Switcheroo (15 page)

“Well, I have to go,” she said, sounding cheerful, to herself, for the first time that evening. “I don’t want to be late for the dermabrasion.” Bob continued to study his face, tapping, right under his chin, the little weakened spot that sagged à la Michael Douglas. “I hate to have to leave you alone,” Sylvie cooed. “Promise me you won’t stay home every night.”

“I’ll find something to do,” Bob said, his voice distant with distraction.

Sylvie tried not to sneer. She knew what he
thought
he was going to be doing, but he’d have a surprise coming. “Maybe you could hang out with John or Phil.”

“Give me a break,” Bob said. “From the sublime to the ridiculous.”

“Well, then you’ll just have to find yourself a new girlfriend,” Sylvie forced herself to laugh.

Bob gave her a look that seemed, well, nervous, but it lasted for only an instant. “Me?” he asked. “Who would want me?” Sylvie shrugged. Bob turned back to the mirror. Sylvie nearly laughed. Then she picked up her bag. While he still stared into the mirror she called, over her shoulder, “I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”

She walked out of the bedroom knowing, if all went well, that it would be Marla who returned. Sylvie was already going down the stairs by the time Bob scuttled out behind her. “Well, call me when you get there,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder as she descended the staircase. “It’ll be nice having the kids back, the whole family together.”

Sylvie couldn’t help it. She was safely in front of him on the stairs, and he couldn’t see the tear that slid out from her eye as she descended to the bottom of the steps.

Marla was throwing some underpants and a pair of Lycra bicycle shorts into a duffel bag when she heard the knock at the door. She quickly kicked the bag under the bed. She went into the living room, checked through the peephole, and opened the door. Bob stood there, a big grin on his face and a bottle of champagne in his hand, just as if he didn’t have a nice wife to go home to. Marla was a bit stiff when he took her into his arms.

“Guess what?” Bob asked as he moved her into the living room, closing the door behind him. Marla had noticed that he didn’t like to be seen outside with her. “My wife is leaving town for a couple of weeks. And you know what that means?” he yodeled, then nuzzled her neck.

“That she’s on to us?” Marla asked.

“No, no.” He kissed her tenderly. Marla held her lips firm. “She’s going to visit her sister. But for us it means I don’t have to run home at night.” He fetched two juice glasses—all she had—from the kitchenette. “You know how you always ask me to stay over? Well…I’m yours.”

How come she’d never noticed before that he was…arrogant.
She
was always doing the waiting,
he
was always giving her his valuable time. But now she smiled. “Wow!” Marla said. “You’re kidding! Boy, Venus must be in retrograde, because I have to leave town too.”

“What?” Bob asked. He’d been playing with the cork of the champagne bottle and at that moment it popped. The bubbly erupted all over his hands.

“Momma just called to say Grammie’s got the cramp again. It’s the damp from the river that runs right by the Home. Shouldn’t have built a home for the aged in Lowood, I said. Anyway, I’ve got to go rub her.”

Bob’s face dropped. Marla tried to keep hers serious. It was hard to do since her grammie actually lived in Vegas where she worked in a casino as floor security. She watched Bob as he stood there, his dripping bottle of champagne in his hands. “When will you be back?” he asked, sounding like a boy.

Marla shrugged. “As soon as Grammie feels better. Probably no time at all. But I
do
have to leave right away. Like, tonight.”

“Tonight? You’re kidding!” Bob tried to grin. He put his arm around her. “Come on. You don’t want to waste Dom Perignon, do you? And maybe we have time for a quickie.”

“Oh no,” Marla said, already high on newfound power. “I never drink and drive.”

Sylvie woke up choking and realized two things: she hadn’t died under the knife and she was in a stark white recovery room. The surgery was over, then. But something, not the bandages wrapped around her head, not the cold compress on her eyes was…smelling. Was…worse. It was stinking. Was she infected already? Had her face turned into oozing pus?

Panicked, Sylvie pulled the wet compress off her eyes. Marla’s lineless face was directly over hers. “Well, hi!” she said cheerfully. “Looking bad. Feeling good?” She didn’t wait for Sylvie to answer. “Wow! You look like my sister Brianna after she had one of her, uh, ‘little discussions’ with Tony. But it’s okay. She’s got a restraining order now.” Sylvie noticed that Marla was wafting a bandage or some sort of gauze pad around her face. That was the thing that smelled like…

“What are you doing?” Sylvie croaked.

“Aromatherapy,” Marla told her. “Herbal oils to promote healing.”

“God. Get it away! It smells like rotting bananas and something—dead,” Sylvie gasped. “I think I’m gonna be sick.” She managed to sit up and grab a basin in time, just before she vomited into it. She hoped she wasn’t breaking any stitches. She patted her eyes, then her swollen cheeks. Her face didn’t actually hurt; it felt numb. She lifted her head up from the nastiness in the bowl.

“Great!” Marla said, as cheerful as a bigot at a Klan convention. “It’s working. You’re expelling toxins and poisons already.”

Sylvie wiped her mouth on the cold compress and wondered if she had enough strength simply to strangle her rival. “Marla, get rid of that rag right now,” she said weakly. Was the girl trying to be helpful or trying to murder her? It was hard to tell.

“Hey! I used this when my mother had her second hysterectomy,” Marla said, sounding hurt. “It made
all
the difference.”

“Her
second
hysterectomy?” Sylvie asked weakly, falling back against the pillow. She handed the basin to Marla. “Who needs two?”

“
Exactly
. If she’d used aromatherapy the first time, she wouldn’t have needed a second one. That, plus if she hadn’t gone to that Filipino doctor. He said he could do the first operation without a scalpel. Come on! You know, just between us, I think my mother’s still vain about her body, and she’s already forty-seven, bless her heart.” Marla stopped, just before Sylvia was going to try to kill her, and rang for the nurse. “Personally, I think vanity in old people is very self-affirming.”

Sylvie looked at Marla Molensky through the slits of her eyes. She wondered if the girl sometimes knew what she seemed to be doing so unconsciously. And it seemed as if she lied—a lot. “What mother? I thought you said your mother abandoned you in Santa’s lap.”

“Oh,” Marla said. Her face registered fear for only a moment. She seemed to be regrouping mentally. “Well, she
did
. For a while. But then she did come back. Meanwhile, Santa asked if he could meet me later, so she reported him to security.”

“I’m confused,” Sylvie said, feeling dizzy.

“Think how I felt!” Marla agreed. “Listen, you look really pale. Maybe you better rest. Oh! Here comes the nurse.”

A woman in green scrubs had entered the room, holding more cold compresses on a tray. “What
is
that stench?” the nurse asked. She looked at Sylvie as if she were guilty. “Your daughter better leave the room while I clean you up a little,” the nurse said. Sylvie groaned. Marla, lucky for her, vanished somewhere beyond the whiteness of Sylvie’s bandaged head.

Sylvie was sitting in an examining chair. Marla was pacing the room while Dr. Hinkle was cutting off the now stiff bandages. “I don’t want you to be disappointed. It’s going to take time for the swelling to go down,” Dr. Hinkle explained.

“She didn’t use enough ice packs. I warned her,” Marla interjected.

“It’s going to take a while for the discoloration to go away,” the doctor told Sylvie, ignoring Marla. “Remember, what you’re going to see today is not the end product,” he reassured Sylvie. She felt so nervous that she almost wished to put off this moment, though she’d spent three days waiting for it.

“Will it gross me out?” Marla asked. “Because I can’t even stand to see a little birdie hurt. You can imagine what big old bloody face stitches would do to me.”

“Your little sister is
very
supportive,” Dr. Hinkle said dryly as he removed the last bandage. He gently touched Sylvie’s cheek, then examined the incisions behind both ears. He surveyed her face for a few moments while Sylvie held her breath. “You did very well,” Dr. Hinkle said, nodding. “Not much swelling.”

“He’s lying! Get your money back,” Marla told Sylvie. “You look like a side of raw beef.”

The doctor held up a mirror, but Sylvie turned her head. “I don’t want to look if it’s that bad,” she whispered, ducking away.

“Sibling rivalry can affect recovery,” the doctor said. “Maybe your sister should go home. Anyway, it’s not that bad. I do great work. I completely re-did each of my wives.”

In two more days the swelling on Sylvie’s face had gone down considerably. The bruises had already lightened from purple to blue. She was up and walking around, though she felt a little self-conscious at first, her head swathed in a sort of Eskimo parka hood, all white gauze. But there were a lot of women at the spa who were wearing worse, including protective cones. A few women also had plastic protectors over their noses, indicating rhinoplasty, and some—whose faces looked just fine—walked with the telltale stiffness that bruises after liposuction caused. So Sylvie fit right in.

She also found there was an unexpected bonus to the operation—she’d lost her appetite since anesthesia. She’d been living on Jell-O and consommé, and she’d already dropped four pounds.

While Sylvie had thus far been recuperating, she and Marla had started what Sylvie thought of as “the counterintelligence program” to ensure the success of the switcheroo. They’d begun by giving one another general notes about their lives; friends, bureau contents, brand of tampon they used. Now they sat in the bedroom they shared, the sliding glass doors open to the cool air. Outside, fat women in sweatpants were running (or trying to) behind a lithe young female drill sergeant. Ugh! Next week Sylvie would have to start that regimen. She might as well enjoy relaxing now, while she could. She was propped up in bed while Marla sat in a chair beside her, a notepad in her lap, a pink pen with a heart on it in her hand. Sylvie couldn’t help but notice that Marla had the awkward handwriting of a fourth-grader. To her own surprise, Sylvie had actually come to like the girl during this week. She was flighty, but there was a sweetness to her that Sylvie—despite herself—responded to. “Okay,” she said now. “Bob likes all the hangers in his closet going the same way.”

“Is that because he was in the army?” Marla asked.

“No. It’s because he’s anal retentive.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about sex yet,” Marla said, and before Sylvie could respond there was a knock at the door. Marla got up and went to open it. Sylvie was surprised to see her mother standing there.

“Oh my god! Sylvie?…What did that doctor do to you?” Mildred cried out to Marla. She put both hands up to her own face. “I wonder if he could do it to me?” she added. Before Marla could answer, Mildred, in a state of shock, grabbed the hallway service cart for support. None was forthcoming; it merely rolled away. Mildred tried to steady herself, but the cart kept moving and Mildred slowly slid past the door, from vertical to horizontal. From her bed Sylvie yelled out to her mother.

“Mom, are you okay?”

Mildred pulled herself up off the floor and entered the room. She was hypnotized by Marla’s face and hadn’t taken her eyes off it, even when she had been lowered to the hallway carpet. “No problem,” Mildred told Marla, her eyes still riveted. “How do you talk without moving your lips? And who did your eyes?”

“God,” Marla said.

“Dr. Hinkle,” Sylvie answered at the same time.

At the sound of Sylvie’s voice, Mildred looked away from Marla. “Oh my goodness!” she said as she finally realized there were two of them. She looked from face to face as her own face turned pallid. Then she sank onto the chair Marla had just vacated, sitting on both Marla’s notebook and her heart-shaped pen. Sylvie winced, but Mildred didn’t seem to feel anything. Sylvie remembered her own shock when she’d first seen Marla and tried to help her mother get over it. “Mom, what are you doing here?” Sylvie asked gently.

It took Mildred a few moments of silence to sort things out. She stared at her bandaged daughter. Then she stared at Marla. “Oh my god!” she said, realization dawning. “She’s the bookkeeper—”

“Yes, Mom. This is Bob’s squeeze.”

“But, but…how? Are we talking Stepford wives here? Is this a clone? I didn’t know they’d moved up from sheep.”

“How did you find me?” Sylvie wanted to know.

“Bob told me that cock-and-bull story about Ellen and an emergency skin peel. Come on! Only a son-in-law would buy it. So I called your sister. By the way, she told me she’d cover for you with Bob and wanted to know how you enjoyed being forty. Anyway, I got your car serial number, looked up your theft locator, and used Bob’s computer to find you,” Mildred stared at Sylvie, stared at Marla, and then looked back at her daughter. “I haven’t been watching
Murder, She Wrote
all these years for nothing,” she added. Then she looked back at Marla. “Extraordinary,” she breathed.

Sylvie smiled. Now, at last, her mother would understand. “Where are my manners? You two haven’t even met yet. Marla, this is my mom. Mom, Marla.”

“Your mother named you
Marla?
” Mildred asked and looked back to Sylvie. “Perfect name for a…bookkeeper.”

“Say, hey! I’m not a bookkeeper,” Marla protested. “I’m a licensed massage therapist, with a specialty in reflexology.”

“Do you mean you rub men professionally?” Mildred asked, her nostrils flaring.

Marla crossed her arms and made a face that passed—on her—for stern. “Why do people think that massage therapy isn’t a totally legitimate medical service?”

Mildred took in the girl, from the tip of her blonde head, past her adorable shorty top, her flat, exposed midriff, down her long legs in tiny shorts, to her pink, pedicured toes, exposed by her high-heeled mules. “Gee, I can’t imagine why,” Mildred said dryly. “Blind prejudice, I guess.” She shook her head. “So, your day job is stealing other women’s husbands,” Mildred said. “Good luck with this one. He’ll never leave the lot.”