Plumage Read Free Page A

mind.
    The fourth day she had to go back to work, because after three days she would need a doctor’s excuse, just like in junior high school, and hers was not the sort of problem one took to one’s family physician. Also, she needed the hours. Her paycheck was going to be even more pathetic than usual this week.
    â€œI won’t look,” she muttered, brushing her teeth over the bathroom sink with her eyes closed against the bathroom mirror. But instinct made her look in the mirror as she reached for her hairbrush, and she almost burst out crying. She stamped her bare foot on the linoleum instead.
    â€œOw!” she yelled at the bird in the mirror, because now her foot hurt. “You stupid budgie, what the—” But Sassy never said hell. “ What do you want? I can’t even see myself to comb my hair!”
    It didn’t really matter. Her hair, baby-fine and as flaccid as spaghetti, was useless for anything except to be scrunched under a ratty old scarf on the way to work.
    The winter air breezed right through the scarf. Since when were these things supposed to protect your ears? Mama had always trained her to wear one to guard against earache, but then, look at Mama. Look at Sassy, her mama’s image. Here came the mezzanine maid in her ugly babushka.
    Sassy was supposed to enter the Sylvan Tower by a discreet back entrance, but she didn’t. The parking garage was filled, she had to find a spot on the street, which meant that she had to put her lunch money into the meter, and the February morning was as cold as Frederick’s heart, and damn everything. She scuttled in through the lofty doors to the main lobby and made her way through its labyrinth of gift shops and jewelers and haute couturiers and cafés and fountainside dining to the elevators, to go down to the swimming-pool level and the catacombs where she reported to work.
    The Sylvan Tower Hotel was rife with mirrors. The hallways were mirrored, the bottoms of balconies were mirrored, the undersides of escalators were mirrored, every surface the decorators didn’t know what else to do with was mirrored, including the elevator shaft, which was walled with gold-tone mirrors outlined in neon. Standing in front of one, waiting, Sassy braced herself and looked. Her parakeet was there, standing on air, as usual. Next to it, with its scaly black three-toed feet almost on the floor, stood a bored-looking six-foot brownish crane.
    Sassy yelped.
    â€œSomething wrong, ma’am?” asked the businessman standing next to her.
    â€œUh, no. No, not at all.” Babbling, Sassy glanced from the businessman to the crane, the crane to the businessman. Both were tall. There the resemblance ended. Yet—she knew it was him.
    â€œYou sure you’re okay, ma’am? You look gray.”
    â€œUm, no, no, I’m fine.” Blessedly, at that moment the elevator arrived. In an inflamed frame of mind, Sassy rode it down and reported to work.
    By afternoon, when she cleaned the mezzanine, she had calmed down. After all, if she was going to be looking at a parakeet in the mirror for the rest of her life, what did it matter if she saw other people as birds too? Vacuuming, she observed with interest the beveled-glass mirrors beautifying the wall as hotel guests strode by. A fashionable woman minced past, and in the mirror a sparrow fluttered along beside her; how could that be? A teenage boy darted by with a gull skimming along in the mirror; that seemed more apt. A man stood talking to his wife, and there was a green-headed duck soundlessly quacking. The wife was a brown-mottled sort of quail or prairie chicken or something; Sassy wasn’t sure. The next woman was easy, a crow, but then came a whole series of birds Sassy didn’t know: a black-and-white pinto one, something that whizzed past trailing an immensely long tail, something large that stalked by on stiltlike legs, something red and blue that bobbed as it