, Adrian, is joining me. I think you'll like him. And Tamara, did I hear you say you're studying to be a model? You definitely need to meet Adrian. When he isn't teaching, he does fashion illustration. He's very good.”

When he takes the tray, he leaves a bottle of Courvoisier on the table.

“This is some hotel,” Skinnybones says, checking out her hair in a fan-shaped mirror on the wall. The spikes have wilted a bit over the course of the day. She seems to be trying to revive them with a bottle selected from a congregation of toiletries she's gathered on one side of the dresser top.

“Do you think I'd better phone Shirl and Herb?”
she asks, unpacking my cosmetics and putting them on the other side of the dresser. In a minute she's wandering around the room with the cellphone cupped to her ear.

“Yeah, great,” she says, catching my eye. “We watched a video and today she's been teaching me all about some classical music she's crazy about...you know, like opera...we might listen to some tonight...the medications aren't hard to keep track of...No, she seems just fine. I haven't had a chance to get bored...I made wild mushroom soup for supper...”

But the day — that drive through Vancouver and then Seattle — has pretty well done her in. She watches a few minutes of
TV
from her bed, and then she's as dead to the world as Brunnhilde in her long sleep on the fire-shielded rock in
Die Walküre
.

I pour some brandy into a Japanese sake glass and sip it slowly. It seems to ease the pains in my hip and legs, and a small breeze comes in through the window Ricardo opened, a balm to the soul. Another glass and the aches of the world ebb away — the deaths of Mama and Raymond, the betrayal of that music professor who said he wanted to marry me. Gerald. Gerald with his sandy-gray hair and Clark Gable mustache. Gerald of New York, behind the lectern in that summer course in music appreciation. The light of August afternoons
falling across his face. 1967. Half a life ago. Odd that it still surfaces. Like rheumatism.

And now Bernard gone. He can't have been old. Sixty-five? A bit older than Ricardo.

I know Ricardo doesn't like anyone smoking in the rooms and, since it's late, I try not to make any noise getting out of the room and moving the walker down the hall to the back door and into the courtyard.

Ricardo is sitting out there, barely visible in the soft light from a couple of Japanese lanterns. Having another glass of wine. He lights my cigarillo from a tea candle sputtering in a small porcelain bowl.

“I think this is when I miss him most,” he says. “Eleven-thirty at night, when we'd finished up all the B and B work of the day and we'd sit out here and have a glass of sherry. Bernard would have a cigarette and we'd compare notes on the guests or just sit and listen to a bit of music.” He sighs and gestures toward the wine with a questioning look.