Please See Us

by Caitlin Mullen

  And then, Jesus, the day you saw him. Your uncle. Sitting there at the cheap little restaurant on the boardwalk, the one with all the yellow plastic tables and chairs, the only person without a Bloody Mary or a mimosa next to his plate. Was this what you wanted? To see your uncle slumped over his phone, probably texting your aunt that he was hopeful the posters would help, even though you saw his posture was broken by exhaustion. And it was all your fault.

  You couldn’t help it. You followed him a few blocks after he paid his bill. You thought how easy it would be to catch up with him. Seven, eight strides? Even now that you are no longer in race shape. You could tap him on the arm, say you were sorry. But none of that would change the chemistry of your personality.

  How to tell your uncle about that? He and your mother grew up in the same tidy little split-level, on a cul-du-sac, where the streetlights weren’t shot out once and never repaired, where whatever was in your mother must have been wrong since then, and it’s wrong in you. You are different from your friends, your coaches, your aunt and uncle. They cared so much about you winning those meets, they screamed your name—your friends even painted it on their cheeks. It had been easy to run that fast, but the attention embarrassed you, made you feel guilty. They couldn’t see that you were slowly souring from the inside out.

  You decide you’ll scrounge up enough for a bus ticket somewhere else, somewhere farther away. You’ve heard the other women in the shelter talking, talking about sleeping with men for cash as though it were as easy and impersonal as working a shift at Burger King. And isn’t it your right? Your body, at least you get to sell it or rent it out as you see fit. And besides, you would only need to do it once, just to get enough to get out of here, to go somewhere you can breathe.

  It’s not that you think there is anything elegant or noble about suffering—pain is just pain, too abundant and easy to come by to mean anything, other than itself. It does not mean redemption, or absolution, and it doesn’t make you stronger. But happiness can be a burden, too. When it comes down to it, you don’t know how to be a human, how to bear either pain or joy.

  * * *

  WITH YOUR mother, you didn’t think of it as prostitution because it was rooted so strongly in need. Cause and effect, no frills or pretenses about it. Prostitutes were women in red dresses and heels, women with too much makeup on, women who marked themselves in obvious ways as available for sex. Women who liked it too much—when you still thought that women weren’t allowed to want sex like men did. You’ve seen those kinds of women around here, too. Like the one with the peach tattoo who got in your face the first time you tried to pick someone up, so you left the bar and were stuck in AC for one more day.

  So now you go down to the parking lot of the Sunset Motel. You heard that’s where some of the other girls hang out, that it would be easy—though you couldn’t expect to get paid as much. You spend twenty minutes toeing bottle caps in the parking lot before a man approaches you.

  In the room the light comes through the cheap curtains and you let the man touch you. You feel the shadow Julie stepping closer, the gap between your selves growing smaller than it’s ever been, an arm’s length, then a few inches as you take off your clothes, then a sliver as thin as a slice of paper when he pushes you onto the bed. You’re scared and a little bit embarrassed by his want. It’s not your first time—Kevin Luther, last spring—but it’s already so different that it might as well be. Kevin pausing after he entered you to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, like you were something delicate, something that could break.

  This could be one of the last ways you might understand her. You’re still scared to go all the way, to open the gates of your brain to the drugs, but this … this is something you could point to and, if you were to meet her again (impossible, impossible, but how little all that seems to matter now), you could say that you understood her desperation, understood the sadness and the strangeness and the loneliness of some man on top of you, groaning a name you gave him that wasn’t yours.

  Afterward, you weep to yourself on the long walk back into town, the marsh grass wavering, rippling like a prairie.

  You wait a day and tell yourself you’ll do it just once more—you want a cushion, after all, just a little bit more cash. You wait until it’s dark, moths weaving in and out under the streetlights. Cars blare their horns at you as you make your way down the shoulder of the road, warning or greeting. Your uncle could drive by at any minute, if he hasn’t already gone home. But still, a part of you wants to rescue yourself, the you of the gingham coverlet, the you of the track medals hanging above your bed.

  When you get to the Sunset Motel, you’re not the only girl there, but you’re the newest, so you sit on the edge of an old planter box until the three other women pick someone up. The parking lot is empty, and all you can hear is the feeble buzz and crackle of the neon sign above your head. The name of the motel, and then a sun, a half circle with sticks of neon that light up one at a time, like rays, and then go dark. A man comes out of a room and you hold his gaze. You can’t tell if he’s checking you out or is about to call the cops. Just in case, you look down at your feet as he comes near.

  He introduces himself as John, and you introduce yourself as Suzanna. Your mother’s name. It carries a current on your tongue and makes everything afterward both more real and less real. He asks you if you’re looking to party, which you guess is one of the ways people talk about what you’re about to do. Maybe, you say. You feel stupid, that you don’t entirely know what you’re signing on for if you say yes.

  He tells you he’s got some stuff in his room. He’s still looking at you in a way you wouldn’t quite describe as sexual. Hungry, maybe.

  He pulls out a chair, motions for you to sit. He offers you a pill, and you hesitate a second before you pinch it from his palm. He watches you place it in your mouth, mime a swallow, and slide it under your tongue. You want to please him but not obey him. What you’ve given up so far has been things or parts of yourself that you were already willing to lose. You wait for him to take a pill, too, and when he doesn’t, when he turns around, you slide the pill into the pocket of your jean shorts, the white surface puckered and cratered where it had started to dissolve. You catch the brassy glint of a ring on the bedside table, the kind of weighty championship ring the football players wear at school. You stifle the impulse to smirk. A man that age still hanging on to a scrap of old glory. You are only eighteen, and yet all of those victories feel like they happened so long ago.

  You wait for him to touch you, to ask for something or demand it, but he only sits on the bed, watching you. Once, you and your friends found a list of strange fetishes online, read them off to one another at school, and laughed so hard that your abs were sore the next day. Foot fetishes and men who wanted to be peed on, men who wanted women to talk to them like babies, people who dressed up as fuzzy animals and had sex, men who wanted to be kicked in the balls. You wonder if there is a fetish for watching to the point of awkwardness, for making women uncomfortable.

  Minutes pass. How many? Three? Ten? Forty? You can’t tell anymore. The room feels small and the minutes feel long and you start to feel hot, then cold, then hot again.

  “Where’d you put it?” he says. He looks mildly amused.

  “What?” you say, but you know he means the pill.

  He sighs. “You’ve gone and made this difficult, haven’t you?”

  It’s like your body knows something before your brain can put it into words. Your jeans go damp. You are nine years old again, still pissing the bed in your aunt’s house every night. He rises from his chair, and the next thing you know there is a cracking noise that splits the air and you cry out, but then something covers your face and you can’t breathe right, then you can’t breathe at all, and your lungs are burning, burning in a way that reminds you of running. In your mind you are running, running out of the parking lot, back down the dark road, down the boardwalk, which stretches on and on, somehow carries you all t
he way back home.

  Home, which has nothing to do with Suzanna, or with this version of yourself you’ve been experimenting with. Home, where you climb underneath the gingham coverlet and sleep.

  JANES 1, 2, 3, AND 4

  IT IS NEARING THE END of July and there has been no break in the heat. The women remember a time when heat like this was related to desire, a ripening of hunger, of want. The kind of heat that made you crave wet, juicy foods. Peaches whose juices dribbled down your forearms; cool, crisp watermelon; cherries that turned your mouth a sultry purple. Desire for feeling, too, to wear tank tops without a bra so that the fabric skimmed your nipples. For the cool water of the ocean sluiced between your legs, the shimmer of sweat collecting between the jut of your hip bones, the reassuring weight of a damp towel over your shoulders, like an embrace.

  There is a sisterhood among them, these women in the marsh. Each time he brings another one, they understand what she has seen. His hatred of them, which he had once masked to look like love, or desire, or sometimes something they interpreted as fear. The way the pill he gave them made the edges of their vision go blurry and a strange halo of light appear around his head, so that he looked like an angel or a saint cast in stained glass. How they only saw him grit his teeth with the effort of it at the end, glance at the blocky sports watch on his wrist as though to count the seconds they had left, as their lungs burned and their limbs became so heavy and their thoughts were reduced to single words that filled their whole bodies: NO or OH or PLEASE. And then the blind, mute pain, the state beyond language, and after that there was only darkness left.

  Fireworks have exploded over them, trails of sparks streaking through the sky. Then there was a memorial service for a young man who drowned in a boating accident, and his family carried candles and white carnations in the sea. For a moment the white heads of the flowers bobbed on the surface of the water. The next morning many of them washed up, a mess of wrecked petals or woody green stems stripped bare. The women shivered with jealousy. All of those footprints in the sand, those hands cupped protectively around flames.

  The indifferent orange neon VACANCY sign of the Sunset Motel blinks weakly through the dark. The building is one of seven squat structures still standing along the Black Horse Pike. They were erected in a strip in the 1950s to accommodate the overflow of tourists pouring into the city on Eisenhower’s new highways, cheap and cheerful alternatives to the big hotels along the boardwalk. Pictures of these motels looking bright and sweet were stamped on postcards, sent to Grandma back in Allentown or Binghamton or Rego Park. Greetings from the Gateway to Atlantic City.

  Families used to stay here: mothers who packed picnic baskets lined with cloth, fathers who taught their boys to throw footballs in perfect spirals, children who ran around with a thick paste of zinc on their noses, grandfathers who showed kids how to catch crabs in the inlet. But the motels’ doo-wop cheer has long faded—the aqua and coral awnings blanched by the sun or torn away by storms, so that their metal skeletons are exposed. Their stucco façades are spotted with gray mold. In the 1990s, they were used to house people on welfare, until county officials raised concerns. Now there are oil stains in the parking lots, syringes in the gutters, condom wrappers and chewed gum and mashed cigarette filters collected in the empty planters. It’s a place for hard drugs only, where dealers sell heroin, coke, crack, speed. Guests wake up with welts from the bugs and rashes from sheets—but if they’re here in the first place, they’re usually too far gone to care. Fifteen bucks a night for a place to sleep, you take what you can get. It’s better than the street. Sometimes if a girl makes enough money here, she’ll buy herself breakfast at the Quality Inn across the road—seven bucks, all you can eat.

  The motel manager will grumble to anyone who will listen that he has to replace light bulbs all the time—crack addicts make off with them, scrounging for anything they can sell. Sometimes you get a room with no lights at all and no one will come fix them, no matter how many times you call. Men beat women out in the parking lot, and everyone pretends it’s not their business, even as the screams get louder and louder and they can hear the fleshy crack-crack-crack of the blows—who can risk the cops showing up, shining flashlights into cars and knocking on doors?

  The women see, too late, the symbolism behind the name, why he drove them here on that last night: He told them that the sun had set on Atlantic City. There is something bad in the air and in the water now, something rotten and wrong. A moral disease. The city needs a warning, a biblical punishment. It needs to change, to repent, before the sun can rise again. He wants to bring them all to their knees. God has clearly brought a few misfortunes to the town: The storm that tore away a stretch of boardwalk and filled the streets with water. The way so many of the casinos have shut down. But bad luck and floods are not enough. That’s where he comes in.

  There is a fourth woman with them now, a young woman with blue toenail polish and long, dark hair. Their bodies hummed like tuning forks as he carried her through the tall grass, arranged her like the rest with gloved hands. The rhinestone in her nose sparkles in the sun.

  The marsh is supposed to be protective, a buffer between the land and the sea. It’s where things transition, where water and land slide together into one. Blue claw crabs scuttle through the murky water, sometimes finding their way back to the ocean. Birds raise their young here, where there are fewer predators and plenty for them to eat. Egrets pick their way through the mud with elegant care. But for the women, it’s purgatory. Nothing in the marsh is either/or, water or land, lost or found. Their bodies are starting to become something else as their tissue softens and the blood pools in their limbs, something not bound by muscle and skin. They’re not women anymore, and yet they aren’t free and light like spirits. Free to float away, to rise above the marsh like ghosts.

  They sense the shift in the wind during the final stretches of July. They know that this new month will bring warmer water, longer nights, cooler breezes. Then, the ocean will brew storms, hurricanes that surge their way up the coast. Wind that tears at the grass, tides that could scatter them, wash away what’s left. They think this means they’re running out of time. Time to tell their stories, time to be heard. They plead again for someone to see before it’s too late.

  CLARA

  IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG to see how quickly a person’s code could crumble, how easily the world would wear away at your rules. Des had told me I wasn’t supposed to meet anyone she hadn’t found. At first I listened, content to scrounge money from the ones she approved of with an extra sticky-sweet smile, an extra kiss. But then, one afternoon I lifted a porcelain doll from the gift shop at the Borgata and was walking to Zeg’s to see what he’d give me for it, when a car pulled up, the window cracked. The driver asked me if I felt like going for a ride. I could only see his sunglasses, which made me nervous. But the math won out. After paying Bill, I was back to $250 again.

  I knew I was being reckless. For a moment I thought of Des pointing out a woman on the street once, when she saw me staring at the strange scars on her face. “Acid,” she said. “She got together with the wrong man and now look at her. She’ll have his marks on her until the day she dies.” Her skin looked like it had melted into itself, the glazed-looking scars, the tragic air that hovered around her because she still carried herself as though nothing about her had changed. And then I thought, So what, and reached for the handle of the passenger’s side door. I had been dreaming of oranges that week, oranges heavy with juice, on the knife’s edge between ripeness and rot like the ones that my mother said splashed into the swimming pool outside of her guesthouse. It felt like a sign—I would rot if I stayed in town any longer. My life would have to get uglier, messier, before it would be clean and bright—I would need to do whatever it took to be free.

  “Sure,” I told him, making my voice husky and low. But I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder before I got in, and now I really knew what those girls felt, the ones I had watched all my
life. How they probably wanted one last fresh breath of air, one more moment to arrange their face before surrendering themselves to someone else.

  * * *

  HIS CAR smelled like cologne and peppermint candy. He tried to act calm but he was nervous—he gave it away in the way he kept scratching at the side of his nose.

  “What do you have there?” he asked. I held up the doll. He laughed so hard he sprayed spit all over my arm. “A whore with a fucking doll. This place is too damn much.” Yeah, I thought. I feel the same way.

  He drove to the parking garage at Bally’s, a shady spot on the upper level. He reclined his seat, unzipped his pants, closed his eyes. When I hesitated, he took me by the hair and pushed my mouth toward his crotch.

  When it was over, he gave me a hundred bucks. Up to $350—$1,650 and then I’d never have to do any of this again. He didn’t offer to drive me anywhere, so I got out in the parking garage. I was studying the constellation of old chewing gum at my feet when he called to me.

  “Hey,” he said. He hadn’t asked my name. “You forgot this.” He handed the doll out the window. I could hear him laughing as he drove off. Once his taillights disappeared, I threw the doll as hard as I could against a concrete pillar. Her face broke into pieces: a sliver of cheek, a blue long-lashed eye. Outside, lightning crackled in the distance, the clouds dense and greenish, otherworldly. The wind whipped through the city, and finally the clouds deepened in color before they broke apart and released rain. Huge drops fell, splashes as big as poker chips, and the thunder boomed through the garage, loud enough to trigger a few car alarms. I sat and watched the city get drenched, listened to the blare of the alarms, and savored the feeling that no one knew where I was. For the first time I could understand what would make a girl want to disappear. No one else to see the bad things you had done.