Wallflowers (14 page)

He lowered the menu and stared at her, but his gaze seemed directed behind her. She withdrew her hand.

“Then I’d call you ‘Mary,’” he said. “Mary.”

There was an unconsummated tension between them. He had liked her at a time when she couldn’t return his feelings. Now, too late, she liked him back.

“Want to split the soft-shelled crab?” he asked.

She didn’t really. But instead she looked at the menu and pretended to consider the description. Her eyes drifted to the beverage list. You could buy a two-litre bottle of beer, which was twice the milk she kept in her fridge. When she looked up, he was still watching her.

“You go for it,” she said.

“I may.”

He shifted his knees on the cushion and peered over his shoulder at the server station. One of the girls saw him and hurried to their table. She wore a kimono, her waist cinched in a red sash. Ilsa lowered her eyes to the nigiri placemat—a laminated poster with pixellated food photos and tiny blurred font. She misread “fatty” as “city of.” City of tuna. City of rainbow fish flesh. She wanted to show him this.
Look, Dex. City of tuna. Look at your placemat very quick
. But she didn’t, because she worried he might not laugh.

He was at the club her first night. She was twenty-two and romantic enough to believe it was romantic. The bouncer asked for her ID. She said, “Hi. Hi, I’m new.” The bouncer leaned into the door frame and shifted his eyes to the paper grocery bag she had carried her costume in. She withdrew a five-inch glass heel. “See?”

He shouldered the door open and told her the girls’ washroom was downstairs.

The dancers’ names were printed in red felt pen on the bathroom mirror, the first three ticked. Each name was clichéd—like the girls had drawn tags from a universal stripper hat. Ginger, Angel, Candy. Or alternatively: names with double
i
’s. Kikii. Kriis. Kiwii. Ilsa wanted a tougher name. A wrestler name. Like Rick. Or the Hacksaw.

“’Scuse,” said a girl with latex elf ears. She leaned past Ilsa and ticked her name off the list. Brandii.

“Brandii?” Ilsa said, and folded her arms around her paper bag.

The girl turned. She tucked a breast inside her blue bikini top and lifted her chin to indicate she’d heard.

“How do I get my name on the list?”

The girl slipped a lavender shrug over her shoulders and stared at Ilsa as she did up the buttons. “Talk to the DJ. His name’s Dex.”

“Dex. Okay. Thanks.”

“Change first.”

“Oh,” she said, then stared into her paper bag. She hadn’t developed her vintage shtick yet, so her costume was silver spandex. Like a moonwalker. Or the Tin Man. She had considered spray-painting a funnel.

Dex worked upstairs in the sound booth. He wore a purple mohawk, his headphones crushing one of the spikes. She told him she was new and he didn’t look up. He torqued a few knobs, then lifted one earpiece of his phones.

“Does the music sound tinny to you?”

“No.”

He reached across the booth for a small whiteboard. “You danced before?”

“Well,” she said. “I’m a figure skater.”

He smiled. She continued, “And I’ve got a degree in linguistics.”

Blue and green lights splashed across his face. He held the pen poised above the whiteboard.

“Stage name?”

She had given it some thought. She decided she liked cities.

“Tokyo?”

“Taken.”

“Oh,” she said, then couldn’t think of her backups. “London” wasn’t exotic. “Paris” set too high or too low a standard.  She felt like she was choosing an email address. “Tokyo_64.” She almost said that, but he was beginning to fiddle again with the soundboard.

“How about ‘the Hacksaw.’”

His hand paused on a sound switch.

“Just call me ‘Ilsa.’”

Her set started okay. She liked to dance. She hadn’t bobbed her hair yet, and her lowest curls hung to the small of her back. She could helicopter her head the way she’d seen strippers do in the movies. The guys liked that. But she was nervous about the tip rail. About bending down to offer the first row her leg so they could slide bills into her garter, which she had secured with an elastic band. What if they didn’t tip? Then she’d be bent over, alone onstage, her silver G-string glinting in the light lasers. So she stayed upright. She lifted her arms above her head. She tried to dangle from them, moodily. A trio of university boys started to laugh. It surprised her she could see them. She expected to be blinded by the front-of-house lights. She slowed, retreated to the pole. Realized she didn’t know how to dance on a pole. She gripped it with one hand and sailed around like Gene Kelly. The boys laughed louder. Her cheeks warmed. She worried she would rash. Hives down her chest, between the triangles of her bikini. Dex said something encouraging over the microphone. A few patrons cheered. Someone tossed a bill. But she wasn’t listening. She was slipping inside the beat. A remixed Billie Holiday song. All of her, why not take all of her. She could see her reflection in the mirror above the bar. How high her shoes were, transparent, so that she looked like she was floating.

When she got offstage, Dex bought her a ginger ale. “The black lights,” he said. “There should really be signs.” He lifted her arm. Her deodorant was glowing.

“Oh god,” she said.

“But plaque’s the worst. At least you don’t have plaque.” He raised his glass, as if to say,
Here’s to your teeth without plaque.

Her mother had worked in the sex trade too. Well, she operated a switchboard. In the eighties, at an escort agency called Cloud Ten. She answered phones and spoke in code: “GFE,” “open-minded”; described girls like paint swatches: hazel eyes, aquamarine. She had moved from West Germany when she was twenty-five, with a diploma in hospitality management. Her name was Freda. Friends and family called her Fritz. She had Ilsa when she was thirty. A young petite thirty, with small hard hips and breasts she didn’t need a bra for. She kept her hair cropped above the ears; cut it with kitchen scissors, into a blunt lopsided fringe that hooked over her right cheek.

She never bothered with a babysitter. She baked bread. Spelt and sourdough. She left a fresh loaf in the oven whenever she worked nights. Ilsa sliced the bread herself. She would drizzle thick wedges with honey and reheat them in the microwave, until the honey seeped into sweet sticky snail trails she could plunge her finger into.

On Thursday and Friday nights, Fritz hung with the girls at Up Yer Alley Lanes. The decor was mid-century modern: drum lamps, fibreglass shell chairs, neon signs. The girls included three escorts, the other phone girl, and an aesthetician. A sixth worked at the laundromat, and another was a Yugoslavian shop clerk who sold Fritz a pair of Frye boots. They would all settle into a lane, or a booth at the bistro, and order pitchers of beer and food puns—kingpin hot dogs, banana splits.

On Thursdays, Fritz worked the day shift, ten to five. She would meet the girls before she walked Ilsa home from the rink. If it rained, she cabbed. That was part of the culture. Cabs. Buses transported a different tier of prostitute. Fritz didn’t escort, but she preferred to be driven from that place. The bus stop smelled like urine. Someone had spray-painted a penis over the Egg McMuffin ad, and over the penis, someone else had spray-painted a swastika.

Every cab driver knew the address. Some made comments. Others winked. She kept a list of safe numbers. Good guys who didn’t care, who kept their hands on the wheel.

Some nights Ilsa didn’t want her to leave. She refused to eat dinner, or hid the house key, or pretended to faint in the hall as Fritz searched for her boots. One night she elbowed her glass of milk onto the floor. She was eight, her hair cut short like a boy’s. She stared at Fritz as she did it, her lips knotted. Fritz told her to get a mop. She said no. Fritz said, “Get a mop, or eat your Hamburger Helper.”

Ilsa folded her arms and said, “I don’t like Hamburger Helper.”

“It’s Beef Stroganoff. Eat it.”

“I’m vegetarian.”

“Fine. Starve.” She opened the front door and waved her finger at the cabbie to indicate she’d be a minute.

When she walked back into the kitchen, she found her daughter on the floor, cross-legged in the puddle of milk. The girl squinted at her, arms still folded over her chest. “I’ll clean,” Ilsa said. “Watch me clean.” She swiped a shard of glass from the linoleum and clenched it in her fist.

“What are you doing—you’ll cut yourself!” said Fritz, and she ran to her.

Ilsa was staring at her own fist now, curiously, as though she had cupped a ladybird inside her palm and if she spread her fingers, it might fly out.

Fritz knelt in front of her, the milk soaking into her nylons. She laid Ilsa’s clenched fist in her hand and whispered, “Open it.”

Ilsa fanned her fingers one by one, and they both stared at the slice across her palm. The cut bloomed open into the milk, the blood streaking thick and pink like Pepto-Bismol.

Fritz kissed Ilsa’s forehead. She hoisted her onto the counter, in profile, so that her small brown feet rested on the bottom of the sink.

“Lift,” she said, and Ilsa raised her heels, plonked them on either side of the sink as Fritz ran the tap. She ran it gently, barely a trickle, and let it stream over her own hand until the water didn’t feel too hot.

Fritz’s mother, Ursula, kept birds. Passerines, from the city. She tossed seed onto the balcony and left the windows open. Birds flew in and out. House wrens and long-tailed tits. The occasional pigeon. A warbler built her nest inside the dining room light fixture. She and Fritz stopped using that light. They lit paraffin lamps. They rolled up the carpet and lined their armchairs with butcher paper.

Fritz’s mother worked at a dress shop. Three nights a week, she danced between skits at a
Kabarett
called the Fischglas. Her act followed a puppeteer from Munich, who left the stage covered in red paint. The posters called her routine “a leg show.” She wore nude stockings and wrens tied to her wrists. “Ursula’s Dance of the Doves,” said the emcee, so she sewed white feathers to her brassiere.

She bought the zinc rings from a Danish birder at the
Universität
. He showed her how to clasp the rings around the wrens’ ankles. She threaded them with fishing line, and looped the line to the silver bands she wore on her forearms. She would dance with four or five birds on each arm. Two or three perched on her shoulders. The others tittered at her cheek. In her hair. She sidestepped like an Egyptian—elbows out, palms flexed to the ceiling so the strings from either arm wouldn’t tangle. The birds chirped and whined a percussion she could pepper her hips to.

Ursula ordered Sears catalogues from America. Every Sunday afternoon, before the food tokens, she sat on the balcony with her catalogue, a cup of coffee and condensed milk. She liked to see what the Americans wore. What combs they fastened in their hair. What undergarments, what springtime coats. Jumper frocks in the Paris manner, for breezy knees and locomotion, available in natural, Nile green, or coral. Fritz sat beside her and cut paper dolls. Wrens pecked at the seed. Crows pecked at the wrens. On the street, brownshirts assembled outside a delicatessen. A yellow-headed boy dawdled behind his mother, his fist latched to the hem of her Sunday skirt.

The Danish birder sent her a bouquet of amaryllises. He left notes in her mailbox—clipped letters of intent, written on university parchment:
Take lunch with me. I’ve brought fatty goose liver home from Paris
. Then, halfway down the page:
You are
, crossed out. Signed at the bottom. The Dane was ten or fifteen years her senior, but his face was boyish in a way that made him look thick. His smile curled around large, plate-like front teeth, and he parted his hair down the centre of his head. He spoke to her gently, and sometimes she couldn’t hear him because he never raised his voice, even if they were at the club or the market on a Saturday, with the crowds and the fish hawkers. He was married, she thought, because he wore a ring, and when she asked, he pretended not to hear. A daughter too—the week before Easter they met at the market and he bought four papier-mâché eggs.

She needed money for her daughter’s identity papers. Fritz’s father was a Jewish actor from Kraków, who returned to Poland before Ursula realized she was pregnant. One of the bartenders at the club knew a guy whose daughter just died of tuberculosis. The girl was Fritz’s age, and Catholic, and the man would sell the passport for one hundred
Reichsmark
. She couldn’t count on her second income—the Fischglas would be closed soon; they all knew it. The sketches were too political. Last week, four officers watched the routines from the back. They didn’t drink or smoke. They stood there like toads, between the toilet and the cloakroom. In his skit, the puppeteer’s dummy wore brown khaki and patent leather boots. He stayed backstage. The costumes assistant snuck him out the rear exit. The pianist doubled the length of Ursula’s song to fill time.

=

After the Dane sent the bouquet, she visited him at the
Universität
. His office was small, loose-leaf papered. The wood desk occupied most of the floor space.