“Not in the mood?” I said lightly. I felt that thing, like a chill, again. Oh, no, not today. How stupid of me! If there were two Ellens, there were also two women in the chair. Mrs. Smith and the widow Maybee. “Madame Elise is very clever with a henna pack,” I said. “With those red lights in your dark hair, I think it would be very successful. Did you ever think of having your hair brightened?”
“What woman hasn’t,” she said, with her awkward laugh. “Oh, I may... some day.”
“But not today,” I laughed. She was going to look at me now! I’d overplayed my little joke! I reached for a jar on the shelf. “This is with Madame’s compliments,” I told her. “Won’t you try it and tell us whether you like it?”
She read the label. “Hand cream? It’s something a little bit different,” I lied. That kept her busy for a while. She massaged cream on her hands while I worked like lightning.
I’d thought of something! Tom was calling for me at half-past five! But it didn’t matter — she’d never seen him.
She said, “This seems rather nice. Nice fragrance.” We discussed the hand cream, languidly. Sometimes a woman talks about herself and her kids and her troubles. Sometimes she gets curious about you. We kept on the hand cream — the four of us.
When she was getting bored, I put her handbag near her. “You must keep the whole jar.” She was pleased, and she fussed around in her bag a while. I finished the front and sides, and was starting on the back.
“You’re very quick,” she said.
My heart jumped and I commanded it, shouting Down! at it in my mind, as if it were a dog. “We all are,” I said. I put a clip in my teeth and grimaced around it. I was getting that scared feeling. I shut up. I concentrated on the short back hair.
Then she was all pinned. I felt the stirring of jubilation. I beat that down, too. I put the silk net over her set, and the pads of cotton batting at her temples and ears. I led her to a drying booth. I swooped up a big bundle of magazines and dumped them in her lap. I put the cord with the hot-and-cold controls over her shoulder and yanked down the dryer. I touched the curtains.
Then I felt Elise breathing down my neck. I’d been quicker than normal, so of course she had to snoop and see if I’d been cutting corners or something. She brushed past me. “Are you comfortable, Mrs. Smith?” She pretended to adjust the hood of the dryer. “Did Ellen take care of you nicely?”
“Very nicely,” said Mrs. Maybee.
I let the curtain fall between me and her smile. The worst was over. When she was dry, I’d take the clips out and comb her hair. But if she hadn’t recognized me yet, she wasn’t going to. I’d got through it and lived. And it was all right. I went into the lavatory and nearly vomited.
I met Madame Elise, outside the door. “Ellen,” she said briskly, “Mrs. Smith will have a manicure.”
My heart felt like a leaf falling in sick spirals. “Couldn’t — one of the girls please — give Mrs. Smith — a manicure?”
“No one is free,” she said sharply. “Is anything wrong, Ellen?”
I stared at her and felt my skin move in a smile, and why it did I do not know. “My head aches,” I murmured. “But I’ll try, of course.”
“You’ll be all right,” she said, not very sympathetically. “Then you can go home.”
I thought, I wonder. To give a manicure you sit facing the woman under the dryer. You have your little wheeled table with its white cover and its jars and instruments, with its bright goose-neck lamp, between the two of you. She has nothing to do, nothing to look at, but the four hands on the table, or — your face.
In the end I just went, numbly. I thought, she will or she won’t, and so be it. She smiled at me. “My nails are really terrible.”
I said, as I always do, “We’ll soon fix that.” When I had everything arranged, I sat down on my little stool. I switched the lamp on, began.
It hit me in the nerves of my hands. They began to shake. I had to let hers go. I looked up and saw a flicker cross her face. I grabbed the edge of the table. I felt as if I were going all to pieces, but I wasn’t. I was coming together — the two of me.
I said, “Don’t you know who I am, Mrs. Maybee?”
And it felt good — it was a delicious relief to be all in one piece again.
She bent forward as if she’d duck her head out from under the dryer.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait, Mrs. Maybee... please.”
“You... you came to my door...” she whispered.
“Yes. Yes, I’m the one. You’re Mrs. Maybee, and I’m the mystery girl. I’m caught,” I said. “All you have to do is scream. The police are looking for me. But please listen—”
She caught her lip in her teeth and settled back a little.
“Maybe you’re a merciful woman,” I babbled. “Not like Elise. If she had only let me go home quietly, this wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t listen. She’d call the cops and wash her hands... Maybe you’ll be kinder.”
“Kinder?”
“We don’t know anything. We can’t help. We had nothing to do with your husband’s death. The newspapers are silly. It wasn’t any killer who took me away. It was only my husband, Mrs. Maybee. How can I make you understand?”
“What is there to understand?”
“We can’t get mixed up with the police. There are reasons.”
“Oh?” she said.
“He was lying in the road and we thought at first we’d hit him with our car. Oh, don’t you see! We couldn’t do any good. But if you tell who I am, now, it won’t help find who killed your husband. It’ll only ruin us.”
“But... why?” Her eyes shifted.
“All right. I’ll tell you. Once, back east, they arrested my husband for something he didn’t do. He was cleared. But he can’t stand... he couldn’t stand it again!”
She moistened her lips.
“Nobody in the world,” I said, “knows about me except you, Mrs. Maybee. Won’t you be merciful?”
“You... certainly...” she said, with long spaces between her words... “scared... me...”
“I’m sorry. We’re sorry. I’ll bring Tom to talk to you. We’ll do anything, Mrs. Maybee. But don’t make us go through all that again!”
She lifted her hands nervously and put them back on the table. “Suppose you fix my nails and let me get out of here,” she snapped.
My head sagged forward. Curtain rings rattled. Madame Elise swiveled her hips around me and the table. She pushed the hood of the dryer up, away from Mrs. Maybee’s head. She turned it off. Mrs. Maybee, looking past me, winced around the eyes. The cop moved up beside me. “You Mrs. Maybee?” he said, just checking.
He was a young cop, a handsome kid. His eyes on me were cool and intelligent. His gun was resting, neat and flat, on his slim hip. “We’ll wait a little minute,” he said. “Somebody will be along who knows about this.” He was neither ruffled nor bored. The four of us were motionless in that tiny pink cubicle. Outside, in the shop, there was whispering.
I sat on my stool, my left arm on the table. I could see my watch. In twenty minutes, maybe sooner, Tom would drive up to the door. There must be a police car...
Mrs. Maybee said, “Can’t I get out of here, please?”
“In a minute, Ma’am.”
Her hand started toward her head. One white cotton pad was slipping over her eye. Madame Elise bent and did things. With the fluffs of cotton gone and the net off, Mrs. Maybee didn’t look quite so ridiculous.
I watched my watch.
When we heard the street door open, Madame Elise sailed out of the booth like a hostess going to greet a guest. The cop shifted his weight.
Mrs. Maybee licked her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said to me, feebly.