An origin story, by Vivian Brightwire
Author’s note: This is my story, told the way I remember it and the way I wanted it told. Dates wander. Sometimes people got no names. Dialogue is dramatized from what I recall of my own circumstances, not some transcript found in a desk. What I feared ain’t necessarily what happened. That don’t mean I’m gonna stop telling my story. Maybe someday I’ll remember it all.
“So, can you take me back to that time, the partner you lost?”
The floor-boss just told me she’d moved on.
“Where’s she at? She’s due for work.”
“She found a better opportunity.”
“Doing what?”
That’s all I got. I didn’t ask if she’d married the Prince of Wales. I wanted to know where my girl went.
We worked and slept in the same hotel. Same room. Handy for management if somebody called in sick or guests were especially generous with their thirst.
I asked around, the other girls. Got a lot of sorry, I don’t know. Nobody knew shit.
Upstairs, her makeup and clothes were still there. No note. No sign she’d packed. We didn’t own much; I couldn’t have told ya if she’d taken a dress. Far as I knew, mine was the only suitcase.
A better opportunity. Doing what? With whom?
Maybe another job. Maybe she went home to mom and dad. Maybe she’d found somebody she liked better and left me holding an embarrassing collection of feelings. That would’ve hurt. At least she’d be safe.
Or maybe it was ugly. We worked near gambling, liquor, and some nasty fellas. Maybe she owed money, outstanding bets? Maybe somebody took her. For all I knew, they stuffed her in a sack and carried her off to a brothel.
What’d I know? The boss had his line. The girls said sorry. Her clothes were still upstairs.
“Let me get this straight. Nobody gave you an answer?
So, what’d you do next?”
I did my shift.
Think I pounded a drink at the bar before heading upstairs. Maybe more than one. Then I curled up on the bed we’d shared and cried the entire night.
I can tell ya exactly… how lonely that bed felt.
I’d wanted to dance on Broadway.
Not sing, mind you. I had a voice for newspapers. Not act, neither, though I could put on a show when I had to. I wanted to dance. And maybe get paid.
I was young, redheaded, pretty, and pretty damned sure everybody else ought to have noticed. I had good legs and could put them to use.
I’m sure there were better dancers than me. There are always better dancers, singers, waitresses, card sharks, and liars. The trick is getting through the door when somebody needs one of whatever you are.
Mother was dead. Daddy loved me, I know that, but after she died I hardly saw him. My stepmother was a bitch. There’s no softer term I care to supply.
So I made a life in Manhattan. If ya wanna call it that. I was underage when I left home.
I did get into a chorus. Girl from a troupe heard somebody’d hurt herself — ankle, knee, whatever — and they needed another pair of legs.
“Still lookin’ for stage work?”
“You got some?”
“Get over there before they find someone else.”
So I went. Director looked me up and down.
“How high can you kick?”
“Wanna see?”
I showed him.
“Good enough for now.”
Not quite my name in lights. I took the job.
We practiced. I worked hard. The costumes were all shine and feathers and heels. Try dancin’ in heels. I double-dog dare ya! And the stage lights could make a girl feel like one of those wax figures melting in some museum.
I loved it anyway. I liked being admired.
“That’s a great mental image. So, you liked being watched?”
There’s a difference between having someone watch you do something well and having someone stare at you like he’d ordered you from a catalog.
And I’d worked hard enough to deserve an audience.
There was a girl in that company I had feelings for. We didn’t date, not so far as I recall. Perhaps she never knew how I felt. Perhaps she did; I wasn’t exactly invisible about my interests, even when I tried to be discreet.
“I assume nobody cared who you fancied?
But I know the times, and they weren’t kind to people like us, were they?”
People started talking about girls like us. There were Reds everywhere, according to some folks. Communists, spies, every kind of moral rot. Pretty soon the whispers got tangled. Liking girls made you suspicious in politics, too. Ain’t that convenient?
Shows got cut. My schedule dried up. There were rules about how many performances you needed to qualify for extra pay, which was a fine trick when they weren’t givin’ ya the performances. Maybe somebody wanted me out. Maybe not.
Couldn’t pay the rent on rumors.
So I quit.
Auditioned again. And again. Nobody bit.
Rent still came due.
New York could be mean to a girl with big ambitions and a small purse. I rented rooms. Shared with girls. Stayed with friends, sometimes fellas. They could be generous with a couch till they decided generosity came with privileges.
One apartment had a kitchenette beside the bed, if you even wanna call it that, with a shared toilet-and-shower down the hall. Another had a magnificent dark lacquered four-poster bed, the stove and sink crammed into a gloomy little common room. I remember the furniture better than the addresses.
And a girl with short, straight, dark hair and a wicked smile. We’d sit on the fire escape smoking, heckling drunk fellas down below.
“Look’it this one. Think he’ll make it home?”
“Depends where he lives, ’suppose.”
“Wherever it is, he ain’t headed there.”
Sometimes we flicked cigarette butts down at ’em. Very mature of us, I know.
Maybe she and I shared a bed. Maybe we were lovers. Couldn’t tell ya.
I waited tables, sold tickets, worked clubs. Whatever turned up. I didn’t generally sleep on the street. Maybe a hallway now and then. But some weeks my housing depended on how much somebody liked having me around.
I mostly got by on the wishful thinking of others.
Now I ain’t no damsel tied to the tracks shouting, But I can’t pay the rent! I liked sex. Women especially. Men too, sometimes. But wanting a fella and needing his couch ain’t the same thing. Rent was due Friday, honey.
I had standards. I also had practices — and needs.
After a while I was stuck between a stone-bitch and a hard-dick, and neither one was payin’ me nearly enough.
I wanted a room of my own. Rent I could pay. A door I could close without owing anybody a god-damned thing.
Then my friend called from Atlantic City.
I remember the telephone in the hallway. One of those arrangements where everybody in the building could hear your business if they were sufficiently bored, which in New York was most of the time.
My friend had been in Atlantic City, maybe four months. She had work of her own, and she’d heard there were other places hiring.
She wasn’t offering me a position, wasn’t managing a hotel, wasn’t promising a golden ticket. She just knew stuff.
That girl had ears like an elephant, I swear to god.
“You still chasing Broadway?” she asked over that hallway ’phone.
“I’m chasing next Friday’s rent.”
“There’s work down here. Hotels, clubs. I keep hearing things.”
“You got a job for me?”
“Not in my pocket. But there’s work. You wanna try, come down?”
She was a cute blonde. There was a time when I couldn’t decide whether she was the same woman I later loved and lost at that hotel.
Now, I don’t think so. The brunette was the brunette. The friend who helped me find my feet down there was likely somebody else.
As a writer, it’d be pretty easy for me to smash them together, but life generally can’t be bothered to provide a convenient cast of characters.
Atlantic City was a tourist town, naturally. Beaches, hotels, entertainment, people coming down to enjoy themselves. But it wasn’t Coney Island, Wildwood, or Lewes, neither.
Different towns have different personalities. You can have a perfectly respectable beach holiday somewhere that also holds a whole ’nother business after dark.
There was gambling. There was booze. The latter was unlawful by then, which didn’t make people any less thirsty. Come to think of it, prob’ly the majority of the former was unlawful too. People can be capable of treating the Constitution with enormous solemnity right up until somebody offers them something else they want.
As for gambling, no constitutional amendment prohibited that. The trouble was with the state laws and whatever local arrangements kept a particular establishment in business. A lot of places had a dry section in the front and a wet one farther back. Gamblers hid in plain sight. Hotels took in tourists, tourists spent money, and the people who prospered found ways to remain on good terms with those who governed.
I hadn’t examined anybody’s licenses. Later, when I worked in the casino, I didn’t do the books or go to the back-office, neither. Taxes, bribes, donations to politicians — I can tell ya what seemed to be going on around us, not which envelope went to which office or office-holder.
At the time, I cared about something more immediate: could a girl like me get a decent job there?
I swiped a sawbuck or two from the jar on the counter.
A lotta money in the twenties — the 1920s, I mean. Call it a Benjie or two in 2025 money. I knew it would be missed. Knew that before I took it.
But I needed to get out.
So I took my suitcase and boarded a bus.
My friend wasn’t waiting to collect me like some visiting princess. She had a life and a job of her own. I needed a hotel, preferably one cheap enough that I might still have enough left to buy supper afterward.
What was the name of the sleazy part of town? Baltic Avenue? I hardly ever play Monopoly now. That’s where a girl like me would have started, whether or not the address itself was on the board.
I’d come looking for work, not a husband or a pimp, but the sort of men who spotted a pretty girl alone with a suitcase tended to supply ideas of their own. There were hustlers and hucksters who all thought I was a promising little investment. Some of their suggestions were just a different version of the trap I’d left behind in The City.
I’d had enough of turning tricks for a meal or a place to sleep.
I don’t know exactly how long I stayed unemployed. Two weeks? A month? There’s no sense inventing a date now, just to make the timeline neat.
Then I found myself working as a barker for a three-card monte game in the street.
Well, it’s a job. Of sorts.
“Yeah, ok. I know how three-card monte works. There’s probability in it that most people don’t intuit. What exactly did they hire you to do?”
Yeah, except… Who’s in the audience? Who stops to watch? Who’s willing to bet? Who’s pretending to be another customer? Who’s gonna cause trouble? How likely is a particular mark to cooperate, complain, or walk away?
“C’mon, fellas! Take a look! Think ya can follow the cards?”
A guy with a shiny watch would stop. They almost always thought the hand was quicker than their eye—right up until they realized their eye was the exception.
“I can see what he’s doing,” one might say.
“Then maybe you oughta show us, mister.”
We weren’t operating an institution renowned for its contribution to public trust. There’d be a man running the game, other people—like yours truly—helping to make it look attractive, and marks who believed they’d spotted an opportunity to make an easy buck. I could draw a crowd, talk a stranger into stopping, and recognize the ones who were trying a little too hard to be clever.
A nice watch could tell you a lot. So could a ring, a suit, or the way somebody carried his wallet. Sometimes you were looking at a fella who could lose the money without much issue. Sometimes you were looking at a man who couldn’t afford to lose but somehow convinced himself he was going to win.
Hear my words… men, never women.
And I wasn’t equally sorry for all of them.
They thought they could outsmart the dealer. I knew the dealer wasn’t giving them an honest chance. I helped anyhow. Money changed hands and I got some of it, directly out of the pot—or from the proceeds as we counted it out.
It didn’t pay magnificently. It did keep me going.
And it taught me to read a face, a pocket, and a person’s pride. All this came in handy later.
My blonde friend and I met in cafés. Coffee, drinks, gossip. She’d pass along something she’d heard at work — somebody needed a girl, somebody was interviewing, somebody’s boss had mentioned an opening. She wasn’t arranging my life for me. I was in a mood to make my own way, even if I wasn’t above listening to a good rumor.
“Heard a hotel’s looking for girls,” she said over coffee one day.
“What kinda girls?”
“The kind that carry drinks.”
“I got hands and feet, don’t I?”
She gave me the sort of look that said I had other qualifications, too.
Eventually, I heard of an opportunity in a hotel with gambling and liquor on the premises.
How did I get the job? I wish I had a wonderful story about charming a difficult manager or bluffing my way through the interview. I don’t remember that. I probably heard there was an opening and went for it. I’m fairly sure my pretty face didn’t hurt.
And that was how I got into the casino business.
Not as a shareholder.
As a girl carrying a tray of drinks, in an indecent outfit.
A casino was a fine place to work if you were young and good-looking, provided ya didn’t take the word fine too seriously.
There were customers who wanted to gamble, customers who wanted to drink, and customers who wanted the people serving them to do possibly more than carry a tray.
Sometimes those were three different customers. Sometimes you got the whole matched-set in one man. Ugh.
We wore uniforms. As I remember them, black leotards and hose, the sort of outfit that made the girls part of the entertainment whether or not anybody bothered to ask us. I didn’t object to looking pretty. I didn’t like it when a man confused looking at me with buying me.
The players could be quite absorbed in their cards. One of the things I remember about the place is how perfectly possible it was to walk across the floor in a skimpy costume and have some fella pay no more attention to your ass than he might do for a passing trolley. He had money on the table. That was the love of his life in that moment.
Other fellas noticed.
Some of ’em were generous. Most were tiresome. And some got drunk enough that management wanted them somewhere other than the floor.
Helping sloppy-ass men find their rooms became part of the business.
“Take this one upstairs, wouldja?”
“He has legs, don’t he?”
“He’s got money, too.”
And that was the trouble. A girl might get a ten or twenty stuffed into her cleavage for it. That’s a considerable amount of cash for someone who’d arrived in town on a stolen sawbuck. Enough to make a girl stop and think when somebody proposed arrangements that weren’t entirely to her liking.
And sometimes the arrangement wasn’t as clearly defined as anyone pretended.
You could help a guy up the stairs and discover that he thought the service included sex. Maybe you wanted to fuck him. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe he’d had so much to drink he’d fall asleep before you finished cleaning up. I learned that taking a long shower was sometimes a useful alternative to an argument or encounter I had no appetite for. A fella might be snoring by the time I’d finished getting ready.
Now and then, I’d rummage through a wallet afterward.
Or there was a watch.
Yes, I stole from them. Not every man, not every night, but enough so I remember it as part of the job I’d made. Some of those men were using their money to take advantage of girls who needed it.
That don’t mean I had some kinda divine right to redistribute their jewelry. Hey, I was raised Catholic. That don’t make me the fuckin’ Pope now, do it? I’ll confess eventually.
Maybe now’s the time.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
How long since my last confession? Father, you got a couple hours? Maybe got a bracket next week?
Sometimes, they’d be back on the floor gambling again the very next morning, and they’d flash me a smile like nothing had happened. I learned that unbelting their trousers was a useful trick. Keep it friendly, and let them pay for whatever the fuck they think happened.
I was hardly the only person in the place whose morality depended on what a guest had in his pockets.
You could say I took advantage of drunks. You’d be right. You could say I was taking risks with men who might decide to take advantage of me. You’d be right on two counts.
Yeah, I got priors.
That’s what the saws, double-saws, and fifties meant. Good money, sometimes. Not security. A girl could be paid very well for an evening and still have very little power over what will unfold next.
I don’t wanna make that time in my life sound like one unbroken sequence of horrors, neither. There were fun nights. There was good company. There were girls who could make me laugh, men who behaved decent, and customers who tipped ’cause they liked being served well. Oh, and I served my little tushie off, believe it. Some people came to town to have a good time and managed to do it without making anybody’s evening miserable.
I enjoyed a great deal of it. Sometimes, I’ll admit it… even the men at times.
I just wouldn’t tell anyone to mistake money for protection.
And somewhere in that crowd was a brunette who caught my attention.
“When you see her now, what’s the first thing you picture?”
I can remember her better in motion than I remember her face.
Short, dark hair, a bit curly. Cute. Not necessarily the most stunningly dressed girl in the room, but she’d move across the casino floor with this marvelous assurance. Those hips swayin’. A tray in her hand and a backside that could make me forget what I was supposed to be doing with mine.
I don’t know the first thing we said to each other.
It’s maddening, ain’t it? I can remember a woman crossing a room and the shape of her hair, but not how we got from being two employees in the same place to sharing a bed.
We did, though.
We worked around one another. We talked. We laughed. Some nights all we needed was one look across the floor.
“Feet hurt?” I’d ask when she got done with her shift.
“These damned shoes.”
“Take ’em off.”
“And serve drinks in my stockings?”
“Most of the fellas wouldn’t notice if you brought the whiskey in a coal bucket.”
She’d laugh. I liked that. She wasn’t somebody I picked up for an evening and forgot the next day. I liked having her next to me. I liked knowing there was somebody I wanted to see when my shift ended, someone who knew what the place was like because she worked in it also.
These days, we’d call her a wingmate.
It’s one thing to have guests that admire you. They see what you’re wearing, the way you move, the smile you’d painted on for them. They don’t have to see what happens when your feet hurt or your temper runs out. Another girl who works beside you knows the difference between the pretty little performance and the woman doing it.
I think that’s a lot about why I loved her.
There may have been some nice romantic declaration. If there was, it’s gone now.
I ain’t gonna invent one and give myself the best lines. I don’t remember us discussing what we’d do in a decade, neither.
We had a room, a bed, work, and each other. At the time that felt like a pretty good arrangement.
I loved her. I know that much.
And, I took a sawbuck or two out of a jar.
She disappeared with my heart.
“And her? Do you know how she felt about you?”
I’m not sure that she loved me the same. Perhaps she did. Maybe she cared about me and assumed I understood it was temporary. We never talked it out, honestly. Why would we? Young people spend a lot of energy making love and much less establishing what they think love is.
I was good at reading guests across a gambling table. That don’t mean I could read the woman sharing my bed with me.
One day she wasn’t there.
“Seen her?”
“Sorry, honey.”
“She say anything about leaving?”
“Not to me.”
Frankly, that last line was all I really needed to hear.
I had no solid leads. Still had a job, but I couldn’t justify keeping that room to myself forever.
Eventually I just moved on.
Not out of Atlantic City. Just out of that room.
“So how did you get from serving drinks to the next big thing?”
I didn’t wake up and decide to be a bartender. I saw somebody drowning behind the bar and figured I could be useful.
“Short a pair of hands?”
“Know how to pour?”
“The booze goes in the glass, am I right so far?”
“Get back here.”
“Same pay? Plus tips.”
That was about the easiest interview I’d ever had.
Oh, the tips were good. Real good!
Better than running drinks up and down stairs. Better than negotiating with drunks about who owed whom a good time. Better than discovering that you’d picked the wrong fella to trust on the wrong evening, then shut up and forget about it later.
And I could make a decent Manhattan already. Whiskey, vermouth, an ice bucket. This isn’t college chemistry. Had enough experience drinking in my hotel room to know it.
There’s more to tending bar than that, naturally, and I got better with practice. I learned what people wanted, how to keep my hands busy, and when a customer wanted company more than a cocktail. If the man across from you is flirting with you, make him feel clever without having to go upstairs.
I found a place where looking good meant getting paid well.
Once I started working behind the bar, living in hotels made all sorts of sense. I could go upstairs when I was done. No subway. No el-train. Best commute ever. Maybe I met the blonde now and then and swapped a bit of gossip over drinks.
Don’t remember any romance like her, the girl with the brunette hair and the tights.
Maybe I had a few lovers who didn’t become more memorable than that. I could still enjoy someone’s company without falling in love all-over-again, then regretting it later.
What I remember from this time was, the bar.
People’ll tell a bartender anything if you leave enough room in the conversation and keep the drinks flowin’. They’ll tell you about a wife they’re cheating on, a job they might lose or win, a business deal that wasn’t perfectly legal, or the terrible things a government was doing to someone halfway around the world, or in our backyard.
As if I ever had a yard.
“To be honest, it sounds like a confessional with better tips.”
I was raised Catholic. You went to confession, told the priest your sins, got your penance, and went home with the idea you were square with God.
Behind the bar I heard more confessions than any priest I ever knew. Only nobody had to kneel, and I wasn’t giving out absolution. Just the blood of Christ, eh?
“My wife thinks I’m in Newark on business,” a fella might say, leaning over his rye.
“Well, you’d better bring her back something nice.”
“She’d kill me if she knew.”
“Then quit announcing it to the whole damned room, eh?”
Some of it was gossip. Some was news. Some was drunken horseshit. And plenty of it belonged in a confessional, not in my ear.
There were conversations about Prohibition. Then about the Depression. Then Roosevelt, and later the likelihood of another war on the horizon. I can’t put those conversations neatly in order; I only remember the sort of things people brought to my bar.
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t payin’ enough attention.
My bar. Sip on that a second.
Some customers thought everything would turn around. Others thought we’re all going to hell, handbasket optional. Either could be quite generous, with a drink in his hand.
As times got harder, fewer tourists came to visit. More people needed work. Some of the regulars who’d once freely spent money began counting it… or counted out. Others spent as if they were determined not to acknowledge there was any problem at all.
I was busy. Busy hands didn’t give me time to drink on-shift. After work, well. I may have drank more than I should’ve. There were stretches when I didn’t have much reason to go looking for romance.
Maybe I was lonely. Maybe I was simply enjoying a few years when I could take care of myself without much interference.
I know I worked.
And for a while… that was fine.
And then the law-of-the-land changed, again.
“I’m missing a step. How does legalizing the booze threaten your job, exactly?”
Everybody talks about the repeal of Prohibition as if the heavens opened and a nation of dry, respectable citizens suddenly discovered whiskey. I can assure you we had plenty of whiskey, and thirsty customers, the entire time.
What changed was the business of selling it.
The hotel didn’t close. The place had guests. It had rooms and entertainment and the kind of income no sane person would abandon. But management changed-over, and the new bosses were interested in legitimacy for the whole operation.
That made sense to me. If you’d been operating the wet room behind the dry one in a hotel for so-many years, you might be very enthusiastic about having everybody forget you were there before the laws changed.
Some of the business maybe went elsewhere. I couldn’t tell ya how much. I wasn’t some dame going over the books.
But expectations were changing, especially behind the bar. New standards prevailed, and experience alone wasn’t necessarily gonna get a girl very far. More people needed work. More people wanted to do whatever management wanted. A pretty face only gets you so far. Win a position, sure. Keep it? Not so much.
One of my bosses warned me that times were changing, so I should be ready for the worst.
“You’re telling me I should look for another job?”
“I’m sayin’, be ready, just in case.”
I didn’t need them to translate. A favor maybe. A move to another hotel. Or a warning. I don’t know, really.
I wasn’t fired. They didn’t drag me out of the place and tell me to never show my face again. I still had work when the message came.
Daddy had died.
Word arrived by courier. I don’t know how they found me. I suppose I’d written home often enough for someone to keep track of where I was, or maybe somebody hired a private-dick. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d concerned myself with when I passed by the newsstand, ya know?
I dropped everything.
I went to my boss.
“My father’s dead. I gotta go home.”
He didn’t argue. He didn’t ask whether I’d be back, and I didn’t tell him I would be.
I left Atlantic City and returned to New York.
I think that must have been around 1934 or ’35. Today, I can look up when Roosevelt was elected and Prohibition ended, just as well as you can. Those dates give the memories somewhere sensible to settle, although I won’t pretend I have a perfect calendar hidden in my head. I could be wrong.
I’d spent perhaps ten years in Manhattan before going south, four years or more carrying drinks and hustling around the hotels, and quite a few tending bar. That’s the best I recall. Maybe it don’t tally the way it oughta.
Anyways, it was a good run.
“What about your father? Did you make it back for the funeral? I can already tell that hit you hard.”
I didn’t attend Father’s funeral. I wish I had.
I loved my dad, and I knew he loved me. He’d been lonely after Mommy died, I think. I hardly saw him, which is something I really regret now, and I wasn’t eager to turn up at the funeral and remind the family of its black sheep.
Maybe I woulda been welcome. Maybe not. I didn’t find out.
But I feel like I already said some of that, earlier.
There were lawyers, of course. There were extended relatives and business arrangements already made, and my stepmother had interests of her own. I didn’t receive everything the family owned. To be honest, I didn’t ever believe I was gonna get any of it at all, in the first place.
But Daddy left me a tidy little fortune. Basically his retirement. He wasn’t gonna be using it, after all. Dark thought.
There was a townhouse in Manhattan, and a trust fund.
I confess I felt rather warm inside, imagining my stepmother discovering that Daddy had left me considerably more than she’d have liked. She’d been an unpleasant feature in my life, and I wasn’t above enjoying the idea that she’d been disappointed.
May god help her soul.
I wasn’t there to see her face. Damn shame.
The inheritance made me safe. It did not make me happy that my father died.
Those things aren’t opposites. I could be grateful for what he’d done and wish I’d had the chance to tell him so. I could be pleased with the money, pleased with the house, pleased that somebody who made my childhood miserable didn’t get to control either one, and still feel miserable about the funeral I missed.
And, yes, there was a little part of me thinking that after everything I’d gone through, the world had finally done something generous for me.
All it took was Daddy dying.
Lucky me.
“What sort of place did your father leave you? What was the house like?”
The townhouse was red, or reddish, brick. Big high stairs out front, the sort that made you feel as though a person ought to arrive carrying a calling card.
Inside, there were sheets over the furniture. Dusty pictures on the walls. A lovely candelabra. It wasn’t a newly furnished palace waiting for me to make a grand entrance. It was somebody’s town house, kept for convenience and left alone long enough that the rooms had gone quiet.
This wasn’t the main family house. Dare I call that a mansion? It was the sort of place a man bought because he could afford it, didn’t care for the commute from somewhere out in Westchester County, and had enough business in Manhattan to make staying in the city attractive.
Nice problem to have.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered if he’s thrown parties here… or entertained some other ladies.
Maybe even while I was in my teens.
There was a bedroom that suited me, a washroom with a clawfoot tub, and a kitchen big enough to waltz in.
Or do a one-woman show-dance.
I liked that kitchen, very much.
You can laugh if you want, but I’d spent an awful lot of time squeezing myself into rooms in which the bed was practically introducing itself to the stove, or where you depend on room service for a meal. Having a kitchen where a woman could turn around without apologizing to the furniture was a luxury.
At least for me.
The house was far too big for just myself.
And it didn’t feel like home.
Oh, it was handsome. The stairs and the furniture made that plain. And I could sleep there without worrying which Friday the rent was due, which man expected to share the bed, or who might decide that I’d overstayed my welcome.
But I had no particular use for all those empty rooms nor a reputation for being comfortably situated.
I hired some men to partition the place.
Tradesmen. The same sorts of fellas I’d taken unfair advantage of more than once in my youth. This time I paid them fairly. I was rather pleased to be the one paying, for a change.
In the trades or sex-work, it’s all the same. You like to be respected for what you’re good at, you like to be paid, and you like to choose the jobs that you’ll choose to take.
We divided off the foyer, part of the cellar, and some rooms that could be reached without everybody traipsing through my private space. The floor plan lent itself to doors.
“Want locks on these?” one of the workmen asked.
“Every bedroom, including mine.”
“Yours?”
“What, you think I don’t want privacy? Mine and theirs. It’s egalitarian.”
Putting another kitchen upstairs would have been annoying, and besides, I liked where I’d decided to sleep.
So my tenants would have rooms and keys of their own. We’d share a washroom. I had, once. I’ll prepare meals. We’ll use the kitchen and dining-table together, more or less, without pretending the house had been made into a stack of little apartments.
Of course I put a lock on my bedroom door, too. It seemed only decent. I wanted everybody to have privacy. I didn’t want anybody thinking I was marking them out as especially untrustworthy.
I’d known what it was to need a room. I also knew what it was to lie awake in somebody else’s room wondering whether the price of staying there’d changed since yesterday morning.
I didn’t want that for people I’d be living with.
Mostly they were younger. Women. Queers, though we didn’t call them that back then. Some men who didn’t make me nervous — the gay theater sort, perhaps, with more opinions about costumes or sets than about whatever a landlady ought to do for them after supper.
I think there may have been a Black man, or woman, among them from time to time. That feels possible, but I don’t have a face I can set beside it. New York wasn’t Alabama, but people didn’t magically become free from prejudice because they lived in The City. Some arrangements were kept quiet, even when there was nothing shameful about it.
Someone might sleep on the sofa when there wasn’t any other place free.
“You got a room for rent?”
“Not today. Sofa’s open.”
“I can pay next week.”
“Then we can talk next week. Don’t leave your bag in the hall.”
Later somebody’d move away for work or find a new family or another place, and a room would open up. The person on the sofa could have it.
I charged rent. I wasn’t running a charity. I cooked, I kept house, I had my own room and my own life. It was a practical arrangement, and it suited me better than living in a huge empty place by myself.
Sadly, I don’t remember their names.
This bothers me. I remember the bricks and the stairs and the tub. I remember the sheets thrown over the furniture when I arrived. I remember having the house altered and paying the workmen. But when I try to picture the people who ate at my table, the faces don’t come to me now.
I don’t think I married. I’m about ninety-nine percent certain of that. I can’t remember a lover sharing my life there, ’though perhaps there was one now and then.
I had fewer opportunities to meet people when I wasn’t working outside the home, and I was older. Not quite as beautiful as I’d been when I was a young chorus girl, and not quite as flexible… in a number of ways, both physically and morally.
Maybe I became a crazy cat lady. That’s what they call it today, right?
Certainly, there are worse things to be.
Sometimes the house felt gloomy. Sometimes it was warm and noisy and inviting. People came and went. Someone needed a place, somebody found work, somebody left for a better job.
For me, it was a kind of family.
I called them my kids, in a manner of speaking. When you take in younger people, feed them, worry about where they’ll go next, and make sure they have a door they can lock, I suppose you can call them yours in some sense of the word.
Not “property”. Not “dependents”.
Just people who belonged there while they needed to be there.
Eventually, with the right people in it, the place felt like home.
“And afterwards?”
And then… my recollections run out.
I remember the Second World War started. I don’t remember how it ended. When I try to place the last of my life on a calendar, I come up with something around ’43, plus-or-minus.
Terrible as it… the war was, you can’t know how relieved I was to learn how it actually ended.
What happened after that? I don’t entirely know.
I might’ve died. I might have lost my faculties. I might have done something very stupid to myself. There may be explanations I haven’t thought of. And because my next clear memories are so strange, I’m not even sure the history I recall belongs neatly to the history I’m living now.
For all I know, somebody named Vivian existed in that very city, in that very period, and left a completely different story behind her.
Does that idea frighten me? Sometimes it scares the piss outta me. Honest.
I can tell ya what I remember. I can’t hand you a death certificate or a receipt for an interdimensional bus ticket.
But, as the kids say these days, it’s my lived experience.
You could even say that I found a better opportunity. Heh.
The next point I can place myself in is ’93, without a body of my own, inside Tomiko’s head.
Poor asshole.
I can’t tell you exactly how that happened, either. I know how I experienced it. I know what being there was like for me. I know how long it felt before I could do much more than exist inside a life somebody else was already living.
Thirty years in solitary confinement will teach a person poise, assuming it doesn’t make her crazy.
I don’t have the redheaded dancer’s body now. I never will again. I can’t do those high kicks or catch a man’s attention across a casino floor with a turn of the hips.
Well, maybe I still can, actually.
I can’t go back to the particular young woman who boarded a bus with ten dollars she knew would be missed.
I’m not that hot-headed, sassy, ambitious girl anymore.
That don’t mean I’m not Vivian.
I mean, people change. Even people who’ve had considerably stranger circumstances to contend with than their usual birthday party.
Doc and I share this body and a good deal besides, but she isn’t me and I’m not her. She’s my sister — syster, when I’m feeling whimsical — and we’ve learned to live together. She has her own history. I have mine, such as I recall it. For a long time I didn’t have much opportunity to build a new one. Now I’ve got one.
I have people who know which of us they’re talking to. I have work and art I want to make, friends I can annoy, or amuse on occasion, and the luxury of making mistakes that are properly my own.
And… I have Tomiko.
Finally ended up with somebody who’ll never leave me.
“You know… I will always be here.” ^_^
I know. That sounds like a setup for a joke, considering the woman whose disappearance started this story. I don’t intend to make one at Tomiko’s expense. Well, not at this moment.
I think about that brunette now and then.
For years the thought was painful enough that I didn’t want to stay with it. I was angry with her. Then I would wonder if something dreadful had happened and feel guilty about that. I’d imagine her leaving of her own choice, and that hurt in another way. All the possibilities were ugly because I didn’t know which one belonged to the life we’d been living together.
It still hurts. It’s easier now.
I don’t need her to have been faithful forever. I don’t need a grand apology. I don’t even need to know whether she loved me as much as I loved her.
I pray she went home to her family, or someone kind.
Maybe she found work. Maybe she fell in love with somebody else, married, had children, grew old. Maybe she had a perfectly ordinary life and eventually forgot the pretty little redhead she’d left behind in Atlantic City.
I’d be alright with all that.
I’d rather imagine her home and safe than turn her into a victim of something dreadful merely to give my own grief some exposition.
When I close my eyes, what I see isn’t a crime scene, or a boss’ face, or even the room with her things still there in it.
I see the casino floor. I see the girls weaving among the tables and the men too busy looking at their cards to notice. I see one woman walking away with a half-empty tray, apparently quite pleased with the way she occupies the world.
I remember wanting to follow her.
And after all these years, I can still tell you this much:
She had swagger and a fine ass.