Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread, Page 23

  But Clovis didn’t. And I couldn’t.

  Clovis came to have lunch, cheeseburgers, bringing along a young client whose fingers were fused into two fleshy pincers and whose legs were withered and useless. Ectrodactyly syndrome, what people used to call “lobster-claw syndrome.” She introduced me to a young woman with pygomelia, which means she had four legs, basically two pelvises side by side and four functioning legs which she hid under long skirts.

  Me, I still told time by songs. Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” is four minutes and nineteen seconds, time enough to smoke a cigarette in the alley. Kim Wilde singing “You Keep Me Hanging On,” that’s four minutes and fifteen seconds, the time it takes me to change the carbonated gas cylinder for the soda machine. Everything you want to forget, you never can. Every moment you want to escape.

  At last, Clovis asks me back to her apartment to meet some people. I tell her my entire day is nothing if not meeting people. And Clovis says this is different.

  At her apartment, she’s introducing me to a girl with two arms and legs, almost a whole other person sprouting from under the bottom hem of her tube top. My first real heteradelphian, her name is Mindy. Next, I meet a kid with a face huge and lumpy as a bed pillow. Neurofibromatosis, the Elephant Man disease. He’s twenty-three and his name is Alex. I meet a cute redhead with no legs and only her feet growing out of her stomach. Osteogenesis imperfecta. Her name is Gwen, and she’s twenty-five.

  Clovis says to me, “You know music. You know the staging.” She says, “It’s their idea, but they hoped you could teach them exotic dancing…”

  She meant stripping. A troupe of differently abled exotic dancers. They were all young and bored with Salt Lake City. Their thinking was: Anyone can bulk up some muscle, bleach their hair, and spray on a fake tan. Why not offer an audience something that wasn’t based on a pile of lies? Why not serve up dancers not hiding behind fake smiles? That bunch of crazy, idealistic kids. Only in Utah.

  I tell them, Sure, they’re young and full of dreams. Sure, they’re monstrously deformed. But can they dance…?

  And Clovis says, “I’ve taught them what I know about working a pole, but I was hoping…”

  The millionaire studio executives had fronted seven figures in low-interest start-up financing. Hell, if I can teach some of those steroid elephants to dance, I can teach anybody.

  Like it says on Backpage: Live Your Fantasy.

  I wish I could say it’s been easy. People will always misunderstand your intentions. People accuse me of exploitation. That, and no small business is all beer and skittles. In Boulder, Glenda, our girl with both eyes in one socket, she eloped with a stockbroker millionaire. In Iowa City, Kevin, our dancer with parastremmatic dwarfism, he knocked up some bachelorette. It helps that Clovis tours with me and the troupe, as a kind of den mother. God only knows what we’ll do come September, when we launch our escort service.

  Me, personally, not a show starts without me sweating in the wings. Counting the seconds of every song. Watching for ASCAP people taking notes, and every muscle in my legs and arms twitching, reliving every handspring, cartwheel, midair flip, and kip-up I ever nailed onstage. Watching those crazy kids bait the folding money and lap dance for the tips, I catch myself still whispering.

  Whispering, “Bless me, for I bring you this humble offering…”

  Whispering, “I bring this!”

  TUNNEL OF LOVE

  People say human hair keeps growing after death. They cite bodies dug out of graves, dead bodies, with long glamour-girl hair they didn’t have at the funeral. These disinterred corpses have fingernails only women of leisure could ever grow so long. It’s like in death, we all get a Glamour Shots makeover.

  Myth or fact? My last appointment on Friday night, she says, “Let’s find out.”

  She’d phoned a week before and asked for the latest appointment I could make. The woman has the wrong kind of muscles, she says, for sitting still.

  In my studio, she pulls a candle from her purse. She says, “Burn this,” and hands it to me. She asks if I have anything other than sitar music.

  She showed up maybe a little unsteady on her feet. It was hard to tell because she was in a wheelchair. In this business a wheelchair doesn’t raise an eyebrow. Lots of people pay for the hands-on nurturing. It’s like submitting for a whole permanent wave when all you need is the nice sensation of someone washing your hair. Not that this woman needs grooming. She already has the hair, bleached Hollywood blond from root to tip. Her legs are smooth as bone. It’s all part of the experiment. Eventually she’s naked except for a wristband heat-sealed around her wrist, like a baby is born wearing, only this one says “Do NOT Resuscitate.”

  Half her hair she had waxed off, she says, the body half. The other half she had bleached Jean Harlow blond, Lana Turner blond. Before I lift her onto the massage table she says to do her legs last. She said that if I feel stubble, it will prove the myth is true. She says the best aspect of being in the end stage is that she’ll never have to get her roots touched up.

  The worst part of being in a wheelchair, she says, isn’t that it makes your legs superfluous baggage. What’s worse is that a wheelchair makes most of your furniture superfluous. This woman, she says she had exquisite furniture, Louis Seize armchairs with needlepoint upholstery, Louis Quinze settees. Once she was reduced to a wheelchair all her most-prized possessions—chairs, sofas, heart, brain—were nothing but obstacles.

  Her purse, she says, is stuffed full of cash. “When we’re done you can dig in like Halloween and treat yourself.” The police don’t have to know she had any cash. Or diamond wristwatch.

  I could tell her drugs were working because she didn’t laugh. The kind of drugs she’d used are legal in this state. They’re so not-suicide that they were paid for under her prescription coverage. There was a ten-dollar co-pay, but it was still a huge cost savings when compared to hospice. Massage, ironically, wasn’t covered.

  In my experience, I told her that unless you’re in a serious car accident, massage is never covered. In this profession, what she has in mind is the new definition of providing a “happy ending.” That usually gets a laugh. People have to make some noise.

  After a particularly long stretch of silence I ask if she’s okay.

  “Sorry,” she says, “that’s the phenylalanine not talking.”

  I tell her that this wouldn’t be the first time someone made their final exit on my table. It’s why massage therapists have begun demanding payment before the session begins. It’s awkward to tell someone in her situation that she’s not such an original thinker. It’s like the final insult. After the first such incident, the responding police officer told me, “You might want to keep every voicemail just in case there’s an inquest.” Anything to prove that I’m not complicit.

  I thank her for requesting my last time slot of the day. It would feel strange to do a swollen rotator cuff after this. Not to mention, nobody sitting in the waiting room wants to see the previous client leave the therapy room inside a zippered bag.

  No one ever tells me up front what they have in mind. But once that cocktail of modern science, those hemlock substitutes, kicks in, their entire lifetime of secrets spills out.

  I tell her, “The long strokes make the blood work faster.” What I meant to say is “drugs.”

  To keep her talking, I ask about whom to call. I’m fishing for next-of-kin, someone more intimate than the medical examiner.

  She tells me that when her first husband wanted to wrap things up, physicians weren’t allowed to assist. In lieu of professional help he consulted with a Gillette double-edged. She found him in the bathtub.

  She asks, “What’s the worst massage you’ve ever gotten?”

  I ask if she remembers a book called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).

  She nods and says, “1969.”

  In the chapter about pheromones, the book advised male readers to do the following: When you fir
st wake up in the morning, before you get dressed, wipe your bare testicles with a clean linen handkerchief. Fold the handkerchief neatly and wear it as a pocket square in your jacket all day. The book promised that women would find the smell irresistible. Whether or not it worked, the advice made pocket handkerchiefs hugely popular.

  The worst massage I ever got was in 1985, I tell her. I was a late bloomer.

  The massage therapist was a girl. She must’ve had a head cold. Or she was allergic. Hay fever, maybe. Something sinus-related, because she kept sneezing. This wasn’t what they call a “Jack Shack” where every massage ends with a “full release.” But maybe she’d worked in one of those lowlife places where she’d been the one dodging one hot outburst after another. As if seeking revenge, she sneezed and sneezed, and even when I said “God bless you,” she wouldn’t cover her nose and mouth. I was facedown on the table, and the spray would mist down onto my back.

  She did this without apology. She did it so easily I started to wonder if it wasn’t a new kind of massage. She’d sneeze again. Without missing a beat she’d just rub the next sneeze into my skin. It must’ve saved her a fortune on oil.

  When the session was up I got dressed and paid her. She was still sniffling so, like a gentleman, I whipped the handkerchief from my pocket and offered it to her. As she put it over her nose and mouth, she got a funny look on her face, like the book might be wrong about women. I told her to keep it. As my parting shot I told her to take care of herself. You never know what an infection can turn into.

  The woman on the table laughs. I can feel it through my hands. At last, my money shot.

  She’d found me on the Internet, she says, on Angie’s List, which seems odd. Clients who see me for this kind of specialized bodywork don’t usually refer their friends and family. “I never have what people call repeat business.” Not for this type of session.

  How she found out, she says, is she went to Zoom Care for a head cold that wouldn’t go away. It was the Zoom Care next to the Westfield Outlet Mall, between Shoes-For-Less and Connecticut Candles where they sell factory seconds at a discount. Candles that sputter. Candles that won’t stay lit. She says, “There was nothing ‘Doctor Kildare’ about the place.” She was thinking strep throat and—blam. The nurse-practitioner at Zoom Care didn’t say Stage Four, but that’s probably not required at his pay scale. Without hesitating, she went next door and bought a pumpkin-colored candle formulated to smell like nutmeg.

  By the time she was diagnosed, it was already too late to do the part where your hair falls out.

  I ask if she’s given any thought to the body. She tells me that it was an uphill climb, trying to find an aesthetician who would give her a Brazilian after this far along.

  She says she told the mortician an open casket and a short skirt. By that she meant a negligee. “I want my ex-husbands to see what they’re missing.”

  When I ask, “Why blond?” she asks if I read the newspapers. Incredulous, she says, “It’s always more tragic when a blonde dies.”

  She mentioned husbands so I redirect. “How many?” I ask. She says the first was so long ago that a wedding license only cost ten dollars. A massage costs more. Even a car wash costs more if you factor in the sales tax. “Ten dollars to screw up the rest of my life,” she says. “How could I pass up such a bargain?”

  She asks if I won’t do her feet last. “They’re so ticklish that I don’t want to be here by the time you get down there.”

  I switch to hard, percussive strokes between her shoulder blades, but not as hard as she’d like.

  She says, “That’s nice,” but coaxes me to go harder. She assures me there’s a handwritten note in her purse to explain everything, just in case the police ask why she’s covered with bruises.

  I pretend to hit harder. Not that she’d notice the difference, not this far advanced. The drugs, they’re mixed to be an overdose a dozen times over. She’s so far gone I could punch her with my fists and it wouldn’t be enough.

  She says, “You know what this reminds me of?” I don’t.

  I work her so hard it makes her voice jump like she’s driving over the ruts in a rough road.

  “When my first husband asked me to marry him,” she says, “he took me to the car wash.” She says the franchise name.

  I’d been through that same car wash in a dozen different cities. The trickiest part is always aiming your tires straight to get them between the little rails. The pimply teenager who guides you, he or she waves his or her hands, pointing left or right like someone on a runway telling a jumbo jet where to taxi. You pay through the driver’s window and they tell you to put the transmission in neutral and keep your engine running. Whatever happens, they tell you not to touch the brakes. A conveyor belt comes out of the floor and drags you along.

  This car wash her first husband took her through, it was the same as others: a long narrow building with a few windows where it’s always a typhoon on the inside.

  “He called it the ‘Tunnel of Love.’ ” She sighs.

  That first fiancé, he’d told her, “Not to worry, baby. I’m smart enough for the both of us.” He’d paid for the most expensive version, where the automatic scrubbers circle your car for what seems like forever while spinning brushes descend from the ceiling. It’s steamy as a jungle and takes as long as an afternoon nap. His eight-track stereo was playing “We’ve Only Just Begun,” sung by the Carpenters. His car had power windows and door locks.

  She said, “I thought he was flirting.”

  She said, “I didn’t know it was supposed to hurt.”

  A few feet into the car wash, she said, he used his controls to lower her window. By then it was too late to open her door and jump out. Even if she escaped there was no place to go. The robots had the car hemmed in, tight. A jet of scalding water raked the side of her head and she screamed. He must’ve been using the child-guard features because she couldn’t get her window to raise. “He said to me, ‘Sheilah.’ Screaming to be heard over the noise, he said, ‘Before you marry me I want you should know what marriage is about.’ ” By now the boiling-hot suds were foaming at her, burning the sides of her neck. The heavy chamois straps descended to start flogging her.

  Moving at a snail’s pace, she says, “It was like cilia. Like I was food being digested.”

  She tried to unbuckle her seat belt and escape to the back, but a high-pressure squirt of detergent blinded her. Her eyes were stinging. When she opened her mouth to scream she was choked by more detergent. She couldn’t even see what was hitting her, but it felt like wild animals clawing the skin from her face and neck. It felt like hydrochloric acid when the spinning brushes ground more soap into the open wounds.

  This young man she planned to wed, he yelled, “You think marriage should be happily-ever-after. Well, this is more like it!”

  The way his words sputtered, she could tell that his window was open, and he was planning to drown sitting next to her. She pictured the tunnel spitting them out at the end: two waterlogged corpses. Coughing water, he shouted, “If you think I’m only being mean, the truth is I’m doing you a huge favor.”

  Recounting the pain, she said there was no arguing with how much it hurt. Some sense told her he’d taken this trip before, with other women, and that’s why he was still a bachelor.

  All the while, grabbing jaws snatched at her long hair and yanked it from her scalp by the roots. A deluge of freezing-cold rinse water drenched her. It was like torture. Like ducking a witch. It was like being water-boarded with no secret confession to offer. Blind and in agony, she felt him suffering beside her and that was her only comfort. The scrubbing brushes gave way to insensate robots blasting streams of melted Turtle Wax straight into her ears. She couldn’t hear anything except the roar of gears. Clutching, scratching mindless machinery ripped at her favorite blouse.

  Her fiancé, he kept shouting, “You and me.” He shouted, “We’ll never again have sex together for the first time!”

  They kep
t rolling forward. There was no going faster. No stopping or going back.

  He shouted, “When we’re married, we’ll say words to each other that make right now feel like a chocolate cake.”

  After the Turtle Wax, gigantic rollers scourged them. Thundering hurricanes of air pounded and stretched their faces. By then she felt like something cast up by a storm on the beach. They were both half bald. The hair they had left was gleaming white with soap and wax.

  “That’s what this massage makes me remember,” she tells me. “No offense.” She’s drifting in and out. I can feel it in the way her breathing slows. It’s no crime, but I’m already doctoring the version I’m going to tell the police. To keep her awake, I ask, “So what’s your beef with sitar music?”

  Her first fiancé, he never laid a finger on her, but after the car wash, there she was: bruised and scraped and burned. The hair she had left was tangled and matted. A trickle of hot Simoniz ran down between her breasts.

  Blowers like high-powered fans at the exit hit her with scorching wind. The sound, it sounded like the end of the world. Like getting sneezed on by God.

  She accepted his ring anyway, thinking the worst was over. She was correct, but only for about seventeen years.

  I asked why she helped, when she found him in the bathtub, and she said she had to. To not help him, she said, “It would be like giving birth to only half a baby.” By “helping” she meant she had to massage his arms. To keep the blood from clotting. She said it was like milking a cow. The idea was to keep things moving in the direction of the outside world. So he could be gone by the time the bathwater got cold.

  She says this while I’m doing her arms.

  She says what she did for her first husband, it was the real definition of what people talk about when they refer to “heroic measures.” What’s the difference, if it’s what the person wants? It was exhausting, all that work to become a widow. In retrospect, she should’ve quit while she was ahead. The joys of widowhood only last until you get married again.