by Zoe Carter
The class erupted. Kids were asking questions, shouting in excitement, talking over each other. I was silent, barely daring to blink in case the whole thing turned out to have been a dream. This was it—this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for, if I was only brave enough to take it.
Mr. Burch slowly brought the class under control again. He told us everything we needed to know in order to apply, including how to put together a portfolio of our work. I’d never told him I already had a portfolio. It had been ready for months, waiting for this moment, waiting for my chance.
The bell rang and my fellow students rushed the door, buzzing with excitement. Mr. Burch called my name before I could join them. “I really hope you’re going to apply, Sarah. This could be huge for you.”
My friends offered me a ride after school, but I insisted on walking home for a change. I’m sure my feet didn’t touch the ground once. I needed silence to process everything. I couldn’t imagine suffering through another discussion about the prom, or who liked what boy and why. I had bigger stuff to consider, life stuff. Career stuff, which none of my friends ever seemed to be interested in.
Peter knew something was up right away. He didn’t have the same power over me, and he could tell. As the days went by and the deadline for the applications drew near, I got more and more excited. And then I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I told him about it.
As horrible as Peter was, he was still our guardian. I guess some part of me wanted to make him proud, wanted him to see I wasn’t just a waste of space like he always said. So I told him. At first he pretended to be excited, too, and I was relieved. Finally Peter was acting like a human being. He asked to see my portfolio, and I raced to my room to get it. I was so proud to show it off, and I couldn’t believe he’d asked. He’d never shown interest in anything I did before.
But as he riffled through the pages, faster and faster, he only glanced at my work, the designs I’d spent so many hours on. “You think this is art?” He sneered at me, lips shriveling back from his teeth. “This is crap. I can’t let you embarrass yourself, Sarah.”
Before I figured out what he meant to do, he threw my portfolio into the fireplace. Without thinking, I ran after it. I would have put my arms in that fire if he hadn’t stopped me. All I could do was scream. He slapped me across the face, told me I was being hysterical, and still I howled. He’d taken the only dream I’d had and destroyed it.
As I tell my sister the story, she grows paler and paler. When I get to the part about Peter burning my portfolio, her mouth goes slack with astonishment. “That bastard,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You weren’t home when it happened. And you—you were happy, Maisey. You’d just gotten a lead role in that play. I didn’t want to spoil that for you.” And I knew you were strong enough to take care of yourself. Once Peter died and Alice got out, you didn’t need me around to keep you safe any longer.
“Acting was a godsend, and so was Peter’s accident. As bad as our foster homes were, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to live with that snake until I finished high school, especially after you left.” She shudders. “He was evil.”
You don’t know the half of it, dear Maisey. And I’m so glad you don’t.
“Peter wanted me to believe I had no talent, but I saw through him. He didn’t want me to leave. He thought destroying my portfolio would clip my wings. But he was wrong.” I rub my eyes, exhausted. It had been another long night without sleep. But my sister deserved to know everything. I had kept the truth from her for too long as it was. “Mr. Burch was a nice man, but he was also honest. He wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up if I didn’t have a good chance of getting the job at Bernard’s.”
“I know you would have gotten the job. Before Dad died, you were always sketching.” Maisey smiles, a tiny dimple appearing in the corner of her mouth. “You made my coloring books for me when I was a kid.”
“That’s right. I’d forgotten.” A memory of bending over a sketchpad until my neck ached, drawing mountain goats and piglets and even an octopus for Maisey, drifts back to me. “I decided to leave for New York when Alice got out. I’d been saving money for a while, putting aside everything I could. I’d wanted to wait until you were finished high school so you could come with me, but once we were back at home with Mother, I knew you’d be okay. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Alice anymore.”
“What happened to you after you left?”
“Well, before I tell you the rest, I want you to know one thing. I tried really, really hard to find a design job. But no one in New York would hire me—why would they? I was a kid with no college degree and no experience.”
“But you were so talented.” Maisey sounds outraged on my behalf, and my chest aches with love for her. We’d been so close before Peter changed everything. Maybe this visit marks the start of getting that back. “Surely someone was smart enough to give you a chance.”
“I wish. When I arrived, it seemed like every artist in the world had landed in New York and was fighting for the same jobs as me. Even the unpaid internships had waiting lists a mile long. And without a portfolio, most people wouldn’t even let me in the door.”
“I’m so sorry. That must have been awful.”
I turn away for a moment, remembering how desperate and scared I’d been. Every cold shoulder chipped away at my confidence until I began to wonder if Peter had been right. Maybe I wasn’t talented. Maybe I was one more wannabe in a city full of them. “Living in New York isn’t cheap. I didn’t have much money to start with, and it was going fast. If I wanted to stay, I’d have to get a real job. So I started looking for waitressing work, but those openings were impossible to find, too.”
Gathering all my new prescriptions into my arms, I put them into an old diaper bag and hand them to Maisey. She’s right—it’s time to start standing up to Warwick, time to figure out how to disentangle myself and my son from an arrangement that no longer works for me, if it ever did.
The unused diaper bag is a Louis Vuitton. Hard to believe I’m giving away a bag that was worth more than I’d had to live on during that first lean year in New York. But like so much of the manufactured beauty that surrounds me, it means nothing.
“By the time I’d hit up a dozen restaurants, I was so distraught I could hardly speak. My shoes were falling apart, and my feet were covered with blisters. My legs ached and I was starving, but afraid to squander my last few dollars on dinner. I kept setting my sights lower and lower, but it didn’t make any difference. When the grimy diner across from my hostel told me all their waitressing jobs were taken, I couldn’t hide my despair any longer. I burst into tears.”
“I can’t even imagine how scary that was for you,” Maisey says.
I nod. “Thankfully, the manager took pity on me. She led me over to a booth, brought me a Coke. It was the first time someone was kind to me in New York. Should have known she had an ulterior motive.”
“You really need this job, don’t you?” she asked. “You’re starving, poor thing.”
The sympathy in her voice triggered another torrent of tears. Without a word, Audette—that was her name, I’ve never forgotten it—went to the cook and got him to make me the biggest burger they had on the menu. While I ate, she sized me up.
“For a nice young girl like you, ordinarily I’d never suggest something like this. But I can see you’re desperate.”
I hurried to swallow, nearly choking on my burger. “I’ll take anything.”
“Well, honey, you might have to.” Ripping a page from her order pad, she scribbled down an address. “I know this guy who owns a strip club. He’s looking for a barmaid. If I call and tell him you’re coming, the job is yours. He won’t give it to anyone else.” I reached for the paper, but she laid her hand over mine. “Now, before you get too excited, I have to tell y
ou it’s a rough place, especially for a pretty young thing like yourself. The people who go to this joint aren’t exactly upstanding members of society, if you know what I’m saying.”
It didn’t make a difference to me. It was work or starve—those were my options. Going back home was out of the question. Audette said men would expect things from me just because I worked in a titty bar. That sometimes they would grope me, and they’d say horrible, demeaning things.
My sister gapes at me. “A strip club? But you were just a kid. How could she send you to a place like that? Weren’t you scared?”
“Sure, but I was more scared of having to go home and feel like a big failure. When I left the restaurant, I headed to the strip club right away.”
There was a group of older women standing around the door smoking. They had bleached blond hair—I knew it was bleached because I could see their roots—and their makeup was so exaggerated they looked like clowns. At first they didn’t want to let me pass. They told me I was too young, called me a baby, laughed in my face. But then Audette’s friend Mike poked his head out the door. He offered me his arm like he was escorting me to a dance instead of showing me around his titty bar. It was dark in there, so dark I couldn’t see the men’s faces. But I could feel their eyes.
Mike told me Audette had a knack for noticing talent, and that if she told him to hire someone, she was always right. I was distributing drinks with an apron wrapped twice around my waist before I had an inkling of what I was in for.
“I can’t imagine you working in a place like that.” Maisey wraps her arms around herself as if she’s freezing. “It must have been horrible.”
“Actually, it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. The women were really nice when I got to know them. They took it upon themselves to be my surrogate moms. They were super protective of me.” I smiled at the memory of how soft those hard-edged dancers could be. Gesturing to the diaper bag, I ask if Maisey will get rid of the medications. Since she’s a nurse, I figure she knows how to do it so no one is harmed. “Elliot’s too young to get into much yet, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
My sister holds the bag on her lap. “Of course. You can trust me. They’re as good as gone.”
It wasn’t long before Mike started putting on the pressure. “Give it a shot, kid. You’d be great. And with a bod like yours, you’d clear up on tips. If you’re going to spend your nights putting up with these jackasses, anyway, you might as well get paid for it.”
When I’d first started working for him, I’d avoided the dancers. I’d kept my head down, trying my best to pretend I was working in a regular bar. Part of it was shyness, but part of me was disgusted by them. Then I began to see the athleticism, the artistry, in it, and after that I couldn’t take my eyes off the stage. But I still didn’t want to be one of them. There was a fine line that separated those women and me, and I was determined to hold on to it.
It was the women who convinced me in the end. They told me it was fun. They insisted it was the only way I’d ever be able to raise the money for art school. They said it was a direct route to my dreams.
“Don’t worry,” they told me. “The customers, they can’t touch you. If one of them so much as tries, Mike will have them killed.”
It wasn’t true, of course, because Mike didn’t make money from the stage shows. Those tips went directly to the dancers—it’s how he kept his “girls” happy. So he not only let the customers touch us, he wanted them to.
“The big money was in lap dances, which were done in the back. Depending on the girl, a customer would pay a lot for a little bump ‘n’ grind, sometimes a hundred bucks or more. And Mike, he kept half. He’d put the cash in this lockbox, and he was always running to his safe to stash the overflow. He must have gone back and forth dozens of times each night. Lap dances were his bread and butter.”
Maisey’s silence worries me. Is she repulsed by me? Mentally shrugging, I force myself to continue, to get through it. I’m committed now.
“Lap dances are every bit as disgusting as you’d expect. Drunk, smelly guys pinching and pawing, even though the rules said ‘eyes only.’ Sometimes they—well, they got a little overexcited, if you know what I mean. That was the worst. The first time it happened to me, I slapped the guy. Mike wasn’t too happy with me that day. But you couldn’t really blame the customers if they lost control once in a while. No one else would touch these losers, so most hadn’t been that close to a woman in years.”
Walking over to the window, Maisey shakes her head. “I can’t believe you could stand it.”
I take a deep breath. Little did she know how bleak things got for me before they started to turn around. I had to hope she was ready to hear it, to hear the truth of who her sister really was and what I’d been willing to do to survive.
The entire joint was buzzing when Di swept in the door, head held high like she owned the place. The other women were awestruck, as if she were a celebrity, but I could see they resented her, too. So in the beginning I didn’t like her. When she dropped by the back room to watch the proceedings with a strange expression on her face, I hated her.
How could I possibly describe Di to Maisey? I did my best. “She stood over six feet tall in heels, with hair the color of fire and this exaggerated Southern accent. If Jessica Rabbit and Scarlett O’Hara had a love child, it would be Cherry Red.”
When she watched my “performance,” I was nearly sick with nerves. She came over to me afterward, and I could tell the other women didn’t like it. The angry gossip sprung up around us like a thundercloud of wasps.
She tsked at me, and I nearly told her where she could go with her condescending bullshit, until—to my astonishment—she put her hand to my cheek and held it there. “Oh, honey,” she said, her accent much softer when she wasn’t putting it on. “What’s a beauty like you doing in a dump like this? You need to come work for me.”
Maisey finally speaks again, which is a relief. I’d been afraid my sister had gone into shock. “She called herself Cherry Red? Really?”
I snort with laughter. I’d said the same thing when I’d heard the name. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? Sounds like something out of a bad movie. The funny thing is, that’s what the clients want. They love all that theatrical shit. Di turns escorting into a high art form—that’s why she gets paid so much. Everyone has a role to play. You’re either dominant or submissive. She’s a dom of the highest order.”
“And Warwick was a client?”
“Yeah, he was one of my first. When he walked into our apartment, I took one look at him and thought I’d hit the jackpot. But, like most men with dominant mothers, he needed a submissive, a woman he could use and abuse. And he chose me.”
My sister rocks back on her heels, nearly losing her balance. She grips the window frame for support. “He beat you? How could you marry him? He sounds as bad as Peter.”
“It wasn’t like that. He never really hurt me.” Not like some. “It was more about the kinky stuff, the feeling of having total control over someone. When he asked me to marry him, I figured he knew the submissive role was just a game, that it wasn’t who I am at all. I thought we understood each other better than we did.”
“I don’t know how you did it. I mean, I’m not judging you,” Maisey says, giving me a look that says the opposite. She’s practically shuddering. “But the idea of those disgusting men pawing you, it makes me ill.”
You and me both.
“Never in a million years would I have thought I’d end up where I did. But when you’re starving on the street with no place to go and scary people are looking at you sideways, you take a warm bed and a hot meal when it’s offered. People don’t tend to make the wisest decisions in those circumstances.”
“You were so good in school, so smart. Surely there were other options.”
Her words sting. Shame I’d su
ppressed for years returns in full force, bringing self-loathing along for the ride. “Don’t you think I tried? I was half-dead before I started working for Mike. This is hard enough on me. Please don’t make it worse.”
“I don’t mean to offend you. I guess I... Well, I don’t know a lot about this stuff.” She exhales in a rush. “I’ve always figured I was the one messed up by our childhood. I mean, I’m not saying you’re messed up exactly, but—”
It’s not an apology, but it’s close enough to diffuse my temper before it can spark into a rage. Di had taught me the right way to react to the judgmental women who looked down on us, thinking they were so much better. And it wasn’t pretty. “It’s okay. I know what you mean. I don’t think any little girl dreams of being an escort when she grows up. If it makes you feel better, you can rest easy knowing that, between the two of us, I am definitely the bigger mess.”
Her eyes widen. “Are you kidding me? I don’t feel better. I feel terrible. I wish I’d known what you were going through, wish I could have been there to support you. You’ve always taken care of me, and what did I do? I went on leading my merry little life, leaving you to fend for yourself.”
How on earth did she think I was okay? She saw how messed up I was when Caleb left, not to mention when Frankie died. I was as far away as you can get from okay. Either Maisey had only cared about herself or she was extremely naive. “I was happy you were safe,” I say, and it was true. “That’s all that matters.”
“Do you love Warwick, Sarah?”
Ah, there’s the million-dollar question. I remember the sweet expression on Warwick’s face when he’d knelt at my feet with that velvet box. I’d had a fantasy, however fleeting, that he could make an honest woman of me, that we could have a good life together, a normal life. By the time I’d understood he would never quit treating me like a whore, I was pregnant with Elliot.
“I thought I did, once. But it was never Warwick I loved. It was what he represented. More than anything, I wanted a normal life, to be a wife and mother, to recapture the family we lost when Dad died.” Maisey reaches into her pocket and withdraws a tissue, which she hands to me. I’ve never been this honest with anyone before, not even Di. “I knew Warwick had certain...needs, but I thought I could handle him. I didn’t get how difficult it would be once I had Elliot. Escorts have a certain armor they wear when they’re with clients, and I didn’t have that armor anymore.”
