By Cynthia Singerman
“Everything is wonderful. Life.”
“Oh, like the movie?”
“Which movie?”
I roll my eyes at the telephone. I wonder what his face looks like. I haven’t seen Vic in five years. Maybe there are gray threads in his hair. Maybe there are crow’s feet at the corners of his blue eyes. I can only imagine how time has washed over him, his face fading like the morning moon in a cotton candy sky.
I know he’s not really paying attention—I can hear her in the background. Water running. A hum of a radio, although no one listens to the radio anymore. Playing the piano maybe. Her new hobby. I want to ask if she’s mastered Chopsticks. But I don’t. I’m very polite.
“It’s A Wonderful Life.”
“I know it is.”
Jesus Christ. “No, the movie.” I don’t want to play a game of Who’s On First. “With James Stewart. And Donna Reed.”
I also don’t want to talk any longer. I lick my lips. A terrible habit that makes them perpetually chapped. After work I’ll stare in the mirror, picking and peeling the red stained flakes like scales. Lizards. Snakes. Trying to remember not to lick them tomorrow.
“I’m late for work.” A lie. I’m never late for work. I love the bar. I live for the bar. We make our own mozzarella sticks. I would never eat them because I’m vegan. Although I ate a hot dog last week from a street vendor. The steaming cased meat squishy and bursting with flavor, smothered with the sugary tang of ketchup. I hadn’t eaten all day, all night. And we did shots after our shift. Which was stupid. I’m too old for shots. I should be sipping some Beaujolais Nouveau, swirling it around in my glass, watching it breathe. I always preferred a white wine. A Sancerre from the Loire Valley, but no one wants to drink white in the dead of winter, when the ground is glossy with ice.
“We’ll talk soon,” Vic says.
“So soon,” I say.
We won’t though. She doesn’t like it. He lives with her now and she is home all the time. She is between gigs, he tells me, which makes me gag. I saw her sing once and she was truly awful, like a mouse whispering its squeaks. I assume she thought it was sexy. I thought it would have been cooler if she’d come out screaming—like really angry, Courtney Love style. Beaver hanging out of her dirty underwear, curly, coarse brown hair bursting forth from the black satin. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just how I’d do it, take the microphone and smash it over someone’s head.
If I could sing, that is. I can’t. I have no talents really, other than not giving a damn. It’s a good one though. It serves me well, in my service. And that’s what most people don’t understand. To truly be a great waiter, bartender, host, manager, cleaner, sommelier, gopher, cocktail waitress, stripper, hooker, escort, you need to truly not give a shit about other people. I suppose you can argue to the contrary, but you have to be immune to do the job, get used to being spit at, barfed on, screamed at, threatened, harassed, coerced, grabbed, squeezed, shook, pushed, bruised, and battered.
I moved to the neighborhood when it was dark and dangerous and I slept on a mattress in my studio under a fur coat, because I read that’s what Carrie Bradshaw did, except I wasn’t a writer. I wasn’t anything but a hostess in a bougie club. You have to work your way up in this life. See everything from the base of a mountain, staring straight up into the peak beyond the clouds. I always think of the sheep I once saw out west, blending in with the boulders. So easily hopping from rock to rock, their majestic horns curling away from their heads like mighty crowns.
I don’t know if I am climbing, although everyone here is climbing. I was just running away. Away from my past to a place where no one knew who I was. I took the first job I could get. That’s how I met Vic. You have to make friends in this world—that’s how I moved up. You got to know people.
I got good at that, knowing them. Winking my big brown eyes out from under my thick black fringe. A white singlet and silver chains that look good with the stud in my nose. I’d spend hours on my eyeliner, getting it just so with a perfect flick of the wrist. Big eyes and big tits. They’re looking at one or the other when they order the drinks, slipping me cash across the counter.
I studied the right way to do it—to trick them into giving me what I needed. I just couldn’t trick Vic. I would have married him, maybe even moved, but my soul would have withered. At least, that’s what I tell myself after we hang up. Freedom for security. I could never make the sacrifice. It doesn’t matter, because he never asked. One day he just said he was tired.
“I’m just so tired.”
It’s hard to be tired in New York. If you’re tired in New York, you better be flush as fuck. Or you better lock down that hot rich man while you got the chance. While you got the looks and the banging body because no one wants a washed up old hag with three roommates who needs a nap.
Though I might stay young forever. I don’t know how but I drank from the fountain of youth so long ago that my skin is still luminous, like a lantern on a hot summer night. I got lucky, I guess. Good genes like my mama. Good jeans like the best, battered blue, worn with love, tight on the tush. She always looked so good. My mama did. So good right before she killed herself by falling off a balcony, drunk and high. Slipped right over the railing and that was that. Dead as a doornail.
It was just the two of us. She raised me alone by the beach. We were the townies and I ran around with a summertime boy in a purple polo. He screwed me in the sand, the sound of water in my ears, lights in the distance if you opened your eyes. Before he traded me for a girl wearing Liberty prints and pearl earrings. She was crisp and clean. Shiny and new. I watched them from the boardwalk, while the wood burnt the bottoms of my feet. The air smelled like fried fish and sickeningly sweet waffles, and tasted salty like tears and sweat and bitter like the dried sunscreen on my upper lip.
I had to get out of there. I was nothing but a body without a face. A fancy, but not fancy.
Because that’s all you’re good for when you don’t have a name or a trust fund. He had a name like Bruce, or Brett, or Carter or Crosby. I know his real name. I wrote it all down in my journal, vowing to never feel like that again. A fool who believed in love. But along came Vic and I believed again. He misses me, I can tell. Although he’d never say, and I’d never ask. So I sit in my studio, staring at my beautiful face in a flea market mirror, wondering when it will all change.
My hands have changed. They are ravaged with cracks, like worn leather saddles in the sun. I should have taken better care of them. I imagine my hands, weathered cowboys, exhausted from all their hard work.
My mother was the opposite. She hated hard work. The life of the party. Beautiful, soft hands, smooth as silk, no lines like mine. She took care of herself. She’d sit in a long heavy satin dressing gown edged in lace and knead her thin thighs with oil every night. She’d dust her neck with perfumed powder and run a white pencil under each fingernail.
So in the end, when she died, at least she died beautiful. And at least now, after Vic hangs up, I am still free. And everything is wonderful.
Cynthia Singerman, a Florida native, is a writer living in San Francisco. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and Spanish, as well as a law degree from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in, among others, The Dillydoun Review, Flying South, Sou’wester Literary Journal, HerStry, and American Writers Review. She is currently working on her novel, set in San Francisco. https://cynthiasingerman.com