Notes: Feed back rocks. The thinking kind rocks the most.
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"She's not supposed to be this beautiful," say Suzan to her friends one Saturday while they pass around a joint. Catharine thinks it's gross the way no one will share a soda six ways but if it's pot no one talks about other people's spit.
Sam is there and he gives a whoop because Suzan has finally stopped saying "one day" and given in.
Red haired Catharine whose 75 pounds and there she goes, digging through her mother's drug-store make up and then through the dirt in the back yard. "Bean pole," says Barrie Gatsby who sits behind her in class and kicks her chair. Catharine doesn't hear it when he turns to his friends and says, "-with boobs."
Catharine's teacher Mrs. Huston is tall with black hair and a laugh that drowns out sound. Like when someone opens a chip bag during a movie and you never know what happened during that part.
In May Mrs. Huston sends Catharine to the counselor's office because she's called her teacher a slut. Mrs. Huston has a forty-inch inseam. Catharine heard Barrie telling his friends at recess last week. Barrie doesn't know what an 'inseam' is but Catharine does. In the hall on the way to the counselor's Catharine isn't afraid. She just thinks of those long legs and slams locker doors as she goes by.
The counselor is a man with a thin face and eyebrows that go up and down separately when he tells a story. When he asks her what she was angry about she says, "I failed a test."
Catharine's worst subject is math and last week she came home early from Erica Sinclair's party to study for her test. There were high school kids at the party. A boy named Kevin wanted to put Vodka in her drink. "Lets go upstairs," he said for the second time. "Lets not," said Catharine just like she had practiced in her mirror at home. She got an A on the math test.
But Mr. Steneck isn't going to check which test she failed. People don't do those things for other people- not even her mother when Catharine needs help studying…
"3 quarters times 5 eighths equals…" begs Catharine but all Suzan will say is, "And he really thought you would go for it? Just- 'Sure Hun, take me on Buddy Gateby's bed! Then we'll all get off!' good Christ!"
They're sitting on the folded down futon in the middle of the living room with the lights mostly off and the TV on. Suzan is waiting for Dana and Paul to show up with their speakers and a bottle of Crown. She says she's hoping Sam isn't working.
So Catharine puts down her pencil and her calculator for a moment and she says, "He was trying to get me drunk, too." Her mother has a glass in her hands. She tilts it and lifts and eyebrow. "There's more than one way to skin a… well, there's more than one way to see some skin." Pretty soon Catharine will go into her room and lock the door. Right now she just wants to watch SNL with her mother in the dark living room.
In his office Mr. Steneck tells Catharine a story about a girl he knew who… but Catharine isn't listening, instead she's reading the motivational poster on the wall behind him.
Aspiration.
"Youth need…" says the poster.
"Ass!" says Barrie Gatsby.
"I'll give you some Ass-peration," says her mother and locks her legs behind Sam's back, pulling him after her onto the bed while the bedroom is door open and her Day In the Life record is skipping.
On the way home Catharine walks along the highway reading, "Garden of Eden," which she took from her mother's bookshelf. Her mother bought it from a used bookstore before Catharine was born and when it wasn't a romance novel she didn't finish it. Catharine's pants are too short now and her sweater is off because it's almost June. After the third car honks Catharine holds up her middle finger like she's seen Suzan do when she's angry with Sam for pouring her green apple cooler out on the driveway tarmac.
When no one is looking, Catharine practices walking like her friends do. She straightens her legs and holds her hips still. "You want some fries with that shake?" yells the third car but Catharine can't help it. Mia's boyfriend has been calling Catharine, "Stripper".
When Dana and Paul show up during SNL, Catharine and her mother are still on the couch. She is lying down with her hair spread out in jumbles over her mother's lap. "You should cut this," says Suzan with her fingers working into the knots. Suzan is the only person Catharine will allow to touch her hair. Suzan has never told Sam about the cosmetology course she had been taking when "the stick turned blue".
When Catharine started grade seven she had asked her mother for the money to get her hair cut like Fara Fawcette. "In ten years you'll hate yourself for it," Suzan warned but she was already digging into the cutlery drawer for her expensive scissors.
When Suzan made Catharine sit in the middle of the kitchen with a towel around her shoulders and all those stupid clips in her hair, Catharine spent half an hour fighting back the frightened pin pricks behind her eyes. "Please," she thought and she didn't know if she was pleading for her hair or for her mother.
In the bathroom mirror Catharine had touched each perfect wave as though she could turn it to gold with her fingertips. "Don't tell Sam it was me, promise?" said Suzan. Catharine tried to stay awake all night and cried in the morning when she woke up with her legs hanging off the bed and one side of her head was flat- afraid she had ruined the most perfect thing her mother had ever done.
Sitting in the living room with her mother laughing rum and coke back into her glass, Catharine pushes herself up to face Suzan and says, "I'm sorry it turned blue."
The credits roll on the television.
The screen door screeches.
The front door thumps into the wall plaster where the door prop has been broken off.
Suzan turns away from Catharine and says, "Paul, where the fuck is my Crown?"
And suddenly it's, "Catharine, if Sam comes by I need to be here so would you go buy some toilet paper?" and it's, "Baby, here's a ten if you need anything- Dana, did you want some cigs?" and it's Mia and Dennis showing up through the side door. Paul's got a barbeque in the back of his truck and, "Catharine, get some Crown too, would you?" and if Suzan has anything to say to her messy haired daughter then she'll have to say it later because Danas handing her a speaker.
"I'm under age," Catharine says but Mia's putting a second bill into Catharine's hand, telling her that she can keep the extra if she picks up some Players Lite and, "Honey, it's Vegas- they'll sell you a dildo if you have the pocket change."
'Henry's Corner Easy' is only three blocks down but that one's closed and the windows are papered up so she has to go the extra three blocks to the mini-mall.
On the mismatched sidewalk she combs her own fingers through the messy half of her hair where her mothers perfume is hiding in the knots Suzan forgot about.
Her mother is so good at applying liquid eyeliner that sometimes Catharine forgets Suzan doesn't know how to cook French toast without burning it. "Maybe she didn't know how to say it," thinks Catharine. Her mother, who knows how to make "fuck" sound like "God" and "fuck you" sound like "God, yes!"
"I'm sorry it turned blue."
"Paul, where the fuck is my Crown?"
Catharine is getting it.
She doesn't see Sam until she is in the check out aisle and he doesn't see her until she is shoving her receipt into the bag with a shaking hand. Her knuckles crack up against the bottle of Crown and when she pulls her hand away there are tiny flecks of skin missing. She's never seen a hand look so angry.
Sam is standing straight-backed up against a wall with the crooks of his elbows bent around the neck of a woman with black hair. The girl is laughing into Sam's face so that he can smell her and he is drinking from her glass (so that he can taste her, probably)…
If Catharine had told Mr. Steneck about Sam he might have said she had to come back and see him every Tuesday. He might have said he wanted her mother to call him. He might have said, "Did you say… friendly Sam and she could have looked down at where her purple sock was poking through her sneaker. Catharine doesn't care about those things. What he couldn't have said was "Catharine, maybe it wasn't what it looked like."
Catharine knows what things look like. Things she shouldn't know: Her mom's friends Dennis and Mia outlined in her bedroom doorway at 3 AM with Mia's hand down Dennis's pants. The way Mia bit Dennis's shoulder but it seemed like she was screaming at the same time. The way Dennis's penis looked when it was standing up like that. Catharine knows the way Dennis's eyes looked when he was watching her over Mia's shoulder while Mia was screaming.
Catharine knows what it looks like when Sam cheats on her mother with someone he is probably going to pay for sex. She also believes that the only person who will come out of this situation with the deal she made going in will be the dark haired girl with bigger breasts than her mothers and a much sharper laugh.
Catharine will never know what Sam tried to say to her across three lanes of customers and the slim shoulders of a prostitute. "Cath-" came his voice and then the woman's laughter like smashing glass.
When Catharine was ten, her mother asked her what she believed in. Standing beside the woman who used to say that Sam was "too tired to drive home" and then scream against his palm all night and kick the headboard, Catharine hadn't known how to answer.
When Catharine gets home from school she's spent two hours in detention- told her teacher that it was her mom on the phone when really is was just an empty dial tone. It's already 5:30 and the front door is open two feet. There's a beer cooler full of melting ice that's being used as a door jam and static riddled chords of music are coming from the back patio.
She goes into the kitchen and gets a Snapple from the fridge. The only one left has the label removed and the seal is broken but she doesn't really care- they get this kind of junk all the time from warehouses. Catharine stopped being afraid of poisoning when she was ten and saw Mia sniff coke off the kitchen floor.
Catharine doesn't believe in germs. When she told her mother that she didn't mind eating the leftovers from the night club where Suzan worked because she didn't believe in germs, Suzan stopped looking for the can opener under the fridge where it had fallen and asked her daughter, laughingly, "Catharine, what do you believe in?"
Catharine hadn't known what to say so she had blurted the first thing that came to her mind: "Money."
Sam and a black haired girl whispering to each other around a straw. Sam has the money in his hand and when he slips it down the front of her pants she bites his lip.
In her house the music turns on in the yard, turns up until the cracked living room window rattles and it'll only hold together so long before… but Catharine doesn't worry about that either.
Once she manages to pull the heavy book down from the top of the fridge, she puts the staples and the condoms she knocked down back up topand takes the volume quietly into the living room. She sits cross-legged between Mia's son Daren, whose four and Paul's baby daughter who doesn't even look like a girl yet. The book is awkward and dusty and it smells like stale tobacco but if there's a book that doesn't lie, Catharine knows it'll have to be this one.
Nose close to the pages in the dim lamp light, she flips through the A's until she finds what she's looking for. Aspect, Asphyxiate, and there it is:
Aspiration, defined as: ambition… desire… want.
And this, thinks Catharine, has infinite possibilities.
Catharine adds silently to her list of things she believes in: Oxford Dictionary.
Looking down at tiny Tina Melrose on the couch with a red face and no teeth Catharine thinks that she always looked like a girl- even before she had hair she had those eyelashes. "Like you were a lady from the start," says her mother nostalgically when she tells the story. "A naked writhing lady." And the friends always laugh at that part.
Of course the Snapple turns out to be mostly vodka- Catharine doesn't need to let Kevin the High School Junior spike her drink and put his searching fingers down her pants. She already knows most of that. She's tried all the bottles in the freezer while Suzan is out doing laundry on Sundays. Mostly Catharine's just stuck her tongue in the end of the bottle and let the taste soak in until she feels like throwing up. Then she'll spit it into the sink, put the cap back on and finish her math problems in her room with a glass of water.
There is usually nothing to drink in her house but beer and sometimes the gross harder brands and water. Her mother hasn't bought any milk for two months and Catharine threw out the sour stuff because she hoped Suzan would remember. Catharine was going to ask Sam. Now she can't.
Tonight Catharine wants Snapple and tonight there is none.
She takes the lid back off the bottle again and sticks her tongue in. this time she doesn't wash the taste away with water.
Twenty minutes later Dennis pries aside the sticky screen door and comes in with blood on his arm ("Fucking nail!") and a cigarette in his mouth. Catharine has drunk half the bottle already.
"Hey Stripper!" says Dennis and Catharine surprisinglylaughs- a soft low laugh- nothing like Mrs. Huston's but not at all like Suzan's either.
The name isn't so bad, after all, she does dance all the time and she has breasts now so she even looks a little bit like those girls she's seen in the movies her mother watches at 4 in the morning.
Unfortunately, Dennis doesn't realize when Sam is behind him and the first thing Dennis knows is Sam putting his cigarette out on the back of Dennis' neck. "Jesus Christ!" Dennis yells and smacks the stubbed out cigarette from Sam's hand.
"Her name. is Catharine," says Sam quietly. He is barefoot with his expensive shirt half unbuttoned and she can see the scar on his shoulder from where Suzan threw a Christmas ornament at him seven years ago. Sam takes another beer from the kitchen where the ice has scattered out of the sink and is making the floor slippery. Then he goes back out the screen door. He doesn't look at her again- just that once like he knows it's what she needed.
Prostitute: defined as "the act of attempting to solicit."
How ironic it is- he does nothing of the kind. Just looks at her with that sad mouth, the same one a small girl gets when standing in the jet of a sprinkler.
Dennis swears a couple of times under his breath once Sam has gone. Then he saunters over to the couch and drops down beside her. Daren is asleep and Dennis ruffles the boy's hair- chuckles under his breath. Catharine has noticed that Dennis does a lot of things under his breath. She's never asked him why.
"See you found my Snapple," says Dennis. His voice sounds farther off and the television colors are bleeding together like a lava lamp that her mother bought her- then stole back.
"Yeah," she says and when she thinks about all the questions she's been too afraid to ask, she figures now is a better time than most to ask a lot of them.
"Why do you call me Stripper?"
Besides, she can just pretend she doesn't remember anything in the morning. She's seen her mother do it all the time.
The song switches in the yard and between beginnings and endings, Catharine doesn't think there's a lot of time for anything important to happen. She thinks the adults in the yard must get frustrated sometimes when they're trying to say something and nobody can hear them.
From where he is standing by the loose fence board, Sam can't see her sitting on the couch with the road runner on television and Dennis's hand on the cushion beside her.
"Well," says Dennis and inhales steadily as he leans towards her as though she is a line of coke. "I call you that because you're a fine little piece." And before she can respond he reaches across her and puts his hand on her breast, his lips on her forehead. His hand is cold and wet from the condensation of his drink. She never understood how thin fabric really was until tonight. Then he gets up and leaves.
"I'm little," thinks Catharine.
"I'm a fine piece of ass," thinks Catharine.
Tea Cup: fragile, used and most often made of China (White).
The next day she leaves the school grounds at recess and goes shopping at the mini-mall by the grocery store where adult boyfriends cheat on their girlfriends. She buys a halter top with the allowance money she saved up for a month and she buys some tight jeans with the birthday money Sam gave her.
"It doesn't matter that he's cheating on my mother," she figures, "This is mine." She wants the pants; they have gemstones on them.
On the way out of the mall Catharine sees the black haired girl from two nights earlier. She is leaning up against the icebox in the dingy diner and her hair is glossy- legs as high as Catharine's chest. Her shirt says, "Money First" in bold italicized letters that are stretched across her C-cup. Catharine couldn't agree more.
"The only one who gets their deal," thinks Catharine.
She's finally got her Barbie clothes now… big enough for a real girl. She'll take her mother's lipstick from the bathroom cupboard. She'll sew sequins onto her old clothes. She'll learn to walk the way that made Dennis start talking to her.
Twenty years from now, standing in The French Palace with her leg above her head and nothing but a G-string on, she laughs until she cries. For the first twelve years of her life all she wanted was those fucking Barbie clothes. All the best strippers know the thrill is in taking them off.