by Maryl Jo Fox
When the movie ends, Edie gets out her black nail polish with silver sparkles and gives herself a manicure and a pedicure. Holding out her thin arms, she splays her fingers out and winks at herself in the crazed dresser mirror. Her wrists are unnaturally limber. She can bend her hands way back, especially the arm with the deformed forearm bone they had to take out. Dawson says she’s made of rubber. She stands on tiptoe to adjust her skimpy attire in the mirror—the black bandana (Dawson’s) that she made into a halter top secured with string, his red boxer shorts rolled dangerously low, her shorn bleached hair, her hairless legs, face and navel piercings glittering on her corpselike skin, the black roses tattooed on her forearm, her four-inch silver platform sandals. Running out of spray net, she spits on her fingers, twists shoots of her spiky hair. She sticks a ten-dollar bill Dawson forgot on the dresser into her little green shoulder purse and sashays on over to Desert Dan’s. On the way over, her stomach constantly growls. She needs to win.
Inside the casino, she changes the ten for a cup of nickels at the change booth and makes her way to the nickel slots. People stare at her, like always. Tonight she ignores them. She’s so hungry she’s a little nauseated. Cruising the nickel aisle, looking for a good machine (one or two cherries or black bars on the screen), she settles on two cherries already in the window. Pumping, pumping, she wins five, then ten, then fifty nickels. She loves to hear the coins clanging out. She’s got nothing but men in her aisle. Their eyes linger on her body, their faces masklike. It’s so stupid and annoying. She’s taken, man. They have no idea.
Soon a tall man moving slowly down the next aisle gets her attention. He’s talking urgently about something, drawing a little crowd. He’s wearing a beige tunic, beige pants, and a little beige hat like a bowl. Some kind of uniform. She wonders if he’s one of those people that used to hang around airports dressed like doctors or nurses, wanting money for something or other. He’s probably in some group all right, but she doesn’t know what. He has a slight accent she can’t place. He looks nondenominational with his sandy hair and dimples, but the close-fitting uniform must mean something. The guy looks nervous that people are actually paying attention to him. He looks trapped, like he’d rather be somewhere else.
Surrounding him are men with red faces and receding hairlines, women with frazzled hair and pinched, tired faces. They look worn out—the gumption knocked out of them somehow. Edie ignores them, keeps feeding in her nickels, keeps winning. After a while, she counts her coins. She can at least buy a drink now. She flags a cocktail waitress and orders a bourbon and Coke. She’s actually more interested in the Coke than the bourbon and imagines the sweet bite of the carbonated beverage sliding down her throat, settling her stomach.
Pretty soon the guy and his fans enter her aisle. He’s still riled, she can hear now—about gambling? “Gambling leads to loose morals and greed,” he says. “If we’re really serious about improving this country, we should outlaw gambling for starters and shut this casino down,” he intones, as if he’s finally found his punch line.
“Right!” exclaim a few followers, who then look around in surprise, as if wondering what to do next.
Edie snorts. How did this guy get in here? He can’t be a Hare Krishna, because those guys are way mellower than this guy. And Hare Krishnas don’t wear beige. Or maybe they do, she can’t remember. The five or six people around him lean forward to catch his words. “We need rules of behavior. Things are too confused in this country. If we had more rules and everyone knew the rules, there’d be less violence. Uncertainty is what causes trouble.” Their faces light up. Finally someone is speaking of things they secretly believe but have kept to themselves before. They gather closer to the man in beige, who still looks surprised all this is happening, as if he really wishes they’d go away. He’s a puzzle to Edie. He looks nice enough.
The group stops about ten feet from her, a couple of them murmuring and looking hard at her, others just looking around dazed and tired at no one in particular.
A bodybuilder type with a shaved head latches onto the group. He’s got biceps bigger than grapefruits, a creased forehead, and a gold stud in one ear. He’s wearing one of those wife-beater T-shirts with no sleeves, the low-cut neck and back displaying his ripped pecs and delts. His eyes light on Edie, and right away his face starts to glow.
Oh, for Christ’s sake, she thinks, disgusted at herself for even looking at him. She hates it that her heart is beating hard. Viciously, she pulls the lever and gets twenty-five nickels. The rattle of the coins distracts her for a few seconds.
The bodybuilder starts moving toward her. The others follow, but the man in beige looks alarmed. With a feeling of dread, Edie coldly turns her back on the intruder and faces her slot machine once more. Her thin shoulder blades are hunched up and stick out like baby bird wings. The bumps show on her spine, and the dimples further down.
Watching her, the bodybuilder hitches up his belt and speaks softly. “Looky here, folks. This young woman is living proof of what the man says here. Who’s looking after her? She needs guidance, not all this freedom.” He gestures at her outfit. The small crowd is electrified by the man’s daring. Their faces freeze.
Edie’s skin crawls. He’s going to make a dirty remark or a Jesus pitch, she just knows it. Tears well in fear and outrage, tears she viciously wills away. Arms crossed, she whirls around to face him. “Who asked you anyway? Mind your own business, asshole.”
Voices ring out in the next aisle. “Atta girl.” “Give ’em hell.” “This is a free country.” “We came here to have fun, not get preached at.” “Where’s Scotty anyway?” “He’ll kick these assholes out.”
Encouraged, Edie defiantly glares at the man in beige’s fans, though they’ve said nothing to her. Surprised at her hostility, they take a step back. What kind of person is she anyway? their shared glances say. An air of muffled outrage infects them. The bodybuilder steps closer. Her hands tremble. She just wants to get away. She scoops her winnings into her cup and holds it close to her chest. The bodybuilder is going to touch her, give her a blessing, or do something worse, something that will make her puke—she sees it in his eyes. The man in beige gives Edie a sympathetic look. Seeing this, her face softens a little. Maybe the man in beige didn’t mean for this harassment to happen. After all, he was only talking about gambling, not wardrobe choices.
Glancing around to plot her escape, Edie notices a familiar gray-haired woman standing around watching this scene. Edie grimaces. It’s the old lady she met when she and her brother Neil just got off the bus. Now the old lady is waving her arms hard at the man in beige, as if she knows him well and wants him to stop what he’s doing. The old lady acts like she’s trying to control the action, like she’s the director. She looks silly, waving her arms around like that. Edie’s mystified.
Standing beside the old lady, a beautiful redhead is just taking in the scene. Edie’s seen her before too. She’s a waitress, but tonight she’s in Levi’s. Edie wishes they’d all just go away and leave her alone. She just wants to eat. Maybe she can duck into the restaurant and grab some fries.
A commotion breaks out at the end of the aisle. Scotty, looking exhausted, is followed by four angry-looking men. Scotty elbows his way past Clara and Stella and halts in front of the man in beige. Scotty stares hard at the man, as if sending him an urgent message of some kind. “I can’t have you bothering my customers, sir. Gambling is legal in Nevada, and I intend to keep my business open.” The man in beige looks surprised. Cheers from the next aisle.
Suddenly the bodybuilder grabs Scotty around the neck and puts him in a hammer lock. Scotty coughs, turning red in the face. “You should listen to this man,” the bodybuilder growls, pointing to the man in beige. “He’s trying to make us better Americans. Not like you with your gambling den!”
Suppressing a grin, the man in beige tries to pull the bodybuilder off Scotty. This confuses the onlookers. The man in beige opposes gambling, yet he’s protecting the owner, who will
keep the casino open! This doesn’t make sense to the onlookers.
The four angry men tackle the bodybuilder and knock him down. Women scream, including Edie, who’s trying hard not to look scared. She’s always so good at acting tough. In fact, she’s frightened to death of these crazy people who want to tell everyone how to live.
Forget the bourbon and Coke. She doesn’t want to die right here in this hellish place, ambushed by a muscled madman and four pissed-off guys. Her glittery green purse slides off her pale shoulder as she elbows through the crowd, heads for the exit, and vanishes into the night.
The confrontation ends almost as soon as it began. Scotty tiredly tells the bodybuilder and the four angry men that the whole episode was a little bit of theater. Something about trying to understand other people’s viewpoints without resorting to violence. His look is sardonic. “It didn’t quite work out that way, did it?”
“Whoa!” exclaims the bodybuilder. “I had no idea. Sorry man, you had me fooled.”
Frank, who is the man in beige, just wants to get rid of this guy. “It’s OK, man, no harm done.”
“Shit, why didn’t you tell us?” an angry man says to Scotty. “We just want to gamble in peace. No preaching.”
“Things were getting messy, so I had to stand as the man in charge.” Scotty is breathing hard. He’s beginning to think he better rein in Stella on her little performance pieces. Things could get dangerous.
The bodybuilder gives a little salute and threads his way through the casino to rising cheers. People don’t know why they’re cheering him, only that they’d heard a scuffle there in the corner, and this strong-looking man striding toward the exit looks like he could settle a fight in twenty seconds flat. The four angry men fade back into the crowd.
In Scotty’s office, Frank starts in. “Why’d you horn in on our show? I wasn’t happy about the bodybuilder hijacking my theme and bothering the girl. I’m sorry he tackled you, but he was just following my cue. He had no idea what was going on. I could have brought him around. You should have trusted me.”
“Listen, Frank, a couple of those pissed-off guys had guns. I saw the bulge under their belts. Did you? They just wanted to gamble, not debate moral values. I wasn’t going to have a body count because of our little experiment in cultural understanding.”
The two old friends exchange hard glances and a long silence. Frank finally says, “We should get over to Stella’s. They’ll wonder what’s keeping us.”
They’re silent on the way over. Frank would like to find the young girl and apologize. He vows he’ll never be shanghaied into one of Stella’s nutty theater pieces again. He’s upset Clara didn’t get to be the mother who calms her immigrant son because she understands his culture shock. She was supposed to be the hero of the piece, for Christ’s sake.
That morning, Clara had gone over to Stella’s so they could work out Stella’s last-minute idea of Clara as hero. When Clara walked in the door, she and her son silently embraced, holding it long. Stella busied herself in the kitchen.
“I’ll come over tomorrow,” he said quietly to his mother.
“That would be wonderful,” she said.
Then the three of them worked on the Clara-as-hero twist.
As Frank and Scotty shuffle over to Stella’s for the post-performance wrap-up, Frank fumes. “It all went haywire. The girl and the pissed-off men came out of nowhere.”
Stella had warned Frank that unexpected things might happen and he had to just deal with it. So this is what she likes, he thinks bitterly—actors in the soup with chaos. He rattles someone’s chain link fence hard enough to make Scotty give him a quietly watchful look.
Stella opens the door to their unhappy faces and exclaims, “It took a wild turn, didn’t it?”
Frank is immediately sorry he came. He’s already talked way too much tonight. He’s in no mood to see Stella or anyone else right now. What he’d really like is to drive somewhere in the trailer cab and work on the fucking burl. He sits down on the purple loveseat beside Clara, but he doesn’t want to talk to her either. Seeing his mother just gets him pissed off about the wasps again. He takes a deep breath and tries to relax.
Scotty has collapsed into an armchair. “I’d sure like a cold beer.”
“Copy that,” Frank says.
Stella hustles two Budweisers from the fridge. Scotty and Frank down hearty swigs in silence, digging into a big bowl of tortilla chips and salsa on the coffee table. The women watch the men stuff themselves.
“So. What do you think?” Stella’s cheery tone fools no one.
Scotty tells the women that four guys had guns and threatened to use them if the anti-gambling crap didn’t stop.
Stella looks chastened. “Wow. That’s street theater for you. But nothing happened, thanks to you and Frank.”
Clara studies her fingernails. “I was concerned about the girl. I know a little bit about her.”
Frank flares. “I bet you do. Is she your latest charity case? Watch the line form in the morning, folks.” As soon as he says this, he regrets it. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that, Mother.”
Clara blanches, then gets angry. “I can’t believe you liked to see the biker spotlighting the way the girl was dressed. Are we advocating wardrobe police now?”
“Hold on, Mother. I wasn’t happy the biker drew the girl into our scenario either. She looked pretty scared.”
Awkward silence.
Stella’s voice is husky. “The last thing I want is to abuse my friends or a young girl.”
Scotty tips his beer to her. “You didn’t abuse us, Stella, and the girl will recover. We all had an idea this thing might get a little wild. The good thing from my point of view is it didn’t involve the whole casino, just the one section back by the restaurant. And it was short.” He gives Stella a meaningful look. “People seem kind of touchy these days. We might want to cut back on polarizing topics.”
Stella swallows, nods. “The country’s a tinderbox. I should have realized.”
Scotty sets his empty beer can on the coffee table. “Tell you what. I’m really not in the mood for a grisly postmortem. I’m calling it a night.”
Clara gets up, her eyes snapping. “Me too. I’m tired.” She’s tired of always feeling like a beggar around Frank. He knows how to make her feel guilty—this time by bringing up her big focus on troubled students when she was teaching.
Stella hugs Clara and Scotty. “I’m sorry we didn’t have time to turn it around to Clara Triumphant.”
Frank stands expressionless at the door beside Stella. He leans toward Clara and says quietly, “See you tomorrow.”
She nods. “Yes. Good.”
Stella clears away beer cans and snacks onto a tray. Frank watches her a minute, decides to make this quick. “OK, look, Stella, here’s the deal. I need some time to myself right now. All this was a bit much for me.”
She looks up from the counter where she just put the full tray. She looks like someone has punched her in the stomach.
“This kind of acting, maybe any kind of acting, it’s just not in the cards for me, babe. I need to think a little bit. And so do you.”
Her face collapses in surprise, her eyes wide brown pools. But she wants to accommodate him. “OK, sure.” She stands there, arms hanging limply at her sides. “I’m so sorry, Frank.”
He moves toward her and kisses her on the forehead. “Nothing’s wrong, Stella. I just need a little time.”
She kisses his chin. “I understand. It’s OK.” She looks at him. “When will I see you?”
“Tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“OK then.”
He lets himself out the door.
Stella stands by the loveseat, hears him gun the motor and drive away. Her spare neighborhood is silent once more in the night. Her trailer creaks like it often does, as if the earth were restless. Tonight the sound seems amplified. Absently she finishes the cleanup and drapes the damp dishrag over the faucet. The pipe under th
e sink makes a thumping sound. Not again! Exasperated, she goes back to the loveseat and flops down, too frazzled to check the faucet tonight. She kicks off her sandals and puts her shapely feet up on the coffee table.
He had resisted this role all along, felt deeply uncomfortable with it. She had pushed him. He only did it to please her. She feels ashamed. She thought it would be a great thing if he discovered he could perform, respond to unexpected moments. For her, performing is the answer to every problem known to man. The stage is a holy place, she likes to say, and the stage can be anywhere. The stage was where we faced human problems way before the early Greeks.
She leans her head back onto the loveseat and closes her eyes. She could control every other man she ever knew, outsmart them, end up getting her way. And all these men bored her to death. She didn’t respect them. Frank, she sees more clearly now, is like her father. Stubborn. Headstrong. Intelligence steaming under the surface.
“You can’t control this man. Don’t even try.” Her voice is anguished. “This is the man you want. Just let him be. Don’t drive him away, for God’s sake. Think you can manage that?”
She picks up her sandals and pads to her bedroom, where she angrily strips off her clothes and falls naked onto the bed. She keeps listening for the guttural sound of the trailer cab. The night is still.
Clara sits at the kitchen table. Agitated wasps circle her head. She watches them, not really seeing them. She’s been getting pressure headaches ever since the purple wasp stung her forehead twice right before the trip. The stings haven’t healed. And lately she’s had intermittent pain in her chest—not a hard pain, just a kind of off and on electrical charge radiating willy-nilly around her chest, like it’s doing now. Just when she thinks she should tell Frank, the pains go away. On this unsettled night, her thoughts turn dour.
It’s just a wobbly time, nothing more, she decides: the move, Dawson, Frank, the invasive photographer (where is she anyway?), the determined purple wasp pushing her toward something she signed on for but still resists with all her might. But she’s not going to be a mother who plays the health-slash-age card. Restlessly she walks through the living room, down the hall into her bedroom. She touches the satiny oak door frames along the way, inhaling the scent of lemon oil. She sees the timeworn objects that fill her house, all of which she would trade for no other. From her bottom drawer, she takes out the big manila envelope full of family pictures and spreads them on the dresser to examine. She often does this when she can’t sleep. After hours of disquiet, she finally sleeps. The wasps are restless until dawn.
