Inside Madeleine (2 page)

As luck would have it, Lola’s little feet took her downtown. Encased in tight, strappy sandals with four-inch heels, her infantile toenails were painted a cherry red. She marched and marched. A man stopped and watched her walk by. A few blocks later, another man yelled something in Spanish at her. Lola, a brave soldier, went onward. A few blocks later, an overweight man sitting on a beach chair in his doorway said, “Nice tits.” Yes, she was special. She’d been special in Detroit, at her high school. The looks, the lewd comments, the occasional grabbing. But what good was that, being special at John Adams High School in Detroit? She was in New York City. She’d come to the right place.

Her feet began to die on her. The endless stretch of asphalt darkened and cooled off ever so slightly. She marched forward, more slowly now, but there was blood on her feet and her arm ached from carrying her duffel. How long had she been walking? At one point, she turned left, and she found herself surrounded by the sort of people by whom she always imagined she should be surrounded. Skinny guys with spikey hair and bad pockmarks, weighed down by the metal in their belts. Girls with breasts like hers, tightly encased in tank tops, their dyed red hair the color of a sunset. The make-up! The cigarettes! She was in the East Village, but she didn’t know that yet. What she did know was she was going to cry if she had to keep walking and cry she did not want to do. No, not
Lola. She was tough. She wasn’t going to cry just because her feet were bleeding.

On the corner of First Street and Second Avenue was a cinder block building with a sign that said Mars Bar. It was a crappy little bar with nary a beer sign in the grimy windows. Lola liked it immediately; she liked small things, being small herself—well, for the most part. She went in and sat on a barstool, dropping her duffel bag to the dirty ground, her white clutch in her hands.

“What can I getcha?” said a muscular, black-haired girl.

“I’ll have a peppermint schnapps, please.” This had often been the drink of choice in the backseat of a Camaro, cruising the strip in Detroit.

The girl raised her eyebrow. Lola noticed it was very thick, thick as a cigar.

“How ’bout a bourbon?” Then she leaned forward and whispered, “I’m helping you out here. You can’t drink peppermint schnapps.”

Lola sat up a little straighter. “A bourbon then.”

It was a welcome burn and Lola quickly had two more. Her feet were feeling better already. Men came into the bar. Women, too. Occasionally, Lola waved at someone who looked interesting, but nothing seemed to happen as she thought it would. Four bourbons later, the bartender took her upstairs to where she lived and laid her out on her futon couch. Lola had never seen a futon. She immediately threw up, but the bartender handled it well.

The next morning, Rebecca, the bartender, made some tea and toast.

“Where you from?”

“Detroit. Thanks for the tea.”

“You can stay here until you find a place.”

Lola sat up. “You know, I’m not hungover.”

“Great.” Rebecca got down on the floor and started doing sit-ups. “But if you keep waving hello to strangers like you did last night, you’ll be dead before you’re ever hungover.”

“Strangers are all I have here. You’re a stranger.”

“You’re not in Kansas anymore, Lola.”

“Detroit ain’t in Kansas.”

“You know what I mean.”

Lola thought for a minute. “No, I don’t.”

Rebecca was silent, finishing her sit-ups. When she did get up she went to Lola on the futon and held her face gently in her hands. “You don’t know what I mean, do you?”

“That’s right. I don’t know what you mean.”

Rebecca kissed her gently and Lola felt a fluttering. She’d had a boyfriend briefly in high school, but nothing much happened with him, so she got rid of him. This felt different. Rebecca picked up Lola’s swollen, blood-stained feet and began to lick them. This went on for a surprisingly long time, until Lola began to get very, very sleepy. Then, carefully, so as not to disturb Lola, Rebecca removed Lola’s shirt and pulled down her bra, leaving it hanging there awkwardly, around the bottom of her breasts. “Damn,” Rebecca said, and then she was lost in
them. Lola, stretched out on the futon, flung her arms over her head, and let the fluttering feeling go on.

Lola worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, and Rebecca worked the rest. It had been easy to get the other bartender fired; he was rude, stole from the register, and drank a bottle of vodka a night. All Rebecca had to do was tell the owner the truth.

The first thing Lola did was buy a pair of sneakers, but still she didn’t match the East Village hipsters in their high tops. She just looked like a five year old with huge breasts, so she found a pair of boots with a nice sized heel on them and that did the trick.

Mondays and Tuesdays she made around a hundred dollars. Wednesdays weren’t much better. That first day she walked from Port Authority, when she felt she’d brought her breasts to the right place, had faded to a quaint memory in little over a month’s time. She was glad to be where she was, but she was surprised she wasn’t getting bigger tips, better offers. Men had looked, men gave her money, one even offered her a job to dance naked at a dive in Tribeca. But nothing felt right. Nothing had felt right since the day Rebecca took her in, and she was getting restless. Lola appreciated Rebecca, very much. But she knew it wasn’t forever.

Four weeks into the job and it was heading toward August, the July warmth giving way to a numbing, stifling hotness and filth that was, well, August in the East Village. Mars Bar had
no air conditioner, and the two fans in the window whirred, loudly blowing hot air everywhere. Lola tied her pale hair back in a ponytail; otherwise, it whipped around and stuck to her moist face. Teardrops of sweat dripped into her cleavage. It was Wednesday, and the beginning of her shift, but her mind was already on the night being over. She’d have four days off to read magazines and shop. She’d clean up the apartment, too, which Rebecca liked her to do.

“What do you have on draft?” a man said, and Lola stood up right away, as if she were in the military and he’d just barked an order.

He sat and drank and looked at her breasts.

“Wipe that lipstick off your face.”

Lola took a white bar napkin from the neat pile she’d just made and rubbed at her mouth.

His name was Christopher. He was six feet three, skinny, face and arms hairless, with large, smooth hands. He had a crew cut of black hair and black eyes and a tattoo of a dragon on one forearm and the name
MARCY
on the other. His father was in jail, which he was annoyed about. He had a motorcycle and he smoked filterless Pall Malls. He took her home that night and it hurt, but it was the right thing to do. She woke up the next morning in an apartment very much like the one she shared with Rebecca, and only a few blocks away, but she knew her life had changed forever.

He left that day, without saying where he was going. She got to work cleaning. There wasn’t much to clean. When he
got back around four in the afternoon, he did it to her again, and this time it felt good. Not as good as Rebecca, but it didn’t matter. She was his now, and that’s the way she wanted it.

Lola sat next to him on the couch where they both held bowls of canned raviolis on their laps, and she let her knees gently touch his.

“We’re going to rob that bar you work at. Tonight.”

The only thing Lola could think to say was, “Rebecca’s working tonight.”

“Who fucking cares? You got the keys, right?”

“No.”

“Well then we’ll have to do it before she closes.”

They drank on Avenue B, not far from Mars Bar. Occasionally, he leaned into her and she thought that he smelled a lot like that man in the Cadillac. Where was he now? Pulling into his driveway in Grosse Pointe, or some other posh Detroit suburb? Going home to a family? A wife who loved him? College-age children with futures? The music in the bar was loud and someone was singing, “Yeah, yeah it’s alright, yeah-ah, it’s alright. Baby, it’s alright, oh oh, baby it’s alright.” The bar they were in had air conditioning, which felt delicious to Lola, and she could feel a thin film of salt dry on her skin. Her nipples hardened up into little stiff puckers, and she leaned against the bar and arched her back a bit. Yes, Christopher had that smell, the smell of a man, a real man, the smell of something exotic, someone foreign. He’d told her he was part Cherokee and that was why
he was hairless. It was destiny she told herself, it was out of her control, just like the size of her breasts.

It was nearing four in the morning and all the bars were closing. It was only three blocks away. Three blocks and everything would change. She’d have that future she always dreamed about, though vaguely.

“Hurry up.”

Lola skipped along behind him, trying to catch up with his long strides. She was wearing her boots and it still wasn’t easy catching up. But she liked the view from behind, yes. His filthy black jeans, the nunchucks sticking brazenly out of his back pocket. The way he stooped over. Did he have a gun? She doubted it. It was all about his hands, his large, hairless hands.

As they got near Mars Bar, a seemingly homeless man with white spittle around the corners of his mouth, the stench of rot wafting forth from his body and a tiny little crack vial in his hand, tried to stop Christopher.

“Man, man, can you spare some change. I’m hungry, man …”

Christopher hit the man, and Lola watched him fall to the sidewalk.

They were seconds from the bar. The lights were out. For a moment, it was as if New York had gone dark, and the only thing glowing were the man’s eyes, staring up at her from where he lay injured on the sidewalk.

“Help me,” he said, and Lola stopped for a moment before a crashing noise jarred her attention away.

It was Rebecca pulling the gate down, the metal scraping
loudly as the gate fell to the sidewalk. But she hadn’t locked it yet, no, not yet. Christopher was a bit ahead now; she scurried to catch up. She saw the nunchucks come out of his pocket and for a moment, she wasn’t the woman she thought she was. She was afraid. She looked away, in fact, she looked down, and she saw that she, too, was glowing, not just that poor man’s eyes, no, but her pale breasts were glowing, and with a little effort she could hide her face in that whiteness, with just a little effort, she could close herself up in all her luck, in all that beauty.

M
AGGIE IMMEDIATELY LOVED
A
NYA
L
ANDER, HER ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR AT
B
OSTON
U
NIVERSITY, LIKE MANY STUDENTS DID
.
This was the first most important thing that happened to her at college. It was, in a way, her first chance in life. She wanted to please Anya. And she was an excellent student, but recently she’d fallen in love.

She was in love with Tony. He was ten years older than her and in a band that was going to be signed, she just knew it. Tony gave her hope, at least some of the time. And so did Anya. Anya radiated hope, as well as energy and enthusiasm and possibility. And Maggie craved hope. Her parents had died when she was seven. And her uncle and his wife, who raised her, never meant much to her. When she got the scholarship to BU, she left Indiana in a hurry.

The second week of the introductory course—which was a huge lecture with about ninety students—Anya Lander asked if anyone could volunteer to read to Caroline, a sight-impaired student enrolled in the class. The materials being used were not
available in Braille. Anya (as she asked her students to call her) stood at the front of the class, looking out at the vast room of people, her long, curly, truly wild hair loose around her shoulders, a brown denim mini skirt revealing her long, shapely legs. And Maggie, sitting at the back of the class like always, felt her hand rise. Maggie could see the entirety of the students in front of her—no one else raised a hand.

“Great. We have a volunteer,” Anya said, smiling fetchingly. “Come up after class and see me,” she said to Maggie, her large blue eyes shining all the way to the back of the class. Maggie’s heart started to race. It stayed that way for the rest of the hour, thumping away, making her breathe with difficulty. She didn’t know why she’d volunteered. It had nothing to do with wanting to help a blind girl. Maggie wasn’t really that sort. Her immediate, yearning feelings for Anya were what propelled her.

When the class ended, Maggie numbly walked up to Anya Lander. Close up, Anya had acne scars, and her head seemed large for her body, but she was still a supremely magnetic person. Standing so close to Anya made Maggie dizzy. And now, here she was. She could practically smell her. One other person remained in the classroom and that was Caroline, the blind girl. She remained seated in the front row, a mousy girl—short, pale skin, unseeing blue eyes, dishwater brown hair unattractively shaped around her face. Her shirt was ill-fitting; in fact, it may have been put on wrongly.

“Thanks so much for volunteering to read to Caroline. What’s your name?”

“Maggie. Maggie Drescher.”

“Maggie, this is Caroline.”

Caroline stuck a hand eagerly in the direction of Maggie. Her other hand gripped a cane. “Nice to meet you. When can we start? I’d like to set up a once a week meeting. Let’s find out how our schedules work out and set something up. I’m very anxious to stay with the class. I don’t like getting behind in my schoolwork. Can you walk me back to my dorm room? We could figure out everything on the way there.” Caroline’s fingers closed on Maggie’s arm like talons. Anya Lander beamed at Maggie as she guided her new acquaintance out the door.

Caroline was very bossy during the walk, ordering her in a clipped, nervous way. “Turn here. Now go straight.”

Caroline’s grip was too hard. Later there’d be small, purple bruises on Maggie’s arm. Maggie said, “Why don’t you just tell me where you live and I’ll just walk us there?”

“No. No, that won’t do at all in this case, but for other things, that would be great. But for now, I need to always go the same route. I need to learn my way to every class because I can’t rely on people taking me around. I’m often by myself.”