“The catch is that it’s a living funeral,” I said.
I couldn’t tell if the phrase meant anything to him. Or if he’d even heard me. Harry looked around his club, his gaze lingering on his clients. There was a man in cutoff jean shorts and cowboy boots, nursing a double-shot of whiskey. Another guy by the stage had a dollar in his teeth and a trucker hat that read “I Love Fat Chicks.”
“Hell,” said Harry. “Every day here is a living funeral.”
24
Here lies the last text you’ll ever get from me.
This was the final dispatch from the land of Daniel Torres. It appeared on my phone at exactly 9:33 the next morning while I was eating breakfast by myself. My dad was off again, who knows where, so I had no one to tell me not to check my phone at the table. I was deciding whether to respond when UPS showed up on the porch with a heavily insured package. I brought it inside and looked at the label: Exotic Land, USA.
I’d spent the latter half of yesterday on the phone with the curator, telling her about Mamie. I even sent her the cell phone video of Mamie telling her story. She said she’d overnight me something, and I wasn’t sure I believed her. But when I opened the box, I found a perfectly preserved black satin strapless gown, encrusted with thousands of glittering rhinestones.
The stones were incandescent in the light of the morning. They were like a constellation plunging down the dark satin bodice to a ruched waistline. The dress came with matching mid-length silver gloves, a fringed pair of black panties, and tasseled rhinestone pasties. Also included in the package were the names and contact information of ten living dancers from the golden age of burlesque.
I got on the phone right away, and called them up one-by-one. I spoke with a former Broadway actress first, a woman with a breathy voice who got into the trade when she couldn’t get acting work. She was now a retired theater teacher in Arizona. I talked to a pinup girl who lived in a double-wide with all her memorabilia, the sole curator and visitor of her own mobile museum. “I remember Mamie,” she croaked. “Great rack on that little lady!”
I talked to a woman once arrested for indecency who volunteered for her church these days. She’d danced with live cockatiels on both arms until one of the birds attacked someone at a show and she had to give them up. I talked to two dancers who never threw in the towel. They still performed on the revival circuit, jumping out of clam shells at the age of eighty-nine.
In the end, I got five out of the ten to confirm. Three others were maybes. Two were too sick to make it. Still, itwas a start. I decided to take a ride out to Sunrise Commons to share the good news with Mamie.
It was a perfect spring day, and on the way, I rolled down all the windows and took deep breaths of fresh air until my mind felt temporarily defogged. It wasn’t until I got to the parking lot of the home that I remembered Daniel’s message. Now that it was in front of me, I wanted to write back. It would be so easy to dash off a text. Instead, I pressed a button and my screen went dark. Then I grabbed the dress and went inside.
When I got to the reception desk, I was told Mamie was not available because she was “recovering.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked the woman with the giant teeth. “Recovering from what?”
“Mamie left the grounds yesterday,” she said. “She wandered to a diner five miles from here. On the way back, she had a fall.”
“What kind of fall?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Are you family?”
“She hates her family,” I said.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she said.
I just stood there for a few minutes in the lobby after that, watching the receptionist tap away at her touch screen, as if everything were completely normal. Eventually, though, Itold her I needed to use the restroom. Then, I headed down the hallway toward the restroom where I took a jagged left turn toward the passageway to Memory Care.
Mamie’s door was closed, but it wasn’t locked, and when I stepped inside, I was surprised to find no one on duty. Instead, I found the shades pulled and the lights off. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark before I could find the bedside light, and when I flipped it on, I got my first look at Mamie in the shadows.
She was on an IV and there was a large bandage across her forehead. Her hair and makeup weren’t done, and I could finally see the age in her face: the thick lines from her mouth to the bottom of her chin, the loose cheeks and heavy-lidded eyes. I set the dress down on a chair and moved closer. Mamie’s pupils opened to the room.
“It’s you,” she said in a hoarse voice.
I sat down on the bed and put my hand over Mamie’s, which was cool and soft.
“Oh, Tilly,” said Mamie, “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess of things.”
I squeezed her hand.
“You don’t need to apologize for anything,” I said.
I picked up Mamie’s hand and saw that her fingernails were speckled with patches of old nail polish. Either shehad gone without a manicure, or she’d scratched them in the fall.
“I’m not supposed to have visitors,” she said. “They even turned my husband away.”
Her husband, I remembered, was no longer alive.
