Her face lit up. “Great. Now listen, I can’t even bring you up to the reception desk without many plucked eyebrows being raised. Will you wait here for me?”

She indicated the square of sidewalk upon which I was standing.

“Sure.”

“Promise you won’t budge an inch?”

“Swear.”

“Give me fifteen minutes,” she said, and made a spin up to my right cheek, planted a quick peck to prove that she’d reached that elevation, and scurried away. I would still be feeling the small brand of her kiss on my face when I went to sleep that night.

Chapter 11

11

The Other Girl

As Gail had asked, I stood waiting outside her building for some fifteen minutes. I felt a bit lame. It was one of those situations in life that cause people to take up smoking. I reflexively reached into my pocket for a stick of gum and discovered that my pack of Beeman’s peppermint was empty.

I noticed a Rexall drugstore alongside Gail’s domicile. They were having one of their penny sales, which meant that for just one additional cent, you could buy two Rexall products for the price of one. In honor of the sale, Rexall had festively doubled all their prices.

I had promised Gail not to leave my spot, but surely I could scoot into the store, make my purchase, and be back out here again in record time.

I stepped inside and was instantly overwhelmed by that American incense that lurks within every corner drugstore: the toasty aroma of powdered malt in open urns and the sweet fragrance of frosty smoke hovering above chromium tubs of ice cream, the griddle’s ever-present scent of grilled everything, the sinister bouquet of oil in deep-fat fryers that quietly await their next victim, the pungent odor of fresh magazines and comic books, and always the underlying reek of gelatin from medicine capsules and that sour-martini smell of a doctor’s waiting room. I’d been out of touch with the world of real people, and so I was mildly disoriented by these powerful olfactory memories from my childhood. It took me a second to regain my bearings, and as I did, I discovered that, apparently, Gail had an identical twin. Because I saw her matching sister at the back of the drugstore, with the exact same mass of hair as Gail but in different clothing (a rust-colored shirtwaist frock that buttoned down the front), sitting in a phone booth, talking to someone while her right hand rocked the booth’s folding glass door back and forth in what could only be described as a nervous or agitated fashion. After a while, she closed the door completely and turned her back on the rest of the store.

I ducked behind a revolving rack of magazines, stealing a peek every now and then.