Elizabeth J Church - All the Beautiful Girls

At age sixteen, Lily walked into Masterson’s Grocers and applied for a job. She needed spending money for makeup and sewing supplies, and Uncle Miles had decreed that it was time she contributed to her upkeep, which he set at thirty-five dollars per month. The manager, an already obese twenty-year-old named Harold, had dense patches of acne on his cheeks and daubs of ketchup on his mint-green clip-on bowtie. He hitched up his pants and slowly eyed the curves of Lily’s body, letting her know in no uncertain terms why he’d be hiring an inexperienced girl. Harold handed her two pink-and-white uniforms to try on for size, and as she undressed next to shelves of canned goods in a back stockroom, she wondered if he was standing at a peephole, watching. Lily imagined his gaping mouth, his widened eyes, and she took her time before choosing the shorter, tighter dress, the one that would best follow the contours of her body.

Harold assigned her to mark prices and stock shelves—an obvious ploy to have her bend over repeatedly, lean over cases with her box cutter and reveal her cleavage. She was on display, just like the towers of canned peaches and pyramids of apples and oranges on the This Week Only! promotions at the endcaps of the grocery aisles. But Lily didn’t mind. The grocery store was merely another stage, another setting in which she could experiment, learn what effect her lush body had on men.

She watched Harold’s face, the faces of men who came in weary from driving a combine all day, their necks and arms dusted in wheat chaff. Lily learned how to signal bashful innocence, along with a sort of vulnerable availability. She learned how to encourage men to help her when she couldn’t quite —not quite but almost —reach the shelves where the Corn Flakes, Froot Loops, and Alpha-Bits cereal boxes lived. She came to realize that men didn’t want to see competent independence; they wanted to see a slice of need. So she gave them that. Lily knew, too, that none of them considered that she might be intelligent. Her agile mind was not something a single, solitary man cared to consider.

EVERYONE WAS READING Truman Capote’s new book about the murders in Holcomb, just a couple hundred miles southwest of Salina. Even Uncle Miles had thumbed through the novel, afterwards puffing out his chest and announcing that those two killers would never have gotten through the door of his home. Lily imagined her uncle ineffectively bonking one of the killers over the head with his dusty Hawaiian ukulele, like the cartoon horse Quick Draw McGraw’s alter ego, the masked and black-caped El Kabong. Kabong!

Lily also thought a lot about the killer Perry Smith, about his childhood, his longing for love and his constant leg pain. It threw her—that Perry could be the sympathetic one in the duo, the one with artistic aspirations, but the one, ultimately, who did the butchering. Lily also wondered about the murdered teenage girl who had hidden her watch in the toe of her shoe. The unfairness of it all. Even if you followed all the rules—got straight A’s as Lily did—it was no guarantee against wanton destruction.

The state of Kansas had hanged the two men last year, in 1965. For so long, it seemed to be the only thing on the news. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock murdered Kansas’ innocence. They killed the myth of idyllic, small-town safety far from the big cities with their slums, poverty, and drugs. Now, people in Salina locked their doors at night. And yet, Lily didn’t share the titillating fears of the girls at school; she knew that danger didn’t necessarily come from a stranger.

LILY STOOD WITH a towel around her neck and used the ends to catch streams of sweat. They’d been practicing flick kicks, falls, and recovers. Effortlessly, she folded herself in half, stretching her hamstrings.

“Lily? Might we take a few minutes to talk about your future?” Mrs. Baumgarten, the owner of the Tah-Dah! Dance Studio, leaned against a nearby wall.

Lily was still awash in the complete relaxation she felt after a hard workout, and her thoughts had been elsewhere. “What?” she asked. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Baumgarten, I didn’t hear you.”

“I was saying that I know you plan to dance, but what kind of dance career do you have in mind? Where do you plan to go from here, when you leave Salina?”

Lily took a deep, luxurious breath and tilted her neck to one side until her ear nearly met her shoulder. “I was thinking Hollywood or New York, I guess.” It was the first time she’d ever dared to speak her dream.

Mrs. Baumgarten continued to watch Lily as she stretched. “Your forte is jazz. That’s where I see your skill, your aptitude. And it’s what best fits your body—you have to pair your body with the right movements. It’s as much about a look as it is about technique. And, actually, I have an idea for you. Are you ready?” Lily’s teacher smiled mischievously. “Viva Las Vegas!”

“Elvis? Ann-Margret?” Lily smiled.

“For you, for dance,” Mrs. Baumgarten replied. “Las Vegas is where there ’s an exciting, growing jazz dance scene. You’d find it easier to break in there than L.A. or New York. You’d gain valuable experience, build your dance résumé. Then you can try for the more competitive venues.”

“You think I should head to Sin City?” Lily could easily imagine her aunt and uncle ’s response to that particular plan.

Mrs. Baumgarten continued as if Lily hadn’t spoken. “The casinos compete with each other for floor shows, dance numbers. And celebrities flock there to perform, to see and be seen.” Lily’s teacher began counting off on her fingers. “Debbie Reynolds. Liberace. Judy Garland. The Rat Pack. Sammy Davis, Jr., ” she said with great emphasis, knowing that Lily was wild about his tap dancing. “Think what you could learn, what you’d see. The exposure you’d have.”

Before Lily left that night, Mrs. Baumgarten handed her a stack of Dance Magazine . Then she leaned close, and Lily felt her teacher’s kiss on her cheek, a brief brush of tenderness. “We’ll talk again,” she said.

At home in her room, Lily used the photos in Dance Magazine to prod her body into new, more complicated movements and configurations. Looking into the mirror above her dresser bureau, she mimicked the professional dancers’ hand gestures, the way they held their arms. She jutted her chin, narrowed her eyes, dared her mirror image the way that Nureyev dared the camera, and wished she had his boldness. She ’d been twelve when Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union, and she remembered watching news footage of him striding across an airfield in Paris, hearing Uncle Miles say that the sissy’s rejection served the commies right. “He can never go back? Never go home again?” she ’d asked her uncle. “Never,” Uncle Miles pronounced, his fingers dribbling flakes of tobacco into the fold of his cigarette paper. “He ’ll never see his family again,” he ’d said with an oddly self-satisfied smile.

Lily began to believe Las Vegas was the answer, and she started to plan. She pulled out the atlas in the school library, studied the route from Salina to Vegas, and counted the state lines she’d cross. She studied the figures in her savings passbook, totaled up how much more she’d be able to save between now and graduation, in just slightly over a year. She’d need bus fare, plus spending money to keep her afloat until she landed a job. Her columns of figures made the whole enterprise increasingly real, and Lily volunteered for extra shifts at the grocery store, just to see the totals multiply satisfyingly. Lily felt a burst of hope. The tallies told her she could do this—would do this. Escape was not only possible; it was within her grasp.