“There’s this little line, under the picture.”
“A photo credit,” I said.
“Whatever. It says, ‘Special to the Suburban by Lesley Carroll, slash, The Metropolitan.’ She must have been parked up the street from the house, took my picture as I was going from the car to the house. I’m fucked.”
Lesley Carroll took the picture? One of our photogs? I thought about it for a moment, and it started to make sense. Magnuson tells his old buddy Blair, Hey, our Walker guy messed with your guy over a picture of this woman? Leave it with us. We’ll get you a picture. We’ll send one of our people. We’ve got shooters who’ve been to Iraq and back. Think we can’t get a shot of this, what’s her name? Trixie Snelling? We’ve got this young intern, eager to make a name for herself as a photographer. You can bet she’ll get you your picture. Consider it our way of saying we’re sorry.
That’s how it must have gone.
“I’m sorry, Trixie. I really am.”
“This couldn’t happen at a worse time. With those guys in town, trying to sell stun guns.”
“Trixie, I have to go.”
“Didn’t you check those guys out? Didn’t I tell you to?”
“Trixie, I’m sorry.”
And I ended the call.
For a while, Miranda was your basic street kid. Stopped going to school, gravitated to the big city, hung around teen drop-in shelters, slept someplace different every night, got a bucket and a squeegee and tried to make some money cleaning people’s windshields. Most of them, they pretended not to see you when you tried to make eye contact. If you could catch their eye, wave the squeegee, smile nice, make them realize you weren’t some crazy crackhead or something, they might give you the nod, let you clean their window, they’d give you a couple quarters, maybe a buck if you were lucky. But mostly they ignored you, or waved you away, or told you “Fuck off, you miserable cocksucking whore, go get a real job like everybody else.”
But she still made a good buck. She got to where she could guess who’d let her squeegee and who wouldn’t. She did better with men, not so good with lady drivers. She figured, maybe the men are less intimidated. “You dumb ass,” one of her coworkers said. “You wonder why you do okay with the guys? Look at you. Leaning over their window with those knockers? That one guy, he drove around the block, didn’t you notice you did his window twice in five minutes? Shit, you look like that, what are you cleaning fucking windshields for? You could be making a fortune doing something else.”
“I’m not hooking,” Miranda said.
“Who said anything about hooking? You’re like a dancer, leaping between those cars. Go on stage, dance around, shake ’em. Beats cleaning somebody’s windshield when it’s ten below.”
Miranda had never really thought of herself as good-looking. Compliments weren’t exactly handed out back home. Somebody told her there was a bar up in Canborough where they were looking for strippers. She should check it out, they said.
It wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do, but she was tired of working outside and freezing her ass off. She could have landed on Claire’s doorstep, but she had a decent life with Don. Miranda didn’t feel right barging in on it. They were living above a pizza place somewhere, sleeping on a pull-out couch in a one-room apartment. She had some secretary-type job, he’d lined up something at the Ford plant. You could make good money there. Someday, he said, they’d get a nice house out in the country.
Miranda was happy for Claire, happy that she had a boyfriend who loved her. They were probably going to get married, that’s what Claire had told her. Miranda didn’t want to mess that up. She had to try to make it on her own. She’d been put down all her life, but she still had pride. She wouldn’t allow her parents to steal that from her.
“You can stay with us,” Claire told her. “Really.”
But Miranda said no, don’t worry, she had plans.
Going to Canborough and trying out to be a stripper, that was her plan.
She hitchhiked up there, carrying everything she had in a backpack she’d found in a secondhand store. Got herself cleaned up in the washroom of a McDonald’s. Someone must have told, because just as she was finishing up, this short woman in a brown uniform and nametag that said “Lulu” came in, said, “This ain’t the Y, sweetie. Scram.”
Then she went to the Kickstart. “Heard you’re looking for dancers,” she said.
“You done any dancing?” This was some short, nasty-looking fellow who kept sticking his finger up his nose.
“Sure,” she said. “But, you know, not on an actual stage or anything.”
“Let’s see ’em.”
“What?”
Rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you come in, want to be a dancer, you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say ‘Let’s see ’em’?”
So she showed ’em.
“Whoa,” he said. “Not bad. Rack like that, we got other ways you can make money too. Upstairs. Nice chunk of change to be had.”
“I don’t think so,” Miranda said. “I’ll just dance.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But when you see the other girls pulling down major bucks, you’ll be begging me, you wait and see.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “What’s your name?”
Miranda had already thought about this part. “Candace,” she said.
9
SARAH SENT ME AN E-MAIL .
“Working late. Will grab something to eat on the way home. S.”
She wasn’t more than seventy or eighty feet away from me, in her office, but she decided to send me a message rather than walk over and just tell me. True, she couldn’t actually see me at my desk the way she could when I was working in the newsroom. I was now down the hall and around the corner, working in Home! But honestly, was this what Bill Gates had in mind? That the greatest technological advances in history would be used to make it possible for people who were within shouting range of one another to not speak face-to-face?
I clicked on “Reply” and started to write something and then couldn’t decide what. Finally I opted to say nothing and canceled my reply. Sarah had plenty of reasons to be angry with me, but her e-mail pissed me off. If she had something to say, she could damn well find her way Home! and say it.
“How’s the linoleum thing coming?” Frieda asked, passing by my desk, being extremely cheerful.
“Frieda,” I said, “you only gave it to me an hour ago. Is it a fast-breaking linoleum story? Is page one looking for it?”
She looked hurt. Her face fell. I instantly felt like a shit.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was only asking.”
This was the difference between working in the newsroom, where sarcasm and angry outbursts are the norm, and toiling away in Home! or travel (called “Away!” at the Metropolitan) or our new shopping section (“Spend!”). It was more like a typical office back here. Someone made tea. A card got sent around for everyone to sign when it was someone’s birthday. People were friendly, sociable, decent to one another.
I had to get out of here.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, I’m sorry, Frieda. I was just being a dick.”
Her eyebrows jumped. I guess people didn’t refer to themselves as “dicks” around here, either.
She left before I could say anything else to offend her.
I went online, looked for some contacts in the flooring industry who could fill me in on the latest developments in linoleum, and as I did so, this sense of hopelessness washed over me. How could it have come to this? It had
