Pretty (19 page)

“You have to pretend like your true love is in the audience,” she schooled me. “Just to the left of the stage and slightly out of the light so you can't see him. Imagine like he's watching you and dance for him. It'll soften you up. It'll make you care. You'll do a better show.”

“Who do you think of?”

“My true love? Tom Waits. No contest. Well, Billy gave him a run for his money for a minute, but now I do all I can
not
to think of Billy.”

“So why do you still keep showing up for him when he calls?”

“Because Tom Waits is unavailable, as far as I know.”

In that moment my life was okay. I was floating there between the sky and the pavement and I had a drink in my hand and money in my pocket and I had made a friend.

After that I tried imagining that Mick Jagger was out there watching and then when that didn't feel quite right I imagined Chet Baker, who I always thought would have loved me if he ever knew me. But that didn't work, either, because Chet Baker kind of reminded me of my dad and you really don't want your dad in the audience when you're stripping. Then it becomes, like, the world's worst nightmare. I even tried imagining John Travolta once but that was just too little girl.

So in the end it was Aaron. I always imagined Aaron in the audience when I danced. Of course that's just a game you play with yourself. You don't really want your true love in the audience when you're stripping. There are things that are meant to stay between women. Francesca could understand that really I was dancing for Aaron, but Aaron would only ever see the other men there. I only know this now. I didn't know it then but I wish I had.

I learned it when Aaron came to pick me up at Jet Strip one night. He usually waited in the parking lot out back, but I told him to come in that night because I wanted him to see my show for real and not just in my imagination. Francesca warned me not to, but I ignored her. I wanted Aaron to see me shine. And maybe I also wanted him to be a little jealous but mostly I wanted him to be one of them for a minute. I wanted to work the magic on him, too. I thought it would be fun. I thought he would think I was glamorous, powerful, sexy.

He thought it might be fun, too, so he agreed to come but he showed up a little earlier than he was supposed to. I had planned to be on stage right when he arrived but instead I was on one of the purple velvet couches that lined the club, milking the last lap dance out of a customer with his face buried in my tits, when Aaron walked in. I saw him before he saw me but not soon enough. I watched his expression darken and harden as his eyes found me on the lap of an insulation salesman in town from Duluth.

It wasn't as if he didn't know what I did. It wasn't as if he'd never seen a lap dance before. I didn't think it was a big deal.

I looked for him when I was on stage but he'd left the room. He didn't even come back at the end of the night to get me and he wasn't home when Francesca dropped me off. I don't know where he went, but I know some shadow grew in him after he saw me working. I didn't know who to be angrier at, him or me, but it doesn't matter because the important part is that I know he never looked at me the same again. It was one of those mistakes. It's one of those regrets.

But Jesus doesn't stop it. Jesus doesn't make it better.

S
omewhere after the trailer park
with the big sculpture of Santa Claus at the entranceway, I pull over for gas. It's one of those whatever places with the terra-cotta fake Spanish-style strip malls and that's pretty much it. I always wonder what the people do who live near these places. Not what do they do for fun but what do they do for real.

My hands freak people out. The palms of my hands look like a million-year-old mummy, but more pink. When cashiers get caught unawares by the sight of my scars, it always gives them a visible jolt. So I'm careful to buy my bottle of water and pay for my gas palms down. The doctors always tell me—everybody always tells me—I'm lucky. I'm lucky I lived. I'm lucky it was just my legs and my hands and not my face or my insides that got all fucked up. I'm lucky I didn't sever any nerves or I wouldn't have my bright future in cosmetology to look forward to.

Refueled, I roll up the coast for another hour, the browns and grays and greens of the coastal cliffs rising to the right of me and the vast glossy expanse of ocean folding out on my left. This is the kind of thing they photograph and make religious calendars out of. Fuck, it's nice here. I wish Jake were with me because he'd probably paint it even prettier than the real thing. He sees things so pretty.

Have I told you about Jake's painting? As far as professionally being a famous painter and all that, he's kind of through. I don't think he has to be, but he refuses to finish anything, refuses to try and sell anything. He always gives his best stuff away to, like, some waitress he thinks is nice or some guy who works at the Jamba Juice and has acne so bad that his face looks like an angry relief map. Jake will think he needs a painting. He says that something just tells him who needs paintings. There's no talking to him about it so I don't try.

Most of his paintings are bizarrely twisted, ugly but still beautiful. His latest series was of ravaged Hitler clowns advertising whatever corporate thing Jake was hating on at the moment. Which makes it hard to believe that when Javi and Paul moved to their town house, they hired Jake to paint Milla's room. Not with Hitler clowns, of course. He agreed to keep it positive. But even painting a castle, he was impossible. He changed his mind a thousand times about every detail and took a whole week to find the right green for the grass and ate all the food in their fridge and some days didn't show up and some days showed up at ten or noon or two or whenever he damn well pleased and before the whole thing was done Javi and Paul were ready to get a divorce or kill Jake or both.

But in the end, the room was the most incredible masterpiece. It was a fairy kingdom, with the ceiling as the bluest sky and the walls decorated with hills and a castle and wood nymphs and birds and a giant oak tree and fantasy animals that Jake just invented as he went and angels and bunnies sailing in nutshell boats and cows with wings flying across the sky.

I had a dream after I saw the finished room. I dreamed I saw Jake in heaven and he was so handsome and he had this quality about him that was different from how I usually know him, and when I thought about it later I thought it was probably peace. He was peaceful. And he had no scar on his face and he wasn't wearing a hat.

He said, “Isn't it funny how we were so hidden from ourselves?”

I laughed and I knew just what he meant. And I wished there was a mirror because I wanted to see what I looked like in heaven, too. The Jake I saw in heaven is the Jake I can see in his paintings.

So I search each freeway marker and billboard and cardboard real estate enticement but they all lead to nowhere I want to go. Half an hour after I think I've gone too far, just when the desperation sets in, I spot the 246 that leads east off the main highway. Tucked into the bend in the road is a little green sign:
Chumash Casino 6
.

Here is where I should turn inland and lose the ocean but instead I pull onto the shoulder. The nausea I've been staving off all day creeps up the back of my throat and into my tonsils. I'm already sitting on a dry embankment with my head in my hands when Vi calls. The phone rings on the seat next to me and the screen lights up: VIOLET.

“Where are you?” she asks, like a worried parent.

“Nowhere.”

“I know where he is, but you can't get there now so come home. There's no point in both of you getting kicked out of here.”

“They caught him?”

“Apparently he walked into a recruitment station. Susan had already reported him to the police, so now he's on a seventy-two-hour hold.”

“Fuck me.”

“Better than prison.”

This is what I was afraid of. I'm losing him. I'm a loser.

“There's something else. There's someone here waiting for you.”

Of course there is. I can tell by her voice who it is. She knows the story of Billy Coyote.

Don't worry, I'll find you.
That's what he said last time I saw him, before I went to detox.

Don't I always take care of you?
That's what he said on the phone before he never showed up.

“Should I get rid of him?” she asks.

“Of course you should. How does he look?”

Pale, pale and blue veins and slippery hands.

“A babe. No doubt. He's a babe. But, Bebes . . . ,” she says. She doesn't finish the sentence.

W
hen you're from somewhere else, you think there's a promise to California. I don't know if it's some cellular thing—like your ancestors in the wagon train only made it as far as Ohio and you're completing the journey—or if it's the Beach Boys or the Beat poets or
Baywatch
. You get in that car pointing west and you think the answer is at the end of the road. You really do. But here I am at the continent's edge, jagged and final, and there is no West left to go to and I still don't have what I want.

I look down at Kitty Hawk Barbie next to me on the car seat and wish I could hold her up like a dowsing rod and she would point the way, just like Javi said. When I wanted a sign and I was back at Zion I would have dropped to my knees and prayed. I knew some people there who had clear visions from God pretty regular. But I never did. I thought it was because I was further down the scale from God, but I didn't know why. Just born that way, maybe. Just born a little dead inside—dead in the place that some people heard God. So I was reduced to seeing signs in the way the rainwater dripped down the window, in the number of Ford Crown Victorias I passed by in a day. But then you wonder—I'm making them up, right? I'm seeing the signs I want to see. I'm making the world reflect what I want, and I'm calling it God. And what bigger sin is there than that kind of pride? You can't think about it too long; it spirals down and down. So I kept praying, kept praying, until I got sick of not getting an answer.

I know Milla's Kitty Hawk Barbie is meant to be a talisman or a charm, but she isn't working. Instead she just lies there like the stiff piece of misogynist plastic that she truly is deep down inside, even with her glitter wings, silver shoes, and retro hairdo. Underneath it all she's still an impossible ideal that worms its way into little girls' heads and haunts them all their lives with what they aren't. I think it again, looking down at the doll. This child in me, I hope it's a boy child.

It's there all the time now: the baby, the thought of the baby, the possibility of the baby, the tiny glowing presence. There's no unknowing it now that I know it's there. There's no going back to being myself alone and separated from everything and everyone by the impenetrable membrane of my skin, this skin that's so resilient you can slice it to bits and it will still grow back tougher than before. Hold my scarred hand and you'll see what I mean.

But now there is this thing, this not even a baby yet, this wisp of an idea, and suddenly I am not alone at all. Everything changes, without my thinking about it. Like, for instance, I am driving down a four-lane highway with only a double yellow in the center, and a road like this one used to inspire an overpowering urge to swerve the wheel and careen into oncoming traffic. The first few months after the accident, the impulse was so strong I often had to pull over, lay my head down on the seat next to me, and wrap my arms around myself until it passed. But now, I face the drive back down the coast with no good news about Jake and evening fast on my heels and I do not think it once. Or I do think it once, but it's just habit. I don't think it twice.

The late afternoon fog sweeps in over the coastal mountains, turning the sky and the ocean into shades of shifting, misty churning gray.

I drive for hours.

When I hit Thousand Oaks, it's nearly six thirty and I have to get back to the house. Am I going to give up and go home and sit in group and pretend like nothing's happening? I listen to the radio and watch for shapes in the clouds. I look for a sign. Where to go next. You never know when you'll get one. Even the most faithless among us are waiting to be proven wrong.

I set my trajectory for Serenity and creep along in the snarl of humanity that is the freeway as the red sticks of the digital numbers on the clock rearrange themselves to make me later and later. I screech off the exit, race up and down the neighborhood streets.