Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen (15 page)

“Settle down. You're making me dizzy.”

She grabs the Vancouver map and drops into the wingback chair.

“Okay if I go and see where that school is?”

“You go ahead. I'm fine.” To tell the truth, more than anything in the world, I'd appreciate being alone right now. This suite is filled with ghosts. Mama liked to sit at that little writing desk. And Myra, who taught social studies and traveled with me a few years before the big C did her in — she'd sit in the wingback chair in the corner, reading or doing a crossword puzzle before we'd head out to a play or for dinner. It seems like her words hover in the room.
That was quite the effect, a lightning storm across the bay — perfect backdrop for
The Tempest
. Can you think of a four-letter word for perspicacious? Would you like a nightcap?

But despite feeling exhausted, I can't fall asleep now. The remote to the
TV
is within reach and I click the power on. The picture congeals into one of those dreadful reality shows that everyone seems to watch in the lounge at the Triple S ranch. I quickly find the arrow for changing channels. Someone is making over a hideous room — wait, the makeover's already happened. Whose idea was it, I wonder, to glue a floral bedspread onto a wall and surround it with bamboo framing? On the next channel, there's a riveting game of lawn bowling in progress.

At least there's concert music on Bravo. I close my eyes. Mendelssohn. So different from Wagner. I wonder if any of the music Tamara has listened to in the past week has managed to penetrate. She'd probably never admit it if it did, spiky as she is — and with that kind of shell around her.

She reminds me of that boy I taught back in the mid-1960s. Graham? Gordon? Answered an essay question on a grade nine final with a long poem that sounded like it had been written by Dr. Seuss. So clever. So bad. I remember laughing until my sides ached.

She's back. Skinnybones. Trying not to make any racket as she comes in. Likely hoping I'm fast asleep so she won't have to talk to me. When she sees I'm awake, she says, “Hey — thought you'd be dead to the world. After the day you've had.”

“Did you find the school?”

“Well...yeah,” she says. “But it doesn't really look like a school. More like a church.”

“A church!”

“I think it probably was a church, and maybe it's still partly a church. I mean, there's a bell tower and it's got those churchy windows that go to a point at the top. There's a big bulletin board at the front, though, that lists all the things going on. Yoga classes. Ceramics. Alcoholics Anonymous. And Universal Style.”

The Wrinkle Queen laughs when I tell her the modeling course is being held in an old church. A laugh that's half laugh and half cough — and, of course, she's sitting up in bed, groping around for her cigarillos.

I don't tell her that someone in the alley behind the church tried to sell me some dope.

She's awake half the night smoking and coughing, turning the
TV
on and off. I think her hearing's going. Someone pounds on the wall of the room beside us to get us to turn the sound down.

“Will you listen to the racket they're making next door,” the Wrinkle Queen says. “I wonder what they're doing in there?”

All of this, of course, means that I'm awake half the night, too. In the morning I have ghost eyes, dark circles
on the white sheet of my face. A great look for my first day.

The Wrinkle Queen's asleep when I leave. To top everything off, it starts to rain when I'm a block away from the hotel, and by the time I get to the church, I'm soaked.

There's a janitor watching me as I come in.

“Universal Style?” I say, pushing my wet hair off my face.

“Downstairs.” He points toward a hallway.

There's a stairway at the end of it, and the first door I see in the basement has the same star and sign that was on the Whyte Avenue office door in Edmonton:
Universal Style — Training for the Stars of Tomorrow
.

When you go through the door, there's kind of a little foyer and one of those church hall kind of tables — the ones with collapsing legs.

Jude Law model man is sitting there. Brad Silverstone.

“Hey, Tamara! Great, you got here okay.” There's a couple of registration packages on the table. He fills in a receipt when I give him an envelope with the rest of the money.

“Just one more to come,” Brad says. “Ethan. He's from Edmonton, too.”

A girl with long blonde hair pokes her head around the door.

“Alicia,” Brad calls to her. “Take Tamara in and introduce her around.”

“I'm an assistant,” Alicia tells me. “They gave me a deal on my registration, and believe you me I needed it after working at the McDonald's in Nelson for the past year. First we'll get you a name tag.”

Through the foyer, there's a big room. Alicia takes me past some orange room dividers where there's a couple of old sofas with coffee tables in front of them plus three tables you can sit at.

There are ten people. Three boys and seven girls. They have names like Madison and Mason and Brittany and Zachary.

I sit down at a table where a young man is sitting by himself. His name tag says Christophe. He seems scared to death to look at me or anyone else, and I'm thinking I kind of know how he feels. I wish I had dry clothes.

“Hi,” I say.

He blushes and says, “Hey.” And then he adds, “Can I get you some coffee?”

“Is there any juice?”

He lopes over to a counter under the basement windows and grabs a carton.

As I'm peeling off the plastic straw, Brad Silverstone
brings in Ethan. He looks like he's at least forty-five. Everybody's jaws drop.

“Never too old to pursue a dream,” he giggles.

Not only old, but he has bad teeth.

Brad points to some metal chairs over by a bunch of gym risers set end to end to make a kind of runway.

“Can I get everyone over here?”

A couple of middle-aged women have straggled in from the staff room to join him.

Brad introduces them.

Ava, with bleached blonde hair in a mountain of Dolly Parton curls and a load of make-up that reflects the light from the overhead fluorescents, will be doing sessions, we are told, on skin and nail care, make-up artistry, hair styling and color analysis. She has a little, high-pitched voice, and it seems like she has to stop and draw a breath two or three times a sentence.

All of us are trying not to look at one another, but the red-headed girl named Mason must have caught someone's eye, because she's giggling and trying to cover it up.

Waltraud, the other instructor, glares at Mason. She's a thin, stringy brunette in ballet workout clothes.

“In my classes you will improve your poise and movement. You will learn how to exercise and what to eat. Dressing and runway technique. It takes work to be
a model, and you
will
work, and not be laughing so much. If you think it's a joke, you will be thinking again.”

Mason has quit giggling.

Now Jude Law Brad takes over. He's in a T-shirt and blue jeans so tight it's hard to imagine how he got into them without doing damage to body parts.

“Photography. Creating videos. Fashion shoots,” he says. “I'm the man with the camera. Believe me, when this week is finished, you're going to have an amazing portfolio to take with you. And we'll do individual videos, too — ones you wouldn't be ashamed to screen in L.A.”

He likes to talk, Brad, and he has a way of making people feel comfortable. Our first class of the day is with him.

“I want you to feel totally at ease in front of the camera, so choose one or two things to wear from the racks — maybe something amusing — and just have some fun. We have a few props over in the corner of the room.”

There's a big folding screen, a kind of long, padded sofa, one of those giant exercise balls and a wicker chair like the one Ricardo has in his courtyard.

The racks are filled with all kinds of clothing — some vintage, some that looks like costumes from a
theater — and there are boxes of hats and shoes. I'm still feeling damp so I take a jacket and vest from a man's pin-striped suit, a dress shirt and a funky tie with colored triangles on it, along with a pair of baggy jeans. One of the smaller rooms off the main hall is a dressing room for the girls, and I quickly change out of my wet clothes.

Brad is shooting pictures of Madison when I come out. She looks like a movie star. Actually she looks like quite a few movie stars, in a dress not too different from the ones the Wrinkle Queen took to Seattle. Brad is loving taking pictures of her on the peacock chair and the sofa. In some, he has her hold a cocktail glass with a bit of juice in it.

When it's my turn, he says, “The return of Annie Hall! Not bad, but let's find you a bowler hat, and let's loosen the necktie, make that collar as rumpled and interesting as possible.”

It seems like he takes a hundred pictures of me lying on the floor or the sofa, or draped over the big purple ball, or dancing with a hat rack.

We spend the rest of the morning with Ava, as she does make-up demonstrations on one of the girls, Lesley, and a boy with bad skin, Tyler. The sunless tanning cream she uses on Tyler, though, turns his whole face orange.

“The problem with sunless creams,” she squeaks and draws in a deep breath, “is that skins react with different degrees (another breath) of sensitivity.”

Desperately, Ava squishes some dark coloring into his hair to try to make his skin look lighter.

Mason is having a small fit of giggles that is catching on and rippling through the class. Tyler is starting to look like a pumpkin whose top leaves have been blackened by a killer frost.

Even though most of the students are grabbing lunch at a sushi restaurant on Davie, I decide I'd better make a quick trip back to the hotel to check on the Wrinkle Queen.

She's managed to get up and get dressed and is in the wingback chair, smoking and watching
TV
.

“You should have been here a few minutes earlier,” she says. “You would have seen yourself on television.”

Watching
TV
news is something I've done very little of in the last few years — even less at the Triple S ranch where the televisions in the common room and the lounge are as old and tired as most of the people watching them. When they actually work, they're tuned to
Wheel of Fortune
or reruns of the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

I've always preferred a good book. Among the items Skinnybones and I failed to pack, though, was anything to read. When I went down to the cafe for breakfast, I noticed a couple of shelves of reading material in a nook in the lobby, but most of it was ancient Reader's Digest condensed books, which I refuse to read, and some copies of Doubleday Club selections from the 1940s. I didn't read Frank Yerby and Frances Parkinson Keyes then and I don't plan to begin now. Luckily there was also a copy of Henry James'
Portrait of a Lady
.

But a couple of chapters of that was enough to make me turn on the
TV
in the suite. Some dreadful morning show with a woman, face frozen into a smile, big capped teeth, interviewing a movie actress who is in Vancouver making a film. A horror movie, from the sound of it.

“Hollywood North!” the interviewer laughs through her teeth. “Watch out for the gore in Gastown!”

After commercials, the station brings on the noon news. I'm about to click it off when the screen is filled with a face.

It's a school picture of Skinnybones — her hair in some crazy lopsided hairdo that looks like it's being held in place with butterfly paper clips — smiling what she believes to be her killer model smile.

“Have you seen this teenager?” a voice is saying. “Police are uncertain when fifteen-year-old Tammy Schlotter, who also goes by the name Tamara Tierney, and an elderly woman to whom she was a companion...” Now my picture comes up. It's thirteen years old — the one I have on the piano in the house. “...eighty-nine-year-old Jean Barclay disappeared from Barclay's Glenora home.

“At this point, police are uncertain if there is foul play involved. The disappearance of Barclay's vehicle, a 1997 red Buick, from her garage is another piece in the
puzzle of the missing teen and senior. Anyone with any information is asked to call the RCMP at...”

“Maybe you'd better phone the Shadbolts,” I tell Tamara when she comes back at lunchtime.

“No,” she says, flinging off the crumpled clothes she's wearing, pulling on a shirt and the costume-jewelry jeans from the closet. “Have you had lunch?”

“Late breakfast. I'm not hungry. Maybe if you call and explain...”

“You think they'd let me stay here and finish the course?” Suddenly she's laughing and then swearing under her breath. “I wasn't born yesterday.”

“Close,” I remind her.

“You should be worrying. What do you think they're going to do to you?”

“You know, dear, I really don't care.”

Now she's looking at me with fire in her eyes.

“Of course you don't care. You got to go to all your stupid operas. I've only started my course. It's not fair.”

“Whoever told you life was going to be fair?”

“Oh, can it.”

She's pacing around the room, muttering.

“I'll call Shirl and Herb tonight,” she says, “just to say we're okay, but I'm not going to tell them where we are.”

When she comes back from afternoon classes, she decides to make the call before we go out to eat.

“Hi, it's me,” I hear her say. “I'm fine. Remember, I said Miss Barclay wanted me to drive her to visit...yes, well, guess what?...her nephew lives in Jasper and he wanted us to stay with him for a couple of days...No, he's not here right now. He's taken her out for supper. I didn't feel like going...Call you when they get back?...Sure, if I'm still awake...His name? Magwitch. Phillip Magwitch...Bye, now...My show's coming on...Bye...”