Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen Read online

  The thought makes me furious. Why does life tantalize us with possibilities, only to turn coy, withdrawing?

  Anger shoves aside the fatigue that had been settling over me like a blanket. I grab the little stand-up calendar on my bureau.

  It’s the second week in May. Only a couple of months until the great Ring Cycle of operas will be beginning in Seattle.

  In my mind, I can hear that astounding beginning, the first bars of Das Rheingold, like the world being born anew. Music at first as slender and thin as light through water and then building, leaping, enfolding, cascading. That incredible beginning playing through my mind, and I can only think it is from the splashing of the Rhine maidens that there are trails of dampness along my cheeks.

  5

  When I get back to the common room, my class is grouping at the front door for the walk back to school. It has begun to rain. I can see the hour and a half I spent on my hair — all the anti-frizz serum and mousse and hair glue and sculpting gel — gone to waste.

  What will the Universal Style people think of someone coming in looking like a half-drowned rat?

  “Tamara,” Miss Whipple calls, “walk fast or run if you want so you won’t get too wet. Just be careful at the intersection. Be sure and push the pedestrian crossing button.”

  A lot of the kids are running and even Miss Whipple jiggles along in front of me. I can’t run in the shoes I have on so I’m the last. Me and the blob of a kid who gave his senior buddy a squirrel teapot. Timmy. I don’t think Timmy has ever run anywhere in his life. He’s beside me, matching his stride to mine.

  “You want my rain cape?” he says. It’s kind of a clear plastic baggy thing. “I don’t really need it with this old jacket...”

  “Hey. Sure. Thanks.” I give him my best smile. There might be hope for my hair yet.

  “No problem.”

  During Social, the last class in the afternoon, I take the flyer out and look at it again. Since I picked it up at the community center where Shirl’s daycare is, I’ve come close to wearing out the sheet. But even now, this thousandth time I’ve looked at it, I feel a tingle along my spine.

  UNIVERSAL STYLE

  Dream of becoming a model?

  Dream no longer. Universal Style’s proven program of model training offers you a ticket to major work in the field. Study the arts of personal enhancement, make-up, movement, photographic posing, and runway protocols with a team of outstanding fashion professionals.

  “I thank Universal Style for helping to make my dreams come true,” states Kelly Kidd, recently awarded the Modeling Association of North America’s Outstanding Newcomer Award. “They gave me my start and I’ve been soaring ever since.”

  Just below the phone number and a Whyte Avenue address, there’s a picture of Kelly Kidd. Light seems to shine off her cheeks and hair. She has a perfect smile.

  The only appointment I could get was for 4:30, so I had to make up a story for Shirl who gets home at around 5:15 and expects me to be there.

  “I’ll be late,” I told her. “Grad committee. You’re always wanting me to join stuff so I joined the grad committee.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m so pleased.” She patted my knee with one of her pudgy hands. “See, I told you you’d be fitting in before long. Herb said so, too.”

  There’s an hour between the end of class and my appointment. I don’t have to wait for the bus to Whyte Avenue and, in fifteen minutes, I’m at the place where the interviews are being held.

  It’s a three-story office building with To Let signs in half its windows. Inside, there’s a central court with a couple of tables, coffee and soft drink dispensers. I have enough change with me for a Diet Sprite. While I’m sipping on it and reading an Elle magazine I scoffed from the Stanley Merkin library, a man and three children, all girls, grab the other table.

  “I wanna Coke,” the youngest kid whines.

  “Okay,” the man says, “but let me comb your hair first. Stand still, Caroline!”

  The girls are all wearing party dresses and hair ribbons, white stockings and baby-doll shoes. One of them has discovered the railing that goes along a winding staircase to the second floor. She’s trying to do something gymnastic on it.

  “Caitlyn!” the man hollers when he notices what she’s up to. “Look at what you’re doing to your hair ribbon!”

  She’s managed to snag it on a piece of the wrought iron.

  “Candace, can’t you keep an eye on your sister?”

  The older girl shrugs, scowls and blows a big bubble of gum, letting it pop and collapse against her face.

  “I told you no gum!” The man’s voice is getting higher by the minute. “Not ‘til after the interview.” He looks at me and shakes his head.

  “I wanna Coke.” With the combing finished, the little girl is hopping from one baby-doll shoe to the other, chanting.

  “We better wait...”

  That’s when we see him. The model man coming down the stairs. Definitely Calvin Klein material. All in black except for a white shirt. Silk? Open at the neck. The bit of chest you can see looks like it’s been polished. His hair has blond highlights. As he gets to the bottom of the stairs, I can see he has smoky-blue Jude Law eyes.

  The bubblegum girl licks the last bit of gum off her lips and smiles at him.

  He flashes a smile back at all of us. A white-strip smile that could blind you.

  “Mr. Andrews? I’m Brad Silverstone,” he says. “We’re ready for you and your lovely daughters. If you’ll just follow me.”

  Then he notices me with my Elle magazine.

  “Miss Tierney?”

  I nod and give him my best smile.

  “Good. As soon as I’ve completed my interview with the Andrews...”

  “I wanna Coke...”

  “Hush, dear.” Mr. Andrews fluffs the ruffles of Caroline’s dress as they follow Jude Law Model Man up the stairs.

  When they come down a half hour later, the Coke kid is howling her head off.

  “I don’t wanna be a model,” she shouts.

  “You think they’d be just a bit grateful,” the man says loudly to no one in particular when they get to the bottom of the stairs. “It’s all for them...”

  “I’m going to be a veterinarian,” the gymnast kid says to me as I slip Elle into my backpack.

  Model Man is at the top of the stairs beckoning to me.

  “What a crew,” he chuckles, holding the door to his office open. There’s a glittery star on the door and a sign: Universal Style — Training for the Stars of Tomorrow. “We’re checking to see how much interest there is in setting up a modeling program for children. Maybe having one of our summer institutes just for kids. I’m not sure.” He looks up at the ceiling as if asking for help from above.

  He clears some papers off a chair for me and then grabs one for himself behind a green card table covered with brochures and files.

  “Now, you, Tamara,” he smiles his white-strip-ad smile, “we can work with. And you’ve got bone structure, young lady, that many would die for.”

  He asks me some questions and begins filling in a form. I tell a lie when he asks me my age.

  “Eighteen,” I say.

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “In a couple of weeks,” I add.

  “Great.”

  When he’s finished filling in the form, he gives me the details of the course.

  “It’s a week-long intensive in the summer and you can choose from a few dates and a couple of locations,” he says, after outlining the program. “We’ll run you off your feet but, at the end of it all, you’ll have a Universal Certificate and, in the fashion world, that means something. I notice you had last month’s Elle magazine. Page seventeen — one of ours. Finished the course last summer.”

  “In Calgary?”

  “No. Our Vancouver campus.” He leans back and brushes his fingers through his streaked curls. They fall perfectly back into place. “We arrange everything. We can even set up billeting and
meals if you need those features.”

  “And the price?”

  “Incredibly inexpensive,” he says, “considering what’s in the package. Exclusive of the billeting, it’s twenty-five hundred. That’s with a five-hundred-dollar deposit. Up the deposit to a thousand, and we drop the course price to a bargain twenty-three fifty.”

  I do have a bank account. One of Mr. Mussbacher’s projects. “Helps develop responsibility and a sense of money management,” he reminds me from time to time. It’s right up there with smiling.

  I have $43.12 in my bank account.

  “I’ll have to think about it, Mr. Silverstone.”

  “Call me Brad.” He flashes the teeth. “We’re in town for a couple of more weeks with our recruitment program. All we need is the deposit — cash or a cashier’s check — to get you registered.”

  He hands me a booklet.

  “This’ll give you more details of the program.” His hand brushes mine as I take the booklet, and I’m surprised at the tingle it sends along my arm.

  “Hope you can swing it,” he says. “To tell the truth, it’s like I can see you on page seventeen already.” He winks at me.

  On the bus going home, the numbers swim in my head. Twenty-five hundred. No point asking Shirl and Herb for it. At the end of every month, Herb does a lot of moaning and sighing over bills and pops Rolaids by the handful. Shirl gives him shoulder rubs and says she’s got a plan for cutting down on groceries next month. The plans never seem to work, though.

  Who in the world has twenty-five hundred dollars? The question aches inside me.

  And then I think of her. Miss Killer Tomato and her diamond-studded opera brooch.

  The idea’s crazy, of course. She looks tougher than the Wicked Witch of the West.

  And yet the idea doesn’t go away.

  6

  To tell the truth, I’m surprised Skinnybones is there with the next Stanley Merkin invasion. Someone who skips school when she can, I’ve been thinking. Wouldn’t have pulled the wool over my eyes, though. She’d have been down to the office with her parents — foster parents, whatever — faster than you could say “forged excuse.”

  Not only is she here, but there’s something different about her. Like a tough cookie that suddenly reveals it has a marshmallow center.

  “How have you been, Miss Barclay?” She smiles and hands me a small tissue-wrapped package tied with silver ribbon. “This time I brought you a real gift.”

  “Too small for slippers,” I say.

  It is a silver filigreed bookmark with a dragon design. Not real silver, of course. Some kind of plastic silver but very nice.

  “A dragon.” I rub my fingers over its head and wings, its coiled tail. “Did I tell you about the dragon in the Ring operas?”

  “No.” She hasn’t quit smiling. “But I’d love to hear about it. Do you want to go to the reading room again?”

  Definitely changed. She rattles on about her English class and how she’s reading Great Expectations with a literature circle group. All of this chattering has brought a slight flush to her face and a bit of a shine to her eyes.

  Then she tells me about the modeling school interview.

  Twenty-five hundred dollars.

  That stops the conversation. She’s quiet while I light up another cigarillo.

  “Miss Havisham,” I say.

  “Miss Havisham?”

  “In Great Expectations. Pip believes the crazy old lady gives him the money he needs to get on in life.”

  “We’ve only read about the first thirty pages,” Tamara sighs.

  “Do you think I’ll give you the money?”

  “It would just be a loan. I’d pay you back as soon as I start getting modeling jobs. They gave me an extra brochure. I’ll leave it.”

  “I may be a crazy old lady but I’m not that crazy. Besides, Miss Havisham didn’t give Pip the money. Sorry to spoil the book for you.”

  “I didn’t really think you would.” She drops the smile.

  “It’s in July, this course?”

  “They offer it four times during the summer. I’m going to see if I can get an after-school job and go to the last one.”

  “It’ll have to be an after-school job robbing banks,” I say, and she does laugh — a small, polite, marshmallow laugh.

  Mrs. Gollywatchit pops her head suddenly through the door.

  “Jean Barclay,” she booms, her transcontinental eyebrow doing a little dance. “You know that smoking is forbidden in this building. What an example! Put it out immediately.”

  “Oh, my.” I extinguish the cigarillo against the ceramic gizmo on the reading table. “It slipped my mind. So many things to remember.”

  Tamara snorts.

  “Your class is getting ready to leave,” she says to Tamara, who has wheeled my walker into place.

  “Is this your last visit?” I ask her when the Gollything has gone.

  She shrugs. “I think we come again next week. Miss Whipple’s scheduled an extra visit because a TV station wants to film us for some special they’re doing.”

  “Maybe you’ll be discovered.”

  “You never know.” But there’s a touch of defeat in her voice.

  “Don’t forget your dragon.” She tucks it into the modeling brochure before we leave and slips them into my purse.

  Back in my room, I use them to replace the postcard I’ve been using as a bookmark in A Tale of Two Cities although, later, I fall asleep reading and my place is lost anyway. Miss Pross and Madame Defarge battling it out — how is it possible to fall asleep in the middle of that?

  Sometime in the night the book and the brochure have landed on the floor and Latoya is asking me where I want them put.

  “I’ll take them. I’m awake now with all this fuss.”

  “How ‘bout a hot drink?” Latoya plumps the pillows. “You been sleeping since just after supper but I kept you a snack and a cuppa decaf from the nine o’clock snack wagon.”

  “Just the coffee. Now, where are my glasses?”

  It takes her half an hour to clean the glasses, heat the coffee and fill me in on what George the Acne Kid has been failing to learn at school and her husband has been confiscating at airport security.

  “You wouldn’t believe the things people try to take onto a plane,” Latoya sighs. “Incredible. Things clipped onto rings where their body has been, well, you know...pierced. Nipples and even...”

  “Latoya!”

  “But I let you read now,” she says finally. “Call me if you need anything.”

  The brochure, I notice, is filled with the kind of advertising gimmickry I always pointed out to students in my English classes. Skinnybones — such a willing victim. As if a five-day course could turn her into a cover girl for Vogue.

  And the expense. Such preposterous expectations. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Choose where you’d like to be parted from your money. Calgary...

  Or Vancouver?

  I look at the back of the brochure more closely.

  In August, Universal Style offers its course in Vancouver, Canada’s most beautiful city, on a campus located a short walk from the Pacific waterfront.

  August 6-10. August 13-17.

  Vancouver.

  Just three hours from Seattle.

  Serendipity is not something I’ve ever believed in. Alignments of the stars are fine enough in a piece of literature or high opera but in real life I’ve always believed we forge our own pathways. The horoscope page of the newspaper would be the first thing I’d use to wrap leftover fish for the garbage.

  And yet, here it is before me, August days and pinpoints on the globe somehow connecting the dreams of an ancient woman (yes, admit it in the dead of night) and the terrible yearning of a skittish, wild colt of a girl. Life whirls and the planets spin and possibility lies in wait for lines that will connect the dots, the way Wagner himself must have connected the dots of music notes from his pen to the trails of staves across a manuscript page.

&nbs
p; “Why not?” I hadn’t meant to utter the question aloud. But Latoya’s out of earshot.

  Why not?

  Maybe Skinnybones will get to take her modeling course. Maybe Jean Barclay will get to see one more Ring Cycle.

  7

  The old dragon. Guarding her money. What would make her part with any of it? Maybe I could be her personal shopper, do her hair and make-up every week. Play Rummy? Read aloud to her?

  Twenty-five hundred dollars. It’d take a lifetime to work it off. Of course, there can’t be too much of the Wrinkle Queen’s lifetime left.

  When we get back to Stanley Merkin, we still have a period before dismissal. Once or twice a month on a Friday, Miss Whipple lets us have the period for what she calls USSR. Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading. Must have been something she started doing long before the real USSR fell off the map. When she announces we’ll have USSR today, the class cheers.

  “Remember, sustained and silent,” she says and makes a point of getting out her own free reading book.

  I’ve no sooner got Great Expectations open and I’m reading about one of Pip’s visits to play with Estella when there’s a call on the intercom for me to come down to the office. Everyone in class puts their sustained silent reading on hold to watch me for the few seconds it takes to get out of my desk, across the room and into the hallway. Someone hisses loudly, “Admit to nothing!” as I close the door.

  A secretary tells me to go into the counselor’s office. Mr. Gossling. I saw him when I first came to Stanley Merkin. A one-man welcoming committee for foster kids. Bald head and a goatee and a bolo tie. It’s hard to forget those skinny braids slipping through a brass cow’s head.

  Today he’s not looking so welcoming. And he’s wearing a real tie with a western sunset on it, a pinkish-orange sun sinking behind a cactus plant.

  There are other people at the conference table. Mr. Mussbacher. I give him my Mona Lisa smile. And Shirl. Good heavens, what’s she doing here? She’s a little redder around the eyes than usual. And puffier.

  “Sit down, Tamara,” Mr. Gossling says. “I think you must know why we’re here...er...having a meeting today.”