It didn’t take long to get to Palm Springs since there wasn’t traffic. I kept the radio off the whole drive and considered my life: Was I in love with Annette? When she moved her hips just a little, like she was bumping into an imaginary line, I wanted to laugh and shake her at the same time. Annette, Annette, I said her name when I jacked off, and I could hear her taunting, Nice Boy, Nice Boy. Jim slipped into my mind—his noises from when I lay behind the couch, but I quickly extinguished the memory.
Before I got to her hotel, I stopped at a Ralphs supermarket. She had explained her plan over the phone. It was five in the morning and the people working looked tired, probably coming off their night shifts. I went to the meat department and selected an especially raw and bloody piece of top sirloin. The checkout woman pointed out in good faith that the expiration day was today, but I assured her that it didn’t matter.
Annette waited in the hotel lobby, barefoot, a toe ring on the middle toe of her right foot, not wearing her nightgown as I’d imagined, but a yellow sundress. The only signs of her distress were her unruly hair and her puffy eyes. She was relieved when she saw me, like a lost kid who suddenly found her mom at the mall, and she ran to me and hugged me.
“We don’t have much time,” she whispered, smelling of cigarettes and Allure. “Bill will wake soon.”
The coffee in the lobby was percolating and the management had set out a pink box of doughnuts. She motioned for me to follow, and then led me by my hand inside a darkened women’s restroom, locking the door behind us. We were so close—her breast against my arm and her mouth near my ear. She passed her lips over mine, tasting of alcohol and cigarettes. I wanted her then, and I pulled her against me, knowing she felt my hard-on against her thigh. She stayed like that for a couple of seconds before she pushed away, turning on the light switch.
“Let us take care of business,” she said, her eyes passing over mine. It was a knowing look, reminding me of the way she smoked cigarettes.
She lifted a piece of cloth from beneath the paper towels and wadded toilet paper in a trash can, handing it to me like a baby. The cloth was as soft as the nightgown we’d picked out, and like the pansy I feared myself to be, I set it against my cheek.
“I wish I’d made you bleed,” I said, lowering the cloth from my cheek and balling it in my fist.
She looked confused.
“You think I’m like Jim,” I said, my throat tightening.
She stared at me for a long moment, as if willingly abandoning her own troubles. She opened her mouth to speak, reconsidered. She shook her head, eyes firmly on me. “I think,” she said slowly, pausing with deliberation between each word, “that you are you.”
A rush of gratitude spread through me and I felt like crying, but instead I took the top sirloin from the paper bag. I opened a corner of the wrap where the blood had pooled, letting it dribble on the cloth.
“Some girls get sewn up down there,” she said dreamily.
“Tell me when,” I said, like I was delivering pepper to a salad.
“Stop!”
“Are you sure that’s enough?”—a Rorschach-like smear.
“Yes, yes. I don’t want to be too much good.”
Bill’s parents had given her a wooden box—the size of a birdhouse—to put the cloth in, and she folded it and set it inside. I dropped the top sirloin in the bathroom trash can and it made a loud slap and clank.
We said our goodbyes in the hotel lobby. The sun was already bright and I was sure she would have a good time in the desert. The mountains looked so near it was like you could touch them. I imagined Bill and Annette would lie by the pool all day.
It would be a long night at Shark Island without her. And I knew she planned on quitting soon since Bill didn’t want her to work. The drive home I kept the radio off. I thought about how customers saw Jim as refined and clever, but how I knew him to be unhappy and cynical. Jim and I were meant to suffer, I decided. We both knew it, but I’d been blaming him. We were similar but I would quit my job. If I didn’t, I might end up a professional scavenger, in limbo between the haves and have-nots, pretending to adore the haves while hating them, a fate that killed me even in the imagining.
Annette was a whole other thing: the more I thought about her, the less I understood, and the harder I tried to understand, the more tightly I held on, the less I could appreciate. The wind picked up and the Impala shook. Out the car window, the freeway shrubs trembled. And I thought about her last words to me. “Thank you for helping me, Jonathon Harold Pearl the third,” she’d said, swiping hair from her sad eyes. It had surprised me that she knew my full name, and it continued to whirl inside me, lit up with her accent, declaring itself a person—complex and unmoored—and hopeful for the first time in a long while.
Holloway’s: Part Two
ROSIE STUDIES HER REFLECTION in the veined mirror behind the cappuccino machine. She stands near the bar of Holloway’s. An hour before closing. Yawns: pale and flat-faced, mouth agape, eyes squinting. She wears a white cap, puffy skirt with a small lacy apron, thick red stockings, and black clogs: a peasant woman serving royalty. In profile, her nose angles satisfactorily and she appreciates the way her dark eyes are soulful in contrast to her pale skin, but her reflection serves as shameful confirmation. A voice nags at her. You fucked so many men, the voice says. Trying to get attention and love. You’re disgusting, filthy. Your family hates you. You can’t ever tell them who you really are.
No, no, no way: she can’t ever tell. Most times, she came to in a sickened bafflement. Who is this man? Where am I? And then there was her dad’s golf friend: she recognized him at a bar, they were both drunk, he was in the middle of a divorce; they went to his apartment near Fashion Island, he talked about his son; and then they were on his couch, kissing, kissing; that was fine, but then her hair was in his fist, and she was encouraging him, taunting him; it ended with him horrified and embarrassed, practically weeping, even when she told him that it was her fault, that she would never tell anyone. His friendship with her dad obliterated, no more golf. But that got her to quit drinking, seventeen days sober, as shaky and vulnerable as a newly hatched chick; she’s not sure about this life-without-drinking thing. Less than three months to her twenty-first birthday.
She turns to face the dining area. Fourteen tables surrounded by pale flesh-colored walls, large gilt-framed mirrors, mounted animal heads, and a chandelier made entirely of crisscrossing antlers. Holloway’s has recently been redecorated, and along with the renovation came “fresh and flirty” uniforms. Near the deer head is an unflattering portrait of Bacchus, god of wine and pleasure, but the waitresses joke that it’s a portrait of Julie Anne, boss and manager, a woman in her midsixties with rolling fat on her thighs and a double chin. There used to be another portrait in its place, but Rosie never saw it.
The customers are mostly men: cavalier, entitled, flirtatious. But the tips are fat, the men trying to impress one another. Julie Anne oversees the French Provencal kitchen, claiming to be the inspired chef, but anyone who works for her knows that the real genius is a cantankerous, hard-working Guatemalan who, hunkered in the small kitchen and sweating over the stove, rarely sees the light of day. One table is occupied in the corner, two men engaged in a quiet conversation, probably about real estate. She tried to pour the large one with the argyle socks more ice water so she could get a glimpse at the tip (seven dollars), and he set his thick hand over his water glass without looking at her.
She turns back to the dining area, runs her hand along the marble countertop of the bar, fingers grazing glass salt and pepper shakers that need to be refilled before her shift ends. The hard texture of the objects makes her feel vaguely connected to a larger definable reality.
Kat gave her the go-ahead to clear the tables even if Holloway’s doesn’t technically close until five. The ice machine behind a large bookcase obscures Kat from customers, but Rosie stands at such an angle that she can see her leaning against it. The bookcase is filled with leather-b
ound classics and books with French titles. Fakes: when opened, the pages are blank. Is she the only one who has tried to read them? Julie Anne has taped the specials of the day and other notes of interest on the ice machine. One is a reminder to employees—No Laughing. It Disturbs the Customers. The other is an advertisement for the new exclusive Porsche. Julie Anne highlighted the amount, and, in a striking display of passive aggressiveness, scribbled in pen—Start Saving Your Tips!
Kat has seniority and consequently lighter side-work. Somewhere in her late thirties, she’s by far the oldest waitress; she used to man the snack bar along the ninth green of the nearby golf course, but she can make more money as a waitress, and Julie Anne is giving her a chance. Even in repose, she looks alert, in case she needs to simulate productivity. She eats from the dirty dishes stacked in a tray—all the waitresses eat from the leftovers—and she uses her fingers to lift a pork chop, nibbling close to its bone. Her peasant server costume looks disobedient, breasts jiggling from the top, slightly askew, as if she wears pajamas rather than a uniform. She looks at Rosie as she eats, but her eyes are impenetrable.
Julie Anne is waiting for a legitimate reason to fire Kat, not only to appease the other waitresses who dislike her, but because Julie Anne doesn’t like her either. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll end up like Kat, hustling for money beyond their twenties, or maybe it’s that Kat doesn’t even try to be cheerful. Her smiles are sullen and quick to pass and two prominent customers have complained that she’s morose. Dark eyeliner outlines her brown eyes, and Julie Anne tells her to soften her look, but even when she softens her look, she looks hard.
Kat doesn’t chatter the way they do, and she never asks Rosie questions, prying in the way the others do. Kat doesn’t care, and Rosie likes that she doesn’t care. Whenever she walks with Kat to their parked cars after work, Kat pulls on the jacket she wears after every shift: dark blue with a hood. She says a sudden, quiet bye—turns and she’s gone—walking with down-turned shoulders, to her dull red Volvo station wagon.
“I’m back!” Jennifer returns from her break, the kitchen doors flap behind her. She’s twenty-one, has worked at Holloway’s since her late teens, and she likes to talk about herself. Tall and thin, her blue eyes carry a perpetual look of astonishment, as if to say, Can you believe it? Pleasantly and purposefully naïve and Julie Anne’s favorite, she’s finishing her degrees in sports medicine and psychology. She’s made good decisions and her path is clear and direct. Standing next to Rosie, her eyes surreptitiously watch herself in the veined mirror as she talks.
Rosie tilts her head back and gazes upwards for a long second, but it makes her dizzy, the ceiling uncommonly high with an ornate mural of naked cherubs playing flutes and harps, their ambiguous genitals veiled by wisps of ribbons and clouds. She wishes she could stuff cotton in her ears, anything to mute Jennifer and the repeating soundtrack of Enya, opera, and Edith Piaf.
Jennifer discusses her life situation: whether to marry a man she’s not sure she’s in love with. She loves him, don’t get her wrong, but sometimes she can’t stand him. She’s worried about her sudden loss of sexual appetite after a prolonged weekend where she was a bridesmaid to her best friend and she had to manage the demands of her boyfriend as well. He’s an engineer and makes over one hundred thousand dollars a year. She loves him, don’t get her wrong.
Rosie often worries that she will go insane, and she thinks about it now. This fear is mixed with her anxiety about death, which feeds into an ever-present and hyper-sensory awareness concerning her body’s nuances, down to the tumorlike knob in her left breast where the underwire in her bra lies; the bump waxes and wanes according to her menstrual cycle. Taking a “temporary hiatus” from college and financially independent from her family (to some extent by choice), she pays for car insurance, health insurance that does her no good unless she’s struck with a terminal illness or involved in a catastrophic accident, and car repairs when she doesn’t give a shit about her car: she took the bus to work this morning because it wouldn’t start again. She consumes money and makes money, consumes it and makes it and makes it and consumes it. What kind of life is that? Money is confusing, especially now that she doesn’t have as much of it.
She wonders how she will function this day, the next, and all the days that follow. When she can’t sleep, she sits in the closet in her small musty room that is a converted garage that she rents. She cries and thinks about cutting her arm with her nail file, even with her own fingernails, or drinking the bottle of Smirnoff the landlady stores in the freezer, but she just sits and cries for a long time until the urges pass.
She moves her gaze so that the Bacchus portrait is hidden then released, hidden then released, behind the bookcase of wordless books. A crown of thorny flowers wraps around Bacchus’s thick, curly hair, his bowlegged stance reckless. A mix between an infant and an old man, his expression is belligerent, his loincloth more like a soiled, baggy diaper.
“Mr. Vanderkemp is coming for lunch tomorrow,” Jennifer says, as if she’s giving a warning, and she makes an expression like she smells something foul. “He’s really old and he reeks like a fart. Julie Anne brings him to lunch once a year on his birthday because he’s loaded. You know, The Vanderkemps. Don’t tell Julie Anne I told you, but he owns this restaurant. She’s been trying to get him to sign it over. He had a stroke or something. He’s a total perv.”
“Hey, Rosie,” Kat says from the ice machine, interrupting. “Last night I dreamed about you.” She holds the L of her pork chop. A pause. The ice machine rattles and drops ice. Her eyes look bold and shy at the same time and she sets the pork chop gently amongst the other remains in the tray. “In my dream you said, ‘He used me like toilet paper to wipe his ass. And then he flushed me.’ You were so hurt. Then I thought about it—dreamed about it—more. Whoever it was fucked you more than once. You’re no one-night stand.”
Kat has never spoken this extensively. Rosie feels heat in her cheeks, but there’s a smile playing at her lips. Someone has finally said something real, challenged her. Kat gratifies her in a beguiling and direct way.
“That’s horrible,” Jennifer says, mouth parted.
Rosie doesn’t say anything, but she wants to talk to Kat privately, ask her questions, the first one being, How did you know?
The kitchen doors swing with a flap and it’s Julie Anne. She rarely works, but when she’s at the restaurant, she sneaks up on the waitresses, tries to catch them eating or talking. Rosie turns to clean the cappuccino machine, body tense and alert, and from the corner of her eye she sees Kat wiping the ice machine with a rag. Tap tap tap. Julie Anne’s high heels hit the marble floor and come closer.
“I just got off break,” Jennifer says, cleared from culpability.
Julie Anne’s fingers squeeze Rosie’s shoulder. “What’s this?” Her mouth is a blur of red and she wears a shiny blond wig. Her eyes narrow in the direction of the glass salt and pepper shakers and the ceramic sugar decanters. She’s always putting her hands on the customers and waitresses—touching, patting, squeezing—going from table to table. Her blouse and skirt are maroon-colored silk, the blouse sheer enough to reveal a lacy camisole beneath, and she wears high-heeled leather boots. She’s perpetually dieting—losing and gaining the same ten pounds.
“I feel like a babysitter,” she says. “Why have the tables been cleared when it’s only”—she looks at the face of her diamond-studded Rolex—“four-thirteen?”
Little fingers of nervousness play at Rosie’s throat. Kat’s fault. Kat will be fired. Julie Anne smells like lilacs and pepper—new perfume?—and it makes the place behind her eyes and nose tickle. “It was slow,” she says, glancing at Kat wiping the ice machine, skirt swishing.
“Why are you looking at her?” Julie Anne asks.
“I wanted to save you money by having us clock out early,” she says, making sure not to look at Kat. “It’s my fault.”
Julie Anne lets out an aggrieved sigh and her mouth stays open. The
men from the corner table look over. She fidgets with her diamond clip-on earring. Takes it off, rubs her earlobe. “You should know better,” she says.
“I’m sorry; it won’t happen again.” She once heard that if you look at a person’s forehead, it seems like you’re looking them in the eyes. She makes her expression apologetic, but there’s a fist of defiance in her stomach.
“Our customers expect the best,” Julie Anne says, tucking wig hair behind her ear, “which means, we have to give our best.”
Kat has turned and her eyes meet Rosie’s with an acknowledgment. Julie Anne notices. “Ladies,” she says, “ladies, ladies. Such pretty girls.” She repositions her earring. “I’m curious, Kat,” she says. “Do you like your job? Or do you want to go back to your hot dog stand?”
Kat holds the rag with both hands in front of her lap.
“Unlike Rosie and Jennifer, you’re too old,” Julie Anne says, “to perform lap dances.”
“I want to keep my job,” Kat says.
“I saw on a TV show,” Julie Anne says, putting sweeteners into a ceramic sugar decanter, “that prostitutes and exotic dancers get their names by combining their first pet’s name and a remembered childhood street name.” She pauses for effect, sets the decanter down. A smile. “That makes me Mandy Vista Real.” She laughs—it sounds like ho, ho, ho. Rosie feels herself smiling, and Jennifer is laughing, but Kat is quiet.
“I’m Fuzzy Marguerite,” Jennifer says, excited.
“Perfect,” Julie Anne says. She stares at Rosie in a bright-eyed way. “A dear friend of mine is dining with me tomorrow, a party of five,” she says. “Rosie will be our waitress. Jennifer, you may leave.”
Jennifer looks unsure, as if her good fortune might dissipate, but she grabs her purse from under the bar and makes it all the way out the door.
“Tomorrow’s lunch,” Julie Anne says, “is very important. I want you at your best. My friend is old, he’s a difficult man and sometimes says things he shouldn’t.”
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