Some Kind of Miracle (13 page)

H
ere’s how it feels to massage Margie Kane: really weird, Dahlia thought, because everything about her was fake. Implants, inserts, nips, tucks, lifts, add-ons, remodels. Some of the scars were new, and Dahlia had to massage gingerly around them. Margie had tiny scars here and there, all of them dead giveaways of her numerous plastic surgeries. Not that Margie cared if Dahlia saw the scars. Who in the hell was Dahlia? The masseuse. Please. That’s why Margie never once apologized about always being at least a half hour late for Dahlia, who came in, set up the table, and then read whatever book Margie had on her bedroom coffee table that week. Usually it was something by Danielle Steel.

Most of the time, Margie came sweeping into the bedroom, rushed into her bathroom, took a long shower, and then made a few phone calls, while
Dahlia read in the little seating area adjacent to the vast bedroom, waiting for her. When Margie finally emerged, she would be chatting away on the cordless phone, which she liked to hold in her hand even as she climbed onto the table via a small antique wooden step stool she kept next to it. She always made sure Dahlia positioned the step stool just so, because climbing onto the table improperly might jar some of her most recent stitches.

Margie would continue to talk on the phone throughout the entire massage, interrupting her conversation now and then only to bark “That’s too hard” or “Dig in deeper.” Dahlia couldn’t remember ever having one actual conversation with Margie since her secretary had hired her a year ago to massage Ms. Kane, as the secretary called her. Probably because Margie was always on the phone. The telephone chats Margie had during her massages weren’t business-related, as far as Dahlia could tell. Most of them sounded gossipy, about what certain people wore and how good or bad they’d looked at some event or other.

“Freddy always says—and he’s right—” was how Margie began a lot of her sentences, and Dahlia figured Freddy must be the Frederic Kane of Marjorie and Frederic Kane, which were the names on the check she was paid every week, already made out and waiting in the kitchen by the back door. Freddy was a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. Dahlia had seen him mentioned in articles in beauty magazines.

Today, when Dahlia came in, Margie was already on the table, and remarkably, she was not talking on the
phone. She was sitting up, and she held a small towel in front of her.

“Hi, Dahl,” she said softly, as if they were and always had been chummy. “I need to talk to you. I mean, I need to talk to someone, and you’re here, so I guess it’s going to be you.”

“Why don’t you lie down, Margie, and I’ll start on your back while we talk?”

“I don’t think I can stand for anyone to touch me. I mean, my skin is crawling. I found out last night that Freddy’s been banging his nurse, doing it in the surgery room at night when everybody’s gone. The fucking nurse called and told me, because she wants him to leave me. It’s kind of like Marla Maples and Ivana Trump. But don’t worry about me. I’m going to emerge like Ivana did. Triumphant.” She smiled weakly, and then a tear fell, and a terrible realization seemed to come over her, because her eyes got very wide. “Oh, my God. What if I don’t? What if he takes everything away from me?”

If Margie didn’t look so pitiful, with that big poofy hair and that overcollagened face, Dahlia would have laughed. Now her flow of tears made her too-thick mascara muddy up, then track slowly down her face, past her implanted cheekbones.

“That’s really sad, Margie,” Dahlia said, wishing Margie would lie down so she could get this over with. “I had no idea things were—”

“Me neither, honey. He was still ripping my clothes off every night, too. How do I live with that? Who knows what kind of horrible diseases she’s been passing on to me? And now he’s saying he’s not going to
give me any money because I was a lousy wife. My God. I could end up having to work. I could have to get a job at Saks, selling clothes I won’t be able to afford anymore to women who used to come to my house for dinner. How do people live?” She looked imploringly at Dahlia. “How do
you
live? How much does someone like you make a month? Maybe I could do that. I could go to massage school.”

Now she was off the table, pacing nervously.

“But then I’d have to massage people who had themselves done by Freddy. Unless I move somewhere else. That’s it. I’ll do massages in Maine. Where
is
Maine? Oh, my God. What if Freddy takes my car? What kinds of cars do people drive who give massages?” Margie hurried to the window, looking down at the huge circular driveway, where the rusting and dilapidated van stood waiting for Dahlia.

There was a long moment while Margie took in the van from end to end. “You have got to be joking!” she said, laughing a bitter laugh. “That’s it? Hah! That’s what it comes to? Well, I’d say that just about does it, then. I’m slashing my wrists,” she announced, and she marched into her bathroom and slammed the door. Dahlia could hear her loud sobs punctuated with moans of “Ohhh, my God.”

Another seventy-five bucks shot to shit, Dahlia thought, picking up her duffel bag of oils and candles and heading downstairs. In the kitchen a dour older woman in a white uniform stood at the sink, rinsing some dishes.

“I think Mrs. Kane needs some help upstairs,” Dahlia said. “You’d better look in on her right away.”
Then she pushed open the back door and made her way to the van. Inside she pulled the rearview mirror toward her face and looked into it. Pitiful, she said to herself, you should at least have told her she had to pay you for coming all the way over here. You are pitiful.

“Do you ever think I’m pitiful?” Dahlia had asked Sunny one morning. Dahlia was eleven, and she was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat, doing her homework, listening to Sunny sing in the shower. She was in the sixth grade, and Sunny had been spending the year working at the furniture store and taking a few music classes at Cal State Northridge in the evening. Her doctors told Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max that a few classes were all she could handle with her on-again, off-again hospital stays and her unstable behavior patterns.

“Why on earth would you ask me that?” Sunny said, sticking her head out from behind the shower curtain. Her long white hair was matted against her head. “Hand me one of those little towels for my hair,” she said, turning off the water and stepping out onto the terry-cloth mat as Dahlia handed her a small towel.

“Because I heard two girls at my school say I was a pitiful nerd with no friends and that’s why I hang around with my cousin.” Arthur the dog sidled over and licked the dripping water from Sunny’s legs as she made a turban for her hair with the smaller towel, then dried off with the larger one.

“They said that? My God, they’re so wrong. You’re fabulous. Let’s ask the studio audience.”

“Who?”

“The ones who watch my show.”

“You’ve got a show?”

Sunny nodded. “And you’re in it.” Then she wiped the steam off the mirror and looked at her naked reflection. “And this is the porno part,” she said, and then she shimmied sexily, her big white boobs knocking back and forth. Then she winked into the mirror. “They love that,” she laughed.

“Who do I play in your show?” Dahlia asked.

“You play the part of my little cuz,” Sunny answered. “But your part will get bigger as you get older and more interesting. Right, folks?” she said into the mirror. “They like you and think those girls at your school are dumb,” Sunny said.

The studio audience. That was the day Sunny told Dahlia that she was always being watched by people who were on the other side of a two-way mirror. Sunny also believed that every mirror in the world was two-way and the studio audience was on the other side of every one of them, which meant that anywhere there was a mirror, the studio audience was watching you. Like in those hospitals where Sunny went to try to get well, and the doctors sat on the other side of a two-way glass watching the way she and the other mental patients behaved. Many of the patients didn’t know what that big window was for. But Sunny always knew and played to it. Once in a therapy group, she stood and pulled her pants down and flashed the two-way mirror.

“They’re everywhere, Dahl,” she said. “In department stores there are millions of them, in the beauty
shop, at the dressmaker’s, behind the lunch counter at Hirsch’s Drugstore. In the car, of course, and in everybody’s house. Have you ever been in somebody’s house who doesn’t have at least one mirror? Of course you haven’t, and that’s the way they want it, so they can watch every move we make. Compacts are part of it, too. The minute you open your compact and look into it, they’re out there looking back and watching you powder your nose.”

“I never powder my nose,” Dahlia told her.

“Smart,” Sunny said. “Very smart.”

Dahlia stayed at Aunt Ruthie’s every weekend, just to be near Sunny. Even when Sunny went out on dates, Dahlia would lie awake reading in the big double bed, waiting for Sunny to get home to tell her if the date was an HT, meaning the date was a heartthrob, or an NFM, meaning the date fell into the reject pile known as “not for me.” Late one night when Sunny came home from her date, she threw her purse onto the bed with a thunk, waking Dahlia, who could smell the alcohol on her breath.

“Oh, shit!” Sunny cried, and she fell onto the bed, lying down with her coat still on. “The studio audience must be very depressed,” she said slushily.

“Why?” Dahlia asked, sitting up, though part of her was still enveloped in her dream. The room was lit by the full moon as the light poured through the attic-bedroom window.

“Because they saw what I did tonight. The room had mirrors everywhere,” Sunny said, her face flushed as she pointed at the mirror above the chest of drawers across from the bed. Then she took her high
heel off and threw it at the mirror. “I hate them!” she hollered. The impact didn’t break the glass, but it did make the big wood-framed mirror swing back and forth. The second shoe fell short and hit the floor in front of the dresser. “The studio audience saw the whole ugly thing,” she told Dahlia. Then she got up, pulled her lipstick out of her purse, climbed up onto the dresser, and slowly and painstakingly drew letters in lipstick on the mirror.

“Stop it, Sunny. Your mother’s going to kill you,” Dahlia warned as Sunny scrawled the printed backward letters deliberately and carefully. “Sunny, don’t. They’ll send you back to the hospital.”

She was writing a note to the studio audience. Writing it backward so they could read it on the other side of the mirror. She seemed to feel better when she climbed down, but she left her coat on when she got into bed and fell into a drunken sleep. Dahlia lay there for a long time listening to Sunny breathe, knowing in the morning Uncle Max would see the lipstick on the mirror and call the hospital, and Dahlia would have to see Sunny’s terrified eyes begging her to find a way to stop them from taking her away again.

After she was sure Sunny was sleeping deeply, she climbed out of the bed and tiptoed down to the laundry room, opening cupboards and drawers as quietly as she could until she found some Windex and rags among the cleaning supplies. She came back up and climbed onto the dresser. Then, using the Windex, the rag, and her fingernails, she stayed up cleaning the mirror until it was perfect.

Dahlia remembered that night, as she turned the rearview mirror away from her own exhausted face and piloted the van home from Margie Kane’s. Another night of going out to work and coming home without a cent. The studio audience at my show, she thought, inching along in the van in the heavy traffic up Laurel Canyon, is definitely depressed.

Seth’s car was in the carport, and she couldn’t decide if she was hoping he’d tell her that Harry Brenner had called or if she wanted Harry Brenner to be like Marty Melman, so flaky he’d already forgotten about her and her stolen song. She grabbed her duffel bag and slid out of the van. This pitiful down-at-the-heels house. Once she’d thought that by now she would have built a second story on it, put the bedroom up there among the trees, and turned her current bedroom into a music room. But now it was starting to look seedy. If she sold just one song, she could hire a painter.

Seth’s daughter, Lolly, was sitting on the living room floor, engrossed in an episode of the
Powerpuff Girls
on television. She was wearing red stick-on earrings and a purple turban and flip-flops with big plastic flowers on them.

“Hello, Lolly,” Dahlia said, trying to sound friendly and warm.

Lolly didn’t bother to answer or look up.

“Harry Brenner called,” Seth hollered out from the bedroom. “I left the message on the machine so you could play it back.”

Guilt. Dahlia was sick to her stomach with guilt.
What if Faith Hill loved the song? Then it would really be too late to tell Harry, because then he’d have to be embarrassed and tell Faith that she couldn’t have the song after all. Dahlia walked to the TV and turned it down.