SAMANTHA
(RUBY)
“You’re so pretty it makes me want to go home and punch my wife in the mouth.”
Samantha smiles and asks if he wants a dance. He smells like a kid, like sweat and juice boxes, and has a stubby body with one hunched shoulder. He skims a big palm over the silver bristle of his hair and says, “I sure do.”
She leads the way to the leather sofas under the main stage, where the bass throbs through the low plexiglass ceiling. Next to her, Violet dances for a bearded guy who looks like a teacher, her dark brown skin shiny in the pink light, her lipstick tangerine. Samantha wishes she could trade places with her. Samantha’s client, settled into the sofa, leans forward to say, “I remember you, from before you got your fake tits. Flat as a popped tire.”
She shouldn’t be annoyed. He’s right, for one, and for another it’s not the worst thing she’s heard. She peels down her dress. “How do you like me now?”
“What I wouldn’t give.”
Samantha reaches for the tiny see-through hook of her V-string and lets the scrap of red fabric fall. She cups her breasts, which still feel alien even though she got them many months ago. They have the density of chewed bubble gum. “Want to come with me to the champagne room?”
“Maybe later.”
The song ends. He gives her a twenty.
He leaves, and Violet’s client does, too. Samantha hooks her V-string back into place. Violet wobbles on her heels as she steps into her dress. She grabs Samantha’s arm for balance and whispers, “Check out the new girl.”
The new girl has plopped bare-butt onto the sofa to wiggle her thong up over clunky shoes. Samantha can’t remember her name. Skinny thing; pale, doughy face. Violet sucks her teeth.
Samantha almost tells the new girl what should be obvious, but Morgan, a tan brunette with librarian glasses and breasts that are fake yet judiciously small, beats her to it. “Don’t sit on the seats,” Morgan says.
The girl glances up.
“You’ll get germs in your cookie.”
* * *
THE EARLY-MORNING LIGHT is smoky when Samantha pulls into the parking lot of her apartment complex and parks next to Mrs. Zace’s car, which the neighbor lets them use in exchange for picking up groceries. Nick says that Samantha wants the world to be like a Hallmark card, but what’s so bad about that? Mrs. Zace likes to play grandmother to Rosie, and occasionally babysat her before Nick lost his job. Mrs. Zace’s sedan looks gray in the mist, like it has been breathed on. Samantha’s sneakers make no sound on the asphalt. Her tight jeans feel cozier than pajamas. Her loose hair smells like cigars and the sour apple of sweat and body spray.
She is glad she wiped off her makeup at the club. Rosie is up, much too early for a Saturday morning, watching TV.
“Your daddy awake?” Samantha says.
Rosie sucks the ends of her blond hair. “No.”
Samantha joins her on the couch, which is new: a nice, sage chenille. Some dancers talk about moving to Chicago to make more money, but she can afford a better life in Fremont. The schools are good, and there’s a playground a block away. Fremont has a cute main street with antique stores, a used CD and DVD place, and a former theater converted into a cinema. The red velvet seats are itchy, but the ceiling is painted like the sky and Rosie loves when the lights go down and tiny stars appear above. Fremont is the right kind of city: not too big, but big enough that a nightlife centers around the club and a casino on the Des Plaines River. Fremont has a Costco and a Best Buy and tracts of unincorporated land interrupted by silos of farms that grow corn and soybeans.
Samantha melts into the couch. Her feet ache beneath the double layer of tube socks. The curtains are still drawn. “Come here, baby.”
Rosie doesn’t move. She is dappled by the shifting light of the television. A commercial becomes another commercial.
“What’re you watching?”
Rosie shrugs her slim shoulders, then leans into Samantha, curling up against her. “How come you’re always late?”
“Not always.”
“I was waiting for you.”
Samantha slopes a hand over Rosie’s hair, down to the spiky wet tips. “I’ll take you out for breakfast. Silver dollar pancakes with chocolate chips.” She feels the possibility of becoming a perfect stepmother, wholesome and lovable, ready to make any moment special.
“Okay.” Rosie’s voice is muffled against her side. “You smell bad.”
That sense of possibility crinkles up inside her like cellophane, like something that can’t return to its original shape even after it is smoothed out.
* * *
NICK IS AWAKE when they get back from breakfast, and thanks her when she hands him half the cash. “Let’s see a movie tonight,” he says.
Rosie lights up. “I want to choose.”
“I have to work,” Samantha says.
Rosie doesn’t like that. “We’ll go without you,” she threatens.
“You should. Go have fun.” Samantha reaches to tuck a lock of Rosie’s hair behind her ear, but she squirms away.
Later, after Samantha gets out of the shower and Rosie is playing in her bedroom, Nick says, “I wonder if those assholes you dance for can tell that you’re part boy.”
* * *
THERE IS STILL daylight when she pulls into the Lovely Lady’s parking lot. She can guess by some of the cars who is working tonight: Skye’s yellow Hummer, Morgan’s blue Taurus. There is a fancy black Caddy Samantha doesn’t recognize, whose black paint holds the sunset the way dark hair can, with hints of red.
She walks into the club through the backstage door and past a row of lockers. Hers bears her name on a simple strip of masking tape, but other girls have elaborately decorated theirs, like Paris, whose locker is lacquered inside and out with pictures of her daughter, also named Paris. Many lockers have photos of the dancers’ children. One of Rosie is taped to the inside of Samantha’s locker door. Even Sasha, who seems far from maternal, has a picture of a quiet-looking, dark-eyed girl whose name, Melody, is written below the photo against a musical staff, the d transformed into an eighth note. A few lockers have fake flowers poked into the air vents, which is not allowed because the flowers eventually fall onto the floor, and so many girls work here, several dozen, their schedules written over each other’s in arcane patterns, that things get messy fast. Dale, their manager, has said it a million times: “The Lovely Lady stays clean.” He is fussy but a good boss. He says his door is always open to them, and it is true. Anyone can walk into his office anytime.
Samantha spins her lock, feeling that jammy give around the right numbers, and remembers how Nick saw what her face did when he called her part boy. She couldn’t respond at first because of the tight pressure of what she wanted to say, the way words bunched up in her throat. Nick said he was sorry. He knew that what he had said wasn’t true. She was a girl. He knew that.
“Think about how hard this is for me,” he said.
“It’s just a job.”
“It makes me feel small.”
She did not care. She did not forgive him.
“Samantha, come here. I said I was sorry.” He brushed hair away from her wet face. “Beautiful girl. Like JFK Jr.’s wife.” Nick always said that, and Samantha used to be flattered until Carolyn Bessette Kennedy died earlier that summer in a plane crash, with her husband flying the plane in the dark. Samantha wished Nick would stop comparing her to a dead girl. Nick said, “How did I get so lucky?” When she remained stiff, he added, “Don’t be like this,” clearly wounded, close to anger, so she forgave him, because if she didn’t she would quickly be blamed. Although he had hurt her, she would be made to feel guilty for being hurt.
It is important that he apologized, she decides. They are not married but they almost are, and she is sure they will be one day. Marriage takes work, everyone knows that. Samantha opens the locker, stuffs in her purse, and grabs a red dress trimmed with feathers.
Violet sits before a mirror in the dressing room, blow-drying her thin braids, which have all been braided into two thick braids. The new girl is doing her own makeup, which she should know by now is a bad idea. She should pay Bella to do it.
Bella is counseling Rhiannon to get a real estate license. Rhiannon has pulled her dress down to her waist and rubs orangeish foundation into the curves of her meager cleavage to make it look bigger.
Violet meets Samantha’s eyes in the mirror. “Hey, Ruby.” Her accent is creamy, almost British. It’s not even fake. She was born in Trinidad.
“Hey,” says Samantha.
“Cut the string after you put the tampon in,” Morgan tells Desirée. “A string is the last thing they want to see.”
“Some do,” Gigi says around a forkful of homemade, gourmet-looking risotto.
“Shut up.”
“Once, I leaked right down my thigh. This guy asked to lick it off. Said he’d pay extra.”
The dressing room howls. Gigi laughs, her belly trembling, her light brown skin rippled with the stretch marks of someone who used to weigh more. She still loves to eat, just like anyone, she has said, but she is choosy. The food has got to be good.
Rhiannon leans back to study her breasts and says she wishes she could leave her panties on so she didn’t have to worry about tampon strings. Oh no, you do not, they tell her. Full nude means it’s against Illinois state law for men to touch them. No lap dances, no beard rash. Panties means pasties, too, or cut-up strips of clear Band-Aids taped around the nipple, because in those states, the law says no holes.
“Titties ain’t holes.”
“The fuck you think the milk comes out?”
Violet turns off the hair dryer. She unbraids the big braids, then finger-shakes the mass of little braids, curly now. Samantha changes into her red dress. The new girl roots through her makeup bag, clearly having paid no attention to anything anyone has said, which makes Samantha prickle with irritation so intense it surprises her. What could you do with someone so clueless, so helpless, someone who doesn’t even try to learn?
* * *
SAMANTHA DOESN’T SEE the new girl again until later, when she steps off Stage 3, the smallest stage, which is tucked into a corner on the second floor. Stage 3 is a desert on slow nights. No one likes Stage 3, or so they say. Samantha complains with the rest of them, but the truth is that she has scored big there before, so when she hears girls gripe about Stage 3, she wonders whether she knows something they don’t or if they are faking, too.
Jimmy offers Samantha a chivalrous hand. Bouncers have been instructed by Dale to do this so the girls don’t trip in their heels. She carefully descends the plexiglass staircase and makes her way to the main floor. Every hour on the hour there is a two-for-one special, and everyone knows they must be backstage in time to get the T-shirts. The new girl is still dancing. Samantha catches a glimpse of her below the main stage. She jumps a little in her heels, a swing to her hips. The guy on the sofa is lanky, with a pale, lantern-jaw face and a baseball cap marked with the letter Z. Samantha has danced for him before. No deep pockets there. She sees the new girl’s expression: familiar, smooth, glowing. It bothers Samantha. Its familiarity feels misleading, out of place, which makes her recognize the expression as frank pleasure.
The girl is late for the twofer, of course. She is last in line, hugging the XXL T-shirt emblazoned with the club’s name to her chest. Buy one dance, get the second free. Plus a T-shirt.
“Look at all of our Lovelies!” the deejay calls through the sound system, his voice extra deep, buzzing at the bottom of his range, and they file out onto the main stage and descend to spread across the club floor, coyly waving shirts. Samantha hates selling them, but the twofer is as good a means as any to finding a man who will pay two hundred dollars for an hour in champagne.
* * *
SKYE IS ON the main stage when Samantha gets lucky. The man Samantha is dancing for can see the main stage over her shoulder, and later she thinks that maybe his offer had something to do with the contrast between her and Skye, who has opulent hips, pebble eyes, and a lot of ink. Skye’s boob job had gone badly, her new breasts shaped as though molded by basket coffee filters. She has sex for money after hours. Most girls know this, but Dale doesn’t, or he would fire her. “I got a kid,” she said once, loudly, so they keep their mouths shut.
“You’re fun,” the man tells Samantha as the song comes to an end. He is gray-haired and middle-aged, maybe fifty, but fit, with a hard, superhero chest. He slips another twenty into her garter, and she rubber-bands it to the rest. “Keep going,” he says. “Sweet little ass. Altar-boy hips.”
Normally this wouldn’t bother her. She knows she has a boyish body, except for her new breasts, but his words recall how Nick knew exactly what would hurt her most.
The man says, “How much for champagne?”
“Two hundred,” she answers breezily.
“I hate champagne. Gives me gas.”
“I’ll drink it for you.”
“And what do we get to do there?”
“Talk.”
He makes a face. “Talk?”
“The bouncers keep an eye on us.”
“Do you like to gamble, Ruby?”
“Sure.”
“Come with me to the casino after closing. I’ll pay you the same you’d make in the champagne room. By the hour.”
She keeps the smile but her voice is serious: “I don’t do that. I don’t hook.”
“It’s just gambling, I swear. I want a pretty thing on my arm while I play. Maybe two. Ask your best girl to come. Same deal for her.” He leans back, opens his muscled arms wide as if to encompass the size of his innocence, then tries on a canny smile and pulls out his wallet to show a spread of cash. “I got it. I’ll give you extra to play with, too.”
“Look, I like you, and I wish I could.”
“I’m safe as houses.”
“I can tell,” she says, because it is always wise to confirm a man’s good opinion of himself. “But I can’t.”
“You’re smart. Gotta be safe, I respect that. Why not get a bouncer you trust to join in? I’ll pay him.”
Samantha glances across the room at Jimmy and calculates the potential haul from such a night. She thinks about calling in sick tomorrow to skip her Sunday double shift. Tonight she could slip into Rosie’s narrow bed and breathe the balm of Rosie’s breath. She will wake when Rosie wakes.
Copyright © 2022 by Marie Rutkoski
