Desiree
Desiree stood at the edge of the dance floor in the Orange
Monkey Nightclub. The break had started, but it was still loud, choking with
smoke, and hopelessly crowded.
She watched the people. She could tell if a woman liked her
date by observing how she sat. She could tell, just by watching, which of the
band members liked or disliked which others. Just to kill time, she had divided
the men into four "types": the hippies, the rappers, the drinkers, and
the ones who did nothing at all.
But there was one guy Desiree could not classify. He was a
rough-looking man, about her age, whose dark eyes had a gypsy look to them. He
scared her a little, probably because he never stopped frowning. Although she
didn’t see him talking to the band members, Desiree could tell that he knew
them all.
The break ended. Desiree felt a tap on her shoulder
A dance! She turned to say yes to -- the dark-eyed guy.
Terrified, she stood there gaping.
"Wanna dance?" His voice was deep and rasping, a
crank caller at 3 am.
But Desiree was programmed to accept dances. She nodded, they
moved to the middle of the floor. He moved like a wind-up toy, as if dancing
were against his very nature. But his high-cheek-boned face looked beautiful now
that he was not frowning any more.
The dance and the set both ended. He talked to her, but none
of the usual grilling ("What's your name?" "Are you here
alone?" "May I buy you a drink?"). He just started telling her
things as if he had known her for years. He gave her details about his friends
in the band, other bars in the city, his antique collection.
Desiree and the dark-eyed guy stood at the edge of the dance
floor and leaned against the wall nearest the band. The man pinched Desiree's
waist, giving her a shy smile. She smiled back.
He took the cue and gave her a kiss. Desiree felt a little
uneasy kissing a man she had just met. But she was depressed; it was impossible
for her to get pleasure from good food, warm baths, a night's sleep, the
standard creature comforts. Kissing was the only joy she had left.
The second kiss was like a long drink of fresh spring-water.
When the music stopped at 1 a.m., Desiree and the dark-eyed
guy started toward the door.
"What's your name?" Desiree asked.
"Ricky Katz."
Since he hadn’t asked for her phone number, or even her
name, Desiree asked for his number. Ricky wouldn’t give it to her.
"You won't find it in the phone book either," he
taunted her, "because I live with my parents and the number's under my
mother's maiden name. And Ricky isn't my real first name, either."
"It's a nickname, right? For Richard?"
"Nope. You'll never guess it."
Eight-year-old Desiree could hear the bands warming up -- a
thrilling cacophony. Her excitement made her rock back and forth from toe to
heel, toe to heel. For the first time in her life, she was going to march in a
parade.
The brownie scout leader came back from the head of the
parade. "We're missing a color guard. The color guards march beside the
flag bearers."
The scout leader asked each of the brownies to pick a number.
The girl next to Desiree said, "Five?"
"No," the leader said.
Desiree detected a faint false start in the leader's body
language just before the "no".
"Four?" she said.
"That's it!" the leader said. She led Desiree to
the head of the parade. What an honor it was to guard colors!
Desiree picked up a book with her left hand. She held it,
spine toward her, with her thumb on the right side, her fingers on the left.
With her right hand, she pulled a small sticker off its backing paper. She
placed the sticker, which said, "Fiction -- BE," at the bottom of the
book's spine.
On the table to her right was an iron. It was shaped like any
iron but was only an inch long. For ease of use, it was attached to a
7-inch-long handle. It was very hot; Desiree had plugged it in.
Still holding the spine of the book in her left hand, Desiree
picked up the iron with her right. Fighting off drowsiness induced by boredom,
she began passing the iron over the sticker. Her job was to make sure that the
sticker's edges were so well attached that no one could ever peel it off.
The iron moved more and more slowly. Desiree's eyelids
drooped and lowered, until -- oww! -- the iron had slipped downward and burned
Desiree's left hand, leaving a large, red welt.
At least now she was awake. Desiree sighed, picked up another
book, another sticker.
That evening, Desiree dropped her purse by the door of her
ghetto apartment and started fixing supper. Some water splashed onto her left
hand, and it hurt; there were five parallel welts on her left wrist. She hoped
that she would get the stories she had written published soon so that she could
quit the library job.
The next Friday, as Desiree arrived at the Orange Monkey,
Ricky stood at the door. He said, "hi," but looked away as he said it.
It was obvious that he was through with her. She shrugged and went inside.
The band members were tuning up. As Desiree passed them, they
jeered at her. Desiree demanded to know what was going on. The bass player
responded by making her an indecent offer.
She confronted Ricky. "What have you been telling the
band about me?"
Ricky didn’t answer.
"You've been bragging about me, just to make yourself
look good."
"So what are you going to do about it?"
Desiree realized that she could do nothing about it; he had
never given her his real name.
Soon after, she quit the library job and became a "tooth
and water girl". She arrived at a local nursing home at 4 p.m. each day.
She walked from room to room, picking up the residents' false teeth and cleaning
them with their toothbrushes.
Pretty boring, until she entered Wilma Cohn's room. Her pale
blue wall was covered with a huge family-tree diagram, complete with photos of
all her descendents.
Desiree moved closer. There was Ricky's photo! His mother was
Wilma Cohn's daughter. Ricky's real name was Eric. When Desiree got home, she
looked up Cohn in the phone book. She found only one female Cohn. She memorized
the woman's number.
The next Saturday night, she said, "Hi, Eric." She
recited the Cohn phone number to him.
"How did you get my name and number?" he said.
"Busted!" Desiree thought. The band members left
her alone after that.
She remembered Ricky mentioning that his father was chief
editor of a fiction magazine. She began visiting Wilma Cohn in her room every
day, smiling, chatting, making friends with her. Wilma eventually told Desiree
that her daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Katz, were members of the
Sunshine Country Club.
Desiree quit the "tooth and water girl" job and got
a job as a "buss girl" in the Country Club. One day, in walked a man
who looked a little like Ricky with a woman in a pink suit who looked a lot like
Wilma Cohn. They had to be the Katz’s.
But, if she walked up to Mr. Katz and handed him her stories,
he would just be angry. Desiree had no idea what to do next.
While she was thinking, and to fight her boredom, she watched
the customers. She knew that Mrs. Lancolm and Mr. Zee were secret lovers. She
knew that Ron, a waiter, had a clandestine crush on the manager. Their body
language revealed it all to her.
Desiree was back in school, in the crowded gym. She heard
four loud banging noises from below.
Someone who knew what he was talking about yelled, "The
furnace is going to explode!"
Everyone ran for the door. But Desiree couldn’t make it;
red-orange flames shot upward through the floor in front of her. She knew that
she was going to die. She resigned herself to dying. There was no pain. In fact,
dying felt rather pleasant.
She jerked awake, disappointed that it had only been a dream.
She dragged herself to bed and went to work.
The part of her job that Desiree hated most was pushing the
bulky cart of dirty dishes back to the kitchen. The tables were too close
together, or maybe the cart was too big. She smiled at any customer who met her
eyes as insurance in case her cart bumped into them.
A new customer came to the door. Desiree glanced at him. He
was a rather dumpy man with a tonsured head. He wore blue jeans.
Something was wrong about him. All her intuitive
body-language alarms went off simultaneously as the man looked the room over.
The man started into the crowded dining area. His hand went
to his pocket. Desiree didn’t, couldn’t, think. She hurled her body six feet
through the air, landing on Mrs. Katz. Mrs. Katz fell backward in her chair,
screaming. Desiree heard a gunshot and felt Mr. Katz land on the floor on the
other side of his wife.
As Mrs. Katz stopped screaming, the other women started to.
She heard four more gunshots. But, by the time the police arrived, the gunman
was gone. The customers, frightened speechless, looked around. Less than two
feet away from Mrs. Katz, a woman lay dead.
"How can I ever thank you?" Mr. Katz asked Desiree.
Back
To Top
Home Page
| 
Will I Go
Crazy?