Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

“I’m just learning,” the woman says, indicating the Fortunes book. “Look around, it’s all for sale.”

The stones sliding around on the glass counter cause Delia to taste the salt of sea glass from someplace far away, from before she knew Austin’s face. It is the taste of a time before she was fearful, when she still envied the deaf and kidnapped little girl. She thinks of the second day in the dead aunt’s house. She carried her suitcases up the stairs with Austin carrying his close behind her. She stopped to get a better grip, and as she did she looked under her arm and there was Austin wearing a secret, wicked smile. He ran his fingers quickly through his hair, but she could have sworn he’d been giving her the finger.

“Gotta get back to love,” the man says, as if it were a place, and he walks into a back room where Delia sees a love seat partially stripped. Every other piece of furniture in the room is unfinished, like somebody’s abandoned New Year’s resolutions.

“Let me try,” the woman says, as if to say, “Let me try again,” as if she’s known Delia for years. “I’ve got it all arranged, according to your height and some liberties I’ve taken.” The stones make zigzags across the counter. Delia is sure that the woman has abandoned the Fortunes book.

“Don’t tell me,” the woman says. “You’re married.” She laughs as Delia looks at her wedding ring. The woman’s hands are covered with rings. One in particular catches Delia’s eye. It has two dark blue stones in a serpentine pattern that seems to climb up the woman’s finger.

“That’s a beautiful ring,” Delia says, touching a stone so smooth it makes her sleepy with contentment.

“These are for sale too,” the woman says, spreading her fingers like a mannequin’s. Delia thinks of the news story of the brothers who play classical guitar together. In this woman cutting deals with the world, Delia has found a similar moment of perfection. The rings must have flown in through the front door and slipped themselves onto the woman’s fingers. Someday they will fly off her fingers and out the back door. The relationship the woman has with the rings has more to do with the way she reached up to take them from the air as they flew in the door than with the rings themselves. Delia pictures Austin’s aunt wandering through the antiques store, opening and closing old cookie tins that once belonged to someone else. She imagines bringing the old teapot covered with flowers and filled with spiders and placing it anonymously among other people’s martini glasses and clay angels. In her mind she walks through Austin’s aunt’s house and gives it all away, everything that Austin has held up to her.

“You have children,” the woman says, then laughs and studies Delia’s face. “You don’t have children?”

The woman reaches for Delia’s hand and holds it with her own. “Let’s give your palm a look,” she says, and Delia hears the tall man in the back room begin to strip a piece of wood he probably hasn’t touched in years. Delia closes her eyes, and the long fingers of the girl in the china shop reaching for the elephant return to her as if the girl were there with her now.

“You are tired,” the woman says, in a voice that is not part of divining Delia’s fortune. The woman leads Delia to a couch stuffed with rag dolls. A small doll foot pokes out of a tear in the arm.

Delia hears a rustling like paper moving across the floor. “Scorpions,” the woman says. Still, Delia leans her head back on the couch, comfortable in this place where anything might go at any moment. Delia breathes easily with this woman willing to divest herself of worldly objects after she’s worn them for a while. “Don’t worry,” the woman says, though Delia has already closed her eyes. “Scorpions carry an ancient toxin. We’ve built up an immunity over the centuries.”

The woman picks a broad-backed silver brush from the top of the crowded vanity and sits beside Delia on the couch. As the woman slowly brushes Delia’s hair, Delia does not dream the dream about Austin’s twisted face. She will not go back there. Her decision is as ancient as the scorpion toxin, one she made long before she ever met Austin. She dreams instead that she is handling scorpions, tracing their curved and rustling bodies with delicate fingers. She dreams that she holds up a scorpion to the woman in the antiques shop and asks, “What is this?” “I’m not sure, but it could be worth millions,” the woman answers as the sweet and ancient poison sinks deep into Delia, seeking out a secret beneath the sum of her experiences. She will take the scorpion and let it loose in the swirling dirt outside her neighbor’s house. Once Delia’s hands are free, she will push the leathery-faced woman in her beach chair all the way to the ocean.

TODAY is not even a holiday and we are waiting in swivel chairs side by side in front of mirrors lit by amber bulbs in a room done all in pinks at Well Hello, Beautiful. It is usually her birthday that is the occasion for visiting, but these days my best friend, Clarissa, finds other occasions — Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Saint Patrick’s Day this year. Last month she said something about the vernal equinox but then came down for a week and never mentioned it again once.

Like me, Clarissa — who informed me when she arrived that she has changed her name to Rissa, and I did give it a day’s effort, but she’s Clarissa to me — is dressed in a wraparound black robe tied in front. We are both naked underneath except for our underwear, according to the instructions in the dressing room: DISROBE FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION. Our heads sparkle with strips of tinfoil. This process, one of Clarissa’s ideas, promises delicate highlights with minimum regrowth difficulty. “Whatever,” Clarissa says. “It’s a necessary indulgence.”

Under the bright overhead lighting, Clarissa and I both look slightly green. There are pink plastic domes attached to the backs of our chairs, whose arms are swung so the domes are not covering our heads. They hover like empty sockets over the floor in this room that smells like canned peaches. Other customers in black robes like ours sit under dryers reading magazines and consulting with salon attendants dressed in pink. The salon is a world unto itself.

“Beauty is more than skin deep!” Clarissa reads to me from the picture taped to the mirror in front of her. It is a picture of a cat with a flower-print dress on, applying red lipstick with an obviously fake paw. Clarissa slides one hand under her robe to her left breast the way she’s been doing all day. “Still smaller than a bread box,” she says of the lump discovered recently by her gynecologist during a routine checkup. I start to offer the hope that she offered me when she arrived, the possibility of the lump being fibrotic, but Clarissa has a way of talking as if to herself when she doesn’t want to hear things. “Because you’re worth it,” she reads from another cat picture. In this picture, a cat with a blush brush in one fake paw and grapes in the other stands over a cat reclining on a divan.

“Do you think this woman is ever coming back?” says Clarissa, referring to our beauty consultant, Camille. Clarissa looks down the V neck of her robe. “I definitely wore bad underwear. I think Zach took all my good underwear and then hoped I would be in an accident.” Zach is Clarissa’s most recent ex-boyfriend, whom I never met before they broke up two weeks ago. Clarissa is one of the few people I know who actually dates, and dates regularly.

“What kind of accident?” I ask, willing to contend. As long as she’s on vacation, Clarissa says she doesn’t want to talk about her real life. I can play this game too. I put on my newscaster’s voice and say, “At Well Hello, Beautiful this afternoon, due to a freak shortage of robes, a woman was required to have her hair done in nothing but her really bad underwear.”