by Kelly Link
In the past two months the tap-dancing robbers have kept busy. Who are these masked women? Speculation is rife. All dance performances, modern, classical, even student rehearsals, are well-attended. Banks have become popular places to go on dates or on weekdays, during lunch. Some people bring roses to throw. The girl detective is reportedly working on the case.
Secret origins of the girl detective.
Some people say that she doesn’t exist. Someone once suggested that I was the girl detective, but I’ve never known whether or not they were serious. At least I don’t think that I am the girl detective. If I were the girl detective, I would surely know.
Things happen.
When the girl detective leaves her father’s house one morning, a man is lurking outside. I’ve been watching him for a while now from my tree. I’m a little stiff, but happy to be here. He’s a fat man with pouched, beautiful eyes. He sighs heavily a few times. He takes the girl detective by the arm. Can I tell you a story, he says.
All right, says the girl detective politely. She takes her arm back, sits down on the front steps. The man sits down beside her and lights a smelly cigar.
The girl detective saves the world.
The girl detective has saved the world on at least three separate occasions. Not that she is bragging.
The girl detective doesn’t care for fiction.
The girl detective doesn’t actually read much. She doesn’t have the time. Her father used to read fairy tales to her when she was little. She didn’t like them. For example, the twelve dancing princesses. If their father really wants to stop them, why doesn’t he just forbid the royal shoemaker to make them any more dancing shoes? Why do they have to go underground to dance? Don’t they have a ballroom? Do they like dancing or are they secretly relieved when they get caught? Who taught them to dance?
The girl detective has thought a lot about the twelve dancing princesses. She and the princesses have a few things in common. For instance, shoe leather. Possibly underwear. Also, no mother. This is another thing about fiction, fairy tales in particular. The mother is usually missing. The girl detective imagines, all of a sudden, all of these mothers. They’re all in the same place. They’re far away, some place she can’t find them. It infuriates her. What are they up to, all of these mothers?
The fat man’s story.
This man has twelve daughters, says the fat man. All of them lookers. Nice gams. He’s a rich man but he doesn’t have a wife. He has to take care of the girls all by himself. He does the best he can. The oldest one is still living at home when the youngest one graduates from high school. This makes their father happy. How can he take care of them if they move away from home?
But strange things start to happen. The girls all sleep in the same bedroom, which is fine, no problem, because they all get along great. But then the girls start to sleep all day. He can’t wake them up. It’s as if they’ve been drugged. He brings in specialists. The specialists all shake their heads.
At night the girls wake up. They’re perky. Affectionate. They apply makeup. They whisper and giggle. They eat dinner with their father, and everyone pretends that everything’s normal. At bedtime they go to their room and lock the door, and in the morning when their father knocks on the door to wake them up, gently at first, tapping, then harder, begging them to open the door, beside each bed is a worn-out pair of dancing shoes.
Here’s the thing. He’s never even bought them dancing lessons. They all took horseback riding, tennis, those classes where you learn to make dollhouse furniture out of cigarette boxes and doilies.
So he hires a detective. Me, says the fat man – you wouldn’t think it, but I used to be young and handsome and quick on my feet. I used to be a pretty good dancer myself.
The man puffs on his cigar. Are you getting all this? the girl detective calls to me, where I’m sitting up in the tree. I nod. Why don’t you take a hike, she says.
Why we love the girl detective.
We love the girl detective because she reminds us of the children we wish we had. She is courteous, but also brave. She loathes injustice; she is passionate, but also well-groomed. She keeps her room neat, but not too neat. She feeds her goldfish. She will get good grades, keep her curfew when it doesn’t interfere with fighting crime. She’ll come home from an Ivy League college on weekends to do her laundry.
She reminds us of the girl we hope to marry one day. If we ask her, she will take care of us, cook us nutritious meals, find our car keys when we’ve misplaced them. The girl detective is good at finding things. She will balance the checkbook, plan vacations, and occasionally meet us at the door when we come home from work, wearing nothing but a blue ribbon in her hair. She will fill our eyes. We will bury our faces in her dark, light, silky, curled, frizzed, teased, short, shining, long, shining hair. Tangerine, clove, russet, coal-colored, oxblood, buttercup, clay-colored, tallow, titian, lampblack, sooty, scented hair. The color of her hair will always inflame us.
She reminds us of our mothers.
DANCE WITH BEAUTIFUL GIRLS
The father hides me in the closet one night, and I wait until the girls, they all come to bed. It’s a big closet. And it smells nice, like girl sweat and cloves and mothballs. I hold onto the sleeve of someone’s dress to balance while I’m looking through the keyhole. Don’t think I don’t go through all the pockets. But all I find is a marble and a deck of cards with the Queen of Spades missing, a napkin folded into a swan maybe, a box of matches from a Chinese restaurant.
I look through the keyhole, maybe I’m hoping to see one or two of them take off their clothes, but instead they lock the bedroom door and move one of the beds, knock on the floor and guess what? There’s a secret passageway. Down they go, one after the other. They look so demure, like they’re going to Sunday School.
I wait a bit and then I follow them. The passageway is plaster and bricks first, and then it’s dirt with packed walls. The walls open up and we could be walking along, all of us holding hands if we wanted to. It’s pretty dark, but each girl has a flashlight. I follow the twelve pairs of feet in twelve new pairs of kid leather dancing shoes, each in its own little puddle of light. I stretch my hands up and I stand on my toes, but I can’t feel the roof of the tunnel anymore. There’s a breeze, raising the hair on my neck.
Up till then I think I know this city pretty well, but we go down and down, me after the last girl, the youngest, and when at last the passageway levels out, we’re in a forest. There’s this moss on the trunk of the trees, which glows. It looks like paradise by the light of the moss. The ground is soft like velvet, and the air tastes good. I think I must be dreaming, but I reach up and break off a branch.
The youngest girl hears the branch snap and she turns around, but I’ve ducked behind a tree. So she goes on and we go on.
Then we come to a river. Down by the bank there are twelve young men, Oriental, gangsters by the look of ‘em, black hair slicked back, smooth-faced in the dim light, and I can see they’re all wearing guns under their nice dinner jackets. I stay back in the trees. I think maybe it’s the white slave trade, but the girls go peaceful, and they’re smiling and laughing with their escorts, so I stay back in the trees and think for a bit. Each man rows one of the girls across the river in a little canoe. Me, I wait a while and then I get in a canoe and start rowing myself across, quiet as I can. The water is black and there’s a bit of a current, as if it knows where it’s going. I don’t quite trust this water. I get close to the last boat with the youngest girl in it and water from my oar splashes up and gets her face wet, I guess, because she says to the man, someone’s out there.
Alligator, maybe, he says, and I swear he looks just like the waiter who brought me orange chicken in that new restaurant downtown. I’m so close, I swear they must see me, but they don’t seem to. Or maybe they’re just being polite.
We all get out on the other side and there’s a nightclub all lit up with paper lanterns on the veranda. Men and women are standing out on the
veranda, and there’s a band playing inside. It’s the kind of music that makes you start tapping your feet. It gets inside me and starts knocking inside my head. By now I think the girls must have seen me, but they don’t look at me. They seem to be ignoring me. “Well, here they are,” this one woman says. “Hello, girls.” She’s tall, and so beautiful she looks like a movie star, but she’s stern-looking too, like she probably plays villains. She’s wearing one of them tight silky dresses with dragons on it, but she’s not Oriental.
“Now let’s get started,” she says. Over the door of the nightclub is a sign. DANCE WITH BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. They go in. I wait a bit and go in, too.
I dance with the oldest and I dance with the youngest and of course they pretend that they don’t know me, but they think I dance pretty fine. We shimmy and we grind, we bump and we do the Charleston. This girl she opens up her legs for me but she’s got her hands down in an X, and then her knees are back together and her arms fly open like she’s going to grab me, and then her hands are crossing over and back on her knees again. I lift her up in the air by her armpits and her skirt flies up. She’s standing on the air like it was solid as the dance floor, and when I put her back down, she moves on the floor like it was air. She just floats. Her feet are tapping the whole time and sparks are flying up from her shoes and my shoes and everybody’s shoes. I dance with a lot of girls and they’re all beautiful, just like the sign says, even the ones who aren’t. And when the band starts to sound tired, I sneak out the door and back across the river, back through the forest, back up the secret passageway into the girls’ bedroom.
I get back in the closet and wipe my face on someone’s dress. The sweat is dripping off me. Pretty soon the girls come home too, limping a little bit, but smiling. They sit down on their beds and they take off their shoes. Sure enough, their shoes are worn right through. Mine aren’t much better.
That’s when I step out of the closet and while they’re all screaming, lamenting, shrieking, scolding, yelling, cursing, I unlock the bedroom door and let their father in. He’s been waiting there all night. He’s hangdog. There are circles under his eyes. Did you follow them? he says.
I did, I say.
Did you stick to them? he says. He won’t look at them.
I did, I say. I give him the branch. A little bit later, when I get to know the oldest girl, we get married. We go out dancing almost every night, but I never see that club again.
There are two kinds of names.
The girl detective has learned to distrust certain people. People who don’t blink enough, for example. People who don’t fidget. People who dance too well. People who are too fat or too thin. People who cry and don’t need to blow their noses afterwards. People with certain kinds of names are prone to wild and extravagant behavior. Sometimes they turn to a life of crime. If only their parents had been more thoughtful. These people have names like Bernadette, Sylvester, Arabella, Apocolopus, Thaddeus, Gertrude, Gomez, Xavier, Xerxes. Flora. They wear sinister lipsticks, plot world destruction, ride to the hounds, take up archery instead of bowling. They steal inheritances, wear false teeth, hide wills, shoplift, plot murders, take off their clothes and dance on tables in crowded bars just after everyone has gotten off work.
On the other hand, it doesn’t do to trust people named George or Maxine, or Sandra, or Bradley. People with names like this are obviously hiding something. Men who limp. Who have crooked, or too many teeth. People who don’t floss. People who are stingy or who leave overgenerous tips. People who don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom. People who want things too badly. The world is a dangerous place, full of people who don’t trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this tree. I wouldn’t come down even if she asked me to.
The girl detective is looking for her mother.
The girl detective has been looking for her mother for a long time. She doesn’t expect her mother to be easy to find. After all, her mother is also a master of disguises. If we fail to know the girl detective when she comes to find us, how will the girl detective know her mother?
She sees her sometimes in other people’s dreams. Look at the way this woman is dreaming about goldfish, her mother says. And the girl detective tastes the goldfish and something is revealed to her. Maybe a broken heart, maybe something about money, or a holiday that the woman is about to take. Maybe the woman is about to win the lottery.
Sometimes the girl detective thinks she is missing her mother’s point. Maybe the thing she is supposed to be learning is not about vacations or broken hearts or lotteries or missing wills or any of these things. Maybe her mother is trying to tell the girl detective how to get to where she is. In the meantime, the girl detective collects the clues from other people’s dreams and we ask her to find our missing pets, to tell us if our spouses are being honest with us, to tell us who are really our friends, and to keep an eye on the world while we are sleeping.
About three o’clock this morning, the girl detective pushed up her window and looked at me. She looked like she hadn’t been getting much sleep either. “Are you still up in that tree?”
Why we fear the girl detective.
She reminds us of our mothers. She eats our dreams. She knows what we have been up to, what we are longing for. She knows what we are capable of, and what we are not capable of. She is looking for something. We are afraid that she is looking for us. We are afraid that she is not looking for us. Who will find us, if the girl detective does not?
The girl detective asks a few questions.
“I think I’ve heard this story before,” the girl detective says to the fat man.
“It’s an old story.”
The man stares at her sadly and she stares back. “So why are you telling me?”
“Don’t know,” he says. “My wife disappeared a few months ago. I mean, she passed on, she died. I can’t find her is what I mean. But I thought that maybe if someone could find that club again, she might be there. But I’m old and her father’s house burned down thirty years ago. I can’t even find that Chinese restaurant anymore.”
“Even if I found the club,” the girl detective says, “if she’s dead, she probably won’t be there. And if she is there, she may not want to come back.”
“I guess I know that too, girlie,” he says. “But to talk about her, how I met her. Stuff like that helps. Besides, you don’t know. She might be there. You never know about these things.”
He gives her a photograph of his wife.
“What was your wife’s name?” the girl detective says.
“I’ve been trying to remember that myself,” he says.
Some things that have recently turned up in bank vaults.
Lost pets. The crew and passengers of the Mary Celeste. More socks. Several boxes of Christmas tree ornaments. A play by Shakespeare, about star-crossed lovers. It doesn’t end well. Wedding rings. Some albino alligators. Several tons of seventh-grade homework. Ballistic missiles. A glass slipper. Some African explorers. A whole party of Himalayan mountain climbers. Children, whose faces I knew from milk cartons. The rest of that poem by Coleridge. Also fortune cookies.
Further secret origins of the girl detective.
Some people say that she was the child of missionaries, raised by wolves, that she is the Princess Anastasia, last of the Romanovs. Some people say that she is actually a man. Some people say that she came here from another planet and that some day, when she finds what she is looking for, she’ll go home. Some people are hoping that she will take us with her.
If you ask them what she is looking for, they shrug and say, “Ask the girl detective.”
Some people say that she is two thousand years old.
Some people say that she is not one girl but many – that is, she’s actually a secret society of Girl Scouts. Or possibly a sub-branch of the FBI.
Whom does the girl detective love?
Remember that boy, Fred, or Nat? Something like that. He was in love with the girl detective, even though she was
smarter than him, even though he never got to rescue her even once from the bad guys, or when he did, she was really just letting him, to be kind. He was a nice boy with a good sense of humor, but he used to have this recurring dream in which he was a golden retriever. The girl detective knew this, of course, the way she knows all our dreams. How could she settle down with a boy who dreamed that he was a retriever?
Everyone has seen the headlines. “Girl Detective Spurns Head of State.” “I Caught My Husband in Bed with the Girl Detective.” “Married Twenty Years, Husband and Father of Four, Revealed to Be the Girl Detective.”
I myself was the girl detective’s lover for three happy months. We met every Thursday night in a friend’s summer cottage beside a small lake. She introduced herself as Pomegranate Buhm. I was besotted with her, her long legs so pale they looked like two slices of moonlight. I loved her size eleven feet, her black hair that always smelled like grapefruit. When we made love, she stuck her chewing gum on the headboard. Her underwear was embroidered with the days of the week.
We always met on Thursday, as I have said, but according to her underwear, we also met on Saturdays, on Wednesdays, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and once, memorably, on a Friday. That Friday, or rather that Thursday, she had a tattoo of a grandfather clock beneath her right breast. I licked it, surreptitiously, but it didn’t come off. The previous Thursday (Monday according to the underwear) it had been under her left breast. I think I began to suspect then, although I said nothing and neither did she.