You sure about this? I asked her as she handed two fivers to a man in bondage gear who stamped black snakes on our hands.
Go on, my mother said over the blare of German industrial, giving me a small push into the swishing columns of dust-ridden light. She watched me turn under the mirror ball through the smoke from a table just off the dance floor, chin on her fists. I spun though my limbs ached, counting the songs off in my head, until I felt I’d made it if not worth her while, then at least worth the price of two covers.
? ? ?
She scoops up her meowing cat and puts him on the bed beside her. “Where’s his collar?”
I tore the hideous rhinestone monstrosity from his neck and threw it over the balcony railing while she was at work the other day. Watched it disappear between the tall pines, then fall with a plop into the dark water. The bell made a pleasant tinkling sound all the way down.
“Don’t know,” I say now. “Must have taken it off.”
“He can’t do that. Not by himself. Not the way I put it on.”
“Well maybe it came loose or something. How are your feet?” I ask her, looking at them still encased in the Keds.
Her eyes flit from my neck to the television, where Audrey’s ice-cream cone has just fallen into the Seine.
“Fine,” she says, not looking back at me.
? ? ?
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here dangerously close to the ice beds full of bleeding fish and live crustaceans, watching them gut and clean slabs of salmon and pike, daring them to spill something on me. Afternoon. I’m alone. Above me, the gray sky is spinning but I ignore that and the fact of the terribly soft asphalt under my feet.
Just need to use the restroom, I told my mother and Tom, who are waiting for me now at a table by the window, by the water.
So you have a view, she told him. You need to have a view.
Be back in a minute, I told them.
Now I rock back on my heels, not the heels she laid out for me this morning. Not the dress she laid out for me either. This one’s a white and black Max Azria that looks like the dress Grace Kelly wears in Rear Window. When I came out of the fitting room in it, my mother said nothing for a full minute, then she said, You’re going to get raped. I have to keep my back straight if I want to keep the sweetheart neckline from sliding down, which it did twice in the fitting room. Tricky, my mother said, standing in the slit between the curtains. But if you can pull it off? Shit. I wanted to wear a cardigan with it, but my mother said, That’ll ruin it—just keep your back straight and your arms close to your sides like this. Like this. Exactly. Five-inch red patent leather Guess heels. Just remember to take the price stickers off, she said. I didn’t. They’re still on the soles, black Sharpie slashes over the original price, the half-off price in red ink.
I teeter closer to the stall, evaluating the different men behind the glass case, their biceps flexing as they throw and sing, throw and sing.
I pick the one with the Hellraiser hair and the missing incisor and the eyes the no-color of oceans. We’ll do it in the dark of the truck full of ice and fresh-caught fish. And he’ll kiss my neck with a hot mouth and tug on my hair with his fish-gut hands. They’ll streak watery blood all over the dress and the sweetheart neckline that has fallen down to my navel, and I’ll grip his spikes tight in my fists. He’ll fuck me so hard, I’ll lose one of my mother’s clip-ons and underneath me a red heel will snap. And I’ll stagger from the truck, earring-less and one heeled, to where my mother and Tom are waiting for me at an elegant oyster bar down the way. Clutching the blood-strewn bag she bought me by its rhinestone handle. Fish guts in my hair. Blood and ice running in pink rivulets down my biceps, but I’ll be grinning from ear to ear. I’ll be grinning so hard its hurts my face.
I’ll make a pit stop at the flower stall to watch them arrange stargazers. To the Vietnamese woman, I’ll say, A bouquet, please. For my mother. I’ll hold the stems in dangerously loose fingers, dragging their heads along the sidewalk. At the pier’s edge, where she’s watched me eat how many apples, where the homeless sleep curled on benches and the corporate men eat their gourmet grilled cheeses with their ties blowing backward in the breeze of the sound, I’ll lie on the wet grass, the flowers across my lap, the yellow pollen spilling onto the white and black taffeta. Such gorgeous detail—look at the details, said my mother, taking the hem between her thumb and forefinger. Eating my apple, I’ll smile at my own bruised legs splayed out in front of me, letting the juice run out of my mouth corners, and I’ll look neither to the right nor to the left, but only at the light dancing on the gray water. And the taste of the apple, cold and sweet, will be like roses, will blend with the blood and salt and fish in my mouth, into something heavenly.
What the hell happened to you? my mother will say when I hand her the stargazers.
Fell, I’ll tell her.
“Can I help you?” one of them says to me now.