Please See Us
Page 8
She thinks that’s what all these gamblers must be trying to hide from, here in these dark caverns, pulling on levers and spinning their savings away: mortality. No clocks anywhere in sight. Gamblers are the only people she knows who believe the future isn’t the past. Sure, she remembers the statistics: One probability is not dependent on the other. A heads on the last flip of a coin doesn’t increase the odds of tails on the next. A loss could yield to a win on the next spin. But what about here, where the odds are rigged? The odds are always rigged. She hates this place, but here, her thoughts come back to her, her memory feels like a room that’s been tidied up. That thing about the coins, probability—she’d never have remembered that with the baby screaming through the night. Motherhood was nothing like what she had imagined, running her hand over her belly all those months, thumbing through paint swatches for the nursery. She thought there would be softness, joy. Instead there was this new soul who, with all her screaming, insisted she not forget how scary, how terrible it could be to be alive. She started to think about what she could do to silence her. A pillow. A few hard shakes, and she could believe in the illusion of safety again.
When she closes her eyes she can still smell her, powdery and sweet, skin pink from the bath. I’m doing this for her, she told her husband on the pay phone outside of Baltimore. He didn’t understand and she couldn’t bring herself to say it. All those times she thought about how much easier it would have been for everyone if she’d held the baby down under the surface of the water in the bathtub. She could have done it with one hand. She thinks about the girl in the shop again, with her practiced adult voice, the too-smooth assuredness of her gestures, her hands. What had happened to her, that she was working in that dingy little storefront? And those posters she kept seeing all over town, about the missing teenage girl? Were they girls whose mothers had ruined them, or ones who never had a chance because their mothers were like her—too afraid of screwing up to even stick around? It was a feeble gesture, leaving that $10 bill, but for a moment it had made her feel a little lighter. At least she could care for someone’s girl.
A man takes a seat at the other end of the bar. She watches him order a drink and thumb through the cash in his wallet, waits for him to feel her stare. He is probably twenty years older than she is, wears a wedding ring—which, of course, doesn’t mean anything—and the top three buttons of his shirt are undone to expose the glint of a gold chain tangled into a pelt of graying chest hair. He looks up at her and she tilts her head at him, but he breaks away when a woman brushes behind him, takes the seat next to his. She can tell by the tension in the woman’s arm that she’s wrapping a hand around his thigh. She had never felt compelled to touch her husband like that in public, to lay claim. Sometimes, when they were at parties together, she would watch a woman flirt with him—her husband laughing a little too loudly or leaning in a little too close—and would feel like it confirmed something. How easily she would be erased, cut out of the equation. It was useful information, she thought. She stored it up, to make the leaving easier.
If she didn’t find a man for tonight, she still had her credit cards, though she didn’t like the idea of using them, of sending up a little flare: I am here. She sold the car for $750 at a mechanic’s shop on the way into Atlantic City, at a place with a strange tower made of scrap metal and hubcaps in the bare dirt yard. She was distracted, the way the light glinted off the hubcaps while she was trying to negotiate him up to $800. She was sure that a woman in her right mind would have waved the white flag, gone home, asked her husband for forgiveness, asked for help, for pills that would make her mind go right. She could go back and submit to the baby, to the laundry, to the endless diapers and scrubbing the grime between tiles in the bathroom. Instead she booked three nights at Harrah’s and the next week she pawned her wedding ring for a fifth of what it was worth.
She doesn’t know how long the man has been sitting next to her, but when she turns from the couple—the wife is now running her fingers through the man’s chest hair—he’s at her elbow, taking her in. He’s got sun-worn skin, and his eyes are a clear, placid blue, but shadowed by the baseball cap he’s got pulled low, the way so many of the blackjack players wear them. To hide. His eyes flash out from under the brim. Looking at them is like looking at a blue object sunk at the bottom of a glass of water. The contrast is startling, uncomfortable and attractive at once. She feels like he can see all of her—the place where the pawned wedding ring used to be, where she still runs her finger over the bare skin, the bruise on her thigh from where the last man whipped her with the cord from the clothing iron in the hotel room. He drinks a beer and then a club soda but buys her another glass of wine.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
She surprises herself by telling him the truth. McLean, Virginia. It feels good, purifying, this honesty. Like her first fresh breath of air in long time.
“So what are you doing here?”
Maybe it’s the wine, or the dimness of the room, or the puzzling clarity of his eyes, but before she can stop herself she tells him about hearing the baby cry in the middle of the night, how she rose from her bed and stood outside of the nursery for a minute, how she couldn’t make herself go in. Instead she walked past the door, put on a pair of shoes, took her purse down from the hook in the hall, got in the car, and drove away. With each mile, she pictured a length of thread being wound back around a spool, returning. Something being called in. She drove past the coffee shop and the preschool where they had talked about one day sending the baby. She passed the 24-hour Qwik Mart, and then there was a highway ramp spread before her like an offering. That night was daylight savings time, and she was still driving when the hour jumped ahead. It made what she was doing feel more unreal. She was no one, going nowhere. Just a woman in a box of steel and glass, like hundreds of others threaded along the highway, following the glow from her own headlights. Maybe she should have felt terror, or guilt, but she only felt free.
She took a bus from the mechanic to Atlantic City, passing billboards for eighties cover bands, a performance by Frank Sinatra Jr., Donnie and Marie Osmond. There was marsh on either side of the highway, the grass rippling in the breeze like a prairie. A few squat motels, the ones where she now spends her nights when she’s not with a john, or when they need a place to go. When the bus growled into the depot, she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the ocean, so she followed its smell, the brine mixed in with the reek of overflowing garbage cans. She sat in the sand until the sun rose and the sweat began to slide along her spine. The exhilaration had yielded to something else. She felt scraped out, raw, exhausted. Used.
“Tell me more,” he says. They’re in his room. He had stood apart from her on the elevator, three people between them, so that she could only see him in the metal panels of the elevator car. She tried to study his face for what she had seen in the others’—greed, hunger, anger—but there was nothing like that. He knew what she was, but he seemed encouraging, kind. “What was that like?” he says, and a sense of confusion splices through her. Is this what he wants? Is he the kind of man who gets off on playing the hero? For some reason that makes her nervous, too. But she runs her hand over the bruises on her leg and pushes the thought away.
She decides to spare no details, partly because it feels good to talk, and because it seems that this is what he wants, the way the others wanted her to slap them or call them “Daddy” or “sir.” She talks about the first time she slept with a man for money. When her cash from the car and the ring dwindled, she asked one of the cocktail waitresses where she might stay on the cheap. The woman told her that the Trump Plaza had been the cheapest room in town, until it shuttered. Now it’s just the motels over by the marsh. A girl like you doesn’t want to stay there.
No choice, she said.
Well, bring pepper spray. Make sure they give you a room with a door that locks.
She didn’t even make it from the motel office to the room before a man propositione
d her. She didn’t say yes or no, only let him follow her to her door. Pointed to the bedside table until he peeled a few bills from a roll in his pocket. She hadn’t even been with her husband since the baby. The pain made her vision go white. They had sewn her up, and she swore she had come back together crookedly, wrong. She bled, stained the white sheets.
Didn’t tell me you had your fucking period, he said. Slammed a lamp to the ground on his way out.
“It was easier to keep doing it than to avoid it,” she tells the man. She is oddly relieved at being able to unburden herself, but she’s anxious, too. When will they get on with it—the thing he’s brought her here for? Whatever way he’s paid to use her. She’s heard of men who just want to talk, from some of the other girls on the street, but never met one herself. So far she’s only been with the ones who get their money’s worth.
“Don’t you think your daughter deserves to have a mother?” he asks her.
“It’s better this way.” She knows it’s true, but still, her voice cracks. “Today, I went to a psychic, this little shop on the boardwalk near Caesars.” She hears herself laugh a bitter little chuckle. “Not a psychic, really. Just this teenage girl. I wanted to know what she could see about my daughter. If … if … she might forgive me someday. A goddamned psychic. A kid, probably a fake. And even then I was too afraid to hear what she had to say. I’m too afraid to see how bad I’ve ruined everything.”
He steps away from her and pulls a bottle from the mini fridge, disappears into the bathroom and pours it into a glass. She wonders if she’s imagining it: the way his footfall has changed, the work boots stomping away. He returns from the bathroom, holds the glass out to her.
“Have another drink, it will make you feel better.” She thinks for a moment about all of the rules you learn first as a girl: Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know. Keep an eye on your drinks. Don’t dress like you’re asking for it. Don’t get too drunk. But she is so tired of rules. When she found out she was having a daughter, she worried that she would have to instill in her that same vigilance, and what was vigilance but a form of fear? Screw it, she thinks, and swallows half of the glass in a single gulp. She needs this, for the drink to do its loosening work. But still she can’t help it. She doubles over, sobs until she gags. He stands over her—she watches his shadow on the floor.
“You said the Sunset Motel?”
What is it she hears in his voice? Anger? Excitement? She nods. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, or else she’ll start to cry again.
“I’ll take you home.”
She’s failed. She’s not sure she can ask for money, but she’ll need to ask for at least $15 to cover her room. She tries to think of how to say it on the elevator ride down, but the booze has already gone to her head. She feels her stomach rise up into her throat when the elevator drops, and she tries to tally up her drinks—the math doesn’t add up. She feels too drunk for the number of drinks she’s had, even with the way she gulped the last one down. She chalks it up to the sobbing, and the way the sound of her daughter’s screams echoes in her mind.
By the time they are in the parking garage, her vision is fuzzy at the edges. She tries to tell him that something is wrong, but there is a drag on her words when she speaks. He helps her into the car but that is not the right word—help. Help is what she needs, something that feels impossible and very far away. Her words retreat. Her arms go heavy at her sides. Along the road the lit billboards hover over the marsh, ringed in a hazy purple glow. They pass underneath the neon sign for the Sunset Motel and into the darkness. He guides his car around the back of the motel. She wants to tell him that this is not where she needs to go but can only manage a groan.
And then his hands are on her, circling her neck, pressing against her throat. She can’t raise her arms to fight him off or kick her feet. She can’t scream, but the screams in her head are louder now, that three-part wail of her daughter’s that used to make her dig her nails into her palms. Her lungs burn. When the blackness comes, it is a relief that she no longer has to look into his face, his teeth clenched, the pale blue eyes that now glow with rage. The last thing Jane hears is the groan that escapes from between his teeth and the swish of the grass in the breeze.
CLARA
I WORE LILY’S PEARL BRACELET again when I got ready for my date—Des’s word, not mine. As Des curled my hair, I looked at my wrist and pretended I was another kind of girl: One whose desk was stacked with books and brochures for colleges with redbrick buildings. One who sat in cafes with her friends, laughing over iced coffees and slices of cake. A girl who lived a careful life, whose mother kept a bowl of fresh fruit on the counter, whose closets were filled with soft towels and clean white sheets.
“Hey, what’s this?” She reached for my hand, tapped the bracelet.
“From that girl. The new one at the spa.”
Des laughed and I could see the dark fillings in the back of her mouth. Des hadn’t asked about the vision I’d had at the spa, and maybe she had thought I had been faking it, spacing out for show. That was fine with me. I always tried to forget most of what I saw from other people’s lives, but it tended to stick around, bits of memories that lingered in mine like scraps of strange dreams.
“You’re quick as hell, Miss Clara Voyant. I might even say you’ve surpassed your teacher. Take anything else this week you want to let me in on?”
I thought of Julie Zale’s purple bandana. It was in my room, under my pillow. Her uncle probably thought he’d dropped it on the boardwalk, that it had been carried away by the breeze. One more piece of her he had lost.
“Nothing.”
“You bring that bracelet over to Zeg tomorrow, okay? And tell him you won’t take less than fifty. He’s been a real tightwad lately, and we’ve got bills to pay.” I nodded, but that wasn’t a part of my plan.
“Lean closer,” Des said. I waited for her to say something else. To ask if I was still willing to do this, to see if I was okay. She wiped her thumb underneath my eye and pulled a kohl pencil from her pocket. “Up,” she said, and I raised my eyes to the ceiling while she ran the eyeliner back and forth, back and forth, rimming my eyes in black. I could feel tears building up but knew that I’d make a mess of my makeup if I let them fall. I told myself there was only one first time for everything. To think of it as one more con—some idiot wants to spend his money on me? Fine. As Des finished my makeup, I had that same feeling again, the fly, crawling across my chin. I tried to keep still, but I couldn’t stand it and twitched to shake it free.
“What the hell?” Des said. She had drawn a black line down my cheek.
“You didn’t see anything?”
“I saw you freaking out. What do you mean? See what?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She licked her finger and rubbed at the mark on my skin. “I need you to be cool about this, okay? We need this cash.”
“I know,” I said. “I will.” She brushed my cheeks with powder and stood back to look at me, smiling at what she had made of my face.
“Hot as hell,” she said, air-kissing near my ear so she didn’t smudge her lipstick. I sat on my hands so she wouldn’t see that they had started to shake.
* * *
THE MAN, who I was supposed to call Tom, would pick me up in a black car so we could eat dinner at the Italian restaurant at the Tropicana. I made my way down the boardwalk ramp, careful to place my feet so I wouldn’t get the heels stuck in the cracks, just like Des taught me. The driver got out and opened the door without looking at me. I took a breath and peered into the dark cavern of the back seat. I had seen moments like this a hundred times—the young woman who had been bought, ducking into an idling car that took her away. You could tell the ones who were new at it by the way they took one last glance over their shoulders before they shut the door, while the old hands smiled and pushed their chests out, a thousand-yard stare in their eyes. I decided I wouldn’t look back.
He put his arm around me as we walked through the Quarter, and I felt myself tense up and go hot every place his body touched mine. The stores and restaurants around us were made to look like old Havana, and the corridors were decorated with fake palm trees that rose toward a pretend blue sky. I stopped to watch the fountain trickle, and remembered the first time Des walked me through Caesars. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen—the columns in the lobby, the statues of helmeted men and their impossibly large horses, the slick sheen of the marble floors. I was six or seven, and she was teaching me how to slide a wallet from a woman’s purse. My small hands would be an advantage, but I had gotten distracted by a fountain just like this one, the layer of coins glimmering under the water. I reached in and scooped up as many as I could take. I still remember the sensation of the cold wet coins in my hands, the way Des laughed when she saw the dampness spreading across my pockets. She used to laugh a lot more back then.