He drew in a breath and closed his eyes, trying to think (and trying to stave off the headache, which was trying to come back). He wanted a cigarette but didn’t dare light one; for all he knew, they might have the smoke detectors turned up enough to shriek at the first whiff of tobacco.
He drew in another deep breath, drew it all the way down to the floor of his lungs, and now recognized the smell in here for what it was — not the smell of dust but the smell of women, women who had been long entrenched with their own kind, women who had knitted themselves into a communal shroud of self-righteousness in an effort to block out the real world. It was a smell of blood and douche and sachet and hair spray and roll-on deodorant and perfumes with fuck-me names like My Sin and White Shoulders and Obsession. It was the vegetable smell of what they liked to eat and the fruity smell of the teas they liked to drink; that smell was not dust but something like yeast, a fermentation, and it produced a smell cleaning could never remove: the smell of women without men. All at once that smell was filling his nose, filling his throat, filling his heart, gagging him, making him feel faint, almost suffocating him.
‘Get hold of yourself, Cholly,’ Ferdinand said sharply. ‘All you smell is last night’s spaghetti sauce! I mean, Cheezus-pleezus!’
Norman blew out a breath, took in another one, opened his eyes. Spaghetti sauce, yes. A red smell, like blood. But spaghetti sauce was really all it was.
‘Sorry, got a little flaky there for a minute,’ he said.
‘Yup, but who wouldn’t?’ Ferd said, and now his empty eyes seemed to express both sympathy and understanding. ‘This is where Circe turns men into pigs, after all.’ The mask swivelled on Norman’s wrist, scanning with its blank eyes. ‘Yas, dis be de place.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘I don’t know where to go,’ Norman said, also looking around. ‘I’ve got to hurry, but Christ, the place is so big! There must be twenty rooms, at least.’
The bull pointed its horns at a door across the kitchen. ‘Try that one.’
‘Hell, that’s probably just the pantry.’
‘I don’t think so, Norm. I don’t think they’d put a sign that says PRIVATE on the pantry, do you?’
It was a point. Norman crossed the room, stuffing the bullmask back into his pocket as he did (and noticing the spaghetti colander which had been left to drip-dry in the rack beside the sink), then rapped on the door. Nothing. He tried the knob. It turned easily. He opened the door, felt inside on the right, and flipped a switch.
The overhead fixture illuminated a dinosaur of a desk heaped high with clutter. Balanced atop one pile was a gold plaque which read ANNA STEVENSON and BLESS THIS MESS. On the wall was a framed picture of two women Norman recognized. One was the late great Susan Day.
The other was the white-haired bitch from the newspaper photo, the one who looked like Maude. They had their arms around each other and were smiling into each other’s eyes like true lesbos.
The side of the room was lined with filing cabinets. Norman walked over to them, dropped to one knee, started to reach for the cabinet labelled D-E, then stopped. She wasn’t using Daniels anymore. He couldn’t remember if that was something Ferdinand had told him or something he’d either found out or intuited for himself, but he knew it was true. She had gone back to her maiden name.
‘You’ll be Rose Daniels until the day you die,’ he said, and reached for the M cabinet instead. He tugged. Nothing. It was locked.
A problem, but not a big one. He’d get something in the kitchen to pry it open with. He turned, meaning to go back out, then stopped, his eye caught by a wicker basket standing on the corner of the desk. There was a card hanging from the basket’s handle. GO THEN, LITTLE
LETTER was written on it in Old English script. There was a small stack of what looked like outgoing mail in the basket, and below a billpayers envelope addressed to Lakeland Cable TV, he saw this poking out:
— endon?
McClendon?
He snatched the letter up, overturning the basket and dumping most of the outgoing mail on the floor, his eyes wide and greedy.
Yes, McClendon, by God — Rosie McClendon! And right below it, firmly and legibly printed, the address he’d gone through hell to get: 897 Trenton Street.
There was a long, chrome-plated letter-opener lying half under a stack of leftover Swing into Summer fliers. Norman grabbed it, slit the letter open, and shoved the opener into his back pocket without even thinking about it. He pulled out the mask again at the same time and slid it onto his hand. The single sheet of paper bore an embossed letterhead which read ANNA STEVENSON in big letters and Daughters and Sisters in slightly smaller ones.
Norman gave this small ego-signal a quick glance, then began to cruise the mask over the paper, letting Ferdinand read it for him. Anna Stevenson’s handwritten script was large and elegant — arrogant, some might have termed it. Norman’s sweaty fingers shook and tried to clench inside Ferdinand’s head, sending the rubber mask through a series of convulsive winces and leers as it moved.
Dear Rosie,
I just wanted to send you a note in your new ‘digs’ (I know how important those first few letters can be!), telling you how glad I am that you came to us at Daughters and Sisters, and how glad I am we could help you. I also want to say how pleased I am with your new job — I have an idea you won’t be living on Trenton Street for long!
Every woman who comes to Daughters and Sisters renews the lives of all the others —
those there with her during her first period of healing and all those who come after she’s left, for each one leaves a bit of her experience, strength, and hope behind. My hope is to see you here often, Rosie, not just because your recovery is a long way from complete and because you have many feelings (chiefly anger, I should surmise) which you haven’t yet dealt with, but because you have an obligation to pass on what you’ve learned here. I probably don’t need to tell you these things, but —
A click, not much of a sound but loud in the silence. This was followed by another sound: meep-meep-meep-meep.
The burglar alarm.
Norman had company.
6
Anna never noticed the green Tempo parked by the curb a block and a half down from Daughters and Sisters. She was deep in a private fantasy, one she had never told anyone, not even her therapist, the necessary fantasy she saved for horrible days like today. In it she was on the cover of Time magazine. It wasn’t a photo but a vibrant oil painting which showed her in a dark blue shift (blue was her best color, and a shift would obscure the depressing way she had been thickening around the middle these last two or three years). She was looking over her left shoulder, giving the artist her good side to work with, and her hair spilled over her right shoulder in a snowdrift. A sexy snowdrift.
The caption beneath the picture read simply: AMERICAN WOMAN, She turned into the driveway, reluctantly putting the fantasy away (she had just reached the point where the writer was saying, ‘Although she has reclaimed the lives of over fifteen hundred battered women, Anna Stevenson remains surprisingly, even touchingly, modest . .
.’). She turned off the engine of her Infiniti and just sat there for a moment, delicately rubbing at the skin beneath her eyes.
Peter Slowik, whom she had usually referred to at the time of their divorce as either Peter the Great or Rasputin the Mad Marxist, had been a promiscuous babbler when alive, and his friends had seemed determined to remember him in that same spirit. The talk had gone on and on, each ‘remembrance bouquet’ (she thought that she could cheerfully machine-gun the politically correct buttholes who spent their days thinking such smarmy phrases up) seemingly longer than the last, and by four o’clock, when they’d finally gotten up to eat the food and drink the wine — domestic and dreadful, just what Peter would have picked if he’d been the one doing the shopping — she was sure the shape of the folding chair on which she’d been sitting must have been tattooed into her ass. The idea of leaving early — perhaps slipping out after one finger-sandwich and a token sip of wine — had never crossed her mind, however. People would be watching, evaluating her behavior. She was Anna Stevenson, after all, an important woman in the political structure of this town, and there were certain people she had to speak to after the formal ceremonies were over. People she wanted other people to see her talking to, because that was how the carousel turned.