Who: Ella Dean What: Narrative; getting a new job When: Recently Warnings: Suggestive of situations?
It was the fifth place she’d tried.
She didn’t have a list; she walked until her sandals were heavy with dust and her shoulders were sticky-damp with the evening’s soft, invasive heat. She stopped at every sign, every restaurant and bar that looked like maybe they made enough in a night, like maybe they had enough custom to pay someone else. She had a packet of paper, to start with, resumes with her name neat at the top and a list of places far off on the East Coast she’d worked and a couple this side of things. They stopped her at the door, she didn’t look like she planned on sitting down and eating, places all linen tablecloths and heavy silverware. She’d abandoned the soft, washed-cotton dresses, picked out the black pants dark enough to hide food stains, the vest she’d never given back (slept like a hundred years, other side of a door instead of notice periods and getting fired, shifts struck through with thick red pen on the schedule on the back of the door). She looked like maybe she worked there already, or up the street, tired face and cut-close nails, but they said no before they looked at the paper, before they read off the list of places.
She slid down the scale, down the guidebooks for tourists. The dollar signs slimmed down to one, maybe two. Little places teenagers took one another on dates, free breadsticks, lukewarm water fresh from the tap, clumps of servers standing bored, idle, picking at their nails. Paper napkins. The manager looked, greasy hair sleek behind his ears and yellow tidemarks on his shirt. He flicked through the paper she handed over, it hung limp between his hands. No good. It had been a couple months, maybe a little longer but time slid on past in days, in an industry for fly-by-nights and passing interest.
She tried bars, tacky floors and dead-eyed drinkers, bright lights and loud music and the kind of cheap drink behind the bar poured into expensive bottles. Ella tried the tight-shirts and rip-off logos and they pointed her on down the road, they said ‘no’, and she heard it thirteen times, the number her momma said to hear before a ‘yes’, and she heard the fourteenth and the fifteenth and she stopped counting, right then.
It was a girl behind the bar, looked like she’d been stood there longer than the night had been going, two drinkers at the other end who leaned in to their elbows, watched the soundless TV like they were attached. She looked weary, seen a thousand things across so many nights they ran together and she stopped putting away clean glasses and she looked, eye contact over the end of the bar. Ella should try on down the street. Better money. Fewer hours. The girl leaned in like she was giving away the combination to the safe, and she said I’d do it if I could.
Down on the street and the kind of music that would have been a warning if she wasn’t so darn tired she could barely think. Lights on outside, the kind of thud-thud-thud that caught itself up together with her pulse and spread itself like a headache on through her skull. The manager didn’t look at her pieces of paper, he looked her up and down and for a long minute, she didn’t feel like herself at all. She felt like maybe floating, like maybe she couldn’t be here and now and telling him her name was May, same way she’d told Anna, when she’d been singing in cold studios in New York or sitting on the couch in the room back home, watching her mom read. Maybe they weren’t the same girl at all, maybe Beth and Vegas, tinsel-bright lights and the girl slowly shedding clothes like skin on the small stage, were May truly, and Ella was New York auditions and Louisiana summers and a sister she didn’t know, a sister she didn’t walk up to with outstretched hands like a panhandler on the sidewalk.
Around three hundred a night, in a good night, and only a little to the club, twenty-five bucks a night and drinks, if she didn’t want sugar water served over the counter. Could she dance? Was she okay with music? And Ella tipped up her head, she looked at him straight and the soft-silk yield of her voice was hard as bone and blood and army training all by itself, and she said yes without a thought of choruses and sweet-sharp music at all. It was a job. It was rent paid and money down against the red numbers in her bank account, the minus sign stubbornly flickering against the digits. It was cash, in hand end of a night, and she could be May forever if it meant maybe one day, she could be Ella again.