22
I went back to Sunrise the next day.
I worried about what to tell my dad, but when I woke up he wasn’t there. I’d heard him talking on the phone the night before, giggling like an idiot, but that was the only thing out of the ordinary. So I drove back to the commons and showed up during visiting hours. When I got back to the Memory Care Unit, I immediately saw two men get into a screaming match over a game of Connect Four. They had to be sent to their rooms like children. I started to wonder if I had it in me to hang around this place.
This all changed when I found Mamie.
“Tilly!” she called to me, when I showed up.
“Hi, Mamie,” I said.
I didn’t correct her about my name. Though, what my dad said about her lucidity flashed through my brain.
“Come with me,” she said. “It’s my day in the salon. I’ve got to get my hair set!”
She took me down to the on-site hair salon, and soon her head was full of pink curlers. I wasn’t sure how to start talking to her about her funeral. But she jumped right in. Before we could move forward with the planning, she said, I needed to know something about burlesque. So Mamie Lee started to tell her story.
“I left Minnesota for Hollywood first,” she said. “But after doing some work in the chorus lines, a promoter saw me and thought I’d be good for his club in New York. He told me I could have top billing if I didn’t mind showing a little more.”
She blushed, but just for a second.
“You have to understand, though, Tilly. It’s not like it is now with girls showing everything down there and working on greasy poles. It was glamorous! A show. And it was about the tease. At Minsky’s, I once took two whole minutes to remove a glove! The guys went crazy for it. They jumped out of their seats! What do you think happened when they saw my bazooms?!”
I started recording Mamie on my cell phone camera, so I could remember some of this. I focused on the little flip of her white hair with her manicured hand. If she noticed my recording, she didn’t seem to care.
“There were a lot of men,” she went on. “But I never went in for the comedians. I was into the sax players myself. They wailed on the stuff that got us going crazy. And there was this one player who was so nervous around me. I used to look him in the eye while he was playing and wait for him to miss a note. Once I left my pasties on his dressing room door. He was just a boy, really. I missed him when I quit performing, but I never did talk to him again.”
“Why’d you give it up?” I asked.
For a moment, Mamie looked like a statue of herself, sitting there, completely still. Then she spoke out of the corner of her mouth.
“It wasn’t really my choice, sweetie,” she said. “I couldn’t make the jump to the movies. Couldn’t act for a damn.”
“But you could have still danced, right?”
The skinny blond doing her hair spritzed Mamie’s curls with a spray bottle. The sunlight caught the mist and made it glow around her head.
Mamie didn’t answer my question.
“Do you still have your old costumes and everything?” I asked.
Mamie waved her hand like she was shooing away a fly.
“I sent what was left to Exotic Land, years ago.”
I watched her eyes droop closed in the long salon mirror.
“Exotic Land?”
“Burlesque Hall of Fame out there in Vegas. They got Sheri Champagne’s ashes, I hear. And Jane Mansfield’s sofa, shaped like a heart.”
“Have you kept in touch with any of the girls?”
She shook her head. I saw Mamie’s eyes go moist. The hairdresser glared at me.
“We try to keep them from getting upset,” she said, as if Mamie wasn’t able to hear her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset anybody.”
I shut off my phone. But Mamie spoke up.
“Leave it on,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Your little camera gadget. Go ahead and leave it on if you want. It’s okay.”
She turned toward the hairdresser.
“You can set me in a minute, Jordan.”
The hairdresser puffed out a breath and walked away. I turned my phone back on and leveled it on Mamie Lee’s face.
“I didn’t want to give it up,” she said. “There’s the truth.”
She wiped a tear from the top of her cheekbone.
“I married a man from back here, a friend of the family, and he told me I was through with it. He was real conservative. Nice enough, but manipulative. I learned too late that’s the worst quality in a man. He wanted to reform me, I guess. That was his kick.”
“Why didn’t you say no?”
“I didn’t know what options I had. It was hard to get a straight job afterward, so I came back to become a housewife. I guess I was comfortable enough, but I always regretted giving everything up so quick and not keeping up with the girls. My husband died a few years ago and left me some money. I’d like to put some of it toward something a little wicked. You understand me, Tilly?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“I spent too much of my life being good. It’s killing me.”
I turned off my camera. I squeezed her hand and told her I would be back soon with a plan. Then I walked out of the commons, my thoughts already churning. Who would even attend Mamie’s ceremony if we could pull it off? She told me she wasn’t close with her children and she had very little other family.
I was driving back, playing my recording in the car, when the answer came to me. And when it did, I found myself pulling over to look up a number and make a call to a place I hoped actually existed.