Джеффри Дивер: The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

“He wanted a million dollars.”

“So say you’ve won the lottery,” said Ginger. She bit into a truffle. “But I didn’t.”

“No one knows what they want until you show them.”

Darlene’s face was flushed, excited. “But I want him to love the real me—”

“Who do you think you are?” said Ginger. “No one. We all are. That’s what I do, notice no ones—”

“I’m not no one,” said Darlene, huffily. “I come from a nice suburb in San Diego. My father is a successful pediatrician—”

“So? That’s all temporary,” said Ginger. “But the noticing, that’s yours.”

She had never allowed herself weakness, never told anyone how it felt to walk into a new city, how she chose her new name just as the train slowed down. Everyone rushed by, gnarled and worn down by the burden of thwarted love; she was free of that, new. She would wash up in the station bathroom and walk out, erased of her secrets: the fact that everything she did with a man was faked, so the only way she could feel pleasure was to give it to herself; the fact that her broken right hand had healed crooked because she couldn’t afford to see a doctor to fix it; the fact that she often ate alone on holidays. In empty coffee shops on Thanksgiving, Ginger looked at the food on her plate, and she knew a strange, burning love for the things the world offered her, real and surprising, again and again.

Evelyn and Ginger rented a room in a Salvation Army and Evelyn began to weep. She curled up on the hard, stained mattress and cried so hard she screamed. Ginger sat beside her, a hand on her shoulder. Sometimes, she had an urge to laugh. Other moments, she wished she could put her hands around Evelyn’s throat and strangle her. She was shocked by the private nature of her emotions, and by the fact that Evelyn seemed to believe she was comforting her.

During the day, they walked down Hollywood Boulevard, trying to decide what to do. Their breath smelled, darkly, of bananas. In the light, Evelyn talked rapidly; they both listened with hope to the sound of her voice.

“We will be cigarette girls,” Evelyn announced one afternoon.

They walked into sixteen bars before they found one that had jobs for both of them. Every night the two of them strode in wearing black tights and rhinestone loafers, selling cigarettes to heavy, sad-looking men with liquored breath.

Once, Evelyn told Ginger that she tried not to be afraid for five minutes a day. She was impressed that Evelyn could identify when she was afraid, for her own fear floated just outside her skin, like a cloud; she experienced nothing but a heavy numbness. She watched her sister closely, trying to catch her in those precious five minutes when she was clearly not afraid. In those five minutes, Evelyn owned something mysterious, and even the claim of it made Ginger ache to have what she had.

At home, Evelyn’s grief metamorphosed into a bloodthirsty envy of the loved, the parented. She wanted their expensive possessions: the jeweled brooches, the feathered hats.

One night, she leaned close to a man clad in a velvet jacket and said, in a husky, unfamiliar voice, “I have a baby at home.”

Ginger, walking by with her tray, stopped.

“He is sick,” Evelyn said. “Bad stomach. He needs operation. Look. Please.” She brought out a wrinkled photo of some stranger’s baby. His mouth was open in anguish. “I need just ten more dollars — he cannot eat—”

“All right,” he said. He dug into his pocket and handed her a bill. His face was haughty with a perplexing pity, and Ginger stared at it, awed.

Later, she walked with Ginger down the sidewalk and smoothed the bill, like green velvet, in her hands. “I have a baby at home,” she said, laughing. She walked down the street, looking down the crowds of people walking down the street, lifted her hands and said, almost gently, “Fools.”

The next morning, Ginger sat in her cabin, looking through the nine photographs that she owned. They were souvenirs from fancy occasions, set in cardboard frames so old they felt like flannel. She had kept them because she liked the way she looked in them, as though she had been enjoying herself.

She heard a knock at the door. It was that girl. “I wondered if you wanted some company. Can I come in?” the girl asked.

Darlene was dressed in imitation of a wealthy person. She wore a sequin-trimmed cashmere sweater that Ginger believed she had seen in the cruise gift shop, a strand of pearls, and a pink velvet blazer. Her shoulders were thrust stiffly backward, giving her the posture of a rooster. The girl’s earnest quality shone through her garb like the glow of a light bulb through a lampshade.

“Who are you?” asked Ginger.

“I am his dream.”

“No,” said Ginger. “Don’t try so hard. Wear your usual and add an expensive piece of jewelry. Make him guess why.”

Darlene shrugged off her blazer and stepped forward too purposefully, like a salesgirl trying to close a deal.

“I can buy you a Rolls Royce,” she said, her voice too bright, to the air.

“No, no! Just hint that you went on a trip to — Paris. The four-star hotels have the best sheets. Nothing he can prove,” said Ginger.

Darlene looked at the photos laid out.

“So who are these people?” asked Darlene. “Fill me in.”

Ginger stood up and picked up a photo. “Here I am on New Year’s Eve, 1965,” said Ginger. “The presidential suite at the Century Plaza Hotel.” She still could see the way the pink shrimp sat on the ice beds, as though crawling through clean snow. “I lit Frank Sinatra’s cigarette,” said Ginger. “I lent my lipstick to Marilyn Monroe.” She remembered the weight of the sequined dress against her skin, the raucous laughter. “Don’t I look happy?” she asked.

“I would be happy,” said Darlene.

Ginger’s mind moved in her skull and she felt her legs crumble. She grabbed hold of a chair and clung to it.

“Whoa! Are you okay?”

She grasped Darlene’s hand and felt her body move thickly to the bed.

“What happened? Should I call a doctor?”

“No,” said Ginger sharply. “No.”

She let Darlene arrange her into a sitting position, her feet up on the bed. Her arms and legs fell open in the obedient posture of the ill. The girl got her a drink of water from the tap and Ginger sipped it. It was sweet.

“Thank you,” Ginger said.

They sat. Ginger picked up another photo. “This was when I met the vice president of MGM and had him convinced I was a duchess from Belgium—”

Darlene frowned. Ginger realized that it was the same picture she had just described. “They were all at the party,” she said, quickly, “Sinatra and Marilyn and duchesses. It was in Miami. Brazil. The moon was so white it looked blue—”

Darlene looked at her. “I wish I could have been there,” she said. She reached out and briefly touched Ginger’s hand.

Ginger looked down at the sight of Darlene’s hand on her own. At first, the gesture was so startling she viewed it as though it were a sculpture. Then she could not look at Darlene, for Ginger had tears in her eyes.

When Evelyn and Ginger began to lie, the world broke apart, revealing unearthly, beautiful things. They began with extravagant tales of woe: deformed babies, murdered husbands, terminal illnesses. They constructed Hair-Ray caps for bald men, yarmulkes with thin metal inside so that in the sunlight the men’s heads would get hot and they would think they were growing hair. They bought nuns’ habits at a costume shop and said they were collecting for the construction of a new church.

She remembered particularly one scam in which she wandered through the cavernous Los Angeles train station with a cardboard sign declaring: HELP. MUTE, HALF-BLIND. When strangers came up to her, she wrote on a chalkboard that had chalk attached to it on a string: HELP ME FIND MY SISTER OUTSIDE. She handed the stranger, usually an elderly lady, her purse, an open straw bag. She let the stranger guide her out the door and carefully fell forward so that an envelope inside the purse fell out. Ginger did not pick it up. Then there was Evelyn, running forward, yelling, “Violet!”