A Girl Seen

“Una Pz Intranquila 4” by Anisley Lago

In the dressing room at the Stardust, Polly stands in front of the wall-sized mirror and whispers at the reflection.

“Trisha is dee-lisha.”

Trisha is Polly’s stage name, and when she first started dancing she fantasized about all the cute guys who’d say this to her. Three years and two clubs later, no one — cute or otherwise — has ever said it, though they do say things like, I like your tits and Nice ass and If you were my girl . . .

In the mirror, Trisha does indeed look delicious, with legs jutting out of a pink sequined mini-skirt, breasts peeking over the cups of a matching bra, blonde hair — roots barely showing — framing a painted face. Trisha smells delicious too, doused in Cotton Candy body spray; Polly’s arms are sticky with it. Staring at the reflection, Polly wonders if Trisha can feel the dull throb in the arches of her feet or the sharp pang of menstrual cramps. She’s not bleeding yet; but she can feel it coming. Maybe that’s why she can’t sell a dance tonight. Maybe men can smell the blood.

The door to the dressing room opens and in the mirror Polly catches the eye of another dancer.

“Better hurry, Trish,” the dancer says. “You’re up next.”

Polly turns away and grabs her make-up bag before heading to the doorless toilet stall, complete with its own full-length mirror. With her back to the glass and one foot on the rim, she slides aside her t-bars and inserts a tampon. She cuts the string with a pair of pocket scissors and, leaving just enough to latch onto later, tucks the strand deep up inside.

***

Polly’s boyfriend James thinks Trisha is a stupid name for a stripper. “Polly’s worse though,” he has said. “For anyone.”

James was the first guy to say mean things to her on purpose. This is probably why she fell for him. At the time, he seemed so honest.

When she met James at a party last year and mentioned she was a stripper, James said, “Big deal,” not even giving her the chance to tell him about how she had found the ad for Dancers: No Experience Necessary! in the local indie paper at the coffee shop where she had been working since dropping out of Ohio State. About how, at twenty-five, with no boyfriend and no cute boys even looking her way, she was starting to feel invisible. Sure, the leering and the awkward would sometimes try to flirt, but she didn’t like the unhip, lonely image of herself reflected in their gaze.

James told Polly he was an artist, though when she asked what kind, he ignored her, and told her about his parents who lived in Cleveland.

“Roger lives off OPM and Judith takes pills.”

“Your dad takes opium?”

“Other people’s money. He’s a financial advisor.”

They left together and later, over double espressos, which he had ordered, she listened in enamored bewilderment as he spoke of his work and the people he knew, throwing names around like so many dollars on a stage.

“Most people,” he said, “they’re so bourgeois.” He pronounced it like it rhymed with George, and Polly found this very sweet. To her, he seemed like a little boy far from home trying to fit into a grown-up world. But, really, who was she to say. She sipped and hummed along in agreement. He had the most beautiful gray eyes and smelled like the inside of the men’s magazines she sometimes flipped through while having her hair dyed. She preferred the men’s magazines over the women’s; they didn’t make her feel so less than. She stared at James’ carefully gelled flat-top and eyebrow stud, amazed that this boy was here, sitting with her. In his presence she felt hip and unalone.

“I don’t believe in working for money,” he told her. “If you’re going to do something, do it because you want to. Otherwise, you’re just a whore.”

Later on, she would come to wonder if he’d feel the same way without the check from his father each month. But at the time, drinking the coffee too strong for her taste, she thought about her job as a stripper — a job she enjoyed, then — and thought, Yes, I agree.

Within two weeks, he was sleeping over at her apartment every night and had his toothbrush and can of pomade in her bathroom. He slept all day and woke up when she left for work at seven at night. He liked to hang out at Lord’s, an S&M bar downtown, and watch the old guys pay to get whipped by young girls in black lipstick. At work, Polly would compare every guy she danced for to James. When a customer would tell her she was pretty she’d say thank you and think, yes, I know, though James wasn’t in the habit of telling her so.

***

Once on stage, Polly feels the music take control of her feet and soon she is gliding in time toward the double poles where she is spun around and around until the next song starts and she is shed of everything except her body. She used to like this part — being naked on stage, all eyes on her, a girl, seen and desired.

Lately, though, she feels oddly sexless, as though her body has become something she puts on and takes off, like a uniform. Still seen, still desired, but something else. She tries to parse this new feeling she has about this job she used to love. This job that saved her from fading into conventional oblivion. From becoming beorge as James would say. Does she feel demeaned? Not exactly. Bored? Somewhat. She catches a glimpse of Trisha in the beveled mirrors lining the back wall of the stage. A million Trishas, all smiling, all twirling. Polly twirls with them, smiles with them, seemingly one with them.

After the set, she moves through the crowd, breasts still bare, a sheen of sweat on her belly, Would-you-like-to-tip-me-sweetie? repetitive on her tongue. Each dollar her small reward.

“Well, you’re pretty enough, aren’t you?” one man says before putting a bill between his teeth. She is supposed to lean down and take it between her own teeth, with a smile and a giggle if she can muster it. Tonight, to her surprise, she can muster none of it. She snatches the bill with her hand, tearing it as she does. The man says, “Hey, what’s your problem?” with the jagged little piece still dangling from his mouth.

***

Unlike the delicious reflection in the mirror at the Stardust, Polly’s real uniform is pale and petite and prone to bruising. In her small shower at home she stands under the hot spray — head tilted back, face smileless and slack — and coaxes her limbs to resettle in her skin. She breathes in the steamy sweet-scented air, deeply, easily.

James stands outside the shower, leaning on the door jamb.

“It’s just not the same,” he’s saying. “There are couples there now. All the time. The wives want to be whipped while the husbands watch. It’s just so predictable, you know?”

Yes, Polly thinks. She knows.

James has been going to Lord’s nearly every night for a year. He says it’s for inspiration, though for what he never says. Polly has stopped caring enough to think to ask.

James watches her as she towels off. Their eyes meet — his, those same soft gray — and he smiles at her in a way that makes her think — for a hopeful instant — that he really sees her. Though, what her she wants him to see she doesn’t know. She wonders what he’d say to her now, after a year together, if she were to ask, Who am I? What am I? To you?

“You’re so scrawny,” James says, not unkindly. “That’s what I like about you. You look so . . . ” He pauses and wets his thin lips, “Corruptible.”

Polly gives him a practiced smile. She’d like to tell James about her first boyfriend, a high schooler she met through a friend of a friend when she was thirteen. She’d like to tell James about how this boy taught her to give head. How he told her, like a recruiter might tell a job prospect, to always swallow. She would like to tell James about the many boys after that boy, and about how not only did she learn to always swallow, she also learned to always moan and buck her hips and cry out at just the right time. Poor, sweet James, Polly thinks. There is so much he doesn’t know.

Once in bed, he reaches for her, and they tumble around in all the ways Polly has come to expect.

“Who’s my bad girl?” James says, as he props her up into another awkward position. He’s breathless and smiling when he says it, so she smiles, too, whipping her hair around so it falls sexy over her shoulder.

On cue, she moans.

“Mmm, you like that, don’t you?” he says as he grabs onto her thigh, pulling her close. Tomorrow, her uniform will show a light green stain where his fingers have been.

***

Sex has always bored Polly. James doesn’t know this either, thanks to Polly learning, as well as she has, to act excited. And, thanks to Polly’s imagination, she has always been able to get herself excited. Enough at least to avoid being deemed a dry, dead fuck.

She wonders what James would think if she ever told him about all the dirty thoughts she has had. Thoughts of getting her face slapped during sex or being a cheerleader ravaged by the rival football team. She’s not proud of these thoughts. In fact, they used to deeply disturb her until she read a book in college about how lots of women are turned on by things they don’t want to happen in real life.

Lately, though, even her favorite fantasies are leaving her cold, not because her imagination is failing her; her imagination is running amok. Like in this one, where she is in the laundry room of her apartment building being kind of forcibly taken by a guy who looks a lot like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. He has her bent over the long table people fold their clothes on. The room is warm and smells like fabric softener. The guy has a fistful of her hair and Polly’s feeling good and dirty when she notices she only has three minutes left on the dryer. She worries they won’t finish in time. Her clothes will wrinkle. Does she have enough quarters for a re-dry?

Or this one, where she runs into a customer — the one who tips her fives while copping feels of her ass — at a local gas station. They both nod knowingly and head for the bathroom. They’re going to have quick, wild sex. They’re both gonna come like crazy. The guy pulls up her skirt and unzips his pants. The edge of the sink is wet and cold against her belly. There’s a hair on the toilet tank and the bowl is stained. In the mirror, she watches the good tipper’s face contorting into something resembling pleasure. She stares at her own reflection and thinks, What am I doing? I never wear skirts outside the club.

***

At the Stardust, Polly eats delivered Chinese for dinner and ends up half-way into her shift on the toilet in the doorless stall, hunched over, lighting matches. She stares at Trisha in the mirror and laughs softly, imagining what James would think if he saw her here, with the bottom of her neon green dress bunched in her lap, thong panties draped over her feet. The cloying smell of Cotton Candy spray subdued by the pleasant scent of burning.

She thinks about a photograph she saw recently in one of those womens’ magazines she tries to avoid looking at when she’s getting her hair done. It was of a model sitting on a toilet, just like Polly is sitting now. The actress was smiling coyly at the camera, her panties hugging her calves. The ad, Polly believes, was for shoes.

Polly sits up a little and positions Trisha’s feet in the same stance as the model in the magazine. She pouts at the mirror. Bats her eyelashes. Blows a few kisses. Her stomach roils again and she’s crumpled forward.

The thumping bass of the music is beating against the thin wall; The toilet paper roll shakes a little with the vibration. Polly flushes, lights another match. She’s been keeping track of the songs. Four more, then she’s up. She has a few drinks tonight, which is good. Men apparently cannot smell shit.

Something is shifting in Polly. While she was dancing earlier, she again caught sight of all the Trishas in the beveled mirrors and, this time, all the Trishas caught sight of all of her. Polly felt a lightness in her body, as though a hidden part of her was shedding her uniform of flesh. Around the stage, men gazed up as they always did — at her — seeing still a girl, desired; none of them seeming to notice that she wasn’t really there.

In the dressing room, with her back against the big mirror, Polly lifts her dress, drops her panties, and bends over, peering between her legs to check for anything that might glow beneath the club’s dark fluorescence. Upside down, hair brooming the floor, she thinks again of James as she plucks a piece of tissue from her soft, complicated folds.

***

“What’s your problem?” James asks a few weeks later. It’s her night off and they are atangle in black satin sheets, a recent purchase of his from a store down near Lord’s where other people with eyebrow studs shop. She looks up and sees her ankle in the grip of his hand. She has been thinking about a private dance she gave the night before to a man who wanted her to press her stilettos into his chest. Polly recalls leaning for leverage against the mirror of the small, secluded stage and digging in her heels. As the man moaned in pleasure, she wondered if he was married or had a girlfriend. Polly imagined the woman running her fingers over the twin indents in his soft flesh, wondering things of her own. Or, would she even notice?

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

James lets go of her ankle and she watches it fall to the bed. Then he rolls over and starts digging for his boxers.

Again, she asks, but she already knows. She keeps getting lost in her head, forgetting herself. This isn’t the first fight they’ve had — “It’s like you’re not even trying,” he said to her just last week — and it won’t be their last.

Polly knows he’s expecting an excuse, but she’s tired of giving them: I’m bloated. I have a migraine. I’m having a herpes outbreak.

James stares at her, waiting, and when she doesn’t speak, he pulls his shirt on. “I’m sick of this frigid bullshit,” he says. “You wanna know what’s wrong? You fucking bore me. To tears.”

Polly blinks and runs her hand up the leg that was just in James’ grasp. Leg to hip, hip to belly. Beneath her hand, a rise and fall.

She tries to explain it then, about the dancing and the uniform. The Trishas in the mirror.

“Dancing has done something to me,” she tells him, knowing she’s breaking the unspoken rules. Slipping out of costume, forsaking her lines. Not doing her job. But she’d like him to understand. To see. She wants to say, I’m more than what I pretend to be. She wants to say, And so are you.

She looks at him looking at her — his expression, angry bewilderment — and she wonders what it is he’s seeing.

Finally, she shrugs. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel anything.” I’ve barely ever felt anything, she wants to add, but that would be admitting to having faked it all this time. And if she tells him she’s been doing something she doesn’t enjoy this whole time . . . well, she knows exactly how she’d look to him, then.

“Every stripper I’ve known’s been a wild cat,” James says. “Don’t blame us for your hang-ups.”

Who’s blaming anyone? Polly wants to ask. And -- every stripper? The only other stripper James ever told her about meeting personally was a gutter punk who spent her time rolling on X, fantasizing about blowing Fred Durst.

Polly sighs, opens her mouth to say something, but James is up from the bed now, zipping his jeans, reaching for his wallet. “I’m going to Lord’s,” he says. “This scene is way too bourgeois.”

The way he says it still makes her smile, a little, and she sees him then as she first saw him, a boy far from home, trying to make his way. I’ve confused him, she thinks. Poor, sweet James.

“We can still do it, if you want,” Polly says. “I don’t mind.” She means it, too. She doesn’t hate sex. She doesn’t hate James.

“Please,” James says. “I’d rather fuck a corpse.”

And then he’s gone.Feeling neither relieved nor alarmed, she pulls the cool, soft sheet tighter around her body, surprised at how good it feels against her skin, which for the first time in months, feels strangely like her own.

***

James comes back sometime around three, earlier than he normally does, smelling of pot smoke and candle wax. Polly watches him closely as he sheds the blue-collar button-down she knows he loves, the one with Stu embroidered on the breast pocket. Watches him shed his carefully torn Levis, his white, ribbed tank. The uniform of a hip, young man with much to prove. As he pulls the socks from his feet, it seems to Polly that his whole body sighs.

She’s still naked under the sheets, and when he slides in beside her she surprises herself by pressing her body against the warmth of his back. She has never done this before. She waits for him to respond, to turn to face her, to shift away, to say something cutting. He does nothing. She lies there, breath held, not sure of what she is doing, or why, but unable to move back to where she has been.

about the author

Amanda Irene Rush is a writer and psychiatric nurse practitioner living in bucolic Champaign County, Ohio. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Ashland University. Her work has appeared in Vanderbilt Press’ 2008 Anthology The Way We Work, The Bellevue Literary Review, and the Brevity Nonfiction Blog. One of her short stories was first runner up in The Saturday Evening Post’s 2020 Great American Fiction Contest. You can find her on the web at https://thegatheringgirl.wordpress.com.

about the artist

The artist Anisley Lago was born on October 23, 1987, in Habana, Cuba. She studied Fine Arts at the "National Academy of Art of San Alejandro" graduated in 2012. She participated in a workshop with artist Rocio Garcia called "Nuevo Fieras", in 2010, where presentations were made in different provinces of the Island. She participated in different collective and personal exhibitions.After finishing her studies she moved to the United States of America in 2012, where she maintains her career as an artist. Her work depicts the vision of creating inner worlds, where physical and spiritual journeys emanate from the conscious and subconscious desire for freedom.