We Are Water

The catch is: you have to dance topless on a little stage across from the bar. But my week’s rent at the rooming house is almost up. I’ve been living on peanut butter, Wonder bread, and tap water all week. Forty bucks a night plus tips, the manager tells me. His name is Rusty. He’s the bartender, too. Dancers get an extra dollar for every cocktail they can get the customers to buy them between sets (when you can put your top back on), an extra two dollars if the guy buys another drink for himself, too. “I give you girls ice tea instead of liquor, but the jamokes who are running up a tab don’t have to know that,” Rusty says. “Another girl just gave her notice, so I can start you tonight.” I’m hesitant but desperate, so I decide to give it a try.

My shift goes from nine o’clock until 1:00 A.M., but we get breaks. There are three of us dancers. Gloria is kind of flat-chested, but she’s a wicked good dancer. Rusty’s girlfriend, Anita, is the other one, even though she has stretch marks and is kind of thick in the middle. “Some guy starts getting grabby with you, I’ll give Rusty the signal and he’ll handle the situation,” she’s promised. The sound system blares sexy disco music: “Rock the Boat,” “Get Down Tonight,” that Donna Summer song “Love to Love You Baby.” My dancing is awkward at first because I’m so nervous and self-conscious about my boobs showing. But it helps that the spotlight on us makes it hard to see any of the men who are watching us. Older men, mostly, which somehow makes it easier. After a while I use my technique from before: thinking of things I’ve memorized to take me someplace other than where I am: the Commandments, the Religious Mysteries, old TV jingles. Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed … Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile … It’s not so bad. By my third night, I’ve made enough money to pay for two more weeks’ rent on my room and go grocery shopping. But on my fourth night, while I’m in the middle of dancing to that stupid song “Afternoon Delight,” I look out at the crowd and can swear I see my cousin Kent out there among the old coots. I keep dancing but I’m freaking out, not concentrating, and I fall off the front of the stage and twist my ankle. The music stops and when the lights go on, I can see it’s not him—that it doesn’t even really look like him. But that ends my dancing career.

After the swelling goes down and I can walk on my ankle again, I go looking for other work. My luck is with me, and I get two different part-time jobs on the exact same day. In the daytime, I’m a fry cook at Josie’s Fish & Chips. At night, I work the shoe rental counter at Three Rivers Ten Pin. Both jobs leave me kind of smelly, from cooking grease and from the antifungal spray you have to squirt into the bowling shoes after people hand them back in. I’m grateful for that spray, though, because sometimes those shoes come back smelling like the jar of Limburger cheese my father used to take out of the refrigerator and spread on crackers. But hey, work is work. Every once in a while, one of the bowlers asks me out, but I always say the same thing: “Sorry, but I already have a steady boyfriend.” I’m not that interested in men, or women either for that matter. Mimi, one of my coworkers at the bowling alley, brings me to a women’s bar one night, but all the public affection—kissing and dancing crotch to crotch—makes me uncomfortable. “Not my scene,” I tell Mimi the next time she asks me to go with her. Priscilla and I are still in touch, though, and when she visits me those two times, we do stuff. But then she gets a steady girlfriend, a welder at Electric Boat named Robbin, and we lose touch.

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