The Fainting Room (19 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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Ingrid watched in silence, forgetting her plan to continue the “
Life: complicated
” questioning as she watched Evelyn wrangle Melvin into a firm hold and then press each claw so that his toenails extended one by one. She cut expertly, saw without Ingrid explaining it how to keep from nicking the toe itself. When she’d finished with the front nails and swung Melvin around to do the hind legs Ingrid asked, “Did you used to have a pet lizard?”
“Me? No.”
“Then how come you’re so good at this?”
Evelyn concentrated on Melvin’s right rear toes. The scales were a baby alligator’s, not so different from the baby alligator Joe had brought home during the winter break in Florida; he’d won it playing cards. He’d thought he could sell it to Serrano the Serpent Man to use in his act, but Serrano didn’t want it, didn’t want it even if it didn’t cost anything. When it had gotten too big for Evelyn to handle and no longer fit into the tiny shower stall, Serrano agreed to take it off Joe’s hands in exchange for a tattoo of a giant python along his thigh. When Joe had finished the tattoo he said, That’ll make your dick look smaller, and came home with a black eye and one of Serrano’s front teeth clenched in his fist.
Ingrid watched, mesmerized, as Evelyn’s hands moved over the lizard. Her hands themselves were “complicated;” she wondered that she hadn’t noticed this before. The nails were perfect, with their polish the color of pink shells, shaped into smooth curves by careful filing. Looking at the fingertips alone you imagined them doing the kind of things they often did—applying powder to their owner’s face, donning rubber gloves before rinsing the dishes, folding laundry that seemed to be all shades of pastel. But if you let your eyes move on to the knuckles you saw they looked too rough to match the perfect surface of the nails, and were studded with tiny scars here and there. And then, of course, on the back of her right hand, running like a train track through the suburbs of her freckles, that long white scar that disappeared into the tunnel of her three-quarter sleeve.
“There—” Evelyn clipped Melvin’s last toenail—“all done.”
“Thanks a lot.” Ingrid unwrapped the towel and set Melvin on the terra cotta tiles of the floor. Some detective you are, she thought. You haven’t found out a single thing.
So stall, Slade. Find a way to keep it going.
She looked up at Evelyn, said the first thing that came to her: “So you wanna do my nails now?”
“Yours?” Evelyn was taken aback. Was this a thank you? Or some kind of trick?
“Yeah,” Ingrid said, and then, accusingly: “Why not? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Evelyn looked at Melvin instead, who had crawled into a patch of sunlight on the floor, and then back at Ingrid. She seemed to be serious.
“Well, if you want me to, of course. Let me see your hands.”
Ingrid held out her right hand and Evelyn frowned. Ingrid’s fingernails had thin crescent moons of dirt beneath them, and besides looking generally unwashed, her thumbs were stained yellow with nicotine.
Go wash your hands, she was on the verge of saying, but she didn’t want Ingrid to be offended, or worse, change her mind and not come back. “Sit here,” Evelyn said instead, and patted the chaise beside her. Ingrid sat obediently and Evelyn picked up her hand and held it steady against her thigh and began filing.
Ingrid felt the jolt go through her, the same one that had attacked when Evelyn had touched her arm out in the backyard. Like electricity it was, the warmth of Evelyn’s leg through those ugly yellow slacks. Evelyn electricity. Evelyn’s hand, the hand with the scar, was moving back and forth above her own, filing so fast the freckles blurred.
“Just clear polish, okay?” Ingrid managed to stammer.
“Whatever you want.”
Question her, you fool, you’re supposed to be questioning her.
“So I was wondering something.”
“Mm hmm,” said Evelyn, without looking up. This was more like what she’d imagined when she pictured Ingrid living here. It was nice, sitting here in the sun doing a girl’s nails. She and her sister Alice Marie used to do each other’s, one of the few activities in which their skills were equal.
“Where’d you get that scar?”
“Oh—” The polish brush in midstroke, Evelyn let go of Ingrid’s hand.
“I was just wondering,” Ingrid went on hastily, “because I mean, usually when someone has a cool scar like that, there’s kind of a cool story behind it too.”
Evelyn, looking through the manicure basket for the white tip guides, felt a panicky tightness fill her chest, the same one she used to get before she stepped into the ring to hand Joe his swords. It was the struggle between the part of her that hated being on display and the part of her that loved the feeling of specialness it conferred.
Laaadiees and genntlemennn, our most colorful and dramatic couple, the tattooed lady and her death defying husband, amazing swallower of deadly sharp swords.
Oh, why not just tell her? Why not, after all? She set a tip guide across Ingrid’s thumb and said, without looking up, “A tiger clawed my arm open when I was a teenager.”
But now Ingrid was laughing. Evelyn looked up. Ingrid did not believe her: she was laughing to see that boring Mrs. Shepherd had a sense of humor after all. Evelyn waited, didn’t smile.
Ingrid’s laughing stopped. “You’re kidding, right?” she asked. “No.” Evelyn pushed up her sleeve, careful not to raise it so far that the tattoos would be visible. “Look, it goes up almost to my elbow.”
Ingrid scowled. “So where’d you grow up, India? Africa?”
Evelyn took a breath. Just say the word, circus, and Ingrid’s face would light up like a pinball machine. The way the faces of the town kids had when she snuck them around to Clown Alley, pulled back the canvas and allowed them a quick peek inside.
“I grew up in a circus.” There.
“A circus?” Ingrid repeated, the pinball in play, wait for it, thought Evelyn.
“A traveling circus. My parents had a high wire act.”
Ingrid looked at Evelyn’s ironed slacks, her matching blouse, her carefully moussed and blow-dried hair. Her white espadrilles through which peeked toenails varnished the same pink as the nails of her hand, the same shade as her lipstick. This was Sears catalog, this was suburban banality, this was not tiger claws and high wires.
Evelyn felt her scar start to ache. She knew what was going through Ingrid’s mind. She cleared her throat and said in her best rapid-fire patter, “Jones and Wallace Big Top, amazing entertainment for all ages, see the jungle animals, acrobats and artists of aerial magic, see the clowns and the scintillating sideshow sampling human freaks of nature too bizarre to be believed except with your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls step up, step right up this way no pushing please—” And here it comes, TILT.
Ingrid’s mouth hung open.
Take that, Evelyn thought. A tiny revenge on Ingrid’s judging her for being boring and banal. “I’m giving you a French manicure,” she said.
“Okay, whatever,” said Ingrid, who had no idea what a French manicure was and didn’t care, not now: “An actual tiger touched you? How?”
Evelyn uncapped the white polish. “I was tossing a piece of meat in the cage and I didn’t do it right. So I got swatted. Hold still.”
“What were they like?”
“The tigers?” Evelyn was surprised. No questions about acrobats and human cannons, no How do they get all those clowns in that little car. She looked at Ingrid, who looked shyly away.
“Well.” Evelyn bent over the tips of Ingrid’s fingers. “The tigers had beautiful fur. When they lay down, you could see the fur move while they were breathing, and you could sort of see into the fur, see how long it was. And the color of it, moving just a little bit like that, it was so incredible that any living thing could be such an incredible color of orange. And I just wanted to touch them, every time I was near the cage.”
“Your hair is that color,” Ingrid blurted, and then froze in embarrassment, realizing, at her horrified molten center that she knew exactly what Evelyn meant about wanting to touch the tigers because she herself wanted to touch Evelyn’s hair. There was one bright piece of hair turning the wrong way out from her head, one brilliant red curl Ingrid wanted to put her fingers in. Twirl around her hand and feel was it silky or rough, did it smell of shampoo or of unwashed hair, and what would it feel like against her face, and what was the matter with her?
Evelyn had hold of her hands, that was where all the heat was coming from. She looked down at her hands, which no longer looked like hers because Evelyn was holding them and because they now had little white lines across the tips of the nails.
“Would you, would you hang on, I gotta go to the bathroom,” Ingrid mumbled, and pulled her hand away.
Evelyn recaptured it. “Better wait. Zippers are hell on manicures—you’ll smear the whole thing. I’ll do a top coat first.”
Ingrid sat there, trapped. What had gone wrong with her insides? Talk about acrobatics; her stomach was doing them, a long series of backflips while her hand lay pressed into the soft and firm and heat of Evelyn’s thigh.
Emily Roseine opened the door to me herself. The flame orange color of her hair hadn’t come from a bottle and neither had her peaches and cream skin. “Please have a seat, Mr. Slade,” she said. “I’ll make us some drinks.”
She mixed two whisky and sodas from a cocktail tray under the window. I watched her do it. I liked watching her. I reminded myself I wasn’t getting paid to like watching her—I was on a job. But I still liked it. She handed me my drink and sat down on the sofa beside me, a little closer than she needed to. I liked that as well.
She moved even closer to me on the couch. She looked me right in the eye.
“I desperately need your help,” she said.
And Mister, right then I stopped being a private eye. I was just a warm-blooded fool sitting on the sofa beside a beautiful woman—
Get hold of yourself, for Pete’s sake.
“Did you—did you walk on the high wire too, besides doing the tigers?” Ingrid managed to ask.
“I didn’t ‘do’ the tigers—”
“I mean train them, whatever you call it.”
“—I wasn’t a trainer. They wouldn’t let me, after I got my hand cut open.”
“So you did the high wire?”
“Well, I can walk on it, I know how, but I never performed. I wasn’t—well, my parents and my older sister had the act, and I wasn’t in it. There—” she released Ingrid’s hand—“Like it?”
Ingrid looked down at her hands. They looked like someone else’s hands, the hands of a girl who smiled a lot and talked on the phone.
“What do you think?” Evelyn looked anxious.
“What do I think?” Ingrid repeated.
I need a cigarette, Mister, that’s what I think.
“You like it?”
Ingrid looked up, into Evelyn’s blue eyes looking hopefully at her, and at that moment she didn’t really know anymore what she liked or didn’t like. Those hands at the end of her wrists were not her hands anyway, so she didn’t have much of an opinion about them, or about anything, really, other than Evelyn’s hair, and if she let herself touch it she would wreck the manicure, which would make Evelyn sad.
“You did a great job,” Ingrid stammered. “It looks very professional.” Now she really did have to pee. She stood up and waved her borrowed hands back and forth to dry them. Blurred like that, you couldn’t see the color and they looked like her own hands again.
“Sit down,” Evelyn said. “You have to let them dry a while.”
“I have to pee
now
.”
Evelyn smiled. “You’re just like my sister. Okay, lemme undo the top button on your jeans, that way you won’t wreck it.”
At this suggestion, the button on Ingrid’s jeans caught fire; her belly, her groin, her guts all began to burn.
“No, that’s all right,” Ingrid mumbled.
“Don’t be silly. Here.” Evelyn leaned over, lifted up the edge of Ingrid’s tee shirt and undid the Levi’s button. “Now listen: when you get in the can, don’t touch the zipper, or you’ll wreck the tips. Just pull the two sides of your jeans apart and the zipper will come down itself.”
“Uh huh,” whispered Ingrid, Evelyn’s fingers grazing her belly, the world melting around her. She turned and fled.
Alone again on the sun porch, Evelyn ran her hand over her scar, the scar made by the tiger. The cage boy job that led to the tiger clawing her hand open had been one in a series of failed attempts to keep her employed with the circus once it was clear she would never join her sister on the high wire. The spring she turned fifteen, the tiger act lost its cage boy to the Navy, and the owner of the act agreed to let Evie try it.
She loved it. She helped rotate the animals, cleaned their cages, prepared their food. Even the less appealing parts of the job—getting up at 5:30, scrubbing the blood and fat out of the cage gutters—were fine, because they meant she could go much nearer to the circus animals than she would otherwise have been allowed. And the tigers had always been her favorites. Though she had never seen it happen at Jones and Wallace, she knew that in other circuses the cage boy sometimes inherited the animal act when the trainer finally retired, and she daydreamed of striding into the ring on her own, the two tigers obediently flanking her, all three of them sporting hair the brilliant color of flames.

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