Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  As she lifted her hand to dab, Sassy pulled back. “Lydia, this is silly.”

  “Is it as silly as seeing a budgie in the mirror?”

  Sassy sighed and closed her eyes, letting Lydia paint her.

  At the first touch her face felt more real. Which was odd, because there is nothing more fake than makeup—is there? But Sassy belayed such thoughts, halted mental activity of any kind, her focus all on the soft dab stroke feathertouch of Lydia’s fingers smoothing creamy quiddity onto the skin of her brow, temple, cheeks, chin. It felt wonderful. Sassy closed her eyes and soaked it in as if—as if—starved, that was it, like a plant starved for rain, like—Most of my life, Sassy realized with a pang of hindsight, I have been starved for touch. Such a simple, nurturing thing, human touch. Such a peaceful, right thing, to sit back feeling Lydia coloring her eyebrows almost hair by hair, hearing only her own breathing and the twittering of the birds, many many birds. Forest, Sassy thought hazily. Canopy. Ivy, ferns, butterflies drifting up like black sparks.

  Lydia said, “Open your eyes a minute so I can see what shadow to use.”

  Sassy blinked. For a moment everything looked strange because it was not the forest, just Lydia’s apartment. Cages. Ripped magazines, poopy newspaper. Ezekial dinging his bell. Dirty birds.

  Lydia stared into her eyes with a frown that deepened into a trembling pout as if Lydia wanted to cry. Very low, Lydia said, “Sassy, do you have an eye color?”

  “Of course.” Didn’t she? “Kind of greenish, last time I noticed.”

  “When was that?”

  “When was what?”

  “When was the last time you noticed?”

  “I guess it’s been a while.” Might have been years ago. Sassy didn’t want to think about it. She closed her eyes again.

  It might have been a brush or a Q-Tip or Lydia’s gentle fingertip feathering the color onto her eyelids. So soft. So pleasant, like holding a kitten. Funny, she felt younger. Sassy sat for a moment not wanting to let the feeling go when Lydia said, “Okay, all done.”

  Then she opened her eyes and said, “Lydia. What you asked me before, how I turned into such a nebbish—I think it was a wife thing.”

  The big woman stared back at her with stolid noncomprehension.

  “Frederick was always hitting on hoochie girls,” Sassy explained.

  “Hoochie girls?”

  “High-maintenance skinny baby chickies. At first I tried to compete, but—it all seemed so shallow—after a while I just kind of said, I’m your wife, deal with it. I mean, I never said that. We always tried to pretend he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just said it with the way I looked.”

  “Huh.” Lydia glanced down at herself, then looked straight into Sassy’s face and grinned. “I never been married. What’s my excuse?”

  Sassy looked at Lydia’s eyes. Warm, shining brown, like woodland pools. “You’re not missing anything important.”

  “Take your word for it. But how come nobody ever wanted me?”

  Huh. Was it worse to be wanted then dumped, or never to be wanted at all? For a moment, forced outside her dismal focus on herself, Sassy felt weightless, relieved, and at the same time her heart went out to Lydia.

  “Men are stupid,” she said.

  “That kind of sums it up, don’t it?”

  No, it didn’t, really. It was unfair and she knew it. But—such being the case, why did it feel so good?

  It felt so terrific that she said it again, theme and variations. “Men are jerks.”

  “Amen. Can’t live with ’em and can’t live without ’em.”

  Although Lydia had lived without ’em, evidently. “I guess in a way you’ve had it worse than I have,” Sassy said.

  Lydia shrugged. “Life shouldn’t be no pain contest.”

  It was a sentence worthy to be expensively framed and hung on a prominent wall. But before Sassy could absorb it or respond, “Twee!” cried a familiar voice. “Twee! Twee! Twee!” Kleet, skreeking his excitement, zoomed to her head, landed in her hair, and pooped.

  “Too bad you can’t see how nice you look,” Lydia said.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I put green eye shadow on you.”

  Put that together with red lipstick and probably Kleet thought he was seeing a Christmas tree. “Thank you,” Sassy said.

  “I wish I could do something about your hair.” Lydia meant its limp-squirrel look, probably, not the bird poop; all she had to do about that was hand over a Kleenex.

  “Kleet seems to like the general effect just fine,” Sassy told her.

  Crossing the lobby of the Sylvan Tower after dark, with her shoe box full of face-crayons tucked under her arm and Kleet hidden under her coat, Sassy wondered what kind of job Lydia had done on her, how she looked. Judging by the way the guests idling at terrace cafés turned their aristocratic heads to stare at her, she had to look clownish, if not downright demented.

  Demented seemed preferable. And if they didn’t think she was demented now, they were going to know it after they saw what she had decided to try.

  She needed a big mirror.

  Passing the elevators, she stopped as she caught sight of the massive neon-lit decorator mirrors that sheathed the shaft. Their darkly golden depths called up within her a resonance she could not name. She had not meant to make her attempt in such a public area, but—who cared. Parting her coat to let Kleet perch on her shoulder, she opened her shoe box, letting the lid drop to the floor. She chose the brightest lipstick she could find—Flame Cerise, the label said—and wielding it like a sword of fire, she swept it outward and upward to the fullest extent of her arm as she red-limned a large oval on the mirror.

  She liked it at once, her hefty lipstick oval. Not perfect, more of an egg shape, but—egg, ova, ovum, oval, wasn’t it all the same thing? Fertility. Life. She grabbed a different lipstick, Tangerine Coral, and added scallops and curlicues to the rim of her oval. So far, so good. No one was bothering her yet, although she could feel people staring.

  But nothing was happening in the mirror yet, either. In the oval, only her budgie looked back at her, one foot tucked up, content to be seen with penciled brows, green smudges above its eyes and red ones on its cheeks, a bright pink smile outlining its beak.

  “Um, honey, what are you doing?” came a tentative voice, sounded like one of the other maids, from behind her.

  “Nothing.” She didn’t even bother to turn and see who it was, just grabbed some more lipsticks: Pearl White, Wild Fuchsia, Raisin, Kiwi Kiss, Tropical Yellow. Confound it, if nothing was going to appear in her nice extemporaneous oval, she’d make something there. As Kleet beat his wings and chirped like a cheerleader, Sassy scrawled a pale oval face surrounding the smiling blue budgie in the mirror, then sketched in a mess of yellow-taupe hair, tilted green eyes, a full-lipped fuchsia mouth. Below the face she added a flow of green-gold gown, and for some subrational reason a pair of shining pearly wings—

  “Sassy,” said an all-too-familiar voice, “there you are. I’m concerned about you. You’ve been acting very oddly.”

  Sassy did not turn around. This was important, she couldn’t let Frederick interrupt, she just couldn’t, ignore him and maybe, Oh Lord please, maybe he’ll go away.

  “Saying I don’t have any, you know,” Frederick continued, sounding more peevish than concerned. “I do so.”

  Feverishly Sassy continued with white lipstick, feathering the strange angel’s wings.

  “Sassy, are you listening to me? What—” Frederick’s tone changed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing!” Sassy could not withstand that bark of wrath. She jerked back from her artwork and whirled, flinching, to face Frederick.

  Why his anger still frightened her she couldn’t say, but it did. That sulky mouth, those narrow eyes—but when he caught sight of her face, his slitty eyes opened almost to normal wideness, and he spazzed into a fit of giggling.

  The Wrath of Frede
rick would have been easier to bear. Or if he had given forth a manly roar of laughter, like a real husband and not a twit, even that would have been more bearable in front of all these people—quite a few people had gathered, staring at Sassy and her artwork and now at Frederick making an ass of himself. How very Frederick: he giggle-giggled, burping out guinea-pig squeaks and squeals the way he had always done whenever he thought he was bad-boy hot stuff, whenever he and Sassy had run into a girl he was hitting on, whenever he had told her that Binky-poo was just a friend. Giggle, giggle, giggle, with his face turning rosy pink beneath the freckles, with his pudgy belly shaking. Giggle SNORT giggle giggle HICCUP giggle some more, and the spectacle of his giggling froze Sassy, as it always had. You can accuse someone of being mean or unfaithful, but how can you accuse him of giggling? How can you tell someone not to giggle like a jerk? Wasn’t giggling in the Bill of Rights, like sneezing? You can’t tell people not to giggle or sneeze. So Sassy had never known what to say. Even now she still didn’t know what to say.

  “Why, Sassy,” Frederick squealed out between giggles, “you’ve got yourself all fixed up! For me?”

  Sassy stood wooden, feeling Kleet perched as stiff as a dildo on her shoulder but herself unable to react in any way.

  “Fuck you with a donkey dick,” said a voice that was hers yet not hers. It came from the mirror.

  Frederick stopped giggling with a grunt. Sassy gasped and whirled to look into the lipstick oval, where—oh, thank Lydia and all goodness, it was her, her, the one with shining wings and laughing eyes and a Julia-Roberts grin, it was the one who never touched the ground, the one Sassy did not yet know how to name, the treetop shadow angel who would take her back to the paradise of lost—

  “What did you say?” roared Frederick’s voice.

  For once Sassy did not lose herself to his anger. She did not even turn around to see whether he was blustering at her or at the mirror. It didn’t matter; she didn’t care. She gave a glad, birdlike cry, and Kleet gave a joyous call that sounded almost human. He whirred off of Sassy’s shoulder and flew for the mirror, and she flew at the same time, lunging toward paradise, hands outstretched. The vision in the mirror reached out to welcome her.

  “I said fuck you, limpie,” she heard that angel luscious Julia-Roberts voice retort to Frederick as the mirror embraced her and took her in, and Sassy found herself laughing, laughing rich and deep from the gut, from the bone.

  Trying to stalk silently like the other outlaws amid towering trees—were they really redwoods?—Racquel turned his head, hearing a sound that was definitely not birdsong.

  “Hark!” Robin heard it too. He paused, hearkening. So did the others.

  “Hark unto a lamentation most sore!” cried Much.

  “’Tis the woeful plaint of a damsel in distress!” quoth Little John.

  “Somebody’s crying,” Racquel said.

  “Well and quaintly put, my Moorish friend,” declared Robin. “To the rescue, my merry men!”

  Half a dozen merry men and one Moor in jerkin and hose changed course and followed the sound of sobbing on the wind. Carrying the longbow Robin had given him, Racquel managed to catch the damn thing on every bush and vine. Robin’s solution to Racquel’s difficulties seemed to consist of adopting Racquel as an outlaw. In a mere half a day Racquel had learned to loathe the woods even more than before. Damn trees tripping him up with their roots all the time, poking twigs in his face. Damn rocks hurting his sore feet, damn condescending moss, damn smiling flowers, damn chirpy birds, and most of all, damn shabby jerkin and damn darned itchy woolen hose, making him look like Prince Bumpo or somebody. If the girl who was crying saw him she’d probably die laughing.

  He tried to hurry his footsore, blundering pace; what was the matter, what had happened to her? The sound of her sobbing wrenched his heart.

  Very near now—

  At the edge of the woods above the waterfall, all of them except Racquel halted in mute astonishment. Racquel dropped his bow and lunged forward, crying, “Sassy!”

  “She weeps green!” blurted one of the merry men.

  Sassy turned toward them a face like a melting rainbow, dripping apple-green and cerulean eye shadow, peach foundation and pink blush. With her glasses in her hand, she sprawled like Wyeth’s Christina in the soft grass at the edge of the falls, and on her shoulder perched a very concerned-looking parakeet.

  An outlaw babbled, “Is that a damsel? But—but it wears trousers!”

  “It bears feathers instead of hair!”

  “The thing has an orange face under its azure tears! Is it human?”

  Sassy gave them a glare worthy of an orangutan and wailed, “Damn it, she was just here! Where’d she go?”

  “It cries out like a human,” said Robin Hood.

  One of the outlaws declared in lightbulb tones, “’Tis tincture on its face, forsooth. Woad and the like, such as the barbarians use.”

  “By my troth, ’tis verily so!”

  “He speaks truth.”

  “Is it a barbarian, then?”

  “Sassy.” Boggled by the strength of his own emotions, Racquel reached her, folded to the grass beside her and put his arms around her. She nestled against his chest, probably getting lipstick on his nice new Lincoln-green jerkin, and he tried to stroke her hair. The parakeet fluttered to her head, gave a screech and pecked at his hand. “Okay, okay!” he told it.

  “Sassy,” he begged, “what’s the matter?”

  She heaved her thin shoulders in a sigh with an air of finality to it and stopped crying. “Oh, poop,” she muttered to his chest.

  “No, thank you, I already pooped today.” And it was no very pleasant experience, not in the woods, not by his standards. He hoped they didn’t have poison ivy here. The stuff he had wiped with had three shiny leaves. “What’s wrong, woman?”

  She sat up to look at him, rubbing her colorful face with her sleeve, and gave him a small blurred smile, but did not answer.

  “You found your parakeet!” It finally registered with Racquel that the possessive budgie was a green parakeet with a yellow head. The parakeet for which she had been questing. The parakeet they had rescued from the mist net in the hotel—God, that seemed so long ago and far away.

  “Yes, and I found you.” Her smile widened slightly. “Or you found me. Love your shoes, dahling.”

  “They’re called pampooties,” Racquel complained of his soft buckskin footgear, “and Daniel Boone would have felt right at home in them, but I do not. Would you please stop stalling? Tell me what’s got you so bummed.”

  Sassy perceptibly clouded up to rain again. She looked away toward the treetops.

  “Yes?” Racquel prompted.

  “She brought me back,” Sassy said in a voice barely above a whisper. “She took me in her arms, she called Frederick a limpie and she—she saved me. She pulled me into the mirror and there I was lying by the oval pool. And I got up and turned to thank her, I saw her for just one glimpse and she made a face at me and then she was gone. Just that quick she was gone. And I’ve been hunting all over creation for her but I can’t find her.”

  TWELVE

  He looks good in tights, Sassy thought, as she crouched by the riverside above the waterfall and stole glances at Racquel. He was gathering mushrooms for a snack, and as he bent over, Sassy admired his butt, then averted her gaze, feeling a twinge of guilt. Since when did she look at young men that way? She was old enough to be his mother. Anyway, this was Racquel, minus his fancy female feathers, that was all. Sassy focused on serene water flowing at her knees—her blue budgie blinked back at her, its pink-lipstick smile blurred and sagging. Sassy sighed, shattered the reflection by dipping her hands in the river, and washed her face. The cold water quieted the stinging in her eyes and, she hoped, removed the runny remains of Lydia’s makeover job.

  Racquel limped back carrying two mushrooms like creamsicle-colored portabellas, one in each hand. The outlaws had discreetly taken themselves off somewhere—probably s
till babbling about her barbaric face paint, Sassy thought. Standing up, she asked Racquel, “Did I get it all off?”

  “You look fine.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “Sassy, who cares? So you look like a watercolor rainbow, so what? You can use some color.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she said with edge, turning back toward the water.

  “Sassy, let it go! If I can go around in this getup, you can have some makeup on you.” Racquel chose a level patch of sward and settled himself cross-legged. “Sit, for God’s sake. You look about ready to fall over.”

  Sassy sighed and sat with him. “Do you think I’ve lost weight?”

  “Who says you need to lose weight?”

  God love him. Sassy found herself smiling.

  He handed her a mushroom. “So give me a full report, woman.”

  She did. She told him about Frederick, about her own unsatisfactory responses to Frederick, about the cop (omitting her inquiry about Devon Shelton’s family), about Lydia. Kleet sat on her knee, stiffly erect, keeping a hard, beady gaze fixed on Racquel as Sassy talked and ate. “He doesn’t like you,” Sassy said, bemused.

  “Great. He’s a bigot bird. Whites only.”

  “I don’t think it’s that,” Sassy blurted, appalled. “I think he’s jealous, that’s all. According to Lydia, I’m his mate.”

  “You’re confused,” Racquel complained to Kleet. “You’re supposed to give her back her reflection.”

  Sassy said, “It—it’s not just that anymore.” First she had thought that if she could only find the parakeet it would solve everything. Then, when she had stranded Racquel in the forest of lost dreams, she had thought if she could only find him again she wouldn’t care about anything else. Now …

  “So what is it now?” Racquel asked.

  In stumbling words she tried to tell him about the lipstick epiphany at the hotel mirror, about—her. Lord, what was it about that sassy young thing in the mirror that brought tears to her eyes again just thinking of her? If she couldn’t find her again, she might as well lie down and die. It was that simple and that desperate, this yearning. “She—hugged me …” Trying to speak of her strange shadow angel, Sassy choked up too much to say any more.