Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

“We could go to Alaska!”

This looked bad; this picture, I was in. We each had our own dog sled, and we were each wrapped in thick fur coats against the snow. Sundown. We were heading off into the cold and the dark, no one knew where. Huge rounds of mink haloed our faces, which were lonely and afraid. Somehow I knew that each of the sleds would end up going in a different direction, the four points of the compass. We would never meet again.

Alaska was cold. Alaska was bleak. It was like the snow of the spirit, covering everything over. Maybe the tropics were better, after all.

“New Orleans is wonderful,” I said. “It’ll be great.”

After all, I had no proof that the picture in Deane’s journal was New Orleans. It could be Haiti or Havana. I’d never seen that voodoo shop.

“Do you really think so?” Linwood’s voice was childlike now.

“Yes.” I wanted to be very strong, for all of them. “We’ll have a terrific time. A real adventure. And then we’ll buy a new house, just for the four of us.”

“We’ve got lots of money for Christmas,” Linwood added.

“Oh yeah?” June asked.

“You girls can each have fifty dollars to buy presents with.”

That would have seemed like a ton of money, once.

“Won’t that be fun?”

“What’s so great about Antoine’s?” June asked me.

We were sitting in our room, putting off getting dressed. No matter how long we delayed, we’d still be ready before they were. “I don’t know.”

“Plus it’s after nine. I wish we could order sandwiches and ice cream from room service.”

I did, too. We were staying in the Hilton. What good was staying in the Hilton if you didn’t get to do all the different stuff? We’d already been down to the indoor pool, and the sauna, ordered Shirley Temples from the downstairs bar and charged them to our room, ridden up and down the elevators a dozen times, and watched the color television. But room service!

The phone rang. June picked it up and said, “We already gave at the office.” She hung up.

“That was them,” I said.

“I know.”

When it rang again, I picked up. Stan told me we had ten minutes and he didn’t appreciate being hung up on. “We better get dressed.”

I put on the outfit Linwood had bought me for Thanksgiving: a black velvet dress with a white lace collar, white tights, and short black patent leather boots. Then I brushed back my long, straight, thin hair and tied it with a green ribbon. When I put on my red coat, I’d look festive.

You had to try.

June put on her new gray wool dress, which looked exactly like her coat. It was the only thing she let Linwood buy.

“Why don’t you put something in your hair?”

She looked in the mirror at her round face. Last year, she’d chopped off her thick, wavy chestnut hair above her ears, and had taken to wearing it combed straight back with a hairband. Now, at least, it had grown out a little.

“Like what?”

I opened up the suitcase and pulled out the present I’d gotten her in Miami. It was a straw hairband with little white shells glued all over it, in flower patterns. “Merry Christmas.”

“Oh.” She looked at the hairband as if it were an object from Mars. Then, shyly, she plunked it on her head.

“Like this.” I rearranged her hair so there was a kind of wave over her forehead. “See?”

Well, funny thing, it worked. Her face looked longer and less moony. In fact, without the glasses, you could see that in a year or two, she would be even prettier than Deane. But pretty was the wrong word for Deane, anyway.

“Thanks, Fatty,” June said. She said it nice, though, so that was okay.

We got our coats and went out into the hallway and knocked on their door.

“Just a minute,” said Stan.

“What a surprise,” said June. “They aren’t ready.”

Then the door opened.

“Don’t you girls look cute,” Stan said. “Eggnog?”

We walked into their room and found Linwood sitting at the table, in some kind of black dress that made her skin look like milk. Her rhinestone earrings were big as Christmas tree ornaments. Stan was wearing his usual dark suit, but he had a red carnation in his lapel.

The best part, though, was the eggnog! Four motel glasses were laid out with the thick creamy stuff.

“Oh boy!” said June.

We all sat at the table, and they didn’t even like eggnog. It was really just for us.

We all raised our glasses in a toast:

“To our new home, wherever it may be!”

We headed down Bourbon Street in the cold December night. We’d avoided this area after dark before, and you could see why. It was solid bars, all of them packed with people, their doors open wide. Sailors moved freely and frequently from place to place, tall drinks in funnel-shaped glasses balanced precariously in their hands. Right to our left, a window above a bar opened, and a nearly naked woman glided out on a swing. Her breasts bobbed up and down, only the very tips protected from the cold by silver-tassled decorations. She was lovely, really, but she looked awfully cold, with her long blond hair swept over one shoulder. You could see the goosepimples on her thighs around the G-string.

“Gross!” June said.

Stan and Linwood were striding ahead, perhaps pretending that we were not their children trailing past strip-tease joints and gawking.

“Look at that!” I pointed to the other side of the street, where the saloon doors were swinging open and shut so you could see a woman taking a bubble bath in a great big champagne glass. She had one of those big sponges like you wash the car with, and she was merrily squeezing it over her astonishing chest.

“Yuck!”

“Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

“With those great big boobs? She looks deformed!”

I made a protocol decision in favor of clamming up. It was almost Christmas; why bicker? I kept my admiration to myself, but these big sleek women filled me with awe. Real live naked women! The closest I’d ever gotten to seeing Linwood naked was one morning, mid-makeup, when she dashed from bathroom to bedroom—but even then she was wearing a brassiere and underpants and a full-length slip over that. Still, I remember being delighted by the round curve of her arms and shoulders, and the place where the breasts meet.

“Why don’t they have hair there?” I asked June. Deane had explained to me about the hair.

June ignored me. She wasn’t trying, like I was, to catch glimpses of Naughty Nan through the swinging doors. Instead, she was watching a trio of tap-dancing boys, shuffling dutifully along on the street corner. An older man, probably their father, played the harmonica with no great show of enthusiasm.

“Pet,” she said. “You can dance as good as that . I could be your manager and we could—”

Stan materialized before us. “What in God’s name is taking you girls so long?” Arms akimbo, previous good humor only a memory, he glared down at us. “Pet, this stuff is strictly for adults. Do you want to end up like Deane?”

I didn’t quite see the connection. What I did see was the threat, so I squared my shoulders and we marched along in two neat rows of two, like Madeline. I tried to close my ears to the sound of low-down music, the wailing trumpet and the raspy beat of the strippers’ snare drums.

Stan and Linwood veered abruptly off Bourbon, and here it was quiet and dark, only a few couples strolling past the antique stores, their windows filled with shadow puppets from Bali, carved jade Buddhas, Mardi Gras clown masks, jeweled boxes with hidden interiors, spilling enameled beads.

Forgetting my resolution, I stopped to stare in the window of a particular store. There was a carved wooden face, with Spanish moss for hair and big carved mouth, eyes, and nose, a little like the stuff at Ripley’s. And there were also all kinds of colored candles in the window, and tiny baby dolls, the plastic kind painted black and gold. They were all bound together with rope and crow feathers.