Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [1]
“I’m so sorry, Ruby. There was terrible traffic,” The Psychiatrist said.
“That’s fine,” Ruby drawled even though she’d rushed to make it there on time.
Ruby watched The Psychiatrist descend the three steps to the office door. Ruby felt mischievous and asked, “How are you?” Knowing full well that Dr. Jody Ray would deflect the question.
The Psychiatrist pivoted her head, looked Ruby in the eyes, and said: “Fine, thank you.”
Ruby was delighted. For the first year of the doctor/patient relationship, Jody Ray had refused to answer direct questions and had invariably thrown questions back at Ruby in a clichéd way that stank three states away. The Psychiatrist still didn’t volunteer many personal details, but she’d at least conceded to giving Ruby a ballpark figure of fine or very well. Even if it was a lie. Which, in this instance, it would prove to be.
As Ruby followed Jody Ray into the waiting room, she felt very tired. Ruby was no longer young. Well, to someone living in a retirement community she was. To herself, she was of moderate age. To the casting agent Ruby had once met with for three minutes (at the urging of an actor friend who’d been convinced that Ruby’s slightly odd but intriguing looks could yield lucrative bit parts on television shows), Ruby had been very old. When Ruby admitted to being thirty-four, the casting agent made a horrified face that savaged fifty grand worth of plastic surgery, and, in a stage whisper, urged that Ruby never admit to this again.
“You’re nineteen,” the casting agent said. Ruby laughed. The casting agent never called, and Ruby continued in her downwardly mobile job at the Coney Island Museum. The job had gotten more interesting lately. Her boss, Bob, who ran both the sideshow and the museum, had decided to start a sideshow school. For a nominal fee, a civilian could learn to eat fire, drive nails up his nose, or walk on broken glass. The small but endless parade of applicants enlivened the atmosphere of the dusty little museum. There were worse fates than working there. And Ruby had experienced some of them. For example, one of her lovers had been murdered in front of her eighteen months earlier. Which was why Ruby first came to knock on Dr. Jody Ray’s door. Ruby’s life was not always easy, but it wasn’t the sort of life where murder was commonplace. She would never get over it completely. She needed help.
The Psychiatrist was now standing in the middle of the waiting room, hunting for something in her yellow leather purse. Ruby let her eyes drift over the room. The walls were still a flat white. The loveseat was, as ever, covered in flower-motif brocade. To its right was a low table on top of which sat an immense fish tank, its inhabitants swimming and occasionally puckering their mouths. There were three office doors off the waiting area, but Ruby seldom saw the other psychiatrists whose names were engraved into a brass plaque on the front door. Ruby occasionally bumped into their patients in the waiting room and vigorously speculated about what might be wrong with them, but she almost never saw the other doctors.
The Psychiatrist seemed confused about which key opened her office door. As Ruby watched this uncharacteristic fumbling, she observed that Dr. Jody Ray’s fingernails were chewed down. Ruby thought it was strange that she’d never noticed this before, stranger still that The Psychiatrist was a nail-biter. She was such a poised woman. Ruby was tempted to comment on the bitten nails. To ask exactly how a woman who evidently felt compelled to chew herself might be qualified to uncloud anyone’s subconscious. Ruby stifled the urge.
The Psychiatrist at last fitted the correct key in the door and pushed it open. Ruby followed her in then flopped into an overstuffed armchair. She closed her eyes and listened to The Psychiatrist