Like a Charm (29 page)

'It's beautiful,' she'd told him again, ignoring her daughter, which she usually did. Then she got up and started down the drive to the gate and her appointment. If he'd waited another month or two before he killed her, it would have been maple season and she would have been boiling syrup on the stove.

'I never saw anybody come before just from the pain,' Mistress Pamela had said, straightening the instruments on her table. 'I never saw anybody as young as you before, either. It's old guys I get, most of the time. Sour old men all shrivelled up and waiting to die. You have to wonder what they've done they think they need to be punished for.'

'It won't look right until it has a few more charms,' the woman in the shop said. 'Not to me.' Then she took the bracelet off and laid it on the counter.

He had meant to buy the charm bracelet for Miss Pamela, but when he had seen it on the arm of the woman in the shop he hadn't been able to imagine it anywhere else. He'd bought another bracelet later, a tin and copper one in a souvenir shop in Leicester Square, with the outline of Tower Bridge engraved on it. He found that one in the pocket of his soiled pants and put it down on the bed next to the charm bracelet. Then he picked them both up and put them away in his flight bag. This was not the first time he had brought a hand back from Europe. He'd done it only last year, after the German trip. The trick was to know what they were looking for, and to keep all things made of metal in their own separate place.

The hands lay in plastic sandwich bags he'd brought from the States. He'd had no idea if they sold plastic sandwich bags in London, and he still didn't know. Miss Pamela's hand was curled in on itself, the nails long and glittery, bare of the rings she'd been wearing the night before. He had had to take off the rings, because they could have tripped a metal alarm. The old woman's hand had never had any rings on it, and its fingernails were as plain as ever. She wouldn't waste her money getting bits of plastic and glass drilled into them. His jeans were loose and fluid
–
'relaxed fit', they were called, meaning they were made to be worn by men who were growing fat. He was not, but he liked the looseness in the legs. He put the bag with Miss Pamela's hand in it down the inside leg on the right and pinned it there. He put the bag with the old woman's hand in it down the inside leg on the left and did the same. He was careful to keep the fingers pointing upwards so that the tips under the plastic brushed against his balls. He liked the feel of the plastic-covered palms pressing against his inner thighs. He would take Miss Pamela's hand out of its bag in the bathroom on the plane and put the bangle with Tower Bridge round the wrist. He would leave it under the tissues in the wall dispenser so that nobody would find it until the plane was being readied for take-off down the line. By then, he would be in a cab in Manhattan, leaving the other one.

'Listen,' Lisa Hardwick had said to him, that day she'd grabbed his crotch in the Student Centre. 'Don't kid me. You always think with your dick.'

Maybe he would sit next to Lisa Hardwick on the plane, in one of those three-across arrangements, with Marianne parked between them. He would take the old woman's hand off his thigh in the bathroom at JFK and put the bracelet on it. He would put the hand and the bracelet in the pocket of his jacket, so that he'd be ready with it when it came time to leave it in the cab. The bracelets always came off. They fell into sewer grates and on to tables. They fell down the cracks in couches. He had left the one from Germany in a drawer in a hotel room on 1-95 in New Jersey, next to a Gideon Bible, and although the story had made the papers the very next day, there had been nothing said about a sterling silver bangle bracelet with clusters of daisies round the edges.

He zipped up his pants and reached for the one clean shirt he had left. He put a plain blue crew-necked sweater over the shirt. He put his hands between his legs and felt their hands there. If he pressed against them hard enough, they felt alive.

Thud and suck, he thought, piling his suitcases up in front of the door to the hotel room. When he'd started, he'd meant to take their hearts, but he always went on too long. Thud and suck, thud and suck, thud and suck. The knife went in and out and up and down and back again, with its own rhythm, like a dance he'd learned to do and could only do again by rote.

'You think with your dick,' Lisa Hardwick had said, and John Robert Mortimer thought that was true.

NOT QUITE U.
Laura Lippman

The newspaper had a story the other day about sisters who discovered each other at Princeton, or maybe it was Rutgers. It was definitely a school in New Jersey, I remember that much. Literally separated at birth in Mexico or some place like that, they had been placed for adoption with two different families
–
one Jewish and obviously rich, the other Catholic and without so much money, so I guess their daughter was on scholarship, like me. Like I? As I am, yes that's it. She was on scholarship, as I am. Or, as I was, at the time of the story I'm telling.

I was a sophomore at what I'll call Not Quite U., a place that was no one's first choice, except for the pre-meds. Not Quite wasn't a safety school exactly. In fact, some of the students who didn't want to be there had failed to get into places with lesser reputations. Sure, we had the usual mix of would-be Ivy types, but also people who hadn't made the cut at, say, Washington University or Bucknell. Not Quite U. was a consolation prize, a future line on your resume, a drag in the present tense. Whenever some magazine did a round-up of the Top Ten party schools, Not Quite could be found in the correlating list of places where no one had any fun.

That was fine with me. I wasn't in college to have fun. I was pretty pleased with myself, getting into Not Quite with a good financial aid package, although it did feel like crashing a party where no one wanted to be. Even with the scholarship, I had to work two jobs to make ends meet. But I didn't mind either. It meant I spent less time in my dorm, listening to everyone whine about how miserable they were.

My first job was a work-study gig, decorous and dull. I worked at one of the information desks in the Great Glass Library, which afforded me plenty of time to study, but it paid only a dollar above minimum wage. So I fudged my age and my ID, took a second job in a working-class bar not far from campus. Most girls would have gone the glamour route at one of the downtown bars, figuring it would pay better. But a woman who sips a single $12 cocktail tends to be a lot stingier than a guy drinking six one-dollar draughts. Most people don't get that, but coming up where I did, I know there's no one more generous than a poor man on payday. I made $100 in tips on Friday-night shifts, and while the men were flirty, they were more respectful than the ones you meet in nicer places, the guys who seem to think a handful of ass goes with the drink, another little bowl of snacks.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was two years ago, and I had been working at Long John's for six months and liking it almost too much. The whole point of going to Not Quite U., after all, was to do better than my parents had done. When I was in junior high, my father had run a small bar near the racetrack.
Run it right into the ground,
my mother would chime in here. My mother always said that if you wanted to know where to put your money, watch what my father did and run in the other direction. To which my dad said, 'True enough, given that I've sunk most of my money into you, and it's the worst bargain I ever made.'

This was drunk talk, late at night. My parents weren't generally mean, just disappointed. In life, in each other, in themselves. And they weren't alcoholics, they just needed a vice they could afford and a six-pack of Carling Black Label cost $3.69. Me, I don't much care for alcohol. I'll nurse a drink to keep a guy company, but I can't understand why anyone wants to dull the edges that way. I like to keep my mind sharp. Mind sharp, body hard. Did I mention I was on the track team in college? Which wasn't a prestige thing at N.Q.U., which had love in its heart only for lacrosse, but still helped to get me in. I ran the mile, which I think requires the most discipline. Anyone can turn it on for a sprint, you're finished before your brain and body have had the chance to register the effort, while the marathon is a dull, plodding affair. The mile requires speed
and
strategy. And discipline. Even on the days I worked until two a.m., I was up at six for my morning run, back out in the afternoon to practise with the team. All the while, I maintained a B+ average, and I would have made straight As if it weren't for all the general requirements outside my major, econ.

Everything began in late February of my sophomore year. Long John's was slow because a freak snowstorm had blown in, keeping most of the regulars at home. It was almost nine p.m. and there were only a few hardcore regulars along the bar when the door opened and four students fell in, giggling and stamping their feet. I disliked them on sight. They were so taken with themselves, so self-adoring that it had never occurred to them that anyone could find them less than fascinating. They kept collapsing in hilarity at their own jokes and I knew that taking their orders would be pure torture. I let them arrange themselves in a booth – more hysterical laughter as they shrugged out of their coats and scarves and hats
–
before I approached.

'I don't suppose I could get a gin rickey here,' one girl said, and the others laughed as if this were the funniest thing they had ever heard. Pretty and haughty, she was the apparent leader, the one they deferred to. Excuse me –
the one to whom they all deferred.
That's it. The one to whom they all deferred.

'The bartender here can do pretty much anything but I should tell you we don't have a lot of premium brands in stock.'

'I like Boodles,' she said, prompting another round of laughter. 'It's a British gin,' she added helpfully, in case I couldn't put it together for myself.

'We have Beefeaters and Gordon's.'

'Not even Bombay?'

'Beefeaters and Gordon's,' I repeated.

She ran her fingers through her hair and I heard the bracelet before I saw it, and the sound it made was like another laugh at my expense. As an econ major, I didn't have to take too many English classes, but I knew about Daisy Buchanan and the silvery tinkle in her voice. That's what the bracelet sounded like to me, a woman's voice, full of money. The girl who wore it had long dark hair, falling loose to her shoulders, and a heart-shaped face. Staring at her was like looking into a mirror, only my hair has a lighter cast, and my cheekbones aren't as pronounced.

They eventually settled for beers and asked if the kitchen was open. They had apparently been lurching from place to place in the neighbourhood, trying to find someone who was open, which is how they ended up at Long John's. They all asked for cheeseburgers, except for bracelet girl, who wanted a chef salad. I brought them their draughts and prayed that they would drink slowly, so I could ignore them as much as possible.

'Hey, you and Maya look alike,' said one of the boys, the better looking of the two. He was a short guy, thin yet muscular, with dirty blond hair curling under the rim of his ski cap.

The girl who wasn't Maya stifled a laugh, as if he had said something forbidden, but the other boy nodded. 'Yeah, the resemblance is uncanny.'

'What is this, another remake of "The Parent Trap",' asked Maya. She began fiddling with her bracelet, unhooking the clasp, sliding it from her arm, sliding it back on. 'Am I the proper one from Boston, or the tomboy from California?'

'They walk alike, they talk alike,' the ugly boy sang.

'That was Patty Duke,' the other girl corrected him. 'What's your name? Where are you from? Maybe you're distant relations and you don't even know it.'

'I'm Kate,' I said, using the shorter version of my real name. My parents had named me Caitlin. It was the year everyone was naming their daughter Caitlin. Only my mother, being my mother, had spelled it Katelyn. I had shortened it to Kate when I was in high school and the crisp, sharp sound fitted me much better. Hard and sharp, like me. 'And I'm from around here, more or less.'

'Well I'm from New York,' Maya said. 'And I have to say, I really don't see it. I mean, we have dark hair and green eyes. So what? Do
you
see it?'

Her look at pretty boy said: You better not.

'No,' I said. 'Our bone structure is completely different.'

And I almost ran to the kitchen, heart pounding. It's not easy to give bad service to your only table of the night, but I managed it that evening, hiding in the kitchen as much as possible. They stiffed me on the tip, but they probably would have anyway. Besides, the last thing I wanted was for them to come back, bring other students interested in slumming for a night. If Maya wanted to disavow me, then I was just as anxious to deny her. Although, by all accounts
–
judging from her clothes, her averred preference for Boodles, and especially that bracelet dangling from her wrist
–
she had done just fine, better than me. Better than I.