Fresh Girls & Other Stories

EVELYN LAU

Fresh Girls
AND OTHER STORIES

The world is a bed.

                                              –Donald Hall
from “The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts”

          C
arol in the bathroom, holding her hair with one hand and a mascara wand with the other, her face lopsided in the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Her face floating alongside cherry-red mouthwash, dental floss, old razors. Carol fixing her honey hair and saying, “You don’t think I’m neurotic, do you? Do you?” … coming out into the living room with the zipper teeth of the makeup bag between her fingers, smiling a girl’s smile. She’s twenty-four — same age as Jane at the massage parlor, bowing her head in the hallway when she thought no one was looking, after that old guy left. Looks like he took more than he paid for. Jane ran an escort agency at twenty, now she’s washed up, sits in the
back room all day waiting for a faithful regular while the other girls come and go. More blondes these days, making up their pale eyes at the table, smoking the other girls’ cigarettes, reading trash. Jane watches. She’s starting to get a curl to her lip, like she knows too much, but she’s not bad-looking in regular clothes, when she changes into a sweater and jeans to buy soup or cigarettes or condoms down the street. She’s got freckles on her shoulders, sort of cute. Looks better when she washes her makeup off, but in work gear — the blue eyeliner, the tight white dress with the chiffon thing along the neck that she ribbons into her hair — Jane looks worn out. Yeah, even though her room is the one with the little pink rosebuds on the shade over the lamp by the bed.

Carol’s not like that, she hasn’t done it long enough. Sitting on the floor, poking at herself with the needle, smearing a trickle of blood with the back of her hand onto her thigh, onto that dress she’s borrowed from somewhere, a purple mini with flowers. Pretty legs, hair falling into her eyes; she’s not even sweating, though she’s been poking for the last twenty minutes. She’s even made one up for me, it’s sitting on the overturned cardboard box Mark calls a coffee table. Pale gold liquid and then the squirt of her blood in the syringe, like a curly hair. I look at it, look back at her, wait to get desperate enough.

“Mark, I need five bucks for pantyhose,” Carol says.

She looks up and the lamplight hits her face and her hair and the hardwood floor. They’re all the same color, honey, and her eyes blink and her teeth show and Mark goes scrambling. She’s one of those you can’t turn down, you can smell the freshness on her, like she just took a shower and dusted off with baby powder. Like she just took a walk through a forest. Monica will hate her; chain-smoking and bitching in the back room, one leg up on the arm of that ancient couch, magazines and science-fiction books and romance novels with torn-off covers stacked behind her. Eating chicken soup out of a cup and pulling at her styled bangs in the mirror on the table; tinted so blonde she’s gone gray in parts, the parts that aren’t shimmering with Grease in the light.

“New girls, they come; new girls all the time,” Monica mutters, exhaling angrily. “How am I supposed to make a living? Tell me. First you, then the redhead, then that skinny blonde, she’s got an accent too, my God! How am I going to get business? Not so many men, I have to sit here all afternoon, waiting and waiting …”

Monica’s red lips pucker with hatred, and then the doorbell rings and she puts her feet in high heels, pulls at a curve of hair in the hall mirror, grabs up condoms. She knows he’ll want a new girl, whoever he is. The men can tell the ones who’ve been here long, they smell
like the back room, five ashtrays operating at once and the taste of packaged soup on their tongues.

Monica, too, looks not bad when the day’s over and she’s changed into a man’s shirt and little pink shorts, examining her face in the mirror in front of me, carefully wiping off the last of the foundation and brushing out her hair before leaving to pick up her kid. She makes it my turn to clean the bathroom, though, and for a moment I hate her. It’s easy to turn to hate behind the boarded-up windows of this place, each room with its lamp dusty with red light so everyone looks good, even sometimes a man, so pale and smooth on the bed it’s like being with a baby, its face not yet formed.

“Thanks, Mark,” says Carol.

She’s rounding the hallway, a package of pantyhose from the grocery store down the street in her hands, her face a bright dazzle. She turns to me and grins for a minute.

“Hey, isn’t it weird walking down the street when you’re stoned? Like, it’s like everyone knows, and they can all tell, and you’re scared you’re showing it somehow, like they can tell just by looking at you. They all look at you funny, except for the guy who whistled at me. He was standing on his balcony. He was real cute, I wonder why girls can’t whistle at guys too? And there was this cop car down the street, the cop inside looked at me real funny …”

She’s tearing open the package and chattering, but I hardly notice, my arm is turned up on the couch, Mark is telling me to pump my hand and saying “Good, good girl, that’s it, there it is,” and I’m leaning back against the back of the sofa real fast, tasting the taste of it come up in my throat, like silver or copper or one of those metals, and that slivered feeling all along the back of my neck and shoulders, where it’ll hurt the next morning.

At the massage parlor I spend a lot of time in the back room too, but that doesn’t matter, I have other people. There’s a doctor, for example, who calls me every few weeks from Medicine Hat, Alberta. “I want to fuck your pussy all night,” he says, and then he flies down for some physicians’ conference and I find him on his hotel bed, waiting. He looks at me after I come back from the bathroom with half my makeup gone and smiles and says, “You’re still pretty,” as if he expected somebody else to be behind the face I put on for him.

To him, and others, I’m still in my Lolita years, but I have a birthday coming up soon. I’ll be twenty, and what then? The back room is getting too small, and even the owner’s tiring of the pretty girls with their daddy complexes curled up next to the desk where he balances the books and takes half their money; the girls who pull up their skirts and tuck their naked legs beneath them on the
chair and fiddle with their long curly hair, pouting — “So, Daddy, should I get it cut? I was thinking maybe I’d get it cut next time, all these split ends, look …” while they dangle a waterfall of gorgeous hair in front of him. Everyone wants to be pretty for Mario, he takes their money and lets them sit in the back room when they get old, twenty-four, twenty-five. Lets them eat chicken soup and buy condoms for the other girls and take in a few hairy, smelly regulars wearing checked pants and bad ties. Mario’s wife comes in then with her freckled legs, wearing a red dress, tilting her head to one side and saying “No, don’t cut it, that’ll be bad for business,” and the girls lid their eyes and put on older mouths, the kind of mouths that say contempt and knowing, but they say, “Well, okay,” and Mario continues to work hard over the ledgers.

But to some men I’m still a baby girl. That’s what he calls me, the rich old man in his apartment with the blackened windows, “Baby Girl,” he says, “You’re still a Baby Girl,” and I think I’ve never heard words so sweet. He calls me nights when he’s drunk. He never touches me, that one, only wants me to sit on his silk-covered couch in that incredible room with one wall nothing but a mirror, like a pond of ice, and the grand piano with red roses in a crystal vase on top. The old man in his blankets smokes Silk Cuts and asks me to light the oil lamp on the table. I turn it up too high, so the flame swirls a
black mark onto the ceiling. He’s getting worse. One night when I go to pee I see he’s vomited up his dinner in the toilet, cut green beans floating in the bowl with rice or some gelatinous white substance; he hasn’t bothered to flush the toilet. But he likes his Rusty Nails the way I make them — clumsily, “Like a woman,” he says, “women never know how to make drinks.” I bring them in to him sloshing over the side of the glass, half a cup of Drambuie, half a cup of Scotch, no ice, spilling over. He smiles weakly and looks at me in the mirror and says I look good or bad, pick a week, I turn around and smooth some swatch of material over my belly and say, “I’m getting fat,” and he says “Yes,” and then “No, no, you’re perfect, you’re just a Baby Girl.” And I swell inside, a golden feeling.

“I like you,” he says, “that’s a real compliment, I don’t usually like anyone.”

But the cab drivers chuckle when I leave, clanging the iron gate behind me: “That old guy’s quite a character, you know, he’s got working girls coming out of his apartment most every night.”

I know. I know about the girl who comes over from the top massage parlor in town, how she lies in the chaise longue and what he does to her. But he never does anything to me and that’s good enough. Nights I sit by the phone waiting for him to get drunk so he’ll call me,
and I can go down to the secret address via certain cab drivers, tripping through the maze of gates and gardens and the exclusive apartments he lives in. He’ll be drunk and fiddling with the grandfather clock in the hallway, offering me a drink and telling me to make it myself. As long as I listen ‘til three, four in the morning and give him a sleeping pill before I leave, I stay on his good-girl list, and sometimes he even calls me afterwards and leaves messages on my machine.

“I’m sorry, Baby Girl, I don’t remember anything that happened last night, we didn’t go to bed, did we?”

And I call him back and reassure him, “No, everything’s still the way you want it, pure.”

Pure as coke, as the driven snow. I know all the dealers in town, they all hold meetings at Mark’s place, the English guy with the crooked tie who swings golf clubs at me and says over and over, “You sod, you sod,” and takes out little green scales to weigh my purchase; the Japanese guy in his designer sweaters with the yellow pills ten times as strong as morphine who watches me and waits for me to come down and call him, with his mercenary eyes and his Jag always parked just around the corner. They all have my number.

But then I have theirs. The old guy’s the best. When I say around midnight, as I always do, that I have to leave, he tugs at me with his little white claw and says, “No,
please stay, please. I’ll give you another two hundred, will you stay?” And then before his lip can curl back on itself, before he gets reflective and serious and says, “This is sad, isn’t it, when you think about it, it’s sad me calling you down here and paying you to listen to me,” I run into the other room and find his checkbook. Some nights I have to fill it out for him; he puts it down and looks at me with deer eyes and that wan smile and says, “I can’t, I’m too drunk,” and I fill it out and then guide his hand to the place where he has to sign, crookedly. And I take the check, plus the stash of twenty-dollar bills he’s lined up for me on the kitchen counter on my way out. And give a little cheer as I run past the gardens and through the three gates to the marble elevator, because I’ve done it again, I’m still his Baby Girl.

So it doesn’t matter about the back room, though yes, I have what one could call expenses. And a Baby Girl name, like Jane’s, that will follow me pathetically from birthday to birthday. I never wanted to get older like ordinary teenagers, I knew there was nothing up there to look forward to except smelly old regulars and a parade of new girls, sixteen, seventeen, coming in illegally through the doors of every massage parlor in town and crowding me out. Days of humiliation, sitting in the back room sifting through an old
Vogue,
answering the phone, accompanying the girls to the vault where they
drop half their money. Watching with a tired smile like the one Jane has on her lips these days, fussing with the ribbon in her hair, her tummy starting to round out under the tight white dress. They’re my only family, Mario and the changing girls’ faces, and the johns who ring the doorbell and grope at my stockings in the rooms upstairs where I go with a kit of condoms and jelly and baby powder, and a porn video to excite them into spending the fifty-dollar bills in their wallets if my naked body isn’t enough.

Carol’s ready, she’s got on her high heels and she’s waiting, nervous, beside me on the sofa. She doesn’t have to say anything for me to know she’s only done it a few times.

“Like, I’m not really sure about this,” she whispers, plucking at her skirt. “Mark told me this guy is really nice, some Chinese guy, but, like, do I kiss him? Are you supposed to kiss them?”

“Well, I do,” I say. “If you want to be special, you do too, because most girls won’t,” but by this time Mark’s come out of his stupor on his end of the couch, and this Chinese guy is coming down the hallway with a big moon face.

Mark says, “This is Carol …” and Carol’s face dims, and next thing I know she’s in the kitchen, dragging Mark, and I can hear her saying, “Please, I need a fix
before I go into the bedroom, please, Mark, don’t do this to me, I thought you were my friend. I feel like you don’t care, you won’t listen to me, I don’t even know this guy, just give me one fix before I go in.”

And him saying “No, come on, Carol, don’t be stupid, he’ll know you’re stoned, he says he only likes clean girls, girls who’ve never done drugs.”

And I’m left alone with this guy in the living room. He stands there. I smile sweetly at him.

“You want a seat?”

“No, no, I’m sitting all day. In the office.” He keeps standing there, toying with something in his jacket pocket, looking around with his lids lowered. He gives me a swift look, I cross my legs.

“Are you clean?” he says.

“Oh, sure,” I say, keeping up that smile. “I never touch drugs, I don’t even smoke.”

It’s true, that last bit, I quit a year ago.

“Good, you sound like a nice girl.” He can hear Carol’s voice from the kitchen, and he turns to me and says, “What about you, are you …?” His voice is hesitant, the kind I like, the kind I can use. “I’ll pay one hundred …”

“No,” I say, laughing. I’ve worked hard all week, I’m loaded. “No, sweetheart, I’m on vacation. But Carol will do you.”

I can hear Mark pushing her into the bathroom, giving up, and the john and I wait in the living room, him standing silently beside me, too nervous to fidget, and me swallowing the taste of chemicals and grinning into the middle distance until Carol comes out, her face shining, her eyes like disco balls, silver and spinning. She grabs me and whispers that she needs a condom, then disappears with the john into the bedroom, and Mark is waving a come-hither needle at me from the bathroom doorway.