Resigned, she took a fistful of paper from the dispenser, rolled it around her hand and inserted it between her legs, then she pulled up her underpants around it. It felt absurd, like wearing a diaper, but at least her dress was loose. At least it wasn’t white, like her jeans that first time, at school. Like the dress that woman had been wearing out there in the lobby.
The memory of that woman’s back, its descending spine, momentarily displaced her discomfort and resentment.
She flushed the toilet and opened the door of her stall.
And there, like something preordained, like something totemic, was that very back, contained by those same white linen straps, inclining forward over one of the sinks, only this time the dreadlocks of its wearer were tumbling down to the shoulder blades. Sally stopped where she was, stupidly, in the open door of the stall, just as the woman straightened up with a damp paper towel in her hand and began to wipe the skin under her eyes. She looked up into the mirror and Sally couldn’t look away. Apparently, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, either.
“Hi,” she heard herself say.
The woman looked into the mirror, into Sally’s eyes, and Sally felt again that terrible sensation, less sharp than dull, less hollow than …
“Hi yourself,” the woman said. Then she stopped dabbing her face and looked again. “You okay, hon?”
Sally, in a perfectly rational response to this question, burst into tears.
“Uh-oh,” the woman said. And before Sally could stop her—and she totally, totally would have stopped her—this person had taken three steps in her direction and was giving Sally Oppenheimer possibly the most encompassing and terrifying hug of her entire life.
“You’re okay. You’re okay,” the woman said, as if this were an established fact. Her embrace was horrifying but also horrifyingly not-unpleasant. She stepped back out of the woman’s arms, and at that moment the door opened and two other women entered, parting like people in a square dance around Sally and the woman with the beautiful back, and slipping into the stalls on either side.
“C’mere,” she said. She meant the little sitting area beyond the sinks: two armchairs and a low table, beneath a framed poster for a show on ship figureheads. Sally sat, uncomfortably crossing her legs over the wedge and trying not to look at the front of that white dress, which, while not nearly as low as the back, was pretty low. The woman had a scar, bright pink, at her collarbone. Sally stared at it.
“Do you want me to get someone for you?”
Sally shook her head, no. Who was there to summon: her father, his girlfriend?
“No, that’s okay. I came on my own.”
“Oh? Just had to see those Dargers?”
“No, no. I mean, well, yeah.” Her voice shook. She was horrified by the drivel coming out of her mouth, and also by the tears. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. And to cry here? In the women’s room at the Museum of American Folk Art? In the midst of her super-brave mission to catch her father in a nefarious act?
“Like moths to a flame,” the woman said, ruefully. “Like there’s no other Outsider Artist on the planet.”
“What?” said Sally, who was remembering that her father had used this exact term.
“I mean, not that he wasn’t a genius, of a kind. Of course he was. And he had an awful life. But I mean, those girls…”
“Oh, yeah.” Sally crossed her legs the other way. The paper in her underpants felt massive, like a rolled-up New York Times. “I mean, they’re kind of crazy, but they’re also kind of beautiful.”
“And that’s what upset you? The pictures?”
The pictures? The pictures might be both strange and strangely beautiful, but they were just pictures. Whatever weird thing her father had about pictures, she didn’t have it. Nothing against a pretty painting or photograph, or even, she supposed, a ship figurehead, but she wasn’t ever going to prostrate herself before a work of art.