by David Kern
Jenna stripped off her coat and tossed it on the windowsill that fanned out behind the corner booth. As she crossed the vinyl bench, it protested, a sound she echoed with a sigh.
Callie and Sam were still in the lot, hashing out some drama left over from work. Bitches, Jenna thought. She was over the catfights, the need to make a big deal over everything: tips, guys, hours, the single pack of Virginia Slims they shared because they were all quitting.
She was done. A coffee-stained newspaper, scavenged for coupons and opened to the obituaries, sat on the table. She mined its guts for the Lifestyles section and found a book review she took for a lie. It wasn’t as if the local rag could afford to insult anyone, channel The New York Times and call out an overtly meta rehash of human nature for what it was.
Jenna stayed, both in town and at her job as a dancer at Jerry’s High life, because she had no idea what she wanted. Sure she knew what she dreamed of when he granted herself that luxury. But there was this disconnect between the ideal and her next step that kept her sputtering like a motor too reliant on its choke.
There was no Jerry. Instead there was Ali, who bought the joint six years earlier and had the common sense to keep the brand. He lent the money from his father, a Syrian immigrant who had built a spider’s web of businesses with grit and a smile.
Eventually the old man married an Italian woman. This accounted for Ali’s good looks: caramel skin, deep-set eyes, wavy hair. His body was sculpted by years of wrestling. Rumor had it he was nearly an Olympian.
He put those skills to use in the sack. In Jenna’s case, they accounted for two blooming, violet fingerprints where he gripped her spindly thighs. She didn’t find him abusive, merely purposeful and direct in the way he laid his claim to her.
Honestly, it was surprising she liked sex given her malaise. But it felt good to have someone try to mine her core, even if for selfish reasons. In some messed up way, they were showing faith in her she couldn’t muster on her own.
— — —
Jenny studied the kitchen’s swinging door. Its stainless steel was scuffed, and there was a small rectangle for a window. She looked through it at a bank of bulbs too brilliant for the hour. But she persisted on the off chance she’d catch a glimpse of someone approaching.
She thumbed through the paper. Beside the crossword and jumble there was an ad for a travel agency with deals on Saint Martin, Saint Lucia, and the Dominican. The girl in the picture was gorgeous and beaming, filling out a two piece in a way Jenna envied.
Before returning to the puzzles, she decided to get herself coffee. This was the sort of place where you could do that without a second look, pouring it from one of four carafes on a machine with red lights that burned 24-7.
Jenna had just topped off when Reny, the nightshift waitress, slipped through the kitchen door with a pad and pen in one hand and a zippo in the other. She sparked a flame and bowed her head to light the menthol dangling from her mouth. She nodded toward Jenna and smiled. Then the waitress tucked the lighter in her apron pocket. “Hi, sweetie, just you tonight?” She tapped the pen on her pad.
Jenna eyed the server’s long nails and wondered how it was they didn’t interfere with her grip. “Not really. Callie and Sam are going to war outside, so you tell me if I’m alone?”
Reny nodded. “Sounds like the same old, same old.” She set silverware and a few extra napkins beside Jenna’s plate. A glass of orange juice followed. “But you’re going to have to decide when and if you’re tired of it.”
“I suppose.” Jenna gave the menu a cursory glance. “Two eggs, over easy, with rye toast, sausage and three strips of bacon on the side.” Before she finished, Reny was done writing.
“I don’t even know why you pick up the menu,” the waitress said.
“Like you said . . . same old.” Jenna shrugged her shoulders.
Reny gave that nod older people use to say they have been there and done that. She grabbed the coffee and poured two fingers for a warmup; it was the only comfort Jenna was willing to accept at the moment. “So, did you at least make some money tonight?”
The dancer leaned forward and produced a wad of cash, secured with a rubber band, from her hip pocket. She dropped it on the table and looked at Reny with widened eyes.
“Damn! That’s close to an inch thick.”
Jenna nodded. “What can I say? People love to watch me shake my ass. That’s mostly twenties and fifties too.”
Reny pursed her lips, clearly considering a career change. “And what can you make in a weekend?”
“Seven fifty if I get the balance of drinks served to lap dances just right.” Jenna sipped her coffee then continued. “What can I say? I’m an artist.”
The waitress, who knew the dancer since she was 11, laughed at the irony. “And you lose Monday to amateur night?”
“For the most part,” Jenna replied. “I still push drinks and nachos, flash a tit if some guy asks for it, but it’s not really money.”
“Your tits are worth more than that, honey.”
“Yeah, you would think I would be able to get ahead somehow, but here I am.” She grabbed her silverware, tore the paper holding it together. The knife slipped from her hand and landed on the plate with a clatter. “Do you think you can put in that order?”
Reny laughed. “Sweetie, I put it in before I even left the kitchen. Luis will have it ready by the time I finish this smoke.” She pulled a box of Mores from her pocket and tapped out another menthol she lit on her way to the door.
— — —
Jenna turned back to the paper. Die Hard 2 was still on top at the box office, but Ghost was pushing it hard. She could not make heads or tails of this, but as her dad always said, opinions were like assholes. Still, she didn’t care what the girls had to say about Swayze. Bruce Willis was the man she would fuck dead or alive.
As if conjured, Callie and Sam ploughed through the door, and Jenna took a swig of juice followed by a shot of coffee to prepare.
Callie caught her thick thigh on the edge of the table and groaned as she shimmied to her seat. Jenna met her cheerleading in high school. The girl was far from a Rhodes Scholar, but she was loyal as shit. Smoking weed and a penchant for post-shift burgers made her a bit of a specialty dancer, but she had the breasts and round ass a lot of the older clients fawned over. And she was willing to do extra stuff in the VIP room to ensure her tips stayed on par.
Conversely, Sam was a beanpole. She took the outside spot in the booth, smoothing her leather mini against the back of her legs. Jenna found Sam’s Penn State sweatshirt a bit bizarre, it being August and all, but it seemed the girl was beyond pretense—even when a fabulous pair of pumps was lost in the chaos.
She grew up in Elkins Park, a flush suburb north of Philly, but claimed to be from the city. To sell the idea, she tried to mimic the voice of Talia Shire circa 1976, but the result was a slurry of Shire in Rocky and The Godfather that left everyone within earshot perpetually confused.
Callie swept the paper—including the section Jenna had been reading—off the table and poured the last dribble of her friend’s coffee in her mug. “So, what’s up?”
Jenna responded with a reedy smile. “Not too much. I was just talking to Reny. You two work everything out?” She shot a glance at both of them, but Sam kept her eyes on the table.
“Yeah,” Callie replied. “I gave her forty more because she pushed a lot more drinks.”
“Oh.” Jenna wished she could chug some coffee to hide her face. Instead, she decided to move on quickly. “You’re both on for the weekend?”
“Just Thursday and Sunday,” Callie said. “Billy and me are heading to Seaside Heights on Friday morning for a thing. He has a bunch of friends coming down to his dad’s condo on Saturday for a cookout—beer ball and the works.”
“We’re heading down on Sunday,” Sam added. “I’m dancing Friday and Saturday. We’ll be able to cross paths for a few hours before she needs to head home.”
“We’re heading down? Am I missing something here, girl? I think it’s time to dish.” Jenna glanced at the kitchen door.
Sam stalled, drumming her fingers on the table. “Yeah, me and Tommy are going down. He’s a guy from the club.”
“You’re dating a customer?” Jenna knew the rules didn’t mean a damn thing to Sam, but this could be bad news for everybody. Conflating customers with boyfriends was downright dangerous.
“It’s more like they’re seeing each other than dating,” Callie said in Sam’s defense. “They’ve only been out twice, so it’s not like they’re screwing.”
“Well . . .” Sam kept up with her drumming.
“You fucking whore!” Callie’s faux exasperation was followed with a playful slug. Sam rubbed her upper arm and shrugged.
As usual, Jenny was the killjoy. “Most guys can’t take it when their girl is a dancer. There’s always a fallout.”
“Yeah,” Sam replied. “Things fall down like a bunch of dominoes.”
Jenna stared back, trying to rearm her tongue. It was dumb luck when Reny came through the door. “Off to get you your plate,” she said as she passed. “Then right back to get more orders.”
— — —
Jenna’s eggs were cooler than her meat, which gave off a bit of steam. She thanked Reny and reached for the toast, resisting the urge to scrape off a clump of butter with no hopes of melting .
“Everything OK?” The waitress rarely missed a trick after sixteen years.
But the dancer deflected the query by snapping her bacon. As long as it was crisp, it was hard to fuck up that stuff. “No, I’m good,” she said.
Reny took orders from the other girls: a Belgian waffle with a side of fruit for Callie and cottage cheese with a cup of maple syrup on the side for Sam.
I swear, Jenna thought, the girl has the food habits of a Depression-era codger. She decided there was no delicate way to re-enter the earlier conversation. “So, Tommy?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s it about him that makes him more dateable than every other man in Queen City?”
“Does he need to be?” Sam lifted her glass toward her face.
Jenna drowned her eggs in ketchup and stabbed a clump of them with her fork. “Sort of,” she said before taking the bite. “When you decide to subject all of us to the risks that come with dating a customer.”
Sam leaned forward, resting her cheek on her fist. “Subject? Risks? Really, I think you’re overstating it.”
“Sweetie, I just don’t want him to get possessive.”
“I have a question. Does Ali ever get possessive?” Sam drug two fingers across her glass.
Callie laid down a sausage link pilfered from Jenna’s plate. “C’mon, Sam, that’s not fair!”
Sam’s fingers drew a dissonant moan from the glass. “Why not? Everyone knows you don’t shit where you eat.”
Jenna slugged more coffee and filed through potential replies. “Look—Ali is not likely to start a fight that rips apart his own club.”
“No, he’s just likely to beat you to death.” The words were a missile strike, and Sam celebrated their accuracy with a porcelain-doll smile.
Jenna wondered if her efforts to conceal the bruises, the blushing left by his fingers on her wrists, failed so miserably. “Got to hell!”
— — —
The swinging door would likely have gone unnoticed were it not for the aroma of cooking oil and canned fruit. The smell was blanketed, in oddly pleasant fashion, by a whiff of menthol. Reny pushed plates to their respective destinations then looked at Jenna inquisitively, but the dancers clung to the silence like a lifebuoy.
Callie smeared butter on her waffle and bathed her plate in syrup. Her fruit went untouched until Jenna claimed a slice of melon as repayment for the sausage.
Sam stirred her cottage cheese then studied herself in her spoon.
“I have a dime bag,” Callie blurted in an effort to end the uncomfortable silence. “Johnny the bouncer said it’s good stuff.”
Jenna shook her head. “I’m not going to get high just to change the topic of conversation.”
“There was a topic?” Sam pulled her spoon out of her gross concoction and licked it clean until it captured the gleam cast through the diner’s old, smoke-dulled light fixtures.
“Yes,” Jenna said. “Until you killed the conversation.”
“Mmm.” Sam kept studying herself with her makeshift mirror. “Well, I’m tired of the predictability of pot—feeling a little sleepy, a little creeped, a whole lot hungry.” She cast Callie a sideways glance. “Besides, that’s the last thing we need.”
“But what else is there to do?” Callie’s question was innocent enough, a reflection of her need to please, but Jenna bristled at it. She thought: What else is there to do? Well, there are books to read, and two hours from here there are eight of the fifty best museums in the world.
Sam’s response was—in a twisted way—more practical. “Out in my change bag I have some coke, a sample from one of Tommy’s friends. I’ve heard it really opens your world–makes you feel like you’re flying. Everything speeds up. You’re just better, productive.”
“Sam! Are you insane or just cruel?” Jenna looked across the table at Callie with uncommon concern. Three years earlier, her brother—six weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday—died after a weekend-long binge on cocaine, cheap vodka, and diet pills. It was hard to put a finger on the actual culprit his heart was so fucking confused.
Callie took a long, slow drink of water. “Sammie, I’m sorry.”
“What the hell, Callie! Why are you apologizing to her?” Jenna gripped the table with both hands, and her fingers blazed.
“I don’t know,” Callie replied. Tears streamed down her face. “All I know is my dad can’t hold it together. He just watches TV and smokes.”
As Jenna struggled to connect the dots, Sam flicked her tongue against her front teeth. “Hey, I don’t think trying it makes you a coke fiend.”
“Don’t call him that! Don’t make him sound like a deviant. Josh had a disease. It’s how he coped with the world. He wasn’t perfect, but he was my big brother.”
Blank-faced, Sam swallowed a spoonful of cottage cheese then pushed away the bowl. “Look, the past is the past. Nothing you do is going to bring him back, so this lame nun business is useless. It’s just going to make you boring. Where will that leave you in five years but alone?”
“That’s condescending, cruel, and discouraging all rolled up in one incredibly shitty thing to say!” A vein on Jenna’s temple throbbed.
“Oh look,” Sam hissed. “The artiste being eloquent, again. Not all of us are packing the luggage full of untapped potential you’ve been carrying around since you can walk. This is it for us. We’re living the dream—the best one we’re going to have. If you’re frustrated about slumming it, I get it. You probably should be. But you don’t get to call my shots because you’ve missed all your own.”
“Fuck off!” Jenna rose to her feet.
Callie interrupted. “Look, she’s sort of right, Jenna. Nothing ever happens here, and nothing ever will, at least for us. We need to live a bit. What do they say: Eat, drink, and be merry?”
“For tomorrow you may die,” Jenna added.
Callie shrugged. “Exactly.” She tapped Sam on the shoulder and nodded toward the front door. They slid out the booth and made their way outside.
Jenna swept her hand through her hair and stole a parting glance. There was a smug, plastic expression on Sam’s face that generated a gravity Callie could not resist and Jenna could not understand.
— — —
Reny stood beside the booth and quietly chewed her lip. She was about to clear her throat when Jenna looked up. “It’s so damn frustrating,” she said. “I like to think she needs me, but she never hears me.”
Reny cleared the plates and wiped down the table. “Which one of them are you talking about?”
“Umm, Callie.” Jenna pushed her plate toward the waitress.
“You may want to stop and think about that, sweetie.” Reny reached for the cutlery. “Some people have a self-defeating need for a rival, to wage a war in which they never gain ground. They just die a little bit every day. The worst part is they drag people into the whirlpool they create, and everyone drowns.”
“So, am I the warrior, the rival, or a bystander?”
Reny balanced a stack of dishes on her hip. “Did you hear me? Everyone drowns.”
As she walked away, Jenna reopened the newspaper. A second set of puzzles, including a word search, failed to hold her attention. But a review of an exhibit—an introspective by a Jamaican-born photographer—tugged at her. He hailed from the country’s interior, far from the beach bars where dime-star Marley impersonators warbled “Stir It Up.” Shots of baby-faced gangsters marking time on the streets of Kingston accompanied the story.
Jenna nodded, suddenly aware of the tenuous connection between the article and travel ads on the same page. This reminded her, amusingly enough, of the way her dad referred to Ali as Egyptian. Despite the shoddy packaging, the pictures stuck with her. There was a boy, about 16, selling flowers in the void between a water fountain and public restroom. He was smoking a cigarette—a hand-rolled one—and staring sadly through the gray netting wrapped around his head.
Another shot captured an old man with a saddlebag for a face framed by heavily salted braids. He straddled a bucket to provide drum accompaniment to a dancer swaying somewhere outside the frame. Jenna guessed it was a woman based on the drummer’s countenance, a thin and slightly twisted smile with eyes narrowed like a congregant wary about experiencing so much grace in one dose.
She tried to conjure the picture she would take of the dancer—the one using shadow play to give depth to the woman’s features and chest, her dress a blur as she spun, sweat pooled on skin glistening in the sun. Jenna started taking pictures in middle school, long before she filled out enough for cheerleading. Shooting provided her with a thing, the frustratingly imprecise phrase her dad used for any activity that confirmed she was alive. She could have done theater, or debate, orchestra, or Model UN—anything—providing it satisfied his conviction she’d be seen as more than a nameless placeholder in a queue. He had done his time in and on the line.
Snapping photos led to stints on the school newspaper and yearbook staff. Callie joined her on the latter though her friend conceived of it as more of a social enterprise. Jenna, however, enjoyed the opportunity to frame the way others saw the world. There were contests, a prize or two, and the opportunity to work at a studio in a neighboring town. But the pay was minimum wage, and the offer came the year her mom died, and her dad was laid off from Steel. He went back part-time ten months later, but the idea of college dissipated by then.
She made good money dancing. After eight months, she was able to help out when her dad needed disc surgery. Now he talked about retiring and picking up hours at the gas station around the corner from his house. He claimed he could save on fuel, but he lived just two miles from the mill, and Jenna knew the problem was pain.
A friend of hers did wedding photography and let her tag along as an assistant once. She was taking candids—seconds meant to fill in the album—and managed to capture this amazing image of the bride and her mother staring at their reflection in a pond. When the bride decided it was her favorite shot in the lot, the one she wanted blown up to thirty-by-forty, the friend got jealous and accused Jenna of trying to steal her business.
Since then trips to Soho for a peak at the galleries were her only art fix—indulgences Ali played along with providing there was a steak dinner and a shameless fuck waiting for him at the end of the night.
By the time she finished the review, her coffee was cold. She returned to the carafes and considered the one with the orange lid for a second before realizing the idea blossoming in her mind was the sort of thing where you dove in headfirst. So, she filled her mug with the good stuff and—in a minor concession to its temperature—sucked it down in three prolonged gulps.
Eyeing the table, she noticed Sam’s sweatshirt, balled up like a kitten on the bench. The Virginia Slims nestled in the hood were an easy find. Jenna tapped the bottom of the pack for a single then mumbled “fuck it” and slid the box in her breast pocket.
She pulled the cash from her hip pocket and peeled off $100 for the bill, tucking it beneath the mug she just drained. Then she grabbed her coat and checked for her keys before heading out the rickety, aluminum back door she imagined led to the lot.
Her instincts were right. Callie and Sam were hunched over a picnic table on the street side of the property—a spot where generations of naïve couples had shared ice cream sundaes, double cheeseburgers, and fries so greasy even the pigeons wrung them out. These days the nubs of cigarettes wedged between the slats were more common. And, to be honest, no one was going to blush at the sight of some blow—especially on the wrong side of 3 a.m.
Jenna slipped into her car unnoticed. There was time to spark a cigarette before turning the key. The others would have to find their own ride home.
About the author:
D.E. Kern is an author and educator from Bethlehem, Pa. His stories and poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, Big Muddy, Denver Quarterly, Good River Review and Rio Grande Review among others. He teaches English at Arizona Western College. He and his wife, Neesha, live in Parker, AZ, during the academic year and Sauk Rapids, MN, during the summer.