Ten Cents a Dance Page 4

  The room was bright and loud, humid as July, thirty girls at least crowded inside and all of them, it seemed, talking at once. "Hey, Marie!" someone called. "Lipstick express, catch!" A small glinting something whizzed past my face. I jerked backward, and I heard the slap of it landing in a palm.

  "This ain't no slumber party, chickie," said someone behind me. "Move it." Her voice raspy and deep, what Angie's movie magazines called smoky. She pushed past me, a tall, dark-haired woman, and I might have shoved her back except for the hones t-to-God red fox jacket draped across her shoulders. I'd seen fur only in the movies, in magazines. I had no idea it shimmered like this. Tawny and red and cream, fire-bright. I followed it like it was a magnet.

  Paulie was right. This was the real deal. I could work at the packinghouse all my life and never have a crack at owning something like that.

  The woman headed toward a row of lockers, barreling through knots of girls in dressing gowns and slips and girdles. Another set of lockers stood against the opposite wall. Between them ran a double row of dressing tables, back to back, each one with its own mirror and lightbulbs. I drifted behind the chairs, glancing at the faces in the mirrors, eyeshadow and hair curlers and rouge, breathing in clouds of perfume and hair spray and cigarette smoke. One of the girls caught me staring and frowned. I didn't care. I felt like I was in a movie. It was the most glamorous thing I'd ever seen. From the first moment I stepped into the Ladies', I knew.

  I belonged here.

  I looked around for a locker, but they all seemed taken: crammed with clothes, underthings tossed over open doors, the doors hung with pictures cut out of magazines—Clark Gable, Cary Grant—or smaller, white-bordered photos of regular boys.

  "Hey, you! With the box," a girl called. "There's a spot over here, if you want it."

  "Thanks," I said. I hurried over and set my box on the bench next to her. She looked about twenty, with the most perfect waves in her reddish brown hair: rolling and soft, as if she'd bottled them right off Lake Michigan on a spring day. I wondered what brand of setting lotion she used.

  "Looks like Del robbed the cradle, hiring you," the girl said. "What are you, sixteen?"

  "Eighteen."

  The girl laughed.

  "Look, you don't believe me, go ask Mr. Giannopoulos! He'll tell you."

  "All right, all right. Touchy, aren't you?" She took a flat narrow hosiery box out of her locker. "But don't imagine you pulled the wool over Dels eyes. He ain't that dumb. He knows plenty of customers go for the babies." She stuck out a hand. "Peggy deGroot. From Wisconsin."

  She had a crooked tooth in front, pushing a little ahead of the others. Freckles and clear hazel eyes.

  "Ruby Jacinski." I shook her hand. "I love your nails." They were long and rounded, painted carmine red with the moons left bare. I busied my hands with my pocketbook, so she couldn't see the scrapes across my knuckles.

  "Thanks." Peggy unrolled a nylon stocking up to her thigh and clipped it front and back to her garter. I kicked off my shoes and shimmied out of my lime green dress, then rummaged in my pocketbook for the makeup I'd brought.

  "Don't bother looking for a dressing table," Peggy said. "This late, you won't get one. There's only twenty tables, and thirty-five of us."

  "The sign outside said fifty girls. And there's a table open right there."

  "The Starlight has fifty girls the same way you're eighteen. As far as that table, that's Yvonne's. Sit there and she'll bust your lip for you. If you go crying to Del, she'll say you started it and get you canned."

  "Who is she? The Queen of Sheba?"

  "And Queen of the May and Queen Bee, too." Peggy pulled a slip over her head, tugged it down past her hips. "Yvonne's the top earner in the place, and nobody forgets it. Least of all Del. There's a mirror by the sinks, you can use that." She nodded toward a dozen girls crammed shoulder to shoulder, standing on tiptoe and craning their necks, trying to see past each other in a mirror hung over four sinks.

  Shove into that mob, when there was a perfectly good table not ten feet away? I didn't think so. I walked over and sat down. The girl at the next table didn't move her head, but she rolled enormous eyes sideways at me, an orange red lipstick suspended in her hand. "You can't sit there," she said.

  I ignored her. She shrugged and turned away.

  The tabletop was littered with makeup. I put my own down—the Magnet Red lipstick, rouge, and powder I'd filched from Ma—careful not to bother anything. See, I argued to an imaginary Yvonne, I'm not touching your precious stuff.

  The bruise above my eye had faded, thank God. A little powder, and nobody could tell. Rouge . . .Just enough for a healthy glow, said the makeup articles in Angie's magazines. No boy wants to be seen with a clown. Somebody really ought to give that Peggy a hint—she was pretty, but she'd plastered on so much mascara it was a wonder she could hold her eyes open. And the girl at the next table, with her orange red lipstick—it was far too bright, hardly becoming at all.

  I'd just finished my rouge when the most gorgeous robe I'd ever seen appeared in my mirror. I actually leaned forward a little, to get a better look. Could that be silk? Brilliant blue and peach, dashes of red. Wide sleeves. I barely noticed the strong tan arms below them, or the hands set on the hips. My eyes followed a line of scarlet piping upward, to see the same dark-haired woman who'd come in wearing the fox. She glared at me in the mirror.

  "What in hell," she said, "are you doing in my chair?"

  "I told her, Yvonne," the girl next to me said. She stood up, all graceful arms and legs, and padded away, barefoot.

  "I'm not bothering anything," I said.

  "Oh." She said it ohhhh, rounding her full red mouth into a circle, eyebrows hitched high. She seemed older than most of the others, maybe twenty-five or so, and she had a hard-edged look to her. Not rough, like some of the girls in the Yards. Polished. But hard all the same.

  "Well, chickie"—she grabbed the back of the chair and, with a grunt, tilted it up—"you're bothering me." She wasn't any weakling; she threw me halfway off the chair. I scrambled to my feet, rubbing my elbow where I'd knocked it against the edge of the table. Before I could say anything, Yvonne's arm shot forward and she grabbed my wrist. "What on earth?" she said. She peered at my scabbed knuckles. At my fingernails, cut short and stained yellow from brine. Her nostrils flared. Delicate, like she was sniffing a flower. I balled my hand into a fist and wrenched it free.

  "What a smell!" Yvonne wrinkled her nose. "What've you been doing, digging graves? Del must be desperate. It's getting so he'll let in anything with two legs and tits."

  That raised a laugh. My cheeks burning, I snatched my makeup and strode to my locker.

  "I tried to tell you," Peggy said.

  "Leave me alone," I snapped. From outside the dressing room came a rat-tatting of drums, the single bleats of a trumpet. "It can't be eight o'clock already!" I said.

  "Band's frisking the whiskers," Peggy said coolly. She glanced at my face and rolled her eyes. "Warming up. You've got five minutes."

  I lifted the dress out of its box, letting the skirt fall to the floor in a cascade of pink dotted swiss. As soon as I saw it, I felt better. It didn't matter how many fox coats that girl Yvonne owned—nobody could outshine me on the dance floor. And I looked gorgeous in this dress, everyone at my cousin's wedding had said so. I gathered up the skirt and popped it over my head, then fit my arms through the short puffed sleeves. How wonderful to be able to wear it again . . . Of course, I'd had to smuggle it out of our flat without Ma seeing. Telephone operators didn't wear party gowns.

  I lifted my hair and turned sideways, my back to Peggy. "Zip me up?" I asked.

  No answer. Maybe I'd made her mad. I was about to turn around and apologize—she had tried to warn me, after all—when a raspy, smoky voice said, "Here. I'll get it." I felt a rough tug on the zipper, then a pat on my shoulder blade. "There now. Let's see."

  I pivoted high on my toes, making the skirt swirl out, and came down on my heels
smack in front of Yvonne. As soon as I saw her, I knew my mistake.

  "Oh . . . my . . . God," Yvonne said, between gasps of laughter. "Its Little Bo Peep!"

  She'd changed out of the silk robe into an emerald green gown, halter cut, with a plunging neckline and a rhinestone buckle at her waist. Her hair was caught back neatly in a sequined snood. Alarmed, I glanced past her at the other girls. Royal blue, apple red, gold, silver, mauve, every gown either glittering with rhinestones or rich with embroidery. Not a pale pink in sight. Not a single puffed sleeve or high Peter Pan collar with a pink grosgrain ribbon tied in a bow. Not one tiny white polka dot.

  "Hey Bo Peep, where's your sheep?" another girl called.

  I didn't blush. I went cold. My fingers, my face.

  Yvonne laughed. She had a rich, lilting laugh, like something you might hear on a radio program. "This one won't last a week," she said, to no one in particular. She sashayed out of the Ladies' on high Cuban heels, the enormous-eyed girl following her, snorting giggles.

  From the hall outside, a sudden swell of music. "Time to hoof it," somebody said. Compacts were snapped shut and shoved into lockers, bosoms adjusted, hair flipped back. Peggy—lovely, a numb part of me noticed, in a canary yellow number with a wide sequined belt—hustled over from the long mirror.

  "I'd change, if I were you," she said, tossing a hairbrush into her locker. "Fast."

  I made my lips move. They felt like frozen wood. "It's all I have," I said.

  She slammed her locker shut. "What I wouldn't give to see the look on Del's face," she said, and walked away.

  I closed my eyes. In for a penny, in for a pound, Ma would say. Ma's wedding ring stuck in a pawnshop, its three colors of gold, its smooth, fat leaves. I'd wrestled it off her finger. I'd stuffed hog's feet into jars.

  A week, huh? You just wait and see how long I last, sister.

  I opened my eyes and joined the surge of skirts for the door.

  FOUR

  Someone had turned down the lights, so that the bare corners of the hall vanished into a velvet dark. A warm glow lit the dance floor, making it shine like clear water. Dozens of tiny colored lights glided over the walls, and the floor, and the girls crossing to the opposite side of the room. Even they looked different. In the dim light, their sequins and rhinestones and gold lame flashed and sparked, jazzy as the trumpet notes soaring from the bandstand.

  Yvonne and the enormous-eyed girl—the others called her Gabby—led the way across the floor. A couple of wolf whistles split the air. Yvonne smiled and waved. Already twenty or thirty men were drifting toward us from the entrance, folding long strips of paper tickets, shoving them in their trouser pockets. Behind them, more men came streaming in.

  "Gentlemen, here they are . . . " a voice boomed. Del stood on the bandstand, the microphone tilted down to his face. He was shorter than I'd guessed, but aside from that, he cleaned up pretty good. Brown suit, cream silk handkerchief in the coat pocket, gleaming wingtip shoes. He spread his arms, swelled his chest: " . . . the ladies of the Starlight Dance Academy!"

  Ragged clapping from the men, a few more whistles. The girls strolled in a loose bunch, heading for the far wall. A few of them waved, like Yvonne. One or two snapped their fingers to the music. Most of the rest walked like they were on their way to the grocery store. I brought up the rear in pink dotted swiss.

  Illusion, Del had told me yesterday. Don't ever forget. In the taxi-dance business, if you ain't got illusion, you ain't got nothing.

  I passed in front of the bandstand. My breath skated high and fast in my throat. The beat of the music was like stones tripping my feet. I couldn't find the rhythm. I glanced up at Del. He stared, blinking hard, like he hoped he was imagining me. Ahead of me, the sequins in Peggy's belt threw yellow sparks into the shadows, left, then right, with the sway of her hips.

  Glamorous. While I was Little Bo Peep.

  If you ain't got illusion, you ain't got nothing.

  I stopped. I let Peggy and the others get ahead a little, so I stood in the middle of the floor by myself. Then I turned, twist in the middle, hand on my hip thrust sideways, bosom to the front. A whistle shrilled from near the entrance. Then another one, closer. I kissed my fingertips and waved, and as I strode off the floor there was the rhythm, my heels striking two-three-four—

  "Fifty beautiful female partners!" Del boomed as I joined the other girls. "Your choice, for the price of a ticket!"

  "Nice move, kid," Peggy said as I came up next to her. "Almost makes up for that pink sack you're wearing."

  The girls started taking seats in rows of folding chairs, ten across and four deep, set across the dance floor from the men. The front row was taken immediately. I was heading for a chair at the end of the second row when Dels voice snapped behind me.

  "You!" he said.

  The other girls scattered as if I had a catching rash. Del took my elbow and hustled me over to a shadowed corner, next to the bandstand, out of sight of the customers. Raising his voice above the music, he jerked his chin at my dress and said, "What in hell's name is that?"

  "A gown," I said.

  "That," Del said, "is not a gown. Those"—he jabbed a finger at the other girls—"are gowns. That's the kind of thing the men who come here expect. Sophistication. Beauty. Not—" He raised both hands in a gesture of disgust. Apparently, no words contained the awfulness of me. "Go home," he said.

  "No!" I grabbed his sleeve. "You haven't even seen me dance. I'm good, I'm . . . Please, Mr. Giannopoulos. You've at least got to let me try."

  "I don't have to let you do a damn thing." He stared again, his nose wrinkling, as though I smelled. "A gown," he said. "By tomorrow. Or don't come back."

  He walked away. I listened to him spread Good evenings right and left among the customers. I pressed my hands together to stop them shaking. While he'd hollered, all I could think about were piles of hog's feet. Bottles of brine.

  And then he'd said tomorrow.

  I had one night to make good.

  As I turned back to the folding chairs, my eye caught one of the musicians. At the Union Hall dance, the band had been white. This band was Negro, and it was bigger, ten pieces instead of five. All of them old, I saw, except for this boy maybe a year or two older than me. Tall, his wrists sticking out from his tuxedo jacket. Wide-set eyes, a smooth, quick face. But it was his look—amused, like I'd gotten lost from the kiddie parade—that started a slow burn up my cheeks. As if he had any call to be high and mighty, with his pant hems floating above his ankles. He saw I'd noticed, but he didn't hide his legs under his chair, like another boy might have. He stood up, and he raised a trumpet, and he blasted a fast scat riff that made my feet feel like leaping right up to my heart. The look on his face then: Yeah, I know. And I'm so good, I don't care.

  I went back to the other girls and worked my way to an empty chair in the fourth row. So far only three couples were dancing. Across the floor, sitting in chairs or leaning against the wall, a hundred men watched us. In the dimness, their cigarettes glowed like the eyes of wild animals. More fellows still coming in.

  Ten cents a dance, that's what Del had told me. Customers bought tickets and gave them to us. At the end of the night, we turned the tickets in. For every ticket a girl got, a nickel went to the Starlight. The girl kept a nickel, plus whatever tip her customer gave her.

  I eyed the gown of the girl in front of me, a sweet floral in chocolate and blue. I bet it cost fifteen dollars, at least. How many nickels was that?

  The music paused, couples broke apart. A fellow wandered by, a ticket in his hand. I sat up straight and smiled right at him, but I was in the thick of the herd and he didn't even see me. A girl in front jumped up and strutted out with him, just as the band struck up "Sing, Sing, Sing." My favorite. The trumpet screaming and wailing, the beat like it could pick me up by my ankles and spin me right across Lake Michigan, my feet flying too fast to get wet.

  Well, these bumps on a log might be able to sit through the hottest jazz G
od ever made, but I couldn't. I got up and strolled along the edge of the dance floor, snapping my fingers. That trumpet blowing so good, I forgot I was Little Bo Peep. I forgot I was a Beautiful Female Instructress. All I knew was, the music rippled across my skin, tiny colored lights dappled the air, and I wanted to dance.

  "Well, aren't you a live wire!" A man stepped up, grinning. He waved a ticket in the air. "Hey, I remember you. You did that little strut there, when you gals came on the floor." He was old, as old as Ma at least, with a pot belly bigger than Mr. Maczarek's. He could've been Frankenstein, for all I cared. I took the ticket like I was in a dream, like I was watching someone else do it, and then I was on the dance floor with my very first student.

  Only he didn't wait for me to show him anything. He wrapped a big arm around my waist and shuffled us into a box step. He smelled like cheap bay rum: musty wood, sprinkled with cinnamon and talcum powder.

  "Excuse me, mister, this isn't a waltz," I told him. "Jitterbug's best for this tune. Here, I'll show you." I tried to wiggle free but the man only grinned wider.

  "I haven't seen you here before tonight," he said. "Am I right?"

  "That's right, but I . . ."

  "I'm your first, aren't I? Come on, you can tell me. I don't mind." He stepped back suddenly and twirled me so hard, my feet twisted and I would have fallen, except he caught me.

  "Ho-ho!" he said. "There, I've got you. What's your name, sister?"

  "Ruby," I said, a little breathless. I knew the jitterbug, the fox-trot, the rumba, the quickstep, the Peabody, and the boogie-woogie. I even knew the Charleston, though with luck I'd never have to do that fuddy-duddy in public. At the parish festivals, the old folks still thought it was the latest thing, probably because it was the only dance they knew that wasn't a polka.

  But what kind of dancing was this?

  Before I could figure it out, the man stepped back again. This time, though, I was ready. I twirled but I stayed on my feet and that was when I felt, clear as ice on a hot day, the squeeze of his fingers around my keister. The next moment, the music ended. Quick as that, he let me go, and quick as that, I drew back my fist to whop the living daylights out of him.