A STRIPPER, A BIKER, A MOTHER AND A MAN’S DRESS

Her mother ran out for the fifth time onto the balcony. She balled up a pair of spandex pants and threw them hard like a baseball. They opened up and spun around in the wind as they fell. They were her daughter’s clothes, working clothes mostly. Her daughter was a stripper, and to stop her daughter’s life she was now emptying the young woman’s closet out among the white painted rocks on the lawn below.

Watching her was her daughter’s boyfriend, looking like a biker; in fact, he was a biker. He wore the bored look of someone who has just had sex with his girlfriend’s mother. When he heard the mother begin what promised to be a sustained speech from the balcony to her daughter below, he lifted a small mirror, which held a blade and a rather precious amount of cocaine, out from under the coffee table, where it had been kept safe from flying hems and sleeves.

The mother turned dramatically against the railing, left hand for right, the moment the blade clicked against the mirror. She stood in the wind for some seconds, becoming unhappy, and then she propelled herself back into the apartment. When she slid the mirror across the room he bounced back and up from the couch. He struck her hard and then he fell on the glass table, which broke cleanly into two sailing panes. In the few seconds that he lay still the mother kneeled beside him and slid the blade along his side.

“Oh, shit. You cut yourself.”

The biker boyfriend brought a palm full of blood up close to inspect it then dropped his forehead to the carpet and blew out a weary breath that flapped his lips.

The stripper daughter sat cross-legged on the lawn. Beside her a feather boa had wrapped itself around the trunk of a tree. The leaves were beginning to turn underneath the bright pink and black dresses that draped the boughs. She knew for certain now that she had begun to hate her mother and to despise men. She sat there throughout the night, disappointed that this certainty wasn’t enough to help her leave this spot. In the morning, however, she crawled over to her purse and was relieved that it contained twenty dollars. She was very hungry and it was time for breakfast. She knew that she couldn’t afford to look unwell. Not yet.

★

Emotions Anonymous is an organization patterned after all Twelve-Step Programs, and its members all knew, with chin-quivering certainty, that with it they could move mountains. They met every Wednesday night in the basement of Bewdley’s United Church. And they were all men. And they all deeply hated the women who had cored them like apples. They also deeply hated homosexuals. This was complicated, because each member was certain that every other member was in love with him. Everyone of them had begun to live for this fact. They were rooting for their team, unconditionally, holding hands and praying. Somewhere down the road, one member would kiss another member, and the twelve steps would be exchanged, by some of them, for a simpler program based on a batter progressing around a diamond.

Then she showed up in her underwear. Her eyes were bloody from crying, her back was sore from coughing and her body shimmered from fasting. One of the men, who had shared his transvestism the week before, offered her some of his costumes so she could work again. He took her home and she cried when she saw his beautiful dresses. She tried each one on and modelled them for him. When she showed him her routine he gazed at her with silent awe and admiration. His cheeks became wet as she bounced into splits, tumbled onto her shoulders and scissored her legs.

Soon she was working again. In the two months that they lived together he went to every single one of her performances. In every one she wore his clothes. At home she would teach him how to dance like a female stripper. He asked her what it was like to be a woman and if she thought he could ever become like one. She told him not to worry and that she would be a woman for him. When they both fell over laughing at this, a loud rip tore up the back of his dress. She reached around her back and felt the loose fabric, and they both smiled at her large breasts.