by Amy Gentry
Then she’s gone. The car growls down the driveway, and I stand there a bit too long before putting the paper in my pocket, still feeling Jane’s touch and wondering absently why she has a white bandage around one of her fingers.
When I turn, Julie is standing by the kitchen island, looking at me. I wonder how long she’s been there, what she heard and what she saw.
Starr
learned how to lie at the Black Rose in Portland, Oregon. Not that she’d never lied before—to police officers, to foster parents, to anyone who looked like he or she might use the truth to hurt her. But those were lies she told with words, and anyone who was really paying attention could see through words. At the Black Rose, she learned to lie with her whole body.
She’d washed up in Pioneer Courthouse Square as Mercy with brown, shoulder-length, under-the-radar hair, and walked due east over the river until she was through with walking. She’d passed two other clubs, but the Rose was the first one with a picture on the dingy sign, and the swirls of dark petals surrounded by a spiky halo appealed to her. She didn’t even have to take her clothes off to get the job, just show Gary, a tall, skinny guy with a hipster mustache, proof that she was over twenty-one. He explained that she’d be renting her mandatory stage time with watery ten-dollar drinks the customers bought her, ten drinks for one stage dance, twenty for two, and so on. If she didn’t make her drink quota, she’d be buying the rest herself at the end of the night, out of the cash she made from lap dances and stage dollars—after tipping out the bar, the door, the waitresses, and the security staff. So it would behoove her, Gary said, enjoying the use of the word, to hustle as many drinks off her lap dances as she could.
As for rules—well, since deregulation, anything went. No no-touch rule, no three-foot rule, and nothing had to be covered. He gestured over to one of the armchairs that lined the walls, where a dancer was sitting naked in a customer’s lap, her legs open, his fingers sunk inside her up to the third joint. The customer’s head leaned back against the wall while the dancer rolled on him absently. “Thank you, Oregon Supreme Court,” Gary said, with a smile implied but none on his face.
She didn’t have to do that stuff, of course. The point was, she could do just about whatever she wanted. She could light her pubes on fire for all he cared. There was just one thing.
“You can’t be Mercy. We’ve got one already.”
Starr’s first stage dance was on a Thursday afternoon, too early, though you couldn’t tell what time it was inside the windowless club, where the fog machine churned day and night. She gyrated awkwardly to the music, slithering out of the makeshift girl-next-door costume she’d cobbled together with a stolen G-string from a mall store, and awaited the exposed and endangered feeling. But the closer she got to peeling the G-string down around her ankles, the more clothed she felt. Naked on the stage save for neon-yellow platform heels, she was unassailable, stripped down to armor that could never be taken off.
When she got down from the stage and walked among her prey, the feeling faded—they were sad daytime customers, and since there was a club on every block, it was nothing they hadn’t seen before. The newly eviscerated vice laws meant the strippers could use their bodies to wrest money from wallets with brazen aggression. Some of the girls ended every dance lying on their backs, arms pasted to the floor, waving their legs like strange underwater plants around naked genitals elevated to customer-face level. Their pussies were as dry as mouths left open too long and as impersonal as rubber chickens, but it didn’t matter; men stood transfixed, peering into the permanent gooseflesh as if they could will its transformation into warm, wet intimacy. Starr tried the helicopter move at home once, but her abdominal muscles were pathetic. She could barely manage the most basic pole moves, though she was learning from her roommates, most of whom were dancers too.
Gary had pointed her toward the dilapidated Victorian off Hawthorne with half the front steps rotted out and black-taped windows that beaded up and sweated in the never-ending drizzle. She didn’t leave anything there; her backpack full of trophies and her slowly growing collection of outfits were safer in a locker at the Rose, and she wore her only jewelry, the gold chain with the little horse charm, around her ankle while she danced.
For all she was addicted to the hot lights on her sweaty skin and the bitter taste of the fog machine in the back of her throat, there was no doubt Starr was a terrible stage dancer. Her lap dances were more successful. She hated being down on the floor amid the stares and gropes and was distant and sullen. But sullen had its own appeal for some, and she had her customers just like the girls who giggled and flirted had theirs. Enthusiasm was not required so long as she got the script right, and the lines were almost painfully easy to memorize; it didn’t matter whether or not they believed her, it was all part of the transaction. She learned which customers to tell it was only her first or second time doing this, which to tell that she was saving money for college or some new toys for her kid. With others, she didn’t say anything about herself at all, just made a kind of purring noise, as if she felt lucky to be grinding on their crotches.
Still, there were too many strippers and not enough customers. Some of the girls rolled their eyes about the “de-reg” and bitched that a worse thing had never happened. Some nights Starr barely took home anything after tip-out. Plus, there were a million ways you could slip and fall in the newly permissive atmosphere, a million ways you could ruin everything in the split second between a smile and a nod. She had seen girls followed out back on their cigarette breaks by their favorite customers after an offer to make a little extra money and then come back that same night with a black eye or a broken strap, or not at all.
Starr, remembering the Petes, had no interest in these side transactions. But if she said no too many times, she risked losing herself a regular, which meant losing the club a regular, and that wasn’t good either. So her job was to say nothing at all, to communicate neither yes nor no but keep looking as if she might say yes someday, as if she were just waiting for the right moment. It was an education in disappearing.
Graduation came when another dancer handed her a plastic tub half full of Manic Panic hair dye in an unmissable shade of red and said, “Trust me. It’ll show up under the lights.” Advice of this nature didn’t come often, so Starr took it and found that being brighter on the outside meant, paradoxically, making an even darker hiding place for herself on the inside.
Over the next eight months she learned it didn’t have to be just hair; it could be an accent, or a strange last name, or a fake tattoo on the back of her neck. It could be bright blue eyeliner, a pair of cowboy boots, or something outlandish she made up on the spot when customers asked where she was from: a farm she had grown up on, a famous ballerina she had studied with. When you looked like she did, with wide cheekbones and smooth, white skin and big, blank kewpie-doll eyes, people would accept anything about you but the truth. Whether she told them she’d been a porn star or a prizefighter, they believed her, in a way they’d never believed or cared about her invented baby sister or community college courses. She started making real cash, buying four stage dances a night and entertaining tables of a dozen customers or more who came in just for her. Moreover, they bought drinks for any girls she brought over, and that made the other dancers friendly.
After one particularly full shift, she and a few other girls went down the street and got matching tattoos of the spiky-haloed rose on the club’s sign. She didn’t know what else she could spend cash on that wouldn’t weigh her down.
But the other law of being highly visible was you had to leave while the shine was still on. So when a group of women started frequenting the Black Rose during her shifts, Starr took note.
Lina, short for Carolina, was a fifty-five-year-old El Salvadorian with a short, grizzled mane, a thick neck, and a body that was round and pleasant. Lina came in all the time with her girlfriend, Heidi, who looked a bit like Starr without her makeup. Then one time Lina came in without Heidi
, and Starr, who was ready to quit the club and move out of the Hawthorne house, got the message. She left with Lina at the end of her shift.
Lina lived in a huge Victorian in Northeast so high up it was practically on stilts. A beard of ground cover spilled down over a mossy concrete wall that looked barely adequate to keep the front yard from tumbling into the street. A stone staircase studded with clumps of tiny violets pinched shut in the predawn chill led from sidewalk to front door. Starr climbed up first, past gnarled Japanese maples with spidery leaves and bleeding-heart bushes whose hot-pink blossoms looked frozen in the act of ripping themselves open. The rough steps seemed endless after a long shift, but when Starr got to the top, she could see it was going to be worth it. The oval of stained glass in the door was just catching the first rays of sunlight.
Lina opened the door and let Starr in. The floor was made of cool, silky wood, covered with a big, soft rug of yellowish-white fur.
“Alpaca,” Lina said, watching Starr’s face as she wiggled her toes in the shag. “From home. They’re very cheap there. I got that for three hundred bucks.”
That didn’t sound cheap to Starr, but she just said, “It’s nice.” The ceiling was vaulted over the living room, and there was a large abstract painting hanging on the wall. It looked like fruit dropped from a great height. “Did you paint that?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Lina said. Her voice toughened up and she looked around the room casually. “You like it?”
“It makes me feel a little dizzy,” Starr said truthfully. “Can I lie down?”
“Of course,” said Lina, and she ushered her out of the vaulted living room and into a side room lined with raw wood where there was a tall bed covered by a shimmering, reddish-orange comforter. The wooden blinds were drawn, and it was blessedly dark. Without hesitation, Starr pulled off her shoes and climbed up on the mattress, which sank under her weight. She slid to the center and flipped over onto her back, exhausted, staring at the motionless ceiling fan of dark wood. She wondered what used to go through Heidi’s head when she stared at the ceiling fan. Where had Heidi worked before Lina came along? Had she fallen in love with Lina?
“Why don’t you tell me your real name? I don’t think it’s Starr.”
She could feel the tiny beads embroidered on the comforter biting into her spine, like the princess and the pea. “Violet,” she said, thinking of the purple flowers outside on the steep lawn. It wasn’t the most convincing name she’d ever come up with, but she needed something as good as Heidi—who’d surely made up her name, too, before she’d been extracted as neatly as a tooth so that Starr could occupy her dent in the bed. Wouldn’t it be easier if she could just use Heidi’s name? She imagined herself saying, Heidi, and Lina saying, What a coincidence.
But the bed was the softest place she’d been in months, and she accidentally said the second part out loud. Just as Lina said, “What is?” Starr let go of the ceiling fan with her eyes and fell backward into slumber.
8
As the door closes behind her, the superficial layer of animation Jane brings to the house falls away, and the uneasy secrets Julie and I share swell up to fill the kitchen like a scent.
“How are you feeling today?” I ask.
“Okay,” she says, placing a hand on her stomach. “Like a bad period.”
I nod, remembering my miscarriage. “Did you tell Jane?”
She shakes her head. “No. We were having a nice time. I didn’t want to make her feel bad.”
“You know, you could have called me to pick you up. If you wanted to get out of the house.” She’s silent. “We could have gotten lunch or something. Gone shopping.”
“More shopping?” she says with a quick laugh. Then she puts on an appreciative face. “I just wanted my sister.”
. . . and now she’s gone. The second half of the statement trails along in its wake like a ghost.
“I’m glad you girls got to spend a little time together. And I’m so sorry for the way I behaved. I just wish we had known where you were.” I’m choosing my words carefully, giving her plenty of space, like she’s a deer behind a tree instead of a girl behind a butcher block.
“I’m really sorry about that,” she says. “I guess I started feeling a little—trapped.”
I can’t even think about what that word must mean for her. Hearing her say it is different from when Tom said it last night. It makes me feel trapped too, suffocated by grief. Like she’s keeping me in a room with all the lights off. I scramble at the evidence of her lies, the paper folded up in the pocket of my jeans, but I am so afraid of confronting her with it that what I end up saying instead is “Julie, I think it’s time we get you a cell phone.”
She doesn’t blink. I let a beat go by before I continue. “For Tom and me, really. So we can reach you, and you can reach us, if you need to.”
Should I have waited a moment longer? Was her mouth opening to tell me the truth when I cut her off? I have one already, it’s in my bag, here’s a plausible explanation of how I came to have it, along with my very good reasons for not mentioning it.
At any rate, what she says now is “Thanks, Mom.” And I feel a strange relief that I don’t yet have to hear the plausible explanation, the very good reasons. She goes on: “Can I ask you something I’ve been worried about?”
“Of course.” Maybe it is coming, right now, after all.
“I’m kind of worried about . . . money.”
It’s so unexpected, so unlike something Jane, for instance, would say, that I just repeat the word blankly. “Money?”
“Well, I know I’ll have to get a job at some point.”
“Oh, honey, you don’t need to think about—”
“But I do need to think about it. I do,” she insists. “We haven’t talked about what it was like for you guys after it happened, but I know you must have spent a lot of—I mean, I know it’s expensive. I’ve—seen the billboards.”
“You have?”
“I looked up some stuff about my case on the Internet,” she says.
Has she been on Tom’s computer? Or did she use the secret phone?
“I just—I know Dad left his job. And Jane’s in college—”
“Your father does fine, and so do I. We’re fine, Julie.”
“—and now I’m here.”
“Which is the best and luckiest and most wonderful thing that could ever have happened to us.”
“I know. I know. I just—” She throws up her hands. “I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.” And then, in a slightly different tone: “I’ve been applying for jobs, you know.”
I’m caught off guard. “What kind of jobs?”
“Oh, anything,” she says evasively. “Baristas, cashiers. I even went inside that bar around the corner yesterday—I forget the name—to ask if they needed a dishwasher.”
It takes me a moment to realize what bar she’s talking about. That squalid, sad little bar in the strip center? Billy’s or Bobby’s or something? She went in there? She’s watching my face, hanging on my flickering expressions, so I try to look expectant, like I’m waiting without judgment for her to finish.
“I tried Starbucks too,” she goes on quickly, “but I didn’t end up applying there. I was too tired. And kind of addled, I guess from the painkillers. That’s when I called Jane.”
“On a borrowed phone,” I add. I can’t help it.
“Yeah. I don’t know why I didn’t call Dad, except I knew Jane had the car and that he would have to walk in the heat to come get me. I didn’t want to be too much of a bother. And I was kind of—not thinking too straight.”
This whole conversation is a lie.
“Anyway, so I wanted to tell you—I feel really bad about this, but I want you to know where I’ve been.” She takes a breath, steeling herself for the big revelation. “For the past few weeks, I haven’t been going to therapy.”
I brace myself. She’s going to tell me everything. And it will
make sense. It will make perfect sense.
“I’ve just been driving around,” she says, and so it’s to be another lie after all, I think, and then immediately afterward I’m not sure. “I can’t bear to think of all that money it’s costing, so I just cancel, and then I drive around trying to figure out what I’m going to do. If I get a job, like as a waitress or something, I can study for my GED at night, and then—maybe I’ll go to college too, someday. Like Jane.” She looks up on that last phrase with an absurd kind of hope, daring me to disbelieve the emotion underneath those words. It works; the thought of all the opportunities Jane’s had, all the opportunities Julie missed out on and that can never be made up, is paralyzing.
My head hurts from trying to separate what’s real from what’s not. “That’s—I’m glad you’re thinking about your future,” I manage. “I mean, I want those things for you too, if that’s what you want. But for now, you have to see a therapist. Someone else, if you don’t like her. Money doesn’t come into it. We’ll be fine, we’ll manage.”
“You’ve spent so much on me already,” she presses on. “All those clothes, new furniture, and now a phone. And if I ever do catch up enough to get into college—I don’t know what college costs, but I doubt there are special scholarships for kidnapped girls.”
The word scholarships makes me think of something. “The Julie Fund,” I say.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“The public donation fund in your name. It’s how we paid for the billboards and the reward money and—everything else.” We did? Tom, the accountant, did. He handled everything, while I—who knows what I was doing. I can barely remember the days, weeks, months. “There was a sum put aside for ransom. We were going to use it to set up a scholarship in your name if—” I can’t finish.
“Can’t we use it now?” she says. “I mean, I’m back.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I say, groping through hazy memories for the details. “There are restrictions to what public donations can be used for, and somebody who’s not in the family has to be in charge of it. Tom and I can’t even make a withdrawal without getting in touch with the fund administrator.”