“Oh,” Norma says, and despite herself, has a seat on the filthy mattress to think. She’s tired. “Okay.” What do I know, she wonders. She has to think for a very long time. What does she know? “I know how to make a hot artichoke dip,” Norma says.
“Everybody knows that, cup of mayo, cup of cream cheese, cup of canned artichokes, diced.”
That was Norma’s recipe exactly. “Plus a little garlic,” she says, and Dirty Norma just stares without answering, as if the garlic were an unspoken and unimpressive addition. “All right. I know how to recite all the presidents of the United States in order of their presidency.”
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Bur—”
“ERRRRG! Wrong,” Dirty Norma calls out. “You messed up. It’s Monroe, ADAMS, Jackson. You forgot the second Adams.”
And Norma knows Dirty Norma is right. “Fine.”
What does Norma know? Not much. She has no knowledge to trade. Nothing. “Come on, just tell me. He’s MY husband,” she says.
“He’s YOURS? Like you own him?”
Norma mulls this over, rolling her head back and forth in her hands. “Yes,” she finally decides.
“You OWN him?”
Norma knows it isn’t right, but she says it anyway. “Yes. I do.”
“Well, even so, you’ll have to guess who he’s sleeping with, and even if you do guess, I’m not saying I’m going to tell you if you’re right or wrong. I just want to see if you can guess.”
“Damica,” Norma guesses.
“I’m not saying one way or another.”
“Look, I don’t really care. I’m not even sure if I love him anymore.”
“Guess!”
“So it’s not Damica?”
“No. But wouldn’t that be evil if it were?”
Norma glances around the room. She adjusts her seat up on the bed. Dirty Norma sits down beside her so that their legs are touching and Norma can feel the warmth of her.
“I don’t know who,” she says.
“I know. You don’t know anything and yet you think you’re better than me.”
Norma stays silent, staring down at an old suitcase left behind in the room, maybe by one of the patients.
“Guess.” Dirty Norma stomps her foot like a horse.
“I don’t know.”
“Fine. I’ll tell you. It’s Linda Kanakas, you know, the lawyer?”
“Yeah. I know her,” Norma says. She’s not surprised.
“Finally. You know something. Your husband is sleeping with Linda Kanakas.”
It feels good to finally know the truth. But then, in a second or two, it starts to feel really, really bad. Her eyes blur their focus onto the suitcase at her feet. It is a small leather one, an older model, a hard-shell brown Samsonite with a leather edge, probably from the 1940s. Just below the handle on the case is a simple golden latch and a monogram that is all but rubbed off, erasing its owner. Dirty Norma sees Norma looking at it. Thumbing the square of brass, Dirty Norma slides the catch to the left and pops the suitcase’s lock. The inside is lined with a forgotten pink taffeta, and the elastic of its side pockets has been stretched into an overextended deformity like a tired and spent girdle. The air inside the case smells yellow and aged. Resting inside is a stenographer’s notebook. It must have belonged to one of the patients.
“Let me see.” Norma kicks the case so she can look inside. Her grandmother had been a stenographer for forty-seven years, an expert in both Pitman and Gregg shorthand. “That’s a stenographer’s notebook,” Norma says, demonstrating her knowledge.
“Yeah,” Dirty Norma says, unimpressed. “It says so right on the cover.”
“That doesn’t matter. Even if it didn’t say it, I would have known.” The wire coil across the top, the long, narrow pages divided into two columns. She thinks she might even be able to read some of the shorthand inside and she is certain that Dirty Norma can’t read shorthand, but as she picks the notebook up and opens the pad to its first page she finds its contents have not been recorded in the scribble of shorthand but are instead written in plain English.
And so both Normas start to read from the stenographer’s pad.
In the coffee shop off Dead Elm Street Norma pushes what’s left of her meat loaf aside.
That’s what it says in the stenographer’s notebook. They continue reading.
Damica bounces The Baby on her knee. Norma looks away from their conversation out the window where automobiles are slowing and then starting under the sway of the stop sign.
“But this is my story,” Norma tells Dirty Norma.
“God,” she says. “You think you own everything.”
The Normas continue reading.
Dead Elm Street was named for a blight that struck in 1937 and laid waste to fifteen trees that once lined Elm Street. Some of the trees weren’t even sick yet, but the town had to cut them all down in order to stop the spread of the disease. And then they changed the name of the street.
Damica’s talking. “If it’s all the same to you I’ll—”
“It’s never all the same,” Norma says, raising her voice this time.
“I’ll just get your lunch tomorrow. All I have is a twenty.”
Norma ignores her. She can’t believe Damica is going to stick her with the bill again. She takes that day’s paper from her purse, opens it up between them, and, bypassing the front page’s headlines, flips to her favorite column, hiding in its pages.
HOUSE OF MUFFLERS DECLARES BANKRUPTCY
Drake and Kanakas celebrate a victory
Linda Kanakas, lawyer for Drake Industries, stated that justice had been served as she and her client left the courtroom yesterday. Judge Burger ruled that Marguerite Eddell, proprietor of House of Mufflers, was in trademark violation not only for her unlicensed use of the word “of” in advertising materials but also for the silent, yet understood “the,” as in “The House of Mufflers.” Eddell was fined twelve thousand dollars, a sum that Eddell complained she “just couldn’t pay.” The Third United City Bank will be handling her bankruptcy claims.
Norma stops reading. There is a photo printed beside the article. It is a picture of Linda Kanakas at some sort of black-tie affair. She is wearing an elegant black evening gown with the tiniest crystal teardrops stitched into the bodice. There is a man standing beside her, a man who has been cropped from the photo except for one hand that is resting on Linda Kanakas’s arm. Norma looks very closely at this hand. The blood rises in her neck.
“I have a story for them,” Norma tells Damica, hitting the paper. “Hector Donoso.”
“Who?”
“Remember Mary Donoso and how her father got deported back to Honduras and she got bumped out of our school district because her family had to move into Section 8 housing because her mother couldn’t afford rent anymore without Hector’s paychecks?”
“Sort of,” Damica says, petting The Baby’s head.
“Linda Kanakas was the one who called INS on Hector.”
“Hmm.” Damica looks out the window. “Linda Kanakas,” she says, and chews her lip. “That was a long time ago. Yeah, I remember.” Damica looks Norma straight in the eye, as if trying to tell her something without saying it, as if she is Superman with X-ray vision. Damica exhales loudly. “Norm, how’s it going?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
Norma knows what she means. “I got my period yesterday.”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry.”