The room is bare. Not a stick. Not a single nail protrudes from the grey walls. Only her clothes trail across the black floor like a love romp. Looking rail-thin in the blouse and skirt, she jerks open a white door hiding canvas chairs folded neatly against the back of the closet. A thin-legged folding table. She whips them out and up, furnishing the place. "Wait till you see my tea cabinet," she says, slapping the swaying loop of canvas meant to cradle an a.s.s. "I've been collecting for weeks." Through another white door to the tiny kitchen stands the old refrigerator, no taller than I am.

"Vine leaves." She s.n.a.t.c.hes out jars and plastic dishes. "Artichoke hearts. Do you like olives?"

The kettle is on the stove, blue flame curling its bottom. She reaches, her long body high above me and her ribs sliding under thin cloth, upward. "Strawberry, jasmine, mint." Tea boxes rain onto the counter. "This is all for you." She is huge. Her heat beats through the inch of air between us. "I have no idea what you like so I've been on the watch for anything really special. Just in case you ever came to visit. Now I'm going to get you a dressing gown and you can change in the bathroom."

The dream lasts only an instant, but in it I have fallen into the cat cage and the tigers are sliding by me, brushing their whole hot length against me. But it is this Miranda, moving liquid past me and out into the big room, miraculously whisking her dropped belongings out of sight, pulling out white painted drawers and doors, allowing glimpses of hidden paraphernalia as she skates, chattering about food, again and again to the resurrected table suddenly crowded with ominous delicacies heaped in small bowls.

A final armload slides onto the table, sketch pads, pencils, a sinister looking camera. Then she takes half a step back and looks at me through half-closed eyes. A flicker of her fathers deliberate calculation pa.s.ses across her face. An ice knife sticks in my chest.

"It's not cold in here, is it?" she asks.

"No."

"Good." She moves to the drawers in the wall. "I'll do some photos first, while you're fresh, and then sketch until you get tired or fed up." She flips her voice over her shoulder while bent, rummaging to avoid acknowledging my jitter of fear. She is holding me to my promise.

"The photos will make it easier on you. It hurts to hold a pose for a long time."

She presents me with a green pajama top and, as I grasp it, she swings open the bathroom door, flicks the light switch, saying, "There are hooks on the door for your clothes ... whoops! There's the kettle boiling."

In the tall bathroom I stand staring at the door. I can hear her moving on the other side. The pajama top trails on the floor beside me and she is whistling in the kitchen. Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed gla.s.s. She is manipulating me. Pushing me around as though I were nothing but a mobile stomach like the news vendor. She fancies she has me under control. Red anger blisters my guts. She doesn't see me at all. She doesn't know who she's dealing with. I am the watcher, the mover, the maker. She is just like her father, casually, carelessly enslaving me with my love. She doesn't know the powers that keep me here. She thinks it's her charm and guile.

"Tea's ready," she calls.

I answer thinly, "Coming," but whirl in a frenzy, shoving the grit of the green pajama into my mouth and biting down to keep from bellowing.

Her drawing is suddenly in front of me, framed and gla.s.sed on the grey wall beside the sink. The darkness is ink and the eyes and teeth come out of the dark and the screaming chicken is bulging vainly away, caught as the teeth close tearing into exploding feathers and black blood behind its desperate skull. Drawn with a bullwhip at thirty paces. Quietly, in the white at the bottom, her penciled hand has scrawled "Geek Love - by M. Barker."

I take off my clothes. I can't reach the hooks on the door. I drape the clothes over the toilet tank, drop the wig on top, and stand my shoes on the floor beside it. The pajama top hangs to my ankles.

I sit. She draws. Wearing only my blue gla.s.ses I am not cold but my skin rises against exposure, rough as a cow's tongue. The cups steam upward into the pale air. Our island is the size of two canvas chairs and a small cluttered table. We are marooned in the breathing bareness of the room. Darkness rolls out around us, seeping into the distant softness of the grey walls. The curtains shift slowly in their own whiteness, as though the light pouring through them has a frail, moving substance.

She is gnawing an olive pit and frowning at the sketch pad in her lap. The wild hair torching out of the edges of her face mesmerizes me. The millions of hairs in a dozen smoldering tones are as alien as her size, the outrageous length of her. My mother, Lillian, is seventy inches high. I am thirty-six inches high.

"How tall are you, Miranda?"

She looks up to focus on my chin, frowning, and says, "Six feet," mechanically before her eyes twitch back to the paper in front of her.

Watching her work is comfortable. I feel invisible again, as though she had never spoken to me beyond "Good morning." She is not interested in my ident.i.ty. She doesn't notice it. Her eyes flick impatiently at me for a fast fix - a regenerative fusing of the image on her retina, the model she inflicts on the paper. I am merely a utensil, a temporary topic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand.

Downstairs in the first floor front, Crystal Lil sits sliding the magnifying gla.s.s back and forth in search of the focal point. The walls around her are slathered with the crumpled glitter of the old carny posters. A dozen glossy young Lilys smile, kick, and reach for the curving gold name, "Crystal Lily," that arches against midway blue above her. Dressed in white, a paper Lil arches her back against a blue-green sky spangled with stars. Strips of a.r.s.enic-green wallpaper peep between the posters.

In my room everything is just as I found it when I moved in. The stuffed furniture molders against the cabbage wallpaper. My real life sits in boxes and suitcases behind cupboard doors. My real bed is not the creaking acre of springs in the corner, but the dark nest of blankets on the floor of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.

Miranda rips out the page she has been working on and absently sails it over her shoulder while she eyes a jar bristling with pens. The page settles, belly up on the dark floor, as she begins dashing ink at a fresh sheet of paper.

"What made you," clearing my throat, "decide to be an artist?"

Her eyes flick at my feet under frowning brows. "No, no. A medical ill.u.s.trator. For textbooks and manuals ... " Her tongue sneaks out at a corner of her mouth as she slaps stroke after vicious stroke onto the defenseless page. "See, photographs can be confusing. A drawing can be more specific and informative. It gets pretty red in there. Pretty hot and thick. But the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds claim I'm undisciplined, too flashy ... " Whatever she is doing to the innocent sheet has nothing to do with me. She rips it out and drops it, starting immediately on the page beneath.

"There's something I want to talk to you about." She tries to make it casual.

The bite of fear - "She knows!" - grabs my chest and then relaxes. No. I've been sitting here bald and naked for an hour. Too late for that.

She stops chewing her thumb and asks, "Have you ever been to the Gla.s.s House?" At my nod she drops the pen, picks up her tame tool, the pencil, and begins work on a fresh sheet of paper.

"Then you know," eyes on paper, "that the dancers, all of us, aren't there for our dancing skills or even our looks, but ... " rubbing her thumb vigorously across the page, "because we each have something odd. We call them our specialties.

"What the Gla.s.s House calls 'Exotic Features' are all in the back room. You know. Separate cover charges for private shows and private parties. Blondes with Dobermans. Group acts. They stage requests, too, for fancy prices. There are one-way mirrors in the peeper booths and special insurance policies for domination or S&M. That's where the girls make money. The club too." Her mouth screws up tight as she squints at her sketch.

"Well, there's a regular customer. Not frequent but regular. Once a month or so she comes in for one of the specialty shows. Maybe twice a year she'll foot the bill for a request. At first I thought she was a standard S&M d.y.k.e. Now I think it's not pain that she's interested in. She's interested in changing people."

Something in Miranda's tone catches me. A swirl of familiar fear starts in my gut. She feels it too. I see a bewilderment strange to her face.

"The lady's rich. She pays. She likes transvest.i.tes if they want to become transs.e.xuals. If they want to go all the way, she'll pay for all treatments and the surgery. That's how Paulette could finally afford it. He could have gone on strapping his b.a.l.l.s up tight for the rest of his life if it wasn't for her. The Gla.s.s House keeps hiring transvest.i.tes and she keeps shipping them off to get real. But she watches. That's part of the deal. She goes along and watches the operation. And it isn't just s.e.x changes. She actually prefers other things."

A cold thought sinks quietly through me. Again? Miranda draws and talks, looking at my elbows, forehead, knees, t.i.ts, anywhere but my eyes.

The long-haired blonde, Denise, who unfurled her pubic hair and danced on her head hair, had furnished one of the recent command performances. They stretched her out on a chrome table in one of the back rooms, and gave her local anesthetics while they burned all her hair off. They set the fire and then ducked back into the gla.s.sed-in booths to escape the smell as the girl shrieked in fear if not pain, and the master of ceremonies, in a gas mask and flameproof suit, stood by with the fire extinguisher.

"The dame paid Denises hospital bills and went to visit her all the time. I went to see Denise the day before she got out. She looks bad. The roots were destroyed and the hair will never grow back. There are a lot of scars on her face. She's not allowed to have any plastic surgery. That was in the contract she signed. You wouldn't believe it but Denise is happy. She says Miss Lick, that's the lady's name, paid her so much she'll never have to work again. Denise says there have been others from the Gla.s.s House. One redhead with enormous t.i.ts who had them amputated and went to college and is a doctor now!"

My daughter is staring at me. Her eyes are looking anxiously at my eyes. The point is coming. I feel it speeding toward me as she searches my face for a reaction. Any reaction.

"The reason I'm droning on with this silly stuff is that Miss Lick came back to the dressing room after the show last Friday night and asked to talk to me. She's gruff and gross and when she isn't being extremely dignified she's being what she calls a 'straight shooter.' That means the first thing she said to me was, 'Look, I'm not going to make a pa.s.s at you, so relax.' Maybe it's nuts but I liked her. She took me out for a fantastic dinner, though she didn't eat. She drank the whole time. She pumped me for my life story and, being the shy, reserved type, I spilled the works. The poor orphan brought up in the convent school. The mysterious trust fund covering my art-school tuition and the permanent rent on this place. I had a gla.s.s of champagne and colored the whole yarn a glorious purple. She was fascinated. And what it comes down to is, she isn't after my a.s.s, she's after my tail."

"Ah," I say. My mouth stayed open.

Miranda leans forward, eager. "Yes. This is the tale of the tail that I threatened you with, and I figure you will understand what I'm talking about."

The sketch pad lies unmolested across her knee. One long leg hooked over the chair arm, she looks at me. Her hands are still. Her face is just young now, all the cleverness washed away.

"I was ashamed of it. You know, as a kid. The nuns would tell me it was a cross to bear and a punishment for my mothers sins. I want to just tell you the truth, not purple it up this time. The nuns were good to me. I loved them. In a funny way the fact that the religion never quite took in me has to do with the tail. It's hard to explain. Maybe I don't even understand it yet. My one prayer was that I'd wake up and my tail would be gone. My backside would be smooth like the others."

My mouth twists wryly. "You hated it?"

"Sure."

I sit, coolly naked, examining her racehorse legs and the jut of her calf out of incredibly thin ankles and remembering my first sight of her head, emerging blood-smeared and dark from between my legs. Her small rumpled face jerked to the side with a profile like a turtle.

And later, with Lil beside me, stretching out the tiny folded arms and legs by gently pulling on her hands and feet, and finding nothing. Nothing but that little pigtail coiled over her b.u.t.tocks. And Lil's voice, not broken or shrill in those days, saying, "Well, remember Chick. He didn't look like much either. Go ahead and love her. We'll see."

Months later she was crawling and learning to stand up, and was getting too big to sleep in the cupboard beneath the sink with me. Her father, whose wide mouth and almond eyes are Miranda's now, looked at her one day when she had tripped and fallen and split her lip on the floor of the trailer and was crying and bleeding, and he said, "Get rid of her." And I cried and begged and yanked down her diapers to remind him of that tail, pink and charming, and he sneered and said, "Get rid of her or I'll give her to Mumpo for supper, stuffed and roasted!"

Now, twenty years later, in this huge room, with Lil downstairs watching a TV screen through a magnifying gla.s.s, her mind steeped in the amnesiac vapor of her own decay, and Arty's wonderful face gone to worms despite me, I sit here looking at the full, ripe flesh of this almost normal young female and for a single satisfying instant see her on a platter with a well-basted skin crackling to the touch.

"You say you hate your tail."

"I did. Then I heard about the Gla.s.s House, where they weren't interested if you were just pretty and could dance but wanted something spectacular. It was a joke to audition. Or an experiment. A different approach to my tail. But since I've been working there I don't feel the same way about my tail. Now I think, in a way, it's kind of marvelous." Her eyes are questions. Is it sane to like my tail? she is asking.

I am too old for this roller coaster. This much anger and this much pleasure should not be crowded into two short hours. My liver, or whatever it is that's trying to crowd its way into my left leg, can't take it.

"This must bore you. It must seem pretty silly."

"No, I'm just resting my eyes. What does she look like, Miss Lick?"

"Mary Lick. She's forty or something, six feet two, maybe two hundred forty pounds. Short sandy hair. I wasn't sure you were an albino until you took off your shades. This is the first time I've seen you without them. You have a fascinating orbital ridge; I'm just going to get a quick sketch. The deal is that Miss Lick has offered to pay me to have my tail amputated. She'll pay all expenses, recovery as well as surgery. She swears the best surgeon. Plus she'll pay me ten thousand dollars in cash. I don't know what to do. Miss Lick isn't what you'd think. She's rough, but when I was telling her about being an orphan she kept saying, 'Kee-rist,' and I could tell she was wrapped up in it. When we left the restaurant, which is out of town a ways, she backed out of the parking lot and into a ditch. There we were with the rear wheels stuck in the mud. She sat there staring out the windshield in the dark. She said, "I've been here a hundred times and this never happened. I'm f.u.c.ked up. But I'm not drunk. It's that convent, your tail." Then she got out to push and I steered and we got back up on the road. She drove me home and I felt right then that I'd give her my tail or anything else she asked for just because she cared."

My eyes pop open to the sight of Miranda's increasingly familiar frown. "Did you tell her that?"

"No. She wanted me to think about it. She's going to stop by the Gla.s.s House tonight for my answer. She says if I decide to do it I should wait until school ends and I have the summer to recover from the surgery."

"Very considerate." The light is the color of dust now as it catches her hair and the side of her cheek. It leaves her dark eyes in shadow.

"Have you talked to your friends at the club?"

"They're all wild about it. They'd jump at it ... but they all hate their specialties. And I'm not sure I do anymore. That's why I wanted to talk to you. You understand living with a specialty. Better than any of us. I don't know how old you are ... "

"Thirty-eight," I say, and her face shows she thought I was older. I was barely seventeen when she was born. But dwarfs age quickly.

"What I'm asking is, am I crazy to have this liking for my tail? Am I just covering up something else? If I turn this chance down I'd probably regret it for the rest of my life. You must have wished a million times to be normal."

"No."

"No?"

"I've wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I've wished for a fish's tail instead of legs. I've wished to be more special."

"Not normal?"

"Never."

"No s.h.i.t! That's astounding! Tell me ... "

"I have to leave." Reaching down for the pajama top, uncramping my legs to climb down to the floor, padding toward the bathroom door.

"Hey, I'm sorry, I've taken most of your afternoon, you must be beat ... You'll come again, won't you? How about tomorrow? I'll work up some of these sketches and be ready for some more-developed stuff tomorrow."

Alone in my room with the door finally closed I stand gaping blankly at the grimy window. I had no right to pretend surprise. The nun told me when I first took her there. Horst the Cat Man was leaning on the fender of his van at the gate and I was inside in the visitors' room. I sat hugging Miranda, the toddler - not yet a year old - still in roomy diapers. Trying to talk through my tears to this clean-faced nun, who had seemed so warm and rea.s.suring over the phone.

"What do you mean, a tail?" Her eyes cooled instantly. She tugged at the back of Miranda's diaper. "Is she r.e.t.a.r.ded?" Miranda clouded at the strange touch, looking anxiously at me. When the diaper dropped to her pudgy knees she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and began to cry.

"Just a little tail," I was saying.

The nurse came in, chipper, with a clipboard full of forms. She held Miranda expertly, dancing her on a chair while I sniffed and scratched at the forms. The nun muttered softly to the nurse. The nurse sang "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Climbs Up the Water Spout" and peeked surrept.i.tiously down the back of Miranda's diaper.

We went to the infirmary, where the nurse chattered rhymes as she stripped the oblivious and chortling Miranda. Probing, listening, peering with tiny flashlights, counting digits, and finally tickling the curl in the tail until Miranda laughed out loud and I turned to grey stone.

"It is not simple surgery in her case, but it would make her life much easier," the nurse was soothing me. "You must imagine what her life among normal children would be like. She will shower and dress and swim in a group setting where it will be impossible to hide. Children can be very cruel."

"No," I snapped. "She keeps it. You won't touch it."

They asked me again five years later as I stood watching Miranda through the window of the visitors' room.

"She prays to be rid of it. How can you deny your own child a chance at a happy, normal life?"

I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the play ground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me. "She's happy," I said. "You've told me so and I see it. She keeps her tail."

But she hated it.

I crawl into my cupboard, pull the door shut, and lie curled in the dark, thinking about Miss Lick. I've seen hobbies like hers before.

It is dark when I wake up. I stick my head under the cold-water tap for a while. Then I put a sweater on, then my coat, and a wool watch cap on over my wig, and stump out past the TV voice from Lily's door to catch the Number 17 bus for downtown.

Huddled under the sick fluorescent glare of the empty bus, I stare at a cardboard warning tucked into the rack above the windows. It says, "Don't get too comfortable."

The doors sigh to let me out on the echoing mall. I head north toward Old Town and the Gla.s.s House. I make one stop in a phone booth. There are several Licks in the books but no Mary or M. It's probably a fake name anyway. n.o.body who can afford her kind of hobby could afford to have it known.

The neon clock in the window of the tattoo parlor says nine. Two blocks later I am scouting doorways across from the Gla.s.s House parking lot. A shut-down leather shop on the corner gives me a view of the parking lot and the side door as well as a long angle on the front entrance. A heap of garbage bags at the front waits for the morning pickup. Five steps lead up to the door. I sit on the top step and watch the lot fill up slowly. The cars spew out cheerful groups and giggling pairs. Mostly men. I count. Sixty going in before one comes out. None of them is Miss Lick.

The cold wraps me. It isn't real rain, just the heavy mist that takes its time soaking through. The clouds hang low, picking up a dull bruise color from the lights of the city. The flesh-toned office tower known as Big Pink haunts the sky above the crabbed three-story horizon of Old Town. The tower disappears occasionally in a gust of darkness. My legs begin to ache.

Who do I think I am? What in the name of creeping Jesus am I going to do? The only answer is the sneer from the region of my hip sockets. I go on sitting, watching, feeling like a rats-a.s.s fool.

Two hours later Miss Lick shows up. She's easy to pick out. Six foot two and 240 pounds in a grey business suit. Her high heels are each big enough to bury an Egyptian in. She trots alone across the parking lot, hunched under an umbrella, and slides into the side door of the Gla.s.s House. My pulse whips high at the sight of her but drifts back down to a rhythmless funk as the door stays closed.

It's another hour before she steps out into the harsh light of the parking lot. She looks up and decides against opening the umbrella. She lets the door sink back behind her and stands, head up, mouth open, fumbling in her pockets. I get up. My knees are stiff and unreliable. I shake my feet trying to get some juice into my joints. The blood begins its burn back to life as she starts her march across the lot. She is too discreet to leave her car that close to the place. She's on the corner, turning. I trot down the dark side of the street. A small bar is evicting sc.u.m, and the drunken banter covers my shuffle briefly. Three blocks from the Gla.s.s House the big woman climbs into a sleek, dark machine parked in front of the blood bank. I write the license number on my wrist with a felt-tip pen and feel as though I've conquered Asia.

Miranda won't get off work for another two hours. She'll take a cab home. I stump over to the bus mall, so delirious with relief and cold that I hallucinate Miranda on every corner. Sitting by the glare-blackened window on the Number 17, I rewrite the license number on an old receipt from my purse. The figures on my wrist are already smearing blue from the mist and my sweat.

I go in to work early the next morning. As I climb onto the bus, a small genderless child lurches in its mother's arms, pointing at me and crowing, "Little Mama!" The woman holding the child goes a sudden hot red and grabs at the tiny hand, shushing. I turn and hop back down the steps and wave the driver on. I walk to the radio station.

By the time I get there I've decided that the license number has nothing to do with Miranda's Miss Lick. How many big women use the side door of the Gla.s.s House? I could be tagging lumpily after a convincing middle-aged transvest.i.te. If Lick is a phony name for subterranean use, I could trail an irrelevant specimen for weeks and never know it.

I slide a license trace request into the newsroom, make two fifteen-second commercial spots for Stereo Heaven and Sun River lunchmeat, and then tape the third installment of Beowulf for the Blind. I wait until after the Story Hour to check my message slot, and find the computer printout of the trace. It is Mary T. Lick. She hasn't changed her name for the Gla.s.s House. Her address is a tony high-rise condo in the West Hills, just below the Rose Garden.

In the elevator it occurs to me that Miranda might be waiting for me in the lobby, hoping to guile me into another drawing session. I hold my breath as the doors open, but she isn't there.

I cross the bridge over the concrete river of the sunken highway and walk down to the library. Lincoln High School is directly behind the station and the students on their lunch hour crowd the sidewalks. Two shrill-voiced girls argue hideously on the Charles d.i.c.kens bench outside the library. I swim through the heavy doors and up the curving white marble stairs to the index files.

Mary T. Lick has a card of her own, just before Thomas R. Lick, her father. They are both buried in microfilm. I go up another two flights to the periodical room and stake out a viewing machine in the most obscure corner. I camp there with a stack of film reels of old newspapers.

There she is, not smiling, in the society columns. A younger Mary Lick is not smiling at the Hunt Club Opera Benefit. Mary Lick is trapped gloomily between two vivacious gargoyles at the City Club. Mary Lick, standing uncomfortably next to the deep V neckline of a Rose Princess, frowns at the crowning of the Rose Festival Queen. A much younger Mary Lick stands glumly, behind a bald and furious-faced man billed in the caption as Thomas R. Lick, at the ribbon cutting for the Thomas R. Lick Swimming Pool at the TAG Club.

The text skates over guest lists, wardrobes, and buffet menus. There is no comment on Mary's wardrobe, which is the same in all cases, a dark featureless business suit.

Thomas R. is referred to variously as the Lickety Split Food king, mogul, or tyc.o.o.n. The grimmest and most recent photo of Mary Lick shows her staring moodily at a Salvation Army truck loaded with cardboard boxes. "24 Lickety Split Thanksgiving Dinners." The caption calls Mary "The Lickety Split Food Heiress," suggesting that Thomas R. has pa.s.sed on to the obituary page, probably with a "Lick Splits" headline.

There she is. The old man is spread out on the worm buffet and Daughter Mary is dumping hundreds of Lickety Split dinners into socially unacceptable hands. The seven-year-old item comments that this is the first contribution in the history of the Lickety Split Corporation, but says, coyly, that it might "signify a new role for the company in the future."