Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

Clarissa pretends to stick two fingers in her eyes.

“We’re getting our hair highlighted. Our underwear is not the point,” I say, seeking a little decorum.

Clarissa visits from a city bigger than this one where we both grew up. She moved after we graduated from the state college here. She’s adventurous, always going places she’s never been before. Lately, though, she says she does not feel rooted, and when she says it she uses her hands, wiggling her fingers as if they are roots settling in. She says the free packets of vitamins she gets as a telemarketer for a vitamin company have lost their charm. She says she is immune to the vitamins and they are actually making her sick now. She blames them for her current health problem. She suspects the lump in her breast is really a vitamin capsule. “I’m taking care of myself to death,” she says. She blames her love life on the vitamins too. Zach, her longest relationship, lasted a month, and on his way out he referred to Clarissa as “the perkiest woman he ever met.” Afterward Clarissa said she needed to visit somebody else’s life, so she came to see me.

“Do you think this woman forgot about us? Leaving this on too long has got to damage your hair.” Clarissa taps the sparkling silver on her head with impatient fingers.

“It’s only been twenty minutes. She said thirty to thirty-five.” I make up numbers to calm us both.

“I feel like a baked potato,” Clarissa says. She picks up a magazine filled with haircuts and flips to the middle. There is a picture of a woman in a red jumpsuit with her hair cut midear and swept dramatically across her face.

“Don’t we all deserve friends and marriage and love and children and jobs that satisfy us and good haircuts and nice clothes?” says Clarissa. “I can understand how having a few of those things might disqualify you from the rest, but really, don’t you think?”

“I don’t like that jumpsuit at all,” I say. This morning when we had this conversation about what Clarissa’s life lacks, I was the one who ended up feeling bad, which scared me because Clarissa has comforted me all my life.

Clarissa and I are longtime friends. Clarissa claims, though we didn’t meet each other until junior high, that she and I have the same first memory. For me, it is a memory of being two, on a Donald Duck swing with an orange duck bill for a seat in Oak Tree Park. For Clarissa, it is a memory of being three and a half (she’s that much older), on a Donald Duck swing with an orange duck bill for a seat in Oak Tree Park, watching another little girl, who was me, swinging on the swing next to her. These things are important, and true or not, Clarissa makes things up with the best of intentions. Once, in high school, she told me she had a dream in which God was her ex-boyfriend. I honestly believed she was that powerful; there are times even now, all grown up, that I still believe it.

Clarissa says she has come to visit my life, but here in this beauty salon we are doing what we always do when we get together — lifting ourselves out of real life even as we stare at ourselves in the mirror.

“Okay, the jumpsuit’s hideous. But doesn’t everyone deserve their health? Sturdy sinuses?” Clarissa says.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I’m relieved because sturdy sinuses is Clarissa teasing me. I’m a medical secretary and during my spare time in the neurosurgery clinic, I read patient files — spina bifida and brain tumors, pictures of shaved heads with stitches like the leather stitching on a baseball. Once, I read the medical report of a doctor who had just finished removing a brain tumor successfully, but with the slip of a scalpel he put the patient’s sinuses out of commission. The report stated that, in order for this operation to be successful, “sturdy sinuses are a must.” When I told Clarissa about the slipup in the operation she said, “That’s perverted.” She has a gift for malapropisms.

The irony of Clarissa’s lump is that, of the two of us, I thought it would be me who would fall victim to something like that. I often go home from my job and run my fingers slowly through my hair, checking. The first time I did it I gave myself a scare, not realizing until I asked a doctor at work that skulls are by nature lumpy. I’m still never sure. I check my whole body for lumps, sometimes mistaking bone for something more tragic. My breasts feel like tapioca, always. It’s this constant searching without results, good or bad, that Clarissa used to say made her wish she’d find something.

One day at work, as I stared out the window, I saw the wind blow a woman’s red hat from her head. A light flickered on and off where I imagine my heart must be and when this happened I thought I understood the weight of Clarissa’s constant search. I sometimes walk up and down the hall in my apartment thinking about that midair red hat against the gray sky as I check for any slight shift in my equilibrium.

When Clarissa visits, we reward ourselves. We sneak banana splits in Clarissa’s roomy purse into movies during the middle of the day. We leave the theater, hands sticky with chocolate sauce, blinking into the sun as our eyes adjust. We go to the zoo and put peanuts on the long tongue of the giraffe. We love to watch the way it blinks its huge brown eyes and rolls the peanuts slow and sexy, one by one into its mouth.

Clarissa always has a plan like movies in the afternoon or coloring our hair. In junior high, Clarissa could memorize the class schedules of her crushes easily so that she would just happen to be walking by a particular doorway when a certain class let out. She is also the sort of person who knew how to leave something strategically, a scarf perhaps, at a boy’s house so she’d have an excuse to come back later. She’s quick on her feet that way.

Clarissa turns to me suddenly and says, as if she’d never seen me before in her life, “Well, hello.”

At first I think she’s reading the neon script WELL HELLO, BEAUTIFUL sign over the basins behind us that are visible in the mirror. But then I recognize the game we’ve been playing since we first met. When we were younger, one of us was the boy and the other the girl and we’d meet for the first time, but lately we play it as two women who haven’t seen each other in a long time.

“Well, hello to you too, Lucretia,” I say, making up a name. “It’s been forever. What have you been up to?” I laugh, in an attempt to keep things light.

“Well, Priscilla,” Clarissa says, “I left this town for a city with a nightlife, a place where there’s always something to do.”

“So you like it? I, as you probably know, am fresh back from Napa Valley where I was doing Robert Mondavi a little favor and leading wine tours. It’s the life. You know, cheese and wine, wine and cheese. And you?”

“I started my own health spa. At first, of course, I was selling vitamins over the phone, but I moved up quickly.” Clarissa is straight-faced. She picks up a comb from the faux-marble countertop and plucks at the teeth with her nails.

“It sounds fabulous.” I drag the a for effect. “Did you hear I’m engaged to one of the Mondavi brothers? Proposed right there in the vineyard. He said I was the bouquet he’d been searching for all his life.” I giggle like a little girl. “The health spa?” I prompt Clarissa when she doesn’t smile.

“Very elegant,” Clarissa says. “Marble columns at the entrance, cool blue throughout.” She pauses, sighing. “Mud baths, steam baths, bath baths. And piles of fruit and specially concocted vitamin drinks served to the customers on silver platters.”

“You’ve come a long way from your small-town beginnings. And you live in a beautiful house, I imagine.”

“The most,” she says theatrically, running one finger quickly down the comb so the teeth whistle as they bend. Clarissa watches the comb as she does this, concentrating. “And I’ve had a thousand lovers and never loved a single one of them,” she says. “Yes, it’s true, I’ve escaped my small-town beginnings….”