Mask Market

just drove the merchandise home like you were paid to do, didn’t even make me blow you first.”

I shook off the image, said, “But you weren’t really running away.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Turning to give me a quick, hard stare.

“That pimp, the one you were with, he hadn’t kidnapped you. I’ve seen enough of those to know.”

“Because I didn’t throw my arms around you for rescuing me from the big bad man?”

“Because you weren’t scared,” I said. “You weren’t stoned. And you weren’t hurt.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” she said, smiling sardonically. “At least, you’re smarter now. That’s right. You think some half-wit nigger could have tricked me? I was playing him, not the other way around. But I didn’t know the game then. Not the whole game. I never figured he’d try to actually sell me.”

“What’s with ‘nigger,’ Beryl?”

“You don’t like the word?”

“It sounds nasty in your mouth, and—”

“Ah. When you spoke to my dear daddy, he told you we were all such wonderful liberals, yes?”

“He did say they were—”

“Fakes,” she said, spitting the word out of her mouth like a piece of bad meat. “Both of them, complete frauds. Every word they ever spoke was a lie. The big ‘radicals,’ fighting oppression. That whole house was a nonstop masquerade ball. Everybody had their own mask. Especially me.”

“Your father was—”

“Weak,” she dismissed him with a single word. “A pathetic, cringing weakling. Funding the revolution from the safety of his living room.”

“And your mother?”

“Oh, she was never weak,” Beryl hissed. “She was even harder than the steel she used on me.”

We gassed up on the Jersey Pike. While Beryl used the restroom, I thumbed my cell phone into life.

“Anything?” I said.

“Nothing,” Michelle answered. “You know I would have called you if—”

“Yeah.”

“Relax, baby. We’ve got a Plan B, remember?”

Beryl accelerated back onto the turnpike, her fingers relaxed on the wheel. As she settled into the middle lane, I said, “You’re sure you—?”

“If you say fucking ‘reparations’ to me one more time, I’m going to throw up all over that cheesy suit of yours.”

We stopped at a diner off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Beryl wanted the restroom again. And a cigarette. She was a heavy smoker, but she wouldn’t light up in her car.

“You don’t smoke anymore?” she’d asked me, the first time we’d stopped.

“No.”

“Doesn’t go with the new face?”

“You’re smart enough to be anything you want,” I told her. The truth.

“Oh, Daddy!” she mock-squealed, clasping her hands behind her back and stepping close to me. “That’s so sweet. You just want your Berry to be the very bestest little girl she can be, don’t you?”

I looked away.

“Now I made you mad,” she said, reaching down and pulling the hem of her skirt high over her thighs. “You think I should be punished?”

“Give it a rest, Beryl.”

“Why? You’re not much of a conversationalist, but it’s been a while, and I could always use the practice.”

I looked away.

“Makes you mad, that I’m such a little whore?”

“That’s your business,” I said.

“Exactly,” she retorted, sticking out her tongue in a deliberately cold parody of a sassy brat.

“Did you ever tell him?”

“Who? My father?”

“Yeah. You said you tried to tell people, but you never said you actually did it.”

“He knew,” she said, with a sociopath’s unshakable certainty.

“Just like that? You said your mother had a special—”

“Just because he was a coward doesn’t mean he was a stupid one.”

“But you couldn’t be—”

“Yes, I could,” she snapped. “I could be sure. I’m sure he would have just closed his eyes, no matter what I showed him. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because my mother had the power,” she said, licking her lips as if the very word was caressing her under her skirt. “If you have power, you can do anything you want, go anywhere you want, get away with anything. It’s all yours. Everything. And you know what makes power? Money. If you have enough money—”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You’re right; it’s not,” she snapped. “If you’d let me finish what I was going to say, you would have heard this: If you have enough money, and the spine to use it, every door opens. The whole world is nothing but a market. And humans are just another commodity.”

“In some places—”

“In every place! You think it’s not a market just because the buyers wear masks when they shop? If you have the price, you can have whatever you want—it’s just that simple.”

“Not all prices are money,” I said, thinking of Galina’s cousin.

“I don’t like word games. They’re just another way for liars to lie. I don’t care what you call it. Some say money; some say God. Some call it a button—a button you push to make people do what you want. Everybody’s got one; you just have to look for it.

“And if you don’t know where to look, there’s tricks to make it come to the surface, where you can see it. I learned something from everyone who ever had me. And I took something from them, too. Like a vampire does. It all comes down to the same thing. Power. That’s all that counts.”

“If that’s all that counts, then most people don’t.”

“Good boy!” she said, rewarding a dog.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked me, a few more miles down the road.

“So I can learn.”

“How bad do you want to know?”

“I don’t know how to measure that.”

“Did you ever fuck a girl outdoors? Like in a park, where anyone might come along and see you?”

“What diff—?”

“We’re trading,” she said. “You tell me, I tell you.”

“And me first, right?”

“Money in front,” Beryl said, giving me a whore’s wink.

“Those so-called feminists make me retch,” she said, lighting another cigarette. We were sitting at a wooden picnic bench at a rest stop. We were the only customers. “They say they’re all about choice—like abortion, how they adore abortion—but you’re only allowed the choices they say are okay. They whine about ‘empowerment,’ but you can only be empowered if you lap up every word they say, like a tame dog.”