Cat In An Aqua Storm

“I sewed for my daughters when they were in gymnastics,” Wilma said in a dreamy, reminiscent monotone. “Bright, sturdy costumes. I got used to working with stretchy material, which is tricky. These girls need the same.”

“Your girls must be grown now.”

Wilma nodded. “Grown. Gone. I still sew.”

“And you still have girls who need you.”

Wilma nodded again.

Above them, the remote drone of backstage chaos continued. Upstairs, Officer Choi was strutting her stuff as Kitty Cardozo for an audience that included a possible killer. Suddenly, Temple didn’t resent being removed from the scene of the police trap. She wasn’t a cop or a private dick. She was an onlooker, like Wilma, a temporary face on the fringe of this exotic lifestyle, though Wilma had made a habit of attaching herself to this milieu. These girls would never outgrow her. Their faces and names might change, but their needs never would.

“Why do they do it?” Temple asked, pulling a chair over. Its four feet screeched across the concrete, as if protesting the dislocation. She sat and squelched the sound.

“Do you have children?” Wilma asked out of the blue.

Temple shouldn’t have been taken aback by such a question, but she was. She hadn’t heard it in awhile. Max would have been great with children. On the other hand, in other ways, Max would have been terrible with children, because he was one himself yet, in a still, small, irresponsible corner of his soul.

“No,” she said. Such questions never required a complicated answer.

“Then you’ve never seen the amazing innocence of a young child close up. Never seen how... trusting kids are. How smiling, utterly loving, and attractive. My girls—all curls and tiny white teeth and laughing eyes. Gigglers. In love with the world. Maybe I was young and pretty like that, but I’ve long forgotten it. You see it in a child and you wonder what we’ve all forgotten. You envy them.”

Temple watched the woman’s work-worn face soften with memories. Years and wrinkles fell away. The straight strands of her unstyled gray hair seemed to curve and grow brown again. Was part of having children, Temple wondered, ending up lonely and nostalgic for them?

“I don’t know about that,” Temple admitted. Her most recent maternal instinct had been fretting over Midnight Louie’s feeding regimen and intermittent absences. “But I’ve seen photographs, school photos, in the paper of some poor kid who’s been abused to death, and I’m always amazed that a child living that kind of nightmare can still give the camera a dazzling, hopeful, trusting smile.”

“The world spits on that trust.” Wilma’s white-knuckled fist shook her G-string ring. Her hands were large, the knuckles coarse and swollen, Temple noticed. Sewing must hurt the arthritic joints. A rumpled clutter of G-strings fell back to the countertop. “All that lovely innocence, mangled by its makers. Poor girls. Poor girls. Don’t understand. Didn’t see themselves. And them, the corrupters, they blame the seductive power of innocence. Innocents, that’s what all these girls are”—Wilma looked bitterly around the dressing room, judging every tawdry detail in the makeup lights’ glare—“though they don’t believe it, though they’d laugh and say they know better now. Corrupted innocents.”

“Big words,” Temple said. Old-fashioned, hellfire preacher words. “Are your daughters... in the business?”

Wilma nodded, her neutral-colored eyes distant. “Somewhere.”

“You’ve lost touch?”

“Lost them, yes.”

“I’m sorry. Was it a bad marriage?”

“Worse than I knew. I thought he only hit me, that that’s all he did. I thought I could take it, that I had to take it. I was so scared, so sure I had to be doing something wrong to make him mad. I stayed as long as I could. Too long.”

“What happened to your daughters?”

Her bleak eyes deadened further. “I found out he’d been messing with them, all the time. They were terrified of him, too.”

“How old were they?”

“When I finally found out? Six.”

Temple’s indrawn breath whistled between her teeth at the awfulness of it. “Then you took the kids and left?” Wilma’s head shook almost imperceptibly. “Then I had a breakdown. Nobody talked about such things then. Incest only happened in the Bible. I was committed to an institution.”

“And the kids?”

“Stayed with him. He was the father, and the mother was-—incompetent, they said.” Wilma’s lips distorted into a crooked smile that reminded Temple of a controlled, silent scream. “I was pretty confused and upset. No one believed me. And the kids were too scared to tell. He’d seen to that.”

She looked at Temple, her eyes clearing. Her tone became more vibrant, almost as if she were snapping out of a trance. “Oh, say, hon, did you get banged up too?” A strong, twisted hand reached toward Temple’s cheek.

Temple found herself dodging the gesture, even as she was shocked by how rude that was. “I’m fine. Just a... dumb accident.”