Ruby spent hours in fittings with Connie, who stood on a stool to lower the unwieldy headdresses onto Ruby. “Sometimes these things are so big we actually have to lower them by pulleys,” Connie told her. The dresser showed Ruby how to wrap her hair in a pantyhose cap so that she could easily slip in and out of the headdresses. There were no chinstraps—and while the caps fit snugly (another measurement recorded in Mother J’s little notebook), they could still slip and slide, and so Ruby practiced maneuvering in the headpieces. Costume changes lasted only two to three minutes—one more thing at which Ruby would have to become proficient.
For two solid days Ruby worked one-on-one with Marnie, the showgirl coach. Marnie first taught Ruby the showgirl walk, beginning with the bevel stance. “Everything’s closed up.” Marnie demonstrated. “Nothing open. Always lead with your toe, chest up, radiating confidence. See?” Marnie stepped down a short flight of stairs. “Think of your legs as the stem of a champagne flute—long, together as one.” Ruby began imitating Marnie’s walk. “Cross, cross. Arch your back a little more. That’s it. Chin up!” Marnie cautioned. “Eye contact with the audience at all times. Engage them.”
Ruby posed for publicity stills and sweet-talked the photographer—a former war photographer who looked to be in his eighties—into giving her a set of prints she could send to the Aviator and Mrs. Baumgarten. How tempting it was to slip one into an anonymous envelope addressed to Aunt Tate. Ruby mailed the photos despite a niggling shiver of reluctance; she was determined to follow Vivid’s lead, to treat the entire enterprise—her new career—as something she was proud to have earned, not some sordid little secret. Besides, she had to admit it: all done up, she looked stunning. Ruby imagined the Aviator sliding the photo from the envelope, reading her note with her new address—a poolside apartment in the same complex as Rose, Vivid, and other Strip employees. He’d see how grown-up she’d become, that she’d landed on her feet and found her place in the limelight.
On a warm November day before her first performance, the girls at the Sunglow Apartments gave Ruby a showgirl party, complete with a cake in the shape of a voluptuous woman wearing nothing but a bright red G-string and gold pasties. Ruby opened gifts, which included a bottle of Visine from Vivid, and, from Rose, a giant bottle of Anacin. “Sure you have a headache, you’re tense, irritable. But don’t take it out on her!” Rose mimicked the television commercial. A girl called Dee (short for Deelight, the group told Ruby), gave Ruby a pair of panties made from soft, white rabbit fur—“for when the G-string has dug a trench so deep up your ass that you can’t even sit.” Dee laughed. She was a brown-eyed blonde whose looks made Ruby think of a lioness dozing in the African sun, sated after gorging on some poor antelope. Dee’s beauty was drenched in primal lassitude.
“Hey—I found out that Ruby reads palms,” Rose revealed. “And I have first dibs.” She sat cross-legged next to Ruby on the floor and held up her palms.
“I need better light,” Ruby said, and Vivid opened the blinds to stark sunlight.
“Well, the first thing I notice is your career line—the line of fate,” Ruby said, running her fingernail down the vertical line that fell in the center of Rose’s palm. “It’s broken. See? Right here,” she pointed. “You’ll have a sudden, decisive change in career at some point.”
“I should hope so,” Rose said, looking intently at her palm. “It’s called marriage.”
The other girls huddled around them, lifting their own hands to see how their lines compared. Ruby checked their palms, one at a time. She kept the readings short, found one or two things per person to explain. Vivid waited until last.
“Shall I?” Ruby asked her.
“None of the women in my family live past thirty-five,” Vivid said, reluctantly extending her hand toward Ruby. “So don’t tell me I’m going to die young.”
“That’s not what jumps out at me,” Ruby said, fudging. She could see that Vivid’s life line really did end abruptly, long before it even approached her wrist.
“What does jump out at you?” Vivid asked.
“This,” Ruby said, using her thumb to depress the Mount of Venus at the base of Vivid’s thumb. “See how meaty it is? How plump?”
Vivid looked, and Rose, seated next to her, held up her palm for comparison.
“Geez. It really is giant,” Rose commented. “Does Venus mean what I think it does?”
“It does.” Ruby grinned. “Sensuality. Love. Actually, your name—Vivid—is appropriate.”
“I’m a lover not a fighter?” Vivid joked.
“You’re sexual and passionate. Desired,” Ruby said, still holding Vivid’s hand.
“Let’s see yours.” Vivid turned Ruby’s palm up while the other girls clustered about. “Aha!” Vivid said, pushing at the cushiony Mount of Venus on Ruby’s palm.
“Whose is bigger!” Rose joked. “Oh, we’re just as bad as the guys!”
“Never,” one of the girls said. “Not even close. For starters, we know how to measure honestly, without exaggerating.” They all laughed.
“Ruby’s is bigger,” Vivid said, a wry smile on her face. “Look out, world!”
“Naw,” Ruby said, fighting the urge to hide her hands beneath her thighs.
“Venus! Oh, Veeeeeeeenus!” Vivid began singing, and the others quickly joined her. “Venus, goddess of love that you are,” Vivid sang, standing and bringing Ruby to her feet. She waltzed Ruby about the tiny living room.
“Frankie Avalon,” Rose said. “Brought to you by Beech-Nut Gum!”
“You’re all great,” Ruby said, well aware of the blush that had brought heat to her face. “I’ve never had such good friends.”
Rose gave Ruby’s shoulders a squeeze. “And you’re not nervous?”
“Oh!” Ruby laughed. “I am really nervous!”
“It’ll pass,” Dee advised. “The first couple of shows are the hardest, but after that, you’ll settle in just fine.”
“First fifty shows,” Vivid joked. “After that, it’s a piece of cake.”
“You guys aren’t helping.” Ruby laughed.
“That’s because you only thought we were your friends.” Rose winked.
* * *
—
HER FIRST NUMBER as one of twenty showgirls was not a topless performance. The girls wore spaghetti-strap micro minis made in a gold eyelash fabric that shimmered beneath the stage lights. The music was The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away,” done Vegas style at an amped-up pace with a lot of horns.
Just before the band began to play, Ruby joined the other girls peeking around the curtain, trying to spot celebrities in the front rows. She could hear the low hum of dinner conversation syncopated with the tinkling of cocktail glasses, the flare of cigarette lighters.
Onstage at last, her heart fueled by the audience’s applause, Ruby spun, kicked, and flung her black derby hat along with the other girls. Their hat tosses formed an increasingly complex aerial pattern that drew cheers from the audience. She was confident of her footwork and managed to keep any jitters from showing. At the end of the number, the dancers climbed into five hot air balloons and ascended into the clouds by means of numerous cranks and pulleys.
She didn’t have long to relish the applause, but she grinned widely, feeling the adrenaline-hot exchange between performer and audience. This was exactly what she’d craved.
Ruby rushed backstage to her dressing area and began removing her micromini, searching the countertop for where she’d left her silver pasties. In the next number, the girls were dressed only in G-strings and giant, full-length, ruffled capes that attached to their arms. The capes, sewn in satin and patterned in bright, variegated colors, were wired to form arcs like rainbows high above the showgirls’ heads. With their bold colors and frilliness, the costumes had a sort of flamenco air to them. Ruby loved how they caught the air and made her feel as
if she could take flight.
She quickly applied several gold stars at the corners of her eyes and fluffed her hair so that it was no longer pressed into a derby shape. But where were her pasties? Maybe she just wasn’t seeing them, what with the multiple sets of eyelashes and the sweat stinging her eyes. She ran her hand across the countertop, feeling for them. “Shit shit shit!” she said.
“What?” Vivid stood behind her, already fully dressed. “What the fuck, Ruby? You can’t fall this far behind!”
“My pasties! I can’t find them.”
“Never mind,” Vivid said, opening drawers in Ruby’s dressing table. “Stealing pasties is an old showgirl trick.” She raised her voice, “Only INSECURE BITCHES pull this kind of shit!” Vivid retrieved a plastic cylinder of silver glitter from the rubble in the bottom drawer. “Where’s your eyelash glue?”
Ruby grabbed the tube of glue from her makeup case and handed it to Vivid. “What’re you going to do?” she asked.
Vivid pushed back the edges of her cape in frustration. “Hold this back for me,” she said, and Ruby tugged at the cape. Vivid squirted glue onto the tip of her finger and circled Ruby’s nipples with it. “Now,” she said, opening the tube of glitter, “help me get them coated.”
They worked together, dumping glitter over the wet glue and completely covering Ruby’s areolas in silver flakes. When they were done, Vivid helped Ruby into her cape.
“No one will be able to tell the difference,” Vivid said as Ruby inspected herself in the mirror.
“I think you just saved my ass,” Ruby said.
“No.” Vivid grinned. “I think I just saved your tits.” She pushed Ruby toward the stage.
The band played the first, halting notes of the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” and the singer began. Ruby bevel-walked her way onto the stage and smiled. She’d done it. She’d made it. She knew she was jaw-dropping gorgeous, and—at long last—she was precisely where she belonged.
* * *
—
BEING A VEGAS showgirl was a gas, just as Vivid had promised. Ruby loved taking an audience captive, knowing that her looks and talent made the casino guests covet her nearly as much as she coveted their attention. She’d never danced so well, never been so beautiful. She’d never before felt such a sense of accomplishment. She’d made it in Vegas. Fuck you, Kansas, she thought.
And she was dancing. The exertion, the physical and chemical release made her body feel vibrant and capable. For those hours onstage, Ruby was unsullied, immensely alive, focused on the moment, and set free from her history.
She had trouble sleeping because she couldn’t slow down, couldn’t turn off the amped-up high. Ruby wore a silly grin on her face even when she was loading dimes into the washing machine at the apartment complex or sifting scouring powder into the tub, still alive from her performance the previous night.
What with frequent rehearsals and the nine or more numbers each night—often twice a night—Ruby found she could eat absolutely anything and still keep her figure. She inhaled steaks, French fries, butter-laden potatoes, and bread. She checked lobster and baked Alaska off of her to-try list, indulged in hot fudge sundaes, and no longer had to shun vegetables in cream sauces or pastas thick with cheese. She was in the best shape of her life, and she was eating like a horse.
Where she fell down, what proved a challenge of Himalayan proportions, was mingling with the big spenders after the shows. “Mixing,” as the girls called the unwritten, nonnegotiable requirement of her job. The men were all much older than Ruby, and she could see the unabashed lecher in every single one of them. Starched shirts, pinky rings, gold necklaces, aftershave, and tinted eyeglasses. High-buck toupees or careful comb-overs, dyed hair and even permanent waves designed to mask thinning hair. Professional shaves, sometimes even manicures. The entitlement they carried with their fat billfolds, the certitude in their thin-lipped smiles, their presumptive possession of her.
“I don’t get it,” Vivid said when Ruby walked across the pool area to Vivid’s apartment for advice. Vivid’s hair was set in orange juice cans, and she was painting her nails a frosty white. “Ruby, it’s simple: We’re arm candy. You keep the high rollers gambling. You keep them from leaving the Tropicana and going elsewhere. They buy you food, drinks. Tasteful gifts.” She laughed. “It’s an exchange—they get to sit with you, believe that you want them as much as they want you. You get them all fired up so that they can go home to their wives or girlfriends or whatever and give them a night to remember. It’s an act, for Pete’s sake, Ruby. Why not just pretend you’re still onstage?”
“It makes me nervous. Really, really uncomfortable.”
“But why?” Vivid screwed the top on her nail polish and blew on her fingertips. She stood. “I’m getting myself a Tab. Want one?”
“Sure. Yeah.” Ruby ran her fingers through her hair. It was time to see Toby for a trim.
“Glass? Ice?”
“No. I’m fine,” Ruby said, accepting the cold can. She pulled off Vivid’s tab for her and then her own, keeping the ring on her finger. Vivid sat cross-legged on the floor, set her can on the glass coffee table next to a beautiful red lacquer box with a painting of a geisha on the lid. Ruby eyed Vivid’s silver coffee table lighter. Everything Vivid had was sophisticated, expensive.
“So, are you going to tell me?” Vivid asked.
“What?”
“Why it makes you nervous to sit with a bunch of men who worship you.”
“Because they want something.”
“Of course they do!”
“And that’s what bothers me.”
“It bothers you that men find you attractive? You’re a showgirl, for God’s sake. You’re designed to be wanted. Good lord, Ruby.” Vivid shook her head. “What woman wouldn’t change places with you in a second? To have men with money who want to spend it on you!”
“They want to spend it on me because then I’ll owe them. Tit for tat,” Ruby said, taking another sip of soda.
Puzzled, Vivid shook her head again. “Ruby, you don’t have to give them a thing. You don’t owe them! They’re doing what they want to do!”
“In expectation of receiving more. Of sex.”
“But not if you don’t want to! It’s up to you. Don’t you understand? You can say no.”
Ruby looked down at the carpeting, tugged at a few of the shag fibers. “A couple of nights ago, this putrid old man with chunks of dandruff on his collar leaned over to me and whispered, ‘I want to stick my tongue up your asshole.’ ”
“So, he’s a classless prick. Just tell him to fuck off. That’s the kind of guy you don’t even need to be polite to.”
Ruby shook her head. “But it’s the whole thing, Vivid. In general.” She blew out a breath, looked toward the ceiling for inspiration that wasn’t there.
“Honey,” Vivid said. “What is it? Really.”
Ruby kept fidgeting with the carpet fibers. It wasn’t simply that for the most part she felt either pity or revulsion for many of the men. The thing was, she found it impossible to articulate her fears, the bedrock certainty that she was truly vulnerable, that she felt threatened even by the innocuous ones. Finally, she said, “I feel safer when I’m onstage and they can’t get close to me.”
Vivid continued looking at Ruby as if she were an intricate filigree lock, something for which there was no longer any key. The two women were so quiet that Ruby could hear a dove cooing from its perch on a telephone line. When Ruby at last looked up, she saw comprehension begin to wash across Vivid’s face.
“I think maybe I get it. How could I be so obtuse?” Vivid touched Ruby’s forearm lightly. “Fuck, Ruby,” she said, and her voice caught. “It happened to me, too.” Her tone was soft, nearly a whisper.
“What?”
“You can’t even say it, can you? Rape. I’m talking ab
out rape.”
“Oh.” Ruby looked at her friend. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you? It’s not something I advertise. But I should have realized that about you—”
“But I haven’t been raped.” Ruby bit her lower lip. Oh good God, she thought. She pressed her lips together hard. She’d never thought about it like that before—what Uncle Miles had done. But now, hearing someone else actually talk about it, say the word, it was, wasn’t it? It was rape. She’d been raped. And raped. And raped. She looked up from the carpet and into Vivid’s sympathetic face. “I guess—”
“For me, it was my older brother’s best friend,” Vivid said. “A guy I’d been around forever. Someone I trusted. I was seventeen.”
“Fuck,” Ruby said, wiping the beginnings of traitorous tears from beneath her eyes.
“Who?” Vivid asked, taking Ruby’s hand.
“My uncle.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. You were a child?”
“Eight. The first time.”
“I want to kill the fucker. Where is he? Is the bastard still alive?”
“He was never alive,” Ruby said, turning to look for a box of tissues.
“Hold on,” Vivid said, heading down the hallway and shouting back at Ruby, “I ran out and haven’t had a chance to get to the store. Here,” she said, returning with a roll of toilet paper. “And give me some, while you’re at it.”
They blew their noses in unison.
“How long?” Vivid asked. “How long did it last?”
“Until I was twelve.”
“Fuck me.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence, sniffling.
“Here’s the thing,” Vivid said at last. “You’re not a little girl anymore. You’re not helpless. Now you’re in charge.”
All the Beautiful Girls Page 12