“Really? Am I that bad?” Chase angled up on her skateboard. It was if the skateboard had become part of her and this was her new thinking posture. Perhaps Gitana was right. She did adopt certain mannerisms as Shelby McCall. Shelby was far more confident than Chase. Shelby was pushy when she didn’t get her way, and if you pissed her off, she exhibited unrestrained petulance. Shelby McCall was a bitch.
“Chase?”
“Yes?”
“Are you standing on something? You look taller.”
“I’m learning a new sport and I need to practice weight and balance distribution.”
Gitana came around the kitchen island and peered down at the skateboard with what the Asberger card labeled as “anger.” She narrowed her eyes and said, “Do you know how dangerous skateboards are?”
“Only to the unskilled and unprotected, of which I am neither.”
“Because you’ve been doing this for how long and where is the protection?”
Chase took the offensive. “I am just practicing standing on it. When I am riding it, I put on full combat gear, and I’ve been riding with Bud all afternoon.”
“Bud is doing it too?”
“It was her idea,” Chase said, adjusting the board so she could roll around Gitana.
“Have you lost your mind?” Gitana stepped back as Chase came toward her.
“Recently or previously?”
“Chase!”
“I know, baby, but I feel like this is opening me up to be a more available and capable person who not only exists but embraces the ever-changing Universe.”
“Through skateboarding?” Gitana said incredulously.
“We all find our way using different paths. Should I put the pasta in?”
Gitana ignored her. “Head injuries, broken collarbones, dislocated shoulders, sprained ankles…”
The litany would have continued if Bud hadn’t come in the room, carrying a file folder stuffed with papers. Chase looked at her for aid in staving off the assault.
“I anticipated this,” Bud said, handing the file to Gitana, who set it down on the counter without even looking at it. “This is documentation of the risk factor for various sports. You must also know that we are not availing ourselves of skate parks, which is where most injuries occur. We are street riders or, technically speaking, rural private road riders.”
“Is there a category for that?” Gitana said.
“Not exactly, but we do fall into the low-risk group,” Bud said.
Chase added pasta to the boiling water, and Bud slid the file toward Gitana.
“I don’t like it, but if it makes you all feel at one with the Universe I will tolerate it. One injury, though, and that’s it. Skateboard es fini, comprendez-vous?” Gitana said. She was listening to French language CDs on her way to and from work. Chase didn’t know why. They weren’t planning a trip to Paris anytime soon.
“That’s fair,” Bud said, looking at Chase for agreement.
“It’s perfectly reasonable,” Chase said.
“Do you want to read this?” Bud asked.
“Not really. I’m exhausted,” Gitana said, staring at the enormous file with a look of defeat.
“Why don’t you go take a quick shower? I can hold the noodles.”
“Okay.” Gitana went upstairs. Even her footfalls sounded tired.
Chase picked up the file folder. “How’d you get all this stuff so quickly?”
“I didn’t. It’s an old manuscript of yours from the time of dinosaurs when you had to use hard copies.”
“Bud!”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. Do you want to keep boarding?”
“Yes, but that was deceitful.”
“I didn’t say that these papers were documentation. I said there was documentation. She just assumed it was.”
“That’s an omissionary truth.”
“Precisely.”
“I hope when you are of legal employment age you work for good and not evil causes.”
“I have a finely tuned moral compass.”
Chase flipped up on the board. It slid out from under her and jetted into the kitchen stool. Bud grabbed for the stool. She hit the cutting board with her elbow, sending the bowl of greens off the counter. Chase ducked down to grab the skateboard as it headed for the coat rack. She slipped on the salad greens, landing on her ass. The skateboard hit the coat rack and it fell on her. She looked up at Bud.
“You should really wear a helmet if you’re going to do stuff like that,” Bud said.
Chapter Eleven—The Manicure
It didn’t take long for people to get used to Chase skateboarding down the halls of the Institute. The painted concrete floors were perfect for the skateboard—smooth and free of ruts. Riding the board allowed for more personal space. People couldn’t keep up with her, and if they had any sense, they kept out of her way. Lacey had complained only once, but when Chase made it evident that the skateboard stayed or she went, the “No Skateboarding” signs were removed.
Ollie, one of the maintenance techs, growled, “I just finished putting them up all over the building and now she wants them taken down. You were the only one skateboarding. Couldn’t she have told you not to do it?”
Chase volunteered to help her take them down. As she helped her, Chase said, “Historically, the Establishment has always been against skateboarding because of the anarchist tendency of the culture.”
“If you say so,” Ollie replied, giving her a dubious expression.
Chase skateboarded into Lacey’s office to find her getting a manicure of immense proportion. Either that or she was being prepped for hand surgery.
“I revisited my stance on skateboarding, as you have probably noticed.”
“I saw that. I’m glad you came to realize the therapeutic value of my new way of life.”
“I wasn’t aware it was so important to you,” Lacey said, allowing the Asian woman to dip her hand in an interesting smelling liquid.
Chase thought it smelled like a combination of seaweed, turpentine and eau d’ butterscotch pudding. “It is important to me,” she said, as she executed a flawless three-sixty.
Lacey raised an eyebrow. “Then you won’t mind signing this waiver.” She pointed to a folder with a sheet of paper clipped to the outside of it.
“Waiver?” Chase looked at it.
“It releases the Institute from any legal liability if you injure yourself—like falling and receiving a blunt trauma to the head resulting in vegetablization.”
“Is that a word?”
“It is now,” Lacey said, with conviction.
Chase read the document and considered not signing it. Would she be removed from the Institute and all its obligations if she refused to sign it? She considered this, realizing it would take an Act of Parliament to get her free of the Institute. Not signing it would mean not riding her skateboard. She signed it. Her odds of getting vegetablized were much lower than of getting mowed down by an angry mob of PMS-suffering bearded Amazons, which had almost happened the week before. At least on her skateboard she could outrun or rather outskate them.
“Thank you,” Lacey said.
Chase glanced down at the file folder. “What’s this?” The folder was thick and it had her name on it.
Lacey dipped her other hand in the strange-smelling liquid. The Asian woman set about pushing back the cuticles on her other hand.
“It’s your dossier,” Lacey said.
“My what?”
“Your personnel file,” she said as if Chase didn’t know what dossier meant.
“Why do I have a file?”
“Everyone does,” Lacey said. Forgetting that her hand was submerged in gunk, she waved her hand nonchalantly, flinging it everywhere.
Chase ducked as some of the smelly shit came her way.
“Sorry about that,” Lacey said as the manicurist began wiping up the mess.
“It no problem, but keep hand in stuff,” the manicurist said.
“What’s in my dossier?”
“Everything about you.”
Chase fingered the file, contemplating whether she wanted to look.
“How come mine is so thick?”
“Because there is a lot to know about you,” Lacey said. She must have sensed Chase’s unease. “It’s more like a biography than a KGB thing.”
Chase relaxed. “Can I look at it?”
“Sure,” Lacey said, studying the manicurist’s movements like she was concerned she might lose a finger through an untimely accident with the cuticle scissors.
Chase sat down on her skateboard. She’d found it made a useful portable chair, seeing as Lacey’s office was full of feminine accoutrements and an Asian woman. She opened the file. It had tax stuff and then it went into a This is Your Life mode. She was bowled over by her lifetime achievements or rather the breadth of them. There was a list of every award and in some cases a photocopy of the award itself, including her sixth grade spelling bee. She came in second place because she missed the word “weltschmerz.” She’d never forget that word. For shit sakes, she managed supercalifragilisticexpialidocious—her sixth-grade teacher was a new-wave import from Slovenia and was a freak about American culture yet felt nostalgic for her lost homeland, so she went for odd terms like “flibbertigibbet” and everyday words with as many letters as possible in them. It was weirdest spelling bee any of the kids had ever encountered. The boy who won first place had to spell Engelbert Humperdinck.
Then her file moved on to the college scholarship awards that she had received for writing odd term papers that seemed to awaken her English professors from their normal state of narcosis. She wrote about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Defoe’s Moll Flanders as businesswomen in a male-dominated society, and about early American male writers being discriminated against by European critics much in the same way women writers were denigrated as mere scribblers. Chase looked up at Lacey. “Where the hell did you get this stuff?”
“Your mom,” Lacey said. She’d chosen a nail polish color from the array offered. She held it up to the light. It was a sparkly bronze color.
“Stella kept all this stuff?”
“Sure did. I had to pare it down some.”
“Why would she save all this?”
“Duh, like she’s proud of you.”
This was news, well, not so much these days. She and her mother, Stella, hadn’t fought much since Chase became a parent and a successful mystery writer. Their relationship had gotten rather banal, but it wasn’t like she could call her mother up and pick a fight. “Do you realize that Stella and I haven’t fought about anything for a long time?”
“Yeah, you’re right. It’s been dull on the home front.”
“It good to get along with your mother,” the Asian woman said.
Chase looked at the woman. The woman was small but sturdy. “Did you fight with your mother?” Chase said, picking up one of the bottles of nail polish. It was cerulean blue.
The woman stopped painting Lacey’s nails, which was a good thing seeing as she burst out laughing. “Oh, no, we fight, like how you say, cats and dogs.”
Chase smiled.
“You like color. I do for you,” the woman said.
“Uh, I don’t think so.”
Lacey admired the woman’s work. “You should. Look at how nice my hands are.” She held them out for Chase’s inspection.
“What’s this all about? I thought you laid off this girlie stuff and became an au naturale girl.”
It was true. Lacey had gone from foo-foo girl—makeup, hair, shoes, pretty undergarments—to a businesswoman with a no-nonsense ponytail and lip gloss with SPF 45 sunblock. Chase thought she looked prettier this way. She checked Lacey’s face for makeup—there wasn’t any.
“Do you realize that a woman’s hands, specifically a lesbian’s hands, are her penis?” Lacey asked.
Chase, who’d been tipped up on the end of her skateboard, clunked down. “What?”
“A lesbian’s hand is her lover’s organ of delight, the manifestation of her sexuality.”
“She right,” the Asian woman said. “Women fuckety-fuck and rubby-dubby with hand so it good for it to look nice,” she said, wiggling her hands.
Chase was mortified. “Well, yes, but…”
“I’m reading this book about the history of the clitoris,” Lacey said, admiring her hands.
“There’s a book devoted solely to the clitoris?” Chase said.
Lacey gave her the if-you’d-get-out-of-the-cave-more look. “Uh, yeah, it’s called The Clitoral Truth.”
Then to redeem herself and nettle Lacey, another activity that had gone by the wayside, Chase asked, “Is it part of a series, the next book being Labia Majora—A Study of Pink Folds? This would be followed by a look at the labia minora complete with easy-to-follow instructions for manual stimulation.”
Lacey turned crimson.
Chase had forgotten how fun it was to poke the snake. Perhaps she’d call her mother later. They’d both been so busy—Stella with chasing errant husbands, and Chase with writing and perfecting her alter ego, Shelby McCall.
“I do not find that amusing. This is serious business. I want you to do something for me.”
“Let me guess—organize a festival for the glorification of the clitoris,” Chase said. This felt good.
Lacey’s eyes lit up. “No, but that’s a fabulous idea and you,” she pointed at the manicurist, “can set up a booth and give manicures and maybe even do a seminar on good hand care.”
Chase tried to envision an Asian woman with broken English teaching a seminar on “hands as penises.” However, she did glance down at her own hands. Both Lacey and the manicurist caught her, and then, like Bruce Lee, the woman had Chase in a chair and her hand stuck in the odd-smelling liquid.
“I make hand pretty,” she said.
Lacey was at the dry erase board, which was as large as a grade school classroom chalkboard. Marker poised, she said, “I envision something along the lines of a medieval May Day. We’d exchange the traditional pole for a giant clitoris.”
Chase looked at the Asian woman, who aptly expressed both their opinions. “Wow, that big, very big.”
“And frightening,” Chase said, hoping she wouldn’t have a nightmare about an army of Brobdingnagian clitorises—or was the correct spelling clitori?—chasing her down and demanding her attention.
Lacey was studying the empty board.
“I think we should have a brainstorming board meeting about this,” Chase said, thinking that with a group discussion Lacey could be pared down to having a brief but informative seminar.
“You hate board meetings and refused to attend them and now you’re suggesting one?” Lacey said.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“What’s desperate?”
“A six-foot-tall clitoris,” Chase said.
The Asian woman smiled and pushed back Chase’s cuticles.
Chapter Twelve—The Undoing
Chase was Photoshopping Bud’s pictures from the dance. Unfortunately, the photos of the “tiny dancers” as she referred to them in homage to Elton John had been taken by Collins and as a consequence no one had feet.
“See, I told you,” Chase had said to Gitana. “No feet. I knew this would happen.”
“Perhaps you should give photo taking lessons for six-year-olds so they will photo document their lives better,” Gitana said.
“No, I should’ve been a chaperone. I should have been allowed to be a chaperone,” Chase said. She glowered at both Gitana and Bud, who avoided her gaze by studiously buttering their toast.
Having not gotten their attention, Chase continued, “And then this feet-chopping debacle would not have occurred. It’s not like I can glue feet on.”
At present, this was what she was attempting to do. She’d taken other pictures of Bud and her frien
ds, and now she was doing a cut-and-paste and trying to insert feet. Not usually tech-saavy, Chase had managed to learn Photoshop. She’d taken over the family photo documentation from Gitana, who wasn’t home enough to capture all the crucial Bud photo ops. Chase worried she’d miss a never-to-be-repeated moment of Bud’s childhood. She didn’t think she had so far, but eternal vigilance was required.
There was a tap at the door and Donna came in, carrying her enormous Day-Timer and looking different. Granted it was a different kind of day—the seasons had changed from a lingering fall of sunny-but-crisp days to an ominous Jane-Eyre-and-Rochester-on-the-moors kind of day with the hint of a snowstorm.
Donna had a definite Rochester vibe. Not feeling like Jane Eyre and yet having a great regard for Charlotte Brontë, Chase inquired, “Is something wrong?”
Uncharacteristically, Donna lied and Chase knew it. “No, nothing is wrong.”
It was the pregnant kind of “nothing”—the one full of so much “something” that it could fill an Olympic-size swimming pool.
Chase bit her lip and contemplated the situation. She wasn’t good at this stuff. Should she approach Donna from the Dr. Robicheck point of view—sitting back and allowing Donna to explain the problem in her own time? Or should she do it her own way—which was to ignore the problem altogether? Or she could approach it like the neurotic Tigger from The Hundred Acre Wood and just pounce.
Donna poured coffee, sat on the couch and then buried her face in her hands. Chase ruminated. She opted for the Dr. Robicheck approach.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
Donna nodded.
The problem with nodding and gestural non-sequiturs was the ambiguity. Chase moved on to the Tigger method—at least that involved action. She leapt at Donna, pushed her on her back and sat on her chest.
Donna was startled, to say the least.
“Don’t make me do the Chinese Water Torture,” Chase said.
Donna blinked rapidly as if only just taking in the odd situation. “What’s that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
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