Gunshy, page 6
The premier wedding season ends in mid-October, because even in Maine there are optimists, and the fancy dress business settled down a bit, leaving Mike free to pore over fashion industry papers and line catalogs, making Cinderella's wish list for next year.
Which is what she was doing when I walked in.
A bell chimed gently as I opened the door, repeating its two note message when I closed it. The Shoppe was lit by overhead fluorescents, sun-bright after the frigid gloom of mid-morning. Mike was sitting at a white and gold spider-leg desk situated near the fitting room, and commanding a clear view of the door. Her head was bent over a magazine page; wet-looking puddles of color gleaming under the beam of her desk lamp.
I'd drawn the story when Mike first bought the business. She glanced up now with a slight frown, then grinned in recognition.
"Hey, the press! Slow news week?"
"About normal, for the beginning of hibernation season."
She laughed and pushed back from the desk, shaking her hair out of her eyes and standing.
Mike is what most times passes for tall in a woman—five-seven, maybe five-eight. Her shoulder-length naturally dark brown hair is locked in a constant, to-the-death struggle with Miss Clairol Chestnut Surprise Rinse for Your Hair. She wears huge round glasses rimmed in red tortoiseshell. The top hemisphere of each lens is tinted the same lightish brown as her eyes, the bottom halves are pink. Being a Fine Arts graduate, she wears a lot of black—straight skirts and straight tops, with two or more scarves floating at more-or-less shoulder-height, and a severe lack of jewelry.
Her own choice of mode aside, she also has the finest eye for fit in the larger Central Maine region.
"I need help," I told her.
Mike stretched her arms wide. "Ask."
I reached into my pocketbook, pulled out The Twins' invitation and passed it over.
"Yummy," she said, giving the card a quick, competent glance before handing it back. "You need a dress, yes?"
"I need a dress, yes."
"So, you come to zee right plaze," she said, hamming it. She spun on her toes, arms outstretched again to show me the glittering racks of improbable clothing. "What we have, eez dresses."
"There's a slight problem," I said apologetically, as she spun back to face me. She lifted haughty eyebrows behind her tinted eyewear.
"And that would be?"
"Myself," I confessed, and sighed, looking around at the tissue-glitter, low-cut confections. Carly could wear any one of these items at random, and look seductively lush. I glanced back to Mike. "No cleavage. Too tall. Too skinny. I'd look like Barbie's vampire roommate in one of those things."
"Hmm." Her face turned serious. She looked me up. She looked me down.
"Take your coat off."
I did. She took it and laid it across her desk, then walked around me, taking her time about it. I stood still and tried not to feel utterly awkward.
Mike completed her circuit.
"You're right," she said, crossing her arms under her breasts. Light from the overheads glazed her lenses into a pinkish brown mirror, hiding her eyes.
"These dresses are for the common run," Mike said, and grinned at me. "For you, something—" She kissed the tips of her fingers and tossed the kiss toward the ceiling, "different."
"Something cheap?" I asked, not too hopefully. Mike shrugged the question away with the contempt it deserved.
"We can go long skirt—full, with lots of gold and sable and sapphire . . . For the top, something high-necked and authoritative in black—a smatter of jewelry. I have something . . ." She caught my arm and steered me to the dressing room. "I'll bring it," she said, and left me.
She was back before I'd finished shaking the static out of my pullover, hanging skirt and top on wall hooks before whisking away again.
I fingered the skirt, which looked like a patchwork quilt as sewn by the lady of the castle, from squares of her worn out velvets and gold-shot satins. I touched the high-necked authoritative black top—Lycra, the wonder fabric. Eventually, I divested, vested and stepped out into the Shoppe, where Mike and the tri-fold mirror were waiting.
I did look formal, that much was certain. The patchwork skirt had a lovely weight to it and rustled when I moved. The lycra-woven top did its magic, molding and holding what there was to either. I looked in the mirror and felt, just slightly—dismayed.
I look like Aunt Sara from England, I complained to myself. Myself sighed and pointed out that aloof elegance was about the best affect the physical plant was capable of producing and who was I trying to impress, anyway?
"Wait a sec," said Mike from behind my shoulder. "I just thought of something else."
I went back into the dressing room and divested once again. In due time, Mike reappeared. I donned the garment she brought me—
And stood staring at the reflection in the dressing room's single mirror. After a full minute, I shook myself and went out to the tri-fold.
The dress was rough-finished off-white satin. Three small satin frogs fastened the high neck along one side and down to the right shoulder. Long, tight, sleeves. The rest of the dress was merely a long sheath, with a shape that hugged mine so faithfully that it would have been impossible to walk without the left-side hem-to-mid-thigh slit.
I stood in the middle of the tri-fold and stared.
"Well?" Mike asked, behind me.
I turned to look at her, though I still reserved an edge of my eye for my reflection.
"Who is this woman and why have I never seen her before?" I demanded.
Mike grinned. "It's you," she announced, which it patently was not, but why argue? She rubbed her palms together. "It's on sale, too."
*
I had to go over to Waterville to buy the off-white satin pumps to match the dress. While I was on that side of the river, I used my Penney's credit card to pick up the various underpinnings recommended by Mike, swept by McD's for a lunch of fishburger and coffee, and made my two o'clock interview with whole seconds to spare.
The hands on the newsroom clock were creeping up on four when I walked in the side door, having virtuously stopped for the early cop log after my interview.
Dayside—also known as "Features" or, according to Bill Jacques, "The Ladies Aid and Social Society"—was quiet, which was odd. Four o'clock was well into the late-afternoon kaffeeklatsch and gossip hour. I craned my neck to see over the movable partition that separated Us from Them and saw the three women who made up Features studiously at their machines.
Odder and odder.
I cut through Sports, waving at Jack-the-Jock and Kevin and receiving polite return waves, but no boisterous invitation to buy into the football pool, which I never did and which never once stopped Jack from asking.
Maybe there was a flu going 'round, I speculated, then stepped into the main aisle, whereupon speculation ceased.
Standing directly before Bill Jacques' desk. Indeed, looming over Bill Jacques, his computer and all that kingdom that was Bill's own. Standing there, cashmere-sweater-clad, the blank pages of tomorrow's paper shuffling between them like a bad juggling act while they muttered to each other, but not to Bill, were John and Jerry Talbot. The Twins. Jay-Two, Tee-Two.
The owners. Our—not to put too fine a point on it—bosses.
No wonder everybody looked so happy.
There is a line from the sainted and revered Fiddler on the Roof in which the Rabbi calls upon God to "bless and keep the Czar—far away from us." I believe it not unfair to state that majority of the Voice's employees feel just this way with regard to The Twins. Nor do I believe it is inaccurate to say that The Twins return the warmth of their employees' regard, in every shaded nuance.
Don't get me wrong. The Twins aren't bad men. It is true that they're spoiled, egocentric and rude, but they possesses true democratic spirit. They treat everybody like the neighbor's dog. The trick is to not take it personally.
It's not a trick I've quite caught onto, myself.
I took a careful breath and went down the Twin-choked aisle, heading for my desk.
"Excuse me," I murmured, hoping that they were so involved in their muttering and second-guessing that they'd simply shift without looking up.
No such luck.
One of them—I think it was Jerry, but The Twins are identicals and I don't really see them often enough to be able to say which is who with any degree of certainty—glanced up, frowning all over his smooth-shaven tennis-tanned face.
"What shift are you working?" he barked.
This was gratifying, in its way. At least he remembered that I worked here.
"Two to eight," I said, holding my eyebrows level by an act of sheer willpower.
"Two to eight," he repeated, with emphasis, and made a show of glancing downroom to the newsroom clock before looking back to me, his eyebrows up as high as they would go.
I grit my teeth and deliberately did not look at Bill Jacques.
"I had an interview at two o'clock, which lasted to three-fifteen. On my way back, I stopped at the cop shop to pick up the log. It's on the sheet." I stared at him for a moment, feeling my temper creeping toward flare, and when he showed no willingness to move yet, said, flatly, "You're in my way."
He blinked.
"I still don't know about this front page, Jer," his brother said, shuffling papers again. "What do you think about moving . . ."
In the Mystic Game of Life, as played by the Talbot Twins, there is a much higher percentage attached to yanking Bill Jacques' leash than in punching my buttons. Jerry turned back to his brother, moving a millimeter or so in toward the half-wall, to let me by.
I grit my teeth, started to slither past and felt my temper go from flare to fuck this.
"Mr. Talbot, please move!" I stated, in my best "all-right-now-boys-and-girls" voice.
Both Mr. Talbots started, heads jerking in my direction amid a clatter of papers.
"Well," said Jerry, covering his startlement. "Ex-cuuuuse us." He made a show of flattening himself against the half-wall and reached out to pull his brother back, too.
"After you, Ms. Pierce," John invited, waving tomorrow's dummy pages like a flag.
"Thank you," I said calmly, and walked, did not run, past them and down to my desk.
*
The shift was a nightmare, of course. The shift was always a nightmare when The Twins were involved.
They changed the layout of the front page three times, dealing stories like card tricks. They rewrote every one of Bill Jacques' headlines, second-guessed his sizing and had Dan Skat back to the darkroom four times for "a little burn on this one," "bring this up, dammit!" and other so-called improvements.
John and Jerry Talbot are not newspapermen. They do not live in Wimsy, Maine, and tend to find the residents thereof—as they tend to find their employees—slightly ridiculous and not a little stupid. Their main interest in the Voice is as a source of money. And when they're in town, they like to play.
So John and Jerry played and Bill Jacques got redder and more taciturn and the shift ran long and when I finally escaped, at ten-fifteen, I had a pounding headache.
At home, I hung the parka on its peg and leaned my forehead against the wall, taking deep, supposedly calming breaths. This exercise was interrupted by a bump against the back of my legs, which was Jasper, saying hi and politely requesting attention to his food dish.
I fed him, took three aspirin and carried a glass of wine upstairs with me to the computer room.
There was mail waiting on the Net. I downloaded it and hesitated with my hand on the mouse, trying to decide if I was feeling patient enough to visit a chat salon. I wasn't.
I logged off and dialed Random Access.
The first message in the Speakeasy was from Lisa.
You know how they say bad things come in threes? And it's true—I hurt my hands and lost my job and then Dan left. But I think it's the same with good things, that they come in threes, too. Because look I got a job and today I got a phone call from Dan and he's coming home. He says he was wrong, that we can make it work, we've just got to talk to each other—and I think that it would be great, after he's settled and all, if I got pregnant right away and then we could be our own family and—
The words broke apart and a moment later I was facing not Lisa's hosannas but the familiar bisected blue screen.
Good evening, Jennifer.
I smiled, as if he could see me through the screen.
Hi. I hope your day's been better than mine.
It's been tolerable, Fox allowed. I've gotten almost half of those stupid machines up to spec. Carl should have the parts he ordered for me tomorrow and with a little luck the whole police station should be networked by this time next week.
Hooray for the good guys, I typed, and then: The Twins are at the paper. Last I saw they were making Bill Jacques' life a burden and a misery.
There was a momentary pause. I'll call him.
It looked like it was shaping up to a late night, I demurred.
In that case, I'll meet him for breakfast. What do you think of Lisa's news?
Alone in my room, I sighed and rubbed my forehead. I hope it works out for her, I typed slowly, and stopped.
But, prompted Fox after a couple seconds had gone by and I hadn't gotten it together to type anything else.
But, I don't think it will. And then she'll not only be by herself, she'll be by herself and the sole support of an infant. I sighed again, sharply, and wished I wasn't feeling so—tired.
They might make it work, Fox pointed out gently. Some people do manage it.
I know, I typed. I'm pretty zoned. Think I'll call it a night and look for my rose-colored glasses tomorrow.
All right, said Fox. Good-night, Jennifer. Sleep well.
You, too, I returned, my hand moving toward the disconnect. I hesitated. My fingers took advantage of the pause to tap out three quick letters on the keyboard.
Fox.
Yes?
Thank you, my fingers typed, while I watched and wondered what they were going to say next.
But unspecified gratitude appeared to be all that my fingers wished to convey on my behalf this evening.
On Fox's end, there was hesitation, then: You're welcome. And thank you. Go to sleep, Jennifer. I'll talk with you tomorrow.
Right, I said. Good-night.
I didn't have to hit the disconnect. Fox took charge from his side and logged me off.
In my room, I finished my wine, shut down the machine and went to bed. In spite of it all, I slept straight through to morning, without dreams.
9
The phone rang at 8 a.m.
The list of people who will call me at 8 a.m. is: Harry Pelletier, but try calling her at midnight; Barbara Doolittle, because she is a faerie creature, above the considerations of mere time and space; and, very rarely and only because she needs to, Marian Younger.
I managed to get an arm out from beneath the quilt and snatched up the receiver before the second ring had quite died away.
"Morning," I told it—not quite a mumble.
"And so it is morning, you clever girl!" Trilling.
Not Harry, calling with a broken down truck and five miles of newspapers to be delivered. Not Marian, calling for a ride because the school district had forgotten—again—to send the bus with the chairlift. Trilling. At 8 a.m. I resisted the impulse to hang up.
"Hi, Barbara."
"Good-morning, sweetheart," she cooed. "I didn't wake you, did I?" She knew better than to pause there and swept on without taking a breath. "Jendarling, I just finished reading your piece for next time and it's brilliant, sweetheart, positively brilliant." This was pure softener, had nothing to do with truth as we know it, and was most generally found followed by a 'but.'
"But," Barbara continued, "there's just a teensy little problem—nothing horrid, sweetheart, but you know we have to be perfectly explicit even over the silliest things for our readership."
Our readership is actually a pretty fair portion of the Rest of the Country. The magazine of which Barbara Doolittle is editor-in-chief is Maine Life, a four-color photo-glutted, digest-sized bimonthly magazine designed to exhibit Maine Quaintness to those unfortunate enough to live somewhere else.
Maine Life does not ask the hard questions, and investigative reporting is absolutely taboo. Barbara wants feel-good feature stories about Maine people, places and things, always bearing in mind that there can be no ugliness attached to any Maine Life story. Quaintness is all.
It is a sad fact that Maine Quaintness sells well, beyond the borders. Maine Life does nicely, thank you, and pays handsomely.
I've been one of Barbara's army of freelancers for a little under a year. "Next time" was the January/February issue, for which I'd submitted a historical piece on Richmond's Ferry, which plied the Smoke from Wimsy to Waterville and back again from 1798 straight through to September 30, 1953. I'd worked hard on the story, spent hours in the Wimsy Historical Society, paging through the old log books; carefully going through cracking photographs, talking with the curator—and most especially with those Wimsy residents who remembered riding the ferry.
I'd worked hard and I'd been proud of the story when I turned it in.
And now there was a teensy problem. I grit my teeth to keep the sigh back and pushed upright against my pillows, cradling the receiver between shoulder and cheek while I groped on the night stand for the pad and pen I kept there.
"OK," I said to Barbara. "What needs repair?"
"Sweetheart, so gruff," Barbara chided, and proceeded, at length, to tell me.
*
The revisions weren't horrible. Not exactly horrible. In fact, I had most of what I needed in my notes and garnered the last bit of missing clarity in a quick phone call to Mildred Begin, the curator of the Wimsy Historical Society. It only remained to fit the new information seamlessly into the existing story.
I am not a writer by training, though I am a life member of the Voracious Readers Society. Reporters, understand, are not writers. Reporters go, they see, they ask a few questions and then they tell the folks at home what they saw and heard. Think of the messenger in the Book of Job: And I am escaped alone to tell thee. It's a craft that demands clarity, but not much art.
