Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

“Fuck,” she whispered as the shaking of her hand smeared a red line nearly to her nose. “Darn,” she amended firmly. Mr. Marchand did not like the F word. He used to like it just fine, but a year, or two, or twenty ago, he had slapped her silly for using it in front of him. After that she never heard him say the word. It was like he’d gotten religion or culture or something. He didn’t have to slap her like he did. All he had to do was ask. Saying no to him had never been an option.

Not since that first night.

Remembering then was better than remembering now. Snow was drifting down from a low dark sky. The world was cold and quiet, not hot and hungry like Louisiana. Her mom and dad were at a prayer vigil for a deacon who had passed. Stillness, snow, and darkness swaddled the house. She was at the window on the second-floor landing looking into the next-door neighbor’s house.

Through snowflakes half as big as her fist falling through the halo of the street light, she watched his mother, wearing a flannel nightgown with matching robe and slippers, just like June Cleaver, kiss his brother on the cheek, then sit on the edge of the bed and sing to him.

He came into the doorway and watched them. She loved the way his hair waved, long in front and short over the ears. She loved his dark eyes, the four-square way he stood, feet shoulder-width apart, like he could take on the world. He was what her grandmother used to call an “old soul.”

Leaning against the window to be closer, she’d fallen asleep. Then, for no reason she could think of, she opened her eyes. It wasn’t like waking up; it was like already being awake, and suddenly, in a pitch-black theatre, the movie comes on.

He was right in front of her, walking down his dimly lit hallway toward her window. He stopped, looked right into her eyes, and smiled that slightly crooked smile that made her weak at the knees.

“Sssshh,” she heard herself hissing. The sound dragged her back to the mirror and the lipstick running up to her nose.

She needed a little something. A stiffener.

A glass of bourbon sat on the back of the commode in a space carved out by repetition. The rest of the toilet tank was obscured by a broken eye shadow container, hair pulled from brushes, two bottles of hairspray, a dirty washcloth, and assorted hair pins and tissues. The overflow hadn’t far to go. A pile had built up over time until the space between the side of the tank and the sink cabinet was full. Where the glass rested was an almost perfect circle in the mess delineated by old rings from the bottom of the tumbler.

Lifting it carefully, she pushed out her lips to do the least amount of damage to her makeup and took a sip. “Cocktail,” she said to chase away the word “booze” that clicked into her mind.

The bourbon was just to steady her hand; she didn’t want to get tipsy tonight. Fortified, she tried applying the lipstick again. Better. Not perfect, but better. At least most of the color was within shouting distance of her lip line. Since her lips were naturally thin, she colored outside of it anyway to make them look fuller. Admiring the effect, she shook a cigarette from a partially crushed pack of Dorals and lit it. “Shit.” The lipstick was okay, but she had another cigarette burning on the edge of the sink, adding its burn-and-nicotine footprint to half a dozen others. Pinching it up, she dropped it in the toilet and set the new one down in its place.

Another hit of bourbon and she began on her eyes. Most days she just ringed them with black shadow and piled on the mascara. Back when she was boring, before she’d come to New Orleans and become the Woman in Red, she would never have dared wear so much makeup. If she had, either her mother would make her wash her face or some nosey parker would say, “And just who are you supposed to be?” and then that biddy would tell her mother. New Orleans loved masks, and makeup was a mask of sorts. Paint to cover youthful extravagances and sins, to let a woman be who she should be instead of who she had to be. When she’d first caked it on, she’d been putting on a character, the Woman in Red. Now heavy base, white powder, carmine lipstick, charcoal eye shadow, and gobs of black mascara were part of the persona she’d worn for so long it ceased to be an act.

Tonight, she wanted to look nice, have the charcoal shadows neat and the mascara without clumps. Squinting through the fog of bourbon, smoke, and dirt, she carefully combed out her lashes with an old toothbrush. At least she hoped it was the old one.

At eight o’clock she was going to meet Mr. Marchand, and she wasn’t going to shame herself. Not this time. She wasn’t going to be too tipsy. She was going to have it together: nice dress, face on straight, hair done. This meeting was a big deal. Mr. Marchand was like family, but better-closer-and meeting him wasn’t a casual thing.

“It’s him moving forward in our relationship,” she said solemnly to the face in the mirror. In her heart she knew that wasn’t the way it was. He did things for his own reasons and hadn’t bothered to tell her what they were for years. No, he’d never bothered to tell her why he did things or had her do things. “This is like Mr. Marchand taking me home to meet his mother,” she said and took a long drag on the cigarette. Her heart put in its place, she picked up the hairbrush.

Before moving to New Orleans she’d never heard of tarot. Because she needed to stay close to Mr. Marchand, she’d had to find something to do that would let her hang around Jackson Square where she could keep an eye on his office door. Since she couldn’t paint or draw caricatures, and there was no way she could stand still like the statues, not even when she was thinner, tarot reading seemed easiest.

Turned out she was good at it. Too big, and too red, and too much of most things, and too little of everything else, she didn’t think she’d ever be good at anything, but she saw things in the cards that were true. People liked to mock her when she said that, especially Mr. Marchand, so she didn’t brag about it-but she didn’t stop believing it either. There wasn’t anything else she could say good about herself except for that. It was true and right and she would not think it wasn’t.

Privately she believed she was a good reader because she’d spent her life being not enough-not pretty enough, smart enough, rich enough, lucky enough-and that gave her a special insight into people.

Ego didn’t get between her and the deck. She could see where the clients who came to her table were broken, and the cards told her how to help them. Of course, lots of times it was an act. Tourists paid for the act as much as for the reading. But not always. Once in a while there was a true “seeing.” Like when she’d warned Mr. Marchand’s wife. That had blown her mind. The act was mirrored in the cards so exactly she knew it wasn’t an act at all. A window between now and the future had opened for just that few minutes. She’d looked right through it, right into the awful place that woman was headed. The words weren’t hers, at least not all of them, but the seeing, that was all her.

Her hand twitched and she jammed the mascara wand into her eye. Pain shot through her and she knocked the lit cigarette to the floor. Not the floor, the floor was no longer visible; a crust of garbage an inch or two deep at its thinnest covered the hardwood. The smoldering butt fell into a stack of magazines and rolled behind the toilet. Bourbon got her as she bent down, and she fell into the toilet, banging her hand against the bowl.

She’d accidentally gotten tipsy.

Grunting, she dug the cigarette out and pounded the place it had landed in case anything had ignited. Dropping the butt in the toilet, she saw the acrylic nail of her right index finger had snapped off, exposing a scabby stub where the real nail had been filed down to take the epoxy.