Lisa giggled until she was crying, clinking teacups with the ladies at the Starlite.
As she wore the sparkly, elbow-length gloves she had won the prior night, she could breathe better. She walked around like a ballerina on tiptoe, with the fancy chamber music in the background, and others did the same. They pirouetted like dancers all over the store.
She had smashed down some wall with these invisible pointe shoes. She joined the others in an improvised ballet class near the nylons, using the table as the barre. It was perfection, them in their vibrant dresses, prancing about the place. They acted like little girls, although Lisa looked more like an adult than ever before in the light of the golden lamps.
She hadn’t met friends like this in a while. And it was all fun and free—until she noticed Madeline.
Madeline’s face—previously lit a sociable glow—had turned pale, her pupils darting.
Something must have happened in the blink of an eye.
Madeline was talking quickly. “He came again; then he ran away.”
She rushed everyone out the door, urging them to be careful. Her beautifully made-up eyelids twitched with the unknown.
As they streamed out the door, a woman named Jackie spoke in a panicked whisper. “I hope my husband isn’t tailing me!”
Jackie’s makeup was melting in her sweat, and Lisa caught sight of deep purple on her cheeks.
They headed out in shifts, clustered together in tight packs to navigate the dark streets.
Power in numbers.
They each found their cars and headed home.
Back at her apartment, Lisa’s mother was still awake, doing needlepoint. Bent over, her mother looked older than her years.
“I’m sorry, Ma.” In the shadows of the night, Lisa turned away from the lines on her mother’s face, the creases of age.
“Oh no, it’s my own issue, dear. When you’re traveling and I don’t know what’s going on, I just go to sleep. You know what they say—ignorance is bliss! But when you’re out and about in Brooklyn and I don’t know what’s going on, it’s a little different.”
Her mother was ready to nod off. Lisa wrapped her arms around her mother’s thin shoulders. Her bones were fragile, knobby.
It was cold in their apartment. The radiator knob was turned all the way to the left—her mother’s technique for saving money.
“Ma—you should come with me to this place. There’re all these women there. There’s some closer to your age too.”
She could give her mother something else. Something beyond grocery money.
“That’s quite all right, darling. I really have no desire to be out and about. My only desire is to see you home safe. Good night, dear. I’m going to bed.” With her robe dragging behind her, her mother shuffled into the bedroom, where Lisa’s father snored.
Lisa pulled her skirt over her knees, alone in their shabby little living room. She had a few days before she had to jet out of town, and she wasn’t ready for sleep.
But she forced herself to her bedroom, and once in bed, she fell asleep quicker than she’d thought—straight into her Technicolor dreams of the Mediterranean Sea and the Starlite, where they all danced on aqua-blue waves, like ballerinas.
It was almost noon when she woke the next day. She stumbled out of her room feeling hungover, though she hadn’t drunk too much the previous night.
She poured herself some cereal, trying to feel normal.
Bzzzzz. The buzzer rang, and she jumped.
Her mother wasn’t home. Sometimes she went shopping and forgot her key. Lisa peeked out the window, parting the curtains so she could see down to the sidewalk.
It was Billy, on the stoop.
He was rubbing his hands together in the cold, stomping in place in his work boots. The sound was familiar: a quick two-step on the sidewalk that Billy always said made him a “winter Fred Astaire.” He would grab her hand and twirl her around, right on the street. His eyes would twinkle. A Brooklyn Ginger Rogers.
Now the top of his head disappeared under the awning to her building and the buzzer rang again.
Lisa struggled to inhale. She darted her head around the room. Then she crawled beneath the table, where she crouched for ten minutes on the linoleum, next to the stained legs of the kitchen chairs.
Once the buzzing stopped, she scooted over to the edge of the window frame on her hands and knees.
Billy was stepping down the icy sidewalk, away from her apartment.
Lisa exhaled and stood upright, pacing in the narrow aisle between her dresser and bed. An animal energy pulsated in her legs as she circuited the messy space in leaps.
Elaine.
Elaine probably hadn’t started her new job yet—she should be home.
Lisa located the crumpled airline napkin with Elaine’s phone number on her dresser, and she bounded to the phone on the kitchen wall. The line rang a dozen times; there was no answer.
She slammed the phone in its receiver and paced in little loops around the furniture. On the corner of the table, she made a misstep and slammed her leg too hard. Rare expletives erupted from her mouth. She pressed the injured area, pushing her muscles inward.
A slam of a door downstairs meant that her mother had returned home from food shopping.
Lisa held in her shakes as she jumped to help. She sprinted down the steps to get the bags, one by one.
Then her mother handed her a piece of mail retrieved from the mailbox, without comment.
It was a white envelope addressed with her name. She ripped it open.
DEAR LISA.
Billy liked to write in capital letters.
I’M SORRY. I HOPE YOU CAN FORGIVE ME. Next to this pitiful apology was a small, blurry sketch of a face, maybe his own face, with a juvenile drawing of a mouth tilted in a sideways line of guilt.
Lisa smuggled the note into her room as her mother put away cans in the cabinets.
Her mother shouted to her bedroom, “You slept late! You must have been tired.”
“Yeah.”
She slipped the envelope into her underwear drawer, in the back—underneath the lingerie she’d purchased for a fantasy of a honeymoon. She slammed the drawer shut and turned on the radio. It was a Western, some irritating show with twangs and blasts.
She raised the volume to produce a protective cloak of sound and threw herself on her bed. She grabbed a photo album from a shelf, something she had once made, from when she and Billy had first starting dating.
She flipped through photos of them together at Coney Island, on the Jersey shore, and on their day trip to Philadelphia, with a silly shot of his smirk next to the Liberty Bell.
They had gone out to Philly that day in his red convertible. Her thighs were warm and solid next to his. The leather seat compressed with each movement of her body. Billy related that the car was a high school graduation gift from his father. He said that he had almost failed English. The words blurred together whenever he tried to read and write, but he had found a way to pass by paying the honors students to proofread his essays. Sometimes they wrote entire essays for him, from their own goodwill. Billy could charm almost anyone.
His car was his pride and joy, an example of what his charm could win. It had chrome wheels and a massive hood ornament. It was a smooth ride, and it spoke of more money than Lisa could imagine.
Lisa had shuddered a little when he told her where it came from, but it was easy enough to move on to new things as her long hair whipped around in the wind on a leisurely, breezy ride with the convertible’s top down. The air changed as they drove over the state line to New Jersey. The trees were tall, and she had never seen so many at once. Her own car would have broken down at the speeds Billy traveled. It always smelled like a leak, and the motor made a clunking sound at forty miles per hour.
Billy talked more about himself on that trip than he ever had on their dates in Brooklyn. Let loose from his usual stomping grounds, he held his identity less tight.
He admitted that he was always restless and that his feet itched to move when he’d been sitting still for too long. His parents used to punish him as a child until they realized that buying things worked better. As he got older, the toys got bigger.
Lisa didn’t tell him that she had received a grand total of three toys throughout her childhood. She didn’t tell him that her parents used to save all year for her annual gift at Christmastime, and that usually it was just a new coat. Her old baby doll remained in her room as a treasured memory.
She didn’t take anything for granted—yet Billy was used to having so much.
She could barely even look at her clothes closet anymore, it was so empty.
Her standard-issue Pan Am uniforms and a few well-worn skirts and blouses weren’t enough.
She wanted to buy something special at the Starlite Dress Shop—a nice number that could impress Billy, or anyone else.
She decided to leave a few less dollars on the counter that morning for her mother’s grocery shopping.
Her mother noticed as she organized her pocketbook for the week. “Honey, are they paying you less money all of a sudden?”
“Pan Am started making the flight attendants pay for their food at the hotels, Ma,” she lied.
There were only so many ways she could break free.