All the Beautiful Girls

by Elizabeth J. Church

  Her first starring role at the Stardust was in a performance meant to feed off of audiences’ fervor for anything having to do with space exploration, particularly as the launch for the moon landing mission approached. Otherworldly, tinny music began playing as the curtains opened. Suspended far above the stage on nearly invisible cables, the Lido Belles were clad only in cellophane and G-strings. Against an indigo backdrop liberally sprinkled with flickering stars, they performed an ethereal spacewalk wearing close-cropped silver feathers meant to simulate space helmets. At the end of the number, brightly colored silk parachutes unfurled, and they descended to the stage in a Vegas version of a space capsule splashdown.

  The switch to the Stardust bolstered Ruby. And yet, she could no longer completely hide from herself the fact that although she’d not been dancing for even a year, tedium was stealthily encroaching. The requisite mixing with men after the show had become work. Their enamored looks had grown stale, and she was finding it harder and harder to feel sympathy for them. Instead, they reminded her of insecure little boys, when what she longed for was virility.

  Ruby had to drag herself to the gaming tables, muster the energy to put on a happy face, to charm and delight. Too, the novelty of applause and of the seemingly endless flood of cash—it was gone, somehow worn thin by repetition. The gaudy superficialities of the showgirl life were no longer enough to hold her. She wasn’t sure where her dissatisfaction came from; she just knew it was there, tapping on her shoulder more and more insistently as the days passed.

  And, she’d begun cutting again. Even though she tried to keep the slices beneath her G-string and used opaque makeup to cover the scars, it was difficult to hide. She experimented with cutting the bottoms of her feet, knowing shoes would always hide the wounds, but slicing into callus didn’t call forth blood, and it was the relief of blood she needed. Putting a blade to the tender skin of her arches impacted her dancing; she tried that once, only once.

  Ruby was certainly smart enough to know that the cutting meant something. She could almost hear the Aviator shouting about her superior IQ and her ability—if she would only try—to marshal her emotions and control all of this. She knew she needed to pay attention, to sit still long enough to come to terms with what caused the insistent hunger for blood and release. In some ways, it reminded her of Vivid’s periodic, compulsive need to rush out and buy ten eye shadow compacts or six pairs of designer boots—sometimes, even a new car. Something hidden, subterranean, gave birth to the need. Ruby knew that the cutting was a symptom, and she could no longer pretend it was a release for something Uncle Miles or Aunt Tate had done—or not done. No, this current urge to cut was the progeny of a need born in her childhood, something she desperately wanted to extinguish.

  Ruby had read an article in one of her Life magazines about the growing popularity of transcendental meditation in far-out California. There was something about Buddhism that called to her, even if it was simply the concept of such extreme internal quietude. So she tried navel gazing, as Vivid called it, thinking that maybe by sitting cross-legged on her bedroom carpeting with a lit votive candle flickering weakly on her dresser top, she’d somehow come to terms with the disease-ridden ghosts of her childhood. But Ruby could only sit for thirty seconds or less before a cacophony of thoughts interrupted. She couldn’t plumb the darkness, couldn’t extricate the threads that connected her past to her present. All she could fathom was that something was missing in her life—something that would drive her, thrill her, that would put an adrenaline-sharp edge to her life. If she had that, the kind of wholehearted purpose that escaping Kansas had given her, then she would be all right.

  Miserable and seeking relief of some kind, Ruby went to her usual fount of wisdom and asked Vivid how she’d stood the life of a showgirl for so long.

  “But it’s a blast! I’ve never been bored. Not once,” Vivid claimed. “I love being in good shape, feeling the beauty of my body, the power it gives me. There’s no other life I want. But maybe I’m not as smart or as deep as you,” she said, clearly intending to goad Ruby.

  “It’s not that, and you know it. It’s just that it’s not enough, for me. I think I need something more.”

  “Well, what, exactly?”

  “That’s just it,” Ruby said, rubbing her forehead. “I don’t know.” She watched her friend pick up the red lacquer box Ruby had often admired. Vivid opened the box and held it out to Ruby. It was about three-quarters full of small white pills. “What’s that?” Ruby asked.

  “Amphetamines. Speed. You’ve never tried it?”

  “Never.”

  “I get them from this doctor. He does a crazy business for all the housewives and teenaged girls who want to be skinny.”

  “They’re weight-loss pills?”

  “Not meant to be, although they do keep you from being hungry. They’ll give you a boost, get you high, make you feel good so that you can get into the swing of things again. Think of them as little bits of motivation.” Vivid handed the box to Ruby to hold and plowed through a kitchen drawer until she found a roll of sandwich bags. She filled a Baggie a quarter full, rolled the bag on itself, and then wrapped a rubber band around the cylinder. “Start with a couple, an hour before you need them. The buzz will last about three hours, max, so you’ll need a pick-me-up after the show—take another couple then. You can always work your way up to more.”

  “They’re not dangerous?”

  “Hell no.” Vivid laughed. “Half the girls in America—well, the rich ones, anyway—are getting these from their good ol’ family doctor. Their mothers drive them to the appointments!”

  Ruby tried them that night, following Vivid’s recommended dosage—but upping it to three pills for sufficient inspiration to survive the after-show drudgery. She found she was better able to concentrate on whatever the men were saying, to listen more patiently or to find something to occupy her attention, such as cuff links shaped like dice or poker chips, scabbed-over nicks from a razor, or a roll of tan neck flesh above a too-tight collar. She created contests for herself, competitions in which she had to name six distinct attributes about a man within the first two minutes of meeting him.

  Speed turned life’s volume up—just enough. She was so wired, though, that she couldn’t get to sleep until just a few hours before the next night’s show—which meant that the following night she took even more. The night after that, she took more.

  Over the course of the next several weeks, Ruby jitterbugged her way into the life of an insomniac. All of those hours when she used to sleep, freed up! She delighted in getting all of her ironing done. Although her fingers vibrated with near-electric voltage, she drew designs for everyday dresses and pantsuits, swimsuits, cocktail dresses, evening gowns, lingerie, and of course, costumes for the stage. She was getting so much done! She defrosted her freezer. She blew the dust off of her record albums and set Dylan’s Greatest Hits to play, flipping the album over time and time again, sometimes moving the needle repeatedly to “I Want You” and “Positively 4th Street.”

  Feeling hollowed out but immune to hunger, rocketing through the night into the early dawn hours accompanied by Dylan’s nasal tones, Ruby wondered what had happened to the fervor she’d felt just a few years ago. Where had she been for the past year or so? Where was her edge, the adrenaline fix of risk? Who was she, anymore? Just a fungible showgirl? Was she coasting, letting her ambition wither while she distracted herself with parties and possessions?

  Her thoughts raced; there was a near constant buzz in her ears like a frenetic housefly ping-ponging, seeking exit. She’d been wasting time. Wasting time! But the speed was helping, helping her to see, to search for what she really needed.

  She got the speed doctor’s address from Vivid. He didn’t listen to her heart, weigh her, or do any of the things Ruby expected. All he asked was that she tell him that she needed to keep her weight down for the stage, and
voilà! she had his signature granting her over a hundred tablets of electric energy. The drugstore pharmacist didn’t even blink when, feeling like a girl with a forged permission slip, she handed him the prescription.

  The drug made her mouth taste like tinfoil. She started sucking on peppermints and red cinnamon candies to mask the metallic taste and help with what seemed to be an eternally parched mouth, no matter how much water she chugged in between numbers. She was fidgety, couldn’t sit still to read, and she felt like one of the Aviator’s cars running in top gear—smooth, perfect, but with the engine pushed to the edges of its design for speed. Each time Ruby popped a handful of pills, she envisioned a tachometer’s needle touching the red zone.

  She stayed up for days in a row, jotting down all the design ideas that came to her, certain that each one was brilliant, that she could outdistance any designer on the planet, once she had the right connections and got better at the technical aspects of sketching and making real what she saw in her head. She gunned the engine of herself and raced headlong toward her future.

  Driving to work during the first week of April, Ruby listened to the news reports. She lit a cigarette, adjusted the tuning on the radio, rolled down a window, drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, and bounced with frustration at the delay imposed by a red light. She heard it then: Martin Luther King, Jr., shot dead in Memphis.

  By the time Ruby reached the Stardust parking lot, she was sobbing, bent in half, clutching her middle. He was thirty-nine. Just thirty-nine. And all he’d wanted to do was lead a strike for poorly paid garbage workers. Could there be a worse job than picking up someone’s rotting trash? Well, emptying septic tanks, maybe. Those men should be the best paid—they did something no one else wanted to do. Imagine being married to one of those guys. The laundry. How could you ever get his shirts clean? Talk about ring around the collar!

  But wait—King. She was thinking about King. She’d been following the news stories of his peaceful civil disobedience, and she’d admired him—had even written to the Aviator about Gandhi and King. This couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.

  Ruby fumbled and then dropped her keys, got down on all fours in the parking lot to search for them beneath the car. She was crying, still. Loudly, messily. She stumbled up the curb, pushed her sunglasses back up on her nose, and, standing next to a perfectly arranged flower bed, she took a deep breath. She couldn’t work. Not today. It was the first time she’d ever considered missing a performance, but she felt helpless, caught up in the King tragedy.

  Ruby made her way down the hallway of administrative offices, trying not to see the garnet-red carpeting beneath her feet, not to think of blood pooling beneath King’s head. She was plain-faced, her gym bag whacking her hip, a baseball cap pulled over her hair. Wiping tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, she knocked on Evan Brashear’s office door.

  “What’s happened?” he asked, coming out from behind his desk. “Here.” He pointed toward his couch. “Sit down. Talk to me, Ruby.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “I can’t. Can’t dance. Not tonight,” she said.

  “But what’s happened? What can I do?”

  “They shot him. He’s standing outside his hotel room, and he gets shot!” She knew she looked awful, that her face was blotchy and red, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten more than two or three hours of sleep.

  “The Reverend King? You’re talking about King?”

  She nodded.

  “Listen, honey,” Brashear said, perching beside her and putting his arm about her shoulders. “It is a tragedy. It is. But your reaction is overblown.” He paused for a moment. “And I think I know why. I’ve been watching you.” He nodded as if confirming something. “You’re not the first, and I’ve been at this a long, long time.”

  Ruby wadded his handkerchief into a ball. She took a deep, stuttering breath, felt her exhaustion. She needed to get a glass of water, down some more pills.

  “You’ve lost a lot of weight. You have dark shadows under your eyes that are no longer hidden by that concealer you girls use.” Brashear picked up her hand, held it. “You can’t keep your hand still, not to save your life.”

  “I’m just a little tired.” Her legs were vibrating, too, and she wondered if, seated so close to her, he could feel them.

  “You’re doing speed. And way too much of it.”

  “Just enough. Just enough to get me through.”

  “But I can’t keep you on. Not if you keep this up.”

  Ruby felt the swift wings of panic. She couldn’t be fired! It had never occurred to her that this kind man would kick her to the curb.

  “Stop the pills,” he said, standing to dismiss her, a firm father determinedly gritting his teeth and laying down the law. “You can have a few days off, but I need to see that you’re serious about quitting. I know you can’t do that overnight, that it will take some time, but nevertheless, next Monday you’d better show up ready to work, looking one hell of a lot better. Convince me that you’re at least trying—or I won’t have a choice. Go home. Get some sleep. Eat. Clean up your act, Ruby.”

  Ruby stood, his handkerchief still a wad in her hand. She felt as if she might start crying again, and she didn’t have a clue as to how to defend herself.

  “It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. But, Ruby, you’re ruining yourself. And I’m not the kind of boss who lets a girl do that.” Brashear touched her shoulder briefly and then walked back behind his desk, picked up his pack of Lucky Strikes, and shook one free.

  Ruby stood for a moment, watching him. And then she turned and walked down the hallway until she got to the drinking fountain. She dropped four pills into the palm of her hand, swallowed them, and took a long drink of water, tossing her head back to make sure they went down. She shoved Brashear’s handkerchief in her purse.

  On the drive home, while she was waiting for the drug to kick in and get her back on course, she felt increasingly angry. How could he so blithely think about dismissing her? Daddy Evan should bear in mind how much money she made the casino. He should remember who brought in the audiences and kept the gamblers hammered on expensive scotch. Who showed up at golf tournaments, kissed the cheeks of winners. Who glowed during the opening ceremonies for championship rodeos and posed for photos with every Tom, Dick, and Harry Brashear asked her to pose with. She’d even been promised the cover of the 1969 Stardust calendar. Brashear was taking her for granted. She’d just go elsewhere. She had the star power to do that. She could do it in her sleep. But first, she’d take a couple weeks off. She’d never taken a vacation, and it was high time she did.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT five days, Ruby stayed glued to the television coverage of King’s assassination. She watched footage of the days of rioting in Baltimore, as well as other major cities across the country. The entire nation burned with outrage, grief, and indelible hatred and bigotry. She sat, cross-legged and crying, as Bobby Kennedy stood on the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis and encouraged forbearance. On April 9, she watched King’s funeral service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. She ran out of Kleenex.

  The Sunglow Apartment girls must have taken a vote; on the sixth day of Ruby’s isolation, they sent Rose as their emissary. When Ruby opened the door, Rose was standing there in a sleeveless flowered cotton shift, her hair tied back in the Hermès scarf Ruby had given her. She was holding a foil-covered pie tin, and she edged past Ruby without asking.

  “I’m opening the blinds,” Rose said without preamble. She set the dish on Ruby’s countertop and began parting curtains. “It’s cold roast chicken. Some cheese and pickles. Make yourself a plate of food,” she ordered.

  Ruby looked beneath the foil but went no further. She watched Rose find the on-off switch to the television set and silence it.

  “The
air is stale in here,” Rose said, crinkling her nose and cranking open a window. “And you.” She turned, put her hands on her hips, and looked at Ruby. “You need a shower. Wash your hair, for God’s sake.”

  Ruby went and sat in one of her wingback chairs. She sorted through the clutter of her side table, trying to find a pack of cigarettes.

  “What the fuck, Ruby?” Rose came to stand in front of her, took Ruby’s chin in her hand, and forced Ruby to look at her. “This isn’t you, this slovenliness. What the hell is going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t have the patience for your bullshit. You’ve been avoiding us.”

  “No one asked you to come here.”

  “Someone had to.”

  “Did you draw the short stick?” Ruby sneered, feeling awful that she was behaving so badly toward the sweetest human being on earth and yet not having the slightest inclination to get ahold of herself. She felt supremely irritable.

  “Vivid didn’t do you any favors,” Rose said. “I know she meant well, but really, Ruby. You have to pick and choose when it comes to following her advice.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Somehow, Rose was making her feel like a petulant toddler.

  “You know exactly what I mean, and don’t think for a moment that I’m that stupid. Please.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “Where are they?” Rose asked, looking about the disheveled living room. “Bathroom?” She headed down the hallway. Ruby could hear the door of the medicine cabinet open and close, the sound of Rose moving bottles around on the bathroom counter. She heard Rose head into the bedroom, then the thunk of the nightstand drawer opening and closing. “Where’s your purse?” Rose said, returning to the living room. Ruby tried to kick her bag beneath her chair, but Rose spotted it and made a dive for it.