In my effort to show them the back, my hip bumps against the table, making the mussels clack in their bowls. Unlike the group yesterday, these are mostly men. I nearly lose my balance turning, but one of them catches me with a firm grip.
“Whoa,” he says with a laugh. “Careful there. Elizabeth, isn’t it? Your mother’s told us so much about you.”
I flop back down in my chair, screwing a cigarette between my lips, smile boozily at her semicircle of bosses. “Has she?” He pours me another glass of white, his eyes doing a downward graze along the bandages, while my mother pats my knee under the table.
“She’s gotten into dancing now,” she’s telling her bosses. She has so many bosses these days, she told me earlier, I wouldn’t believe it. Can’t keep them straight, she confided in the bathroom as she marched me into and then out of a cloud of Angel. “Belly dancing, of all things. Belly, isn’t it, Elizabeth?”
My mother looks at me, her eyes a shin kick.
“Belly,” I affirm, the cigarette dangling unlit from my lips. One of her bosses pours me another drink, even though I’m reeling from the first two.
“How exotic,” the one female in the group offers, slightly sourly. “Maybe you could teach us some moves sometime.”
“Maybe.”
“Oh! Show them!” my mother says. “She showed me last night.” She does an awkward impression of snake arms, causing the sleeves of her lace coverall to rise up her forearms. She smooths them down, then goes back to prying open mussels. “Didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t know what possessed me to undulate in front of my mother last night while she sat on her flower-patterned couch and watched, her palm pressed firmly on the armrest, Mick Jagger meowing in her large lap.
“I’d love to see,” a boss says.
“Room right here,” another one says, waving a hand at the space beside him.
“Little shy,” my mother says, rubbing my back vigorously, then patting it gently.
The boss who’d love to see gives me a smile like a flickering light. “Shouldn’t be.”
? ? ?
After a while, they forget I’m here, thank heaven. Hairy hands braided over mountains of glossy disemboweled black shells. Lost in drunken shoptalk. Stopped refilling my glass. I look out the window for the water but all I see is my own swaying reflection. Who are you and what have you done with my daughter? she said to me in the market earlier, as I ordered my four ounces from the monger. The package is still in my purse, along with an apple for later. Seriously who are you?
In the window’s reflection, I see my mother is no longer part of the shoptalk. She’s nodding and murmuring Yeah every now and then, but out of the corner of her eye, she’s watching me light a match with one hand.
“I’ll have one of those,” she says to me now from across the table, eyeing my cigarette pack.
I look up at her. Her freshly shorn black spiked hair like Liz Taylor meets sea urchin. Each spike slicked crisp with pomade. Snow White skin I was always jealous of. Mouth the color of black plum flesh and full like a fish’s. Eyes brimming with odd gold flecks, the left one slightly lazy. The weird slope of her slender nose, broken by a baseball when she was young because she used to play catcher without a mask. My mother’s face has always been something she just shrugs off. Whenever anyone calls her beautiful, she shakes her head, bats her hand, her fish lips curling to one side. Like, Whatever. Fuck you. On to something else, please.
I shake the pack at her now in offering, though I know she shouldn’t. Her heart, the water in her lungs, and I know she’s not telling me the half of it. How she gripped the balcony railing last night. Breathing like she was drowning.
Are you okay? I called from the couch.
Fine, fine.
You sure?
Trust me.
“You can afford to lose one?” she asks me now, withdrawing a cigarette.
I can’t, really. I’ve only got a couple left. And what’s even more annoying is how she doesn’t inhale, just puffs. But I say, “Sure.”
I light it for her with my one-handed trick. She flinches slightly at this.
“Thanks,” she says, puffing on it like it’s a cigar. She returns to nodding at her head buyer, Rich, who is asking if she and I have ever been sailing.
“Never,” my mother lies, still watching me out of the corner of her eye.
“Never?!” Rich says. Oh well, we need to fix that. Only way to see the city. And he has a boat. If we’re interested?
We are.
? ? ?
On the way home, she takes an off-ramp, gets herself a large Frosty from a Wendy’s drive-through. “You want anything?”
“Diet Coke, lots of ice, make sure lots of ice.”
“MAKE SURE LOTS OF ICE!” she roars into the drive-through window. Then, turning to me, “Rich loved you, you know. And he’s a tough customer, trust me. My boss for a year and I still don’t know what he thinks of me.”
“Probably just being polite,” I say.