ONE
The Plumrose Dossier
I became familiar with the Plumrose Dossier one cool February morning when it was read to me in the private rooms of Madam Harding at the Clinic.
I'd arrived that morning for my weekly 'therapy' and had only enough time to hang up my outer clothes in the Sissies' cloakroom and don my Eva Gabor wig before a facilitator poked her head in and told me I was wanted in Madam's office immediately. Even at that point I knew this couldn't be good so I shrugged into a nylon dressing gown and followed her down the corridor in my bare feet.
"What's it about, Dorcas?" I asked while simultaneously waving at another sissy who was being wheeled in opposite direction in a gurney. He was strapped ankle and wrist to the side rails and to judge by the tent in his neglige, loving it.
"Don't know sweetie, just know she wanted me to hustle you to her pronto. Probably about money."
"No probably about it," I thought. I turned my attention towards The facilitator's appearance.
"And what on earth are YOU wearing this morning?"
She had on a floor-length grey gingham dress that featured a tight bodice and a crisp white apron that ended a few inches above her hem. She was wearing her hair up, tucked under a cap.
"Because it looks like a Civil War reenactment!"
Dorcas laughed, "You're close, honey, it's a Simon Lagree scenario I'm featured in."
I noticed that although her apron was freshly laundered my acute eye could spot, a faint straw-colored archipelago of stains from bygone escapades.
We passed one of the ward doors and Dorcas nodded toward it.
"Sissy Pulver's in there, waiting for me."
"I won't even try to imagine," I said.
We arrived at a heavy, richly varnished door labelled DIRECTOR in a gilt font. Dorcas knocked, we heard a mumbled reply and she prodded me through the entryway into a large quiet chamber carpeted in a deep blue pile and tastefully furnished in the same shade of oak as the door.
Madam Harding was looking down at two files on her desk top, her hand was to her forhead and her blue and white chalk-stripe suit jacket hung on her chair back. The silk blouse she wore was a burgundy high-collared invention. She looked up from her papers.
"Thanks for stopping by Blane; but where are your slippers?"
"I was given no time to dress properly," I replied. "what's the the emergency?"
She ignored the question, "Well, never mind the slippers you won't be playing dress-up today anyway, I'm afraid."
She looked at me quizically, "What are you wearing under that robe?"
"I told you I have only just arrived..."
She waved away my words impatiently and with the same hand beckoned me forward. I stepped up to the desk and she placed her hand into the teal nylon gown I was wearing and slipped her fingers into the leg-hole of my underwear and pulled the material away from my hip, (I should say here that I was still wearing the men's jockey bikini briefs I had arrived in.) I started to tell her this.
"Men's?" She chuckled, and turning me around with her left hand while her right was still inside my briefs she pulled down the waistband in back to peek at the label.
"Oh, quite right, men's - nonetheless I saw them on you Bland and they reminded me of the cotton knickers they made us wear at St. Anne's. Ours weren't, um, 'hipsters' like these though, we wore them right up above our navels. Those are a chic lightweight weave aren't they? Must make you feel very breezy when you wear them - does your boyfriend approve?"
"You know I don't have boyfriends!" I protested.
"Well not yet," she said quietly, "but we're not here to discuss your drawers, Betty."
She had used my sissy name.
"We're here to discuss your money, or my money as the case actually stands. You are six months in arrears with your clinic fees."
She looked up at me over her lunettes, "At four visits a month, sometimes five...it's around seventy-five hundred dollars, a little more actually."
"What? It's only one-fifty a visit!" I protested.
"That was the introductory fee, first month only."
"That you've extended to me for a two and half years," I reminded her.
"True. Because you seem to be good for business - but those days are over now. How are you going to pay it?"
"I'm not, I can't. I've just unemployment insurance and what my sister can send me."
Harding smiled, "you could get another job?"
"Get a wot?"
She leaned back in mirth, "I was kidding. You've got your house Betty."
"Please! Anyway it already has a second mortgage."
She leaned forward across her desk and looked at one of the files on her desktop.
"A very modest one, plenty of equity here to get you clear with the Clinic, I've looked into it you see."