Jane dressed up. pexels-andrea-picquadio
“Maybe you two should just live here with me for a while” I posited.
They both gave me a puzzled look at this unexpected invite.
“Until I can find you a nice place to live.” I added. “Scout deserves a good home, and this might work out for the summer. My only condition is that you let me school her each morning in the library, in things that I know, in literature and the arts. And you don’t have to clean or anything like that. If you could just help me hire the right people to restore the house and manage them, I’ll pay you for it.”
They looked at each other, not knowing what to say. But Scout did. She got up and gave me a hug, saying ‘thank you’. With that they nodded in agreement.
Jane and Mary spent the next hour downstairs along with Scout, washing and drying their clothes from the day before, finally getting out of their bathrobes. We spent another hour on the deck, sipping more wine, enjoying the afternoon. I’d found Scout a small, illustrated book about birds, a field guide, and brought out my binoculars, to see if she could find any types and identify them. She spotted one, then began excitedly turning over the pages of the guide until she found it, or something like it, a blue warbler.
“I think she’ll turn out quite the scholar.” Jane remarked proudly.
“My little girl, look at her now, restored to health. Roland, I owe you everything, and now a place to stay. I can hardly believe I’m not dreaming.”
She rose from her lawn chair, put her head on my shoulder and began to cry. I didn’t move. But I felt the strongest urge to cry along with her. I didn’t know why, yet I knew it had to do with the chip. It amplified everything, each feeling, each sight and every smell, so much so I could hardly take out the garbage and I would notice the rose bush from ten feet away.
As Scout peered around the backyard through the binoculars, looking for another bird our conversation drifted onto the topic of relationships. I asked Jane what brought her around to loving another woman, even bringing up our brief fling.
“I hope it wasn’t me that made you abandon men.”
“No, not at all. I had several male lovers before and after you. But with Mary I’ve found a much simpler bond of happiness. With men, it was always an ugly, complicated contest.
“You don’t hate men, do you?” I asked.
“No Roland. I just avoid sleeping with them. I like you immensely. But you’re different than most men, you always were, less macho, feminine in certain ways or at least sensitive and empathetic. Sometimes at school, I thought you might be gay. But you proved me wrong there.”
“Shyness made me that way. Besides, I’m too intellectual. I see too many things from all sides, the good and the bad to everything, which makes me stop from chasing any one object, any goal. It almost freezes me, and I see this. That’s why I still live alone. Sometimes I imagine I was born neither an ‘X’ or a ‘Y,’ just an ‘O,’ a cipher, a circle, with no beginning or end, beginning where it ends.”
“Well Roland we love you very much.” Mary chimed in, reaching over and taking my hand. “And Scout loves you most of all, don’t you darling, for all these blessings.”
Evening was upon us. For dinner, we ordered out from ‘Chez Panisse.’ I had a computer at a side desk in my office, and we looked up the menu and ordered a feast, much more than we ate. I’d often ordered from there before and they knew me well.
After dinner, I told Scout another fairy tale, this time ‘The Ugly Duckling’ from a fine edition of Andersen’s works. I didn’t have that story by heart, so I read it to her. But she enjoyed it immensely and told me so. I suggested that she might be just like that bird, with a hard beginning but slowly to grow into a beautiful swan. For that, she gave me the broadest smile and I put her to bed, this time in the little brass bed in my old bedroom, leaving on one dim light, so she could admire the pictures on the wall and enter dreamland.
Jane and Mary spent the time in the basement. They both liked jazz and wanted to leaf through my father’s collection and also the liqueur selection at the bar, right beside it. Mary smoked cigarettes, and this was his smoking room. I went down for a minute but could sense that they were in the mood for love, glass in one hand, the other wrapped around each other. So I bid them good night with one parting reflection, telling them how happy I was that they were here.
The next morning I awoke like a man with a mission. It was almost as if I held a job. Once again Mary and Jane were up before me, making breakfast, back in their bathrobes again.
“Today we’re going to get you out of that hell you’ve been living in and retrieve all your belongings.” I said as I stepped into the kitchen.
“Let’s eat first.” Mary replied. “Scout’s still asleep. Once we get her up and dressed, then we can go. But this might be tricky.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Our landlord is the most reprehensible crumb of a human being on the face of this planet.” Jane burst in, “and he’s probably watching our front door from his window with a shotgun in his lap, to confront us for the rent, for the most disgusting place I’ve ever lived in if you can call that ‘living.”
“Calm down,” I said. “You have your personal items there. So we’ll go collect them and your clothes and be gone. We’ll take one of my cars.”
On our tour the day before I’d skipped the garage. An hour later we entered the four-bay structure. It had a loft and a workbench bench but not many tools, as neither my father nor I had much interest in crafts. It did have two cars, a Bentley Continental from the eighties and an old, cherry red, convertible Mustang from the sixties which my father loved to drive when he was much younger. It was his first car.
Jane ran to it, clasping the black convertible top with outstretched arms in some sort of awkward bear hug.
“This is the one we’re taking Roland, and I’m driving.”
“It’s a clutch” I said, “and loud.”
That didn’t deter her a second. The car had a resonator instead of a muffler, making it the loudest beast on the road, sounding much like a Harley, hardly the choice vehicle for a stealth mission. But off we went, Scout and I in the back seat once again, top down, Jane shifting gears and squealing tires around sharp turns, down into the ghetto of Oakland, the wind blowing our hair straight back, the sun shining bright in our faces.
We screeched to a stop before a white, dingy, two-story building in the heart of the slums. It looked like a derelict motel, with a metal walkway stretching along the second level. That’s where they were living, and as I saw it, I realized Jane’s descriptions were not exaggerated.
We walked the iron staircase to their door, but it was locked from the outside with a hasp and padlock that hadn’t been there two days before.
“We can’t get through that” I told them. We headed back to the car and drove around the back of the building for plan ‘B.’
Mary was sure they’d left the small bathroom window open just a crack. There was also an extension ladder alongside the building. We set it up as nobody was around and I climbed up with Scout in front of me. She was small enough to slip through and open the larger bedroom window next to it. Soon we were all inside. I told Jane and Mary to make haste and just grab their personal effects and their clothes. Jane was in the living room filling a suitcase with pictures, notebooks, and a few mementos while Mary was in Scout’s room stuffing a garbage bag with her clothes. Then there was a loud banging on the front door. Jane peeked through a curtain. It was the fat landlord with his son.
“We know you’re in there. John, run downstairs and get the key to this damned thing.”
One of them must have spotted us when we first pulled up. But they didn’t seem to realize we snuck in the back.
“We only have a minute girls. I’m taking Scout down now. Just throw your packages out the window. I’ll load them in the car. Hurry up and follow me right away or this could get ugly.”
The man was still banging on the door, spewing out obscenities. Jane ran to it and locked the deadbolt.
“That won’t hold them for long” I told her.
“I’ll be right behind you. Mary, hurry up. We have to move” she shouted.
I took Scout and we made our way down the ladder. Jane was right behind us carrying her suitcase. Mary appeared at the window and threw down the bag of Scout’s clothes. But then she disappeared inside again. The three of us loaded up the trunk. Jane ran back to the ladder in a real panic and called for Mary to come down immediately.
Suddenly Mary appeared at the window with a small suitcase and threw it to the ground, descending the ladder in her ladylike fashion, not fast. Just as she reached the ground the landlord was at the same window, screaming and yelling, so Mary shoved the ladder and it came crashing down. Now the landlord would have to run around the building and by that time we’d be gone. But the little suitcase had broken open, spilling its contents all over the ground, and what were they? All sorts of sex toys and sexy lingerie, which Mary knelt to gather up as Jane and I ran towards her.
“Are you crazy? We’ve got to go.” We grabbed her arms and pulled her up. She wouldn’t let go of the half-open suitcase, stuffed with her treasures, which slowed us dragging her. When we reached the car the landlord was only twenty feet behind, running at us like some berserker. Lucky the car was a hot rod. Jane popped the clutch and off we tore, the tires squealing as we panted for breath, adrenaline pumping. A moment later we were squealing just as loud in laughter as we sped away.
“From now on I’m going to buy your clothes in a store. It’s a lot easier on the heart, less traumatic. Whose idea was this anyways?”
“I think it was yours” Mary said demurely. “But we had to collect our personal items. We just couldn’t leave them there, that wouldn’t be proper.”
“Well propriety has been duly honored” I said. “Thank God it’s over.”
Back at the house Jane and Mary stowed away the few items they were able to retrieve. Scout was set up in my childhood bedroom with her collection of clothes, while Mary and Jane had only their papers and some lingerie to organize. There was a fine Louis the sixteenth style desk in the boudoir next to their bedroom, and I moved my computer from the study to that room so they could use it.
I spent two hours in the library teaching Scout to read. She was far beyond the slow ‘sounding out’ stage of children. She was using our mutual telepathy and scanning page after page of Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ through my eyes. She instantly knew the meaning of each word as I read, which she memorized once and for all. By the end of the second book, that afternoon, she must have gained a reading vocabulary of a bright middle-school student, and I calculated, given a week I could supply her the vocabulary of a college student, that is, over ten thousand words. I would pick out more intellectually complex books each day. Then I’d feed her all the foreign languages I knew, one a week.
For dinner we were cleaning out the fridge. It was a few leftovers and cheese and crackers. Jane was augmenting these slender pickings with copious draughts of wine, now on her second bottle.
“I hope Naomi shows up tomorrow with more food. If not, we’ll go shopping. I’d love for you to meet her, but she’s been very sick lately. And it concerns me to no end that she hasn’t called.”
“Why don’t you just call her.” Jane replied bluntly.
I was so concerned for her and my imagination turning over so many dire possibilities that I was scared to call.
“Tomorrow, if she doesn’t come by.”
Towards the end of dinner Jane sighed and said, “well Roland, we didn’t recoup any of our clothes, so unless you want to see us wandering about this house in these same bathrobes every day, or lingerie, I suppose you’re going to have to buy us some.”
This statement threw a spark in my head and I said excitedly:
“Wait a minute. I have lots of women’s clothes, dresses, shoes, nylons, coats, hats, everything, everything you could desire.”
“Roland, I hope you’re not a cross-dresser” she giggled.
“You have a twisted mind Jane, and you’d probably like it if I was. But I’m not. You certainly have changed over the years.”
“Well bully for me. Where are they?”
“In the panic room” I replied, just as forcibly.
There was a confused expression on all of their faces, even Scout’s.
“What the hell is that?” Jane said.
I led them up the stairs, into my bedroom and then into the bathroom behind it.
“My parents, when they grew older, built this out of fear of a break in. My father hated guns and would never tolerate one in his house. Some friends of theirs showed them this alternative defence, an iron room where no one can get at you or even find you, while you call the police. So they had it made.”
On the back wall I opened a secret panel by the mirror and pushed four buttons, and a metal door slid open, perfectly camouflaged by the rich wallpaper that decorated that wall. Behind it was a full room. Bright lights came on instantly as the door opened. The antechamber was a long, mirrored dressing table, with glass shelves on each side full of makeup and lipstick and all sorts of colorful vials of perfume. I pushed another code on another keypad inside and a set of drawers opened up and rolled out, right from the wall of mirrors, in cascading order above the counter, my mother’s jewelry collection, rings and necklaces and earrings, all gold and pearls and diamonds, sparkling under the lights on their beds of black velour.
The ‘oo’s and ah’s I heard from this display put me in mind of Scout, who wasn’t saying anything, stretching on her tiptoes to see the pretty sight. I pushed another button, and they disappeared into the mirrored wall again.
“If you girls will come with me now, I’ll show you the clothes.”
They followed me around the corner to a series of three walk-in closets, about ten feet deep, where there hung a large collection of colorful attire, not only my mother’s but my grandmother’s. My mother was somewhat of a fanatic in saving everything, having said to me many times: “the fashions go round in a circle and what’s no longer popular this year will be again, twenty or thirty years from now.”
She had stored up all her old dresses and outfits, shoes and hats, and also her mother’s, some dating back to the thirties. There were drawers underneath the dowels containing silk stockings and underwear and garters, while shoes lined the floors. In the last aisle were my father’s clothes, suits, and Italian dress shoes and ties and bowler hats. Jane was agape at this collection, pushing the hangers back and forth in wild amazement.
“Roland, these outfits, they’re priceless, levels above the best things we have in the shop where I work.”
“Well they’re all yours now” I said. “I have no use for them, since I don’t cross-dress, Jane. Sell them in that shop, or better yet start your own shop, but make sure you get a pretty profit from them or wear them yourselves. Dolly yourselves up. I remember some of these costumes looked quite lovely on my mother. She was about the same size as the both of you, so I imagine either of you would look good in them. Why don’t you dress up and take pictures of yourselves, and post them on Facebook?”
I said this just to get out of there, too many female pheromones overpowering me.
And this is precisely what they did, playing dress-up until late into the night. I don’t know how late because I took Scout to her bedroom and we read another story, and then I went to bed myself, trying to sleep with oversensitive ears. I could hear their excited talk and commotion two rooms away, even though the bathroom door was closed. But I fell asleep at last, content at so many accomplishments, at how happy we all were, at how well things seemed to be working out in this incipient family. Only Naomi left a lingering worry in my mind.
