Dawn Turner Trice

From the novel Otis and Danny

"Something ain't right," the first man said, shaking his head. "You sure we followed them directions to the letter?" Pausing to sip faucet coffee, the man looked around the room. Paper, plastic, Styrofoam packaging lay scattered about the floor and the bed.  "Something seems off-balanced, off-kilter or off-something."  "Well, she always has been a little off-putting about the face," the second old man commented, his tongue tripping over the "Ps." He had tried to speak under his breath to be discrete but poor hearing carried his words. "I think she looks damn good, if you ask me." Much louder, he said: "In fact, gentlemen, I do believe we've performed one of them miracles, considering what we had to work with."  "Maybe if we stood her up straighter," the first man said. "She looks a little swaybacked. I don't think she's supposed to be looking swaybacked." The three old men continued to stand there, staring in that same lost and indecisive way they had stared at the wall of cosmetics at the nearby Rite-Aid Drug store. It wasn't just the wall that had stumped them, but the aisle with the pantyhose, the one with the glamour magazines, the fingernail polish, and that perfume counter, whose offerings, reformulated in their noses, weren't sweet smelling at all, but held the odor of something that had long turned.  Now, their reflection shone in the mirror across the room. Three posteriors--of denim held up by suspenders; of polyester fighting a shine around the ass area; of pressed seersucker suit, all hems fraying--crowded the frame. But in the wee corner of the glass, a youngish-looking woman peeked around the men struggling as she always had for space and to tease out her own likeness. She was standing on a chair, and yet she resembled a child, short and thin. She was standing as straight as she could, still she indeed was as swaybacked as any beast of burden.  She wore a pastel gossamer-like dress that hung slightly askew on her shoulders. You had the sense that a small breeze might blow the dress away. The woman, who was actually nearing forty years old, could see herself in the mirror. From a distance, at least she enjoyed what she saw, which was why she smiled, revealing a side of her---her optimistic side--- that she rarely displayed in the presence of men. These men in particular.   "It ain't so bad," she said in a tiny voice, swaying slightly from side to side. "I think I look kind of pretty." If the men hadn't always been so one-dimensional in their thinking when it came to her; hadn't always been so willing, as she often said under her breath, to throw stones in her soup, the word pretty would have sent pangs through their round guts. They would have realized that she really did look pretty in an abstract oil painting sort of way. The truth was---in recent years living in the Go-Tell Motel---they hadn't experienced pretty in such a long time that the word fell mute on them.  Pretty hadn't moistened their lips nor flowered in their imaginations.  At one time, each had been married to fairly ordinary looking women who compensated by planting pretty things about their lives, especially on their plates. And, well, not every day, but most days, or most parts of days, the men could build on their memory of pretty. Even though neither was the type whose profession or temperament would allow him to focus on such a sissy word, each used to feel it. Each used to know it unmistakably. But now with their wives in various states of lucidity and leaving, pretty had withered and was going away with them.