Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen (3 page)

“My God,” Miss Barclay says, her voice raspy but a strong whisper. “What on earth...?”

“Slippers,” I say, and try to keep from laughing.

“They're the ugliest things I've ever seen,” Miss Barclay says and then looks at me. “No offense.”

I try to be quiet, but it doesn't work. I burst out laughing.

“I was forced to bring them,” I manage to say, finally catching my breath. “They look like purple hairballs some cat threw up.”

For the first time, I see Miss Barclay smile. Wrinkles rearrange themselves around her eyes and the edges of her lips.

“Forced?”

“I didn't have a buddy gift. This was a spare one Miss Whipple had.”

“Miss Whipple?”

“Our L.A. teacher.”

“That one in the navy skirt? With the stomach?” Miss Barclay arches a painted eyebrow.

“That's her,” I say. “Miss Whipple.”

“That's what I taught. Language arts. English, we called it, before they decided to rename everything.” Miss Barclay holds up one of the deformed purple slippers like it's a rotten fish. “Forty-one years.”

“You're a teacher?”

“Was.” Miss Barclay's voice is suddenly clipped. Sharp. “Past tense.”

“What do you want to do with this stuff?” I point at the mess of fishing-tackle paper, crumpled tissue and the lumps of purple wool.

“Maybe we could take them into the courtyard and bury them,” Miss Barclay says.

“Good idea.”

“Or I could save them for Latoya.” She looks slyly at me. “Latoya would like these.”

“Latoya?”

“Night staff.” Miss Barclay shudders, sending a ripple through her tomato-colored dress.

Mrs. Golinowski has been going around the room from one buddy set to the next, and now she is in front of us.

“What have we here!” She scoops up the purple slippers. “Aren't these cozy! Why, I could just steal them. You'd better keep a close eye on these, Miss Barclay.”

“I'll post a guard.” Miss Barclay's voice is thin and
dry as chalk dust. I look at my watch. Still a whole half hour to go.

“Miss Barclay,” Mrs. Golinowski leans towards the old woman and announces loudly, “why don't you take Tamara on a little tour of the lodge.” She turns to me. “I'm sure you'd like to see the cafeteria and the craft room and the multi-denominational worship center.”

I smile.

The eyebrow leaves us and makes its way to another group.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” I say.

“I
would
like to get out of this bedlam.” Miss Barclay waves a claw at all the kids and old people in the lounge. “Can you set up that contraption for me?” She nods towards the walker leaning against the wall.

Walkers, I know, are for old people to hang onto so they don't lose their balance. Kind of a folding cage on wheels. Miss Barclay looks fierce as she struggles down the hall. I follow half a step behind with the crumpled gift wrap and slippers.

At the end of the hall there is a T-intersection.

“You don't really want a tour, do you?” Miss Barclay's walker has come to a stop.

“Whatever.” I shrug my shoulders.

“Here's the reading room.” She points at a door in
the middle of the T. “Let's just hole up in here for a while. You can tell me about what they're teaching in so-called Language Arts these days.”

I hold the door open for her. The room looks a little bit like a library. At least there are shelves with books on them. But the books look like the kind left over from garage sales.

“Mostly trash.” Miss Barclay waves a hand towards the shelves. She eases herself into a vinyl-covered chair. The chair is faded orange and has been patched with silver duct tape. You can imagine what the Wrinkle Queen looks like in the middle of it with her bright red dress.

“I think there are a few copies of Dickens and Austen. I have my own books in my room though.” She points at another vinyl-covered chair. “Sit down.”

I nudge the slippers and crumpled paper under the chair.

“Is that what young ladies are wearing today?” She's giving me the once over. Once and back again and then again.

“Is that what old ladies are wearing?” She can see I'm staring at her nosebleed-red polyester, and this fancy brooch flopping on her skinny chest.

“
Touché
,” she cackles.

“Actually, I'm going to be a model,” I tell her. “If you think what I've got on today is crazy, you should watch
Fashion Forecast
. This is nothing.”

“I see.” She fishes a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. Long brown cigarettes like thin cigars. Maybe they're made special for witches.

“Are you allowed to smoke in here?”

“Do we care?” She flashes her false teeth at me, lights a match, gets the brown coffin nail going, and then, for a second or two, stares at the fire burning down the matchstick. When it reaches her fingers, she drops it into a piece of ceramic sculpture on an end table.

“Such rules are a transgression against our civil liberties,” she says. “Did you know that in
Götterdämmerung
, the last of the great operas in Wagner's Ring Cycle, the whole stage is filled with smoke and fire? So wonderful. Exhilarating. I suppose that's the next thing they'll be banning.”

“Gotter what?”

“
Götterdämmerung
. The twilight of the gods. If I guess correctly, you've never seen an opera.”

“No,” I say. “And it's not high on my list.”

Miss Barclay sucks on her mini-cigar and then exhales a few dragon puffs of smoke.

“This is the year,” she sighs. “The year they're doing
the whole cycle in Seattle.
Das Rheingold
,
Die Walküre
,
Siegfried
and
Götterdämmerung
. And I'm stuck here. I might as well be six feet under.”

“Couldn't you just go? You're not locked up, are you?”

“Next thing to it.”

“I'd go,” I say. “If I really wanted to. If I had the money. Nobody would stop me.”

She takes another long drag on her weird cigarette. It gives her a small fit of coughing and, still hacking, she whispers, “I believe you would.”

She's tough, Skinnybones. A fledgling walküre. No one will stop her from flying.

The gollything comes flip-flopping by the reading room door just as I've finished my cigarillo, thank the Viking gods of smoke and fire. She wrinkles her nose and looks accusingly at me.

“Something stuck on the radiator, I think,” I say. “Maybe Tamara wouldn't mind helping me back to my room.”

“I think you'd just have time.” Gollywog beams her my-I'm-glad-you're-bonding smile, and Tamara smiles back at her.

“Someone should help her,” she whispers as we round a corner and head down the stretch of hall to my room.

“Mrs. Gollywatchit?”

“She could use an extreme makeover.”

“Extreme is the signature word,” I agree.

“Are you expecting company? There's a man waving at you,” Tamara says.

She's right. It's my nephew, Byron. And to think the day had been going so well for a change.

“I'm okay from here,” I say. “Thank you again for my lovely gift.”

Tamara pats the hideous package she's tied to the side of the walker.

“You're so very welcome,” she says with mock seriousness. “See you next time.”

I watch her for a minute heading back down the hall, moving like some exotic zoo animal.

“Hi, Auntie.” Byron has strolled down to meet me. So attentive, Byron Barclay, ever since that day when I was sure death waited for me and I signed a paper giving him power of attorney. Is it possible to sue a doctor who suggests an eighty-nine-year-old heart might not make it through surgery? Any mind would have to be morphine-addled to put her affairs in the hands of a high-school dropout who has worked most of his life servicing soda-pop dispensing machines.

Six months ago, when the pain was so bad it made me dizzy, I was sure my boat was headed out to sea, all primed with tar, ready for the torch. I said things; I
signed things. But the funeral barge wasn't set afire. And, God, it's hard to have to hobble back to shore and find Byron waiting for you.

In fact, he always seems to be lurking these days. Like a turkey vulture.

“Alberich,” I say.

“Alberich?” He shakes his head, puzzled, and then smiles. I can tell he thinks I've gone off into loony land. I don't bother telling him that Alberich is the ugly dwarf guarding the gold of the Rhine maidens in
Das Rheingold
. That he's Alberich and the gold is mine.

“Have you given any more thought to selling your house, Auntie?” He's followed me into my room and drops into the visitor's chair.

Poor Byron, he's lost pretty well all of his hair like my brother did, and he's red in the face, as if the very business of living embarrasses him. He mops at the perspiration on his forehead.

“I can't think why I'd sell it,” I say. “I expect I'll be back there soon. Once this hip is working.”

He doesn't look at me. He stares, instead, at the bureau by my bed, as if it were a heap of Rhine gold.

Minnie, an afternoon worker, comes in and helps me into bed. She sends Byron out into the hall while she gets me out of my dress and into a wrap.

“You're tired, aren't you, Miss Barclay?” she says.

I like Minnie. There's no nonsense about her. She does up the last couple of buttons on my housecoat and tucks a quilt around me. “You want me to send him away?”

“No. I can do that.”

She smiles. “I'm sure you can.”

“Think of it,” Byron says when he comes back in. “It's a seller's market right now. You'd really come out on top.”

“I'll think about it,” I say. I
am
tired and, more than anything, I'd like Byron to go. I close my eyes.

“And your car,” he says. “I'd like to put an ad in the paper. I just had it tuned up and it's running like a charm. Anyone who test-drives that Buick —”

“I'll think about it.”

“Think about it,” Byron echoes, tiptoeing to the door.

The last trip I took with the Buick was to drive to Seattle to see
Die Walküre
. Gladys Enright went with me. It would have been better to have gone by myself. Gladys dithering and twittering around. The type that would say sorry to a coffee table if she stubbed her toe on it. Never learned how to drive. Always had a husband who did it for her until he died. Once he was gone, Gladys would declare, “Too late to teach an old dog new tricks.”

It was at the end of that trip that I began to notice the hip pain, and by the time I got home, it was agony to work the pedals. But it was Gladys, an old dog with no new tricks, who had the heart attack and died three weeks later.

Will I ever drive again? The doctor says no. “It's not just your legs. You have lapses, times when your mind just shuts down for brief periods. It's really not safe for you to drive.”

The thought makes me furious. Why does life tantalize us with possibilities, only to turn coy, withdrawing?

Anger shoves aside the fatigue that had been settling over me like a blanket. I grab the little stand-up calendar on my bureau.

It's the second week in May. Only a couple of months until the great Ring Cycle of operas will be beginning in Seattle.

In my mind, I can hear that astounding beginning, the first bars of
Das Rheingold
, like the world being born anew. Music at first as slender and thin as light through water and then building, leaping, enfolding, cascading. That incredible beginning playing through my mind, and I can only think it is from the splashing of the Rhine maidens that there are trails of dampness along my cheeks.

When I get back to the common room, my class is grouping at the front door for the walk back to school. It has begun to rain. I can see the hour and a half I spent on my hair — all the anti-frizz serum and mousse and hair glue and sculpting gel — gone to waste.

What will the Universal Style people think of someone coming in looking like a half-drowned rat?

“Tamara,” Miss Whipple calls, “walk fast or run if you want so you won't get too wet. Just be careful at the intersection. Be sure and push the pedestrian crossing button.”

A lot of the kids are running and even Miss Whipple jiggles along in front of me. I can't run in the shoes I have on so I'm the last. Me and the blob of a kid who gave his senior buddy a squirrel teapot. Timmy. I don't think Timmy has ever run anywhere in his life. He's beside me, matching his stride to mine.

“You want my rain cape?” he says. It's kind of a clear plastic baggy thing. “I don't really need it with this old jacket...”

“Hey. Sure. Thanks.” I give him my best smile. There might be hope for my hair yet.

“No problem.”

During Social, the last class in the afternoon, I take the flyer out and look at it again. Since I picked it up at the community center where Shirl's daycare is, I've come close to wearing out the sheet. But even now, this thousandth time I've looked at it, I feel a tingle along my spine.

UNIVERSAL STYLE

Dream of becoming a model?

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“I thank Universal Style for helping to make my dreams come true,” states Kelly Kidd, recently awarded the Modeling Association of North America's Outstanding Newcomer Award. “They gave me my start and I've been soaring ever since.”

Just below the phone number and a Whyte Avenue address, there's a picture of Kelly Kidd. Light seems to shine off her cheeks and hair. She has a perfect smile.