It had come twice since that first time: sporadic, irregular, abbreviated. This was the third time, and once again, of course, she was totally unprepared.
Women were coming into the bathroom now, but there were plenty of stalls. Sally stayed where she was, motionless and silent, trying to play out the various options open to her. The tampon dispenser she’d noted on her way in, beside the door, was useless to her (this being a transition she still hadn’t made), but she obviously couldn’t do nothing, and another drone of pain was even now surging through her lower abdomen. That pain was a sharp reminder of how deeply unfair this all was. Lewyn and Harrison would never hunch over a toilet seat in the name of procreation, just as they would never be called upon to waddle around with a bloody pad inside their underpants, or shove cotton up their revolting penises. (She assumed they were still revolting. She hadn’t actually seen them for years.) All for the privilege of that greatly multiplied sorrow in the bringing forth of children!
Resigned, she took a fistful of paper from the dispenser, rolled it around her hand and inserted it between her legs, then she pulled up her underpants around it. It felt absurd, like wearing a diaper, but at least her dress was loose. At least it wasn’t white, like her jeans that first time, at school. Like the dress that woman had been wearing out there in the lobby.
The memory of that woman’s back, its descending spine, momentarily displaced her discomfort and resentment.
She flushed the toilet and opened the door of her stall.
And there, like something preordained, like something totemic, was that very back, contained by those same white linen straps, inclining forward over one of the sinks, only this time the dreadlocks of its wearer were tumbling down to the shoulder blades. Sally stopped where she was, stupidly, in the open door of the stall, just as the woman straightened up with a damp paper towel in her hand and began to wipe the skin under her eyes. She looked up into the mirror and Sally couldn’t look away. Apparently, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, either.
“Hi,” she heard herself say.
The woman looked into the mirror, into Sally’s eyes, and Sally felt again that terrible sensation, less sharp than dull, less hollow than …
“Hi yourself,” the woman said. Then she stopped dabbing her face and looked again. “You okay, hon?”
Sally, in a perfectly rational response to this question, burst into tears.
“Uh-oh,” the woman said. And before Sally could stop her—and she totally, totally would have stopped her—this person had taken three steps in her direction and was giving Sally Oppenheimer possibly the most encompassing and terrifying hug of her entire life.
“You’re okay. You’re okay,” the woman said, as if this were an established fact. Her embrace was horrifying but also horrifyingly not-unpleasant. She stepped back out of the woman’s arms, and at that moment the door opened and two other women entered, parting like people in a square dance around Sally and the woman with the beautiful back, and slipping into the stalls on either side.
“C’mere,” she said. She meant the little sitting area beyond the sinks: two armchairs and a low table, beneath a framed poster for a show on ship figureheads. Sally sat, uncomfortably crossing her legs over the wedge and trying not to look at the front of that white dress, which, while not nearly as low as the back, was pretty low. The woman had a scar, bright pink, at her collarbone. Sally stared at it.
“Do you want me to get someone for you?”
Sally shook her head, no. Who was there to summon: her father, his girlfriend?
“No, that’s okay. I came on my own.”
“Oh? Just had to see those Dargers?”
“No, no. I mean, well, yeah.” Her voice shook. She was horrified by the drivel coming out of her mouth, and also by the tears. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. And to cry here? In the women’s room at the Museum of American Folk Art? In the midst of her super-brave mission to catch her father in a nefarious act?
“Like moths to a flame,” the woman said, ruefully. “Like there’s no other Outsider Artist on the planet.”
“What?” said Sally, who was remembering that her father had used this exact term.
“I mean, not that he wasn’t a genius, of a kind. Of course he was. And he had an awful life. But I mean, those girls…”
“Oh, yeah.” Sally crossed her legs the other way. The paper in her underpants felt massive, like a rolled-up New York Times. “I mean, they’re kind of crazy, but they’re also kind of beautiful.”
“And that’s what upset you? The pictures?”
The pictures? The pictures might be both strange and strangely beautiful, but they were just pictures. Whatever weird thing her father had about pictures, she didn’t have it. Nothing against a pretty painting or photograph, or even, she supposed, a ship figurehead, but she wasn’t ever going to prostrate herself before a work of art.
“I don’t even like art,” she heard herself say, and rather forcefully. “My father collects paintings. He’s always running around after them and fawning over them and spending probably a lot of money to buy them, and then he just hides them away someplace in Brooklyn and goes to look at them on his own. I’ve never even been there.”
It was the most critical thing she had ever said about Salo, at least to another person, and now she was saying it to a total stranger? It made no sense, and of course there was now a barely suppressed look of shock on the woman’s face, even if she was trying to cover it up by smiling, as if what Sally had just said were witty or hilarious. Then she said, “My name is Stella. What’s your name?”
But Sally didn’t want to say her name. She just wanted to keep on doing what she was doing, which was looking into the woman’s—Stella’s—smile, and at the pink scar at her collarbone, and the long coiling dreadlocks down that lovely back. But she forced her gaze away.
“I’m so sorry,” Sally said. “You know, I think you’re right about those girls. I guess I didn’t realize how upset I was. I’m just going to wash my face.” She forced herself to her feet, the wedge shifting uncomfortably in her underpants. She might have missed our father’s arrival by now, which meant at the very least that she’d have to repeat her reconnaissance mission around the galleries but which also might mean, if she was particularly unlucky, that Salo was standing near the door to the women’s room with his girlfriend, and that there’d be no way to not be seen by him when she tore herself away and went out there.
“Well, okay,” the woman said. “If you’re all right.”
“Of course I’m all right,” Sally said. Even to herself she sounded borderline insulted. “I mean, thank you, I appreciate your concern.”
Stella nodded, and to Sally’s great relief she turned without another word and left the bathroom, and Sally thought what a kindness it would be to never have to see this woman’s face (or her back) again for the rest of her life, although she would never forget the humiliation and mystery of this encounter, not ever, even without what happened next.