Dorothy Parker's Elbow Read online

  It didn’t take me long to get used to the feel of the needle. I learned to love it. Tiny gave me maybe two tattoos a year for our first four years of marriage. Little ones. The bigger ones took form over several months, or even longer. He sometimes did sketches for them on his own knee. I started sitting in the shop in a halter top and high-cut, low-slung shorts, ready to get up and turn a thigh this way or that, showing the customers how the colors went. I saw the same sorts of people I’d seen Tuesdays before I married Tiny, plus others: businessmen, priests, telephone operators, school-board members. Now they started asking me: “Does it hurt?” I told the truth. Of course it hurts, about the same as a vaccination, a lightly skinned knee, but less than a well-landed punch, a bad muscle cramp, or paying the bills. And look what you get: something that can’t be stolen, pawned, lost, forgotten, or outgrown.

  In the late sixties, when Tiny was still working on a small scale, every time I got a new tattoo, I’d steal a daily touch—I would feel the scab starting, covering the colors, and I’d get impatient and think about peeling it off myself. Tiny’d read my mind and bawl me out, so I’d just run my finger over the tattoo, feeling the outline raised up like it always is when fresh. Then it’d peel by itself, and one day I’d put my finger down and not be able to tell the difference in skin: It’d really be a part of me. And that’s when I started wanting another one.

  After we’d been married ten years, Tiny got interested in art. Mother had given me a big book called Masterpieces of the Renaissance—she wanted me to latch on to something, to go to college, and she figured art history, all things considered, might appeal to me. It was a beautiful book—the gloss of the paper made all the paintings look just finished; the pages gave off the scent of brand new things. I read it the day I got it, and set it aside. The next afternoon, I picked it up and all the reproductions had been taken out with a razor blade. No Raphael, Michelangelo—just a tunnel of empty frames where they’d been, front of the book to back.

  I ran down to the shop, grumbling. The plates from the book were tacked up on the wall; Tiny was eyeing an El Greco and sketching.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, hands on my hips, the way my mother stood when she started a fight.

  “Take off your pants,” he said.

  “You ruined my book”

  “I saved your mom’s inscription. When I’m finished, we’ll tape all the pictures back in. Come on, Lois, I want to try something.”

  “I don’t feel like getting tattooed today, thank you very much.”

  “Pen and ink, that’s a11. I just want to sketch something”

  “Sketch it on paper.”

  “Paper doesn’t curve as nice as you. It’ll only take a minute. Please?”

  So I gave in, and Tiny sketched something on my hip in ballpoint pen. He didn’t like whatever he’d done, and wiped my hip clean with rubbing alcohol. The next day he tried again. He took his time. I got a book to read while he was working (I couldn’t get interested in something that wasn’t permanent), but I couldn’t figure out how to arrange myself. I leaned this way and that, holding my book at arm’s length, and Tiny told me to stop squirming. Every night for a week he sketched and erased. At the end of the sessions, my hands would be dead asleep from trying to hold the book steady, and when I hit them on the edge of the table, trying to rouse them, they’d buzz like tuning forks. He never let me see what he was doing.

  One night at the end of the week, after closing, Tiny said he had achieved what he wanted. He planned to tattoo it on my hip as a surprise.

  I balked; my hip was my own, and I wanted to know what was going to be there. He promised that it would be beautiful and decent and a masterpiece.

  “You’ll love it,” he said. “I’ve got this painting racket figured out.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He decided to do the work upstairs at home. I stretched out on the bed, and he put on some Bing Crosby. Tiny loved Bing Crosby and at one point wanted to tattoo his face on me, but I put my foot down on that one. He gave me a glass of wine; he often let me have a glass, maybe two, when he was working on me. Never more, because it was against his strictest principles to tattoo a drunk.

  He started at eight and worked until eleven. Tiny had a light touch, and by the end of the evening I had a little bit of El Greco. The colors weren’t quite right, but it was mostly wonderful, the face of a Spanish monk blooming on my hip: Fray Felix Hortensio Paravicino. Tiny was good, believe it.

  He adapted a lot of paintings from that book, did them up in flash and hung them in his shop. Few people asked for those designs—he thought of them mostly as eye-catchers, anyhow—but one skinny lady had the Mona Lisa put on her back, all those folds of fabric, the little winding roads in the background.

  “Lucky she’s built like a boy,” Tiny said, meaning the woman, not Mona Lisa. “Otherwise, the picture woulda been all lopsided.”

  We went to the Art Center every now and then and wandered through one square room after another. I tried to get Tiny to look at my favorite thing there, a little Van Gogh landscape, but he always shook his head.

  “That guy,” said Tiny. “He’s not a painter, he’s a sculptor.”

  All those paintings and little descriptions made me sleepy; I would sprawl on a bench while Tiny practically pressed his nose to the oldest canvases.

  We made the guards very nervous.

  Tiny started to work bigger all the time, and put designs on my arms, down my legs. Eventually, he left only my hands, my feet, my neck, and face blank—I can still get dressed and look unmarked. But look at me undressed, see how he got better over the years: his patriotic stage, his religious stage. He liked greens and reds especially, and fine single-needle outlines, which he called “rare and elegant.” I’ve got George Washington on one arm and Lincoln freeing the slaves on the other; I’ve got a garden planted between my breasts, Japanese peonies and daisies, reds and faded yellows; I’ve got a little pair of arms sinking into my belly button captioned HELP LET ME OUT.

  My life drove my mother crazy. All she wanted was for me to become miraculously blank. I broke her heart—that was my job. She let me know her heart was broken—that was hers. She loved me, loves me. She has had a thousand lives: as a girl, she was pretty and could dance and flirt; her mother died, and she learned to take care of her father and older brother, and still she was happy, poised, and courted. She worked her way through college cleaning houses; she went to law school and New York and had a practice for a while; she married the owner of a women’s clothing store and moved to the Midwest; she went to Indianapolis to learn how to fit women’s underwear, and has her G.C. (Graduate Corsetiere) from the Gossard School. When my father died in 19S5, she took over the shop herself and ran it for twenty years. She has taught ballroom dancing, travels to foreign countries; she is a small-business consultant, the vice-president of her temple, and president of the sisterhood. She used to paint, sculpt, needlepoint, and knit, and there is a table in the front hall of her apartment that she made sixty years ago. My mother believes in being able to start fresh whenever life demands. Tattoos confound her.

  One Sunday when I was thirty and just beginning to become the tattooed lady (Tiny had started the Ascension the week before), my mother poured me a cup of coffee and said, “Sweethearts carve their names on trees, not each other. Does it ever occur to you that you are not leading a normal life?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I adjusted my pants and peered at my ankle to see whether I had embarrassed myself, whether a tattoo had managed to come loose and slip to the floor. My cousin Babs, who had just had a baby, was coming to lunch, too, and my mother and I sat on the brocade sofa waiting.

  “I just feel that you’re painting yourself into a corner,” Mom said to me. “How’s Tiny?”

  “Doing very well,” I said. “Business is up.” My mother winced.

  The doorbell rang. Mom answered the bell and ushered in Babs, still a little thick around the middle, bu
t elegant in her suit, stockings of just the right color, curled hair.

  Mom sat her down on the sofa.

  “Honey,” she said. “How’s the darling baby?”

  “A baby, all the way,” said Babs. “No, he’s fine, he’s sweet.”

  “Well,” said Mom. “Look at those nice clothes.”

  Babs had calmed down in the passing years; her parents had offered her a car if she stopped seeing Steve, and it was a better-than-fair deal. After college, she met and married a high school principal turned local politician, and she seemed to have lost every drop of wildness in her.

  The sight of a well-dressed Babs never failed to surprise me. “No one would ever suspect you had a reckless youth,” I told her.

  “It’s true,” said Babs. She looked at me with some regret and sighed. “Now I’m a nice married lady who sometimes has one too many glasses of whiskey at one of my husband’s parties and then tells the truth.” She sighed and shifted her weight on the sofa cushion. I imagined her bow tattoo pricking her skin, an old war injury kicking up.

  The three of us sat there and chatted about local news, babies, recipes. We covered ourselves. Looking at my mother, I realized how little I knew of her. Recently, I had gone through her desk, trying to unearth a phone book, and found a doctor’s bill for a mammogram, detailing two suspicious spots, the next appointment. My heart jumped whenever I thought of it. Did her body show what happened next? Her face didn’t, and nobody—especially me—asked my mother such things. Babs, too—besides that bit of color, what else: stretched-out stomach, the zipper of a surgical scar?

  I knew myself under my green pantsuit, could tap George Washington on the chin, prick a finger on the thorn of a rose, strum an apocalyptic angel’s wing, trace the shape of a heart Tiny’d given me after our first fight.

  Anyone could read me like a book.

  When my mother took the dirty dishes to the kitchen, I leaned toward Babs.

  “Watch that whiskey,” I told her, “or sometime you’ll drop your pants to show a visiting dignitary the colorful result of a misspent youth”

  She looked sad and understanding. “Oh,” she whispered, “I know.”

  That night, after Babs left, my mother took me to her bedroom closet to give me some of her old clothing. She was almost as tall as I was and very fashionable, her hand-me-downs nicer than my new things.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a pile of skirts and dresses. “Try them on. Don’t take what you can’t use.”

  I started for the bathroom to change.

  She sighed. “I’m your mother,” she said. “I used to fit girdles on women with stranger bodies than yours. You don’t have to be modest”

  So I undressed there and tried on the clothes, and my mother looked at me and frowned. Afterward, I sat down on her bed in my underwear and lit a cigarette.

  “Wouldn’t you like something to eat?” she asked me.

  I did, but couldn’t. I had just taken up smoking because I had put on a few pounds, and Tiny told me I better cut it out before I changed the expressions of all the tattoos. If I wasn’t careful, Washington and Jesus and Fray Felix would start to look surprised or, at best, nauseated.

  “No thanks,” I told her.

  My mother, who only smoked in airports and hospital waiting rooms (“All that cleanliness and worry gets to me,” she’d say), slid a cigarette from my pack, took mine from my hand, and lit the end of hers. She looked at all of me stretched along the bed, started to touch my skin, but took her finger away.

  “Well,” she said, blowing out smoke, “you’ve finally made yourself into the freak you always thought you were.”

  I looked at her sideways, not knowing what to say.

  “Actually,” she said, “you look a little like a calico cat.”

  My mother was wrong. I never felt like a freak because of my height: I felt like a ghost haunting too much space, like those parents who talk about rattling around the house when the kids move out. I rattled. It’s like when you move into a new place, and despite the lease and despite the rent you’ve paid, the place doesn’t feel like home and you’re not sure you want to stay. Maybe you don’t unpack for a while, maybe you leave the walls blank and put off filling the refrigerator. Well, getting a tattoo—it’s like hanging drapes, or laying carpet, or driving that first nail into the fresh plaster: it’s deciding you’ve moved in.

  When Tiny turned seventy, he retired. His hands were beginning to shake a little, and he hated the idea of doing sloppy work. We still had the apartment over the shop, and Tiny kept the store open so that people could come in and talk. Nobody took him up on the tattooing lessons he offered; after a while, he tried to convince me to learn. He said I’d attract a lot of business. I told him no, I didn’t have the nerves, I wasn’t brave like him.

  I took a job at the public library instead, shelving books. I worked in the stacks all day, and when I came home, Tiny’d be asleep. I’d know that he’d been napping all day so that he’d be awake enough to stay up and chat. He was getting old fast, now that he wasn’t working.

  I pulled the dining room table into the shop’s front window, because Tiny liked to see who was coming and going. He knocked on the glass and waved, even to strangers. One night, a week before his seventy-sixth birthday, his arm started hurting halfway through dinner.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” I said.

  “Don’t,” he told me. “It’s like saying there’s something wrong. It’s bad luck.”

  “It’s bad luck to die,” I said, and phoned.

  He was surprisingly solid in that hospital bed, unlike his roommate, who looked like he had withered away to bedding. After a week, that roommate disappeared and was replaced by a huge man, a college professor with a heart problem.

  One day, Tiny asked me an impossible favor. He wanted me to bring in the needle and put my initials on him.

  “Ah, Tiny,” I told him. “I’m not ready to sign you off yet.”

  “You have my initials on you, but I don’t have yours. It’s bad luck.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “You’ve seen it a million times.”

  The college professor was eavesdropping, and he looked a little queasy.

  “We’ll get caught,” I whispered.

  “We’ll be quiet.”

  “This is a hospital,” I said, like maybe he hadn’t noticed.

  “Sterile conditions,” he answered.

  So I brought the needle and some black ink the next day, rolled up my sleeves, got to work. We had to bribe the professor quiet, but he was easily bought. All he wanted was quart bottles of Old Milwaukee and the sort of food that would kill him. We turned on the television set to drown out the needle’s hum. The professor pretended to sleep, so that if a nurse came in he could plead innocent.

  We lived in terror of those nurses. One of them might walk in on us or notice something new on Tiny’s arm. Tiny might die while I was working on him, and the hospital would conclude tattooing was some weird form of euthanasia. The professor might raise his price and demand fancier food, imported beers I couldn’t afford.

  I started with a G, and put an E on the next day. That afternoon, when I was just sitting there watching Tiny sleep, he raised his eyelids to half-mast and muttered, “I wish I woulda finished you.”

  “I thought I was finished, Tiny,” I said.

  “Nope,” he said. He put a hand on my arm; his nails were rippled like old wood. “A tree, for instance. You don’t have a tree”

  “Where’s room?”

  “Soles of feet, earlobes. There’s always room. Too late now. But you’ll change anyhow, needle or no. For instance, when I put that George Washington on you, he was frowning. By the time you’re my age, he’ll be grinning ear to ear.” He yawned, then suddenly pulled himself onto his elbows, squeezing the one hand on my arm for support. “I mean, tell me,” he said. “Do you feel finished?”

  “Yes,” I said, and although I was thirty-nine, it was true: it
hadn’t occurred to me until that minute that I’d have to exist after he was gone.

  The next day I was putting a T on his arm when Tiny said, “Do me a favor, Lois, huh? Don’t forget me?”

  The professor began to giggle in bed and ended up laughing, hard. “Do you think she’d be able to, even if she wanted? Look at her—she’s a human memo board”

  I really thought that I would keep on going, that I’d put a letter a day on him for a year, more. I hoped it would keep him going, because he seemed to be giving up a little.

  By the end of the week, Tiny’s arm said GET WELL in letters of all different sizes.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s a little boring.”

  “It’s going to get more interesting.”

  “It better,” he told me, smiling. “Tomorrow you can put on a horseshoe for luck. Get fancy. Put on a heart for love.”

  “Okay,” I said. But he died in the night, left without my name or love, with only my good wishes on his arm.

  “What’s going to happen to you now?” my mother asked me. “What if you want to get married again? What man will want you when someone else has been scribbling all over you?”

  A month after Tiny died, Mama told me she was going to start inviting nice young men to our Sunday lunches. She bought me new outfits, unrevealing ones, and told me that we should keep my figure secret—she always referred to it as my figure, as if, over the years, I had put on a few things that could easily be taken off. I go to keep her happy, and sit on one side of the sofa while the fat divorced sons of her friends flirt with her instead of me, knowing that’ll get them further. Sometimes I eat fudge and don’t say one word all afternoon.

  Every day I get up and go to work at the library, dressed in short skirts, short sleeves, no stockings. The director has told me that I’m frightening people.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “These are my widow’s weeds.”