Chapter 31 #6
“Hey …” I put my arm around her. She was shaking. “Let’s wait and see what she says. I’ll stay with you.”
The old wooden root table had been scrubbed and covered with clean white butcher paper and held, among many things, our Bon Ami cleanser, probably Flossy’s acetone nail polish remover, the El Heato hot plate we should’ve sold, Henry Tartt’s old cigar humidor with his gold initials, rows of glass tubes, jelly jars, a copper pot, toothpicks, shredded cotton, lots of silver utensils, and a microscope with a plaque that read Property of the University of Mississippi Medical Dept.
Above it, a framed diploma was propped up on a shelf: Virginia Cunningham University of Mississippi Medical Certificate, next to some jars of Picador’s good watermelon pickle.
I kept holding on to Flossy, but I asked, “Virginia, did you really steal all this?”
Still peering deep into Ruby, she said, “I borrowed some of it from the hospital that nobody’ll miss. And your kitchen. And the lab room at school—but they have dozens of microscopes, and we’ll give it all back.” She added, “I paid for the toothpicks.”
“Did anybody see you?” I asked. We did not need to add theft to our already long list of crimes.
Virginia turned on the squeaky stool and dropped the spoon into a tall pot. “No. I mean, Dr. Pittman was there seeing to an appendix patient, but he didn’t see me.” I was about to ask was she sure, but Flossy’d started sobbing.
“Can I put my twat up now, Doc?” Ruby asked sitting up. Virginia looked at her.
“Fine, may I put my va-gi-na away please?” Ruby said.
“Yes, no lesions, but there’s some scar tissue we should keep an eye on,” Virginia said. To me, she said, “Ruby’s been tested, she’s negative for everything.”
Ruby got up and pushed her dress down while Virginia scrubbed her hands, fingertips to elbow, in the old cast-iron sink. She put on fresh gloves. “Let me see your finger, Flossy,” Virginia said. I unwrapped my arm around her, but Flossy stayed put in the corner.
Ruby stood in front of her. “You’re the one that made everybody get tested, so give her your stinkin’ finger.” Ruby grabbed Flossy’s hand and held it out to Virginia, who took it gently, then swiped Flossy’s forefinger with alcohol and gave it a quick prick. Flossy whimpered.
I watched her blood get squeezed and sucked up a thirsty glass straw that Virginia let drip into a glass tube.
She handed Flossy a cotton ball to press to her finger and took the vial to the table.
She stirred it with a toothpick, glancing up at one of the new clocks the girls had bought today that she’d hung up on a nail.
Then she tipped the blood droplets onto a glass slide and pinched a tiny, red-tipped dropper.
“This is just salt water, so it’s practically free …
” she said. She stirred this with a different toothpick and tonged a vial from a metal holder.
“Everything’s sterile, but we have to watch for dust down here.
” She added a careful drop from the vial to the slide of blood.
“This is antigen I took from the hospital … if you’ve got any beef heart powder in your pantry, we can make our own …
and this … is just water”—she added a few drops—“I distilled on the stove upstairs.” Steady as a stone, she set the glass slide in the microscope and looked up at the clock again.
The hanging bare bulb swayed as somebody walked across the kitchen floor.
Seconds passed, minutes. I held Flossy by her thin shoulders, and Virginia checked the clock again and peered in the microscope. “Congratulations, Flossy, you don’t have syphilis.”
“Jesus H.,” Flossy said, and she sobbed again.
Now, out on the back porch, Virginia took the white coat off and sat on the steps with the other girls. The twins had gone to bed; so had Charlie. I sank beside Esmeralda, who was inking more cards, using her knee as a table.
“Want a stick, Doc?” Ruby offered Virginia a cigarette. She was predictably unpredictable. I’d never seen Ruby offer anybody anything other than a possible broken nose.
“No thanks, I don’t have a good feeling about those things,” Virginia said. “I guess I better get back to campus and get some sleep.” But she stayed where she was, gazing up at the soft gold lights in the trees.
“By this time tomorrow this crib’ll be open, and we’ll all be making bank,” Ruby said.
“It’s about time. Any longer and I’s afraid my cherry was gonna grow back,” Flossy said.
“It’s actually called a hymen,” Virginia said, sitting up. “And for thousands of years men have used it as a patriarchal symbol of a woman’s worth. In fact in some places—”
“That’s very interesting, Doc, maybe we’ll discuss that at breakfast,” Flossy said.
I wondered what tomorrow night would be like, the yard crowded with men, waiting to go upstairs to my sister’s or Mrs. Tartt’s room—oh my God, what were we doing?
How in the world had it come to this? Maybe it’ll rain and we won’t be able to open, I prayed.
I looked up at the moon, bright as a nickel. Another clear September night.
“Be nice if this crib had a name,” Esmeralda said. With her black ink pen, she drew vines and flowers on the back of the card, leaving the center empty. “Something snazzy, like Le Grand écart or Le Monocle in Paris.”
“You been there before?” Flossy asked. She looked ten years younger now that she knew she didn’t have syphilis. No gonorrhea either, which had to be a bonus.
Esmeralda nodded, turning ink into a long twisting vine. “I’m going back there. Soon as I make a couple hundred more bucks, I am on the next boat to Paris, and I’ll be drinking champagne at the Ritz.”
“Draw them cards fancy as you want,” Ruby said, “but there’s a couch in there reeks like a dead cat. No card can change a smell like that.”
“She’s right, don’t make it look too high-class of a house,” Flossy said. “Clean but dirty is what the customers want.”
“Whose house is this again?” Esmeralda asked.
“The Tartts’,” I said.
Esmeralda smiled. She seemed to own more teeth than I did. “Now that is a name,” she said, and in a few swift strokes she’d written in the center of the card:
The Tart Club
She looked at my expression. I’d call it alarmed. “Not clever?” she asked.
“Please, please don’t call it that.” We couldn’t do that to Mrs. Tartt. So Esmeralda drew more black vines, twisting and twining them around the words until they disappeared, like Hester Prynne’s letter A.