Her companion, truly irritated now, it seemed, looked up at the smoke-heavy ceiling and rolled her eyes. But Frannie plowed on. “Still, heaven does like to write things down, doesn’t it. I mean, take Moses and the tablets, right? So I’d like to do that, too.”
All complacency and charm suddenly, Randi folded her hands on the tabletop again. No nail polish, Frannie saw, but lots of lipstick, still. All juicy and red, as well, and with hair unmussed and cheeks as peachy as a child’s.
“Tablets? You want tablets, Frannie dear? What – exactly – do you have in mind?”
“Okay.” Frannie was encouraged by that “dear.” She grew almost articulate for the first time tonight. Nothing remotely like a suburban St. Louis housewife or a frightened old woman with nothing to lose but nothing to live for either.
“So,” she began, “I’m sixty-six and old, as both of us have pointed out, and recently, well, that’s been getting, shall I say, hard? And yet, in my long – granted, dull – life, I’ve experienced a few of the things that people think make most people happy, but have found that, in fact, they don’t. I’ve also learned that no matter what you have or who you are, everybody’s crazy, and everybody’s hurt. That’s just the way life and things are.
“So here I am, crazy and hurt and not a saint and really unhappy, if I’m honest, and all those accomplishments you’ve been offering, they’re incredibly tempting. And I’m truly appreciative, Randi. I am.” (Would she ever get over being Miss Manners?) “But I think they’re too rich for me. Kind of like lobster, these days. Perhaps if I were younger; perhaps if I were a man. But I’m an elderly woman. And I know exactly what I’d sell myself for. You know it, too. You’ve known it all along.”
No reaction from Randi, who seemed to be eyeing another waitress. Frannie began to feel she’d been talking to herself. Quite possibly, she had.
“So. A child, Randi. That’s my price. And if I’m allowed to ask for two things,” still no acknowledgment, “well, then, I’d want the reciprocal love of a wonderful man. That’s all. Although I guess I’d probably have to be younger for both – and beautiful, too, because beautiful would make the man part easier, right?”
She’d been trying to sound nonchalant, but couldn’t quite carry it off. Her voice broke slightly.
“If you can offer me that, we have a deal,” she said very softly now. “A bargain. A pact. Whatever you care to call it.”
Randi’s silence was unsettling. Her courage was leaking away.
Frannie squared her shoulders and summoned up the rest of what backbone she had.
‘But here’s the thing.”
“If I’m able to get those things, this agreement is dissolved. I get to go on with my new life: my husband, if I have a husband, my child.’
‘So if I succeed, then you don’t get my soul.” (If it’s true I have a soul, Frannie thought once more.) She watched the milling gamblers hustling by.
‘Everyone hedges their bets.”
Randi’s eyes followed hers. She shook herself a little, then turned to blind Frannie with that smile.
“Okay, my friend. Really nice try, especially the maturity part. But here’s the way it’s going to go.”
The girlfriend was gone.
“You can give it all you’ve got to get that baby and that ‘soulmate’,” an ill-concealed sneer distorted her mouth –“but if you can’t manage to do that, well … you’ll get old again. You’ll get old. Though you won’t necessarily die right away. It won’t be that easy. You’ll age a lot. Get sick. Suffer considerable pain. And you’ll reach the point where you’ll consider sleep to be the best part of your day. Then you’ll die.’
‘And there will be no going back to anything, Frannie. No undoing anything. You certainly won’t revert to this life, my dear. You won’t return to St. Louis – as if anyone would want to return to St. Louis. You don’t pass go. And if you fail, when you do finally die, then you and Mrs. A” – Randi smiled affectionately and toyed for a moment with Frannie’s middle finger – “well, let’s just say, from that day on, you’ll absolutely remember her name.”
Frannie shut her eyes.
“And all right, you want a written contract? Fine. But if you want things in writing, we’re only giving you a year.”
Her eyes popped open.
“Wait. I didn’t say that.”
“I did.”
She turned it over in her mind. The Devil was in the details, but God was in the details, too. And if she wasn’t hallucinating this, then this impossible, ludicrous, crazy, nightmare thing could be a miraculous second chance.
A baby, a soulmate and youth.
All she had to do was beat the clock.
(She was nothing but clichés tonight!)
Though she could still back out.
“Do I have to give birth within a year, or just get pregnant?”
“Whichever you like, my friend,” Randi answered pleasantly, applying an emery board to the pinkly-new oval nail on her middle finger. “We’re easy to get along with.” She looked over at Frannie, filing all the while, “And just to sweeten the deal, within that one-year time period – because we know it isn’t long – whatever you decide to do, how you do it, and who you do it with will be completely up to you. We’re just here to make you young and beautiful and give you your fifteen minutes, so to speak. In all its variants, it’s worked for thousands of years.”
The nail file vanished into the scarlet clutch as she slid one arm around Frannie’s shoulders and hugged her really tight. This time, it didn’t burn. They were girlfriends again. Frannie and the popular girl who could also be the mean girl.
She peered around the corner of the booth. Except for that boy, no one in this stuffy, unwholesome room had even seemed to notice them, or in any way to validate the preposterous transaction that was – maybe? – going to happen here. She had learned the house rules now.
“Okay,” she said.
She was sitting so close to Randi now that she could smell her tomato juice-lipstick breath and it sickened her a little. “I just have to get pregnant within the one-year time frame. I can give birth after?”
Her companion nodded amicably. “Good choice,” she agreed, like some solicitous waiter.
‘So let’s just do this, then.”
Dumbfounded, Frannie looked up to see a piece of loosely rolled, mottled parchment unspool line after line of sepia script upon the tabletop in front of her. From someplace beside her on the bench, Randi had retrieved a miniature bottle of hair color, carefully labeled in an inky Gothic font, Flaming Bosch, and NOW, with three long fingers, she was unscrewing its jewel-encrusted cap. Opening Frannie’s pocketbook once again, she extracted an elegantly worked gold pen along with what looked like a packet of vintage Lady Gillette razor-blade refills.
“If you’re ready then, Mrs. T …”
Flattening the aged vellum against the table with her forearm, Randi dipped the pen’s iridescent nib into the tiny bottle and began to write.
It took her several seconds to fill in the blanks at the top of what appeared to be a boilerplate document, and then she turned to Frannie expectantly.
“Both, or either?”