Pins & Needles

by Karen Brown

  Lorna had no idea what making the drink entailed. She looked at the liquor bottles on their mirrored shelves, reading all of the labels. Susie watched her. “Rye,” she said, annoyed. When Lorna could not find the bottle, and glanced up at her in defeat, Susie grabbed one from a top shelf and made her the drink.

  “You be nice to that girl, Susie,” the customer called from the end of the bar. “I like this one.”

  Susie handed the drink to Lorna. She smiled, showing all her teeth. She flounced her hair. Lorna brought the man the drink and placed it on a white napkin in front of him, enduring his stare, his wet grin. She took the ten he handed her, his fingers lingering on the bill, along her palm. She couldn’t remember the price of the drinks. They hadn’t let her do the money yet, so she gave the bill to Susie.

  “The rest of that is for you,” the customer yelled. “And Susie-Q, her ass is sweeter than yours.”

  None of this mattered, Susie said. They pooled their tips. Lorna worked two afternoons with Susie, and didn’t see Arlo at all. There was another man there, Larry, Arlo’s assistant. He would lean on the bar and smoke cigarettes and ask her questions about herself.

  “Where are you from?” he would ask, and Lorna would pretend to be busy, wiping the top of the bar with a damp rag. “And you left because . . .?” She would lift his cigarette out of the red plastic ashtray and dump the butts, then replace the cigarette and set the whole thing back in front of him.

  “Because I wanted to,” she told him.

  “Do you always do what you want to do?” he asked her. He had a wide mouth and dark eyes that were always only half-serious. She looked at him, and he blew his cigarette smoke out of his nose. “I mean, look, Lor, it’s really slow in here, and we’re both doing nothing, so what do you want to do right now?” he asked, the words carrying a significance she would pretend not to understand.

  On the third afternoon Lorna worked with Yolie, and both Larry and Arlo came into the bar. Arlo wore his usual shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest as if he’d forgotten to finish dressing. His hair looked dirty. He shuffled past the bar without acknowledging her and approached Larry.

  “Who the fuck is that?” he asked.

  Larry looked up at Lorna with mild surprise.

  Afterward, Yolie laughed, reassuring her. “That afternoon he hired you he was out of his mind,” she said. “You’re just lucky.”

  Arlo came out of the office later and stopped at the bar. He was slight and almost delicate, like a boy, but older than the boys Lorna knew. His hair hung in wisps over his eyes. He always held a cigarette. Sometimes his hand shook, other times it didn’t. On this afternoon he stood in near darkness and watched her bring a drink to a customer. With his eyes on her now, Lorna felt awkward, hideous. He whistled under his breath. “Oh baby,” he said. “You have amazing legs.” She wanted to turn on him and strike him. She wanted to take his face in her hands and kiss his mouth.

  ———

  After the country and western saloon closes, the club becomes a Chinese buffet. Lorna works as a hostess at the airport’s revolving rooftop restaurant. She wears a long, black Lycra skirt and seats elaborately dressed couples on their anniversaries, businessmen in dark suits, their hair cut cleanly around their ears. She loses track of the tables as the restaurant turns, spills Tom Collinses onto a woman’s silk lap. But she meets a man who calls her “Lo” and takes her out in his Ferrari. They eat outside at an iron table on the leafy patio of a famous hotel restaurant on the beach, and he pours her wine and lights her cigarettes and they talk. They watch the sunset, which strikes her as overly pink and orange. She tells him how different the beaches are where she grew up, and he asks the differences, his head cocked to one side, his eyes warm and interested. She explains the ones she can articulate—the sand on the beach is coarse and brown, and the water is darker, and colder, more green. She is not able to tell how the debris that washes up, the pieces of trees, the milk cartons, the occasional shoe, makes the beach feel like suffering. But he intuits a kind of sadness in the way she describes it and looks at her with compassion. He has graying hair and a wry smile that she likes because it reminds her of someone else. At the end of the night he tells her she has a beautiful heart, but there is only that one weekend in a room in the pink hotel on soft, expensive sheets, and then he will not see her again.

  ———

  When she got the job at Arlo’s club, Lorna lived in an apartment complex with a pool surrounded by a hibiscus hedge, which for her was its most alluring feature. She shared an apartment with a girl she met some weeks before, temping at an insurance company, and spent her free afternoons lying out in the sun by the red flowers and the chlorinated blue pool water. Here, dragonflies dipped and circled her body on the chaise, their wings opaque and gold-veined, their hovering movements timed, it seemed, to inaudible music. She slit her eyes against the sun and watched them, their appearance in a multitude like a portent. She dreamed about Arlo, how she might kiss his smooth chest, the softness above the button of his pants, how his mouth would slide into his smile, one side first, tentatively, fearful of revealing too much.

  She had already forgotten her boyfriend, who had brought her to Florida, run out of money, and gone back up north without her. She told him to go because his only skill was as a painter, and it was too hot, he whined, to paint here, and anyway, she did not love him, and did not want to support him. The only problem with his leaving was that now she had no car. Her roommate was never home, so Lorna could not ask her for rides. One day, Yolie picked her up for work at the club, but the other days she asked a neighbor to drive her. She had seen him in the afternoons at the pool, pretending not to watch her climbing out of the water. She saw him leave the complex at night in a silver Fiat, the top down, his hair slicked back with gel. When she approached him at the pool about the ride, he was lying on a striped towel on a chaise, his torso oily, smelling of coconuts. He stared at her bare stomach, considering, then back up to her face. He grinned.

  “Well, sure,” he said. He drove her, willingly, almost joyfully, his hand sliding on the stick shift, his legs revealed in shorts, covered with curly hair. He would shave and put on a pressed shirt before he picked her up, and she realized, with an almost faraway kind of acceptance, that she would owe him in some way. One day he would exact a price.

  This happened when Arlo decided to close in the afternoons, and no one called her to let her know. She arrived at the club in the Fiat with the neighbor, and he slid his hand between her damp thighs and leaned over and kissed her. She turned away, but his mouth moved into her hair, and in her confusion and surprise she sprang from the car and slammed the door and stalked off. The Fiat sent up gravel at the parking lot exit before she realized the club was closed. From there she walked to the 7-Eleven in her high heels and suntan hose and cutoff shorts, the leotard hot and clinging underneath. She called her roommate from the pay phone, knowing she was not home. She called Yolie and left a message. She wasn’t able to think of anyone else. The manager of the store came out twice and asked her to move on. And then a car pulled in, a black 280Z. The boy ambled into the store in gym shorts, the back of his T-shirt wet with sweat, and came out, tapping his pack of cigarettes onto the palm of his hand. He made a sad face at her, one she accepted as sincere. And she thought, This is OK, to be pitied.

  “Need a ride somewhere?” he asked.

  And she gratefully got into the car.

  The upholstery was slippery and cool. She told him the name of the apartment complex, which was all the way across town, a route that she had never paid attention to as a passenger. He took the interstate, humming to himself, and everything suddenly looked unfamiliar. She had never seen those houses with the tin roofs before.

  “Which way are you going?” she asked. He looked at her and shrugged.

  “The only way I know,” he said.

  His cheeks were chubby. His mouth was small, the lips pursed. He was whistling, tapping his fingers on the steering whee
l. He smelled of scented deodorant. He asked her name and she told him, “Lorna,” but he didn’t hear or didn’t listen.

  “Do you work at the club back there, Laura?” he asked. Her heart pounded in a place at the base of her neck. She put her hand on the door handle and imagined leaning on the door, jumping out onto the swiftly passing shoulder. She was sorry she slammed the neighbor’s car door. She was sorry she didn’t allow his kiss, his groping between her legs, as payment for the week’s worth of rides. She wanted the air-conditioned darkness of the club. She craved Arlo’s face, pictured it like a salve, the dry edges of his lips, his sorrowful brows, the reddened rim of his nose. She was sure she would never see him again. She was sure she would suffer now, at the hands of this stranger whose car maneuvered skillfully at high speed between lanes of an interstate she did not know.

  And then, “Here we go,” the boy said, and they pulled into the complex with its withered tropical plants, its asphalt radiating heat. He gave her a piece of paper with his name and his phone number. She took it from him with a trembling hand, her eyes wet with unshed tears. “You really are pretty,” he told her. And she recognized his pity again, his genuine sadness mixed with checked lust, and despised herself.

  ———

  As the Chinese buffet, the building that once housed Arlo’s club finally achieves some success. People flock there from the surrounding office complexes for inexpensive lunches. Lorna goes with some coworkers from Suncoast Realty one afternoon, and she does not realize it is the same place until one of the men mentions the outfits the bartenders wore there when it was a club, and another one recalls a night when he got into a fight in the parking lot. The two women shake their heads and roll their eyes, and Lorna looks around the interior of the restaurant and makes out the old brass railings, sees where the bar has been replaced with a sushi bar in the center of the room. She recognizes the same air-conditioned darkness. She foolishly admits she worked there, and the women raise their eyebrows and glance down into their plates, and the men stop chewing their food and never look at her the same way again. “Really?” one asks. They have trouble believing she served drinks when she is so inept at the copier and the coffeemaker, and though everyone laughs, a new tension invades their group, one that prevents the wave of memory from suffusing her. They nervously stack the white plates with the remains of rice and lo mein, gather their purses and pull out their wallets, preparing to leave. Later, the men begin to ask her out, and she refuses them, even the ones she has dreamed about alone at night, because she does not trust their attention, their eagerness to have her in their possession. Suddenly, the only thing she has that they desire isn’t the thing she desires to give.

  ———

  The leotards had been Arlo’s last ploy to draw customers, but business was slowing down for good. There was still money on weekend nights, when a band came in and played on the stage up front, and people filled the tables in the sections beyond the brass rails and their bodies moved together on the dance floor, lined ten deep at the oval bar. Larry told Lorna that Arlo wanted her to work Friday and Saturday nights. She could make a rum and Coke and a Jack and Coke, a sea breeze and a screwdriver. Yolie showed her how to make a vodka martini. “That should be good enough,” she said.

  The first night she stumbled around behind the bar, in everyone’s way. Six girls worked, three on each side, all of them with weighty hair and whip-thin legs, their leotards crawling up in back like thongs. Lorna acquired a reflexive motion of tugging hers down that customers found beguiling. She thrilled them in her idiocy.

  “I’d like a kamikaze,” someone might say, and she would look at them.

  “And that is . . .?” and the customer would throw his head back and laugh. Yolie, working next to her, would place her lips near her ear:

  “Vodka, splash triple sec, splash lime.” The bottles still felt heavy and slippery in her hand. She still pushed the wrong button on the gun. She miscounted change in her hurry to get out of the drawer. But by Saturday night she became used to approaching the people at the bar, their faces part of a larger blur that was the rest of the club, the band on the stage, the hum of bodies pressed in close. She liked the makeup she wore, her glossed lips, the way whatever she did, filling glasses with ice, tipping a bottle and replacing it in the well, bringing a drink to a customer, became timed to the band’s music, her body its own song. She took the money the customers pushed toward her across the bar or folded into the palm of her hand, their eyes teasing and sly. She sensed the bargaining going on, none of it having much to do with the drinks. They paid, and they waited, and they never got what they wanted. Behind the bar, she was untouchable, on show, like a museum piece.

  She aroused the fury of the other bartenders. They looked over at Arlo where he sat at the bar, wondering when he would notice her incompetence. But he said nothing, continued to sit and sip his drink, his eyes glassy and electric, following her movements. Now, Lorna wanted his eyes on her. She leaned over the bar and lit his cigarettes, and he gave her his slow-motion smile. He chatted with customers, ignoring the running of the club, the band’s lengthy breaks, the scuffle erupting on the dance floor, Larry’s pleas to return to the office and speak with someone on the phone. Arlo’s eyes, watching her, felt like a caress.

  At the end of the night he called her into the office. He sat under the fluorescent light in his leather chair counting out one of the register drawers. Larry was there with his half-serious expression. Arlo had the drawers stacked on the floor and lines of cocaine on the glass top of the desk. He told Larry to get Lorna a drink, and Larry looked at her, smirking, and asked, “So, do you know what you want?” She stared at the top of Arlo’s bent head, waiting for him to finish the line. When he looked up his eyes were watering and red.

  “What should I drink?” she asked. She sat in a chair across from him, her legs curled up underneath her, her tips in the blue Crown Royal bag beside her on the floor. She played with her hair, piling it up on top of her head and letting it fall.

  “Grand Marnier,” he said. He settled back into his chair and they looked at each other. She did not know what he saw when he looked at her, but when he did something in his face broke and smoothed out, some slackening of disdain, a softness he didn’t offer anyone else. She sipped the drink that Larry brought her in a tiny glass. It burned her throat, tasted of oranges, and deep down, an amber-tinted sadness. Arlo said nothing to her at all. The drawers stayed there stacked on the gold carpet, and he leaned back in his chair and tipped his head and watched her. She memorized his face, the shape of his hands, the soft hair on his arms below his rolled-up sleeves. He put his hand over his mouth, and they stared at each other endlessly, until Larry began to count the drawers, muttering to himself, and Yolie came in and told her she was ready to go home.

  ———

  Eventually, even the Chinese buffet fails, and the club becomes an empty building with a for sale sign and weeds growing up through the parking lot. Lorna marries a man who makes the claim that he loves everything about her—her intelligence, her humor, the smell of her skin, because he knows this is what she wants to hear. She learns the truth when she discovers her role involves clothing and hairstyles and, among his friends, a certain silence. He becomes immune to what he saw as her beauty when she allows gray to thread her hair and lets her body lose its firmness, when too much dreaming pulls down the corners of her mouth. They live in a new subdivision where the houses are different but oddly the same, stucco homes painted in the hues of pastel Easter eggs. There is her own pool, with a screened enclosure, and beyond that a pond with water spraying up out of a fountain at the center. There are woods that she sees in the distance, and other neighbors with young children in strollers and leashed dogs, their porches and front lawns decorated for each holiday. She conceives two children but never carries them. She has an affair with a man, simple and straightforward, with no pretending he wants her for anything more than the one thing she has learned to give, expertly, wi
th no trace of herself. She meets him at his apartment on his lunch hour, and when they are in bed together he asks her if she is happy. “What is happy?” she says. “What you pretend when you have everything you thought you wanted?” He turns his head on his pillow, decidedly miserable, and tells her he shouldn’t see her anymore. And then one afternoon she comes out into her suburban yard and finds the dragonflies again, their dance among the one tree’s branches and the bird-of-paradise. They have not meant anything until that moment, their power to foretell delayed by years.

  ———

  She did not go home with Yolie that night. Larry counted the drawers and put money in zippered bank bags for the deposit. He stood in the doorway to the office, terse and concerned, for once completely serious. “You all set?” he asked Arlo. Arlo’s head seemed heavy, his eyelids weighted. He waved Larry away with his hand. Larry made a noise under his breath and turned and left.

  “You know why you’re here?” Arlo asked her.

  She had finished her drink and all the dark lines on the paneled walls wavered.

  She stood up and crossed the gold carpet, knelt down in front of him in his leather swivel chair and put her hands on the tops of his legs. His brows knit together. He pulled back and took her hands in his. “Don’t do this to me,” he said. He shook his head and laughed, softly, the laugh catching in his throat. He looked away from her so she could not see his eyes. “I have nothing to offer you, sweetheart,” he said.

  She kissed him anyway, and he put his hands along her face, and Lorna slipped the leotard off her shoulders, each arm pulled from its sleeve, the outline of her bathing suit marked by her tan, the string ties, the cups of white. How she looked, loving him, her eyes shining with it, her mouth trembling on his, and then his mouth, wet and roaming, his hands on her shoulders shaking with the tremors of what he used to know as desire, the memory of it stirring in his head and nowhere else. He told her he wasn’t worth it. He begged her to stop, and then said not to. He wished he could be who she wanted. She told him she loved him the way he was. But nothing she said or did was any use. His body, drained and wasted, refused them, and none of it, he assured her after they had tried and tried in the cold, air-conditioned office, was her fault.