3 Women Walk Into A Bar

by Linda Sands

  Roxie spent hours reading biographies and interviews of people she admired—strong, confident, single women. She approached her life as a cultural project and began to design and alter herself, creating an act that was her life, a character that was Roxie.

  While her parents had noisy sex in the boys’ old playroom, Roxie would spend her afternoons meditating on quiet thoughts, which usually started with the words, “What if?” and “How could I?” Questions that led to choices, decisions, and changes that could transform an empty shell into a complete person.

  By the time she graduated from high school, Roxie had become the girl every girl wanted to be around and the girl every guy wanted to be in. She knew both sides of the equation and figured out that she liked being wanted much better than being forgotten.

  She was popular with all the cliques: stoners, jocks, nerds, even brownnosing brainiacs. Roxie earned her way in, paying with glorified untruths, wasted moments, and a tiny part of her soul.

  In her first—and only—year of college in San Diego, Roxie’s English professor pushed her up against the wall after class and said with his coffee breath in her face, “I know your kind.” Then he winked and stepped back, running his eyes over her body, giving her a feeling not unlike mosquitoes alighting and drawing blood.

  Roxie wasn’t at all sure what “kind” she was—never had been—and almost wished he’d tell her. It would be much easier knowing what was expected of you if you knew who you were. But the professor never had a chance to tell her, as the moment was lost when Matt Bryant walked in, saying he’d forgotten his notebook. He snatched it from the table in the second row, where he’d sat for the last hour collecting fallen strands of Roxie’s hair, then shoved it in his backpack and tapped his watch.

  “Don’t want to be late,” he said to Roxie, who quickly gathered her books and backed out the door, not wanting to give the professor the benefit of a view of her ass. Matt and Roxie walked out together looking like a couple, which was what Matt wanted people to think.

  “Thanks,” Roxie said.

  “No problem. So, where are you headed?”

  Matt wanted more than anything to put his arm around her, kiss her, and call her “Babe.” Then he’d tell her he’d be thinking of her when he was in his biology class, but that would be a lie, because all he’d be thinking about in biology was how much he hated his fat-ass instructor and the smell of formaldehyde.

  Matt forced himself to focus because the hall was coming to an end and this was do-or-die time.

  Roxie said, “I don’t have any classes until two. I was going to go to the library and study. What about you?”

  “What a coincidence. I was on my way to the library too.” Matt said, wondering if his ears were turning red like they did when he lied to his mother.

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah, cool.”

  Then, because Matt was a good kid—albeit a bad liar—and because he saw something in Roxie, something inherently special that might even go deeper than the intoxicating scent of her perfect hair, he said, “I have to tell you something. I didn’t forget my notebook. I left it there on purpose.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, I know a girl that got hit on by that same professor last semester. She filed a complaint with the department. He’s supposed to be on some kind of probation.”

  “She filed a complaint? What did she say?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe you should file one too, you know, just to make sure.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He seems harmless enough.” Roxie thought the words sounded trite as they left her mouth and wondered how many neighbors had said the same things about serial killers. She started walking. Matt fell in beside her.

  He said, “Yeah, well, a guy like that should never become a teacher.”

  Roxie looked at him sideways, wondering what Matt meant, wondering what he thought he was protecting her from.

  He asked her to lunch that day, then dinner and a movie, and eventually he asked her to go away for the weekend. Roxie said yes and spent the next four months learning just what “kind” she was and how much a man like the English professor could have ruined her.

  She enjoyed her time with Matt, and their relationship grew from a damsel-in-distress feeling of appreciation and devotion to her savior to a comfortable pairing of two young kids who—from what everyone told them—seemed perfect together. Roxie felt safe and protected, desired even.

  But something was missing, and in a short while she began to see Matt as more of a damsel than she was. He’d call her from biology class, weeping for the life of a fetal pig. Stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire and no jack, he’d ask her to come pick him up; when she got there and changed his tire, he’d felt appreciative instead of embarrassed. She began to hate him.

  When Matt sent her crappy love poems and recorded sappy songs on cassettes, then taped them to her windshield, Roxie thought Matt might have more estrogen than she would ever be capable of producing. She worried that if the relationship continued, she’d become cruel and callous and he’d melt into a fleshy, soggy, teary mash of almost-man.

  She broke up with him on the phone at the end of the semester and had to lay the receiver on the pillow to hide the sound of her leaving the room while he cried and begged and pleaded, then threatened to take his life.

  Roxie knew he’d be as incompetent at that as he was at giving her head. She went away for three weeks to visit her parents in New York. When she returned, he was gone. Someone said he’d quit school and joined the Peace Corps.

  Roxie hoped he was happy.

  Now that she could date whomever she wanted, it turned out that she wanted men who were nothing at all like the boy she’d had in Matt. Roxie wanted hard-bodied, dumb, insensitive jocks. Father figures for abused children.

  There was Steve. He was cool like Elvis was cool, even when he got fat and bitchy. Steve could have been one of those movie mob guys with bad teeth who wear cheap shoes that turn up at the ends, but who classy women driving Jaguars still want to blow under the table at The Palm. Steve was all Roxie needed until their third month, when the steroids really kicked in and his balls shrunk and the hair on his chest began to grow back, thick and red and prickly like a cactus against her breasts.

  Roxie plowed her way through relationships with college boys, steak house waiters, an insurance agent, and even her boss’s boss at the golf course. She dated as if it was a contest, racking up numbers and statistics, always keeping one or two men on the line. She was the girl in the center ring, spinning plates on sticks.

  Until Don, no one came close to winning her heart, partly because Roxie hadn’t been using her heart in those informative years.

  After all the men were catalogued and dissected, she figured that what she’d been filling instead of her heart was maybe just a kidney, or an armpit, or even a lymph node. Because when she met Don—when she kissed Don—her whole being soared. Every nerve ending tingled, every cell was jolted into life. She felt like she could funnel herself out of her skin through the tip of her tongue and wriggle right into him. She felt present—and for the first time, desperately, joyfully, giddily in love.

  Maybe it was the intensity of the love that burned it out. Maybe Don was right when he said he wasn’t a marathoner, he was a sprinter. He’d looked sorry when they broke up, when he left her that card with the lame quote about birds in a cage and leaving the door open. Didn’t he know roosting birds always return?

  Roxie tried to forget him. She put a tattoo on her ankle of comedy/tragedy masks and spent weekends driving slowly past his house at midnight trying to peer in the windows, guess whose shadow was whose. And when she read in the paper that he was getting married to his ex-girlfriend, she tore up the last note she’d wanted to give him—the one where she quoted all the things he’d whispered in her ear while making love. She burned it in a pot on the stove along with his favorite pair of boxers she’d found under her bed.

  That kind of love c
hanged her. For the rest of her life, Roxie would compare other men to Don. She’d size them up, test their first kiss against a memory that gained favor in direct proportion to her dissatisfaction with her current conquest.

  With Barry, the busy day trader, Don became the King of Siam for the manner in which he had pampered Roxie.

  When she woke up next to Jake, the personal trainer, her feelings for Don were so strong that she wept. She lied to the massive man by saying she had been dreaming of a tiny, sad kitten mewing in a box on the side of a highway. Jake nodded knowingly, then pinched her breast and said, “Fuck me hard, baby.” And Roxie knew he had no idea what she needed or desired.

  She almost started dating women, thinking they would fill the void of Don. But the one botched night with Laura only served to solidify her desire for men—all men.

  It went on like that for years, no matter what part of California she lived in, how many cocktails she served. It was the wrong man after the wrong man after the wrongest man ever. Her brothers and her parents left her to her vices, left Roxie to confess everything to the priest behind the screen, earn her absolution, and move on.

  When her parents finally decided to join her out west, Roxie broke the news that she was returning to Syracuse, said she’d decided she was an East Coast girl after all. She wished Nell and Robert well on their second-chance life, secretly hoping someone would come whisk her away and that she would be the one living on a coastal cliff with eight successful coffeehouses and just enough Microsoft stock.

  Weeks later, hungry and almost broke, Roxie passed Flannigan’s. When she saw the Help Wanted sign, she felt a bit of the old Don tingle return. It was a gauge she couldn’t ignore, so she opened the door and walked in. It was just another bar in just another town, but it felt like home. It felt like a hot meal on a starched placemat in a clean kitchen. It felt like a yellow room full of unused baby furniture. It felt like the perfect combination of a broad chest and strong arms spooning her from behind.

  And when the owner approached smiling, introducing himself as James Smith, holding out his hand, Roxie took it. When their eyes met, she told him, “Take down the sign.”

  Chapter 5

  TEDESCO ON THE JOB, IN A ROOM WITH A VIEW

  My cell phone rang, nudging me from a nap I didn’t know I’d needed. I dug the phone out of my pocket, ran my tongue around my mouth trying to get a little saliva going, then answered it.

  “Tedesco.”

  “How’s it going?”

  It was Tommy Bane, my protégé.

  “Good.” I yawned. “What do you have for me?”

  “You were right, the rest of the staff checks out. Just normal working Joes. I did get a hit on the weekend dishwasher, a trip to juvie when he was thirteen. But he’s been clean since. Might have just been one of those things.”

  “That it?”

  “So far, but I need a better name on the Moon woman. She’s invisible.”

  I looked through the folders. “Moon, Crescent aka Crescent Moon Brigade,” was on the bottom.

  I said, “Let me call you back.” I hung up with Tommy, then opened the file and started reading.

  The picture attached to the file looked nothing like the third girl in the crime scene photo. It wasn’t what I expected for a girl named Crescent Moon Brigade—a moniker that seemed part Little Debbie, part Frank Zappa. Part commune, part crackhead stripper.

  I had to look twice, and I’m good with faces. Names not so much. But crash your cart into mine at the grocery store then walk past me a month later and I’d recognize you. I would definitely remember all the details of our meeting if prominent tits or big blue eyes were in the picture. It was something I prided myself on.

  With the Moon girl it wasn’t so simple. First I had to get past the fact that in her file photo she was alive. She was upright. Not splayed across a dirty bar floor. There wasn’t a hole in her chest. She didn’t have blood smeared across her long, regally pale neck. Her eyes weren’t rolled up in her head, zombie whites glaring back.

  The poorly photocopied, expired driver’s license showed a girl with bushy black hair, low brows, a wide nose, and chipmunk cheeks. Her pursed lips looked as if she’d been ready to argue with the photographer—or spit. I was pretty sure Miss Moon hadn’t been happy to hand over this document.

  I pulled the newspaper clipping from my breast pocket and looked at the photo of the girls leaning on the bar. The only one with blue eyes was the blonde. Now that I looked, I could see the resemblance. Like seeing twins: one who’d lived the party life and the other who probably knew the public library intimately. The blonde version of Crescent Moon looked like she’d been modeled after Barbie—which was not altogether a bad thing as far as most warm-blooded men were concerned.

  I wondered why an innocent young woman would do that to herself—change everything. People running from something did that. They transformed themselves.

  But young girls in a small city like Syracuse? What did they have to run from? And who around here did quality work like hers?

  Chapter 6

  SHE GIVES A WHOLE NEW NAME TO COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER

  Crescent Moon Brigade applied the fader cream to her arms and legs. She worked her way over every inch of her body methodically, lovingly. It made the other women in the gym locker room uncomfortable. They were okay with changing next to strangers, even tolerated the occasional towel slip in the sauna, but did she have to rub cream all over her body with those long, slim fingers? Did she have to hum as she did it, looking so damn pleased with every perfect curve, so damn happy with herself?

  If asked, most women would be eager to write off Cress’s appeal, saying, “If I had the money, I could look that good too,” in the same way people downplayed the lives of celebrities, calming themselves by whispering lies and assumptions—things that made the insides of beautiful people ugly and by their whispers ricocheted all the ugliness back on them.

  People like that would only ever see Cress as an enhanced beauty, the product of a capable, expensive plastic surgeon. They had no desire to look any deeper, and certainly wouldn’t invite her over for dinner, not with their sexually deprived husbands sitting across the table.

  Cress ran a hand down her arm, the skin warm and firm under her touch. She liked herself this way: china pale, light all over. Bread-dough colored, as if in this incarnation she’d been kneaded then set on chilled marble to rise under a warm cotton cloth.

  She finished dressing, then went to the mirror to put on her makeup. The first glance could still startle her. Maybe in time she wouldn’t even remember the old Crescent Moon Brigade. There weren’t any pictures—except a few ID cards—and no one left from her past.

  As Cress leaned in closer to line her eyes, a tall brunette in a red suit stepped up to the mirror, blow-dryer in hand, staring. When Cress met her eyes in the mirror she stammered, “You . . . you have the most beautiful eyes.”

  Cress smiled. “Thanks.” She ran her tongue over her lower lip. “I get that a lot.” The woman blushed and turned quickly away to plug in her dryer, missing the outlet twice.

  Cress’s large eyes had never lost the clear blue of babyhood. Instead they’d gained in intensity until they were the color of a turquoise sea, ringed with litmus-paper blue and dotted with tiny pupils, as if someone had added them later with a black felt pen.

  Growing up, people had always noticed her eyes first, but their pleasure would turn to disappointment as they scanned the rest of her. She grew up feeling like the blind date who was always described as “having a great personality.”

  Fed up and turning twenty-three, Cress saw her first TV makeover show and cried with empathy. She spent the next three months convincing her boyfriend, Rodney, to use money he’d earmarked for a new Camaro to buy her a nose job. She told him she wanted to be beautiful for him, that this was about their happiness, and if he loved her he’d understand.

  Rodney gave up his hot car dream and helped Cress through the procedure, drivi
ng her back to their apartment afterward, tucking her into bed. He pretended to be happy when the bandages came off, happier still that she’d lost twenty pounds during her recovery, but really he hated that she was getting hit on by guys everywhere. He hated how she spent hours staring at herself in the mirror, that she started wearing tight clothes and makeup and going out with the girls—something she’d always dismissed as false and bourgeois. Rodney smelled the impending death of another dream.

  He would never forget the humid Wednesday morning when he stood in the doorway with his duffel bag and handed Cress the spare key. She’d coated her hair with a coconut-and-plantain conditioner the night before, pecked him on the cheek, then rolled over to her side of the bed and promptly fell asleep. Rodney blamed the odor emanating from her turbaned head for giving him bizarre dreams of deserted islands and manic monkeys. He still felt a bit jittery inside.

  She stood there, dangling his key, head cocked, shiny egg-white mask on her face, feet coated in paraffin. It was too much for Rodney.

  He said, “You have always been beautiful to me, Cress. Inside and out. But I can’t do this anymore. You’ve become obsessive about this . . . this whole thing.”

  “Obsessive?” The egg white mask cracked over her brow and split around her lips. “I don’t think so. I mean, what’s wrong with wanting to look good?”

  Rodney shook his head. “It’s not right. I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”

  Cress would have cried at his leaving, but she didn’t want her eyes to get puffy and she knew what her nose looked like when it was red. Instead she ran five miles on the treadmill and confessed her feelings to the DVD aerobics instructor. She took the woman’s smile to be encouraging. In another hour, drained, sweaty, and toned, Cress served herself a vegetable smoothie, slid into a hot tub, and managed to convince herself that she’d be fine. Mr. Rodney Stimp was making a big mistake. A huge mistake that he’d regret forever. He had no idea how extraordinary she was meant to be.