The Shining Girls

Alice ^{4 JULY 1940}

‘Will you sit your toches down?’ Luella says through the hairpin clenched between her teeth. But Alice is too excited to keep still, prancing up from her seat at the mirror every two minutes to peek through the caravan door at the rubes pouring into the fairground, grinning and happy, already arming themselves with popcorn and cheap beer in paper cups.

Crowds gather in pockets of interest; at the hoop toss and the tractor show or to gawp at the rooster who plays tic-tac-toe. (Alice lost two out of three games to that chicken this morning, but she has it figured now, just you wait.)

The women veer towards the pitchmen reciting the merits of domestic wares that will ‘transform your kitchen and your life’. Rich men in stetson hats and expensive boots that have never set heel on a range amble over towards the auction to bid on steers. A young mother dangles a baby over the fence to see the enormous prize sow, Black Rosie, with a white snub nose and a low-hanging spotted belly and nipples like pinky fingers.

A pair of teenagers, a girl and a boy, are standing admiring the butter cow, which is supposed to have taken three days to carve. It is already suffering in the sun, and Alice can detect a whiff of rancid dairy among the tumult of hay bales and sawdust and tractor smoke and cotton candy and sweat and animal dung.

The boy makes a joke about the butter cow, something everyone else would have said already, Alice imagines, about the number of flapjacks you could eat with that, and the girl giggles and responds with something equally clichéd, maybe that he’s just trying to butter her up. And he takes her words as his cue to dart forward to kiss her, and she pushes his face away with one hand, teasing, only to reconsider and dip back to peck him on the lips. Then she slips away, towards the Ferris wheel, laughing and looking back for him. And it’s so lovely, Alice could just die.

Luella lowers the brush and tuts, irritated: ‘You want to do your own damn hair?’

‘Sorry, sorry!’ Alice says, and flings herself back into the chair so that Luella can resume the unenviable task of trying to iron and pin her mousy blonde hair, which is too short and too unruly to do what it is told. ‘Very modern,’ is what Joey said at her audition.

‘You should try a wig,’ Vivian says, smacking her lips together, to spread the lipstick evenly. Alice has practiced the same maneuver in the mirror, trying for that brazen little pop of a kiss-off. Vivacious Viv, the feature attraction. It’s her likeness painted on the pictorials on the ornately carved front, with her shining coal hair and those enormous blue eyes that manage to look salacious and naïve at the same time. It’s a good look for the new act that has impressed ministers and schoolteachers in going on six different towns now. A girly show unlike any other that got them specially invited to appear.

‘B-a-l-l-y, ladies! Five minutes ’til bally.’ Joey the Greek throws open the door of the already cramped trailer, a bumblebee of a man stuffed into a jade green sequinned waistcoat and shiny black pants that are starting to wear around the seams. Alice gives a little squeal of surprise, her hand fluttering to her chest.

‘Well, you’re skittish as a filly, Miss Templeton,’ Joey says and tweaks her cheek. ‘Or a schoolgirl. You keep that up.’

‘Or a colt ’bout to get gelded,’ Vivian snipes.

‘What’s that supposed to mean, Vivi?’ he frowns.

‘Only that you get more than you bargained for with Alice,’ Vivian says, pulling on one of her curls to test its bounce. Dissatisfied, she re-subjects it to her iron.

‘Like actually being able to remember my dance steps?’ Alice retorts, feeling a bright burst of hate.

‘Now now,’ Joey claps his hands, ‘there’ll be no cat-fighting in my girly show. Not unless it’s on the billing and we charge extra for it.’

There have been extras in the past, Alice knows. Luella used to do torch shows with men peering between her legs like a gynecological exam. But there is a new prudishness in the air lately and Joey has cunningly adapted the act to suit.

It feels like family, this gilly show, packing everything up into railcars to move on to another showground, a new fair. A million miles removed from Cairo (that would be Kay-ro, Illinois, not Egypt, even if Joey says she has ‘Nefertiti cheekbones’) and everyone who knew her. She would have simply expired if she’d stayed there. Of sheer boredom, if not in actuality at the hands of Uncle Steve. When they evacuated people with the ’37 floods, Alice evacuated right out of Cairo and her old life. God bless the Ohio River, she thinks.

Joey grabs Eva’s ass through her costume as she steps into her heels, and gives it a fond little shake. He winks at Alice. ‘Curves, princess! That’s what men like. You need to earn more dollars so you can buy more cake so you can get more curves so you can earn more dollars!’

‘Yes, Mr Malamatos.’ Alice gives him a nervous curtsey in her greenand-white cheerleader skirt. Joey susses her out, leaning on his cane topped with a fist-sized emerald he swears is real, eyebrows bobbing up and down, up and down in a vaudeville leer. ‘Like humping caterpillars,’ he once put it.

And then he goes for her crotch. For a gut-wrenching moment, she is terrified he is going to grope her, but he only tugs her pleated skirt down.

‘Much better,’ he says. ‘Remember, princess, this show is wholesome family fare.’

He ducks out the front, clumping up the stairs to the bally, framed by the carved marquee with its suggestive paintings of Vivian to ignite patrons’ imaginations, already launching into his patter. ‘Step up, gents and ladies, step up, and let me tell you about our performance today. But first, let me warn you. This is no cooch show! We don’t have diving girls or hula girls or forbidden Oriental dancers!’

‘What do ya got then?’ someone heckles from the crowd.

‘Why, sir, I’m glad you asked!’ Joey turns to him, beaming, ‘For you, sir, I have something far more valuable. For you, sir, I have an education!’

There is a smattering of boos and jeers, but Joey has them hooked before any of the girls have set so much as a toe on the bally steps. ‘Look here, sir. Come closer. Don’t be shy, sir. May I draw your attention to this lovely specimen of innocence, Miss Alice!’

The curtain twitches to allow Alice through, blinking against the sunlight. She’s wearing a cheerleader’s outfit: a pleated wool skirt with green insets, a white jersey embroidered with the motif of a green megaphone and a collegial ‘V’ (for ‘virgin’ Joey teased when he presented it to her), bobby socks and shoes.

‘Why don’t you come on up here and say hello, sweetheart?’

She waves cheerfully at the smattering of people gathering, drawn in like kids to a shooting gallery, and skips up the stairs. As she reaches the top, she flips neatly into a cartwheel that brings her up standing right beside Joey.

‘Wowsers!’ he says, impressed, ‘Give her a hand, folks. Isn’t she lovely? The all-American girl. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Until… well.’

‘Well, what?’ It’s the skeptics that are easiest to play. Get their buy-in and you’ve hooked the crowd. Alice knows that the candy butchers will have marked the loudmouth to work on him the moment he’s inside the tent.

Joey prowls down the bally. ‘Well? Well, well, well.’ He takes Alice’s hand, as if to waltz, and swings her round to face the crowd. She looks down in sham modesty, one hand on her cheek, but peeking at the onlookers through her lashes to gauge the response. She spots the young couple from earlier hanging on the fringe of the crowd, the girl grinning, the boy wary.

Joey lowers his voice, conspiratorial, so that the audience has to edge closer to hear. He circles Alice on the bally. ‘It’s true, isn’t it, that there is a certain kind of man who likes to destroy innocence? To pluck it, like you might a ripe cherry from a tree.’ He reaches out to draw a pretend fruit to his mouth and pretends to take a sensual bite. He hangs on to the moment, drawing it out and then snaps round, pointing to the base of the stairs with his stick.

‘Or what about the young housewife plagued by unnatural, uncontrollable desires?’ Eva brushes through the curtain, wearing a belted-up housecoat and a beaded mask over her eyes and makes her ascent, her hand poised on her chest. Joey shakes his head, apparently not noticing that her hand has started to fret at her clothing, rubbing over her bosom.

‘This poor young woman, who wears a disguise to protect what remains of her dignity, is that most pathetic of creatures, wholly at the mercy of her depraved fantasies. A nymphomaniac, ladies and gentlemen!’ At this point, Eva tugs open her coat to reveal the lacy negligee she is wearing underneath and Joey, horrified at this display, quickly goes to cover her up.

‘Fair ladies, good gentlemen. This is not one of those low carnie shows designed to titillate and inflame you. This is a warning! About the dangers of decadence and desire and how easily the fairer sex may be led astray. Or do the leading…’

‘Pre-sen-ting…’ Vivian throws open the curtain and struts out wearing bright red lipstick and a pencil skirt, her hair tied up in a bun. ‘The strumpet! The hussy. The harlot. The wicked temptress! The ambitious young office girl with her eye on the boss. Intent on coming between husband and wife. Women, learn how to spot her. Men, learn how to resist her. This lascivious predator in lipstick is a danger to society!’

Vivian stares into the crowd, hand on hip, reaching up to unpin her hair so that it cascades down over her shoulders. Unlike poor suffering nympho Eva, Vivian wears her lust the way other women would strut a mink coat.

Joey ramps up the spiel. ‘All this and more, inside! Instruction in avoiding moral turpi-tude. Come see for yourselves just how far and how easily a good woman may fall. Prostitutes and drug addicts! Women victim to their own quivering desires! Insatiable black widows and sweet young innocence tainted!’

It all proves too much for the teenage couple, and the boy tugs the girl away to other pursuits, cleaner ones to judge by the stink-eye he gives them. The other girls have developed an immunity to contempt, but Alice still feels shame like a hot bead in her throat. She flushes and looks down, not pretending this time, and when she looks up again, she sees him.

A lean, rakish man, well dressed, handsome if not for his bent nose. He’s standing at the back, staring at her – and not the way men usually do, with a wolfish hunger full of jokey bravado. He’s riveted. As if he knows her. As if he can see deep down into her secret self. Alice is so startled by the pure fervour of his attention that she stares back, barely hearing Joey’s wrap-up. The man breaks into a smile that makes Alice feel warm and sick and dizzy. She cannot look away.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this show will mesmerize you!’ Joey swings his cane to point at a young woman in the audience who grins in embarrassment. ‘It will hypnotize you!’ He swings it again, stabbing at the loudmouth from before. ‘It will paralyze you!’ And here he raises the cane up, stiff and quivering. But only for a brief moment before he sweeps the stick, and indeed his entire portly body, towards the tent entrance down below. ‘But only if you buy a ticket! Three shows only, ladies and gents. Step up, step inside and let us educate you!’

Joey bustles the girls down the other set of stairs as the crowd sweeps towards the ticket booth, primed to go. ‘No cartwheels down the stairs?’ he chides Alice, but she is too busy looking over her shoulder for the stranger. To her relief, he’s still there, pressing forward with the rest of them to buy a ticket. She stands on the back of Eva’s heel going down the stairs and nearly causes them all to go skeltering over like milk bottles at One Ball when the carnie loads the heavy bottle on top of the pyramid to demonstrate that there’s no trickery here, folks.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she whispers.

She only gets more flustered when she peeks through the curtain to see that he’s standing still as stone among the tide of punters scrambling for good seats. The candy butchers are already working the short con. ‘Get some candy, win a prize!’ Bobby is chatting up an older couple, but Micky spots the man standing all by himself and moves in for the kill: ‘Hey, fella, you want to win something? We got a new confection, Anna Belle Lee, brand new on the market. And tell you what, we’re so convinced you’ll love it, we’ve sweetened the deal with surprise gifts in some of the packages. We got men’s and ladies’ watches, lighters, pen sets and five-dollar billfolds! Take a chance, you might get lucky! Only fifty cents! It’s a sweet deal. Whaddaya say?’ But the guy brushes him off without even looking at him, his face tilted up towards the stage. He is waiting for her. Alice knows this with absolute certainty.

It’s so unnerving that she almost blows her vignette. The spot blinds her, so she can’t see the audience, but she can feel his gaze. She misses her cue, then she mistimes her flick-flack and nearly tumbles off the stage. Luckily, it fits in well with her act, the cheerleader who is plied with drugs and promises by Micky in a zoot suit, so that in the final scene she is leaning against a street pole in heels and a skimpy dress, innocence lost, having succumbed, as Joey’s breathless narration says, ‘to the ultimate corruption’. The spotlight dips dramatically and she slips off stage to make way for the next scene, as the incognito nympho is carried on stage, lounging decadently on a couch carried by two strapping young stagehands.

‘Someone’s got an admirer,’ Vivian jeers. ‘Does he know that there’s a dud prize in his candy box?’

And like that, Alice is on top of her, scratching at her face, yanking at those perfect curls, knocking her glasses right off. Vivian goes down hard enough for the sound to be heard out front, forcing Joey to speak louder,‘…Who would have thought that the most intimate, most loving moment between husband and wife on their wedding night would have unleashed this dark insatiable hunger, throbbing inside her?’

Luella and Micky pull her off. Vivian gets to her feet, smiling as she touches the scratches on her cheek. ‘That all you got, Alice? No one ever teach you to fight like a lady?’ And while Luella and Micky are holding her, limp and sobbing, Vivian backhands her, her fistful of rings slicing into her face.

‘Jesus, Viv!’ Micky hisses. But she’s already moving to take her position. Just in time, as Eva drops her negligee on stage and the lights snap off, giving the rubes only a moment’s ogling, which is still enough to set off gasps of shock and outrage from the well-intended, and whistles and cheers from the peanut gallery. Vivian struts on as Eva walks off, naked, grinning, ‘Heck, you’d think they’d never seen two seconds of a naked lady… oh hell’s bells, Alice, are you all right?’

Luella and Eva take her back to the dressing-room to wash off the blood and rub in some ointment from Luella’s collection. She’s practically an apothecary with all the lotions and oils she collects. But Alice can tell it’s bad because they won’t say anything about it.

The worst is still to come.

Joey calls her into the caravan right after the show, with his serious face on, no waggling eyebrows now. ‘Take off your clothes,’ he says, cold as she’s ever seen him. She’s still wearing her Fallen Woman outfit, the red high heels and the slinky dress.

‘I thought it wasn’t that kind of show,’ Alice protests with a half laugh that doesn’t even fool her.

‘Now, Alice.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You know why.’

‘Please, Joey.’

‘You think I don’t know? Why you get dressed in the toilet all by yourself? Why you carry rubber bands around wherever you go?’

Alice gives a tight little shake of her head.

Gentler this time: ‘Let me see.’

Trembling, Alice peels off the dress, lets it slip to the floor, revealing her flat chest, the elaborate bondage of tape and elastic around her genitals. Joey’s eyebrows furrow.

She has fought against this her whole life. Against Lucas Ziegenfeus, who lives inside her. Or she lives inside him, resenting his physical body, the despicable hateful thing dangling between her legs that she straps down but doesn’t have the courage to cut off.

‘Yeah, all right.’ Joey indicates for her to get dressed. ‘You’re wasted here, you know. You should go to Chicago. There are specialty shows in Bronzeville. Or join a carnival. Some of them still do he-she-it. Or be a bearded lady. Can you grow a beard?’

‘I’m not a freak.’

‘You are in this world, princess.’

‘Let me stay. You didn’t know. No one else has to find out. I can pull it off, I know I can, Joey. Please.’

‘What do you think will happen to us if someone sees you? Or Miss Magpie spills the beans? You’ve got her riled enough that she will, you know.’

‘We hightail it to the next town. Same as when Micky screwed the treasurer’s daughter in Burton.’

‘This is different, princess. People like being fooled only up to a point. We’d be run out of town. Lynched, probably. All it takes is one rube to spot you wrapping up, one punter to get a hand up your dress before Bobby can intervene to protect your modesty.’

‘Then I won’t perform. I can do candy. I could clean up, do the cooking, help the girls with their costume changes, their make-up.’

‘I’m sorry, Alice. It’s a family show.’

She can’t bear it. She bursts from the caravan like a dove from a magician’s sleeve, weeping. And runs straight into his arms.

‘Hey there, sweetheart, careful. Are you all right?’

She can’t believe it’s him. That he’s been waiting for her. She tries to speak, but her breath is coming in jerky sobs. She covers her face with her hands and he hugs her tight against his chest. She’s never felt like she so utterly belonged somewhere before. She looks up into his face. His eyes are wet as if he’s about to start crying himself.

‘Don’t,’ she says, filled with a desperate sympathy, touching her long, narrow fingers (girl’s hands, her uncle always said) to his cheek. Everything in her wants this. She could fall away into him.

She is moved to see that he is just as overwhelmed. She intercepts him with her lips. His mouth is hot against hers, she can smell caramels on his breath before he pulls away, full of shock and wonder.

‘Astonishing girl,’ he says. He is struggling against some torment inside, she can see by his face. Let go, she thinks. Kiss me again. I’m yours.

Maybe he’s got some of the psychic gift Luella claims to have, because it’s like he hears her and the resolve settles on him. ‘Come away with me, Alice. We don’t have to do this.’

Yes, the word is on her lips. And then Joey ruins everything. A torpid beetle silhouetted at the top of the stairs of the caravan. ‘Hey, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

The stranger releases his hold on her. Joey lumbers down the stairs, waving that absurd jewel-topped cane. ‘This isn’t that kind of show, my friend. Hands off, please.’

‘This has nothing to do with you, mister.’

‘Well pardon me. Did I not make myself fucking clear? Hands off, now.’

‘Go back inside, Joey,’ Alice says, filled with a calm so pure it leaves her giddy.

‘Sorry, princess. Can’t let it slide. Next thing you know, every rube’s gonna want a piece.’

‘It’s all right,’ her lover says, casually straightening his hat in defiance of Joey’s bluster. But he is going, Alice realizes. She grabs at his arm, filled with panic.

‘No! Don’t leave me.’

He chucks her lightly under the chin. ‘I’ll come back for you, Alice,’ he says. ‘I promise.’