GOD. I was hearing Dr. Brightner talking to my mom. About me.
I could not move. Air slipped in and out of my open mouth in skinny little sips.
“My concern is that without a male figure to anchor her at this crucial time in her life she’s liable to cut and run. Not all runaways are abused children, you know. Some of them are sensitive kids reacting to rather ordinary situations they don’t feel they can cope with.”
Could they be having their meeting in the back room of the cleaners, for cripes’ sake? And piping their conversation out front through Mr. Kress’s stereo system? Was I just plain going crazy?
“Mr. Kress!” I screamed.
“There are all kinds of ways a kid can yell for help, you know,” the radio continued. “I think Tina’s sullenness and total lack of cooperation with me today was that kind of signal. I don’t mean to scare you, but I think it’s realistic to think of her as a potential runaway, given her history and her problems.”
My problems! What problems? What kind of crap was he dishing out to my mom, anyway? He’d only seen me for ten minutes, for cripes’ sake, and he’d done all the talking!
I had to get out of there.
I almost dislocated my arm, trying to yank the door open. It wouldn’t budge. It was as solid as if it had been nailed shut.
And the big plate-glass window had changed. I couldn’t see through it to the outside anymore. The glass had become a mirror, and in it, behind me, I saw something moving.
The mechanized clothes rack was turning all by itself. Not only turning. Advancing, coming closer to me.
No, I realized, that wasn’t what was happening at all, of course not, it couldn’t happen. The rack was trapped behind the long counter. What was happening was that I was walking backward, backing away from the mirror-window, toward the counter.
And the flap of the counter had silently raised itself, and as soon as I moved through that gap the chain of moving clothes was going to grab me up. I was going to get sandwiched in among the plastic-shrouded garments like just another empty dress on a hanger, and the rack would trundle me back into the darkness to someplace that didn’t really exist, someplace I couldn’t ever get home from.
That was why Dr. Brightner was talking about runaway kids to my mom. Because he knew I was about to disappear, just like Gran! Except, I reminded myself feverishly, he didn’t have Gran, not if he’d been so hot to get me to bring her to him.
Why didn’t I hear my mother’s voice? There was only Brightner’s, and in answer, a faint crackle of static. He wanted me to be scared. He wouldn’t let me have the comfort of hearing Mom.
My legs walked backward another step. I couldn’t look away from the mirror image of the moving rack behind me.
“Tell me something about you, Laura,” the voice from the radio went on. “May I call you Laura? Kids aren’t the whole world, even though it may seem that way sometimes. It’s no crime to give ourselves a little attention now and again, you know. To tell the truth, in my line of work I get lonely for some grown-up company myself.”
He was calling my mother by her first name, for Pete’s sake—coming on to her, when he was supposed to be having a professional conference! On top of that, he wasn’t even bothering about me anymore, he figured he had me nailed down already. I was outraged.
I opened my mouth and I croaked, “Gran! Help!”
The image of myself in the glass continued to wobble toward the counter at my back, which I could feel looming very close behind me. The metal hangers rattled softly, like teeth being gnashed in a hungry mouth.
But way inside my mind words formed themselves, faintly, as if from far away.
The words were, “Put on the silver glove.”
Granny Gran’s glove, still in my jeans pocket! I fumbled it out with clumsy hands: soft silvery leather, wrinkled and worn. How could this discarded old thing that I had once been babyish enough to give as a gift help me now?
I yanked it onto my left hand as my legs carried me into the gap in the counter. I felt the first brush of the circling clothes against my back.
Warmth from the glove flooded my whole body. My fingers unclenched.
In the mirror a glittering claw of silver wire reached out from the rack, rattling toward me, ready to snag me and yank me in among the hanging clothes.
Brightner’s voice oiled along, ignoring all this completely, though I was sure he knew exactly what was happening here in Kress’s Old-Fashioned Cleaning. “I wanted kids of my own, of course, I come from a large family myself. But my ex-wife—”
I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the mirror image that had me hypnotized. Risking the moment of blindness, I clapped both hands over my eyes, and that did it. I whirled around and with my gloved hand I grabbed the glittering, reaching claw, set my heels, and gave the hardest pull I could.
The radio let out a shriek that went through my head like a needle of ice.
The claw in the clothes rack was so hot—or so cold—that I could feel its wiry pincers burning my skin through the leather of the glove. I gritted my teeth and hung on, straining against what seemed like the weight of the whole rack, the whole back of the cleaners place, the whole world.
It all came loose so suddenly that I staggered.
Out from among the clothes flew something like a silver skeleton, but of some buglike creature that never lived on this earth. It was all bundled wire, with a lot of whirling, glittering, skinny limbs that ended in catching claws.
I slung it away from me as hard as I could, yelling with disgust and horror. It shot through the air, all huddled into a defensive, angular knot, and it hit the mirror with a shrieking jangle.
Suddenly I could see outside again: the street, the restaurant opposite, a guy walking by with an attaché case.
“What’s the rush?” came this crabby voice behind me. I spun around.
Mr. Kress shuffled out of the back room looking very annoyed. “I’m coming,” he said. “I heard you. All of New York heard you. You might try to have a little patience, young lady. I do all my own work, you know, the old-fashioned way, here on the premises.”
He held out his hand for my cleaning ticket.
The radio played the theme from The Sting, and The Claw was nothing but a bunch of hangers lying all tangled up in a heap under the plate-glass window.
4
Trouble, Trouble, Trouble
I WALKED HOME IN A DAZE with the clothes over my arm and the glove still on my hand. I let myself into the apartment and fell on my bed.
The glove was unmarked, except for a couple of dark spots where my tears of desperation had fallen on it. I took it off very carefully. Two of my fingers were red, as if singed, where I had gripped The Claw for that instant before I flung it away.
It had really happened.
After a while I took some aspirin from the medicine cabinet and downed a small drink from the open bottle of wine Mom kept in the fridge. Barb and I had once done some experimenting with various bottles of this and that from the liquor cabinet, so I knew it wouldn’t take much.
Sure enough, I conked out in about three minutes and I slept for an hour. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember what of, which was probably just as well.
When I woke up around dusk, I wandered through the apartment reliving those crazy moments at Kress’s in my mind and repeating in a whisper what I could remember of the conversation I had heard over Mr. Kress’s radio. Everything around me was comforting and familiar—the blistered plaster and paint around the steam pipe in my bathroom, the pencil marks on the bedroom door that marked the stages of my growth—but nothing could wipe out the memory of that voice.
Mom got home at seven-thirty and she looked spectacular. She was humming to herself when she came in the door, and her hair was sort of sweeping around and her eyes were big and glowing and all that stuff. I hadn’t seen her look like that since she had floated around for a week over some math professor from City College. He was actually not bad, but it didn’t l
ast.
My mom and I had been having some tiffs about our respective love lives lately, if you can call mine that. Just to put what follows into perspective, let me lay out here a brief example of the kinds of conversations we’d been having. They went like this:
Mom: “I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time with this boy Lennie. You’re too young to be dating.”
Me: “Who’s dating? We were just hanging out together, that’s all. What have you got against Lennie, anyway?”
Mom: “He just seems a little, um, I don’t know, flaky to me. Dopey, even. You know. Slow.”
Me: “He’s not. Anyway, it’s not exactly a heavy romance, Mom. We just happen to know each other from first grade, that’s all.”
Mom: “First grade was a long time ago. I know all your friends are starting to be interested in boys, Valli, but I hate to see you get too involved with any one person so early.”
Some of my friends were way past “starting,” but that wasn’t the kind of comment that helped.
Me: “I thought you were worried about me being a ‘late bloomer.’ ” That was Mom’s approach whenever she thought I was spending too much time by myself, reading. “I thought you wanted me to learn ‘social skills.’ ”
Mom: “‘Social’ means with lots of other people, not just this one boy.”
Me: “What’s wrong with Lennie?”
Mom: “For one thing, he’s got one continuous eyebrow. Don’t you find it hard to trust a person who has one continuous eyebrow?”
This referred to the fact that Lennie’s eyebrows almost met over his nose. I happened to think that the slightly loopy, werewolfish look this gave him was one of Lennie’s more interesting features.
Me, counterattacking: “That’s nothing compared to some people. Speaking of hair, what about that client of yours who wrote the book on horned toads? You could shave the backs of his hands and stuff a sofa with the cuttings.”
My mom, being divorced and pretty and terrific, did some dating. Her glamorous though shaky new career as a literary agent had somehow led to an increase in this activity. “If this doesn’t work, I’d better have somebody on hand to marry,” she’d told me at least twice, only partly joking.
It also led to her being more watchful and nervous about me. I had begun to wonder whether I was going to have to wait until I got divorced to do any real dating of my own.
Mom: “Valli, don’t get offensive, please.”
Me: “Well, what’s wrong with one continuous eyebrow?”
Mom (after a brief pause): “When I was much younger and lived in Greenwich Village, there was a Turkish painter who was madly in love with me. He spent one evening chasing me around the kitchen table with a carving knife. And he had one eyebrow.”
And so on.
Now, compare and contrast the foregoing with what took place when my mom came home on the evening of the attack of The Killer Claw.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “Have you had dinner already?”
“Nope,” I said. “What about you?”
She said vaguely, “Oh, I was talking . . . walking . . . window-shopping . . . I forgot about food, to tell the truth.”
She opened the fridge door and stood there casing the shelves and humming. You would never think that this person had a missing Gran on her mind, which was very weird. I began to feel anxious.
“Window-shopping?” I said. “I thought you were having a conference with, uh, with somebody from my school.” I could not, so help me, say his name.
“That’s right, darling,” she said.
Trouble, trouble, trouble. When she calls me “darling,” she’s on some other plane of existence where men are gallant and kids are darlings and life’s a dream. This is kind of endearing in a grown person, but it’s also a pain in the neck as long as it lasts, which usually isn’t beyond the third date.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve been with a delightful male companion, and it’s somebody you know already.”
Well, of course at that point I knew, all right. Window-shopping! For what, a new Claw?
I tried ignorance anyway, on the off chance that I was wrong: “I know him?” I said. “From where?”
She brought out some cheese and ham and took a bite of each. “Can’t you guess?” she said. “Valli, darling, why didn’t you tell me that the new school psychologist is such a sweet, smart, caring man?”
“Because he isn’t!” I yelped. “And he’s got a face like a—like a bulldog!”
Mom looked hurt. “Since when have you thought that looks were everything?”
“He’s too old for you,” I said. “Come on, he is a lot older than you are, isn’t he? He told us he was old, in assembly.”
She blushed. It was awful. “Well, maybe he is—I didn’t ask to see his birth certificate. I didn’t know you were so conservative, Valli.”
“I’m not, I’m just trying to tell you—you can’t—how can you stand him? He’s a creep!”
She flinched, which made me feel awful. But I was desperate.
She recovered her poise, though her voice got an edge on it as she went along. “Look, I know it’s against the unwritten code for a mother to get involved with a staff member at her kid’s school. But you’d better face it, love, and learn to live with the crushing embarrassment as best you can.”
I was now more alarmed than ever. Mom only gets sarcastic with me when she’s defending something really important to her. “What do you mean, involved?” I said.
“He seems like a very nice man,” she said, and she got a plate and sat down to start some serious chomping. “He gave up a substantial chunk of his free time to me today.”
“What did you talk about?” I said, remembering what I’d heard over the radio at Kress’s. What would her version of that awful, smarmy conversation be?
“About you, of course, but lots of other things, too: life, and the state of the world, and publishing, and how hard it is to go into business for yourself. I told him a little about striking out on my own as a literary agent. He’s had two books published, did you know that? They don’t know how lucky they are at that smug little school to have a man of his caliber on their staff. For once I feel as if the price of sending you there is justified.”
She was so caught up in all this that she had poured herself a glass of milk instead of her usual Perrier.
I said, “You’re going to see him again?”
“As soon as possible.” Then she gave me a long look, and she said, “You’re really upset, aren’t you? Look, darling, I’m as worried as you are about Gran, but for the first time I’ve found someone who seems to have a sense of what I’ve been going through. Besides you, of course.”
“You talked to Brightner about Gran?” I said, feeling totally betrayed.
“Well, of course.” Abstractedly she gulped down the milk and blotted her mouth on a dish towel. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I guess I forgot. What a strange coincidence—your Dr. Brightner turns out to be the same person whose letters I have in my desk offering to include Granny Gran in his Alzheimer’s study up in Buffalo. I thought the name was familiar.”
What a coincidence! But what could I say? That I’d listened to part of their conversation on Mr. Kress’s radio while Brightner’s Claw—that thing had to be his—tried to nab me and haul me off into never-never land? Well, you can imagine how that would go down. I could, too, so I didn’t even try. But I was sure that if only I could get through to Mom I could save us all a load of grief.
I compromised. I said Brightner was a bully.
She said I was overreacting to his concern, and that he was actually a very thoughtful and warm person who was worried about me. He had told her so.
I said the coincidence was crazy.
She said, what coincidence?
I said the one she’d just mentioned, him being the “doctor” who was so anxious to ship Granny Gran off to Buffalo, for Pete’s sake, and also being the new psychologist at my school in New York
.
She said he was a very fine psychologist who was pursuing his interest in mental degeneration from two angles at once: on the one hand he worked with the aged who were losing their marbles, and on the other he was interested in the young who were just learning to use their marbles. Can you believe that? She must have gotten it straight from Brightner himself.
This was getting worse than nowhere, and the tips of my scorched fingers had begun to throb.
She said, “Valli, are you all right? You look flushed,” and she touched my cheek with the back of her hand.
“I’m fine!” I yelled. “I’m dying, if you want to know!”
And I flung myself into my room and slammed the door. The phone rang, and I heard her settle down to a low-voiced conversation (it wouldn’t be Gran, then). I stayed where I was with the light off and sort of drifted off to sleep.
I woke up at about two in the morning. My fingers, where The Claw had touched me, were hot and blistered and made my whole hand ache. Maybe The Claw had given me blood poisoning or gangrene.
Mom was asleep. I could sort of feel that in the stillness of the apartment. She was sleeping, and I was sick, but I wouldn’t wake her up and worry her with my crazy fantasies, not me. Let her find me raving in the morning, or unconscious, swooned out. Too bad tomorrow was Saturday, not a school day I could miss due to Claw-poisoning death.
Feeling very sorry for myself, I scrunched up on my bed in my clothes in the dark, longing for my Gran to come, call, do something about my hand and my mom and Brightner. I took out the silver glove and folded it under my cheek. It brought back very clearly the bristle-faced flea market vendor who had sold the glove to me, and the two women going through the box of shoes next to me and laughing about how out-of-style they were.
All of a sudden it hit me: tomorrow was Saturday. Flea Market Day. The glove had told me where to find my runaway Gran.
5
Bad Character
I WOKE UP EARLY with my wounded hand wrapped in the silver glove, and my fingers didn’t hurt anymore. Nothing was left of the blisters but two faint red marks.