Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  “Aha,” Bluey said.

  “Also, did you know Deuce has a girly friend? Yes, he does. She came calling while you were—whatever you were doing. Getting sweet. She’s a demure red spaniel.”

  “Unh,” said Bluey, sounding defeated and far away.

  “Say, if you’re at loose ends …” Greer said.

  “No, I just feel weird.”

  “Well, I was going to suggest you build a nice hangover like me and Deuce are doing. It’s all right. We’re twenty-one, all of us.”

  •

  The sky had pinked up nicely in the west, was going gray in the east. The twins were on the high back deck, playing canasta on a picnic bench with X-shaped legs. The view behind them, over a kind of porch of leaves, was of nice houses like theirs.

  The next lawn was big like a playing field, and it tilted steeply down. A bare-chested man was fighting the grade, shoving a green mower. His shirt was tied to the mower’s handlebars.

  “That’s Bing,” Greer told Bluey. “Bing Litzinger and his grinding machine kept me from napping, and not only that but Buh-Buh-Bing will get all the insects moving from over there to over here. Yes, he will. Triste but true.”

  “Knock off the French,” Bluey said.

  “Oh, no, Deuce, Bluey the crank is back. Hey, where is Deuce?”

  “I let him run,” Bluey said.

  Greer jumped from the table, went indoors, and was gone for a while. Bluey, wearing only swim trunks and a baseball cap, shuffled the cards as if they could warm him. He heard his sister’s shrieking whistle from the side of the house. Finally, Greer was back, carrying clothes.

  “Dog’s gone forever. Probably eloped,” she said. “Here. These’ll ruin your bad mood.” She traded Bluey’s cap for one of her straw picture hats. Its brim was enormous. She wrapped a long scarf at Bluey’s neck, telling him, “You were cold.” She draped his black blazer over his shoulders.

  “God, I wish you’d sober down,” he said.

  “Paging Dr. Wellman,” Greer said. “You’re wanted in Pre-Op. Stat. Code Blue.”

  “Dr. Wellman, you’re wanted in Detox,” Bluey said.

  Greer sat and dealt. As she fanned her cards, she nodded agreeably, acknowledging each one.

  Bluey watched her, re-aimed his gaze, fidgeted. He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t stand this.” He plucked the straw hat off and sailed it over the deck rail. “Why am I so jittery?”

  “It’s all right,” Greer said. “We’ll get bold. I’ve got some great things stored away.”

  Getting bold was the twins’ name—a name thought up when they were younger—for a session of truth-telling.

  “Let’s crowd the last available boundaries of decency and privacy,” Greer said.

  “Yeah, trample ’em,” said Bluey.

  “O.K., I’ll start. I read your letters to Ivy,” Greer said. “Good start?” she added after a minute.

  Bluey kept a long silence, and his eyes, Greer could see even in the dimming light, blinked too much.

  “Well, I’ll never forgive you. I can’t imagine forgiving you,” he said at last.

  “Naturally. Way to play.”

  Bluey said, “I’ve got to get Deuce.”

  “I’ll wait. No, change that. I’ll wait inside,” Greer said.

  Bluey went barefooted down the deck steps, walking a little sideways to avoid splinters. He ducked through a five-tree orchard of crab apple his father had once devised.

  Bluey was slapping at mosquitoes when he saw the flash of the dog’s silky coat, and then he saw Deuce pile out of tall grass and galumph into Bing Litzinger’s yard. The dog lifted himself onto the birdbath there and drank.

  Bluey was sneaking up on him when Litzinger, who had finished mowing, came from his house.

  “Get him out!” Litzinger called.

  “I’m trying, damn it,” Bluey said. The dog bucked at the sound of Bluey’s voice and sprinted in a meaningless circle.

  “There’s a leash law. I can’t have a dog in the yard,” Litzinger said. He watched the contest as Bluey tried to capture Deuce. The dog was taunting, getting just beyond reach, his butt raised up, his front legs flat on the grass.

  “I know your mother,” Litzinger warned before heading back to his house.

  •

  Greer was in the kitchen, wearing the picture hat that she said she had climbed over the deck to retrieve. She was eating a bran muffin and a cup of lemon yogurt.

  Bluey had dragged Deuce with him. The dog’s nails scraped on the polished floor. His tail was stuffed down, his ears back.

  “You’re still purple with rage,” Greer said to Bluey. “Why don’t you crash a dish or two?”

  Bluey freed the dog, straightened, removed a brandy bottle from a cupboard. The ship calendar on the cupboard door flapped. Bluey measured out a full glass. “They do this in movies,” he said, and tried to drink it all. He couldn’t manage even a full swallow.

  “They probably have their stand-ins do it,” Greer said.

  Bluey gasped and breathed for a bit. He said, “Okay, where were we? Ivy, the girl I write to, I met at an Iggy Pop concert. You couldn’t know her; she didn’t go to school with us. She lives in Boston. We were both high when we met. I, you know, liked her. Really, tremendous …”

  “Got it,” Greer said.

  “I thought we were high. So we agreed, after that night, we’d keep in touch. Next day, phone call from her. I was very flattered. But the thing being, she wasn’t high the night before. She’s always like that. Babbling. She’s probably got maybe a brain tumor or a limbic disorder. She thinks her brother had something to do with killing Lennon. That kind of thing. I mean, I liked her for her looks, but what’s the use?”

  “Bluey, this all sounds like a lie. One of your lies,” Greer said.

  “So who I’m writing to is sort of Ivy, but sort of not, and what would be the point of mailing the letters? Most of all, they’re for me.”

  “Well, that’s a violently unpleasant story if it’s true,” Greer said in a summarizing tone. “Now. What’ve you got to crush me with?”

  The dog, under the table, charged Greer’s shoe—a pale moccasin. She crossed her ankles in halfhearted defense.

  “Nothing,” Bluey said.

  “Don’t be cruel,” Greer said.

  “I have nothing for you. Live with that one, Greer.”

  “Go ahead and gnaw off the whole heel. What the hell,” Greer said to Deuce.

  “Except this,” Bluey said. “Mom told it to me, though it doesn’t mean much. You were not expected. You were not prepared for. Your body was behind mine—in the womb, I mean. Shadowing mine. Our father died and never even knew you were there. Now I’m sorry I told you,” Bluey said.

  “No, don’t be. I think it’s interesting what’s going on. You hoped I’d feel unwanted?”

  “Somewhat. To pay you back for reading my letters,” Bluey said.

  “My, my,” Greer said, and sighed.

  Eventually she said, “I don’t think you’re playing this game well at all, Bluey. I mean, I don’t know which lie is bigger—Ivy of Boston or the shadow in the womb.”

  “Hey,” Bluey said, alarmed.

  “Or my lie. I never read your letters. Relax. I never saw them but for the ‘Letters to Ivy’ title.”

  “You didn’t read them? Never even looked through them?”

  “Nope,” Greer said.

  “Well, someday you were going to get to. You were supposed to,” Bluey said.

  “Look at what the moonlight’s doing to the grape trellis,” Greer said. “Out the window.”

  “You hear me? The letters are to you,” Bluey said.

  “You didn’t have anyone else to write to?” Greer said. She touched her sternum.

  “No one else to write to,” Bluey echoed.

  Greer pressed back in her chair seat, her neck stiffening. She spoke slowly and purposefully, as though Bluey were a stranger. “Then I shall read them. Sometime. Whenever it is to your li
king.”

  “No, forget it. I don’t think so,” Bluey said.

  “Well, were you sort of kidding about their being written to me?” Greer asked.

  “They aren’t to anybody, really. Or they’re to every girl. Only I don’t deeply know any other girl. They’re to a fantasy I have in my brain.”

  “Aw, Bluey, wait a while,” Greer said. “Lots of things could change for you. It doesn’t seem like it, but they’ve got to, don’t they?” Greer said. “Don’t they?”

  23

  Mirror

  BEHIND US WERE COUNTERS with cool basins and cabinets framed with white or amber bulbs. There was overhead, over-bright lighting as well. And music—piped from somewhere above—to which Lolly kept time with her duck boot. We were side by side in swivel chairs, at a hair salon near the Watergate.

  I asked Lolly what was so absorbing in her magazine—a young women’s thing, with frantic announcements about dreams and skin tone on the cover.

  “This asinine survey,” she said indignantly. “‘What Women Want Most in a Man.’ Can you believe it? Intelligence is ranked fourth here, behind security and good eyes. An athletic build is number one.”

  “Yeah, prizefighters,” I said, and sighed happily.

  “You’re as bad as they are,” Lolly said.

  In the mirrors, my eyes looked fierce beneath straight black brows, which were like charcoal strokes. My lips are dark naturally, but here they looked stained by red wine.

  “Hopeless,” Lolly said with sudden affection.

  Our heads were prickly with perm curlers. We were draped in blue plastic ponchos with fresh cotton shoulder bibs on top. Under her poncho, Lolly wore careful layers of expensive clothes. Her ears, with their gold dot earrings, were worried pink at the lobes. We are longtime friends. We went from kindergarten all the way through Potomac Senior together, in Baltimore. We graduated at the same time, four years ago. I live in Boston, but I’d been visiting Lolly in Washington lately, camping at her place in Foggy Bottom—a third-floor two-roomer on H Street.

  “My head tickles,” she said. “Is yours burning? I think they’re making us keep our curlers in too long.”

  “Oh, yikes,” I said.

  Lolly ejected from her swivel chair, leaving it wiggling.

  “Where are you going?” I said to her back.

  She stalked across the deep main space and headed through one of the enameled doors at the back—the washroom, I guessed.

  Aside from a few snipping sessions, I hadn’t had my hair really cut since I was fifteen. I had kept it side-parted—a straight veil about my face. I didn’t think my hair needed a professional to tangle it. Today’s hair job was Lolly’s idea and her treat. “To thin your hair, but give it a fluffier look, with more body,” she told me severely. She knew I’d always preferred to mow my own split ends.

  “Things in D.C. are all right—trustworthy, the best next to New York,” she said. “You wouldn’t let a Baltimorean near your hair.” Since she’d moved to Washington, she took responsibility for everything about it. She was proud of this but embarrassed too.

  Now I was looking around, panicky. The salon’s walls had a pink-and-black wallpaper, with many gold French poodles descending a winding staircase. All the hairdressers were up at the front of the salon, in a conference of some kind. I tried to lose myself in Lolly’s magazine. I went through it once and then, caught by nothing, started again with the first article: “Envy—What It Does to You.”

  This was Christmas season, a wintry day. The salon was full of noisy customers, chattering, knitting, thumbing paperbacks. More women arrived, in furs, mufflers, and galoshes. They carried shopping bags stuffed with varnished red paper and glinting foil. One woman I could hear was saying she had just spotted Baryshnikov over at the Star Market. “He was in floor-length sable,” the woman said. “I swear it.”

  There was a blonde child loose. She was two or three years old, dressed in a doll’s version of the salon’s livery—a tiny smock and nylon trousers. She came stumpily over to me and offered a round complexion sponge pad.

  “My friend’s missing,” I told the little girl, who fitted the sponge into her mouth and left.

  Lolly returned by and by. “Hi,” she said cheerfully.

  “Is it O.K. you didn’t take out the curler rods?” I said. “That’s good? It means our hair isn’t getting scorched?”

  “I was once here with my father,” Lolly said absently. “I mean, here in D.C., of course. Father took me to dinner in Georgetown. This was over ten years ago, when we were in middle school. Anyway, Father saw John Mitchell in the restaurant where we were eating. Mitchell had been sick and he looked like the air had been let out of his face, although he was dressed in a very nice cashmere topcoat when he came in.”

  Lolly hoisted herself into her chair and swung sideways to face me. “Father said, ‘Sweetheart, that’s John Mitchell,’ and I said, ‘Who is John Mitchell?’”

  “Was everything O.K., Lolly?” I said. “Are our heads all right?”

  “Yeah,” Lolly said. “On that same night, in the ladies’ room in the same restaurant, written on the mirror there in crimson lipstick was ‘If you’re looking for the future, you’re looking in the right place.’”

  “Why is my scalp on fire?” I asked. I patted the spiky rollers. “What do I smell burning?”

  “You won’t believe this,” Lolly went on, “but the same woman just wrote the same thing in this washroom. Whoever she is. I mean, she could be here with us today.”

  Lolly and I peered around.

  I said, “Seriously, Lolly, could something be going wrong with my hair? Am I going to come out of this with a Mamie Eisenhower?”

  “Possibly,” Lolly said. “I think I should have told them I’m pregnant. It can make a difference as to what chemicals they dump on you.”

  “I’m worried,” I said.

  Lolly was slumped low on her spine now. She stretched her legs and yawned expansively. “I was just kidding. You’re completely fine,” she said.

  The hairdressers’ team conference had broken up. A man with Inca features and a brown line of beard came over to us.

  “All is well? Very bored?” he asked. He checked his gold wristwatch. The watch was nestled in several gold wrist chains. “Soon now,” he said.

  “Good, Kenny,” Lolly said. Her eyes were closed.

  “I’m glad I brought up the subject of the baby,” she said when Kenny had drifted on. “What’s your opinion of Doug, really?” Doug was the father. He and Lolly weren’t married. They weren’t even dating anymore.

  I studied my fingers, frowning some.

  “Come on, tell me—it’s O.K.,” she said. Her head bent forward. She was trying to get me to look at her. “He’s not husband material, is he?”

  “He wouldn’t be for me,” I said.

  “So that’s out,” Lolly said. “One down, out of several big decisions.”

  “Do you want a child, here and now?” I said. “On your income?”

  Lolly’s job was clerical, at the Library of Congress.

  “Next year I’ll be a G.S. three,” she said. “And besides, money isn’t quite at issue, thanks to my folks.” She had pushed back in her seat and thrown one long leg over the other. She was in the earnest posture of a talk-show host. “My mother and father could shelter us nicely and do a lot of the work, and they’d probably love it. The routine and the baby.”

  I was considering the other people in the shop. “Maybe the lipstick writer is one of the help,” I said. “Maybe a manicurist.”

  “I think my father would especially enjoy a grandchild. My little sister would get to be an aunt.”

  “The help?” I said. “Did I just say ‘the help’? See how you get me talking?”

  “Two different worlds,” Lolly said. She was mopey-sounding and hurt.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—do you know how stupid I feel right now in this stuff? I can’t discuss anything, looking like this, let alone som
ething like your entire future life!”

  Lolly seemed appeased. After a moment, she said, “I’ve thought about that lipstick message once a week, at least, every week of my life. And now here it is again.”

  “Well, people are funny,” I said.

  Lolly had reclaimed her magazine. She dabbed her thumb, with its steep lacquered nail, on her tongue and swished through pages. She said, “Yeah, like who’d guess from your appearance that you’re a life model?”

  A woman three chairs down tilted forward to stare at me.

  “I would think that, even for some of those college guys, you’re the first woman they’ve seen up close completely noodle,” Lolly said.

  One of my jobs is to model nude for the Francis Scott Key College adult-education evening art classes.

  I put my hand on the razor ad in Lolly’s magazine. “This is the last time I’ll explain it to you,” I said. “For me, the work is like an athletic event. It’s an endurance test. For the students in the class, I’m a headache, an equation to be solved. I’m their homework.”

  “I know,” Lolly said, and I could tell she wanted me to calm my voice.

  “One guy actually said he wished I’d gain weight, so there’d be less anatomy to draw and more volume,” I went on. “He said he does better with volume.”

  “Easy—just get pregnant,” Lolly said.

  I began to loosen my curler rods. “I want these out,” I said.

  “You cannot!” Lolly said. “They have a special way of removing those. You could end up bald.”

  The hairdresser, Kenny, hurried over. I was undoing the curlers and uncoiling damp squiggly hair. He started dripping neutralizer onto the curls I had undone. He said, “You pay anyway. I mean that emphatically.”

  “Attention!” I said to the room. “Who wrote that message on the bathroom mirror? Who of you here did that?”

  •

  We were going along Pennsylvania in a cab. Bits of snow, like flecks of paper ash, blurred the view. The avenue was hectic but festive with snow.

  “You’re not talking,” I said.

  “I’m so angry,” Lolly said. Her lips were pursed. “You know I’m not a conformist, but still. Do you have to be so stubborn, always making a statement? I think of looking attractive as a favor to others. I do it out of respect for my fellow beings. It’s considerate toward them.”