The Missing Person Read Online Free

leaving his boots there near Fanny’s daybed in the front room, like a movie stand-in for him.
    The way he behaved toward her convinced Fanny she was what he kept telling her she was—beautiful. She could never find anything to say to him when he called her that. Even then, she realized, she never knew what she was going to say until she said it—so it was hard for her to begin. Jerryboy talked mostly to her mother, about the men at work and his union. Her mother would tell him about the girls at the beauty parlor and the customers they “worked on.”
    Jerryboy and her mother went out a lot together nights after work. Fanny would then have the flat to herself. She would lie on their bed with her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms clasping her legs, and stare, dreaming, at the ceiling. She would think about the Stars on the Silver Screen, about plucking her eyebrows and her widow’s peak and whitening her hair like Harlow. In her daze she put on her mother’s stockings with spider clocks and high heels like Carole Lombard wore and walked around like Joan Crawford, her hips swaying, into the lights of the Premiere, curvaceously (a word she had learned from the gossip columns) leaning toward a curly-haired young man on one side of her, and a slick-haired older man on the other. Both would gaze fondly down at her (they were both very, very tall) as they advanced through the cheering crowd into the theater. But she would smile brightly into a camera hidden in a velvet curtain.
    The fantasy would spread. She saw herself, not Carole, not Joan, but her face, the side with the dimple, hers, Fanny Marker’s. Then she would seem to cry out, “No, not that name, for Christ’s sake! Laverne Lucienne! Melinda Courtney!” A beautiful name was what she was searching for, to go with the beautiful face she had and the Star she was going to be.
    The dream went on and on. She forgot her mother, the beauty operator who gave marcels, shampoos, and perms, encased in her all-in-one, her large bosom flattened under a white uniform with short, pink-cuffed sleeves. Gone was Jerryboy at night or the somebody before him but just like him: “My roommates,” her mother called them. No webbed feet in the bedroom, no groans and grunts, no sounds like the bed straining and giving way, no more mysterious scuffling noises.
    Fanny would walk, bathed in light that came down in pointed beams from the sky. The soft, black night would be shot through with those lights and where they came together, like in geometry, there she’d be, Melinda Lucienne, the vamp of all the Jerryboys’ dreams. But way out of reach, untouchable, her dimple shining and shadowy like a crater on the moon. Silver, glowing: “Look at her up there!” the Jerryboys would scream.
    She lived in her daze most of the time she did not have to go to school. It made her mother angry. Her mother was a big woman, with a face that had once been pretty but was now round and somewhat flat. She looked friendly. Her eyes creased when she smiled; she had what Perc was to call “laugh lines.” But Fanny knew they meant nothing. Her mother’s face changed fast, and then she looked as though she were sizing Fanny up and would never come to any good opinion of her. She seemed always to be judging her and disliking what she saw. Fanny never noticed her using that look with Jerryboy or the other men she knew. But with Fanny it was always there. Jerryboy would say, “Leave the kid be.” Then her mother would look away from Fanny, and the laugh lines would appear again as she looked at Jerryboy. She’d throw her head back so her neck would seem thinner. But when she looked back at Fanny she’d be estimating again, like when the butcher held up a piece of lamb for her to see over the glass counter. She gave Fanny the same look.
    Fanny had been named for her. Her father, whoever he was, left before she was born, so she was