Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

Mama Kelly did the honors. “This here’s the competition PR lady, honey.”

“Oh, hi. Get us tons of publicity, hear? I’ve got a super act.”

Temple eyed Kelly’s blue-gingham pinafore and matching, supernaturally bright blue eyes. Molina’s eyes were arresting, but light enough a blue, however electric, to convince. This woman’s contact-lens-store teal clashed with her disingenuous air of Southern comfort.

“You’re mother and daughter?” Temple asked a bit uncertainly.

“I used to be darker and thinner,” the mother said wryly, chuckling again.

“I used to be shorter,” the daughter added with a wink.

Temple laughed. “And only Kelly goes onstage?”

Mama answered. “What do you think? I want to ruin her chances? Mildred Bartles is the name. How do you do?”

No one had said “How do you do” to Temple in a coon’s age. She found it charming.

“Temple Barr. I admit I’m astounded. I figured most mothers of strippers wouldn’t want to know what their darling daughters were doing.”

“Then they are dumb mothers,” Mildred answered genially. “Kids these days do what they want. You can either fight ’em, or join ’em.”

“But not onstage?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a backstage mother. I help her rehearse, I sew all the costumes. Travel around with her for company. Life on the road can get lonely.”

“Then strippers don’t date the men from the clubs.”

“Lordy, I should hope not!” The indignation came from the beauteous Kelly. Her cerulean eyes drilled into Temple’s. “No matter how it looks, stripping is a business and it pays pretty fair. All that happens between the customers and the strippers is what you see onstage or out front. A little tease, a little talk, and—hopefully—a lot of tips.”

“What if a man wants more?”

“Then I give him a freezing look and make clear he’s out of line. Some girls,” she added disdainfully, “are willing to be whores, but they don’t last. The clubs don’t want their dancers disappearing before pumpkin time, and the rest of us don’t want to ruin our reputations.”

By now, Temple didn’t find the notion of strippers preserving their reputations laughable. “But you must know the public is highly titillated by your occupation.”

“Titty-what, honey?” Kelly produced a dimple that proved she could tease offstage as well as on. “You got to ditch those big words. A lot of us didn’t go no further than high school.”

“People are curious,” Temple said, “about why you dance almost-naked for an audience of the opposite sex.”

“Oooh.” Kelly shook her long fingers to indicate a topic too hot to handle. “Well, if we were whores, like they thought, we’d wouldn’t waste our time and energy dancing first. We are performers,” she said matter-of-factly. “Some of us are terrific and some of us are stinko. We bust our butts giving a good show, and then we’re outa there. Listen, it beats waitressing, and I spent a lotta hours breaking my fingernails on trays loaded with forty pounds of restaurant ware. What’s the difference? You give service for a lousy wage and make your money in tips. Except the tips are a damn sight better for strippers.”

“Still, the club makes the real money in liquor sales.”

“So does the restaurant.”

Temple eyed the mother. “How did your daughter grow up to do this?”

Mildred Bartles accepted a full and nonfoamy glass of beer expertly poured by her daughter before musing on the past. “Since she was a tiny thing Kelly was a bolt-lightning of energy. Begged for dance lessons. It wasn’t easy. Her father had run off. I was waitressing and no spring chicken—where do you think I got these varicose veins?”

She thrust out a foot in a canvas wedgie. Temple glimpsed swollen ankles and veins like angry red crayon marks. “Kelly was too cute and too smart to end up like her mom. She started as ring girl at wrestling matches when she was fifteen, then got a job waitressing at a topless club.”

“That’s how most of us break in,” Kelly said. “We see how the moves go. We also see how much better the tips are.”

“But you’re paid to cozy up to a lot of strange men.”

“So is Meryl Streep.”

“Some of those guys are pretty revolting.”

Kelly shrugged her handsome shoulders, flapping the ruffled gingham cherub wings that covered them. “Most of them are just lonely. Harmless. They pay for attention, and they get it. It’s a transaction. Damn few ever step over the line. They know what the girls are there for and how they make their money. It’s worth it to them to stuff a rolled-up fifty in my G-string, better than gambling with it. And we’re stars, girl, to them.”

Temple believed Kelly, but she wasn’t satisfied that the stripper’s life was that simple.

“What about Dorothy Horvath?”

“Who?” Both Bartles spoke in tandem.

“The woman who died Monday.”

“Oh, you mean Glinda.” Kelly nodded sadly. “We' almost all use stage names, and that was hers. Dorothy.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like her. Maybe that was the point.”

“She was getting away from her past then, remaking it?”

“Most of these girls,” Mildred said, leaning forward to prop both elbows on the tabletop, “have had bad breaks, that’s true. Some of it’s pretty sad. Fathers that were beaters, or worse. I didn’t let Kelly in for any of that. I could have remarried a time or two, but by then it was pretty plain that she was going to be a looker. I didn’t want no stepfather messing her up just because 1 was as desperate for a man, or a man with a job, as a dog for a bone. No, sir.”

“That’s admirable,” Temple said, meaning it. She didn’t need Ruth and her statistics to know that stepfathers or a live-in boyfriends often abused the children of another man, and that their mothers didn’t—couldn’t, wouldn’t—see it because of their own abused pasts, or their financial dependence or their fear of independence.

“So,” Temple summed up, “you’re your daughter’s big sister. You support her, travel with her—”

“Hey,” Kelly put in, interrupting a pull on her beer, “I support her . I told you the money was good.”

“I meant emotionally, not economically,” Temple clarified.

“We support each other,” Mildred put in, pushing back one of her strapping daughter’s errant little-girl curls. “Don’t we, sweetie?”

“That’s right,” Kelly said. “We’re a team.”

Mama Rose and Gypsy these two were not. Temple sensed an easygoing affection between them that would be the envy of many mothers and daughters in primly proper families, often hopelessly estranged themselves. This duo liked and needed each other, despite, or maybe because of, the daughter’s supposedly seamy line of work.

She eavesdropped on her own thoughts, then analyzed them. “Supposedly”? Was she getting converted to life on the wild side? She suddenly recalled her own mother’s horror when Temple had developed a yen for amateur theatricals in high school. The playhouses were invariably in “bad” neighborhoods and the other cast members, especially the males, were suspect from the first read-through until the cast party.

That might be an interesting angle for a newspaper feature... strippers’ moms. Yeah. Temple eyed the cocktail area, looking for more story sources.

Ike Wetzel held court at a round, slate-topped table amid a harem of female strippers. The waitress was circling to deliver another round of drinks, her skimpy veils floating around her metal bikini.

Temple couldn’t join that table, not even in her most professional capacity, without aligning herself with the harem, so she looked farther afield.