A Million Girls by Eliza Sullivan

A Million Girls
by Eliza Sullivan

A young girl cried in the bar bathroom stall. I held her purse in one hand and her beer in the other; it’s the least we can do for each other. She hadn’t given me a chance to ask her what was wrong, and worse, a chance to tell her that I needed that stall. The big one with extra room and two metal disposal tins. Mark’s cocaine was in one of those. He waited outside, maybe impatiently, maybe scuffing the tips of his boots on the door. He’d probably forget to take me home after this. Worse, he’d show every girl here how he can light his cigarettes with the bottom of his shoe. 

The bathroom light was cracked down the middle and the shadows threw a pair of distraught lips everywhere, on the walls and the soap-streaked mirror. The music barely a thrum outside, I set her beer down, glanced under the stall, and called out.

“Hey,” I said. “Can you check the second dispenser from the wall?”

Sniffles. Heels skittering across the linoleum. The sound of the tin opening.

She asked, “is that yours?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want some?”

She opened the door. She wasn’t as mascara streaked as I thought she’d be. She shimmied the dress down back over her knees. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “Hell yes.”

***

Mark had been my boss at the first job I could find when I entered college: the fast-food restaurant just a block from campus. It was greasy work, but it paid my rent. Every night, I tied the yellow apron around my body as tight as I could to give myself a semblance of a figure, sometimes just for tips, but mostly so that I felt more of a similarity between myself and the other girls I worked with. I was a little older than them, their acne fresh and white, mine scarred and red. I left work smelling like fire and hamburgers. It was always hot in the kitchen; we had no A/C, and there was a perpetual fire burning up the dry grass in the distance. My throat always felt choked.

The ovens had a way of sometimes shutting down a little after midnight despite us being open until the early hours of the morning. I tended to let the other girls go on Saturday nights: they had places to be and alcohol to drink; I did not. My mother watched my daughter on the weekends in exchange for my attendance at Sunday church. On these slow nights, I’d read and study for my exams in the back next to the fryers, the bubbles consuming the sound of the door’s obnoxious bell.  

One Saturday night, the ovens shut down, and a wave of girls shouldered their way through the door. I hadn’t restarted the ovens, I didn’t know how. I called the only number on the fridge, the one for Mark, the manager on call. I slid my book under the cooking tables. He answered, but it was hard to hear him; people screamed in the background.

“Who is this?” he shouted.

“It’s Lori,” I whispered into the phone. “The ovens shut off and I don’t know how to restart them.”

“What?”

“There are a million girls here,” I said. I was almost crying at this point. “They’re banging on the counters demanding food and I don’t know how to turn the ovens on.” Then I was crying. “Please come.”

He took his time thinking about it. Finally, I heard him sigh into the phone. “Fine. I’m on my way. Don’t touch anything.”

I hid in the freezer and came out when I heard his fist pounding on the metal door. He wore his yellow apron untied and his hat backwards, smiled a lopsided smile, and looked much younger than me. He’s a junior, the other girls would later clarify for me. An upperclassman.

He turned the ovens back on with some presses of buttons and then pushed me to the front, palms big on my back. “Come on, then. Shout the orders to me and let’s get this done.”

It took us three hours. By the time it was over, my apron was untied too, my hat slipping down my forehead from sweat. We opened the freezer door and let the crisp air wash over us until we felt normal again.

He put on a hand on my shoulder. “It’s good you called,” he said. “You would’ve been fucked without me.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “I’m sorry I ruined your night.”

“How old are you? Thirty?”

I shrugged. “Almost,” I admitted. 

“That’s super cool,” he said. “Good for you.”

Maybe it was our shared yellow aprons or the shared smell of grease under our arms, or maybe it was the slight flick of his wrist as he waved goodbye when we went our separate ways. Maybe it was when I caught him staring down my shirt.

But I think it was when he put that big hand against me, so firmly. That’s when I fell in love with him. 

Every Saturday night after that, I made sure the ovens shut down. I would turn them off myself and then call the fridge number I’d memorized. He always answered, always came, despite the empty store. Mark, I would say, I’m just a little worried. Remember that one night? Ha-ha, yeah that one? What if it happens again? I need you here. To help me with the ovens.

At the end of the night, we’d pass a cigarette back and forth. I didn’t smoke, but I liked the idea of our lips wrapping around the same thing. We watched the fire clouds rise over the dumpsters and the sun shift across the horizon. 

I started wearing my clothes differently. I tied the sides up in rubber bands so that he could see the slit of my belly button. I cut the middle of my shirt so that more would show and only tied my apron halfway. When I could get away with it, I wore my hair down, the only part of me that even had a semblance of college youth left. The girls helped me. They thought it was fun, teaching this older woman how to let loose. You look so hot, they’d say. You’re a cougar.

This is what we do for each other.

***

I poured some of the bag on the counter. A couple of rocks fell out with the powder. The girl took a rock between her fingers, tapped it with a red nail while I searched for my credit cards to make the lines.

“Are there supposed to be these lumps in it?” she asked me.

“That’s crack,” I told her. “Put it back in the bag.”

“Oh.” She put it back and settled it in the white powder. “That must be expensive.”

“I know a guy.”

I took a dollar bill out from my purse and rolled it up tight, like I’d seen Mark do several times a week, taking hits on the minivan’s center console or in my daughter’s old playpen. I told myself it was better than strangers’ flat stomachs or in between girls’ legs. But I knew he still did those things too when he’d forget to take me home. I handed her the dollar bill.

“Thanks babe,” she told me. She washed her hands first and then lifted the bill to her nose.

“I’m forty,” I said. “I’m a little old to be called that.”

She shrugged. I sipped her beer as I watched her easily clear the line. Someone had taught her to do that, like someone teaches you to do anything, like how to speak or how to walk. It wasn’t something you learned yourself. Someone has to teach you how to ruin your life.

***

Mark asked me to have sex with him in the store bathroom three months after we’d first met. I was ready. The girls had told me I’d better start shaving every week, so I shaved until I was stripping off pieces of old skin. I sprayed perfume down my throat and then up inside me. The last time I’d been with a man was my prom night. I’d taken Justin from math class. I hated him. He cheated off my tests. But he was the only one who ever looked at me, or in my direction, and the only boy I knew that didn’t have a date already. After the dance we picked off the sticky confetti from each other’s naked bodies. We never spoke again after that.

Then I was pregnant, and my parents didn’t speak to me for months. I surfed on couches until I found a tiny apartment on a college campus known for parties, because those blocks were the cheapest. After a couple of years, I begged my parents for their financial help with college applications. I told them I’d get whatever degree they wanted. I’d get a law degree, an accounting degree, whatever. I bounced my girl on my hip; she always cried. 

They chose the accounting degree. As Mark and I fucked in the store bathroom, I saw numbers in my head. It was painful. He didn’t really know what he was doing. The girls had warned me. Mark is a little bit of a player, they’d said. He has wandering eyes, but whatever gets you out of the house, girl.

It hurt, truly. What could I do but shrug at the pain. The fingers wrapped around my hips pushed my bones into the wrong places. He pinched my belly fat and my breasts. He grabbed my jaw and pushed my cheek against the mirror that we would clean together after. It felt so good to have hands that needed me so badly they almost pushed through me, tore me apart and stitched me back together. The bathroom was our spot. Behind the dumpsters was our spot. His dirty mattress was our spot. He whispered things in my ear, how I was so much better than the young girls he was used to, how I was better than pretty, I was experienced, I saw numbers in my head, the two of us. The two of us. 

***

Yes, he could kiss me gently. Afterwards, he would. On the forehead, my shoulder, sometimes even the back of my hand. But my want was disgusting. 

“I wish I had time to be gentle with you,” he told me. He pushed my head down.

I needed it. I could not have it any other way. I went home to my daughter and my mother, said to them, fryer burn. Took a knee to the table. Grease rash, all these different phrases for love.

My mother never said anything. My daughter liked to poke at them and see how white they turned in the middle before turning black again.

***

It was my turn to take the dollar bill and pinch it between my fingers, not too tight, otherwise the powder wouldn’t go through. Just enough so the bill would not unfurl. I cleaned the line faster than her. She sat on the sink counter and leaned her head against the mirror, breathing deeply.

She was pretty. Mid-twenties. Probably here with her own version of college. I made two more lines.

“Who are you here with?” I asked her.

“Some of my friends and this guy I like,” she said. “It’s kind of a mess, though. I don’t think it’ll work out between us.”

“Why’s that?”

She shrugged. “You know, all the regular reasons.” I offered her another line, asked her if he was going to have a problem with this. It’s better she do it with me, I told myself, instead of some regular-reasons asshole.

She shook her head. “I don’t think he cares what I do.”

Behind the thrum of the music, I swore I could hear Mark’s foot tapping and tapping. The broken bathroom light was making me feel sick. I told her she could do one more line and then she was done.

***

I told the girls they could go home around midnight on Saturday night, like I always did. Mark would be coming soon, they didn’t need to be here. I reached for the tip jar with freshly painted nails so I could give them each their share for the night. The three of them stared at me, and one of them put a hand on top of the jar.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “We don’t like the hair down?”

They did not laugh, didn’t even offer consolation. No, babe, your hair is flawless, I would die for it. Instead, the blonde one, Jessica, cleared her throat.

“We’re not really sure we should leave you alone with Mark anymore,” Jessica said. She couldn’t look me in the eyes.

Rebecca said, “You rolled up your sleeves while you were working the oven.”

Then Sabrina, “Babe, that’s not right.”

I stared at them blankly. My tongue was large and dry in my mouth. I felt like a kid again, standing in front of my parents. How they’d yelled at me, lectured me. We should call the police, they screamed. They broke plates. They waved at my swollen stomach. We’ll get rid of it.

But I had not wanted to. I liked what was growing inside me. A physical, tangible wanting. I enjoyed the painful kicks and the acid reflux, the soft tumbling. I could not get rid of it. 

I cradled the tip jar. “Everything’s fine,” I told them. “Besides, Mark is younger than me. Aren’t I, like, you know, the cougar? The predator?”

They looked at each other anxiously. I was grown. They felt like they were correcting a professor that had done a problem incorrectly. 

Jessica put a hand on my shoulder. “We’re not judging,” she said. “but we aren’t leaving.”

They stayed with me the rest of the night. Mark slept in his car outside while the four of us lined up at the registers. I refused to look at them. Jessica’s hand on my shoulder had burned. I wouldn’t let them walk me to Mark’s car when our shift was over; the sun was coming up, that was our place. The air was thick.

I got into his car while snow blew across the windshield, the gray cold stuck to my hair and my cheeks. “I waited all night,” he said. “Where were you?”

I stared out the window as he unbuckled his pants. “With the girls,” I said.

***

My father was not kind to my mother. He did not like to sleep in the same bed with her. When I was born, he slept on the couch exclusively. He never took her anywhere. She would ask if he’d like to go to the movies and he’d shrug. She would ask if he’d like to go to that new theater downtown and he’d grunt. The word ‘yes’ was for special occasions. I learned the power of a simple yes early on and I have never used it, not once. My dad sat me down when I got my period and told me, life is going to be hard for you. Now, you’ll have to start raising your hand. Pushing people away. Raising your voice at the end of a sentence. He drank beer as he told me this; my mother was out at the new theater, alone. I wished you’d been a boy, he said, so you wouldn’t have to go through this. All that crying, I couldn’t stand it. It made my stomach sick. Your mother did nothing about it; the best I could do was stay away. My dad lectured me for hours until my mother got home. When she saw the two of us together, she smiled, waved, and slowly went up the stairs. I called my parents, when my daughter spoke all the sudden at breakfast for the first time, but they didn’t pick up. She’d pointed to the fruit bowl of fake fruit and moved her fat little body back and forth. My daughter’s first words were phrased as a question, a confession:

Can I? Can I?

***

Eventually, I quit the restaurant. The girls were no longer helping me with my clothes or painting my nails like they’d used to. They weren’t letting Mark in the store while I was working. They presented me with a goodbye cupcake with pink frosting on my last shift. They told me they would miss me and congratulated me on passing my exams. 

I took it from their hands and placed it on the counter. I hugged each one of them softly, patting their backs like you do for people you haven’t quite gotten the chance to know. I thanked them for their kindness. I told them I’d bring my daughter in sometime if they’d like to meet her. The three girls gushed, oh yes, I bet she looks just like you.

Mark moved into my apartment. When I told him I was thinking of bringing my daughter by the store, he rejected the idea. “You want to bring her around those sluts?” he laughed. “I don’t think so.”

It was the first time he’d taken my statement and turned it into a question. And before I knew it, he’d done that to my whole life.

***

The cocaine was beginning to make me feel real. Most of the time, I didn’t feel like a person unless something or someone was pushing against me. An existence made violent for survival. Mark did it well. He did it so well I was left thinking afterwards that it wasn’t enough. Even though I was older than him, he made me feel like a kid again, and like a kid, when he said mean things to me, I laughed like it was a joke I didn’t understand but still wanted to be a part of.

He often threatened to leave me. When I got pregnant again, he told me to get rid of it. I laughed. I got rid of it. When he told me I needed to get a second job so he could buy another computer, I laughed. I got a second job. When he told me no one else would want me, I was fat, I was old, I had wrinkles, my hair was too thin, I laughed, and I agreed with him.

One night, I found my daughter sitting on the edge of my tub, one hand gripping a tampon box and the other cradling her stomach. Blood all over her pajama shorts. I could see the question rising in her throat, worming its way to her lips. Mark waited in our bedroom, and I could have said that I couldn’t keep him waiting, but I saw her blood and I saw dumpsters and backseats, store bathrooms and yellow aprons. So I closed the door. I went to Mark and forgot myself, for a little bit.

She moved in with my parents a few months after that, two states away. Who was I to stop her? Mark thought it was a great idea. 

Mom, she said on her last night, packing her stuff in a suitcase, I think I’m starting to hate you.

I wanted to scream at her. I think? I think! Get rid of the question in your voice, say it with your chest, say it with your hair down and push me.

I knew then.

***

The girl finished her second line and handed back the dollar bill. I stuffed it in my purse. She hopped down from the counter and wobbled a little bit, I held her elbow to keep her steady. She asked me how she looked; there’s no escaping the eyes of a mother. I used the top-knuckle hooks of my fingers to pull her dress down a bit, and my thumb to push her black makeup upwards, so that the glassiness of her eyes presented in less of a sad way and in more of an ‘I just got high’ way. This is what we do for each other. I warned her of the headaches she would get when the high wore off. I thought of Mark, waiting outside the door for his cocaine. All that was left were rocks. Maybe a little bit of powder stuck in the bag’s pinched corners. The bathroom smelled like smoke. There was a fire out there, somewhere. For a moment, I was back in the restaurant, the stink of sweat, smoke and grease leaking from my pores.

“I forgot to ask you,” the girl said. She gathered her things. “Who are you here with?”

Mark was not the type of man that would kill me. He was not the easily identifiable violent type. But Mark would hurt me. I might not like it. I had a hard time knowing, after all these years, what I did and did not like. What I had put on my body and what he had done to me. I gripped the bag of cocaine. She held my drink while I stuffed it in my pocket. 

“No one,” I lied. 

***

I didn’t visit her for a long time. I was embarrassed, and Mark had the car most days. But when she turned eighteen, I pled my case to him, and he let me take it for four hours so I could deliver my daughter her birthday gifts. I even took the day off from work, although I would be starting a new second job soon, at the fast-food joint similar to the one I worked at in college. 

The door was already open when I arrived. The air smelled sweet. I carefully crossed the threshold with the birthday cake and gift bag. The living room and kitchen were filled with balloons and streamers, her name in big letters across the window. She stood in the backyard with a circle of friends. I placed my cake and gifts on the table. I fiddled with my dress. Stayed away from all the other mothers crowding in the kitchen, including my own. A gentle hand cupped my shoulder.

“I didn’t think I would see you here,” my father said. “You haven’t visited.”

I turned to face him. “Right,” I said. “I’ve been busy with work.” 

“Are you going to say hello?” he asked.

I looked out the window once more. She wore this long yellow dress that just barely touched the blades of grass as she walked through the yard, touching the elbows of each of her relatives, smacking her friends playfully on the shoulder. My mother had done her hair in long black braids. She looked absolutely gorgeous, and like she could have never belonged anywhere else.

I looked for too long. She caught my eye. I watched as she approached the house and wished my father had kept his hand on my shoulder to keep me steady. When she finally stood in front of me, we exchanged hellos.

“You look beautiful,” I finally said. “Happy birthday, my love.”

She gave me a smile. The kind of smile you give cashiers. And when she hugged me gently, she patted my back, wouldn’t let her chest completely touch mine. After pulling away, she tugged at her dark braids and played with the ruffles of her dress. 

She cleared her throat. “Do you want to come meet my friends?”

Her friends stood in a half-circle, waiting for her to rejoin them in the grass. They whispered among themselves. Some of them laughed. Some of them looked very sad. 

I laughed. “No, no,” I said. “You go have fun. I’ll be over here.”

She didn’t hesitate to walk away. By the time I turned back to my father he was already shaking his head. He poked the hard frosting of my cake.

“Well damn,” he said. “Wasn’t that something.” 

***

We exited the bar hand in hand, giggling. I didn’t know what we were laughing at, but it felt like we were laughing at each other. My nose hurt. Mark was doing what I dreaded he was doing, lighting cigarettes with the bottom of his shoe, earning some eyebrow raises from the underage girls in front of him. He hadn’t been waiting in front of the door after all. I felt like the broken bathroom light had followed me out here, somehow. A shadow of the past fifteen minutes.

Mark turned and saw me in the dress that’s too black and short for me and the girl hanging on my arm. She noticed Mark staring at me. She whispered excitingly into my ear; I could feel her teeth against my earlobe. 

“That guy is staring at you!” she whispered. “See? You’ve still got it. Now wish me luck.”

This is what we do for each other. She left me and pushed her way through the crowd to find her guy. I waited until she was out of sight and lost in the surf before I told him, “Sorry, babe. It’s gone.”

He said, “I’m gonna kill Tony.”

“Do you want to leave?” I asked.

He grunted. He went back to the bar for another drink and sat down. I made sure they settled him in with another beer and then pushed my way outside. I went towards the back and leaned against the alley brick. Smoke disguised as night clouds billowed in the distance, rising above the dumpsters. There’s a fire in the grasslands. I can’t breathe. I can’t tell how far.

Bonus audio of Eliza reading from her story…

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