Karen Bender - Refund - Stories

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, Evelyn 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 looked at the people walking, 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 again. “I wondered if you wanted some company. Can I come in?”

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

Ginger stood up and picked up a photo. “Here I am on New Year’s Eve, 1959,” said Ginger. “The presidential suite of the Beverly Hills 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 the girl, 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 their heads would get hot and they would think they were growing hair. They bought nun’s 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, tilting the bag so that an envelope inside fell out. Ginger did not pick it up. Then there was Evelyn running inside, yelling, “Violet!”

Evelyn looked in the purse and said, “Where’s your money?”

IN THE PURSE , Ginger wrote.

They looked at the kindly woman holding the purse. “Did you take my blind sister’s money?” Evelyn yelled; that was Ginger’s cue to weep.

“I didn’t,” the hapless stranger would protest, but there she was, holding the purse, with a blind mute weeping beside her; they could get ten, twenty, thirty dollars out of the stranger. When the sucker left, Evelyn would walk Ginger around the corner and hug her.

“Good, Violet,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Ginger, feeling the solidness of her sister’s arms around her, and she closed her eyes and let herself breathe.

WHEN GINGER WOKE UP FROM HER NAP THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, she did not know where she was. The dark afternoon light streamed through the mint blue curtains. She shivered and sat up. She flung open a drawer, looking for clues. The room felt as though it were moving. She was not in a hotel. Where were they going? She opened the curtains and saw mountains covered in ice. Her mind was a crumpled ball of paper. She stood up quickly, as though to straighten her thoughts. The phone rang.

“How are you feeling? Do you want to go to the dinner tonight?”

Her heartbeat slowed at the naturalness of the question, at the caller’s belief that Ginger would continue this conversation. She remembered that they were on a cruise to Alaska. She also remembered that the girl had said something kind to her.

The room was decorated to flatter the passengers into believing they were traveling in opulence. There were plaster Roman columns, painted gold, topped with bouquets of roses. The waiters’ jackets were adorned in rhinestones that said: Alaska ’03 . Outside the large glass windows, the water and sky, black and clear, surrounded the ship.

Tonight, Darlene’s hair was slicked up into a topknot and shone, a metallic blonde, in the light. Her eyelids gleamed blue, unearthly.

“How are you?” asked Ginger.

“I just want to say. . I am someone,” said Darlene. She looked dazed. “I am going to graduate with a B average in communications.” She sat down. “Listen.” She closed her eyes. “I left a message on his answering machine. I said, I’ll do anything. Let me. I’ll change.”

“What?” Ginger asked, alarmed.

“I tried to do what you said,” she said. “I know how to fool him. I’ll keep calling him. I’ll be what you said, generous, you’re right, I have been selfish—”

“No,” said Ginger. “That’s not what I meant—”

The girl stared at her with her reptilian eyes. “Then what do I do?” she said, and her voice was hoarse.