Chloe Doe (9 page)
He doesn’t look at them. He’s waiting, but that’s all I have. Vons was it and there’s no happy ending there.
“So that was my one great attempt at the good life,” I say. “That’s why I know it doesn’t work. Not for me.”
“Are you saying you’ll go back to the street?”
I’ll go back because it’s all I know.
Because I’m good at it.
Because it pays the bills.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” I tell him. “I need to eat. I need to know I won’t come home to an eviction notice. The only thing that gives me that is my job. You see, Doc? Like my sister always said, it’s a matter of survival.
“Soon after, the
policía
will pick me up. I’m underage. They’ll say, ‘Why not Madeline Parker? Give this girl a chance to change.’ Then I’ll be back here, looking at your smiling face.”
Isn’t that nice?
“You want to come back?” he asks. “Once isn’t enough?”
He doesn’t understand King of the Mountain. He doesn’t know how I can feel like I have the world in the palm of my hand when I’m selling myself at the going rate.
He says as much. My
doctor.
He wants me to make sense of it for him.
I tell him there’s no way he’ll ever understand.
“Guys don’t get it,” I say. “Especially when they had a mom baking them pies and checking their homework. Did you have a mom like that, Doc?”
He says she was something like that. He got paid for good grades.
“Then maybe you do understand, just a little.”
We were both paid for a good performance.
Let’s try it, he says. Give him a chance.
“It’s like I’m not even there,” I tell him. It’s a mindless occupation. I can go over my grocery list while I’m working.
This is how I try to explain:
It’s better than doing it to a husband you’ve come to hate. Strangers are always a better trick.
“I bet you’ve had women complain they can’t stand their husbands. Couldn’t give them love one more time if their lives depended on it.
“Maybe even your wife, huh, Doc? Does she refuse you? Is she cold, like the North Pole?”
“Let’s stay focused,” he says. We’re talking about Chloe Doe.
Right. Right. Chloe Doe.
We come from different circumstances. I survive, and that’s what it’s all about.
I tell him, “There was never any multiple choice.”
“So your life was already decided? So you have no control over what you do tomorrow?” he asks.
“So you made the best of your circumstances, and turned your hovel into a palace?”
A palace? No. I wouldn’t go so far as to say my hole in the wall is the Beverly Wilshire. But it’s my
nido,
my home. And maybe that makes it a palace. Sure, and I’m Princess Diana come back to life.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Right?
“So, you’re happy with the arrangement?”
“It has its moments,” I tell him.
“I’m happy I’ve got something I do good. I’m happy I’ve got something that pays as well as it does.
“In fact, Doc,” I say, “I bet I can beat your money in a day’s work. What do you say? Let me out of here for a Saturday night? I’ll go out and do a little doctoring of my own. We can see who makes more in an honest day’s work. What do you say?”
T
oday there’s a real mariachi band. They’ll play their guitars and trumpets and we will dance.
Mariachi bands are all male, and Mexicans are a passionate, easy breed. They’re wearing blood-red shirts and flap their arms like rabid chickens.
We like the broad, brown faces of the men, their crooked smiles, and their hot eyes on our bodies.
They like dance here. It kills two birds with one stone. We get exercise and recreational therapy at the same time. They get to watch, to sit back and enjoy the music, to instruct or reprimand from the sidelines. For them, work is an easier day.
We have special antennae, us
amantes.
A sixth sense. We know a man from his scent. Not the cologne and sweat smell that sticks to a girl’s body, but the scent of man underneath.
He’s vinegar, and depending on his disposition, he’s sour or he’s sweet.
These mariachi men, they’re all right. They’re what we expect on the street, and maybe better. They have what we call religion: they’ll adore you, and it lasts as long as a prayer.
You don’t have to worry about them hitting you. You don’t have to worry about much with men like this. They’ll take their pleasure and leave you. If you’re lucky, they’ll make you a little slice of heaven for themselves, and there’s worse you can be for a man. When you’re someone’s angel, you’re not a whore. You’re their world. A person has a way of treating their world, the best part of it, like it’s something they want to go on forever. They treat you real well. They treat you like you’re their Madonna. And that made it easier, my life on the street.
We worked for this. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the gym for a month, with our recreational therapist, we learned the seductive moves of the dance. The mariachi will play their music and serenade us, and we will dance around them in bright skirts and white blouses the staff donated for the event from their own closets.
Our audience is the doctors who examine us, who peel back our flesh for a look at our insides; the nurses who herd us from one activity to another, confusing our names and ailments; and the social workers who can’t imagine our experiences, who place us in recovery groups for problems we don’t have.
They’re standing and sitting in groups, backed up against the walls to give us space. They’re watching, talking among themselves, waiting with their arms crossed over their stomachs, passing time until we begin.
For them we learned the hopping, laughing hyena steps of this dance. For their entertainment, we’ll perform.
The mariachis begin the light strumming of their guitars and the triumphant blasts of their horns. They drift around the room, first impressing the nurses in their pant uniforms, and then the doctors who sit in folding chairs at the edge of our dance floor. They play and bow their slim bodies toward the women, smiling.
Mexicans have something we don’t. I’ve seen it in my
chicas
on the street, in the men who buy us, in the mariachi who play. It’s in their smile: life is for the living.
¡Viva los vivos!
For the hours of TV, for our choice of chocolate cake for dessert, for a check mark next to Cooperative on our charts, we dance. We dance because it’s expected. Because the men have come for the women to dance.
The mariachi, their eyes speak. They tell us
unas muchachas bonitas.
Pretty girls. Pretty girls with pretty breasts and thighs like sweet cream. And there’s expectation, like the shiny blade of a knife. These girls will dance, they will open themselves to our loving. Optimism is their only fault.
They watch me, flung out and arms stretched above my head, turning and turning. They watch the nurses and the doctors, sitting in their folding chairs, feet pumping to the music, their eyes watching the mariachi and watching me and watching the others. But mostly watching me. If I go on, spinning, if I lose my balance and fall, all of this will be for nothing. If I spread myself out, lay myself down, if I lose myself completely, this goes belly-up.
There’s only so far you can go in America without being
gringo.
There’s only so much work the mariachi will put into defeat. I would be their finest achievement, but I’m watched like a convict.
The mariachi turn their attention to the others. The girls move sluggishly to the tempo, uninvolved in the freewheeling journey I’m on. They lift their feet: sleepwalkers. Like a merry-go-round, they get nowhere. Even those who try to keep up, trip over a chord. And the rest, they wait for a loud noise. They wait for the mariachi to scatter like crows. The little Niña especially. She is jumpy around men. She won’t sit behind a closed door with her therapist. She won’t make eye contact with any of the male staff unless she’s forced to. It’s written as one of her goals: The little Niña will, when speaking to a male staff member, make eye contact on two out of three occasions. They don’t expect perfection. Which is a good thing. The little Niña would never measure up. Now, she twirls in a circle by herself, at the edge of the dance floor. She stares at her feet, lifting them one beat behind the music. She refuses to look at the mariachi, or at anyone else.
The mariachi notice her and leave her to herself. They weave themselves around the rest of us, playing their instruments. They brush against us. An elbow touches a breast. A hip brushes our
nalgas.
Anything for free.
It’s happening for them, inside their bodies. They watch us lift our legs and move across the floor. Bright, black eyes watching us all the way, imagining things. Their skin flushes red. The muscles under their black chinos and ruffled blouses are tight. They want us, but will settle for watching, for painting pictures. They will find satisfaction in something small.
¡Viva los vivos!
“Hey, mariachi!” I hold up the hem of my skirt. I dance my way across the floor, working to the music. “Mariachi!” I can dance. My body moves on the beat. I’m in tune. My mouth open, laughing. My white teeth dazzling. “Mariachi, come dance with me!”
Chloe Doe is the master of movement. In dance, I’m graceful. I move like water downstream. I’m lovely.
In invitation, I’m obvious. There’s one I’m interested in. So young, his skin is smooth. No beard, not even the start of one. A pencil-thin, wannabe mustache. And skinny.
Palo.
A stick. The way I like them. I dance a circle around him. He laughs and stomps his foot, and plays his guitar faster. My heels follow his lead. They stop and watch, the other
amantes.
They clap their hands and start to chant: “Chloe!
¡OLÉ!
Chloe!
¡OLÉ!
”
The doctors and nurses are caught off guard. They stand and move closer and are frozen, trying to find a way to restore order. They all watch me, because Chloe in motion is mesmerizing.
¡Viva los vivos!
I glow with it.
The mariachi men smile and nod their heads. They pick at their guitars with blunt fingers. They run a bow over a violin. They throw their heads back and laugh with delight. They are men of dance and men of music, and men of food and of women, of passions.
They’re not complicated. Not difficult to understand. The mariachi men can be reduced to one thing only:
esperanza.
Hope.
We are born with it. Some with less than others. And these consume it, or they wither and die. I’m a consumer. I know it. I eat it out of their hands. I see it in their eyes and I’m snagged.
“Mariachi, I’m watching you.” I dance away from the skinny guitar player. I look at him with big eyes and satisfaction. “I like what I see.”
I back off before the doctors and nurses come. I drop the hem of my skirt and spin away to the corner of the dance floor. Some of the girls begin to step into the rhythm. The guitar player watches me. His eyes follow me around the floor, where I turn and laugh and hold the hem of my skirt above my knees so my legs move smoothly through each pump and twist of the dance.
When the mariachi leave, we are called to sit in a circle, in folding chairs. All seventeen of us. The doctors, Dr. Dear included, sit with legs crossed and with pens and clipboards ready. They want feedback, to know what we think of today’s activity.
Dr. Dearborn says, “That was fun,” and waits for our response.
Only the little Niña will talk. She says, “The music was nice.” But she didn’t like the dancing. “I have two left feet.”
Chloe, they say, you had fun?
“Oh, yeah, I love dancing.”
And the men. The attention, the spotlight. We like knowing they wanted us.
They doubt my word. They say, “Sometimes we hold on to the familiar because it’s all we know.”
I
’m late. I sat on my bed and watched the big hand on the plastic travel-size clock tick-tick past ten. At ten-oh-eight the floor nurse comes in asking did I forget.
I didn’t.
Individual therapy is not voluntary, she says.
She walks me down the hall. “What’s the matter with you?”
She thought I was over this refusal
.
I’ve been in ten weeks now. One month in I played possum with the flu and skipped two sessions. I needed time to think. Time to accept my change of address. To decide I was worth the work, the sacrifice, the walking through quicksand.
“I thought you liked Dr. Dearborn,” she says.
Not today.
“What’s so special about today?” she wants to know. Why the sudden change of heart. “It usually takes a girl to the three-month mark before she realizes the road ahead is almost too much.”
“I’m a fast learner,” I say. It’s true. I thought a lot about our last visit and how I was held prisoner inside my own mind, and I don’t know if I can live up to expectations. I don’t know if I want to try. I’ve lived scared so long, I’m a natural. Rule number one: don’t let the fear catch you, and now he wants me to turn around and stare it in the face. That may be more than I can do.