Chapter 5 Lily #2
AS EMILY went over the phone system I watched as a girl hanging on a man’s arm left the Swim Club and walked toward the main lobby, her limbs loose.
She leaned her head on his shoulder like it was too heavy to hold up.
When the police questioned me about Steffanie’s attacker, I tried to remember his face and his clothes through the haze of rum, the darkness of the club, and the fog that rolled out of machines, the buzz in my ears from the throb of the bass, but I couldn’t say anything definitive.
Had his shirt been gray or blue? His eyes brown or green?
I remembered him as an outline: broad shoulders, muscular arms, a paper cutout of a man.
I wasn’t surprised that they never found him.
I never mentioned to anyone that I had watched her leave the dance floor with him, and when I saw her stumble, I told myself it was only because of her heels.
Or that she swayed into his shoulder on purpose.
One of those girlish tricks we were always reading about in Cosmo: make him feel needed.
I let myself believe that she was in control, that she wanted him to put his arm around her, so that she could have an excuse to get close to him and press against his side.
Steffanie quit the field hockey team after that night, and whenever we passed one another in the halls at school she gave me a look that I could only call pity—like there was something plain and obvious between us that I didn’t understand.
All of it felt tied together—the spa and its rules about how we were allowed to act and look, Steffanie, Ramona.
I thought back to the night Ramona showed me her first large-scale paintings, when I was trying to woo her to sign with me as my first client.
The one I liked the most was of a woman reclined on a divan.
In the background there were bouquets of flowers laced with razor blades, wolves or dogs baring their teeth.
The woman’s skin, pale with a blue cast to it, seemed to glow.
Her nipples were midnight blue, her belly button cobalt, her pubic hair navy.
We talked about what it meant to be a woman, to be looked at all the time, judged and measured and punished in a thousand different ways every day, to feel both undermined and empowered by your body.
I thought we had agreed on something. I’d been wrong.
EMILY WAS teaching me how to process gift certificate sales when I looked up and saw two women making their way toward the spa.
I noticed their hair first as they came around the bend in the hall, the same jarring red on both of them.
Not a natural red, but the color you’d get out of a Kool-Aid packet, concentrated and fruity.
Ripe. Even from that distance their bodies hummed with want.
They had the flashing, attentive eyes of stray dogs, of scavengers.
I couldn’t tell right away what they were hungry for.
All I knew was that they seemed more intense, more alive, than anyone else around them.
Next to them, the other casino patrons seemed as inanimate as furniture: the tripod stances of old men resting on their canes, the woolly-haired women pushing through on their walkers, the ends of the metal legs capped with tennis balls.
It was in the way they moved down the long hallway, switching their matching boys’ hips, narrow and square.
Their tangled gold necklaces and clanking bracelets.
The thick wedges of eyeliner that made them look haughty and exotic and bored, high priestesses displeased by their retinue.
Right away I could recognize that part of that magic had to do with sex: their long legs exposed in tiny pairs of denim shorts, their concave midriffs revealed in crop tops, the WonderBra cleavage edged with lace.
But they had something else, too, something interior, something the spa was trying to promise people could be found in a bottle of expensive serum or in a series of treatments.
It was the particular confidence of knowing who you were and of knowing what you wanted.
I recognized it right away because I’d lost it. Or maybe I’d never had it at all.
Emily paused, having felt my attention drift. She must have followed my stare. “Oh God, those two. And on your first day. Well, you better start getting used to this shit.”
“Who are they?” The two redheads flipped their hair, pouted.
They clearly relished the attention, even the looks that they got from the women nearby, women wearing terry-cloth visors and pleated khaki shorts cut to the knee.
Women who sneered as they passed but then looked down at the paper cones of french fries in their hands with a little less pleasure than before.
“Scam artists, as far as we’re concerned.
One of them will try to read you your cards while the other slips products into her purse, or they buy a day pass and try to hustle the few clients we’ve got.
You have to keep a close eye on them; they’ll take anything and everything while you’ve got your back turned.
Last time they were here the younger one managed to pry the hairdryer off the wall in the ladies’ lounge. ”
“How often do they come in?”
“Not as much as they used to. Deidre blacklisted them so we can call security if they refuse to leave. This is the first time they’ve been back since.
I think they’ve got another hustle going on.
Drugs or prostitution, probably. A few weeks ago I watched the older one flirting with this guy at the Swim Club, kept putting her hand on his leg, laughing at his jokes. Or maybe she stole his wallet.”
I must have looked surprised.
“Oh, come on, didn’t you say you grew up here? That kind of stuff happens all the time.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know that.” But it still gave me the chills to think about it.
From far away the women had looked to be the same age, but I could see through the spa’s door that one of them was older than I had first thought and the other much younger, just a girl.
“Hello, sunshine,” the older one said, greeting Emily. “Long time no see. And look! You’ve got a new friend.”
“Des, this is Lily. And she’s not going to put up with any of your bullshit either, so don’t even try.”
The woman, Des, held out her hand. Up close I could see that her face was caked with makeup that had settled into the lines around her mouth, her eyes.
She wore so much mascara that her eyelashes matted together in five distinct spikes.
The younger one had wandered over to the magazines arranged on the coffee table.
She picked one up, flipped through a few pages, and rubbed a perfume sample on her wrist. When I shook Des’s hand, she clasped her other hand on top of mine and squeezed.
It felt strange to be touched with such tenderness and intent by someone I had just met.
“Ooh, pretty!” she said, fingering my bracelet hungrily. I pulled my hand away.
“Okay, seriously, Desmina, beat it,” Emily said. “Deidre is here today, and she won’t hesitate to call security on you. Neither will I, for that matter.”
Desmina turned to me wearing an exaggerated pout. “I’m so glad you’re here. See how mean she is to me? And most of the time we just want to come by for a quick visit, a little chat.” She turned over her shoulder. “Clara, come meet our new friend, Lily.”
The girl looked up from her magazine and stared at me. Her mouth parted a little, and a strange blankness came over her face, like she had been waiting for a bus for a long time or watching a run of late-night infomercials on TV.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“Oh, she’s fine. She gets like this when she’s having a vision, is all.”
“A vision?” I asked. I felt Emily sigh.
“What? Your girlfriend here didn’t tell you? She’s doing you and us a disservice. We are the best psychic duo on the East Coast. Ah!” She pointed one long-nailed finger at me. “You are intrigued. I can always tell.” I hated that she was right.
“That doesn’t make you psychic, Desmina,” Emily said, rolling her eyes. “It just means you’re not blind.”
Clara’s face had resumed its normal expression, and she skipped over to the desk, linked her arm with Des’s—they had to be related, but I couldn’t puzzle out how.
Mother and daughter? Cousins? With her other arm she wriggled a business card out of the tiny front pocket of her jean shorts.
She held it out to me. Clara Voyant, it said. Seer and Fortune Teller.
“Clara’s the psychic, really. I have a different set of talents.”
Emily coughed. “I’ll bet.”
Clara was silent, still staring at me. Nervous, I reached for a canister of pens, straightened them just to have something to do with my hands.
“So, Miss Lily, as a gesture of friendship, what do you say you give us a pass to the spa for the afternoon and in exchange, we’ll read your palm.”
“I’ll do it,” Clara said. She pulled on my wrist and turned my hand over, pinning it to the top of the desk.
“This is insane,” Emily said. “You two don’t leave in the next thirty seconds, I’m calling security. We are a private business, and we don’t need to serve you.”
Clara didn’t look up but stroked my skin with her fingertips so softly that it tickled and I flinched. Both women giggled.
“Ah,” she said, her catlike eyes scrunched in concentration. She pet my palm as though it were wounded. “You are recovering from a broken heart.” I felt my face go hot. I pulled my hand away and crossed my arms behind my back.