Leave It to Me (5 page)

“Do I need it?” DiMartinos do their thing with scarves. Shawls are exotic.

Frankie twitched the silk piece this way and that for the right effect. “Green looks good on you. When you walk in, have the bloody thing frame your shoulders just like that,” he advised my speckled reflection in the mirror. “When you settle into your chair at the table, let it glide down on its own. You’re not thinking about clothes, that’s the main idea.”

Because I’m thinking “Expiration date”? And what’s he thinking? Rhino horns and tiger balls?

“Well,” he said, giving me the final once-over, “it’s in your hands now.”

I caught the kiss he air-blew.

Frankie slapped his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. “Shit! I’m all out. Meet me at L’Auberge? We shouldn’t both be late!”

It’s in your hands now
. I’d believed Frankie then. Maybe I still do. Success or failure’d been in my hands that evening. But the question I can’t stop asking myself
is, How had these hands come to belong to a DiMartino woman?

An orphan doesn’t know how to ask, afraid of answers, and hopes instead for revelation. Ignorance isn’t bliss, but it keeps risky knowledge at bay. I never badgered Mama to tell me all she knew about my toddler days. Mama must have liked it that way too. She kept my origins simple: hippie backpacker from Fresno and Eurasian loverboy, both into smoking, dealing and stealing. She left my bio data minimal: some sort of police trouble my hippie birth mother had got herself into meant that the Gray Nuns in Devigaon village had had to take me in; one of the nuns had renamed me Faustine after a typhoon, but Mama’d changed it officially to Debby after Debbie Reynolds, her all-time favorite.

It
was
in my hands. I didn’t want it to be in anyone else’s. This was a night I expected revelations. It would close on champagne and Frankie’s saying, one hand on mine, another on Baby’s, “Mama, she is the most important person in my life.”

I was demanding acknowledgment, not a wedding ring.

Frankie slipped out of the apartment. I didn’t stop him. From my window I heard Frankie slam the building’s outer door, then slip into his Flash walk, swiveling and strutting through the parking lot, leap into a silver Jaguar I didn’t know he owned and vanish around the block. I stayed at the window awhile, savoring the splintery roughness of the window frame, and the play of shadows cutting across the sidewalk. In the park the Dixieland band was doing a halfhearted job, but, thinking
Tonight’s the big night, tonight Prince Flash will fit the glass slipper on the Foundling’s foot, I didn’t mind at all
.

By the time I made my teetery way on the slingbacks with the high heels and the pointy toes, an upscale crowd in a party mood was already clotting the sidewalk outside L’Auberge Phila, and the small open space around the bar, waiting for the maître d’ to find them tables. My mood was good to begin with, but the head turns and near leers from tanned guys in summer blazers as I cut through the crowd to the maître d’ made it soar.

“I’m with the Fong party,” I announced. For the rest of my life:
The Fong party. Debby Fong
.

“Ah, yes, the others are waiting for you,” the maître d’ said with a perfunctory dip from the waist, and led me to a table for four.
See how they scrape!

Frankie was in one of the two chairs that faced the wall. He was leaning forward, elbows on the tablecloth, listening to a young and very sexy Asian woman with long-lashed eyes and long black hair tell what must have been a joke. If this was Baby, then Baby was aptly named. She had a high, melodious voice, and she was saying, in an accent that sounded very much like Frankie’s had when he’d called me that first night from Kuala Lumpur or wherever, “There was a talking bird in a golden cage stranded with a deaf-and-dumb chap on a desert island …” I stopped behind Frankie’s chair, wanting to shout at Miss Asian Knockout: Hey, you can’t call a person
dumb
. Not in Saratoga. I confidently waited for Frankie to feel my presence before I spoke up, but he just hung on her every word, looking down her dress.

“Hi!” I announced myself while the maître d’ hovered.

Frankie scraped his chair back, and half rose to greet me, while the woman made a gesture with her hand that could have meant “Hello” or “Go away, don’t bother us.” The hand she waved was elegant: beautiful skin and delicate bones, set off by two large rings, one a huge black pearl and the other a heart-shaped sapphire. Asians must make the best “hands” models.

Another Asian woman, shorter and older, and dressed in a Chanel suit, joined us. She held her hand out straight, each finger stiff with rings. “Ah, you must have walked in while I was in the loo!” She had a pale oval face powdered paler, and vigilant eyes under green-shadowed lids. Her scalp showed through her thin hair, but what hair there was was dyed a dead black. “That’s the trouble with middle age,” she rattled on in her loud, good-humored voice. “Bladder ruins welcomes you’ve planned to the last detail. Oh, you wouldn’t know, but you will. Where’s that darn gift? Frankie’s sung your praises, Miss DiMartino, hasn’t he, Ovidia? We have a present for you. But first I have to scoot around Frankie and find it in one of the shopping bags behind my chair. I know you must be in a rush to get away from the boss, Frankie’s such a slave driver, but it won’t take me a mo. Frankie, do they have that first-class champagne I like? Have you asked the waiter?”

Ovidia stooped to rummage through the shopping bags at her feet. Frankie’s eyes followed. I caught Ovidia’s smile as she became aware of Frankie’s interest.

“Look in the Harrods sack, dear,” Mrs. Fong encouraged.

“That’s a pretty necklace,” Frankie muttered, his eyes on the pendant of pearls hanging from a gold chain just above Ovidia’s modest cleavage.

“I’ll tell you what we brought you, Miss Di. You don’t mind if I shorten your name to Miss Di, names are so difficult. Anyway, if you’re like Cynthia, that wonderful girl Frankie’s got in KL, you probably hate surprises. Am I right?”

“Frankie?” Let my mean fears be unjustified, I prayed.

Ovidia straightened up just then. She held a prettily wrapped medium-sized box out to Baby, for Baby to hand in turn to me I guessed, but it was Frankie, and only Frankie, she was looking at.

“Not that one,” Baby said.

“Frankie?” I tried again.

He smiled at Ovidia for a very long moment, then turned away, picked up the wine list. It hit me, like a mugger’s truncheon from behind on prime-time TV police shows: Frankie’d presented me to First Class Fong as a simple Saratoga secretary.

“A handbag,” Baby stage-whispered, “because nobody doesn’t not have an use for a handbag, am I right?”

Ovidia pulled out my present from the Harrods shopping sack. It wasn’t gift-wrapped. And it wasn’t a pocket-book. “Here we are,” she announced.

Ovidia’s pretty hand was still dangling the Singapore Airlines freebie toilet kit as I ran to the entrance, and up Phila Street.

“Lousy day at the tracks? Something a drink can fix?” someone said in a nothing-to-lose voice. I kept running.

I had to nuke Frankie from my memory. No such person as Frankie, never had been a Frankie, no supercool superrich Asian lover who opened up a whole continent for me. I’d made him up out of needs I didn’t know I had. It suddenly came to me as I sat in the car why First Class Fong had dropped herself into my life. Oh Baby, thank you. You brought me more than the freebie toilet bag. If Wyatt’s vision for me was right, I’d be able to pay my own first-class Singapore Airlines fare, and buy a Saratoga apartment. One day I’d be tall, pretty, rich, a mover and shaker as long as I knew enough to lie low on bad days and scratch my fleas in private, right? Tomorrow I’ll wake up with a cold nose and bright eyes and the first rich couple with a big yard that comes in will take me home.

No more rhino horns and tiger balls, think Animal Shelter
Wyatt gave me a base to build from. He didn’t realize that a few of us are given chance after chance because we have life after life to get it right. In fact, I wouldn’t mind another couple of chances with Wyatt now that I am not a stubby, punk thirteen. One thing Wyatt got totally wrong: cuteness counts for some, but not for all. You get put down when you finally run out of wrath and a canny sense of timing.

I drove straight to the pound. It was minutes to closing time, and the dogs mostly lay curled tight in their roomy cages, their backs pressed against the grille.

“They look so sad,” I remarked to the Animal Shelter officer, a woman in her fifties. She was nursing a sick iguana, which she cradled against her chest as if it were a baby. “Do they sense time is ticking?”

“Oh, they’ve just had a big supper,” she said, without taking her eyes off the iguana. “And they’re probably worn out from the good run they got today. We have a new volunteer this week, a high school kid who wants to study veterinary medicine. A really sweet kid whose Lab just died of diabetes.” She stroked the iguana. “Sniffles getting you down, Izzy?”

“Mind if I take a quick look around?” I asked the officer.

“Sure thing,” she said. “Glad for interest, glad for company. The cats are in the last two stalls, all the way down the hall behind that door and to the left. Be a big boy now, Izzy, don’t fight the medicine. Are you looking for a dog or for a kitty?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Probably a dog.”

“Take your time,” the officer advised. “It never works when you choose on impulse. Not for you, and certainly not for the dog. Best to think through all the stuff like what breed’s best for your family, do you have babies, do you live in a big house or a tiny apartment, will your neighbors complain about barking. The big fellow in the first cage to the right as you go through that door was brought back last week. The man said his wife was afraid he’d trample the baby.”

I walked in through the door marked
ANIMALS & OTHERS
, past Izzy’s empty case and two glass cases of thin snakes, to where the dogs, cats, rabbits and ferrets were kept. That evening I counted seven dogs, though one of them had a
NOT FOR ADOPTION
sign above its cage.

The dog inside had a huge, grim head, and a don’t-mess-with-me-and-mine kind of muscular face; in fact, it looked more like a wild bear than a housebroken pet. But its body was long, slender and elegant, stuck on top of twitchy little legs.

“See that head?” The officer lowered Izzy into its case, and whistled at the dog. The dog stared and stiffened its ears, but didn’t scurry towards the grille.

“A dog with dignity,” I commented.
No wants, no needs, no expiration date?

“He’s got a bit of Akita in him,” the officer explained. “You can see it in the massive head.”

“Akita?” Some fancy breed that nobody I knew owned.

“Poor fellow, he’s also got some dachshund or poodle. Look at those matchstick legs.”

“Why the sign?” I asked.

“He hasn’t had all his shots yet. First we have to gauge if he has what it takes to be adopted.”

“I’d consider it.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Poor mutt. It was bred like me, with crossed signals and conflicting impulses.

“Wait till the end of the racing season,” the officer advised. “That’s when we get all the pets the summer folks don’t want to take back home with them. You’d be surprised. Beginning of September’s when I get really desperate for homes.”

When I got back to my apartment, I found a half dozen gladiola stalks, the gift-wrapped box, which turned out to be a Chanel handbag, and a note from “Mr. Francis” on Elastonomics letterhead. The note was brief and word-processed. It said, “
C’est la vie
. Thanks for the superb times. I shall have left town on business by the time you get this. The apartment is yours gratis till the end of the month. Good luck and god bless.”

“Why waste your money?” Mama sighed when I called her the next afternoon and told her that I’d just signed on as a client with Finders/Keepers, a family-reuniting service in Albany. “We’re your family. Aren’t we your family, Debby?”

“I need to know.” I should’ve stopped there. I heard Mama’s dishwasher going. She’d be in pull-on knit pants and a T-shirt, broken-down Wallabees, a bandana tied low over her forehead, cleaning up after making her nectarine relish, which Pappy never dared tell her he hated. Family secrets. “About crossed signals and conflicting impulses. They say there’s a time every adopted kid suddenly has to know.”