Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

She noticed me clutching another guy’s used mustache and smiled. One of her incisors had come in crooked; it made her look extra delighted.

“Hello, son,” she said. “Hungry?”

I shrugged. Six months on the road alone had made me a lousy conversationalist. Miriam didn’t care.

“Come to dinner,” she said.

I shrugged again.

“You’re about to be handed your pictures,” she said accurately. “I’m offering you a free meal. Don’t be dumb.” She extended her hand, and I took it, and she dragged me across the street to a Chinese restaurant, my first. Dark red walls and dark green booths, Chinese tchotchkes everywhere, and a woman dressed as a toddler who sat across the table and seemed to be flirting with me. Despite the costume, I couldn’t reconcile the kid who skipped onstage with this languid creature.

“Hey, boy wonder,” Miriam said.

“Who, me?”

She’d filled in the rest of her lips the minute we sat down; now they matched the scarlet rickrack that trimmed our emerald-green booth. Her elbows were on the tabletop, her hips all the way back on the seat. Though I could not see down her high-necked dress, somehow I felt like I could. “I collect boy wonders,” she said.

“Like your partner?”

“Ben? Ben has a crush on the saxophone player.”

I tried to remember a lady saxophone player.

“Don’t look so shocked!” she said, though at the moment I wasn’t. “He’s a nice boy. They all are.”

So then I began to get shocked. But she reached across the table and fingered a button on my jacket cuff. She smoked. She swore. An old-timer, she’d been playing six years old for ten years. “I’ve tried other acts, but this is the only one.”

“What will you do when you get too old for it?” I said.

“Hey! Who says?”

“No,” I said. “I — Never. Of course never.”

“That’s right.” She had her fingers in my plate. I had ordered chop suey, because it was the only thing on the menu I’d ever heard of. “You don’t think I’m too old, do you?” she asked, and she reached across the table with her sticky fingers and fiddled the button again.

“For what?” I asked. I was trying to flirt. Now I suspect flirting on my part would have been beside the point.

“That remains to be seen.”

I was eighteen years old, but before this night — this memorable night, as it turned out — I’d never so much as kissed a girl. In the most abstract way the female sex was not a mystery: I’d grown up in a house filled to the rafters with it. I’d had passing crushes on girls at Valley High, but they were not Jewish. There were no nice Jewish girls my age in Vee Jay; my father sent Hattie and me to dances at the Jewish Community Center in Des Moines, where we took to the floor with each other. We picked out couples to mock. Hattie could mimic anyone’s shuffling step. If Pop had wanted us to meet our future spouses, he should have sent us without each other. Now here I was in a Chinese restaurant, some strange woman tickling me on the wrist, and I realized I could have gone with any of those Valley Junction girls, if it hadn’t been for Hattie. She had taken up all my time. These days any psychiatrist will tell you that it’s normal to feel anger at someone who dies — first for being dumb enough to quit living, then for every other transgression — but I didn’t know that. There I was, invigorated with rage for Hattie. I turned my hand around and caught Mimi’s.

“He lives!” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette and blinked at me — a movement so deliberate and lash heavy I thought I could feel the wind from it on my cheek. I brought her knuckles to my mouth and kissed them.

Nine hours later, after the second show, in her hotel room, I said, “The only thing you’re too old for is this wig.” It was a wig after all; it had shifted under my hand.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked.

Well, I may have been underexperienced, but I wasn’t a lost cause. “I don’t know.”

“Sixteen.”

I laughed.

“Sixteen,” she repeated, and suddenly I saw it: she was sixteen. Six years old for ten years, six plus ten. Maybe it was her lovely large nose that made her look older, or her cigarettes, or the way she’d seduced a lonely young man as though she were a vaudeville cliché. Later I got so good at guessing women’s ages — not out loud, of course — that I could have done it as an act. At the time, though: sixteen?

“You’re still too old for the wig,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the wig.” She got up and went to the chair by the window to smoke a cigarette. She had a swimmer’s figure, lovely to me, tiny through the torso but wide hipped and perfectly suited to her costume: nothing to tape down above, concealed by petticoats below.

“Why?” I asked. As the boys in the band would say, I had already discovered that she wasn’t a natural blonde. The way she was sitting, I could see the major piece of evidence.

She looked at me, and sighed. “Because this,” she said, and pulled off the wig. What was underneath was not exactly hair: it was flossy blond in some parts, and white in others, and ragged and peaked; underneath you could see its original dark brown, like tree bark in a snowstorm. “I’ve been peroxiding for. . Last week some chorus girl did this to me. She said she knew how I could go real. . ” She tossed the wig around on her fist, and then regarded it, as though she were on the edge of a sentimental wig-induced monologue, a sweet vaudeville Hamlet. “It’ll grow out eventually, but in the meantime. .”

“That’s not so bad,” I said. “You should just cut it short.”

“The wig?”

“Your hair. I could do it for you.”

“You know how?”

“I cut my own. That’s harder. Do you have scissors?”

“In. .” She gestured toward a bag on the vanity. I found them: they were shaped like a long-billed bird.

“You’re sure?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

And so, in Duluth, Minnesota, shortly after sleeping with a girl for the first time in my life, I cut her hair short, and tried to comb it back. I was so grateful to Miriam that I would have done anything: after the haircut, I could clip her nails, or iron her dresses, or polish her shoes.

“It bristles,” she said.

“You need some greasy kid’s stuff.” She had Vaseline in her bag; that would do, though a few moments later I would wrestle her back to bed and we’d get the pillowcases and sheets so greasy they turned translucent. Now I took a glob from the jar and combed it through her hair, which was actually nearly mahogany.

“I think I’ll keep you around,” she said. “You’re handy.”

And so she did, and so I was.

The Disappointment Act

“You’re going on in Indianapolis tomorrow,” Miriam said the next morning over the room-service tray. She had ordered me coddled eggs and dry toast, like the invalid I was. “With me,” she added. “Okay, Savant?”

I’d never meant to be a comedian, but as always my breaks came when I rode on someone else’s coattails, in this case Miriam’s frothy yellow skirt. Ben Savant said he wanted to take some time off. He knew that Mimi had been eyeing me that week — that’s why he’d handed over his handlebar mustache — and before he left town he handed over everything else too: his costume, his supply of cotton wool and spirit gum, even his name and glossies, because there was no point in throwing out perfectly good pictures. Turned out the guy I met wasn’t even the real Ben Savant; he’d stepped in so seamlessly everyone, including Mimi, had forgotten his real name. The first Savant had drunk himself to death some years before, and had been, in fact, Miriam’s father. The mustache, as advertised, was hot, and the spirit gum tasted awful.