Old Bag

A woman in a green dress asked if I could watch her purse while she went to the restroom. Something about being my age allows people to assume that I will watch things despite not being able to see all that well. I wear the most idiotic glasses lately. I had little choice in the matter as my son picked them out of a catalog for me. They are rectangular and become dark in the sunlight which makes me think I’m dying about 14 times a day. 

I can see clearly enough to read the woman’s driver’s license. She was born the same year that I retired. Amazing that she’s even old enough to drink, which she had obviously been doing to excess at the open bar. I will ask her to bring me a drink when she comes back. She’s an organ donor and I imagine convincing her to not only bring me a drink, but to give me a good piece of her liver before she returns to the wedding reception. She will come back for her purse and I will steal her whole, sweaty body. She has a very long neck and dry skin, but I can probably fix some of those things when I take the reins. 

She has a cell phone. Someone has been calling her all night. The name is saved as Alfred. I hit the redial. 

“I’ve been trying to call you.” His voice has no muscle. “You need to come home right now. I can't deal with this behavior all the time. I have work in the morning and I’m not going to have you waking me up at midnight.”

“Is this Alfred?” I ask. 

“Who’s this?” He is smoking. I can hear him take that quick, delicious little breath. 

“I have your girl.” I try to sound menacing, Italian. 

“What the hell are you talking about? You have Maura? Who is this?”

“I have your girl and if you don’t give me 50 thousand big ones I’m going to throw her off the Mainline bridge.” I had considered 80, but that seemed like a reach for Maura.

“Listen lady, I don’t have time for some kind of pathetic joke. Did Maura put you up to this? She’s so dead.”

“She will be if you don’t deliver the cash in unmarked bills to the top of the Empire State Building in 24 hours.”

I hang up, already bored with Alfred. We aren’t even in New York, how could I get all that dough when I need a walker to move 4 feet? I consider dialing 911. Officer, I have died of dullness, my brain flatlining while watching distant cousins do the macarena. He is already calling back and I put the phone into a side pocket. 

It’s a nice bag, terribly ugly, but expensive. Snake skin illusion but a name brand, not a knockoff. She has 60 dollars in her wallet, which I do take and put into my bra. There’s a lipstick too, also pricey. It is called Cavernous Plum, which gives me a chill as I apply it to lips always trying to disappear from my face. I don’t know why other items in life can’t have such delicious names. A wedding is a perfect opportunity to take on a whole new identity. These idiots would be called the Gregsons. They could have renamed themselves the Bimbos or the Swanky Violets. Maybe I will choose a new name for my gravestone when I die. I won’t really be myself anymore, so truly the plot should mark the spot of this new dead person. You don’t get to choose your name when you’re born, so why not rebrand after death?

To my amazement, she has a small personal calendar in her bag. I leaf through only to have my heart sink. For the past 8 months she has recorded every single calorie in her day, each almond accounted for and marked down. I turn to next week and use the tiny pen to write eat shit on the 24th. What a waste, an incredible waste of time. It makes me mad. I might be 87 now but I had once been her age and terribly thin thanks to a constant wire of fear that ran through my body. You lose your appetite when someone towers over you, buries your mind under a pile of resentment and violence. I see a round little boy walk past. 

“Come here little boy.” And I use a long, knobby finger to lure him over. He does not want to talk to me but he is remarkably polite or at least recognizes an opportunity for candy. I could look at his skin forever, not a single pore on his face. I can understand why women my age want to pinch cheeks, I feel like I could pull them off and eat them. “Do you want 20 dollars?”

He’s off in a minute with explicit instructions to return with red wine. I am in a terribly gaudy hallway, gold and marble and crystal lighting that makes a person sick from such a very predictable kind of excess. I see them all dancing through a door, a disco beat grinding away. I do miss dancing. It is the single best thing that a body can do. When you can’t dance anymore it is like losing the ability to call someone on the phone, a way of communication cut off forever. I can move my hands, tap my foot, but it is not the same as letting a whole feeling wrack your body, to escape from your mind through physical movement. When I steal this woman’s body I’m going to enjoy her legs the most, her strong back. 

She has been gone for a while, though, this green dress Maura. The boy returns with a glass of red wine so full that it has spilled all over his front, giving him the appearance of a deep flesh wound. Not my problem to solve. I give him the purse in exchange. At first he is confused but then simply walks off with it tottering over one of his thick arms. He seems pleased. Unburdened by my duty I turn to my glass and begin to drink it as quickly as possible before my son finds me and tells me that it will kill me. 

“Hi love, thanks for minding my bag.” I don’t meet Maura’s eyes. I have a nice film of red over all my teeth that might frighten her off if I were to hiss. But I need her body. 

“Excuse me, dear?” I ask this with the fake voice I use to get out of traffic tickets, which I get frequently regardless of my efforts. I am never going to pay them. 

I enjoy every moment of Maura’s face crinkling in confusion, a column of lines erupting between her eyebrows, a slight curl of her lip. She needs to reapply Cavernous Plum after her vomiting. She’s so beautiful. “Do you need something, dear?”

“You were watching my bag for me while I was just there in the loo. Where has it gone?” She had started the sentence out quite normally and then raised her volume to an insulting level that elderly people are regularly subjected to due to a perception of our collective deafness. 

“Where has who gone?” I ask. What a delight. 

“My purse, my bag, my green bag that was right here.” She was about to give up. 

“I would love some liver, or some deviled egg if you have it.” I stretch out a hand and tap at her elbow to let her know that she is a good girl. She turns so quickly that her shoe makes a terrible noise. I can smell her body odor, musty and rummy, in the wind that she creates while leaving me. I close my eyes, trying to remember every movement from the interaction, the dance. Her hands had started together, clasped with nothing to do and eager to get belongings back. Upon realizing my failure, her fingers released and traveled up, gripping her shoulders so that her arms created two triangles. She charged back with fists pumping, moving her forward with a new and exhilarating purpose. I missed her already. A great and familiar sadness saddled itself onto my shoulders and I opened my eyes to find the bride in front of me. 

“I'm not dead,” I reassure her instantly, recognizing a familiar look.

“Oh no Granny, no I know I could see you breathing.” So she had checked.  “I just wanted to come out here and thank you for coming.” 

She has a lot of hair, I did not remember her always having this much hair. And so blonde too. I could not possibly be related to this beautiful woman. 

“Have you been eating jello?” I ask with sincerity. My mother had once said that the animal hoof in gelatin helped hair to grow. “How did your hair get so long overnight?”

“Gran I have extensions in, I have fake hair.” To my absolute horror and delight she reaches around the back of her head and pops off a long wave of yellow hair. “Paid a fortune for it, look.”

“Oh that’s ghastly.” And I hold out my hand to look at it. Better yet the young lady shuffles over in her pounds of crinoline to fix it to my head. She manages not to pierce my brain and then connects my hand to the long locks that now emerge from my small white bun. It is startling to see such bright gold against the speckled backs of my fingers. I think of my other body, now gone in the night, pulsing with angry blood, yelling at the little boy. I look up at the smiling bride and I hope she enjoys her marriage even though her teeth are comically large for her face. Perhaps they are also fake.

“Now, don’t you look like a hot piece of trouble, Gran?” 

“Oh, I know I do.”