Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

Javier puts his arms up as if in surrender and then starts to fan himself with one hand. “It’s getting hot in here,” he says. “What are you going to do?”

  “Well, honey, that seems to be the question of the hour, now, doesn’t it? I guess I’m going to find him.”

  “This isn’t your crisis, doll. You’ve got your own crisis to deal with.”

  “I’d say this crisis and my crisis are kind of related.”

  “You can’t just go running out into the world trying to find someone. What are you going to use, a dowsing rod?”

  I pause. I hadn’t thought much beyond leaving.

  “Wait,” Javi says. He grabs me by the arms. “Just wait one tiny, tiny second. It’s important.”

  Javier runs to the other room, leaving Violet and me staring at each other.

  “Bebes, stay. This is a terrible idea.”

  Javi returns, holding the Barbie that Milla made.

  “Take her with you. She’ll be like your little fairy.”

  “You’re my fairy,” I say to him, but I take the doll.

  Javier wraps his arms around me and kisses me on one cheek and then the other.

  “Go on, then,” he says. “Go get your man.”

  1550 hours down. 50 hours left to go.

  Fifteen

  What I think is that Jake’s probably gone to try to reenlist. Where do you go to do that? There must be a million places and I don’t know one. It was ridiculous, my revelation that I have to go and find him. How do you find someone?

  I park out in front of Serenity, sag, and lean into the steering wheel. Buck stands on the front stoop talking to Jake’s roommate, who gives me an uncomfortable little wave. Hardened criminals who have spent most of their lives in prison are so awkward around women it makes me want to cry for them. The roommate, who Buck likes to call Himmler, is actually a nice guy, even though he’s done a lot of time and as a result has a giant swastika tattoo covering his entire back and he really does things like kill people. One or two. The story changes.

  One thing about ex-cons is that they are the tidiest guys you will ever meet. The women’s Serenity House is often a sty, but the men’s Serenity House next door is neat like an army barracks. Jake’s roommate saw our kitchen one day and actually offered to clean it for us. And our resident reformed Cholo stood with me out on the back porch one Saturday afternoon and taught me how to iron. He showed me how to press razor-straight creases into a pair of khakis. Not that I’ve ever used it, but it’s a good skill to have if one day I make a life where I do things like iron.

  Buck bounds down the front stairs and slides into the passenger seat.

  “I made you a sandwich and shit for the drive,” she says. “Himmler over there knows where he’s headed. I got it out of him.”

  “Why didn’t he stop him?”

  “How was he gonna stop him? The road was calling him. You gotta go, you gotta go.”

  Buck smiles at me, her gold tooth catching the sunlight.

  “And?”

  “He went back to the motherfuckin’ Marines, that nut,” she says.

  I open the bag. Buck packed me a sweater, jeans, water, a sandwich, and carrot sticks.

  “At least we know they won’t take him. I just want to find him before they lock him up.”

  “You never do know. Maybe they want a nut like him to go in there and blow some shit up. Probably not, though.

  And I don’t know what the fuck he’s going to do then, because they’re not letting him back in here after this stunt. Maybe he’ll stay up north with his mama for a while.”

  Buck looks forward through the windshield and visibly winces at how dirty my car is. She takes the sleeve of her flannel shirt and tries to wipe some of the dust off the dash.

  “That’s where he went. To go kiss his mama good-bye. That’s what he told Herr Himmler, anyway. She lives in a trailer near Solvang, a couple hours north of here. I heard him talk about it once.”

  How I said that convicts are with women: that is how I am with moms. I’m incredibly uncomfortable around moms. But it’s not just me. Moms will fight you for their boys.

  “Really? By the way he described his mom’s trailer I thought it would be further. Out in the middle of the desert somewhere.”

  “This is the middle of the fucking desert. We just pay the Mexicans to water it so you can’t tell.”

  “Buck.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “He’s got a head start on you, but you never know. He might still be there. Then you two can have a touching reunion.”

  “How do I find it?”

  “His mom works at the casino. There’s always signs for the casino, right? Never too hard to find a place that wants your money. What’s this?” she asks, picking up Milla’s Kitty Hawk Barbie from where she’s lying in the well under the emergency brake. “Aw shit. This reminds me of my little cousin.”

  She gives the doll a kiss on the head and lays her back down.

  “Himmler said he stopped taking his meds weeks ago,” Buck says, looking in front of her toward the downtown skyline.

  “I suspected something like that. He hates the way they make him feel.”

  “You shouldn’t go, you know. You want I should come with you?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  She wishes me luck and lurches back toward Serenity, a slight permanent limp on her left side. She never told me where she got it.

  In the car, I quickly change out of my uniform and into the clothes Buck packed for me. Follow the 101 north and look for the casino signs. Not much to go on, but it’s what I’ve got. I secretly hope for an arrow in the sky. Even when you don’t believe anymore, how do you stop looking for signs? How do you stop listening for God? I turn the key in the ignition. I like long car rides. You sit in the traffic white noise of womblike nowhere as if time isn’t happening and you’re at least not doing any damage you’ll answer for later.

  Unless, of course, you’re this car’s previous owner, who slit his wrists while he looked out at the ocean and died where I’m sitting. I think about him sometimes, like he’s almost here to talk to. Thinking about the surfer suicide doesn’t creep me out; it’s more like having a friend in the car with me—a surfer dude who was so, so sad, a boyfriend I could have had. A blue-eyed gentle boy with a tangle of long blond hair and beach tar on his feet. Where he is now he might have some more wisdom than what he left with. He might know the thing that could have saved him. Maybe it could save me if I could get through to him. Listening for God and dead surfers and looking for signs in the sky—am I any less crazy than Jake?

  The 101 freeway cuts a swath through the San Fernando Valley, and alongside it lie a hundred towns you don’t want to visit. People say it’s the suburbs but I’m from the Midwest and I know suburbs and this isn’t them. This is something different. There’s a faster rate of decomposition here; it’s a big compost bin between the mountains, an endless grid of roads choked with sun-baked traffic jams. This is houses and more houses, box after box, richer or poorer, fancier or shittier. The poor just want to be the rich and the rich never get enough and everyone is driving these monstrous blood-bloated ticks of debt called things like Hummer and Escalade. This is tanning salons and nail salons and corporate coffee and cute coffee and strip mall yoga studios and storefront Scientology. This is the land of think it and you can buy it. This is window display after window display of ugly clothes and pretty clothes and the same slaves in China making all of it.

  Welcome to the land of the living. That’s what people say to you when you get sober. Uh, thanks.

  And what do they say to you when you have a baby? Welcome to the land of living in the Valley? Welcome to the Valley, where you can breed and eat and buy until you die.

  My phone rings and the display reads: DON’T ANSWER. It’s the name I programmed in for the number Billy called from the other day. Billy again. Always Billy trying to pull me off the path when I have somewhere to go. I don’t ans
wer. I keep driving. What does he want? Same thing as ever, probably. To ruin my life, probably.

  Sober, reinvented, reborn. My ass.

  The Valley opens out onto rolling green and gold hills and this is where I start to breathe a little more and hate the world a little less. In summer these hills turn to kindling, except there are always those green broccoli trees that crawl up and around the mountains. I don’t know how they stay green with no water. No water in summer at all, but there they are. I slip in and out of the fast lane, in and around the other cars. Always since that night, I’m aware of the steel and the velocity, the potential for destruction. The sound of metal on metal is engraved on my every cell. I wonder if it ever goes away or if I’ll forever be like those vets who get hurled into a panic by loud noises for the rest of their lives. Exaggerated startle reflex. That’s what it’s called. It’s one of the symptoms of PTSD. PTSD, ADD, CD, MDD. And still driving, folks. Come and see her. The amazing rubber girl. From the darkest reaches of Ohio. Watch as she falls again and again. She should have gone splat long ago but she just keeps bouncing.

  I push forward, attempting to force the traffic faster with my will. I blast the radio, hoping the sound waves will cancel out any thought spirals infiltrating my brain. The thinking will get me exactly nowhere; the trick is to move without thinking.

  The road takes a turn and I look to my left and, on the other side of a row of shaggy palm trees, the ocean appears. I open the window. The air is glorious. It smells like real air. The hazy sheet of ocean fades into the cloudless blue sky so that I can’t see the edges of either one.

  The trick is to move without thinking but I’m the world’s most inconsistent magician. Because I see the ocean and that’s how it starts.

  I remember how Aaron and I rolled into California and then it rolled right over us. I try not to think about it but I don’t try very hard. I just let it come. Because sometimes I’d rather be with him, even if it sucks, even if it hurts. Regret perches like an umbrella over all of my days. All I do is look up and I see its spiny inside. An invisible hand grips my heart just a little too tight and squeezes every time a memory washes over me. And, yes, Jake is my right now but Aaron is my always. Always gone and always here.

  I have throbbing pulses of regret embedded in the sidewalks around L.A. I imagine them sprinkled across the grid of the city like red dots on a map. On the satellite map, take your finger and follow the freeway south instead of north and exit by the airport. You’ll find a big bleeding splotch at the coordinates where Hawthorne intersects with Lennox. For some reason today that’s where I go in my mind.

  Jet Strip, all gray concrete and purple neon, was where I first got to know Billy’s ex Francesca, my first stripper friend and my first real friend in L.A. I remember it all in soft focus, because that’s how I lived then, the outlines of everything bleeding into each other. Unlike now, when everything is too sharply defined—blackheads and spider veins and gum on the asphalt.

  One thing about me is I’m brave. I do things like wade into a freezing river and give my life to Jesus. I do things like pack a bag and step into a bus with a musician I kissed one night and never go back home again. I do things like sling a bag with a new pair of Hollywood Boulevard heels over my shoulder and step through the heavy velvet curtain that obscures the doorway of an airport strip club and act like it’s nothing. I was always the one on the front of the sled, the first to try out a bigger hill on my skateboard, to cannonball off the high dive with a running start.

  The dressing room was alarmingly small—a walk-in closet lined with lit mirrors. If you bent over too far, when you leaned in to curl your eyelashes you would bump bare asses with the girl facing the opposite wall. That’s how tight the quarters were.

  There were about six girls crammed in when I arrived. Their reflections eyeballed me suspiciously while I stuffed my bag into one of the tiny lockers. I looked for a spot on the ledge in front of the mirrors where I could wedge my makeup caddy. They ignored me, deep in their own coded conversations about parties they were at or customers who were in there last night or guys who would install a car stereo for a lap dance. Everywhere you go has its own special language—beauty school, AA meetings, strip clubs. Until you catch on, you won’t make any true allies. And let me be clear, your first night working at a strip club you must have an ally. If you don’t, the other girls will spill Diet Coke in your makeup and steal your shoes and make your life a worse hell than any junior high playground torture imaginable until you leave for good, clutching your remaining belongings to your chest. But I had a stacked deck, because I came in already kind of knowing Francesca. I had only met her briefly once in person, but Billy had put in a call to her about me needing a job and for some reason everyone fell all over themselves to help out Billy.

  She breezed in five seconds later, a petite rockabilly girl wearing only red cotton hot pants with a pair of dice, showing seven, printed on the back. She dropped her flamepainted makeup case down on the counter and then moved it over to make room for mine on the end. On her cue, the other girls easily shifted to make space. The lid of her open box was plastered with a sweet collage of photographs and stickers. I wanted to look at the photographs, but I didn’t want to be too nosy.

  “Hey, Francesca.”

  “Hi, sweetie. I’m Betty here,” she said, smiling at the mirror. “Who are you gonna be?”

  “I’m Bebe. I’ll just stay Bebe.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I don’t know why I used my real name. I was caught off guard. I didn’t know I was going to have to make something up. Plus, my name, I like it. My pop was the one who started calling me Bebe in the first place.

  Francesca was tiny and high waisted, with blue-black Betty Page hair and saucer-big, turquoise eyes in a sharp pixie face. There were seams of cherries tattooed up the backs of her legs and she looked oddly spiderlike in her tall, tall shoes. She was older than me, eyes surrounded by fans of lines in the dressing room light.

  There are angels everywhere. Francesca was an angel to me. I never saw her after the funeral. I wonder sometimes where she is now.

  I changed into the one costume I owned, a neon pink bikini from a Hollywood Boulevard sale rack. Then I surreptitiously checked out the competition and discerned that my ass was by far the biggest one in the room, its dimpled curves pushing the tiny pink shorts far into my crack. I figured that was why Francesca was being so nice to me. Because of Billy and because my ass was bigger than hers.

  The dancing was not so jazzy or romantic as Aaron and I imagined it, but it wasn’t so bad at first. It didn’t take a genius and it wasn’t exactly fun but there’s no need to be all victimy talk show dramatic about it. It wasn’t horribly humiliating or anything. You put back a drink or two and the lights get starry and you can almost believe that you’re truly pretty up there. It all gets normal fast. So after a while when some customer whips it out and comes on your bare ass during a lap dance, you just go to the dressing room, wipe it off, touch up your lipstick, and head back out. It isn’t how you’d thought it would be, but what is?

  Francesca had a fifth-floor apartment in Koreatown with French doors opening up to a balcony and almost no furniture save a canopy bed and a huge old steamer trunk that she said her grandmother brought over on the boat when she came from Austria. We went to her place after that first night and sat outside smoking and drinking wine poured out of a box. I wore her too-small sweatshirt and we laughed hyena laughs that got absorbed in the constant traffic buzz of the street below. There wasn’t a view of anything very spectacular and far away, only the surrounding buildings, but even that seemed rare in the amber glow of the streetlights.

  “You have to pretend like your true love is in the audience,” she schooled me. “Just to the left of the stage and slightly out of the light so you can’t see him. Imagine like he’s watching you and dance for him. It’ll soften you up. It’ll make you care. You’ll do a better show.”

  “Who do you think of
?”

  “My true love? Tom Waits. No contest. Well, Billy gave him a run for his money for a minute, but now I do all I can not to think of Billy.”

  “So why do you still keep showing up for him when he calls?”

  “Because Tom Waits is unavailable, as far as I know.”

  In that moment my life was okay. I was floating there between the sky and the pavement and I had a drink in my hand and money in my pocket and I had made a friend.

  After that I tried imagining that Mick Jagger was out there watching and then when that didn’t feel quite right I imagined Chet Baker, who I always thought would have loved me if he ever knew me. But that didn’t work, either, because Chet Baker kind of reminded me of my dad and you really don’t want your dad in the audience when you’re stripping. Then it becomes, like, the world’s worst nightmare. I even tried imagining John Travolta once but that was just too little girl.

  So in the end it was Aaron. I always imagined Aaron in the audience when I danced. Of course that’s just a game you play with yourself. You don’t really want your true love in the audience when you’re stripping. There are things that are meant to stay between women. Francesca could understand that really I was dancing for Aaron, but Aaron would only ever see the other men there. I only know this now. I didn’t know it then but I wish I had.

  I learned it when Aaron came to pick me up at Jet Strip one night. He usually waited in the parking lot out back, but I told him to come in that night because I wanted him to see my show for real and not just in my imagination. Francesca warned me not to, but I ignored her. I wanted Aaron to see me shine. And maybe I also wanted him to be a little jealous but mostly I wanted him to be one of them for a minute. I wanted to work the magic on him, too. I thought it would be fun. I thought he would think I was glamorous, powerful, sexy.

  He thought it might be fun, too, so he agreed to come but he showed up a little earlier than he was supposed to. I had planned to be on stage right when he arrived but instead I was on one of the purple velvet couches that lined the club, milking the last lap dance out of a customer with his face buried in my tits, when Aaron walked in. I saw him before he saw me but not soon enough. I watched his expression darken and harden as his eyes found me on the lap of an insulation salesman in town from Duluth.