Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

Room 1061, the set shop, was open, its door rolled up, accordion style, like an old-fashioned rolltop desk. The concrete floor was spattered with paint in a rainbow of colors, and the frigid air was filled with the delicious, piney smell of freshly sawed wood.

I found Dorothy there, on her hands and knees, looking fairly chipper, considering, and painting pink and white stripes below the chair rail of a flat that would soon be installed as one wall of Mrs. Lovett’s parlor. The wall above the chair rail was decorated with wallpaper, a whimsy of hearts and roses.

“Hey,” I said.

On the far side of the cavernous room two midshipmen, a man and a woman dressed in sweats, looked up from their work and waved. They were putting the finishing touches on a backdrop, a stylized black and white representation of the rooftops of London.

Dorothy sat back on her heels and wagged a paintbrush at me, dripping pink paint onto one of her neatly executed white stripes. “There you are! Oh, damn.” She dabbed at the drips with a rag that she kept tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “There’s gloves over there,” she said, wiggling the fingers on her free hand in the direction of the workbench. “In case you don’t want to ruin your manicure.”

Not having a manicure that I could ruin, I passed on the gloves. I was pleased to see that Dorothy was wearing both a big smile and one of the ball caps I had given her. Wisps of blond hair peeked out, more or less at random, from under the brim. Big gold hoop earrings bounced gently against her neck.

“Great hat,” I said.

She reached up and patted it with a gloved hand. “I thought the crab went well with my ensemble.”

The crab, embroidered on blue denim in tomato-colored thread, exactly matched the red T-shirt Dorothy wore under her cardigan. “ Excellent choice,” I commented.

Dorothy went back to her stripes while I looked around for a place to stash my my handbag. “What did you want to talk to me about, Dorothy?” I asked, unzipping my jacket a few inches but leaving it on for warmth.

Dorothy looked up from her painting, took a deep breath as if to say something, then shook her head. “Nothing, really. I was just starting to panic about the signs.”

I knew precisely which signs she meant. “Not to worry.” I tried to sound more self-assured than I felt. “I think I can finish them by tomorrow.” Using a screwdriver, I pried the top off a can of black paint, snatched a dry brush from the workbench, and began painting the bold letters that spelled FRESH HOT PIES on a rectangular board with several screw eyes installed across the top.

While the letters were drying, I went looking for the jars of tempera I planned to use for the sign’s only decoration: a pie. Not much of an artist, I’d downloaded a clip art picture of a pie to my computer, enlarged it, printed it out. Using a pencil, I copied the design, inch by painful inch, to Mrs. Lovett’s sign. Then I got my colors together and filled in my outlines with them. That done, I opened a jar of gray and added a twist of steam coming out the hole in the top of the pie. I stepped back to admire my handiwork. “Voilà! What do you think?”

Holding one paintbrush in her teeth and the other in her hand, Dorothy strolled over to check it out. “Thass goot,” she mumbled around the paintbrush. She removed the paintbrush and grinned. “Thanks. That looks absolutely super.”

I wasn’t so sure about the super, but it would certainly do, especially from the vantage point of three rows back. “Guess I better attack the banner now.”

The banner I was referring to was the one used by Pirelli to hawk his elixir. I’d frame the edges of the banner with gold curlicues, I thought, and in ornate script, neatly centered, I’d paint in crimson edged with gold:

Signor Adolfo Pirelli

haircutter-barber-toothpuller

to his royal majesty

the king of Naples

And under that, in big, bold black:

Banish baldness

with

Pirelli’s miracle elixir!

Since Pirelli was supposedly Eye-talian, I’d decided on a fancy script, appropriately called Informal Roman. I was shameless: I used a package of stencils I found at Michael’s crafts store.

I’d painted as far as “the king of Naples,” trying to decide if “king” should begin with a capital or a small K when a bell rang and the two midshipmen who had been working on the backdrop plopped their brushes into jars of paint thinner and hurried away. Dorothy and I were alone, and the silence lengthened between us.

Finally, Dorothy spoke up.

“Hannah?”

“Hmmm?” I’d given the king a small k and was working on a capital N that would have made a medieval monk proud, so I didn’t even bother to look up.

“Hannah?” she said again.

I turned to see that Dorothy had finished with the parlor flat, stripped off her rubber gloves, and was sitting on the concrete floor with her back resting against the wall.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Did your husband…?” she began, her voice echoing hollowly in the cavernous room. She folded her hands as if she were praying, then pressed them tightly against her lips.

I waited, knowing something important was coming and not wanting to rush her.

“I feel ugly as sin,” she announced. She grabbed the crab cap by the bill and lifted it off her head. “Look!”

The wisps of hair I had noticed earlier were about the extent of it. Except for a line of peachlike fuzz along her forehead, Dorothy was bald. Before I could say anything, she clapped the cap back on, quickly covering her baldness. “Gross, huh?”

“We’ve all been there,” I said reassuringly. “You hair will grow back. Trust me!”

But Dorothy refused to be reassured. She sat on the concrete, stone-faced, her feet tucked up under her. “After your surgery,” she said after nearly a minute had ticked by, “did your husband lose interest in you?”

I knew where Dorothy was going with that question and decided to make it easier for her.

“Sexually, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

I balanced my paintbrush on the rim of the open paint jar and crossed the room to sit next to her. Even though we were the only two people in the set shop, I didn’t feel comfortable shouting across the room about my sex life. “Actually, Paul couldn’t have been more loving and supportive,” I told her after I’d gotten settled. “It was me who pushed him away.”

Dorothy turned to me in surprise. “Why on earth would you do that?”

I shrugged. “I took it into my head that since I was damaged goods, Paul was only being nice to me out of pity.”

A tear rolled down Dorothy’s cheek, and she quickly brushed it away. “Pity? I’ll take pity, but Ted shows absolutely no interest in me whatsoever.”

I reached across and took her hand. “Sometimes post-surgery, men are at a loss about what to do. Ted might be afraid he’s going to hurt you, for instance.”

It had always amazed me how many support groups there were for cancer survivors, but I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the support groups that were available for their families-their husbands and children.

Dorothy shook her head sadly. “Ted doesn’t even try. He spends hours and hours at the office. And when he gets home, he says he’s too tired.”

“But he’s an admiral at the Pentagon! Didn’t you tell me he deals with supplies and matériel? There’s a war on in Iraq, Dorothy. Surely it’s not so hard to believe that he has to spend a lot of time at the office.”

Dorothy snorted. “Well, if he is at his office, he sure as hell doesn’t answer his damn telephone.”