Yolanda fetched me the next morning as promised, taking me for the first time into Honey’s inner sanctum, where a version of Honey that I hadn’t met yet awaited me behind a sleek, minimalist white desk with gleaming steel legs. Hair swirled into a severe, Hitchcockian bun, she was trussed into a pinch-waisted cream business suit, chunky tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of her nose, slashing her way through a pile of papers with a mother-of-pearl fountain pen. As I walked across the vast room, the kitten heels of my leopard-print slingbacks sinking into the plush pile of the long-haired silk carpet, she put down the pen, propped the glasses up on her golden crown, and rose from her seat. “Come closer, let’s get a good look at you,” she said in her breathy baby voice.
Obediently, I approached, eyes lowered, afraid that they would betray the loathing for her that was eating me from the inside out. But when she cupped my chin with a soft, warm hand and cooed, “Poor baby, Mother is sorry that she had to hurt you,” my eyes silvered with tears. She sounded so sincere, and I yearned for a gentle touch, a sympathetic word. As I began to sob, she tenderly directed my head toward her shoulder until she saw the pink bubbles coming out my nose.
“Oh, be careful of my Nina Ricci,” she said, abruptly stepping away from me just as I was reaching my arms out to clutch at her.
I put a hand up to my nose and wiped away a stream of mucus threaded with blood. She pulled a clump of tissues out of a box sitting on her desk, handing them to me in a wad, while standing far enough away that a stray glob of mucus wouldn’t splatter on her.
“My nose has been doing that since…” I let my sentence hang as I sopped up the snot.
“Careful, careful, you don’t want to ruin Dr. Panzov’s handiwork,” she cautioned. “And watch your blouse!”
I looked down to see little pinprick dots of pink spotting the raw yellow silk. Rushing to the tissue box to tuck a few into the neckline, I squeaked, “I’m sorry, Honey.”
“Oh, well,” she said bravely, “that’s what Ting’s for. She’s no stranger to getting blood out.”
She seated herself in a chrome swivel chair padded in white leather and motioned for me to join her. There was no other chair behind the desk, and the ones scattered around the room were too cumbersome to move, so I stood behind her, staring down into the vertiginous eye of her shimmering bun. She settled the glasses—the first evidence I had that Honey was actually aging like a normal person—onto the knuckle of her nose.
“This,” she said with a wave of her manicured fingers, “is the master schedule.” It was a large desk calendar, each date crammed with annotations written in a rainbow of different-colored inks. “And this”—she tapped a leather appointment book—“is my daily programmer. You have one of your own. Now, where is it?” With an annoyed click of her tongue, she stabbed a button on an old-fashioned intercom with her mother-of-pearl pen.
“Yes, Madam?” Yolanda’s tinny voice blared in answer.
“Where is Lisa’s daily planner?” Honey shrieked.
“Right away, Madam,” Yolanda responded, and in another moment came through one of the many doors that paneled the room.
“Didn’t I tell you I wanted the appointment book waiting here for Lisa?” Honey harangued Yolanda.
“Sorry, Madam,” Yolanda apologized, handing me a daily planner. “I have also brought the vitamins that the Young Master has recommended for your health.” She placed an enameled pillbox in front of Honey.
“And how are we supposed to swallow them down? Honestly, Yolanda!”
As Yolanda bustled away, I called after her: “I think you made a mistake. This is a 2010 diary.”
“It’s not a mistake,” Honey said with a sigh. “It’s the best we could do at such short notice.”
“But how am I to coordinate with you when you have a 2011 calendar?” I asked, not unreasonably.
“Oh, Lisa, what does it matter?” she snapped. “Every month has the same number of days no matter the year. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, what difference does it make to you? Here, there are no days of the week, just dates.” However, the very next instant, she said, “Now, you and I are going to dine together every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday evening, so you can start by filling in those days in your daily planner.”
“But…” I meekly protested, offering my opened planner as evidence of the impossibility of the task.
“Oh, really!” Honey erupted in a strangled scream. “Must I do all your thinking for you?” Drilling a long nail onto the page of her own planner, she instructed in a voice boiling with impatience, “Start with tomorrow, which is Wednesday. As you can see by my planner, tomorrow is June 27. Now, in your planner put ‘Dinner with Mother at 7:00 p.m.’ Then count two more days, that’s Friday, so again at seven, ‘Dinner with Mother.’ Then two more days, that’s Sunday. Now on Sunday we eat dinner at six, so write ‘Dinner with Mother at 6:00.’ Now three more days, we’re back to Wednesday.”
I mechanically began to fill in the lines as she instructed, adding the initial of the day in a little circle next to each date just to be safe, but my mind was mostly preoccupied with the fact that it was the end of June already. Meaning I had been in captivity for three months. And that tomorrow was my birthday.
Meanwhile, Yolanda came mincing in with two glasses of orange juice, the pulp still swirling in the glass, as if she had just finished squeezing the juice from the fruit with her bare hands. She placed the glasses next to the pillbox.
I continued to scribble in my book, hoping that the extra glass of juice was for Yolanda and not me, that I would somehow escape Jonny’s vitamins. But it was not to be, as Honey flipped open the pillbox and tapped out two blue capsules. Throwing her head back, she popped one into her mouth, chasing it with the juice, and then held her hand out to me, her long nails curved like bamboo rain gutters, a blue capsule nestled in the center of her palm. I put the glass of orange juice up to my lips defensively.
“Take it. On Jonny’s recommendation. He says it’s like a health supplement, you know, essence of kale, green tea, and gingko, or something like that. We have a very sophisticated pharmaceutical industry, and Jonny is always bringing me new wonder drugs to try.” She batted her aquamarine eyes at me, not caring if I believed her or not. “Go on and try it. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you feel its benefits.”
I took another stalling sip of juice. A ripple of annoyance fractured the glossy line of her lips. I pinched the pill from her palm. She watched as I slipped the pill between my lips, gagging briefly as it stuck at the back of my throat before flushing it down with a gulp of juice. She rewarded me with a dazzling smile.
“Good girl. Now”—she resettled the glasses on her nose and peered down at her desk calendar—“where were we? Oh, yes, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons you will spend with Cookie. I feel he has made so much progress under your tutelage. You should both be proud.”
Another tender smile. I found the date after the Wednesday dinner, writing in Cookie in large letters in the P.M. hours, skipping the next day to write the same thing on what was supposed to be Saturday.
“Don’t worry, you can fill in the rest of the planner during your office hours, which are to be Monday through Friday, nine to five, with an hour break for lunch, which will be taken in your room, from twelve to one. That is, when you are not here with me or in the kitchen with Cookie.”
“Where will my office be?” I inquired, shifting from foot to foot, my calves tired from balancing my heels in the sinking softness of the carpet.
“Don’t interrupt.” She lifted a warning finger in the air. “You and I will meet every Tuesday and Thursday from ten to noon, after which we will eat lunch together, just the two of us.” Her nails scratched against the paper of the desk planner, a dry, grating sound that irritated my ears. “If there is a lot of business to go over, we may extend our meetings after lunch.”
“Except I can’t on Thursdays,” I muttered as I scribbled away. “Because that’s when I help…” The
look she gave me strangled the words in my throat. “Of course, if that happens, Cookie will understand why I can’t be there,” I hastily noted.
“All right, now as to your office,” Honey said, tenting her fingers together as she leaned back in her chair. “Yolanda will take you there when we are done. This is a big step for you, as you will get your first clearance to use the ocular scanner. Mind you, it is only for entrance to two doors and not to exit, but I thought it was appropriate to give you a taste of the freedom that your loyalty will earn you.”
“Oh, thank you, Honey,” I said breathlessly, moved that she trusted me, a feeling of warmth and goodwill stealing over my body, along with an outbreak of goose bumps. My palms were sweaty, and my fingers kept slipping down the smooth casing of the pen. I paused to wipe my hands on my skirt. Looking down, I noticed the bib of tissues still tucked into my neckline and plucked them free. “Forgot about these,” I tittered. My heart began to pirouette in my rib cage like a ballerina. Jonny’s vitamin was beginning to take effect. “I must have looked pretty silly.”
“You still look silly with that pink mustache under your nose,” Honey teased me.
Gasping, I flitted over to the large gilt-framed mirror that she had hanging from a wall, to see that I did indeed have a lopsided mustache of dried pink mucus smearing up one cheek.
“Come here, baby,” Honey called, spitting on a tissue and wiping it daintily across my upper lip. Her fingers hummed with a fine vibration, and I held out my hand to see it humming in answer to hers. “There, all better.” She gave me an affectionate pat to my cheek.
“Except for my eyes,” I reminded her, grinning goofily.
“Yes, they do look pretty awful,” she admitted. “But it was worth it, wasn’t it, baby?”
“Of course it was,” I assured her, not because I agreed, but because I suddenly understood my mother on an elemental level, almost as if my nerve endings had jumped into her body and I was feeling what she felt, which was lightness, affection, a great, glowing, expanding love. She was me and I was her, and we were joined together as one organism by a pulsing, all-encompassing love.
Reaching into her cleavage to retrieve a small golden key, Honey exulted, “Now for the fun part.” Fitting the key into the desk drawer, she slid it open to reveal a laptop computer. I was so excited to see that computer that I bunched my hands into fists and did a little jig, which fortunately Honey did not see, as she was flipping open the laptop and staring entranced as it sprang into life with a dramatic crashing chord. Scooping it up, she beckoned me to follow her as we went through a door into a cubbyhole of a room that was scattered with brightly colored cushions and what looked like harem furniture: divans and ottomans covered in lush gold-flocked silks of magenta and crimson. She settled onto a divan and patted the space next to her. I sank into the deep cushions, and we leaned against each other, the crown of my head nestling into the crook of her neck, as she began to navigate her clumsy way on to the internet, having to go through a number of sign-ins on blank gray pages, the text displayed in blocky letters like the WordPerfect programs of my extreme youth. Several times she typed in the wrong thing and was taken back to the beginning, and I bit my lip to hold myself back from taking control of the machine, which she approached like an uneasy lion tamer, keyboard strokes hesitant and uncertain, muttering instructions to herself under her breath. But then, all of a sudden, there she was, on the internet, YouTube her homepage.
“Oh, wait, wait, before we go any further let me show you this,” she squealed, and called up a video of two red-cheeked babies in diapers goo-goo-ga-ga-ing at each other as if they were having a real conversation. Oh, we found that hilarious, clutching at each other until I gasped, “My nose, my nose,” and we both tried to quell our giggles. That led to another video of a computer-animated cat with a Pop-Tart body flying through the air, trailing a rainbow, to the sound track of Nya-na-na-nya-nya-na.
“Oh god,” I moaned, gently dabbing at my puffed-wheat eyes with the tassel of one of her harem cushions, “I love the internet!” Then we watched a fat guy in a tight Speedo do a belly flop, five guys in monkey masks do a dance, and a mother cat and her kitten hug each other in their sleep.
“Oh, I discovered the funniest thing the other day,” Honey shrieked, pecking a new address into the browser with two fingers. After a few tries, she came up with the proper page and then had to find what she was looking for, me all the while rubbing my sweaty palms on my lap, using every ounce of self-discipline I had to keep from seizing the softly humming machine so that we could get on with it. “This is hilarious! Photos of Lindsay Lohan falling down in front of a club in LA. If you click on the photos quickly, it’s like a movie clip.” As she tapped quickly with a vermilion nail, I watched an obviously inebriated young woman, eyes lidded, mouth slack, ricochet among some bystanders, take a few lurching steps into empty space, and then whoopsy-daisy to the ground.
I felt bad for her, imagining what the paparazzi would have captured of me on a night out on the town, but following Honey’s lead, I chortled gleefully. “Poor LiLo. It’s sad.”
“Lilo!” Honey screeched. “Yes, it’s perfect!” Boff-boff-boff, she lightly slapped me with both sides of her hand on my upper arm.
“What’s perfect?” I tried to stretch my eyes in imitation of her wide-eyed girlish delight.
“As a nickname! For you!” Her eyes grew and grew until they threatened to swallow up her whole face.
It seemed like a bad omen to share a nickname with a young woman rumored to suffer from substance abuse problems. “Yeah, but isn’t a nickname supposed to be a shortening of the name? Lilo just substitutes one syllable of my name for another.”
“No, no! Nicknames are affectionate names that are some sort of a corruption of the person’s original name. Or, as in my case, illustrate a person’s character or most striking physical feature. Honey is just as long as Mary, but Honey radiates more warmth and intimacy. It notes that I am blond and sweet. It’s a sign of a special bond between me and the person who calls me Honey.” She snapped my elbow with her nails. I was quickly discovering that to be Honey’s pal was to be her human punching bag.
I opened my mouth to protest, but just then Yolanda came sweeping into the room. She pretended not to see the cozy couple we made on the couch, our arms intertwined, our sides heaving with hilarity, our skirts riding up to our thighs. “Lunchtime, Madam,” she announced.
Seized by inspiration, I announced, “Well, if I’m to be Lilo, then Yolanda must be Yoyo.”
“Yoyo!” Honey screamed. “I love it!” Skidding thumb and finger over the corners of her mouth to wipe away the webbing of dry-mouth gunk that had accumulated there, Honey said to me, “I’m not hungry. Are you hungry?”
I groped around at my stomach as if feeling whether I was hungry. My esophagus felt tight, closed, like something was crawling up it, blocking the passageway for anything trying to go down. “No,” I said, my words clicking from my dry throat. “I am not at all hungry.”
Ignoring me, Yolanda said in a surprisingly bossy tone, “Cookie has made you a wonderful lunch, Madam. Please come to the table to eat it.”
“Oh, all right, Yoyo,” Honey groaned, extricating her limbs from mine and wriggling into a standing position.
We moved deeper into the sanctum, to a conservatory with a big picture window that looked out upon a Japanese-style rock garden, the room itself bright with white wicker furniture and highly burnished copper shelves from which arched an array of orchids, their sumptuous scent sugaring the air. The table was laid with lunch already: a small bowl of thick white soup dotted with chives, a pear and walnut salad, and crustless white bread tea sandwiches. “It’s all so white,” I marveled, holding a hand up to shield my eyes.
“I like white!” Honey exclaimed, settling into a wicker chair. “This is new!” She dipped her spoon into the soup. “What is it?” Her tongue, as white as the soup, flicked out. “It’s cold!” she shrieked. “Yoyo, what’s the meaning
of this?”
“Wait, wait, I think I know!” I said, anxious to save Miura-san from a berating. “It’s vichyssoise. We looked up the recipe, thinking it an elegant way to beat the heat of summer.”
My teeth began to chatter, my muscles contracting with a quick shiver that was gone almost as soon as it came upon me. We dabbed our tongues into the soup, took tiny bites from the sandwiches, ate a slice of pear or two, but that was all we could manage.
My office was a small, windowless cubicle much like the room where I had awoken to a new nose. In fact, I thought it might be the same room, as I recognized a tiny patch of air-bubbled paint in the far right corner, which would have been right across from where my head lay when there was a cot in the room. Instead of the cot, there was a simple wooden desk, no drawers, with a single ballpoint pen and my daily planner on it. Yolanda showed me how to look into the glowing panel of the scanner to release the door, instructing me to raise my eyebrows in order to expose more of my eyeball. She explained that I now had access to enter both my office and bedroom, but not to get out, and that I’d need to remember to leave the door propped open if I didn’t want to get trapped in my cubicle all day. Through the open door, I could hear the occasional gust of wind that swept through the hallway with a whooshing, haunted howl, the only sound to break the silence until the bellicose beat of Yolanda’s approaching footsteps.
I spent my first day of work obediently filling in the planner until December 31, as per Honey’s directions. According to the daily planner, it was my birthday. I was twenty-eight years old. A little panic fluttered like a trapped bird in my chest when I thought about the passing time. Every day I was gone I receded a little further into oblivion. Each day that passed my scent grew colder, the memory of me fainter, and the idea that I would never return grew stronger. I was certain, on this first birthday of my disappearance, my mother had baked the chocolate marshmallow cookies that she made every year for my birthday, mailing them to me halfway around the world if she had to, and Mindy had selected another sumptuous journal as a gift, just as she had done every year since we had decided that I was going to be a writer. But what about next year, and the year after that? How long until they lost all hope that I was alive and consigned me to the ash heap of history? How long until they stopped baking me cookies and buying me journals?
Famous Adopted People Page 24