Kat unwrapped the bulbous gum-filled pop and stuck it in her mouth. It was so ridiculously huge it barely fit. She made some of the waiting girls giggle by pretending to fellate it. “Ooh baby, you’re so big!”
Marla laughed and shook her head as Kat pulled some bangs into place and then sighed, blowing them right back out of place again. Lipstick, okay. Face, a little sweaty, but glowy, not gross. Eye makeup okay, no raccoon shadows, hair… Well, impossible to fix.
“Don’t scowl so hard at yourself, Kat,” Marla said. “Didn’t your mama teach you your face would freeze like that?”
No, my mama never taught me that. She taught me a lot of things, but not that.
Kat’s mother disapproved of her current life choices. Katyusha, she would scold, get yourself a man. You’re not getting any younger. Kat sighed and looked at her face, her features too ethnic and strange, her eyes a weird green color, her dark curls as always a total mess. No wonder her mother just shook her head at her. You will be the last one to find love.
And she knew, Kat’s mother. If anyone knew, she did. Kat’s mother was a fortune-teller, a respected one—as much as anyone claiming to be a fortune-teller can be respected. She didn’t have a fancy mystical name, a crystal ball or flowing, iridescent robes, but she amazed people with her insights and had a huge clientele. She amazed and disturbed Kat all the time. She didn’t keep a darkened office with New Age music in which to receive her many important and wealthy clients, only a crowded, noisy, estrogen-filled Victorian on the west side of Boston.
Kat had three older sisters and two younger. All of them had husbands and most had children. At twenty-eight, with no man and no children, Kat was the aberration of the family. You are the smartest one, her mother mourned. Why are you still alone?
You tell me, Mama. I don’t know. Tell me what my future holds. More and more it seemed to her that life was hopelessly random. She figured the whole fortune-telling thing was a crock of bullshit. Sure, sometimes her mom hit on some pretty amazing truths, but it had to be luck or simple percentages. Any guess would be right around fifty percent of the time. No, Kat didn’t believe it, not for a second. Life was random. There was no way to know what was coming and no sure way to get where you wanted to go.
Her father at least understood her. He was aloof, secretive and silent like her. Elena, let her be. She is a perfect, beautiful princess just as she is. Her father remained eternally convinced she was a princess, although she’d long since been sullied by non-princes of every pedigree. He called her Princess more than he called her Katya or Katyusha, or even Ekaterina, her real name.
Her father had been a spy for many years, a bona fide Russian spy for the State Department. He had returned home a bit strange, although they loved him just the same. He had been very good at his work—too good. So good that he seemed to have lost some memory of who he was. Sometimes when speaking to him, it wasn’t clear if he was answering as himself or someone else he was in his mind. In that way they were alike, because Kat wasn’t sure who she was either. It seemed patently unfair that she, the daughter of a fortune-teller and a spy, was not more savvy and all-knowing, that she didn’t have the world at her feet. But no. She didn’t know anything and didn’t understand anything, including herself. She was just a listless, lonely club girl with few friends and a dead-end job translating textbooks into Russian.
But all that—her job, her crazy parents and sisters and nephews and nieces and loud crowded home in West Boston—that was her other life. This was her real life. The clubs. She kept the two lives separate as much as she could. The club was her crystal ball, the only future she cared about, at least for the moment. The darkness, the swirling mist of fake smog and cigarette smoke. The press of bodies, the familiar faces every week—the only fortune she wanted to know. The music drowning out the emptiness, and later, if she wished it, strong arms around her, making her feel good until they slept and she could steal away. In this life she was not Ekaterina or Katyusha or Katya. She was just Kat, simple and easy to understand. Just a simple girl who wanted to become nothing, rub up against nothing, who didn’t want to face all the questions of what life was about.
She checked her teeth for lipstick, wrangled her bangs one last time, then left Marla and made her way back out to the club. The bathrooms opened right onto the dance floor so if you just kept walking you’d be swept into the fray. She pushed her way through the writhing bodies, passing by at least three guys she remembered fucking. They ignored her just as she ignored them. A quick glance at the bouncer near the bar, then up the stairs and in and out among people until she’d threaded her way up to the balcony.
The balcony was her spot. It was crowded, but not as crowded as downstairs, so you could actually get some air. Her favorite spot was near the DJ booth. She loved to watch him sort through his CDs and cue them up, his face screwed into a mask of concentration.
