Siren Queen(25)

I said yes cautiously, and she brewed something strong and smooth, handing me mine and drinking hers standing up in my doorway. She was dressed only in a short nightgown that stretched tight over her large breasts and round belly, and underneath it, I could see the bandages that wound around her hips.

Dazed as she was, she caught me staring and shrugged, her shoulders moving like smooth rocks.

“My tail,” she said, as if she were passing the time. “They said I could not have it any longer.”

Greta Nilsson was my roommate my first year living in the dorms. She was from Sodermalm in Sweden, where they say the girls are so beautiful that no man can resist them. In Sodermalm, the most beautiful girls are monsters, hollow-backed or cow-tailed, and no one thinks it strange at all. Oberlin Wolfe heard of Sodermalm. When he sent a scout out there, the scout was wise enough to speak with the old-timers on the mountain, and so went out armed with a rope blessed by a priest.

With the rope, he captured Greta as she sat sipping her coffee on a bench by the water. He led her all the way back to Los Angeles like that, shedding her navy blue coat, her mustard scarf, and her warm boots as the sun grew hotter than she had ever seen. A girl with a hollow back would have been a difficulty, but a girl with a cow’s tail was no trouble at all.

I drank the coffee she gave me sitting on my bed with one bare foot tucked under my thigh. I wasn’t good with other girls. I felt strange around them, all competition tangled with a desperate urge to please and belong. My new roommate didn’t look like a girl I would have fought with or a girl that would draw my eye over and over again without my quite understanding why. She watched me as I watched her, and she spoke first.

“Did they bring you from China?” asked Greta curiously. “You came of your own will—are things so very bad there?”

I shot her an irritated look.

“I came from Hungarian Hill,” I said coldly. “You can get there on the trolley if you want to walk a mile.”

A few miles, but it might have been a world away. My mother never left our few city blocks. My father never left the laundry anymore.

“Who wants to hear about a girl from Hungarian Hill?” she said. “Did you work in a laundry or a restaurant as well? Come up with something more interesting.”

I bridled at her words, but her tone was calm and sweet. There was no malice there or contempt. When I looked closer, it was as if her eyes tracked a different world than the one we all saw, one that was slower and more vivid by turns, something that might have made sense in the high mountains of Sweden but certainly didn’t translate to bright Los Angeles.

That day, I ignored her strange words. I might be ahead of the graduated changelings who clambered all over the dorms like newly hatched lizards and the open-call starlets who had had their names stripped away, but my feeling of elation at being at Wolfe Studios tangled with the fear of how far I had yet to climb. In the weeks since my meeting with her, Mrs. Wiley’s bloodstained teacup and satisfied smile crept into my dreams. Twenty years, that was a lifetime, it was my life back to my birth and beyond, and I was realizing it was no small thing I had gambled away. I was in a hurry, and I had no way to start.

When I didn’t answer her, she entered my room without speaking and leaned down to face me. Her movements were graceful in spite of the bandage swathed around her, but she missed the balance of her luxurious tail. She was foreign to me just as I was foreign to others. She had a round moon face, her heavy breasts straining the loose shirt she wore. Under it, I could see the slight hang of her belly and her heavy thighs. She had a lunar beauty rather than a human one, and people looking at her could drown in it, still confused by the pull of this one fat and lovely girl.

“We are in this together, right?” she said. “Shall we be friends?”

“Is it really that easy?” I asked. I wanted to sound tough, but it came out slightly wistful instead. I didn’t have friends. I had never really felt their lack, or at least that was what I told myself.

She smiled sweetly, and took my hand in hers. She smelled faintly of milk and honey and something warmer as well. Later, I realized that she was still very much on painkillers when we were having this conversation.

“Of course it is, min skatt. Nothing’s hard but life, eh?”





III


As it turned out, there were plenty of things that were hard. The girls and boys in the dorm, we were interchangeable parts, ones that needed to be tuned and supple enough to step into whatever gap or crack that appeared. Some had patrons who could speed the way, but the rest of us were relying on sheer shine and determination to bring us to the attention of the casting directors.

Mondays Greta and I made our way to the dance classes of Mme Benoit, who taught out of a squat and dusty building off the set. She wore a pair of supple red leather shoes, a strange combination of ballet slippers and tap shoes, and when she danced, the whole world stood still. She could not dance without crying, and it was unnerving to hear her lecture us on attitude, cambré, and turnout with her cheeks wet with salt water.

Tuesdays both Greta and I had to study with the diction coach, a man we only knew to be German because of his name. Greta was purposefully obstinate with Herr Hochstetler, but I steamrolled my native accent as flat as a sheet of gold leaf. I had told Oberlin Wolfe no funny accents, and I meant to hold up my end of the deal. That was where I lost the very last of my Cantonese, and it died with a soft aspirate, a consonant rhotic.