The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [56]
“What are you doing?” Lydia hissed. Her head snapped up and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Someone had. Lydia was so red I was afraid she would begin to bleed from her face in her shame of me. She grabbed my arm and savagely jerked me out of the jumble of felled mannequins, my fallen angels. She whipped my leash out of her purse, seized my collar, rotated it on my throat until the clip was in the front and attached the leash.
“What were you thinking?” she spat in my ear in a whisper. One of the salesgirls who worked in this area of the store was now clacking rapidly toward us. She was young and wearing an inch of makeup, with a name tag pinned to her shirt and high-heeled shoes of the same sort that my mannequin was wearing, exposing her tiny pretty feet and painted toenails. Those shoes, her feet—her toes, the gracile slope of her instep, her ankles—were mouthwatering to me.
The bags full of my new clothes lay beside us on the floor in a big puffy pile. Lydia was holding on to my leash with one hand while trying to reerect one of the mannequins. Her face was still enflamed with the hot blood of humiliation, and she was nervously, compulsively, tucking strands of hair behind the ridges of her ears.
“I’m so sorry,” Lydia said to the salesgirl.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Please. We’ll take care of it.”
Lydia stopped trying to set the mannequin back up, but she hadn’t balanced it properly, and it immediately tipped over again, clattering and thudding back to the floor.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lydia. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Please, we’ll take care of it.”
Then the salesgirl saw my face. She looked at my ape face under the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt. We locked eyes for a moment. She jumped back. We both shrieked. She began to back slowly away.
“Sorry,” said Lydia one last time, this time with a curt snort, and she snatched up the shopping bags in her fists and jerked on my leash. We fled. We left the store in a scramble of fear and desperation. We got caught in the revolving glass doors with the poofy plastic bags. Lydia jerked it loose and we tumbled through the glass merry-go-round and out onto the street. I clung to Lydia, my arms around her neck, my legs wrapped around her waist. She yanked the hood low over my head. She struggled under the combined burden of me and the plastic sacks full of my new clothes. She walked quickly down the sidewalk and around the corner, as if we were being pursued (we weren’t).
After we’d put a block or two behind us, she ducked into a doorway to escape the currents of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk. She stopped, collected herself, and gave me a kiss of absolution for my recent sins on my forehead. I’d been in a state of shame at the embarrassment I had caused her, but that kiss instantly made me feel better. Such was the power of her forgiveness, her touch. We passed a flower shop, where there was a sidewalk display of pale green roses. Lydia bought a dozen of them, and the man behind the counter in the store wrapped them up for her in a cone of crinkling cellophane and another cone of paper. She asked him how he made the roses green. He told her he put dye in the soil.
I was allowed to hold them. I crushed the green flowers to my face and deeply sniffed them, and loved their gorgeous smell. Lydia hailed a taxi, which we rode back home. There, she cut the stems of the flowers and put them in an empty spaghetti sauce jar full of clear cool water from the tap and put them on the dining table for a centerpiece. I tried on all my new clothes, and Lydia one by one snipped off the tags for me with the same pair of scissors she had used to cut the stems of the green roses, and rooted through the folds of each article of clothing looking for pins and bits of plastic and stickers needing removal.
XIII
In the lab, everything