“For a decent interval.”
“I found this.” I picked up the hair dryer and held it out.
She smiled remotely.
“I found it here in this room, my old hair dryer.”
“It must be,” she said. “Yours is the only hair dryer in the house.”
“But it was here,” I persisted, “in this room.”
“Well, take it back, Margaret. Put it where it belongs.”
“When the doctor explained the dangers of a pacemaker, you asked about a hair dryer—”
“I suppose I did.”
“Why?”
“It was necessary that I know all the precautionary procedures in order to take care of your father adequately.”
“Oh, you took care of him, Mother. You took care of him very adequately.” She smiled and inclined her head as if she were receiving due homage for a fulfilled obligation. “Mother,” I said too loudly, and dropped my voice, “I left the hair dryer in my closet. Up on the shelf.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember you found it there when your father was sick. Now why don’t you put it back there where it belongs?” She rose and smoothed her hair. “And after that you may return your father’s suits to his closet. Hang them carefully, with a space between each hanger, the way he always insisted they be hung.” The doorbell rang and she started from the room. Over her shoulder, she added, “And rack the shoes neatly, browns at the left, blacks on the right.”
I returned the hair dryer to my closet. Then back in my parents’ room I hung my father’s suits, with equal air spaces between each, and returned his shoes to his shoe rack — browns to the left, blacks to the right.
The voices from the front of the house were rising in a crescendo of leavetaking. I closed the closet door and went downstairs.
Mother was seated on the Victorian sofa, her ankles crossed. “What will you do now?” I asked.
“Now?”
“Now that Father is gone. What are your plans?”
“I will make no plans. Not for a year.”
“A year?”
“A year of mourning, Margaret.” She stroked each of her fingers from tip to base with careful precision and, as I watched, I resolved to put the facts of my father’s death out of my mind as completely as my mother had.
But if I can blank out my suspicions, I cannot blank out the sure knowledge that, if she did it, she did it with glove-fingered Victorian elegance.
Bottomed Out
by Robert Twohy
Ranee Rangoon was going to make a comeback...
When you’re in a coffin, you feel out of touch. It’s absolutely quiet. For maybe the first time since your glands started working, you have time to think. So you think of things you did and didn’t do, and of the people who passed in and out of your life. You’re glad you knew this one, sorry you knew that one.
I lay there and was sorry I’d known Marsha. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have been shot down at age thirty-two, life’s prime time.
On the other hand, maybe I would have been. Marsha wasn’t the only woman I was having an affair with. When you’re an actor in Hollywood affairs come in clusters. If I hadn’t got plugged that April night in Marsha’s apartment in Westwood it might have happened the next night, next week, next month, in somebody else’s apartment — Melinda’s or Zizi’s or Savanarella’s.
Somehow Marsha’s husband, Alfred Grout, a real-estate tycoon, got wind of our affair and that Thursday he didn’t go East on business as scheduled, but cabbed back from Burbank and let himself into the apartment while we were out to dinner. When we came back, he was in the bedroom. He wasn’t alone — he held a big .45, and its cold eye was fixed on me.
I’m not sure he even knew who I was when he pulled the trigger; all he knew was that I was a guy with broad shoulders and lots of shiny teeth who had been having a thing with Marsha.
So time passed, and I came to and I was in this coffin, and it took me a while to realize that. Then I started thinking of the things I’d done, the people I’d known.
Then, clear as the tinkle of a highball glass, I heard a laugh. Not a jolly laugh — more like sardonic. I said, “Who laughed?”
“Irwin Groggins — you can call me Grog.” It was a flat, nothing voice. “Just don’t call me Frogface. I hate that. Even when it’s said in good humor.”
“Where are you?”
“Right above you. Marcelina is with me.”
“Hi,” said a soft voice.
Then I heard ripping sounds, like a crowbar ripping up nails, and called, “Hey, wait!” But the ripping went on. Then the blackness over me was cut with an angle of light. Not much light — pretty wishy-washy — but after stone-dark, you’re glad for anything.
I wondered out loud, “How come I didn’t get a faceful of dirt?”
“You want a faceful of dirt?”
“No, but—” I hitched my shoulders, shifted my hips, moved my head, lifted my arms to stretch. In the pale light I could see my hands. No, not hands — I saw a lot of skinny finger bones.
I raised a foot and saw hanging from it a shred of shoe and, under and around the shred, nothing but bone.
I said, “I’m a skeleton.”
The top was all the way off the coffin now. I put my hand bones on the edges and pushed myself up. As I got vertical there was a rustling sound; I looked down. Shreds and scraps of clothes were falling off me.
“Hey!” I was embarrassed. A woman with a pretty voice was out there, and here I stood in my bare bones — not looking my best at all. Call it vanity, but I used to take pride in my smooth muscles and healthy skin tone.
Now there was no muscle, no healthy skin — no nothing. Just bones and more bones.
I started to sit down.
The woman’s voice said, “Oh, don’t be an old silly. You look fine.”
“I look awful.”
“No — you’ve got cute clavicles and your teeth are terrific. Come on out.”
A pink hand took my nearest hand bones and I looked up from it and saw a pretty face with tawny gold hair around it. Gazing back at me were bright green eyes.
So I let myself be led out of the coffin. And now I stood in a stone place — stone floor, stone walls. A still and stoneish place. I kicked the shred of shoe off my foot bone and asked, “Where am I?”
“In a crypt.”
“A crypt!” I hadn’t ordered a crypt in my will. I hadn’t made a will.
“U-G-A paid for it,” said Marcelina. “It was a great funeral. Front-page pictures from here to Bangkok. Great advance publicity for the movie.”
“What movie?”
“The movie about you.”
A movie about me? “Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”
“If you’re Ranee Rangoon, you’re the guy,” said Groggins.
“Not really. That was my agent’s idea. My real name is Homer G. Wermcraft, from The Dalles, Oregon.”
“That’s beside the point. You’re the only Ranee Rangoon in a holding pattern.”
Now I could see him — a little guy with a wide, lippy mouth and protruding eyes who you could see at a glance why he hated to be called Frogface, even in good humor. He wore a plainish grey robelike thing and held a paper shopping bag by the handles. Marcelina wore a green robelike thing that didn’t show her figure but I knew she had a good one, because her face was the kind of face that goes with a good figure. I d always been the one to find out which faces go with good figures. Except for the robes, these two looked like people you’d see in the streets anywhere, when you’re alive.
Groggins said, “Sit down.” He waved toward a crooked stool.
“Why?”
“So Marcelina can start fixing you up.”