by Jung Yun
“And what about you?” Elinor turns to Lisa, trying to fill the increasingly awkward silence. “Are you working too?”
Right away, she can tell that she’s touched a nerve because Lisa’s face tightens and Travis leans into the conversation, resting his elbows on his knees.
“Well, go on,” he says after a beat of silence. “You told her everything else about us. Why don’t you tell her how you’re dancing at a club now?”
The sound of his voice startles Elinor. She realizes he’s not quiet or shy, or even tired. He’s definitely not a mumbler. He’s mad. He’s been mad this entire time and now she’s tapped into the very thing that probably made him mad in the first place.
“I just started dancing at this club on Route Ten,” Lisa says, ignoring him. She scans Elinor up and down. “You could too, you know, if you’re looking for work. I can introduce you to the manager. The money’s in-sane.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Travis jump up from his chair. In one swift motion, he kicks the grill, as hard as someone trying to kick a football over goalposts. Steaks and hot coals fly everywhere. The metal grate rolls away, spiraling in a bright silver blur until it finally clatters to the ground.
“What the fuck?” Lisa shouts. “That was our dinner, Travis.”
But he’s gone already, walking barefoot through the parking lot as onlookers peek their heads out of their vehicles to see what the commotion was all about.
“Choke on your dinner,” Travis shouts back. “Fucking choke on it.”
36
One summer, the agency sent a young Ukrainian model to fill a vacant room in the apartment. Nadeeja was thin, blond, and blue-eyed, a look that was universally in demand, and she also had a prominent beauty mark on her cheek that was very on trend that season. She’d barely unpacked her bags before landing an enviable succession of editorial shoots that went straight to her head, especially when she learned that her new roommates mostly did catalog work—steady, stable, decidedly unsexy catalog work for companies whose clothes they would never deign to wear in real life. Instead of trying to get to know Elinor and the others, Nadeeja treated the apartment like the way station they all knew it was. On her days off, she holed up in her room, watching TV with her hanger-on of a boyfriend, a quiet man who never bothered to introduce himself to any of the roommates. They took to calling him “Ivan” because he looked just like an Ivan should. Big, tall, and brooding, with a shock of white-blond hair that he wore in gelled spikes.
Elinor, whose room shared a wall with Nadeeja’s, often heard them talking in their native tongue, punctuated with its long vowels and guttural consonants. Although she couldn’t understand what they were saying, she could tell when one of their conversations was about to turn into a fight because Nadeeja would cry or plead, and then her voice became muffled, as if he was covering her mouth. Elinor was almost certain that Ivan was hurting her in some way that never left a mark or cost her any work, but she was afraid to ask. She assumed that no woman wanted to be on the receiving end of that question, and given how imperious Nadeeja was, Elinor expected her to react badly, possibly with anger, to being cast as a victim by someone she barely knew. It was almost a relief when Nadeeja abruptly moved out at the end of the summer, leaving only a Duane Reade receipt on the refrigerator as proof that she’d ever lived there. On the back of the receipt, she’d written her full name, a forwarding address for her mail, and nothing more.
Years later, when a booker at the agency casually mentioned that a former client named Nadeeja had jumped off a balcony in London, Elinor felt a strange, sharp pang of guilt that she knew she wasn’t entitled to. She hadn’t given her former roommate a second’s thought since she’d moved out. And she hadn’t intervened or offered her help when the younger woman desperately appeared to need it, even if she didn’t appear to want it. The booker, upon hearing Elinor’s suspicions about Ivan, tried to absolve her of any responsibility by suggesting that Nadeeja could have had a drug problem or money trouble or a serious bout of depression—things that happened with alarming frequency to people in their line of work. There was no reason to believe that Ivan was still in the picture or his abuse had anything to do with her decision to end her life. But that was exactly the problem. Elinor wasn’t sure what effect, if any, her inaction had, and wondering without the possibility of an answer was actually worse than knowing what the answer was. She made a rare promise to herself that the next time she felt the question needed to be asked, she wouldn’t avoid it again.
If not for the incident with Hannah at the Depot, Elinor probably would have blurted it out already. But now she’s wary of making the same mistake twice, coupling good intentions with less-than-careful phrasing. Fortunately, Lisa has given her plenty of time to think. Ever since Travis took off, she’s been talking nonstop, cycling through embarrassed apologies and petulant name-calling, sometimes all at once.
“I just thought it might do him some good to be around new people, you know? Like being sociable would maybe snap him out of the shitty mood he’s been in all week.” She swats at a mosquito buzzing too close to her face. “I’m sorry you had to see him act like that. Big fucking baby.”
The two of them are walking through the parking lot in the blast radius of Travis’s outburst, picking up the dust- and gravel-crusted steaks and stomping out the occasional live coal. Under Elinor’s arm, she’s carrying the miniature barbecue grill, which landed nearly twenty feet away from the van. It’s empty now, but still warm to the touch, and there’s a huge dent on the side where Travis kicked it. They have yet to find where the cover rolled off to.
“He just can’t get it through that thick head of his—I actually like dancing. I always have. And I’m good at it too. I mean, I’m not Friday or Saturday night kind of good. Those girls are like fucking acrobats. But I’m way better than the Tuesday morning freak show.” She kicks a black coal down the long row of cars, waving at a man listening to the radio in front of his camper. He responds with a friendly wave back and a “Hi, Tina” that she doesn’t bother to correct.
“Look, I’m not trying to pry or anything…” Elinor’s brain is swimming in cortisol, still shaken by the image of Travis punting the grill across the lot. She couldn’t sleep now if she wanted to. She’s too worried about what will happen to Lisa when he returns, which will probably be soon given that he left without shoes on. Elinor has always been deeply uncomfortable with male anger, the ways in which it can manifest. She doesn’t understand how something can feel both predictable and unpredictable at the same time.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way…” She hesitates again, but reminds herself that if she doesn’t take advantage of the break in conversation, she might not get another one for a while. “But I need to ask. Does he lose his temper with you a lot?”
“Oh God, no,” Lisa says, laughing almost. “Travis isn’t a hitter, if that’s what you’re getting at. He just blows up at things. He’d punch a brick wall a million times before he’d ever lay a finger on me.”
Her response, while relaxed and good-natured, isn’t very reassuring. Elinor also wonders if it’s the truth, or if it’s simply what a woman in a bad situation might say to a stranger. She examines Lisa out of the corner of her eye, searching for bruises or scratches, but sees only a few dark moles and a wine-colored spot on her thigh that appears to be a birthmark. The absence of physical evidence doesn’t necessarily mean anything though. If dumb, silent Ivan knew enough to hide his handiwork, then maybe Travis does too.
“I’m sorry I asked about your job,” Elinor says. “I had no idea he’d react like that.”
“It’s not your fault Travis bugged out. All anyone wants to talk about around here is what people are doing for money. He should be used to it by now. By the way, I was dead serious about introducing you to my manager. He’s always on the lookout for exotic girls—as dancers, not because he’s got a fetish or anything.”
Despite disliking the word “exotic” and all the
baggage it carries, Elinor decides to ignore it in favor of something she should have mentioned earlier. She explains that she’s actually a writer, working on an article about women in the Bakken for the Standard. It’s the first time she’s been able to say this out loud without feeling uncertain about it, wondering if someone was preparing to yank the rug out from under her feet. It feels good, but still surreal.
“I’m obviously not going to write about you,” she continues. “Or Travis either. I don’t write about people without their permission, just to be clear.”
“I like writing,” Lisa says, seemingly unbothered by this information, and slightly off topic. “And I don’t mind being in your article if you want to include some dancers in it. Or hey—” She grabs Elinor’s forearm, shaking it gently. “I work on Sunday and Monday nights. If you want to swing by the club and see what it’s like, I could show you around.”
Elinor had mentally disqualified Lisa as an interview subject as soon as she learned she was stripping. So many articles she’d read had already gone down this route, focusing on women who were making a small fortune in the Bakken by taking their clothes off for men. It was too easy. As far as she was concerned, writing about strippers was as lurid as writing a dead girl story. “I don’t need any dancers for this particular piece,” she says, being careful to use the same euphemism that Lisa does. “But I could use some help finding female roughnecks to talk to. Do you know any of those?”
“Oh, sure. There’s a bunch of them around here in the lot. Travis is actually friendly with a couple of older ladies—lesbians,” she whispers curiously, as if she’s scandalized by the idea of two women in a relationship. “I don’t think they work on weekends, so I bet he could introduce you tomorrow if you want.”
She does want, but the mention of Travis reminds her that he could be anywhere right now. She turns around, walking backward for a few steps to make sure he’s not behind them.
“You don’t have to bother looking for him, if that’s what you’re doing. He’s probably hanging out in his friends’ RV. He’ll have a couple of beers and then come home when he’s calmed down.” She says this so casually, as if Travis has blown up with enough regularity to establish a pattern, which also isn’t reassuring.
“I hate to bring this up again, but are you sure—are you absolutely sure he’s not going to come back and do something to you?”
Lisa shakes her head. Thankfully, she doesn’t seem annoyed to be asked the question twice. “I swear, he’s not like that. And I’m not like that either. I knew girls in school whose boyfriends used to slap them around and I always thought they were so sad. Some of them even married those assholes.”
It’s hard to tell what part of this argument Lisa believes, and what part is meant to make Elinor believe. She studies her expression, trying to find some evidence of a lie, but she neither knows what to look for nor sees anything that would give her cause to doubt. She has to let it go. “Well, I hope I didn’t offend—”
“It’s fine, it’s fine.” Lisa waves her off and then puts a hand on each hip as she surveys the distance they’ve walked from her van. The plastic bag of steaks that she peeled off the pavement dangles loosely from her wrist. “There’s no way the cover could have rolled this far, is there?”
“I doubt it.”
“Fucking Travis. I just bought that grill too.”
They walk to the gas station, where Lisa deposits the bag in an overflowing dumpster that specifically forbids its use by anyone other than employees. Judging from the mountain of garbage and the casualness with which Lisa adds to it—flinging the bag high in the air so it falls on the pile with a splat—no one who lives in the parking lot pays any attention to the signs or to the pair of security cameras angled at the bank of dumpsters. The act of defending Travis appears to have calmed Lisa down because on the walk back to their cars, she changes the subject and begins giving Elinor an unsolicited orientation to life at Emerald’s.
The rules are actually much stricter than she imagined. There’s really only one rule that matters and multiple variations of it. Be invisible. This means using the dumpster at night when the manager isn’t around, and not blasting music or getting caught stealing from the gas station. There are four pay showers for truckers and parking lot residents in the lounge area. The natural temptation, according to Lisa, is to buy a shower and have sex behind a closed door for a change instead of in a vehicle, but don’t do it, she warns. The management wouldn’t put up with that for a hot minute.
“We’ve got to be self-policing,” she explains. “Emerald’s has been threatening to call in a tow company for a while, which would suck for pretty much everyone living here, so we’re all really careful about respecting the property and not causing any trouble.” She bends over and fishes a rock out of her shoe, throwing it at an angle like she’s skipping stones. “And if you leave during the day, don’t forget to be back in the lot by ten every night; otherwise, you might not find a spot, and you definitely can’t park on the grass.”
“It seems like you know a lot about this place.”
“I should. We’ve been here going on six weeks now. We staked out a spot as soon as we heard they weren’t towing.”
“And before Emerald’s?”
“We were renting a patch of dirt in some farmer’s field about ten miles north of here. That guy was a jerk though. He kept jacking up the price every week, saying he could always find someone else who needed a space if we couldn’t pay. Actually, he and Travis almost got into it a few times.”
Elinor lifts and lowers her eyebrows. Lisa must notice because she quickly follows up.
“Travis is a good guy. He just has this really strong sense of right and wrong, so he gets pissed at the thought of customers disrespecting me at the club, or if people try to push him around on the job or make him feel small.”
Elinor wants to wave her hands at the parking lot, row after row of cars filled with people whose labor Avery needs, but whose presence the town neither welcomes nor wants. “But isn’t this a bad place for him then? I mean, doesn’t that kind of thing happen all the time around here?”
Lisa is silent for a moment. Then she tips her head back and releases a single, loud “ha!” straight into the air. “Jesus. I never thought of it like that.”
37
At first, all she sees are the knuckles. White knuckles, knocking against her window and then pulling away. As she rubs her eyes, Travis slowly comes into focus. He’s standing beside her car, peering in at her under a visored hand. He knocks again and says her name. Muffled through the glass, it sounds like he’s calling her “Elenora,” which he very well may be. She’s more confused by his presence than afraid, especially when she removes the sunshade from her windshield and notices an older woman hovering behind him, smiling like she’s embarrassed to be there. Elinor brings her seat to an upright position, accidentally jerking the lever and thrusting herself toward the dashboard. Her neck and back feel terrible. She turns on the engine and lowers the dusty window, trying to sit up straight. Small pockets of air crack and pop in her spine, bursting in places where they don’t belong.
“Lisa said you needed help finding some ladies for that thing you’re writing?”
Travis looks like a dog that just shat in the house. Tail curled between his legs, unable to make eye contact. He shoots his thumb back at the older woman. “This is Annie. She hauls dirty water for Kincannon.”
Only a man eager to make up for his bad behavior would do this, she thinks, introducing two strangers—one of them fast asleep—at the crack of dawn. Elinor and Annie wave at each other, both hesitant and awkward. They make arrangements to meet in the diner after Elinor has a chance to tidy up, which amounts to little more than brushing her teeth and washing her face in Emerald’s restroom. It’s early and the facilities appear recently cleaned, with streak-free mirrors and dry countertops that smell like lemons and bleach. Remembering Lisa’s advice from the night before, she wipes off the water she
splashed on the tile, careful to be a good and respectful guest, a ghost.
Annie is sitting in a booth in the back corner of the diner, nodding off over a cup of coffee. Elinor slides into the seat across from her and orders two glasses of water from a passing waitress, feeling parched and certain that one won’t be enough. As she removes her recording equipment and notebooks from her bag, she regrets not having more time to prepare for their conversation. She has no questions written out. Nothing remotely resembling a plan. She unpacks her bag a little slower until the strangeness of the silence prompts her to say the first thing that comes to mind.
“So how are you?” she asks.
Annie’s expression softens a little. “Tired. Same as you, I bet.” She points at the jukebox attached to the side of their table. “You mind? I could go for some music right now to wake me up.”
Music might interfere with the quality of her audio recording, but this isn’t the kind of request Elinor can say no to, not when she sees the quarters already in Annie’s palm. She watches her deposit them one by one into the slot, giving the side of the machine a gentle tap so they fall in. The last time Elinor saw a jukebox like this, she was in her twenties, on the tail end of a long first date in a twenty-four-hour diner. The guy she was with made a big deal about taking turns, probably to show off his taste in music or evaluate hers. As soon as he picked out a song, he made her pick one, back and forth until they spent down every credit. Thankfully, Annie makes all the choices herself, punching in several four-digit codes that she seems to know by heart. The song that begins to play through the tinny speaker is something from the Motown era, one of those trios or quartets of Black women in matching dresses who made upbeat hits but were poorly paid.
“You like Motown?” Elinor asks.
“Love.” Annie nods. “It reminds me of home.”
“You’re from Detroit?”