“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.” I pushed the song and the skin-crawling feeling and the bloodied tooth from my mind, shook my hair from its ponytail, and we stepped inside, the dim of the casino familiar and cool.
LILY
WHEN I WOKE BEFORE MY first day at the spa, my throat felt strained, as though I’d been trying to scream in my sleep. My heart zinged, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I tried to focus on the details of my bedroom, the inventory of familiar things: my old bookcases along the wall, lined with paperbacks. The watercolors I’d done in high school hung over the desk. The red ladder-backed chair that had once belonged to my great aunt. I could hear my mother moving through the kitchen below me, the whistle of the teakettle and the creak of her opening cabinets. I rose and sipped a glass of water. After a few minutes my breathing slowed to normal, but heat lingered in the tips of my ears, my cheeks.
I got in the shower and lowered myself to the floor, rested my head on my knees. I didn’t have much time to spare—it was a twenty-minute drive from Margate through Ventnor to Atlantic City—but I closed my eyes and let the water hit the back of my neck. I had been the same way after my dad died: anxious and jumpy during the day, grinding my teeth in my sleep. It took all my strength to stand up and lather shampoo in my hair.
After the shower I washed my face, brushed mascara on my eyelashes, and a memory surged up: the last time Steffanie and I got ready together to get into the club at the Taj Mahal. Sixteen years old, taking swigs from a Poland Spring bottle filled with Stoli while her parents packed for a weekend trip to Cape May. I shook my head. Over the past few weeks my brain had gone vulnerable, all of my worst memories coming to the surface. I hadn’t thought of that night in years. As I swished blush over my cheeks in a lazy arc, I remembered how painstaking we had been with our makeup and clothes that night. Then Steffanie’s face a few hours later, bloodless, with black makeup smeared around her eyes. Her legs sticking out from underneath the bathroom stall, and how I knew they were hers because it had been field hockey preseason and I could make out the tan lines from our shin guards, pale shins and browned knees. I pushed the image away and pulled a brush through my hair.
You are only pretending, I told myself as I stepped into my pants, slid into the cheap black blazer I’d found at T.J.Maxx. Pretending to live at home for a few months. Pretending to care about this receptionist job. Pretending that New York and everyone in it didn’t exist for now. Yet before I left I slipped on a little freshwater pearl bracelet that my grandmother had given me when I graduated from high school. I hadn’t worn it in years but maybe it would bring me luck. Even if I was just pretending, I had, for better or worse, inherited my father’s penchant for superstition, and with the way my thoughts were tilting, I needed all the help I could get.
* * *
I EXPECTED to see Emily at the desk again, but instead I was greeted by Deidre. She told me she usually took it upon herself to oversee training personally, as she liked to instill the spa’s values into new hires. Though the things I learned from her couldn’t be called values, exactly: more like dictums, or threats. Never cross your arms in front of your chest. Never say “hi” instead of “hello.” Never say “you’re welcome”—it’s always “my pleasure.”
At the spa, there was no hint that beauty could be dangerous, could be seen as a prize ripe to be seized. Instead, as Deidre toured me through the space, I saw that everything about the spa had the air of the sacrosanct, of mystery and ritual. The wall of little glass vials of serums, which were dispensed with droppers, like medicine or poison. The sauna, with its cedary smell and hard, bare benches that seemed built for prayer or penitence, the vaguely threatening glow of the red coals in the corner. The bar of teas and glass jars full of trail mix, banana chips round and pale, like communion wafers.
We passed the ladies’ restrooms on the way through the women’s lounge, and I found that I couldn’t escape the thoughts of Steffanie, even here. Her attacker had dropped her underwear into the toilet bowl, a bloom of pink lace under a murk of waterlogged toilet paper. Earlier that night we’d felt admitted to a new kind of existence, as the bouncers eyed our obviously fake IDs and still slashed Xs on the backs of our hands with black marker, and when the bartender poured us each a double shot of rum for the price of a single. The memory made me dig my nails into my palms. The world was always conspiring to make young women vulnerable while labeling it as “fun.” Made it seem like we were in control, like we were making all the choices, and then it was our fault when things went wrong. Us and our short skirts, our makeup, our taste for rum, for liking the things we were told to like, wanting what we were taught to want.
Deidre led me out to the lobby again, and I was relieved to see that Emily had arrived. “Lily, I’ll leave you in Emily’s capable hands for the time being. She will walk you through check-in and scheduling procedures. At two o’clock please come to my office, and we will review the material from the training manual, including etiquette, preferred language, and wardrobe expectations. And please, for your next shift take care to apply some powder.”
“I will,” I said, flushing as I brought my fingers to my forehead. Emily and I were silent as we listened to Deidre click click click away.
“So, you’re here after all. Brave of you to join us. How’s your morning with the Skeletor been?”
“Oh. She’s not that bad …” I was already thinking of Deidre’s bony wrists, how her upper arm was so narrow I could probably close my pointer finger and thumb around it.
“Bullshit,” she said, smiling. Her real smile, as far as I could tell, was slyer than the one she saved for Deidre. Mouth closed, eyes crinkled, a slight wrinkling of her nose. “If by not bad you mean totally sadistic, sure. Anyway, if I’m supposed to show you check-in, let’s get to it.” She tapped a button on the keyboard in front of her, and the computer screen came to life. “Our software is from like 1994, so it sucks. This company invests everything in product research and marketing so they probably won’t upgrade during either of our tenures here. For now we will just have to deal. Here’s the check-in screen. Notice anything?”
I did. There was a lot of blank space next to each time slot.
“No one’s coming in today. Mondays are the worst, but we are underbooked in a big way, even on the weekends. I think they should really be focusing on creating a more approachable brand image, attract younger clientele. But what do I know. I’m just chipping away at my BA one lousy class at a time. Anyway, enough about this joint. What’s your deal? You new in town?”
“Sort of. I grew up here, lived in New York for a few years, now I’m back. Living in Margate with my mom.”
“Jesus, why the hell would you come back?”
“Breakup.” I didn’t want to go through the whole story with Emily. She was so self-possessed. I risked becoming her counterpoint: a ridiculous hysteric, babbling about betrayal and performance art. Breakup. The word was so simple that it felt untrue.
“That’s rough. Still should have stayed in the city.”
“It wasn’t … it wasn’t really an option. What about you?”
“From a flyover state. Religious family. Ran away from all that shit, clearly. Went to L.A. when I was eighteen and tried to find work as an actress.”
“Did you ever get any roles?”
“Some soft-core porn, but other than that, nothing. Waited in a lot of lines to try out for Coke commercials.” She drummed her fingers on the counter. “I’m just kidding about the porn, you know. Thought about it but it actually doesn’t pay shit. Not unless you’re willing to let someone fuck you up the ass on camera, and you don’t even get much for that. Oh, and speaking of cameras, you should know that Skeletor is crazy enough to actually review the footage—when she’s not back there in her office watching it live.”
She took me by the shoulders, forced me to pivot, and gave me a little shove.
“There. Memorize this spot right here. If you hold your phone out six inches, the cameras w
on’t be able to see what you are doing, only that you are standing here reaching for something.” She crouched, reached around my knee, swung a cabinet door open. “And here, behind the gift certificate boxes. That’s where you’ll want to stash any contraband. Soda, candy, gum, pills—whatever your jam is.”
“Pills?”
“Hey, whatever gets you through the day. Anyway, you get one free meal in the cafeteria every shift, but they use the same vendor as that prison over in Delmont. That’s all to say you’ll want snacks. But whatever you do, don’t buy a hot dog from that guy with the cart out front. I made that mistake when I was new and I shat my brains out for three days straight.”
The guffaw I let out surprised me. I didn’t recognize it as my own right away—it’d been so long since I’d really laughed. Emily shrugged. “Just trying to tell you what I’ve learned the hard way.”
* * *
AS EMILY went over the phone system I watched as a girl hanging on a man’s arm left the Swim Club and walked toward the main lobby, her limbs loose. She leaned her head on his shoulder like it was too heavy to hold up. When the police questioned me about Steffanie’s attacker, I tried to remember his face and his clothes through the haze of rum, the darkness of the club, and the fog that rolled out of machines, the buzz in my ears from the throb of the bass, but I couldn’t say anything definitive. Had his shirt been gray or blue? His eyes brown or green? I remembered him as an outline: broad shoulders, muscular arms, a paper cutout of a man. I wasn’t surprised that they never found him. I never mentioned to anyone that I had watched her leave the dance floor with him, and when I saw her stumble, I told myself it was only because of her heels. Or that she swayed into his shoulder on purpose. One of those girlish tricks we were always reading about in Cosmo: make him feel needed. I let myself believe that she was in control, that she wanted him to put his arm around her, so that she could have an excuse to get close to him and press against his side.
Steffanie quit the field hockey team after that night, and whenever we passed one another in the halls at school she gave me a look that I could only call pity—like there was something plain and obvious between us that I didn’t understand.
All of it felt tied together—the spa and its rules about how we were allowed to act and look, Steffanie, Ramona. I thought back to the night Ramona showed me her first large-scale paintings, when I was trying to woo her to sign with me as my first client. The one I liked the most was of a woman reclined on a divan. In the background there were bouquets of flowers laced with razor blades, wolves or dogs baring their teeth. The woman’s skin, pale with a blue cast to it, seemed to glow. Her nipples were midnight blue, her belly button cobalt, her pubic hair navy. We talked about what it meant to be a woman, to be looked at all the time, judged and measured and punished in a thousand different ways every day, to feel both undermined and empowered by your body. I thought we had agreed on something. I’d been wrong.
* * *
EMILY WAS teaching me how to process gift certificate sales when I looked up and saw two women making their way toward the spa.
I noticed their hair first as they came around the bend in the hall, the same jarring red on both of them. Not a natural red, but the color you’d get out of a Kool-Aid packet, concentrated and fruity. Ripe. Even from that distance their bodies hummed with want. They had the flashing, attentive eyes of stray dogs, of scavengers. I couldn’t tell right away what they were hungry for. All I knew was that they seemed more intense, more alive, than anyone else around them. Next to them, the other casino patrons seemed as inanimate as furniture: the tripod stances of old men resting on their canes, the woolly-haired women pushing through on their walkers, the ends of the metal legs capped with tennis balls. It was in the way they moved down the long hallway, switching their matching boys’ hips, narrow and square. Their tangled gold necklaces and clanking bracelets. The thick wedges of eyeliner that made them look haughty and exotic and bored, high priestesses displeased by their retinue. Right away I could recognize that part of that magic had to do with sex: their long legs exposed in tiny pairs of denim shorts, their concave midriffs revealed in crop tops, the WonderBra cleavage edged with lace. But they had something else, too, something interior, something the spa was trying to promise people could be found in a bottle of expensive serum or in a series of treatments. It was the particular confidence of knowing who you were and of knowing what you wanted. I recognized it right away because I’d lost it. Or maybe I’d never had it at all.
Emily paused, having felt my attention drift. She must have followed my stare. “Oh God, those two. And on your first day. Well, you better start getting used to this shit.”
“Who are they?” The two redheads flipped their hair, pouted. They clearly relished the attention, even the looks that they got from the women nearby, women wearing terry-cloth visors and pleated khaki shorts cut to the knee. Women who sneered as they passed but then looked down at the paper cones of french fries in their hands with a little less pleasure than before.
“Scam artists, as far as we’re concerned. One of them will try to read you your cards while the other slips products into her purse, or they buy a day pass and try to hustle the few clients we’ve got. You have to keep a close eye on them; they’ll take anything and everything while you’ve got your back turned. Last time they were here the younger one managed to pry the hairdryer off the wall in the ladies’ lounge.”
“How often do they come in?”
“Not as much as they used to. Deidre blacklisted them so we can call security if they refuse to leave. This is the first time they’ve been back since. I think they’ve got another hustle going on. Drugs or prostitution, probably. A few weeks ago I watched the older one flirting with this guy at the Swim Club, kept putting her hand on his leg, laughing at his jokes. Or maybe she stole his wallet.”
I must have looked surprised.
“Oh, come on, didn’t you say you grew up here? That kind of stuff happens all the time.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know that.” But it still gave me the chills to think about it.
From far away the women had looked to be the same age, but I could see through the spa’s door that one of them was older than I had first thought and the other much younger, just a girl.
“Hello, sunshine,” the older one said, greeting Emily. “Long time no see. And look! You’ve got a new friend.”
“Des, this is Lily. And she’s not going to put up with any of your bullshit either, so don’t even try.”
The woman, Des, held out her hand. Up close I could see that her face was caked with makeup that had settled into the lines around her mouth, her eyes. She wore so much mascara that her eyelashes matted together in five distinct spikes. The younger one had wandered over to the magazines arranged on the coffee table. She picked one up, flipped through a few pages, and rubbed a perfume sample on her wrist. When I shook Des’s hand, she clasped her other hand on top of mine and squeezed. It felt strange to be touched with such tenderness and intent by someone I had just met.
“Ooh, pretty!” she said, fingering my bracelet hungrily. I pulled my hand away.
“Okay, seriously, Desmina, beat it,” Emily said. “Deidre is here today, and she won’t hesitate to call security on you. Neither will I, for that matter.”
Desmina turned to me wearing an exaggerated pout. “I’m so glad you’re here. See how mean she is to me? And most of the time we just want to come by for a quick visit, a little chat.” She turned over her shoulder. “Clara, come meet our new friend, Lily.”
The girl looked up from her magazine and stared at me. Her mouth parted a little, and a strange blankness came over her face, like she had been waiting for a bus for a long time or watching a run of late-night infomercials on TV.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“Oh, she’s fine. She gets like this when she’s having a vision, is all.”
“A vision?” I asked. I felt Emily sigh.
“What? Your girlfrien
d here didn’t tell you? She’s doing you and us a disservice. We are the best psychic duo on the East Coast. Ah!” She pointed one long-nailed finger at me. “You are intrigued. I can always tell.” I hated that she was right.
“That doesn’t make you psychic, Desmina,” Emily said, rolling her eyes. “It just means you’re not blind.”
Clara’s face had resumed its normal expression, and she skipped over to the desk, linked her arm with Des’s—they had to be related, but I couldn’t puzzle out how. Mother and daughter? Cousins? With her other arm she wriggled a business card out of the tiny front pocket of her jean shorts. She held it out to me. Clara Voyant, it said. Seer and Fortune Teller.
“Clara’s the psychic, really. I have a different set of talents.”
Emily coughed. “I’ll bet.”
Clara was silent, still staring at me. Nervous, I reached for a canister of pens, straightened them just to have something to do with my hands.
“So, Miss Lily, as a gesture of friendship, what do you say you give us a pass to the spa for the afternoon and in exchange, we’ll read your palm.”
“I’ll do it,” Clara said. She pulled on my wrist and turned my hand over, pinning it to the top of the desk.
“This is insane,” Emily said. “You two don’t leave in the next thirty seconds, I’m calling security. We are a private business, and we don’t need to serve you.”
Clara didn’t look up but stroked my skin with her fingertips so softly that it tickled and I flinched. Both women giggled.
“Ah,” she said, her catlike eyes scrunched in concentration. She pet my palm as though it were wounded. “You are recovering from a broken heart.” I felt my face go hot. I pulled my hand away and crossed my arms behind my back.
Please See Us Page 5