Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen (10 page)

Hey, mushroom soup. Well...wild mushroom soup. That seems safe, and a package of crackers. Not regular crackers that you crumple up in your hand and drop
into a bowl of Campbell's cream of mushroom. Cocktail crackers, it says on the box. Sounds like something Miss Barclay would like.

There's a regular set of normal dishes in the cupboard. When I've set the table and heated the soup, I check on the Wrinkle Queen. Snoring away in her bedroom.

I decide to let her sleep. In a room off the living room, there's a
TV
, and I've only missed ten minutes of
Fashion Forecast
. They're broadcasting from Milan, Italy. Some designer who's into feathers and leather. A good model can wear almost anything in the world and act like she's strutting around in jeans and a T-shirt. Like a leather bra with pigeon feathers sticking out of its sides. Or suede hot pants fringed with rawhide laces dripping bangles and beads.

“Tamara.”

Hold onto your dentures, Queen Elizabeth. My show's almost over. She scowls at me when I come into the bedroom a couple of minutes later.

“Lunch is all ready,” I tell her. I've never figured out why it's always tougher for her to get off a bed than get into one. You'd think the force of gravity would be with her.

“Oh, good,” she croaks when I get her to the table. “Wild mushroom soup and...cocktail crackers.”

“Would you like Melba toast?”

“No. But I wouldn't mind a proper spoon. You should never serve soup with only a teaspoon. And the soup bowls should have plates underneath them...”

She's not happy until I've got the big spoons and plates and rounded up cloth napkins that look like big hankies. But she slurps a spoonful of soup and sighs. “Why can't the Triple S figure out how to make something this good?” Cracker crumbs make a trail down her fuchsia-colored dress.

“Now try on those new dresses,” she says after I've cleared away the lunch dishes. “I'd like to see what you've got for my money.”

Her money. Is she ever going to let up? I model the green dress with the full skirt first.

“I'm trying to imagine what it'll look like on you when your hair doesn't look as though you've stuck your finger in a light socket,” she mumbles through a cloud of smoke.

“Well, work on it,” I suggest, “but don't give yourself a stroke while you're doing it.”

“Now don't get touchy,” she glares at me. “There's no point in you wearing a two-hundred-dollar dress if your hair looks like a magpie's nest.”

She puffs away for a few minutes on her cigarillo as I go and look at myself in the hall mirror and do a twirl.
The dress does look awesome. Especially with the dress pumps. Forget about the old bat carping.

When I change and come back out in the black sheath, she says, “You're a little young to wear black. But it's a good fit. Now go into my bedroom and look in the top right hand drawer. There's a jewelry box I'd like you to bring to me.”

So the dragon has some treasure in her cave.

The box is antique-looking — fancy gold trim and shiny bone stuff on the outside.

“My mother's.” The Wrinkle Queen's voice has gone suddenly soft. When she opens the lid, it plays a tiny, tinkly bit of music. “The waltz from
Coppelia
.”

“Pretty.”

“Nothing terribly valuable in here.” She rummages through it. “But, yes, this will do quite nicely with the green dress — and the black, too, for that matter.”

It's a triple strand of pearls.

“Cultured,” she says.

“What?”

“Cultured pearls. Quite good quality. Leave them out and we'll pack them.”

The pearls glow in the window light, and the beads feel wonderful as I run them through my fingers. To tell the truth, I wouldn't mind borrowing some of the other pieces from the old jewelry box. A silver bracelet that
looks like a snake. Big chunky gold earrings. But Miss Barclay bangs the lid down, stopping the tinkly waltz in the middle of a note.

She has a matching set of bright red luggage (surprise!), and she loans me the second-biggest bag so my green dress won't get crushed.

Her own opera dresses are long silvery things. One has about a zillion little glass beads sewn all over it. And another has a pattern of swirls that makes you dizzy when you look at it. The Wrinkle Queen treats them like they are precious pets and has me make little nests for them out of tissue paper. She throws in one of those wraps made out of dead rats, too. This one is white.

“Likely it'll be warm in Seattle,” she says, “but every once in a while it gets a little cool and drizzly. That reminds me, we should take umbrellas.”

She points at a list I'm making. I write “umbrellas” beneath “opera glasses.” They have special glasses for looking at opera? Who would have known?

It takes us most of the afternoon to pack. Mid-afternoon I phone the nursing home and tell them I'm Miss Barclay's nurse, Stella Havisham, and everything is a-okay. Just a quick question. Should she be taking an aspirin a day along with her other medications?

Then, at 5:30, when I know everything will be in an uproar at the Shadbolts with Shirl hustling to get supper,
and the gremlins fighting over which cartoons to watch, and Herb hunting up a beer and trying to find all the pieces of his newspaper, I give them a call.

Herb answers.

“Everything is going great,” I tell him. “Miss Barclay's ordering a pizza for supper and then we're going to watch a video. It'll be fun. Say hi to everyone from me. I'll phone you in a couple of days.”

Miss Barclay actually does have a couple of shelves of videos — ones she owns, not just rentals she's forgotten to take back. But, instead of watching a movie, we decide I'd better practice driving the Buick. She hasn't made any more noises about doing the driving herself.

This isn't like Herb's Plymouth or Mr. Mussbacher's Toyota. The Buick has white leather seats and lots of shiny chrome and so many dashboard dials it looks like the flight panel on an airplane.

Once she's managed to get into the passenger seat, the Wrinkle Queen pats the dash like it's some kind of pet.

First I have to back it out of a garage that must have been built when cars were skinnier. I actually scrape the side view mirror — the one on the side where the Wrinkle Queen is sitting — against the door frame.

“Are you sure you've been taking driving lessons?” she asks. She's already lit up a cigarillo.

“Herb didn't teach me how to back out of a closet.” I feel like grabbing the cigarillo and chucking it into the lane. “Would you mind opening your window? I wouldn't want to die from second-hand smoke poisoning before we even get started.”

“Then turn off the air-conditioning,” she snaps.

“You turn it off. I'm driving.”

Neither of us say anything as I steer the car down the alley and out onto the street.

“You can just drive slowly along the crescents here,” she says finally. “No need to get out onto Stony Plain Road any sooner than we have to. When we get back, you can park in front of the house. I hate to think what might happen if you attempt to get this vehicle back into the garage.”

The Buick is twice as big as Herb's car. Candy apple red. Give it to the Wrinkle Queen, she means business when she says she's not into old lady colors.

We're back by ten o'clock. And, yes, I did get out onto Stony Plain Road, the one we'll take out of town tomorrow morning, to get gassed up. It was kind of scary but traffic wasn't too bad on a Thursday night.

I can see the Wrinkle Queen is going to be a pain to drive with. I guess you can't call it backseat driving because she's in front. Sideseat driving? Some of what she has to say, I need to hear. About one percent. Like
which side street will give me a light onto Stony Plain. But the other ninety-nine percent I could do without. Look out for that street fountain...now be sure and signal...I didn't see you shoulder check...yadda yadda yadda. She's yammered on so much that she's practically dead from exhaustion by the time we get back to the house.

Still, she has some of her brandy in a little glass that looks like it should be hanging from a chandelier. I let her pour me a taste, too. It's pretty awful, but I pretend I like it.

We clink glasses.

“To Wagner.” The Wrinkle Queen raises her glass. “Dreadful man but the source of the most wonderful music ever written.”

“Dreadful?”

“Womanizer. Racist. Egomaniac.” The words sound almost like praise the way she says them.

“To the journey,” I say, “and may all our expectations be met.”

“Remember, dear.” Miss Barclay drains her glass. “Dickens was being ironic. Maybe, like wearing black dresses, you're a little too young for irony.”

It seems like I've just fallen asleep when I'm awake again. But it is three o'clock, I can see by the relentless red digits of the clock on my bureau. It's not easy getting out of bed, but I manage — I don't want to wake Skinnybones. She'll need her energy for that drive.

There's a kind of wonder to the night. Witching hours, I guess. The light of the street lamp shining through the living-room sheers onto the Persian rug. Without even thinking about it, I make a tour of the house. Very slowly. Using this wretched walker contraption. But slow is fine at night.

Skinnybones is fast asleep in what used to be Raymond's room, the one I turned into a study with a pull-out couch. Asleep, she looks as if she were twelve instead of nearly sixteen.

Lord, Jean Barclay! What have you gotten yourself into?

In the kitchen, I treat myself to a smoke and another bit of brandy — mindful of its sleep-inducing attributes. When I do get back into bed, the clock reminds me, minute by minute, of the slothlike passage of time. 5:17. And then I do drift off.

Someone touching my hand stirs me. At first it seems like it might be Mama, waking me to go to school. That's how she'd do it. Even when I was older and going to Normal School. Just tapping my hand.

“Time to get up.”

“Mmm. What time is it?” Can that be my voice?

And it isn't Mama. It's someone else.

“Seven o'clock.”

I see it's the girl. Skinnybones. Her hair all spiky.

“There's coffee on.”

She's a bundle of energy. Almost doing a little dance as she gets me into the clothes I had her lay out on my bedroom armchair last night.

“Settle down,” I tell her. “No one's going to run away with the road. Where are my cigarillos?”

She's a terrible driver, I realize, when we get out onto the highway. Poking along ten kilometers below the speed limit, drifting over lane lines, driving half way onto the shoulder at times.

“You might want to get over and let that dump truck by,” I suggest.

“God. He's got other lanes!”

“But you're driving in the fast lane and you're going slower than the rest of the traffic. Now get over.” I haven't lost it, the voice that could send students hurrying from the classroom into the hall or down to the principal's office.

She changes lanes abruptly without a proper shoulder check, and a huge semi blares its horn at her, frightening her so badly that she scoots totally over onto the shoulder and stops. I expect she's going to cry but instead she just grips the steering wheel and clenches her teeth and utters a couple of choice oaths. It seems like a good time to light a smoke and settle my own nerves.

Finally she turns and glares at me.

“I can only drive if you quit nagging me,” she says, dropping her words like stones, each one thudding. “Otherwise, I can't concentrate.”

“All right,” I say, “but if you're going to kill us, I'd prefer you did it on the way back, after I've seen the Ring.”

“Right.”

The traffic going west thins out as we get farther away from the city. Most of it is coming into Edmonton.

And she does seem to steady, the more kilometers we log.

“Where did you put those tapes?” Over the years I've put together a collection I like to listen to on a car trip. Mostly Wagner, but some Puccini and Verdi, too.

“Under the picnic hamper in the back.”

She's not happy about pulling over and rummaging in the back seat for them, but she doesn't say anything.

“Ah, there we are.” It's the top one in the carrying case. “
Das Rheingold
. Act one. Imagine the scene, Tamara. Water nymphs frolicking in the river water. Music so exquisite it breaks your heart.”

She thinks I don't see her but I do. Rolling her eyes.

“And then the music will change. A dark, ominous undercurrent filled with menace. That's because Alberich, a dwarf who lives under the river, comes up and begins flirting with them, but they reject him. Alberich spies the gold, though, glinting in the sunlight through the water.”

For a minute, I close my eyes and see that image, one of my favorites in the whole cycle. When I open them again, I catch Skinnybones stealing a quick glance. Checking, no doubt, to see if I'm still alive.

“The Rhine maidens tell Alberich if he can renounce love forever, the gold will be his along with magic powers that will allow him to shape it into a ring.”

“Lord of the rings?”

“Well...a different story but not all that different.” I push the tape into the slot on the dashboard.

As we drive, the morning sun makes its own dappled patterns through the trees and across fields, somehow a perfect fit with the Rhine music.

Yes, it's all worth it. When you get closer to the end of your life, the decisions you make are shaped by a sense of urgency — a kind of urgency that plays out in slow motion. Last chances, I guess.

She's liking the instrumental music, I can see, but when the first Rhine maiden begins to sing, she grimaces, glances at me in amazement, and then begins to giggle.