Six-foot-two, seventy-four-year-old Cherry Pie wears a red wig and a motorcycle jacket when she’s not working. When she is working, she wears almost nothing: her bony body and close-cropped gray hair serving as an anatomy lesson for students at the art college and retirees at the community center.
“You can actually see where the different plates of her skull come together,” an instructor said once. “And see, there’s no muscle so you can really see the structure of her shoulder blades.”
Models are usually fully nude but no one has complained about the pale pink thong Cherry Pie keeps on, her scrap of modesty.
One night Cherry Pie goes to bed with what feels like a sunburn on her back. It’s winter and there’s no sunshine in the studios where she poses, so it can’t be a sunburn. She chalks it up to dry skin.
In the morning, she wakes up with the skin of her back on fire. She takes a dry loofah and scratches, straining her arms back to reach every part of her back. She scratches until it bleeds. In the too-small bathroom mirror, she sees a garden of sores and welts. Slathering hydrocortisone cream on it helps, but it looks horrible. Like she has the plague. There’s no way for her to work like this.
She calls the college and tells them she can’t make it today. That’s OK; they have a roster of substitutes at the ready. The community center is a different story.
“I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling well,” the instructor says over the phone. “See if you feel better this afternoon, though. If you can’t make it, we’ll have to cancel the class.”
Cherry Pie tries to explain that it’s not about how she feels; those open sores on her back aren’t going to heal up by six-thirty PM.
“Maybe you could wear an open robe? I think I’ve got a nice kimono somewhere that would fit you.”
Cherry Pie agrees to this compromise, hangs up, and scrapes her back some more with the loofah. It feels incredibly good, but she knows she’s making it worse.
She goes to the urgent care, where the doctor draws blood and asks if she’s started using a new detergent recently. Cherry Pie tells her no; no new detergent, no unusual foods or drugs or beauty products, nothing she can think of that would have caused this.
The doctor leaves her alone in the room for a long time, during which Cherry Pie steals a wooden tongue depressor to use as a back scratcher. The doctor comes back and says, “Good news, you don’t appear to have an infection. Your white blood cell count is fine. And it doesn’t look like a severe allergic reaction either; your airways are fine.”
“So what is it?”
The doctor shrugs.
Fifty dollars poorer, Cherry Pie goes to see Absalom at the house he’s renovating. It’s almost eleven AM, so he’ll be asleep. She tries his phone several times and bangs on the door. Eventually, the door opens onto the dark, half-finished living room. Cherry Pie enters and Absalom shuts the door without exposing himself to the harsh daylight. It’s freezing in here, but he’s wearing his usual unbuttoned work shirt with his flannel pajama bottoms. Absalom has a thing about letting his bellybutton breathe. It also might have something to do with his nipple piercings.
“What’s going on?” he asks through a yawn, pulling his long ash-blond hair into a ponytail. “Oh, shit.” She’s taken off her jacket and turned around, giving him the full picture.
“Doc says no infection, no allergies.” Cherry Pie shrugs, and the act of shrugging sets off a wave of hot itching that makes her hiss and start clawing at herself. Absalom grabs her wrists and holds them, gently but firmly.
“Do I have to put mittens on you?” he says and yawns again. “Let me see what I’ve got.”
Absalom’s medicine chest is under a tarp in the corner. There are several pieces of furniture under tarps, so it’s inconspicuous until the tarp comes off. The aluminum footlocker is airbrushed with a cosmic acid trip of a scene based on images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Inside is a layer cake of foam pads, each studded with dozens of tiny glass vials and pots. Absalom kneels and rummages, and sorts and examines. He sets aside two small bottles and a palm-sized jar, and he pulls a pair of black latex gloves onto his hands.
“Open,” he says, and drops some kind of oil onto Cherry Pie’s tongue. He drops another kind of oil onto his gloved palm and rubs it into her back, and then scoops cream out of the jar and does the same. “It should be better by tomorrow,” he says, “if you wash your clothes and sheets. Twice. In hot water. You were in City Market yesterday?”
“How did you know?” She’d be shocked at his prescience but she’s too distracted by a sense of orgasmic relief.
“They sprayed some shit all over there a couple days ago. All over the benches, walls, any place people might sit or lean. I don’t know what it was for. But you’re the fourth person I know who had a skin thing from it. Don’t worry, it’ll clear up fast.”
“Thank you,” says Cherry Pie. She puts her shirt back on. “What do I owe you?”
Though still sleepy, Absalom grins. His sharp canines glint as he takes her left wrist in his hands and lifts it to his mouth.