The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [19]
“Not that I can remember,” she admits.
“Well, now you know why. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you have cookies in cupboards?”
“I guess so.”
“Loving parents? Happy childhood?”
“That’s kind of a sore subject,” she says.
He looks at her expectantly. She gives in.
“They divorced when I was thirteen,” she begins. “Standard story. My dad left my mom for a slightly younger woman, moved away with her, and started a slightly younger family. Not very inventive, but then, he’s not the interesting one. That’s my mother Gwennan’s job. Pretty much her full-time one since she lost her real job.”
“What was her job?”
“She was a plastic surgeon, until she did a few operations on a woman who wanted to look like Betty Boop.”
“Betty Boop,” Javier repeats. “Sure, she’s pretty hot, for a cartoon.”
“I guess I’m not making myself entirely clear. The woman didn’t just want to kind of resemble her; she wanted to have the exact same proportions as the cartoon character—her face, her body, everything. She was a performance artist, or wanted to be one. The operations were going to be a publicity stunt for the Postfeminist Movement. Her life-character would be known as the Boopleganger, and her mission would be to disrupt media events.”
Javier nods somberly, bulging his cheek with his tongue. “And . . . your mother did the operations.”
“My mother is a supporter of the arts. That’s more or less what she told the jury when the woman sued.”
“She didn’t do a good job?”
“No, she did a very good job. She obsessed over the job. She did eleven operations on the woman over four years. She planned out each one for months. She stopped taking other clients. She’d sit in her study poring over medical books, making notes and sketches, screening Betty Boop cartoons against the window shade using an old movie projector. The result of it all—the Boopleganger, I mean—was, well, something less than human, more than cartoon.”
“ ‘Less than human’?”
“It’s not easy to describe. Her nose was just a kind of fleshy tab. Her lips were sort of sectioned off, and collagen was pressure-pumped into the centers. Her cheekbones were like the bony faceplates of a rhinoceros. Her breasts, I’m pretty sure, were unrivaled by anything in history except for maybe a couple Indian fertility goddesses.”
“Wow,” Javier mumbles. “So did she do her performance art? I never heard anything about it.”
“No. She stayed indoors, mostly. At first she wanted everything complete before she made her appearance. And then . . . she just didn’t want to go out. The final operation was going to be on her eye sockets, which my mom was planning to expand so they could contain plastic replicas of Betty’s giant moonpie eyes. These would be removable, for the Boopleganger to use primarily during performances. In court the Boopleganger’s lawyer argued that no ethical and responsible plastic surgeon would ever have collaborated in the plans of a woman so clearly deranged—which, according to the Boopleganger herself, she’d been all along.”
“And then she . . . um . . . stopped being deranged?”
“She testified she got her sanity back suddenly one day and found herself hideously deformed; a couple psychiatrists explained her condition. But none of the testimony was really necessary anyway. The sight of her alone probably would have convinced any jury. The clincher was when Gwennan admitted under cross-examination that she’d encouraged the Boopleganger to go on with the operations even after she started expressing doubts. Gwennan basically confessed she’d become emotionally invested in the project.”
“I can see how that wouldn’t look too good.”
“My mother was a postmodern Dr. Frankenstein, and the Boopleganger was her creation, her true daughter, a monster that returned to destroy her. The newspaper editorials called it a lesson to any and all who would presume to overstep the natural limits of taste.”
Javier looks at her—a little fearfully, she thinks.
“What happened to your mother after that?” he asks.
“She became a Buddhist, joined a bridge club, and in her one or two hours