The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe

by Hannah Moskowitz

  Melody, of Melody and Diana fame, is our newest dancer. A few years ago, she found out what we pay and then applied the second she turned eighteen. She’s already here when I show up that morning, even though we don’t open until one on Saturdays, sitting on the reception desk in her street clothes. “Where’d you go last night?” she says. Her curly hair is loose and wild down her back, and her long, rake-in-the-tips legs are crossed over each other.

  “Taxi service.”

  “I heard Ivy slept with a high schooler.”

  “Mm-hmm. But over the age of consent.” I checked last night, thinking maybe it’d be illegal so I could scare Ivy into kicking Dot out. No such luck.

  “I didn’t even sleep with high schoolers when I was in high school,” Melody says.

  “That’s a depressing statement in a number of ways,” I say.

  “Hmm. Does it help to clarify that it’s because I wasn’t sleeping with anyone?”

  “Ah, now you’re speaking my language.”

  She clicks her tongue. “We have got to get you laid, Andie. How long has it been?”

  It’s starting to feel like the people in my life have some sort of financial stake in how long I’ll keep my legs closed. “Decades,” I say. “Is Hailey coming in?” Our front desk worker. Not the most reliable, but our staff manager is a coward about firing people. And is me.

  “Uh, she was texting me this morning complaining about how hungover she is, so I would be surprised if she shows up.”

  “Great.”

  “I think Max was looking for you.”

  I head past the bar and the small stage—the main stage is around the other side, where the booths are bigger and the shows are more elaborate, but the small stage is more casual and low-key and some people prefer just to sip their drink and hang out—back to where my brother’s office is. He’s wearing a blue shirt a lot like the one Ivy stole this morning, which I decide not to mention to him. It looked better on her, but it’s not really a fair fight. Max looks like me but with short hair, which is unfortunate for one of us, and I choose not to think too hard about which.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Do you have kitchen inventory from last week?” he says.

  “I don’t, but I will. Is Catherine here?”

  He nods. “In the other office. Interviewing a new girl.”

  “We don’t need a new girl. We can’t pay a new girl.”

  “We always need new girls,” he says with a sigh, moving to a new bit of paperwork in the stack in front of him.

  “I need to see if she can spare anyone today,” I say. “I don’t think Hailey’s coming.”

  “I cannot put someone at the front desk again when they’re supposed to be dancing,” he says. “They will mutiny.” You still get a share of the tips working the front desk, but you lose the opportunity for stuff like private dances, which is where a lot of our workers earn a decent chunk of their nightly take-homes.

  “I need someone at the front,” I say.

  He gives me a look, and yeah, I’m sure it’s a big mystery how this is going to end up resolved.

  “I’m out of here at six,” I tell him. “Unless you want to pay me overtime, find someone else for the night shift.”

  He waves me out of his office. Charming guy, my big brother.

  It’s not like it’s my first time doing intake, and it’s not exactly challenging work. You sit there, collect the cover charge, point toward the bar or the main stage, tip off security if anyone looks like they might be trouble. You have to deal with assholes who think they have a shot of seeing you naked just because you’re a woman inside the club, but honestly I’d prefer they get the record set straight on that, with me, before they go off and try to harass our bartender or the servers. I’ve got my brother here and many, many security guards. I’m not scared.

  And honestly, we very rarely get any sort of significant trouble here. Like I said: it’s not that kind of place. Cardboard palm trees. The real demanding patrons are at the charmingly named Girl Dungeon a few blocks over, not at Davina’s with our bright-pink walls and Wednesday night specials on Slippery Nipples.

  Still, if I’m going to get a share of the tips tonight, I need to bring in what I can, so I go back to the dressing room to get ready with the dancers before we open. Catherine, my sister-in-law, comes over and hands me her lipstick without a word.

  “How’d the interview go?” I say, quietly so the other girls won’t hear.

  “She was experienced and amazing, so I think she’s probably going somewhere else.”

  “Nobody pays what we do,” I say.

  “Trust me, I saw her. We can’t compete with the tips she’d get at a full-nude place.”

  “Don’t think about it,” I say. “It” meaning: how much more money we could make here if our dancers bared all.

  “Yeah. I try not to.” She looks tired.

  I have to take my post at the front desk pretty soon after that, so I sit down and put my feet out and get comfortable. I stopped at the library on the way here, thank God, so I actually don’t mind sitting here as much as I usually do, especially since early afternoon isn’t exactly our busiest hour. I smile and take the cover charge from the occasional customer and, besides that, dive into a new release from my favorite author, Ella Gennesy. She does pretty much the same thing with every book and I love it. Wrong-side-of-the-tracks heroine meets bored rich boy, sometimes the other way around. There’s banter and electricity. There’s some big misunderstanding. And everything works out perfectly at the end.

  I know I should branch out, but also…why? What reality is better to lose yourself in than this one?

  I get a text from Ivy at around three. So I’m done with the fire inspector, she says.

  How’d it go?

  Well…turns out it was arson.

  What??

  i’m fucking with you. it was the gas line. Womp womp.

  I hate you.

  they’re giving me a tiny bit of money. Meet me at Sloan’s after work. Gotta start the rebranding.

  Okay. I hear the chime of the door opening. Gotta go.

  I put my phone down and…okay, this is immediately like something out of one of my books, because one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen has just graced our motley strip club with her presence. She’s white with short blonde hair—natural dark blonde, not like my bleached-out disaster Ivy convinced me would be hot—and she’s wearing black skinny jeans and a dark-blue tank top. Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, I would guess. Freckles on her shoulders.

  She hooks her thumbs in her belt loops on the way over to me. “Um…hi,” she says.

  I pull my bottom lip between my teeth. “How can I help you?”

  She flashes me a half second of very, very beautiful smile. “Do you guys do, like…events?”

  “We do! Our specialty.” Trick of the trade: anything a customer asks for that we can in any way toss together is our specialty. Though our parties are genuinely kind of great.

  “Okay. My best friend from high school is getting married and I’m the maid of honor, so…apparently it’s my job to set these things up. Is there someone I need to talk to about that?”

  “There is, and it’s me.”

  Her eyes glimmer. “Fantastic.”

  “Let me pull out a pricing sheet for you, okay?” I duck under the counter and root around in our disorganized file cabinet. When I finally find our rate sheet and straighten back up, the girl seems even less comfortable than she did before. A few of our dancers are walking from one stage to the other, and she’s trying to look casual about shielding her eyes like they’re an eclipse, but you can only look so casual about being afraid of strippers.

  “I’m guessing this isn’t your favorite maid-of-honor duty?” I say, handing her the sheet.

  There’s that smile agai
n. “Sorry.”

  “Nah, it’s okay. Naked ladies aren’t everyone’s thing.”

  She laughs. “No, I’m a big fan of naked ladies,” she says. There it is. You learn ways to fish.

  “Meeeeee too,” I say. You also learn to do that.

  She looks at me for a second too long, and God, right now I’m glad I let the strippers do my makeup. After a moment, she says, “I don’t know, I know it doesn’t make me cool or whatever, but I just take this stuff really…seriously. I don’t mean any disrespect at all to the people who do it or anything like that. I know it’s just a job.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “But for me, it’s…” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I take sex very seriously.”

  Could you demonstrate that for me, please? I swallow. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “No,” she says, watching me. “I don’t think so, either.”

  …

  “Tell me you fucked her,” Ivy says.

  “Yes. Right there on the reception desk.”

  She sighs, rooting through a rack of clothes. “I hate that I know you’re being sarcastic.”

  We’re at Sloan’s, this hole-in-the-wall thrift store Ivy discovered years ago. We both get all our clothes from here now, and somehow she always looks like she walked off a runway and I always look like I walked out of…a hole-in-the-wall thrift store, but hey, there’s a reason she’s the one in fashion.

  Ivy’s always had an eye for this kind of thing, even when we were kids. She used to cut up her dolls’ outfits and make these avant-garde dresses, and she was always wearing ties as belts or knotting her hair up in scarves or turning her old comforter into a circle skirt, stuff like that. In middle school, she got her first sewing machine and filled all her notebooks with sketches of dresses and shoes. But fabric’s expensive, and Ivy likes stability too much to go into something artsy. Hence applying for fashion merchandising at URI instead of design at RISD.

  “I gave her my number, at least,” I say.

  “Christ, what is this, the fifties?”

  I hug the hangers I’m holding to my chest. “She asked for it so smooth on her way out the door. Like she wasn’t even nervous at all.”

  “Why should she be?”

  “Some people get nervous sometimes, Ivy.”

  “Sounds fake.” She holds up a floral dress. “Maybe I should do like a sundresses and cowgirl boots thing. Like Miley Cyrus, post-appropriation.”

  “Sounds a little sweet.”

  “I’m six degrees of separation from every dyke in this town. No one’s mistaking me for sweet.”

  “Sex-peration.”

  “Cute.” Ivy looks at the tag on the dress and puts it back. “So is she hot?”

  “Very. Kind of a butch-lite librarian vibe. It’s really gay.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth,” Ivy tries, like it’s a new and unfamiliar name. “What’s she like? This shirt would be cute on you.”

  “I don’t really know; I only talked to her for a minute.”

  “Well, maybe she’ll call and you can ask her all sorts of fun getting-to-know-you questions. If you were a rock, what rock would you be?”

  “She texted me already. I don’t know if I’m going to answer.”

  Ivy looks at me like I’m speaking another language. “Why wouldn’t you answer?”

  “I don’t know. She was wearing, like, jewelry. Like stuff that costs money. And her hair looks like it was cut by someone named Gustav who smells like pine cones and gives sage life advice. Not Bonnie at the Hair Cuttery.”

  “Bonnie does good shit,” Ivy says. “And now Elizabeth just sounds old.”

  “Twenty-two.” I took her license for the party registration.

  Ivy roots around a shoe rack. “Hmm. Old.”

  “Well, we can’t all be cradle-robbing.”

  “What?”

  “Last night…?” Christ, imagine having so much sex that you have to be reminded the next day.

  “Oh. She’s seventeen. Two years apart isn’t exactly an exciting scandal. Your mom is how many years older than your dad, again?”

  I nearly choke on nothing. “Did you just compare your one-night stand to my parents?”

  She shudders but then says, “I’m just trying to speak your heteronormative hopeless romantic language.” Ivy thinks I need to read more books about lesbians. She’s probably right.

  “Mm, I appreciate the sacrifice.”

  “I’m going to need to rinse my mouth out now. And not in a fun way.”

  I try not to laugh. “Gross.”

  She holds up a pair of pants. “These are hot. Wear these on your date.”

  “Yeah, if I had your legs, maybe.”

  “Your legs are gorgeous.”

  I look away so she won’t see my reaction to that. I clear my throat. “And I told you, I don’t know if I’m going to go for it. She hates strip clubs. I’m, like, genetically part strip club.”

  “She came to Dav’s and told you she hates strip clubs?”

  “No, she didn’t…she didn’t say she hates them, she said she thinks they, like…trivialize stuff.”

  “What’s stuff?” she says, looking inside a pair of boots.

  “Sex, I guess. Or, you know. Sex-related stuff.”

  “Just generally?”

  “Yeah, she thinks it should be treated with more, like, respect.”

  Ivy squints at me.

  And I squirm. “What?”

  “I mean…it’s sex. The thing where you’re sweaty and jiggly and making gross squishy noises and rubbing up against another sweaty and jiggly person, right? I’m just making sure I have our topic right here.”

  “I thought you liked sex. Isn’t that your whole deal?”

  She rolls her eyes. “I love sex, obviously. And loving it required seeing through all the bullshit that it’s something huge and significant and meaningful. It’s just fun. Anyone who says sex is supposed to be serious is trying way too goddamn hard. And this is why people get their little hearts broken. They buy into this cultural myth that sex is anything more than doing something that feels fucking great for a little while.”

  “They say it’s better when there are feelings involved,” I say, not that either of us has any idea. I’ve slept with all of two girls ever, and both were so long ago that who knows if that’s even how people are having sex nowadays, and Ivy, of course, has never had a feeling she couldn’t shake off.

  “Bullshit,” she says, predictably. “Like, okay, take me and what’s-her-name last night. That was some fucking phenomenal sex.”

  It’s been a while since I’ve heard Ivy describe her one-night stands with anything more than a shrug and a dirty remark, so that’s kind of weird. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, she’s got a future. But it’s, you know, not with me, because we didn’t make up any shit or pretend it meant something it didn’t. We had a really, really great time, and now we’ve both learned a few new tricks to bring on to other people. Her more than me, of course. But no hurt feelings, no sad little heartbreak, just a good time. Because I’m not buying into Miss Elizabeth’s little myth that sex is some sacred act.”

  “You learned tricks from a virgin.”

  “I’m saying. She’s got promise. Come on, I want to try this stuff on.”

  We haul our load to the fitting rooms, tell the bored girl who’s very much not watching for shoplifters that we’re sisters, as if she cares, and go into a room together. Ivy pulls her shirt over her head and I try not to watch the way her waist stretches, her ribs rippling like piano keys.

  “Try the pants first,” she says. She pulls a dress over her head, this light-blue cotton thing with sunflowers all over it. I’d look like I was wearing a tablecloth, but Ivy, of
course, instantly looks Parisian chic.

  I shimmy myself into these too-tight pants while Ivy messes with the sash on her dress. “It’s pretty,” I say.

  “Can you zip me?”

  “Yeah.” I move behind her and start working the zipper up. It’s old and feels delicate, so I go slowly. She smells faintly like her perfume from last night, and her hair falls down to her bra strap in those perfect dark-red waves.

  It’s just not fucking fair.

  “You think I can do it?” she says quietly, after a minute.

  “Do what?”

  I feel her take a deep breath under my hand. “Replace everything,” she says. “Start over.”

  I finish zipping her and wrap my arms around her waist, resting my chin on her shoulder and looking at our reflection in the mirror. She’s stunning, so much more stunning in these crappy fluorescent lights than I could ever be anywhere. And she’s right here, warm and quiet and smelling like mango. I breathe.

  “Of course,” I say. “You can do anything.”

  She leans her forehead into my cheek. “Not without you,” she says, and I try to memorize the moment.

  “Well, you never have to,” I say.

  She turns her face to mine and kisses me, softly, and I cling on for a lot longer than I usually do. I don’t know. Glimpses of vulnerability from her just do something to me. Give me some kind of pointless hope, even after this long.

  She pulls away eventually, laughing a little. “What are you doing?”

  God. “What? Nothing.”

  She studies me for just a second, then shifts away from me and twirls a little in front of the mirror. “It’s cute. I’m going to get it. Even though it’s a summer dress.”

  “Fuck the rules.”

  “Fuck the rules. And you have to get those pants. And wear them on your date.”

  I crane my neck to look at my ass in the mirror. “I don’t know.”

  “Your vagina’s going to go on strike soon if you don’t use it.”

  “I don’t think I’d notice.”