Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

“Only if you're not too busy.”

  “I can drop you off and come back.” It takes hours for the full treatment, I've noticed. Once every three weeks. I shudder to imagine spending that much time and money doing nails.

  “Mmm.”

  “What? You didn't expect me to sit and wait, did you?”

  “Well, no, not really. I was hoping to give you a little treat, sweetie. Why don't you come in with me and have a paraffin treatment? I noticed you were rubbing your hands again the other night. They're hurting, aren't they?”

  My hands always ache the slightest bit lately a side effect of the constant keyboarding. And the paraffin treatments are heaven. “I don't really have time this morning, Mom. I have to get a rough outline of a site done by the end of the week.”

  “Well, then, how about late this afternoon? Knock off an hour early and we can go to the salon and I'll fix us some supper back here.”

  I think of Jack, telling me that parents don't live forever. I think of my father, asking me to take good care of her. I hear myself say, “Okay. I'll come for you around three-thirty Make an appointment, though, so we don't have to sit around waiting.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap'n.”

  At the nail salon, my mother greets the shop at large in Vietnamese. They speak back to her in the same language, and a girl who looks about twelve, with tiny hips and tiny shoulders and tiny breasts, ushers Eldora to the pedicure chair. Everyone greets her. She asks about one's new marriage, another's cousin from California. They're eager to tell her everything.

  Because I am Eldora's daughter, I'm also given a queen's welcome. Unlike her, however, I find the accent painfully difficult to decipher when the young man who is to take care of me tries to make small talk. It distresses me that I have to keep saying “Pardon me?” and I take refuge in silence.

  Eldora has her toes done in fire-engine red, her nails in an extravagant French manicure that makes the most of her long fingers. She does have beautiful hands, I think, as we stand outside afterward and she smokes a cigarette. She wears several rings—a diamond engagement ring that glitters in the low afternoon sunlight, a ruby the size of a peanut, even a delicate thumb ring made of lacy white gold. “Would you mind,” she asks, “if we ran an errand on the way home?”

  “Not at all.” The paraffin treatment has left my hands feeling loose and relaxed, and the rest of me seems to have followed. Not even the acrid smell of her cigarette is annoying just this moment. Nobody else's smoking particularly bothers me, actually. Only hers. “What do you need?”

  “Well!” She blows out a plume of smoke, and gets a look of mischief around her eyes. “I've had the most wonderful idea!”

  Thinking it's about Las Vegas, I give her a noncommittal, “Oh?”

  “Yes.” Her voice is breathy in that Marilyn Monroe way. “I have, well, I'd rather show you. I have some things in storage.”

  “All right.” When she finishes her cigarette we pile into the Thun-derbird and drive to the U-Store-It. It's fenced and bleak, and I nervously eye a pair of rough-looking characters at the end of the strip. Probably drug dealers, stashing bodies. “Mom, why do you have stuff in here?”

  “Oh.” She waves a vague hand. “It's just stuff I brought with me from Las Vegas. Never really knew what to do with it.”

  “Did my dad know?”

  She's digging the keys out of her purse. “More or less. We didn't talk much about my life before he and I met.”

  I'm not sure I want to go there, but my mouth says for me, “Why not?”

  She fits the key into the lock, her gold bracelet sliding around with a heft of diamond. “Some things are just better left behind.” The door swings open. “Here we go.”

  There's not much inside except stacks of large, flat plastic storage boxes, the kind you can put under your bed. Through the pale green plastic walls of the boxes I can see swaths of fabric—the hem of a green brocade, a fluff of what looks to be fur. “God, Mom!” I squat to peer at it more closely. “Is this mink?”

  Her mouth turns up in a secret smile. “Yes, it is.”

  “Wow.” I stand up, brush my palms off. “What do you want to take?”

  “All of them, if they'll fit. If not, we can come back.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Sell them!” Her long blue eyes glint happily. “I was looking on eBay the other night, and I just had a brainstorm! All that stuff from the sixties has come back into style, you know? The hairstyles and the drinks”— she waves a hand—“everything. On eBay they had a few vintage dresses, but nothing like these.” She grabs a box, and the size is awkward enough she has to tilt her head around it. “Let's load up and I'll show them to you. You might even want first dibs.”

  In the end, it takes three round-trips to get the boxes transported to my mother's house. We stack them in the living room, go back and get another load, and now stand in the lowering darkness of evening, our hands on our hips. Through the pale plastic sides, beads and embroidery and wisps of netting peak through like flowers in a forest. “There must be dozens!” I say.

  Eldora inclines her head, brushes the top of one box. “Fifty-two.”

  Everything I know about my mother seems suddenly thin as chiffon. “Fifty-two dresses.”

  She raises one elegantly arched brow. “Fifty-two cocktail dresses.”

  “What in the world did you need with so many cocktail outfits?”

  “It wasn't like now, India,” she says with a hint of censure. “Women didn't go out to the casinos in just any old thing. They dressed up. Always. That was my world, and I couldn't go out in the same ones all the time, now could I?”

  “I guess not.” I reach for the box on top. “Let's see 'em, then!”

  “Wait!” She holds up her hands. “Let's do it right.”

  “Right?”

  “Yeah. Let's see …” She snaps her fingers. “Martinis, and Frank Sinatra.”

  In spite of myself, I smile. She does love setting the mood. “You make the martinis and I'll put on the music.”

  She wiggles her shoulders happily and trots off to the kitchen. I bend over the prodigious number of CDs alongside the stereo, everything from Vivaldi to Patsy Cline to Frank, Miles Davis to Mendelssohn, all of them alphabetized. She seems a ditzy sort, my mother, but her taste in music is as vast and varied as her taste in books, and there is an entire bedroom devoted to her collection of books.

  My fingers walk through the Sinatras, and I pull out a “Best of collection, slide in the CD. As the smooth voice and tinkling piano pour into the room, I smile. “They call you Lady Luck….”

  From the kitchen, my mother calls out, “Olives or onions, sweetie?”

  And I remember that I can't drink anything. “Um …” It'll break her heart if I don't have at least one martini. But if—

  “Onions, please.” I'll pretend to drink with her. Pretend to sip, then pour it out into … what? I look around. There's an African violet in full, passionate pink bloom. Not there. “I need some water, too, if you wouldn't mind.” I'll dump sips into the water glass.

  Dancing slightly, I peer at the sides of the boxes, where a splendiferous array of color and glittery fabrics press into the plastic.

  I am seven, standing in my mother's bedroom, adorned in one of her beautiful negligees and a pair of rhinestone clip-on earrings and a pair of red high heels. In the full-length mirror, I am beautiful, as beautiful as my mother, and I incline my head the way she would.

  Then, suddenly, she's behind me, and I start, whirling around, afraid she'll be mad. Instead, she smiles, sways toward me and tilts her head. “I think you need a necklace with that,” she says, and plucks out a long rope of faux pearls from the treasure chest of her jewelry box.

  “Here we are,” she sings now, and hands me a perfectly chilled martini with three onions on a cocktail sword. Only my mother would have actual swords in her cupboard. She sips her drink and gives a sigh of satisfaction. “I'm not crazy about gin, but there's somet
hing so perfect about a good martini once in a while!”

  “It's a Gibson if you put onions in it.”

  She waves a hand. “Whatever.” Settling her glass carefully on a coaster, she puts her hands on her hips. “Now, where shall we start?” She bends over the boxes, running her long index fingernail along the sides, clearly cataloging which dresses are where. “Ah! This one.” She takes the top two boxes off and puts them aside, and opens the lid of the third.

  I'm struck by the expression on her face as she lifts out the dress on top. Her eyes are soft, misty, and the smallest of smiles turns up her mouth.

  Then the dress itself steals my attention. It's sleeveless hot pink silk, empire style, with a scoop neck. Literally thousands of tiny crystal beads cover it in a shimmer of light. “Oh, my God, Mother!” I cry my hands reaching for it. “This is gorgeous!”

  She puts it up to her body. “Wonder if they still fit me?”

  “Oh, go try it on!”

  Quickly she shakes her head, smooths a hand down the skirt. “Not now.” She holds it out to me. “Want to try it yourself?”

  “I will if you will.”

  Her eyes glitter. “Dress-up?”

  “Yeah.”

  So we open all the boxes and look at every last dress. I feel dizzy with the beauty of them, dazzled by sapphire and teal, by silk taffeta and chiffon. There is a dress in every color from ivory to black, mostly in bombshell styles that would have shown off her fabulous figure brilliantly, but also more demure numbers. One of my favorites is a bronzy design over silver lamé. The front is simple, fitted, and the back drops to a dramatic V. “You had a green dress like this.”

  “Yes, your father bought it for me. I was wearing this one when I met him.”

  “Really.” I finger it. “Try this one on, then. Let me see you in it!”

  She lifts a shoulder. “No, not that one. I don't think I can get into it.”

  It's difficult to choose which one I want to try, particularly because some of the waist sizes are positively miniscule, but I settle on an aqua taffeta. The fabric shimmers when it catches the light, turning blue and aqua and forest green by turns. The scoop neck is crossed over with a little flap of a collar and the skirt is modestly full. “That was always one of my favorites,” my mother says approvingly. “It will look wonderful on you.”

  There are others, too. A black crepe with a chiffon neckline and satin trim, with the designer's name inside: Don Loper. “Isn't he the one on the Lucy show?” I ask.

  Eldora, absorbed in shaking out a brilliant, Chinese red silk with a Mandarin collar, says, “Mmm-hmm. A lot of these are designer originals. You could get them at the end of the season pretty cheap if you watched.”

  She opens the last box and says, “Ah. This one.” It's a soft blue-and-cream princess line, with a sweetheart neckline and floaty chiffon skirt. A scarf wraps around the bodice and joins the skirt. It's Pussy Galore through and through. I start to laugh. “They had to fall over dead when you wore that dress.”

  “You better believe it.” She holds it against her. “I absolutely loved this dress. I wore it one night to the Sands.” Her limpid eyes go misty as she looks back in time. “Frank was playing.”

  “The Frank, I assume?”

  “Naturally.” She sways, and the skirt floats around her legs. “I had some gold high-heeled sandals, and it was summer and I had a good tan, so I wore it without stockings.” She closes her eyes, lets her head fall back. “That was some night.”

  For a second, I feel again that slight sense of disorientation over the woman standing in front of me, but there's another part of me skittering away from the vision. We're pretending here. “Put it on!” I say. “I'll try this one.”

  “Oh, India, I don't know.” She touches her face. “I wasn't thinking of putting them on. I just thought I'd try selling them on eBay so somebody could maybe get some pleasure out of them. I thought you'd look nice in some of them, too.”

  “Just one?” I bend my knees, stand up again, like the little girl I was once. “Please?”

  She grins. “Oh, all right. Don't ask me to look in the mirror at my age spots, though.” She skims off her shirt right there, but I rush away into the bathroom and close the door.

  The taffeta rustles as I pull it over my head. It smells faintly of some perfume I can't name. The bodice falls into place and I skim out of my jeans beneath the dress, pull up the side zipper. I tug a little at the waist, shift my breasts more fully into the magnificent bodice and pull my hair into a knot before I turn around and look in the mirror.

  Magic. I laugh aloud at the vision of myself—white shoulders luminous against the green-water shimmer of the fabric, creamy breasts framed like plump melons in the sweetheart neckline. But it's not slutty. It's Elizabeth Taylor—sensual elegance.

  I can only imagine how my mother looked in this dress. She'd been what—twenty-two, twenty-three—when she wore it?

  God.

  I dance out of the bathroom on my tiptoes, imitating high heels, and my mother is struggling with the back zipper of her dress. I ballet-dance over, taffeta swishing around my knees, and pull it up for her. It slides up easily. If she's gained two pounds since then, I'd be surprised.

  She turns around slowly, fussing a little with the scarf at the bodice, adjusting the fall of it. I can see she's embarrassed, which is a total rarity for her. “Oh, India, I feel silly. I haven't worn this dress in forty years. No woman my age needs to be in a cocktail dress like this.” Her hand falls protectively over the top of her chest. “I have wrinkles in places that never occurred to me in those days.”

  But there in front of me is the mother I remember from my childhood—her slim shoulders, her prodigious bosom, her tiny waist and pretty long legs. I take her hand, and hold it out, and curtsy before her. “Mom,” I say, smiling, “you are still the most beautiful woman in any room.”

  “You're sweet,” she says, but I see a dangerous emotionalism in her eyes. It's not booze-induced, either. She's been good tonight.

  Then she blinks. “Oh, look at you, India!” she cries. “You'll have to take that one and wear it out to dinner sometime when you go to New York City.”

  Jack. He would love this dress. I feel a rush of excitement, followed by the big gut-drop of remembering my secret. I swallow. “Maybe I will,” I say. “Let's put this one aside, anyway. And Mom, I've just had a great idea. Rather than putting the dresses on eBay why don't you let me design a Web site for you? We could write little stories about each of the dresses, maybe link to eBay if you want, but have it all go to your Web site.”

  “You would do that?”

  I hate it that she really is surprised, that I've been so mean-spirited about things that she's honestly shocked when I want to do something nice for her. “It would be a blast, Mom. Truly.”

  She smiles. “All right, then. It'll be our little project.”

  Chapter Seven

  Eldora, 1959

  When India leaves, I pull out all of my favorite dresses and spread them over the couch, pour myself a new martini, and try them on, one by one. I can't bear to see myself in the mirror, but it pleases me that they still fit. The smell of Joy perfume comes out of the seams, bringing ghosts crowding into the room with me.

  It gets to be a burden when your whole life is a lie. You start getting confused over what's true and what's not, what really happened and what didn't, which sins need addressing and which ones can be let go.

  There isn't a soul on this earth who knows my real story. It's beginning to weigh on me. It's not that it's pretty—far from it. I have a lot to answer for, but even murderers need to confess, don't they?

  I start the Frank Sinatra CD over again. Hear that? It sends an arrow right through me, every time.

  It was such a different world then. I guess there were a lot of things wrong—I can see that. It's not such a great thing that the black folks were living on one side of town and we were living on another. That Las Vegas was so racist back th
en. There were social problems. There always are.

  But the world in those days wasn't nearly as grim as it is now. We were so innocent in so many ways. We were trying to get into space, and there was a sense of possibility, a sense that anything could happen.

  Listen … you hear that light, lilting happiness in there, in his voice, in that piano? God, there's nothing like it.

  Now, come with me, back in time.

  We're sitting in the Copa Room at the Sands, and it's not some imitator, it's really Frank singing. It's dark and a cloud of blue cigarette smoke hangs over it all; in the background is the sound of the barman clanking bottles. I'm drinking a martini, with two olives. It's served so cold there's condensation on the outside of the glass, and each time I take a tiny crisp sip of it, a little bitty river of moisture makes a line through the frost.

  I'm wearing a cocktail dress—a Castillo, bronzy over silver lamé. It leaves my shoulders and a nice swell of bosom bare. My hair is swept up into a French twist and around my neck is a single, winking diamond my prince gave me because I loved the one Elizabeth Taylor wore in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I know, when I walk through the room, everyone is admiring me, men and women alike. It's a heady feeling. I sometimes just walk through the room to feel their eyes sliding over me, licking at the turn of my neck and the smell of my perfume.

  But tonight is different. Tonight there is a man with dark eyes who is staring at me and I am trying to ignore him. For one thing, he is much too handsome—thick dark hair swept away from his forehead, a strong nose, cheekbones flying upward, a bold jaw and clean chin. A beautiful, full-lipped mouth. He's wearing a white tuxedo jacket and black slacks, something of a uniform, I will learn, because the white sets off his darkness so beautifully.

  And I know, looking at him across the room, that he knows the power of beauty, too. That sometimes he, too, takes a walk across a room just to revel in that gaze. I think of how I will look next to him, round and red-headed and white-skinned. There will be no one who cannot stare at us. I think of how our bodies will look together naked, and my knees go weak.