Plumage Read Online Free PDF Page B

stayed up late in disobedience to her training, she felt druggy and free. When she should have been fetching towels, she stood looking over the balcony, watching the mirrors on the far side of the atrium and promising herself a small pair of binoculars when she got her next paycheck. If she got it. “Whatcha doing, Sassy?” another maid wanted to know.
    â€œBird-watching.”
    The woman gave her an odd look and hurried off. Sassy laughed. She actually laughed out loud. That hadn’t happened in a while.
    She had already identified many of the birds she had seen the day before: a magpie, a quetzel, a great blue heron, a frog-mouth, a hoopoe. The names of the birds in her books amused Sassy as much as anything else that was happening: ouzel, brant, limpkin, crake, dowitcher, willet, whimbrel, widgeon, quank. She couldn’t wait until she spotted a quank. Racquel was right; she was obsessed. She was going to get her own Peterson, all the Petersons, and record the species she saw on the Systematic Checklist. She was going to join an ornithology club. Her life was a huge joke.
    Rats. She had to go to the bathroom.
    The Sylvan Tower rest rooms were ultra clean, and Sassy had read somewhere that there were a bazillion more germs on the average dishcloth than on the average toilet seat, but she couldn’t help herself; she checked for toilet paper and spread some on the seat, as trained. As she sat, a large pair of ebony feet in strappy gold-stone heels walked into the stall next to hers.
    â€œHi, Racquel,” Sassy called. One of the differences between men and women, she understood from her sociological reading, was that men wouldn’t dream of talking to the man squatting in the next booth in the rest room. Too bad for men. In Sassy’s experience, some of life’s best conversations took place in the shared yet separated intimacy of the john. The stall walls made the place like a confessional, bringing forth confidences, secrets.
    â€œSassy?” Racquel seemed to be taking some time to get her panty hose down. Struggling with the damn things.
    â€œRight.”
    â€œHey, woman.” Racquel’s throaty voice wafted warm and comfortable to Sassy as she turned and assumed the customary straddle position. The odor of her bared privates wafted similarly. “How’s it hangin’?”
    That meant how was it going, Sassy guessed. “Better.” Until she said it, Sassy didn’t know this was the case. Up until then, when people had asked her how she was, she had said in tepid tones, “Okay.”
    Racquel said, “Hey, that’s good. Is it that your mother’s better, or your love life is better, or you’ve figured out some way to kick Frederick’s lying ass?”
    Sassy laughed. “My mother’s the same, nobody loves me, and Frederick is living it up with his Binky-poo. I don’t know why—I just feel better.”
    â€œ Nobody loves you?”
    â€œNot really.” Obviously Frederick didn’t. “We never had kids.” Maybe things would have been different somehow if they had had kids. But that was an old, old heartache. Let it alone. “My brothers don’t call me from one year to the next. My mother doesn’t even know who I am.”
    â€œGod, that’s a pisser.”
    Much surprised at herself, Sassy laughed again, because, by the sound emanating from the next stall, pissing was what Racquel was doing.
    â€œLiterally,” Sassy said.
    â€œDamn straight.” Apparently, Racquel didn’t get it. “But don’t you have friends ?”
    Sassy thought about it. “All the people Frederick and I saw were couples,” she said slowly. “I thought they were friends.”
    But apparently they had been more of a social convenience. Now that she wasn’t the female half of a couple anymore, she didn’t hear from them.
    Racquel seemed to understand. “Bummer,” she